1The Convention ordained the worship of Marat, and cast his corpse to the people as an idol.

2He was called Cæsar, and his funeral was modelled upon the historical narrative of that given by Rome to the great Julius.

3The body was carried by torchlight to the garden of the house in which he made his most inflammatory speeches; and there he was buried under trees heavily laden with countless brilliantly-illuminated paper lamps.

4His head was placed in an urn, and hung in the centre of the Convention. His memory was decreed an altar, and at its foot his admirers appropriately called for blood.

5The enemy was now approaching on all sides, and thousands more Royalists were in array.

6Meanwhile Danton was sinking in estimation, Robespierre rising, for Robespierre was a patient man.

7Danton, dazzled with his new wife, wished to live the life of a small country gentleman. It was too late.

8Robespierre was breaking in health, but his temperance would stand him in good stead of health for a long while. His motto was “Wait.”

9The Committee of Public Safety was meanwhile reaping a rich harvest of death.

10Money was no longer to be seen.

11Bread was rare.

12People were dying of starvation (especially the old) in every street.

13The more cruel of the Conventionists carried by acclamation these decrees—the true legal inauguration of the Reign of Terror:

14“Six thousand soldiers and twelve hundred artillerymen to do blindly the bidding of the Committee of Public Safety.

15“All men who have been in the Government occupation during the late King’s life, to quit Paris.

16“The delivery of the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Moderate Conventionists.

17“The right to search any house at any hour of the night.

18“The transportation beyond the seas of every common woman in the land.

19“Finally, the payment of workmen who should leave their shops to follow up the public service.”

20By these measures the mob were not only encouraged to take life, but paid to do it. Nothing could save such a system resulting, if long continued, in national death!

21By the way, Sunday was chosen as the best day for working these mob committees.

22This was followed by Merlin’s decree, which provided for the arrest (without proof) of any suspected person, and of all those who, not working, were enabled to live in a better condition than one of penury. This was an attack upon all people who had hidden money. In fact, starvation had by this time become the only mode of avoiding the guillotine.

23Prisons were not large enough to contain prisoners, and all the confiscated churches were converted into gaols. Death was decreed for almost every act of life—certainly for every act of pity.

24A hundred men, less two, were beheaded in sixty days in Paris alone.

25The Queen was too noble a victim to escape.

26The Convention suddenly ordered her trial, and commanded her separation from the two children.

27Now all the lethargy which has possessed her since the King’s death departs, and she becomes as a lioness fighting for her young.

28By this time, all the beauty of Marie Antoinette had vanished, and there remained a very broken old woman, aged about a little more than thirty, with very scanty white hair, falling in patches from an almost bald head. The body, as the soul, had shrunken—a skeleton remained, covered with mere skin.

29This was the Queen, who leapt into life when her dulled hearing comprehended that she was to be separated from her children. They had but the mercy only to remove the son.

30The boy clung to his mother, who lost all dignity, dug her nails into the child’s flesh, and called upon the men to kill them both.

31For two hours this lasted, and then she became a woman again—a mother; and dressing him to look as smart as possible, she gave him up with her own hands to his gaoler, Simon, who took him at once to the room where the child was destined to die. For two days and nights the child lay upon the floor, taking neither food nor drink.

32The Queen never took her son in her arms. He was to outlive her but a little time, and then die of sheer ill-usage and neglect.

33The Queen, however, still had her husband’s sister and her daughter with her. The only consolation they had, was ascending to the platform of their tower, to catch a glimpse of the boy on the platform of the other tower.

34Simon’s work it was to deprave the body and soul of the wretched child. He forced him to drink strong wine, and made him answer to the name of “Wolf.” He beat him if he wept, encouraged him to every possible disgusting act, and compelled him to sing obscene songs, while he (his master) smoked and drank.

35Once, he nearly destroyed one of the poor Prince’s eyes; at another, he raised a poker against him. Sometimes he was kind; and, upon one occasion, he said, “Capet, if the soldiers come and deliver you, what will you do?”

36“Forgive you,” said the child.

37The man Simon actually wept, but he cried immediately afterwards, “There’s some of the blood of the lion in the whelp.”

38In the middle of the night of the 2nd of August, the Queen was awakened, and told she was to be removed alone, to another prison.

39In vain the women threw themselves at the feet of the men. They had but their duty to do.

40The Queen was compelled to dress before them, while they ransacked the room, and seized every little object the Queen still retained. The miserable creatures left her a handkerchief.

41And now, exactly as Louis XVI had told his children to forgive their enemies, so now desolate Marie Antoinette told her daughter, in her last words to the poor child, to forgive those who parted them.

42“I give my children to you, sister. Be a second mother to them.”

43For precisely as Louis appears to have had no conception of the monstrosity of putting a woman to death, so the Queen, in leaving the Temple, appears not to have supposed for one moment that the Princess Elizabeth would be claimed by the scaffold,—she who had led the life of a true woman, who had nursed and helped the people, and never joined in the frivolities of the Court.

44The Queen was taken to the prison of the Conciergerie, which is composed of the dungeons below high water mark, to be found amongst the foundations of the Palace of Justice.

45To a wretched cell, having in one corner a straw bed, and by the light of one candle, was the ex-Queen taken.

46A woman desirous of death in the dungeon of a stronghold, and yet they only believed her safe when two soldiers, swords drawn, stood at the outer door watching, with orders not to lose sight of the Widow Capet, even when asleep.

47Madam Richard, that good woman who tended Charlotte Corday in her last moments, was the Queen’s most humane gaoler. She found something like furniture for the cell, procured wholesome food for the captive, and often brought a low-whispered message from the royal prisoners still in the Temple.

48A little while, and the dampness of the cell rotted the Queen’s only dresses—two very common ones; and her underclothing becoming in tatters, she was half naked.