Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 133.djvu/323

Rh Conciergerie fell dismally over the narrow dungeon, and the captive was exposed to the pestitential moisture which ran from the filthy prison walls. The queen suffered so much from the intense cold that she complained of it at last, but to whom should she have recourse? The little Breton maid alone took pity on her, and would carry her camisole to the jailer's fire to warm it, and as in the long, dark nights they permitted the prisoner to have no candle, nor any other light than that of the lamp in the court-yard, which looked like the small funeral lanterns it is the custom to place on newly habited graves, the young peasant, out of sorrow for the queen, would lengthen out her evening work so that she might see her candle burning some five minutes more.

Twelve days passed thus, but on the thirteenth the judges came and began their first examination. They made an officer of the Revolution sleep in the royal cell, but on that night the queen did not retire.

On the 15th of October they came at eight o'clock in the morning to take her to the audience chamber. She was sleeping, and they awoke her by rudely shaking her. She was fasting moreover, and they gave her nothing to eat. When she was questioned, she answered sweetly, speaking like an angel, and gave utterance from her breaking heart to that "appeal to all mothers," which made the heroes of September grow pale, and which drew forth applause and even tears from the tricoteuses (the name given to the market-women who sat around the guillotine knitting, while they waited for the cart-loads of victims to be brought up for execution) in the galleries. It was only at four o'clock in the afternoon that the examination was terminated, when one of the jailers remembered that the queen had had nothing to eat that day. The poor woman had been battling with the murderers of Louis XVI. for nine long hours. Then they ordered a cup of bouillon for her, and the young servant Rosalie was on her way to take it to her, when passing through the large chamber as she was approaching the queen, a Revolutionary policeman snatched the cup from her hands. He was a low, hunchbacked fellow, named Labuziere, who had for his mistress one of the public women of the Palais Royal, whom he had placed on the first row of benches, in order that she might assist, more at her ease, at the torture of the "Widow Capet." Rosalie thought at first that Labuziere was not going to allow the queen to have the bouillon, of which the poor unhappy woman had such need, but he was really meditating a greater crime — to give to an ignoble creature who wished to have a good look at the queen, an opportunity of approaching her still closer and so he took the broken cup out of Rosalie's hands, who was also in tears at this new insult. The cup was given to Labuziere's mistress, and she, in her impertinent curiosity to see the queen, carried her the bouillon, half of which she spilt on the way, every drop of which as it fell on the floor was a drop of blood less in her Majesty's veins. That same day Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, was condemned to death, and Labuziere went off to sup with his mistress.

Before the fatal day arrived the queen asked for a priest; the republic sent her one of its own, whom the queen refused to see, and knelt alone before her God. At last the day of her deliverance came. The day before the royal victim had mended with her own hands the black dress which she wished to wear to the scaffold, but as she had appeared before her judges too handsome and majestic in this poor widow's gown, they would not permit her to wear it on the day of her death, so that it was in the white peignoir which her sister Elizabeth sent her that she went to the guillotine. Of her two widow's caps she had made one, but without strings or any sign of mourning — she no longer needed to wear mourning for any one. She arranged her lovely hair for the last time, and shuddered to find it had grown perfectly white in her last twenty-four hours! She finished her last toilette by putting on her feet the same little shoes she had taken great care to preserve, and which she had not spoiled in the seventy-six days that she had constantly worn them.

Shall I dare to tell you what Rosalie relates? that the queen, half hidden between the wall and her small bed, was endeavoring to change her clothes, when the gendarme on guard bent down in order to see her, and when her Majesty turned toward him, her eyes full of tears, and prayed him in the name of honor to desist, he replied that he was acting on his orders ;and when she had changed her dress, moved by a feeling of modesty, the poor woman folded it up with care and hid it under the mattress of her bed — and all this time the executioner was waiting for her.

Hardly had the queen left her miserable cell to go to her death, before the officers of the republic, fearing, it would seem,