The account of the way the Royal Family passed their time in the Temple is very pathetic. When at four o'clock the King slept in his arm-chair, the Queen and Princesses worked at their tapestry or knitting, while the little Dauphin learnt his lessons, and after the King had retired for the night they mended their clothes or those of the King and the Dauphin.
It is stated that the King's coat became ragged, and as Madame Elizabeth mended it, she had to bite off the thread with her teeth, as the scissors had been taken away.
So long as they were allowed to employ themselves with needlework there was comfort for them, and yet more, for by their work they were able to keep up some sort of correspondence with their friends outside the prison. It is just possible that the jailors had a suspicion of this. Anyhow, the time came when all their sewing materials and tools were taken from them and they were desolate indeed.
Subsequently when Marie Antoinette was removed to the Conciergerie, a place of confinement of the lowest order, her suffering was greatly increased at not being allowed to work. The jailors refused even knitting-needles. At length the thought came to her of drawing out some threads from the stuffing of her bed, which, with two wooden skewers, she knitted into garters.
Some of the work done by Marie Antoinette and Madame Elizabeth during the last two years of their lives is still in existence, and consists of hangings six feet by four. The groundwork of the tapestry is in black wool, with bouquets of flowers, roses, pinks, and convolvulus, on coarse canvas.
Some of these hangings were acquired by Rome in 1881.
The Empress Josephine, wife of Napoleon Buonaparte, both loved and excelled in the art of needlework, and it certainly was of the greatest possible comfort and solace to her during the years of her retirement.
Like Marie Antoinette, she always worked at her embroidery or tapestry when receiving her most intimate friends, and chatting with them late in the evening.
After her separation from Napoleon she took up her abode in beautiful Malmaison, where, between botany and needlework, she spent most of her time. The hangings of the saloon were entirely her own work, and the exquisite furniture of her drawing-room was upholstered in embroidery and tapestry worked by herself and her ladies in previous happy years.
Needlework was not infrequently put on one side during the evening hours, in order that Josephine, her ladies, and guests, might make lint for the Sisters of Charity, who were greatly in need of it for the wounded soldiers.