Of all the victims of that bloody period, there is none whose story is so touching as that of the little son of Louis and Marie Antoinette. He was born at Versailles on the 27th of March, 1785. All eye-witnesses describe him as a bright and lovely child, with shining curls of fair hair, large, blue eyes, liquid as a summer sky, and a countenance of angelic sweetness and rare intelligence—“a thing of joy” to all who beheld him. Crowds waited for hours to catch a glimpse of him disporting himself in his little garden before the palace, a flower amidst the flower-beds, prattling with every one, making the old park ring with his joyous laughter. One day, when in the midst of his play, he ran to meet his mother, and, flinging himself into a bush for greater haste, got scratched by the thorns; the queen chided him for the foolish impetuosity. “How then?” replied the child; “you told me only yesterday that the road to glory was through thorns.” “Yes, but glory means devotion to duty, my son,” was Marie Antoinette’s reply. “Then,” cried the little man, throwing his arms, round her knees, “I will make it my glory to be devoted to you, mamma!” He was about four years old when this anecdote was told of him.
It is rather characteristic of the child’s destiny that two hours after the bereavement which made him Dauphin of France, and while his parents were breaking their hearts by the still warm body of his elder brother, a deputation from the Tiers Etat came to demand an audience of the king. Louis XVI. was a prey to the first agony of his paternal grief, and sent to entreat the deputies to spare him, and return another day. They sent back an imperious answer, insisting on his appearing. “Are there no fathers amongst them?” exclaimed the king; but he came out and received them. The incident was trifling, yet it held one of those notes of prophetic anticipation which now first began to be heard, foretelling the approaching storm in which the old ship of French royalty was to be wrecked.
On the 6th of October the palace of Versailles was stormed by the mob; the guards were massacred, the royal family led captives to Paris amidst the triumphant yells of the sans-culottes. Then followed the gilded captivity of the Tuileries, which lasted three years; then came the 10th of August, when this was exchanged for the more degrading prison of the Temple; then the Conciergerie—then the scaffold.
The Temple was a Gothic fortress built in 1212 by the Knights of the Temple. It had been long inhabited by those famous warrior-knights, and consisted of two distinct towers, which were so constructed as to resemble one building. The great tower was a massive structure divided into five or six stories, above a hundred and fifty feet high, with a pyramidal roof like an extinguisher, having at each corner a turret with a conical roof like a steeple. This was formerly the keep, and had been used as treasury and arsenal by the Templars; it was accessible only by a single door in one turret, opening on a narrow stone stair. The other was called the Little Tower, a narrow oblong with turrets at each angle, and attached, without any internal communication, to its big neighbor on the north side. Close by, within the enclosure of the Temple, stood an edifice which had in olden times been the dwelling-house of the prior, and it was here the royal family were incarcerated on their arrival. The place was utterly neglected and dilapidated, but from its construction and original use it was capable of being made habitable. The king believed that they were to remain here, and visited the empty, mouldy rooms next day, observing to Cléry what changes and repairs were most urgently required. No such luxurious prospect was, however, in store for them. They were merely huddled into the Prior’s Hotel while some preparations were being made for their reception in the tower. These preparations consisted in precautions, equally formidable and absurd, against possible rescue or flight. The heavy oak doors, the thick stone walls, which had proved safe enough for murderers and rebel warriors, were not considered secure for the timid king and his wife and children. Doors and windows were reinforced with iron bars, bolts, and wooden blinds. The corkscrew stair was So narrow that only one person could pass it at a time, yet new iron-plated doors were put up, and bars thrown across it at intervals, to prevent escape. The door leading from it into the royal prisoners’ apartment was so low that when Marie Antoinette was dragged from her children, after the king’s death, to be taken to the Conciergerie, she knocked her head violently against the upper part of it, exclaiming to some one who hoped she was not hurt, “Nothing can hurt me now!” The Abbé Edgeworth thus describes the access to the king’s rooms: “I was led across the court to the door of the tower, which, though very narrow and very low, was so overcharged with iron bolts and bars that it opened with a horrible noise. I was conducted up a winding stair so narrow that two persons would have had great difficulty in getting past each other. At short distances these stairs were cut across by barriers, at each of which was a sentinel; these men were all true sans-culottes, generally drunk, and their atrocious exclamations, re-echoed by the vast vaults which covered every story of the tower, were really terrifying.” For still greater security all the adjoining buildings which crowded round the tower were thrown down. This work of destruction was entrusted to Palloy, a zealous patriot, whose energy in helping to pull down the Bastile pointed him out as a fit instrument for the occasion. These external arrangements fitly symbolized the systematic brutality which was organized from the first by the Convention, and relentlessly carried out by its agents on each succeeding victim, but by no one so ferociously as Simon the shoemaker. The most appalling riddle which the world has yet set us to solve is the riddle of the French Revolution. The deepest thinkers, the shrewdest philosophers, are puzzling over it still, and will go on puzzling to the crack of doom. There are causes many and terrible which explain the grand fact of the nation’s revolt itself; why, when once the frenzy broke out, the people murdered the king, and butchered all belonging to him, striving to bring about a new birth, a different order of things, by a baptism of blood, the death and annihilation of the old system—many wise and solemn words have been uttered concerning these things, many answers which, if they do not justify the madness of the Revolution, help us to pity, and in a measure excuse, its actors; but the enigma which no one has ever yet solved, or attempted to solve, is the excess of cruelty practised on the fair-haired child whose sole crime was his misfortune in being the descendant of the kings of France.
The Princesse de Lamballe fell on the 3d of September at the prison of La Force. The National Guards carried the head on a pike through the city, and then hoisted it under the windows of the king, and clamored for him to come out and show himself. One young officer, more humane than his compeers, rushed forward and prevented it, and saved Louis from beholding the dreadful spectacle. The king was deeply grateful for the kind action, and asked the officer’s name. “And who was the other who tried to force your majesty out?” enquired M. de Malesherbes. “Oh! I did not care to know his name!” replied Louis gently. That was a night of horrors. The two princesses, Mme. Royale and Princess Elizabeth, could not sleep; the drums were beating to arms, and they sat in silence, “listening to the sobs of the queen, which never ceased.” But more cruel days were yet in store. Before the month was out the Commune de Paris issued a decree for the separation of the king from his wife and children. “They felt it,” says this curious document, “their imperious duty to prevent the abuses which might facilitate the evasion of those traitors, and therefore decree, 1st, that Louis and Antoinette be separated.
“2d. That each shall have a separate dungeon (cachot).
“3d. That the valet de chambre be placed in confinement, etc., etc.”
That same night the king was removed to the second story of the great tower. The room was in a state of utter destitution; no preparations of the commonest description had been made for receiving him. A straw bed was thrown down on the floor; Cléry, his valet, had not even this, but sat up all night on a chair. A month later (October) the queen and her children were transferred to the story over that now occupied by Louis in the great tower. On the 26th the Dauphin was torn from his mother under the pretence that he was now too old to be left to the charge of women, being just seven years and six months. He was therefore lodged with his father, who found his chief solace in teaching the child his lessons; these consisted of Latin, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. The separation was for the present mitigated by the consolation of meeting at meal-times, and being allowed to be together for some hours in the garden every day. They bore all privations and the insults of their jailers with unruffled patience and sweetness. Mme. Elizabeth and the queen sat up at night to mend their own and the king’s clothes, which the fact of their each having but one suit made it impossible for them to do in the daytime.
This comparatively merciful state of things lasted till the first week in December, when a new set of commissaries were appointed and the captives watched day and night with lynx-eyed rigor. On the 11th the prince was taken back to his mother, the king was summoned to the bar of the Convention, and on his return to prison was informed that he was henceforth totally separated from his family. He never saw them again until the eve of his death. The Duchesse d’Angoulême (Mme. Royale) has described that interview to us with her usual simplicity and pathos: “My father, at the moment of parting with us for ever, made us promise never to think of avenging his death. He was well satisfied that we should hold sacred his last instructions; but the extreme youth of my brother made him desirous of producing a still stronger impression upon him. He took him on his knee, and said to him, ‘My son, you have heard what I have said, but, as an oath is something more sacred than words, hold up your hand and swear that you will accomplish the last wish of your father.’ My brother obeyed, bursting into tears, and this touching goodness redoubled ours.”
The next day Louis had gone to receive the reward promised to the merciful, to those who return love for hate, blessings for curses. When the guillotine had done its work, the shouts of the infuriated city announced to the queen that she was a widow. Her agony was inconsolable. In the afternoon of this awful day she asked to see Cléry, hoping that he might have some message for her from the king, with whom he had remained till his departure from the Temple. She guessed right; the faithful servant had been entrusted with a ring, which the king desired him to deliver to her with the assurance that he never would have parted with it but with his life. But Cléry was not allowed the mournful privilege of fulfilling his trust in person; he was kept a month in the Temple, and then released. “We had now a little more freedom,” continues Mme. Royale. “The guards even believed that we were about to be sent out of France; but nothing could calm the agony of the queen. No hope could touch her heart; life was indifferent to her, and she did not fear death.”