Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty Part 15

We have just seen what occurred at the a.s.sembly after the close of the combat. Cast now a glance at the Tuileries. What horrible scenes, what cries of grief, how many wounded, dead, and dying, what streams of blood! What had become of those Swiss who, either in consequence of their wounds, or through some other motive, had been obliged to remain at the palace? Eighty of them had defended the grand staircase like heroes, against an immense crowd, and died after prodigies of valor.

Seventeen {322} Swiss who were posted in the chapel, and who had not fired a shot since the fight began, hoped to save their lives by laying down their arms. It was a mistake. They had their throats cut like the others. Two ushers of the King's chamber, MM. Pallas and de Marchais, sword in hand, and hats pulled down over their eyes, said: "We don't want to live any longer; this is our post; we ought to die here!" and they were killed at the door of their master's chamber.

M. Dieu died in the same way on the threshold of the Queen's bedroom.

A certain number of n.o.bles who had not followed the King to the a.s.sembly succeeded in escaping the blows of the a.s.sa.s.sins. Pa.s.sing through the suite of large apartments towards the Louvre Gallery, they rejoined there some soldiers detailed to guard an opening contrived in the flooring, so as to prevent the a.s.sailants from entering by that way. They crossed this opening on boards, and reached the extremity of the gallery unhindered; then, going down the staircase of Catharine de Medici, they managed to gain the streets near the Louvre. These may have been saved. But woe to all men, no matter what their conditions, who remained in the Tuileries! Domestic servants, ushers, laborers, every soul was put to death. They killed even the dying, even the surgeons who were caring for the wounded. It is Barbaroux himself who describes the murderers as "cowardly fugitives during the action, a.s.sa.s.sins after the victory, butchers {323} of dead bodies which they stabbed with their swords so as to give themselves the honors of the combat. In the apartments, on roofs, and in cellars, they ma.s.sacred the Swiss, armed or disarmed, the chevaliers, soldiers, and all who peopled the chateau.... Our devotion was of no avail," says Barbaroux again; "we were speaking to men who no longer recognized us."

And the women, what was their fate? When the firing began, the Queen's ladies and the Princesses descended to Marie Antoinette's apartments on the ground-floor. They closed the shutters, hoping to incur less danger, and lighted a candle so as not to be in total darkness. Then Mademoiselle Pauline de Tourzel exclaimed: "Let us light all the candles in the chandelier, the sconces, and the torches; if the brigands force open the door, the astonishment so many lights will cause them may delay the first blow and give us time to speak." The ladies set to work. When the invaders broke in, sabre in hand, the numberless lights, which were repeated also in the mirrors, made such a contrast with the daylight they had just left, that for a moment they remained stupefied. And yet, the Princess de Tarente, Madame de La Roche-Aymon, Mademoiselle de Tourzel, Madame de Ginestons, and all the other ladies were about to perish when a man with a long beard made his appearance, crying to the a.s.sa.s.sins in Petion's name: "Spare the women; do not dishonor the nation."

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Madame Campan had attempted to go up a stairway in pursuit of her sister. The murderers followed her. She already felt a terrible hand against her back, trying to seize her by her clothes, when some one cried from the foot of the stairs: "What are you doing up there?"--"Hey!" said the murderer, in a tone that did not soon leave the trembling woman's ears. The other voice replied: "We don't kill women." The Revolution goes fast; it will kill them next year. Madame Campan was on her knees. Her executioner let go his hold. "Get up, hussy," he said to her, "the nation spares you!" In going back she walked over corpses; she recognized that of the old Viscount de Broves.

The Queen had sent word to him and to another old man as the last night began, that she desired them to go home. He had replied: "We have been only too obedient to the King's orders in all circ.u.mstances when it was necessary to expose our lives to save him; this time we will not obey, and will simply preserve the memory of the Queen's kindness."

What a sight the Tuileries presented! People walked on nothing but dead bodies. A comic actor drank a gla.s.s of blood, the blood of a Swiss; one might have thought himself at a feast of Atreus. The furniture was broken, the secretaries forced open, the mirrors smashed to pieces. Prudhomme, the journalist of the _Revolutions de Paris_, thinks that "Medicis-Antoinette has too long studied in them {325} the hypocritical look she wears in public." What a sinister carnival!

Drunken women and prost.i.tutes put on the Queen's dresses and sprawl on her bed. Through the cellar gratings one can see a thousand hands groping in the sand, and drawing forth bottles of wine. Everywhere people are laughing, drinking, killing. The royal wine runs in streams. Torrents of wine, torrents of blood. The apartments, the staircase, the vestibule, are crimson pools. Disfigured corpses, pictures thrust through with pikes, musicians' stands thrown on the altar, the organ dismounted, broken,--that is how the chapel looks.

But to rob and murder is not enough: they will kindle a conflagration.

It devours the stables of the mounted guards, all the buildings in the courts, the house of the governor of the palace: eighteen hundred yards of barracks, huts, and houses. Already the fire is gaining on the Pavilion of Marsan and the Pavilion of Flora. The flames are perceived at the a.s.sembly. A deputy asks to have the firemen sent to fight this fire which threatens the whole quarter Saint-Honore. Somebody remarks that this is the Commune's business. But the Commune, to use a phrase then in vogue, thinks it has something else to do besides preventing the destruction of the tyrant's palace. It turns a deaf ear. The messenger returns to the a.s.sembly. It is remarked that the flames are doing terrible damage. The president decides to send orders to the firemen. But the firemen return, saying: "We can do nothing. They {326} are firing on us. They want to throw us into the fire." What is to be done? The president bethinks himself of a "patriot" architect, Citizen Palloy, who generally makes his appearance whenever there are "patriotic" demolitions to be accomplished. It is he whom they send to the palace, and who succeeds in getting the flames extinguished. The Tuileries are not burned up this time. The work of the incendiaries of 1792 was only to be finished by the petroleurs of 1871.

Night was come. A great number of the Parisian population were groaning, but the revolutionists triumphed with joy. Curiosity to see the morning battle-field, urged the indolent, who had stayed at home all day, towards the quays, the Champs-Elysees, and the Tuileries.

They looked at the trees under which the Swiss had fallen, at the windows of the apartments where the ma.s.sacres had taken place, at the ravages made by the hardly extinguished fire. The buildings in the three courts: Court of the Princes, Court Royal, Court of the Swiss, had been completely consumed. Thenceforward these three courts formed only one, separated from the Carrousel by a board part.i.tion which remained until 1800, and was replaced by a grating finished on the very day when the First Consul came to install himself at the Tuileries.

The inscription which was placed above the wooden part.i.tion: "On August 10 royalty was abolished; it will never rise again," disappeared even before the proclamation of the Empire.

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Squads of laborers gathered up the dead bodies and threw them into tumbrels. At midnight an immense pile was erected on the Carrousel with timbers and furniture from the palace. There the corpses of the victims that had strewed the courts, the vestibule, and the apartments were heaped up, and set on fire.

The National Guard had disappeared; it figured with the King and the a.s.sembly itself, among the vanquished of the day. Instead of its bayonets and uniforms one saw nothing in the stations and patrols that divided Paris but pikes and tatters. "Some one came to tell me,"

relates Madame de Stael, "that all of my friends who had been on guard outside the palace, had been seized and ma.s.sacred. I went out at once to learn the news; the coachman who drove me was stopped at the bridge by men who silently made signs that they were murdering on the other side. After two hours of useless efforts to pa.s.s I learned that all those in whom I was interested were still living, but that most of them had been obliged to hide in order to escape the proscription with which they were threatened. When I went to see them in the evening, on foot, and in the mean houses where they had been able to find shelter, I found armed men lying before the doors, stupid with drink, and only half waking to utter execrable curses. Several women of the people were in the same state, and their vociferations were more odious still.

Whenever a patrol intended to maintain order made its appearance, {328} honest people fled out of its way; for what they called maintaining order was to contribute to the triumph of a.s.sa.s.sins and rid them of all hindrances."

At last the city was going to rest a while after so much emotion! It was three o'clock in the morning. The a.s.sembly, which had been in session for twenty-four hours, adjourned. Only a few members remained in the hall to maintain the permanence proclaimed at the beginning of the crisis. The inspectors of the hall came for Louis XVI. and his family, to conduct them, not to the Luxembourg, but to the upper story of the convent of the Feuillants, above the corridor where the offices and committees of the a.s.sembly had been established. It was there, in the cells of the monks, that the royal family were to pa.s.s the night.

Then all was silent once more. Royalty was dying!

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x.x.xII.

THE ROYAL-FAMILY IN THE CONVENT OF THE FEUILLANTS.

What a strange prison was this dilapidated old monastery, these little cells, not lived in for two years, with their flooring half-destroyed, and their narrow windows looking down into courts full of men drunken with wine and blood! By the light of candles stuck into gun-barrels the royal family entered this gloomy lodging. Trembling for her son, who was frightened, the Queen took him from M. Aubier's arms and whispered to him. The child grew calmer. "Mamma," said he, "has promised to let me sleep in her room because I was very good before all those wicked men." Four cells, all opening by similar small doors upon the same corridor, comprised the quarters of the royal family. What a night! The souvenirs of the previous day came back like dismal dreams.

Their ears were still deafened with furious cries. They seemed to see the blood of the Swiss flowing like a torrent, the pyramids of corpses in red uniforms, the flames of the terrible conflagration sweeping the approaches to the Tuileries. Marie Antoinette seems under an {330} hallucination; her emotions break her down. Is this woman, confided to the care of an unknown servant, in this deserted old convent, really she? Is this the Queen of France and Navarre? This the daughter of the great Empress Maria Theresa? What uncertainty rests over the fate of her most faithful servitors! What news will she yet learn? Who has fallen? Who has survived the carnage? The hours of the night wear on; Marie Antoinette has not been able to sleep a moment.

The Marquis de Tourzel and M. d'Aubier remained near the King's bedside. Before sleeping, he talked to them with the utmost calmness of all that had taken place. "People regret," said he, "that I did not have the rebels attacked before they could have forced the a.s.sembly; but besides the fact that in accordance with the terms of the Const.i.tution, the National Guards might have refused to be the aggressors, what would have been the result of this attack? The measures of the insurrection were too well taken for my party to have been victorious, even if I had not left the Tuileries. Do they forget that when the seditious Commune ma.s.sacred M. Mandat, it rendered his projected defence of no avail?" While Louis XVI. was saying this, the men placed under the windows were shouting loudly for the Queen's head.

"What has she done to them?" cried the unfortunate sovereign.

The next morning, August 11, several persons were authorized to enter the cells of the convent. {331} Among them was one of the officers of the King's bedchamber, Francois Hue, who had incurred the greatest dangers on the previous day. Cards of admission were distributed by the inspector of the a.s.sembly hall. A large guard was stationed at all the issues of the corridor. No one could pa.s.s without being stopped and questioned. After surmounting all obstacles, M. Hue reached the cell of Louis XVI. The King was still in bed, with his head covered by a coa.r.s.e cloth. He looked tenderly at his faithful servant. M. Hue, who could scarcely speak for sobbing, apprised his unhappy master of the tragic death of several persons whom His Majesty was especially fond of, among others, the Chevalier d'Allonville, who had been under-governor to the first Dauphin, and several officers of the bedchamber: MM. Le Tellier, Pallas, and de Marchais. "I have, at least," said Louis XVI., "the consolation of seeing you saved from this ma.s.sacre!"

All night long, Madame Elisabeth, the Princess de Lamballe, and Madame de Tourzel had prayed and wept in silence at the door of the chamber where Marie Antoinette watched beside her sleeping children. It was not until morning, after cruel insomnia, that the wretched Queen was at last able to close her eyes. And when, after a few minutes, she opened them again, what an awakening!

At eight o'clock in the morning Mademoiselle Pauline de Tourzel arrived at the Feuillants. "I cannot say enough," she writes in her _Souvenirs de Quarante {332} Ans_, "about the goodness of the King and Queen; they asked me many questions about the persons concerning whom I could give them any tidings. Madame and the Dauphin received me with touching signs of affection; they embraced me, and Madame said: 'My dear Pauline, do not leave us any more!'" The courtiers of misfortune came one after another. Madame Campan and her sister, Madame Auguie, saw the Prince de Poix, M. d'Aubier, M. de Saint-Pardou, Madame Elisabeth's equerry, MM. de Goguelat, Hue, and de Chamilly in the first cell; in the second they found the King. They wanted to kiss his hand, but he prevented it, and embraced them without speaking. In the third cell they saw the Queen, waited on by an unknown woman. Marie Antoinette held out her arms. "Come!" she cried; "come, unhappy women! come and see one who is still more unhappy than you, since it is she who has been the cause of all your sorrow!" She added: "We are ruined. We have reached the place at last to which they have been leading us for three years by every possible outrage; we shall succ.u.mb in this horrible revolution, and many others will perish after us. Everybody has contributed to our ruin: the innovators like fools, others like the ambitious, in order to aid their own fortunes; for the most furious of the Jacobins wanted gold and places, and the crowd expected pillage.

There is not a patriot in the whole infamous horde; the emigrants had their schemes and manoeuvres; {333} the foreigners wanted to profit by the dissensions of France; everybody has had a part in our misfortunes." Here the Dauphin entered with his sister and Madame de Tourzel. "Poor children!" cried the Queen. "How cruel it is not to transmit to them so n.o.ble a heritage, and to say: All is over for us!"

And as the little Dauphin, seeing his mother and those around her weeping, began to shed tears also: "My child," the Queen said, embracing him, "you see I have consolations too; the friends whom misfortune deprived me of were not worth as much as those it gave me."

Then Marie Antoinette asked for news of the Princess de Tarente, Madame de la Roche-Aymon, and others whom she had left at the Tuileries. She compa.s.sionated the fate of the victims of the previous day.

Madame Campan expressed a desire to know what the foreign amba.s.sadors had done in this catastrophe. The Queen replied that they had done nothing, but that the English amba.s.sadress, Lady Sutherland, had just displayed some interest by sending linen for the Dauphin, who was in need of it.

What memories must not that little cell in the Feuillants convent have left in the souls of those who were privileged to present there the homage of their devotion to the Queen! "I think I still see," Madame Campan has said in her Memoirs, "I shall always see, that little cell, hung with green paper, that wretched couch from which the dethroned sovereign stretched out her arms to us, saying that our {334} woes, of which she was the cause, aggravated her own. There, for the last time, I saw the tears flowing and heard the sobs of her whose birth and natural gifts, and above all the goodness of whose heart had destined her to be the ornament of all thrones and the happiness of all peoples."

During the 11th and 12th of August the tortures of the 10th were renewed for the royal family. They were obliged to occupy the odious box of the _Logographe_ during the sessions of the a.s.sembly, and from there witness, as at a show, the slow and painful death-struggle of royalty. As she was on her way to this wretched hole, Marie Antoinette perceived in the garden some curious spectators on whose faces a certain compa.s.sion was depicted. She saluted them. Then a voice cried: "Don't put on so many airs with that graceful head; it is not worth while. You'll not have it much longer." From the box of the _Logographe_ the royal family listened to the most offensive motions; to decrees according the Ma.r.s.eillais a payment of thirty sous a day, ordering all statues of kings to be overthrown, and pet.i.tions demanding the heads of all the Swiss who had escaped the ma.s.sacre. At last the a.s.sembly grew tired of the long humiliation of the august captives. On Monday, August 13, they were not present at the session, and during the day they were notified that in the evening they were to be incarcerated, not in the Luxembourg,--that palace being too good for them,--but in the tower of the Temple. When Marie {335} Antoinette was informed of this decision, she turned toward Madame de Tourzel, and putting her hands over her eyes, said: "I always asked the Count d'Artois to have that villanous tower of the Temple torn down; it always filled me with horror!" Petion told Louis XVI. that the Communal Council had decreed that none of the persons proposed for the service of the royal family should follow them to their new abode. By force of remonstrance the King finally obtained permission that the Princess de Lamballe, Madame de Tourzel and her daughter should be excepted from this interdiction, and also MM. Hue and de Chamilly, and Mesdames Thibaud, Basire, Navarre, and Saint-Brice. The departure for the Temple took place at five in the evening. The royal family went in a large carriage with Manuel and Petion, who kept their hats on. The coachman and footmen, dressed in gray, served their masters for the last time. National Guards escorted the carriage on foot and with reversed arms. The pa.s.sage through a hostile mult.i.tude occupied not less than two hours. The vehicle, which moved very slowly, stopped for several moments in the Place Vendome. There Manuel pointed out the statue of Louis XIV., which had been thrown down from its pedestal. At first the descendant of the great King reddened with indignation, then, tranquillizing himself instantly, he calmly replied: "It is fortunate, Sir, that the rage of the people spends itself on inanimate objects."

Manuel might have gone on to say that {336} on this very Place Vendome "Queen Violet," one of the most furious vixens of the October Days, had just been crushed by the fall of this equestrian statue of Louis XIV.

to which she was hanging in order to help bring it down. The statue of Henry IV. in the Place Royale, that of Louis XIII. in the Place des Victoires, and that of Louis XV. in the place that bears his name, had fallen at the same time.

The royal family arrived at the Temple at seven in the evening. The lanterns placed on the projecting portions of the walls and the battlements of the great tower made it resemble a catafalque surrounded by funeral lights. The Queen wore a shoe with a hole in it, through which her foot could be seen. "You would not believe," said she, smiling, "that a Queen of France was in need of shoes." The doors closed upon the captives, and a sanguinary crowd complained of the thickness of the walls separating them from their prey.

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x.x.xIII.

THE TEMPLE.

There are places which, by the very souvenirs they evoke, seem fatal and accursed. Such was the dungeon that was to serve as a prison for Louis XVI. and his family. The great tower for which Marie Antoinette had felt a nameless instinctive repugnance in the happiest days of her reign, arose at the extremity of Paris like a gigantic phantom, and recalled in a sinister fas.h.i.+on the tragedies of the Middle Ages and the sombre legends of the Templars. It was formerly the manor, the fortress, of that religious and military Order of the Temple, founded in the Holy Land at the beginning of the twelfth century, to protect the pilgrims, and which, after the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, had spread all over Europe. The great tower was built by Frere Hubert, in the early years of the thirteenth century, in the midst of an enclosure surrounded by turreted walls. There ruled, by cross and sword, those men of iron, in white habits, who took the triple vows of poverty, chast.i.ty, and obedience, and who excited royal jealousy by the increase of their power. It was there that Philippe le Bel went on October 13, {338} 1307, with his lawyers and his archers, to lay his hand on the grand-master, seize the treasures of the order, and on the same day, at the same hour, cause all Templars to be arrested throughout the realm. Then began that mysterious trial which has remained an insoluble problem to posterity, and after which these monastic knights, whose bravery and whose exploits have made so prolonged an echo, perished in prisons or on scaffolds. Pursued by horrible accusations, they had confessed under torture, but they denied at execution. When the grand-master, Jacques de Molay, and the commander of Normandy were burned alive before the garden of Philippe le Bel, March 11, 1314, even in the midst of flames, they did not cease to attest the innocence of the Order of the Temple. The people, astonished by their heroism, believed that they had summoned the Pope and the King to appear in the presence of G.o.d before the end of the year. Clement V., on April 20, and Philippe IV., on November 29, obeyed the summons.

The possessions of the order were given to the Hospitallers of Saint John of Jerusalem, who transformed themselves into Knights of Malta toward the middle of the sixteenth century. The Temple became the provincial house of the grand-prior of the Order of Malta for the _nation_ or _language_ of France, and the great tower contained successively the treasure, the a.r.s.enal, and the archives. In 1607, the grand-prior, Jacques de Souvre, had a house built in {339} front of the old manor, between the court and the garden, which was called the palace of the grand-prior. His successor, Philippe de Vendome, made his palace a rendezvous of elegance and pleasure. There shone that Anacreon in a ca.s.sock, the gay and sprightly Abbe de Chaulieu, who died a fervent Christian in the voluptuous abode where he had dwelt a careless Epicurean. There young Voltaire went to complete the lessons he had begun in the sceptical circle of Ninon de l'Enclos. The office of grand-prior, which was worth sixty thousand livres a year, pa.s.sed afterwards to Prince de Conti, who in 1765 sheltered Jean-Jacques Rousseau there, as _lettres de cachet_ could not penetrate within its privileged precinct. Under Louis XVI. the palace of the grand-prior had served as a pa.s.sing hostelry to the young and brilliant Count d'Artois when he came from Versailles to Paris. The flowers of the entertainments given there by the Prince were hardly faded when Louis XVI. suddenly entered it as a prisoner.

It was seven o'clock in the evening when the wretched King and his family, coming from the convent of the Feuillants, arrived at the Temple. Situated near the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, not far from the former site of the Bastille, the Temple enclosure at this period was not more than two hundred yards long by nearly as many wide. The rest of the ancient precinct had disappeared under the pavements or the houses of the great city. Nevertheless, the enclosure still formed a sort of little {340} private city, sometimes called the Ville-Neuve-du-Temple, the gates of which were closed every night. In one of its angles stood the house called the grand-prior's palace.

This was the first stopping-place of the royal family, which had been entrusted by Petion to the surveillance of the munic.i.p.ality and the guard of Santerre. The munic.i.p.al officers stayed close to the King, kept their hats on, and gave him no t.i.tle except "Monsieur." Louis XVI., not doubting that the palace of the grand-prior was the residence a.s.signed him by the nation until the close of his career, began to visit its apartments. While the munic.i.p.al officers took a cruel pleasure in this error, thinking of the still keener one they would enjoy when they disabused him of it, he pleased himself by allotting the different rooms in advance. The word palace had an unpleasant sound to the persecutors of royalty. The Temple tower looked more like a prison. Toward eleven o'clock, one of the commissioners ordered the august captives to collect such linen and other clothing as they had been able to procure, and follow him. They silently obeyed, and left the palace. The night was very dark. They pa.s.sed through a double row of soldiers holding naked sabres. The munic.i.p.al officers carried lanterns. One of them broke the dismal silence he had observed throughout the march. "Thy master," said he to M. Hue, "has been accustomed to gilded canopies. Very well! he is going to find out how we lodge the a.s.sa.s.sins of the people."

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The lamps in the windows of the old quadrangular dungeon lighted up its high pinnacles and turrets, its gigantic profile and gloomy bulk. The immense tower, one hundred and fifty feet high, and with walls nine feet thick, rose, menacing and fatal, amidst the darkness. Beside it was another tower, narrower and not so high, but which was also flanked by turrets. Thus the whole dungeon was composed of two distinct yet united towers. The second of these, called the little tower, to distinguish it from the great one, was selected as the prison of the former hosts of Versailles, Fontainebleau, and the Tuileries.

The little tower of the Temple, which had no interior communication with the great one against which it stood, was a long quadrangle flanked by two turrets. Four steps led to the door, which was low and narrow, and opened on a landing at the end of which began a winding staircase shaped like a snail-sh.e.l.l. Wide from its base as far as the first story, it grew narrower as it climbed up into the second. The door, which was considered too weak, was to be strengthened on the following day by heavy bars, and supplied with an enormous lock brought from the prisons of the Chatelet. The Queen was put on the second floor, and the King on the third. On entering his chamber, Louis XVI.

found a miserable bed in an alcove without tapestry or curtains. He showed neither ill humor nor surprise. Engravings, indecent for the most part, covered the walls. He {342} took them down himself. "I will not leave such objects before my children's eyes," said he. Then he lay down and slept tranquilly.

The first days of captivity were relatively calm. The prisoners consoled themselves by their family life, reading, and, above all, prayer. Forgetting that he had been a king, and remembering that he was a father, Louis XVI. gave lessons to the Dauphin. "It would have been worth while for the whole nation to be present at these lessons; they would have been both surprised and touched at all the sensible, cordial, and kindly things the good King found to say when the map of France lay spread out before him, or concerning the chronology of his predecessors. Everything in his remarks showed the love he bore his subjects and how greatly his paternal heart desired their happiness.

What great and useful lessons one could learn in listening to this captive king instructing a child born to the throne and condemned to share the captivity of his parents." (_Souvenirs de Quarante Ans_, by Madame de Bearn, _nee_ de Tourzel.)

All those who had been authorized to follow the royal family to the Temple--the Princess de Lamballe, Madame de Tourzel and her daughter, Mesdames Thibaud, Basire, Navarre, MM. de Chamilly and Francois Hue--surrounded the captives with the most respectful and devoted attentions. But these n.o.ble courtiers of misfortune, these voluntary prisoners who were so glad to be a.s.sociated in their {343} master's trials, were not long to enjoy an honor they had so keenly desired. In the night of August 18-19, two munic.i.p.al officers presented themselves, who were commissioned to fetch away "all persons not belonging to the Capet family." The Queen pointed out in vain that the Princess de Lamballe was her relative. The Princess must go with the others. "In our position," has said Madame de Tourzel, the governess of the children of France, "there was nothing to do but obey. We dressed ourselves and then went to the Queen, to whom I resigned that dear little Prince, whose bed had been carried into her room without awaking him." It was an indescribable torture for Madame de Tourzel to abandon the Dauphin, whom she cherished so tenderly, and whom she had educated since 1789. "I abstained from looking at him," she adds, "not only to avoid weakening the courage we had so much need of, but in order to give no room for censure, and so come back, if possible, to a place we left with so much regret. The Queen went instantly into the chamber of the Princess de Lamballe, from whom she parted with the utmost grief.

To Pauline and me she showed a touching sensibility, and said to me in an undertone: 'If we are not so happy as to see you again, take good care of Madame de Lamballe. Do the talking on all important occasions, and spare her as much as possible from having to answer captious and embarra.s.sing questions.'" The two munic.i.p.al officers said to Hue and Chamilly: "Are you {344} the valets-de-chambre?" On their affirmative response, the two faithful servants were ordered to get up and prepare for departure. They shook hands with each other, both of them convinced that they had reached the end of their existence. One of the munic.i.p.al officers had said that very day in their presence: "The guillotine is permanent, and strikes with death the pretended servants of Louis." When they descended to the Queen's antechamber, a very small room in which the Princess de Lamballe slept, they found that Princess and Madame de Tourzel all ready to start, and clasped in one embrace with the Queen, the children, and Madame Elisabeth. Tender and heart-breaking farewells, presages of separations more cruel still!

All these exiles from the prison left at the same time. Only one of them, M. Francois Hue, was to return. He was examined at the Hotel-de-Ville, and at the close of this interrogation an order was signed permitting him to be taken back to the tower. "How happy I was," he writes, "to return to the Temple! I ran to the King's chamber. He was already up and dressed, and was reading as usual in the little tower. The moment he saw me, his anxiety to know what had occurred made him advance toward me; but the presence of the munic.i.p.al officers and the guards who were near him made all conversation impossible. I indicated by a glance that, for the moment, prudence forbade me to explain myself. Feeling the necessity of silence as well as myself, the King resumed his {345} reading and waited for a more opportune moment. Some hours later, I hastily informed him what questions had been asked me and what I had replied." (_Dernieres Annees de Louis XVI., par Francois Hue_.)

The unfortunate sovereign doubtless believed that the others were also about to return. Vain hope! During the day Manuel announced to the King that none of them would come back to the Temple. "What has become of them?" asked Louis XVI. anxiously.--"They are prisoners at the Force," returned Manuel.--"What are they going to do with the only servant I have left?" asked the King, glancing at M. Hue.--"The Commune leaves him with you," said Manuel; "but as he cannot do everything, men will be sent to a.s.sist him."--"I do not want them," replied Louis XVI.; "what he cannot do, we will do ourselves. Please G.o.d, we will not voluntarily give those who have been taken from us the chagrin of seeing their places taken by others!" In Manuel's presence, the Queen and Madame Elisabeth aided M. Hue to prepare the things most necessary for the new prisoners of the Force. The two Princesses arranged the packets of linen and other matters with the skill and activity of chambermaids.