Marie Antoinette was removed to the Conciergerie, which she quitted only for the scaffold. After the parents had passed under the knife, the young dauphin and his sister Marie Thérèse continued in the prison of the Temple "the sorrowful Odyssey of the Royalty of France." The daughter of Marie Antoinette must quit the Temple to go into exile, the son of Louis XVI. must die wretchedly in the prison of his father. The "education" of the poor little dauphin was entrusted to Simon the shoemaker, whose wife, it is said, used to teach him ribald songs. He had a charming face and a crooked back, "as if life were already too heavy for him." In the hands of those singular preceptors he came to lose nearly all his moral faculties, and the sole sentiment which he cherished was that of gratitude, "not so much for the good that was done him—which was small—as for the ills that were spared him. Without uttering a word, he would precipitate himself before his guards, press their hands, and kiss the hems of their coats."[[13]] After the retreat of Simon, who had not used his gentle captive over-tenderly, the dauphin's imprisonment was somewhat kinder, though he continued to be watched as closely as before. His gaoler one day asked him: "What would you do to Simon, little master, if you were to become king?" "I would have him punished as an example," answered the young Capet. He had had no news of Simon for two years, and did not know that the ungentle shoemaker had perished on the scaffold.[[14]]
[13]. Nougaret.
[14]. Idem.
The little dauphin's own untimely death, while still a prisoner in the Temple, induced more than one audacious adventurer to seek to assume the mask of Louis XVI's son. Hervagaut, Mathurin Bruneau, and more recently the Duc de Normandie essayed in turn the rôle of pretender, "draped in the shroud of Louis XVII." The first-named, condemned in 1802 to four years' imprisonment, died ten years later in Bicêtre. The second, tried at Rouen in 1818, received a sentence of seven years; and the Duc de Normandie ended his days in Holland.
The Convention seems to have given no political prisoners to the tower of the Temple, which was again a prison of State under the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire.
It was the Directory which consigned to the Temple the celebrated English Admiral, Sir Sidney Smith, M.P. for Rochester, who had defended Acre against Napoleon, and who was arrested at Havre "on the point of setting fire to the port." He was transferred to the Temple from the Abbey, the order of transfer bearing the signature of Barras.
On the 10th of May, 1798, certain friends of the Admiral, disguised in French uniform, presented to the concierge of the Temple a document purporting to be an order of the Minister of War for the removal of Sir Sidney to another prison. The concierge fell into the trap, and bade adieu to his prisoner, who, a few days later, found himself safe in London.
The mysterious conspiracy of the Camp de Grenelle furnished the Temple with a batch of one hundred and thirty-five prisoners; and the coup d'État which swept them in proscribed also the editors of twenty-two French journals. During the next eight years the most distinguished of the "enemies of the Republic" whose names were entered on the Temple register were Lavalette; Caraccioli, the Ambassador of the King of Naples to the Court of Louis XVI.; Hottinguer, the banker of the Rue de Provence; Hyde de Neuville; the journalist Bertin; Toussaint-Louverture, the hero of Saint-Domingue, who had written to Buonaparte: "Le premier homme des noirs au premier homme des blancs"; the two Polignacs, the Duc de Rivière, George Cadoudal, Moreau, and Pichegru.
General Pichegru, arrested on the 28th of February, 1804, "for having forgotten in the interests of the English and the Royalists what he owed to the French Republic," was found dead in his cell on the 6th of April following, having strangled himself with a black silk cravat. Moreau, liberated by the First Consul, took service in the ranks of the enemy, and was slain by a French bullet before Dresden, in 1813.
Toussaint-Louverture's detention in the Temple is an episode which reflects little credit upon the military and political history of the Consulate. Certainly the expedition of Saint-Domingue, under the command of General Leclerc, Napoleon's brother-in-law, makes a poor page in the annals of that period. After having received Toussaint-Louverture's submission, Leclerc, afraid of the great negro's influence, made him a prisoner by the merest trick, and despatched him to France. Confined at first in the Temple, he was afterwards removed to the fort of Joux, where he died in April, 1803.