1I saw Louis XVI die.

2“Go,” said Robespierre, “see liberty declared, and a King proved to be no more than a man.”

3I stood amongst those at the foot of the scaffold.

4I 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.

5Robespierre 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.

6I 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.

7But let me return to the course of events.

8There 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.

9As 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.

10The loud cries of “Long Live the Republic,” and the rumbling return of the cannon, were the first evidences she received that all was over.

11She 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.

12She 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.

13Cléry, 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.

14About 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.

15The Queen asked very humbly permission to wear mourning for the King, and this was granted, on condition of extreme parsimony and meanness.

16There was a special debate, in order to obtain the Dauphin a few shirts.

17The 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.

18Her 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.

19The King had now been dead ten weeks, and Marie Antoinette had yet to live six cruel months.

20Her 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.

21Her 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?”

22She 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.

23These 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.

24She 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.