WHAT FOLLOWS.
I saw Louis XVI die.
“Go,” said Robespierre, “see liberty declared, and a King proved to
be no more than a man.”
I stood amongst those at the foot of the scaffold.
I will say no more than this—Louis died bravely, and like a man. And
I think the people were sorry. Of course they had more to regret
before the Reign of Terror was over.
Robespierre changed nothing in his mode of life after he came to
Duplay’s. He drank water, he lived very temperately and frugally, was
always master of himself. By the way, another of Duplay’s daughters
coming home, Maximilian actually fell in love with her, in a grave,
calm way; and it was agreed that, when liberty was completely
obtained, and France was at peace, that they should be married, live
in a cottage, and hide away from the world.
I had frequently been at the Temple during the incarceration of the
King, and often saw various members of the unhappy family. I am
desirous that my hearers should believe that the men who surrounded
the Capets in their imprisonment, were no more good examples of the
revolutionary masses than I am an angel. A few hundred ferocious men
rose to the surface of the Revolution, and disgraced it. At heart,
its adherents sought to make France happy, and the people richer.
But let me return to the course of events.
* * * * *
There is very little known of what the widowed Queen did or said
during the night before the execution, and upon that morning itself,
beyond the fact that she passed from prayer to insensibility
continuously. The entire family seem to have been conscious, from
the first, that the separation with the King, on the eve of the
execution, was final—that his promise to see them in the morning was
a pious fraud.
As the morning progressed, after she knew by the lessening noise of
the drums that he was on the way to execution, her great anxiety
appeared to be to ascertain the exact moment when he died, so that
from praying for him, she might entreat his soul to pray and plead
for her and his children.
The loud cries of “Long Live the Republic,” and the rumbling return
of the cannon, were the first evidences she received that all was
over.
She appears from that time to have passed into a state of
half-unconscious moroseness—a condition which is one of the mercies
of nature, and which only ended in her life.
She knew, she said, that he would die like a man, and that was her
consolation, when, with a cruelty beyond measure, she was refused any
information concerning his last moments.
Cléry, the valet, now, apart from her family, the dearest being to
her in all the world, as the man who had been with the King during
his last days,—Cléry was now a prisoner, and remained one during a
whole month, during which time he had not the faintest approach to
an opportunity to give the Queen the King’s last words, or place in
her keeping the hair and ring with which the King had entrusted him.
About these relics there is a strange bit of tender history.
One Toulan concealed under the most frantic demonstrations of
Republicanism, a sacrificial devotion to the royal family. He feared
these relics would be wilfully destroyed by some drunken, ruthless
hand; and pretending that he would not allow the chance of their
being delivered to the Queen, he insisted on their being placed under
the keeping of the chief officers of the Commune.
The Queen asked very humbly permission to wear mourning for the King,
and this was granted, on condition of extreme parsimony and meanness.
There was a special debate, in order to obtain the Dauphin a few
shirts.
The more merciful men of the Revolution fully expected that the death
of the King would be followed by the liberation of the Queen, her
children, and the Princess Elizabeth. This hope being held out to the
Princess Elizabeth, she carried the grateful news to the Queen, who
heard it, without interest, and returned an answer almost stupid to
this good news. Either she knew that a nation who had not spared her
husband would not spare her, who had always been the least liked of
the two, or she did not care to live. Probably the latter surmise is
the nearer correct.
Her only expression of resolution took place when she was requested
for her health’s sake to walk in the garden of the prison. She
resolutely refused. She said she could not pass the door of the
King’s prison—could not put her feet upon the stairs down which he
had marched to death. It was only at the end of six weeks—at the
close of February—that she consented, for the sake of the children,
who never left her side, to walk on the platform at the top of the
tower. Here, between the battlements of the parapet, she could be
seen from the neighboring houses; and this tending to create pity, it
was ordered that the spaces between the battlements should be filled
up with boards—an order which pleased the Queen, for it shut out from
her sight a city which, to her, appeared a mere charnel-house. This
intended petty cruelty—which was a relief—took place towards the end
of March.
The King had now been dead ten weeks, and Marie Antoinette had yet to
live six cruel months.
Her bodily health was breaking, but she had no knowledge of this
fact. Her heart was dead. She was simply decaying. For whole nights
she would lie awake, never complaining, never showing signs of
weariness.
Her life had passed into _wailing_. She was weary almost of the love
of her children. Upon the face, and in her step, walk, in every
gesture, and at rest, at last, or awake, the woman appeared to be
pleading, “Good Lord, how long shall this endure?”
She was now more closely watched. The Princess Elizabeth, at
peace, become essentially a religious woman, contrived to obtain
intelligence of what was happening. One Huc—once valet to the King
when in prosperity—conveyed messages through the friendly Toulan
into the prison. These messages were put in the pipe of a portable
fireplace, and found by the Princess Elizabeth, who replied in
letters written with sympathetic ink, so that only those who knew how
to treat them could read their contents.
These letters contained minutes of all that was doing in Europe in
the royal cause. Many promising lines thus came to the prison. The
Queen heard them read, said a vacant word or two, and sank back into
her usual condition of partial lethargy.
She only came back to life when she heard the voices of either of her
children. Then she lived. When they were silent, she was dead, though
her heart still beat.