XXXII. 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 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 Assembly; but besides the fact that in accordance with the terms of the Constitution, 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 massacred 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. Among them was one of the officers of the King's bedchamber, François Hue, who had incurred the greatest dangers on the previous day. Cards of admission were distributed by the inspector of the Assembly hall. A large guard was stationed at all the issues of the corridor. No one could pass 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 coarse 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 massacre!"

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 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 Auguié, 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 succumb 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; 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 noble 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 compassionated the fate of the victims of the previous day.

Madame Campan expressed a desire to know what the foreign ambassadors had done in this catastrophe. The Queen replied that they had done nothing, but that the English ambassadress, 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 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 Assembly, 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 compassion 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 Marseillais a payment of thirty sous a day, ordering all statues of kings to be overthrown, and petitions demanding the heads of all the Swiss who had escaped the massacre. At last the Assembly 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 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!" Pétion 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 Pétion, 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 passage through a hostile multitude occupied not less than two hours. The vehicle, which moved very slowly, stopped for several moments in the Place Vendôme. 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 on this very Place Vendôme "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.