They were both of them sick and tired of their office by this time; she of the cruel work it involved, he of the close confinement to which it condemned them. He tried to get released from his post, and after some fruitless efforts succeeded. On the 19th of January, 1794, they left the Temple. The patriot shoemaker died six months afterwards on the guillotine. He had no successor, properly speaking, in the Tower; in history he has neither successor nor predecessor; he stands alone, unrivalled and unapproachable, as a type of the tiger-man, a creature devoid of one humane, redeeming characteristic. Other men whose names have become bywords of cruelty or ferocious wickedness have at least had the excuse of some all-absorbing passion which, stifling reason and every better instinct of their nature, carried them on as by some overmastering impulse; but Simon could not plead even this guilty excuse. His was no mad delirium of passion, but a cold-blooded, deadly, undying, unrelenting cruelty in the execution of a murder that he had no motive in pursuing except as a means of adding a few coins more to his salary. He entered on his task of lingering assassination with deliberate barbarity; he was not stimulated by the sense of personal wrong, by a thirst for revenge, by any motive that could furnish the faintest thread of extenuation. He rose every morning and went to his victim as other men rise and go to their studies or their work. He devoted all his energies, all his instincts, to coolly inflicting torture on a beautiful, engaging, and innocent little child. No, happily for the world, he has no prototype in its history; nor, for the honor of humanity, has he ever found an apologist. He is perhaps the only monster of ancient or modern times who has never found a sceptic or a casuist to lift a voice in his behalf. Nero and Trajan, Queen Elizabeth and Louis XI., have had their apologists; nay, even Judas has found amongst the fatalists of some German school an infatuated fellow-mortal to attempt a defence of the indefensible; but no man has yet been known to utter a word of excuse for the brutal jailer of Louis XVII.
And yet his departure, though it rid the helpless captive of an active, ever-present barbarity, can hardly be said, except negatively, to have bettered his position. The Convention decreed that it was essential to the nation’s life and prosperity that the little Capet should be securely guarded; and as if the insane precautions hitherto used were not sufficient to secure a feeble, attenuated child, he was removed to a stronger and more completely isolated dungeon, where henceforth his waning life might die out quicker and more unheard of. There was only one window to the room, and this was darkened by a thick wooden blind, reinforced by iron bars outside. The door was removed, and replaced by a half-door with iron bars above; these bars, when unlocked, opened like a trap, and through this food was passed to the prisoner. The only light at night was from a lamp fastened to the wall opposite the iron grating.
Mme. Royale thus describes the state of her brother in this new abode, to which he was transferred—whether by accident or design we know not—on the anniversary of his father’s death, January 21: “A sickly child of eight years, he was locked and bolted in a great room, with no other resource than a broken bell, which he never rang, so greatly did he dread the people whom its sound would have brought to him; he preferred wanting any and every thing to calling for his persecutors. His bed had not been stirred for six months, and he had not strength to make it himself; it was alive with bugs and vermin still more disgusting. His linen and his person were covered with them. For more than a year he had no change of shirt or stockings; every kind of filth was allowed to accumulate about him and in his room; and during all that period nothing had been removed. His window, which was locked as well as grated, was never opened, and the infectious smell of this horrid room was so dreadful that no one could bear it for a moment. He might indeed have washed himself—for he had a pitcher of water—and have kept himself somewhat more clean than he did; but overwhelmed by the ill-treatment he had received, he had not resolution to do so, and his illness began to deprive him of even the necessary strength. He never asked for anything, so great was his dread of Simon and his other keepers. He passed his days without any kind of occupation. They did not even allow him light in the evening. This situation affected his mind as well as his body, and it is not surprising that he should have fallen into a frightful atrophy. The length of time which he resisted this treatment proves how good his constitution must have originally been.”
While the boy-king was slowly telling away his remnant of miserable life in the dark solitude of the Tower, thousands were being daily immolated on the public places, where the guillotine, insatiable and indefatigable, despatched its cartloads of victims. On the 10th of May Mme. Elizabeth, the most revered and saintly of all the long roll of martyrs inscribed on that bloody page, was sacrificed with many other noble and interesting women, amongst them the venerable sister of M. de Malesherbes, the courageous advocate of the king. She was seventy-six years of age. By a refinement of barbarity the municipals who conducted the “batch” obliged Mme. Elizabeth to wait to see her twenty-five companions executed before laying her own head on the block. Each of them, as they left the tumbrel, asked leave to embrace her; she kissed them with a smiling face, and said a few words of encouragement to each. “Her strength did not fail her to the last,” says Mme. Royale, “and she died with all the resignation of the purest piety.”
Mme. Royale was henceforth left in perfect solitude like her brother. She thus describes her own and the Dauphin’s life after the departure of her beloved aunt, of whose death she was happily kept in ignorance for a long time: “The guards were often drunk; but they generally left my brother and me quiet in our respective apartments until the 9th Thermidor. My brother still pined in solitude and filth. His keepers never went near him but to give him his meals; they had no compassion on this unhappy child. There was one of the guards whose gentle manners encouraged me to recommend my brother to his attention; this man ventured to complain of the severity with which the boy was treated, but he was dismissed next day. I, at least, could keep myself clean. I had soap and water, and carefully swept out my room every day. I had no light.… They would not give me any more books, but I had some religious works and some travels, which I read over and over.”
The fall of Robespierre, which rescued so many doomed heads from the guillotine, and opened the doors of their prison, had no such beneficent effect on the fate of the two royal children. It gave rise, however, to some alleviation of their sufferings. Immediately on the death of his cowardly and “incorruptible” colleague, Barras visited the Tower, and dismissed the whole set of commissaries of the Commune, who were forthwith despatched to have their heads cut off next day, while a single guardian was appointed in their place.
Laurent was the man’s name. He had good manners, some education, and, better than all, a human heart. The lynxes of the Temple eyed him askance; he was not of their kin, this creole with the heart of a man, and they mistrusted him. It was not until two o’clock in the morning that they conducted him to the presence of his charge. He tells us that when he entered the ante-room of the dungeon he recoiled before the horrible stench that came from the inner room through the grated door-way. Good heavens! was this the outcome of the reign of brotherhood which talked so mightily of universal love and liberty? It was in truth the most forcible illustration of the gospel of Sans-culottism that the world had yet beheld. “Capet! Capet!” cried the municipals in a loud voice. But no answer came. More calling, with threats and oaths, at last brought out a feeble, wailing sound like the cry of some dying animal. But nothing more could threats, or even an attempt at coaxing, elicit. Capet would not move; would not come forth and show himself to the new tutor. Laurent took a candle, and held it inside the bars of the noxious cage; he beheld, crouching on a bed in the furthest corner of the dungeon, the body which was confided to his guardianship. Sickened with the sight, he turned away. There was no appliance at hand for forcing open the door or the grating. Laurent at once sent in an account of what he had seen, and demanded that this remnant of child-life, that he was appointed to watch over, should be examined by proper authority. The next day, July 30, some members of the Sûreté Générale came to the Tower. M. de Beauchesne tells us what they saw: “They called to him through the grating; no answer. They then ordered the door to be opened. It seems there were no means of doing it. A workman was called, who forced away the bars of the trap so as to get in his head, and, having thus got sight of the child, asked him why he did not answer. Still no reply. In a few minutes the whole door was broken down, and the visitors entered. Then appeared a spectacle more horrible than can be conceived—a spectacle which never again can be seen in the annals of a nation calling itself civilized, and which even the murderers of Louis XVI. could not witness without mingled pity and fright. In a dark room, exhaling a smell of death and corruption, on a crazy, dirty bed, a child of nine years old was lying prostrate, motionless, and bent up, his face livid and furrowed by want and suffering, and his limbs half covered with a filthy cloth and trowsers in rags. His features, once so delicate, and his countenance, once so lively, denoted now the gloomiest apathy—almost insensibility; and his blue eyes, looking larger from the meagreness of the rest of his face, had lost all spirit, and taken, in their dull immovability, a tinge of gray and green. His head and neck were eaten up (rongés) with purulent sores; his legs, arms, and neck, thin and angular, were unnaturally lengthened at the expense of his chest and body. His hands and feet were not human. A thick paste of dirt stuck like pitch over his temples, and his once beautiful curls were full of vermin, which also covered his whole body, and which, as well as bugs, swarmed in every fold of the rotten bedding, over which black spiders were running.… At the noise of forcing the door the child gave a nervous shudder, but barely moved, not noticing the strangers. A hundred questions were addressed him; he answered none of them. He cast a vague, wandering, unmeaning look at his visitors, and at this moment one would have taken him for an idiot. The food they had given him was still untouched; one of the commissioners asked him why he had not eaten it. Still no answer. At last the oldest of the visitors, whose gray hairs and paternal tone seemed to make an impression on him, repeated the question, and he answered in a calm but resolute tone: ‘Because I want to die!’ These were the only words which this cruel and memorable inquisition extracted from him.”
Barras, the stuttering, pleasure-loving noble of Provence, “a terror to all phantasms, being himself of the genus Reality”—Barras, who had stood, like a bewildered, shipwrecked man while the storm-wind was whirling blood-waves round about him, now enters and beholds the royal victim whom it has taken nearly eighteen months of Simon the Cordwainer’s treatment “to get rid of”—perishing, but still alive in his den of squalor, darkness, and fright. His knees were so swollen that his ragged trowsers had become painfully tight. Barras ordered them to be cut open, and found the joints “prodigiously swollen and livid.” One of the municipals, who had formerly been a surgeon, was permitted to dress the sores on the head and neck; after much hesitation a woman was employed to wash and comb the child, and at Laurent’s earnest remonstrance a little air and light were admitted into the damp room; the vermin were expelled as far as could be, an iron bed and clean bedding replaced the former horrors in which the boy had lain so many months, and the grated door was done away with. These were small mercies, after all, and to which the vilest criminal had a right. All the other rigors of his prison were maintained. He was still left to partial darkness and complete solitude. Laurent, after a while, wearied the municipals into giving him leave to take him occasionally for an airing on the leads. The indulgence was perhaps welcome, but the child showed no signs of pleasure in it; he never spoke or took the smallest notice of anything he saw. Once only, when on his way to the leads, he passed by the wicket which conducted to the rooms that his mother had occupied; he recognized the spot at once, gazed wistfully at the door, and, clinging to Laurent’s arm, made a sign for them to go that way. The municipal who was on guard at the moment saw what the poor little fellow meant, and told him he had mistaken the door; it was, he said, at the other side. But the child had guessed aright. The kind-hearted Laurent began soon to feel his own confinement, almost as solitary as the prince’s, more than he could bear. He petitioned to have some one to assist him in his duties, and, owing to some secret influence of the royalists, a man named Gomin, who was at heart devoted to their cause, was appointed. The only benefit which the young prisoner derived from the change of his jailers was that civility and cleanliness had replaced insolence and dirt. For the rest, he was still locked up alone, never seeing any one except at meal times, when the two guardians and a municipal were present, the former being often powerless to control the insulting remarks and gratuitous cruelty of the latter. So the wretched days dragged on, silent, monotonous, miserable. Meanwhile, Paris was breathing freely after the long night of Terror. The Fraternity of the Guillotine was well-nigh over, and the Jeunesse dorée had flung away the red caps and the Carmagnole, and was disporting itself with a light heart in gaudy attire of the antique cut. Fair citoyennes discarded the unbecoming and therefore, even to the most patriotic among them, odious costume of the republic, and decked themselves out in flowing Greek draperies, binding their hair with gold and silver fillets like Clytemnestra and Antigone, and replacing the sabots of the people with picturesque sandals, clothing their naked feet only in ribbons, despite the biting cold of this memorable winter. The death-beacons one by one had been quenched, not by nimble hands, like the lights of the ballroom or the gay flame of the street, but in blood dashed freely over their lurid glare. Terrified men were emerging from their holes and hiding-places; nobles were returning from exile; there was a sudden flaming up of merriment, an effervescence of luxury, an intoxicating thirst for pleasure, a hunger to eat of the good things of life, of which the reign of sans-culottism had starved them. There were gay gatherings in all ranks; in the highest the bals des victimes, where the guests wore a badge of crape on their arm, as a sign that they had lost a near relative on the guillotine—none others being admitted. So, while the waltzers spun round to the clang of brass music and in the blaze of wax-lights, and all the world was embracing and exchanging congratulations, like men escaped from impending death, the tragedy in the Tower drew to its end unheard and unheeded. The King of La Vendée ate his dinner of “bouilli and dry vegetables, generally beans”; the same at eight o’clock for supper, when he was locked up for the night, and left unmolested till nine next morning. One day there came a rough, blustering man to the prison, who flung open the doors with much noise, and talked like thunder. His name was Delboy. He chanced to arrive at the dinner-time. “Why this wretched food?” cried the noisy visitor. “If they were still at the Tuileries, I would help to starve them out; but here they are our prisoners, and it is unworthy of the nation to starve them. Why these blinds? Under the reign of equality the sun should shine for all. Why is he separated from his sister? Under the reign of fraternity why should they not see each other?” Then addressing the child in a gentler tone, he said, “Should you not like, my boy, to play with your sister? If you forget your origin, I don’t see why the nation should remember it.” He reminded the guardians that it was not the little Capet’s fault that he was his father’s son—it was his misfortune; he was now only “an unfortunate child,” and the “nation should be his mother.” The only advantage the unfortunate child derived from this strange visit was that the lamp of his dungeon was lighted henceforth at dark. Gomin asked this favor on the spot, and it was granted. The commissioners were continually changed—a circumstance which proved a frequent cause of suffering and annoyance to the captive, who was the victim of their respective tempers, often fierce and cruel as those of his jailers of the earlier days. These accumulated miseries were finally wearing out his little remnant of strength. The malady which for some time past gave serious alarm to his two kind-hearted friends, Laurent and Gomin, increased with sudden rapidity, and in the month of February, 1795, assumed a threatening character. He could hardly move from extreme weakness, and had lost all desire to do so. When he went for his airing, Laurent or Gomin had to carry him in their arms. He let them do so reluctantly; but he was now too apathetic to resist anything. The surgeon of the prison was called in, and certified that “the little Capet had tumors on all his joints, especially his knees; that it was impossible to extract a word from him; that he never would rise from his chair or his bed, and refused to take any kind of exercise.” This report brought a deputation of members of the Sûreté Générale, who were so horrified at the state of things they found that they drew up the following appeal to their colleagues: “For the honor of the nation, who knew nothing of these horrors; for that of the Convention, which was, in truth, also ignorant of them; and even for that of the guilty municipality of Paris itself, who knew all and was the cause of all these cruelties, we should make no public report, but only state the result in a secret meeting of the committee.” This confession is revolting enough; but it might find some shadow of excuse, if, after hiding the cruelties for the sake of shielding the wretches who had sanctioned them, these deputies had taken steps to repair the wrong-doing, and to alleviate the position of the victim; but, as far as the evidence goes, nothing of the sort was done.
The tomb-like solitude to which the young prince had so long been subjected, added to the chronic terror in which he had lived from the time of his coming under Simon’s tutelage, had induced him to maintain an obstinate, unbroken silence. He could not be persuaded to answer a question, to utter a word. Yet it was evident enough that this did not proceed from stupidity or insensibility, but that his faculties still retained much of their native vivacity and sensitiveness. Gomin was so timid by nature that, in spite of his affection for his little charge, he seldom ventured on any outward expression of sympathy, afraid he should be detected and made, like so many others, to pay the penalty of it. One day, however, that he chanced to be left quite alone with him, he felt safe to let his heart speak, and showed great tenderness to the child; the boy fixed a long, wistful look on his face, and then rose and advanced timidly to the door, his eyes still fastened on Gomin with an expression of entreaty too significant to be misunderstood. “No, no,” said Gomin, shaking his head reluctantly; “you know that cannot be.” “Oh! I must see her,” cried the poor child. “Oh! pray, pray let me see her just once before I die!” Gomin made no answer but by his look of pity and regret, and, going up to the child, led him gently from the door. The young prince threw himself on the bed with a gesture of despair, and remained there, senseless and motionless, so long that his guardian at one moment, as he confessed afterwards, feared he was dead. Poor child! The longing to see his mother had of late taken the shape of a hope, and he had been busy in his mind as to how it could possibly be realized; this had been an opportunity, he thought, and the disappointment overwhelmed him. Gomin said that, for his part, the sight of the boy’s grief nearly broke his heart. The incident, he believed, hastened the crisis, that was now steadily advancing. A few days after this occurrence a new commissary came to inspect the prisoner, and, after eyeing him curiously, as if he had been a strange variety of animal, he said out loud to Laurent and Gomin, who were standing by, “That child has not six weeks to live!” Fearing the shock these words might cause the subject of them, the guardians ventured to say something to modify their meaning; the commissary turned on them, and with a savage oath repeated, “I tell you, citizens, in six weeks he will be an idiot, if he is not dead!” When he left the room, the young prince gazed after him with a mournful smile. The sentence, brutally delivered as it was, had no fears for him; presently a few teardrops stole down his cheeks, and he murmured, as if speaking to himself, “And yet I never did any harm to anybody.”
A new affliction now awaited him. The kind and faithful Laurent left him. His post in the Tower, repulsive from the first, had become utterly insupportable to him of late, and on the death of his mother he applied to be liberated from it. When he came to bid farewell to the unhappy child, whose lot he had endeavored to soften as far as his power admitted, the prince squeezed his hand affectionately, looked his regret at him, but uttered no word.