Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/322

316 goblets at the royal fêtes of Versailles — her lovely white, but cold hands, her beautiful, calm face, only half seen in the dim prison light, her elegant and majestic figure, and her silence full of resignation. Ah! who could forget them who had ever seen her in the Conciergerie? But she was failing little by little under the influence of bad nourishment and air, and from her grief and loneliness, but she never complained. She was dying slowly and silently.

Her linen all wore out, and asking Rosalie to try and procure some more, the faithful little peasant gave some of her own coarse underclothes to the queen. Poor woman! She no longer even knew what o'clock it was, for her hours now were only marked by the departures for the guillotine in the morning, the death-warrants read out at mid-day, and by fresh imprisonments at night. These desolate time-markers were all that divided her days spent in that terrible prison, which was crowded with so many sorrows, for they had carried away her watch, which she had hung on the nail on entering her cell. It was a simple little ornament in enamelled gold, which her mother had given her when she was yet a young girl, ignorant of life. It had never left her, and recalled so many happy hours to her. When dauphine, and then queen of France, and even in the dungeon of the Temple she had never worn any other watch, but it was taken from her "by order of the nation," and she wept bitterly when she handed to the officer of the republic the gift of her mother, Maria Theresa of Austria. They took from her also two pretty rings ornamented with diamonds, which was all that remained to her of her past fortune. She loved to wear them, and would amuse herself changing them from one hand to the other, and the little diamonds shone on her slender fingers like her blue eyes from out her pale, sad face. But that was not all! They ruthlessly tore from her her marriage ring, given her by the king of France, and which was the last and touching relic she possessed of the martyred sovereign. Ah! you barbarous madmen, had she not paid for it dearly enough, this unhappy woman, that you could not have left it to her? She had paid for this gold ring with her youth, her beauty, and even with her head. This golden ring had made her queen of France, but of what a France? Queen rather of a volcano. This golden ring had placed her on a throne, but a throne crumbling. This golden ring had opened for her the doors of a palace, but a shattered palace. This golden ring had given her a royal bed, but a bed that a maddened populace had torn to pieces with bloody bayonets. This golden ring had affianced her to a king, but a king beheaded. This golden ring had made her mother of a king, but a king who was given over to a cobbler who killed him with brutal treatment. This golden ring had made her sister of a saint, Saint Elizabeth, who was insulted and covered with ignominy. This golden ring had given her friends, but friends proscribed from France, or whose heads fell upon the scaffold. It had given her a friend (the Princess de Lamballe) who was violated, beheaded, and whose heart was eaten by the cannibals. Ah! if the murderers of that time had known better how to play their part of torturers, far from taking it away from her, they would have suspended this golden ring before her night and day! If they had known that the widow of Louis XVI. wore a lock of the king's hair in a locket over her heart, and that she held it to her lips morning and evening before she said her prayers, no doubt they would have tried to find it in the queen's bosom; but heaven spared her this outrage the only one she was spared.

Every day and at every moment new spies came to trouble her resigned silence and her fervent prayers; architects, brutes in red caps, ferocious and threatening wretches with their caps on their heads, forced their way into her cell, examining the bars, gratings, bolts, doors, the walls, and even the stones of the pavement, to say nothing of the jailers, the turnkeys, and guards. A lion chained in a sheepfold could not have given greater anxiety than this poor queen caused these murderers.

She, however, grew only more and more resigned every day. She knew from these increasing barbarities that her last hour was finally approaching, and she spent all her time in praying to heaven. One day when she was on her knees, she saw in a cell which was opposite to her own, a poor nun who was praying most fervently and she felt that she was praying for her. The two prisoners from the depth of their misery understood one another, for they pointed toward heaven, giving each other a rendezvous there!

These sad and gloomy days in the hot month of August gave place to others as sad and gloomy, only dreadfully cold, as September approached. Suddenly the noisome heat of the cell changed to a damp coldness, the heavy shadow of the