There is one detail in connection with Jemappes which the reader must know because it does so illustrate the myriad coincidences of the Queen’s life:—

That child whom she had seen and adopted during her early childless years, when her fever of youth and exasperation was upon her, that child which for a moment had supplied to the girl something of maternity, had now grown to manhood. The birth of her own daughter had long ago driven out any recollection of the whim: the peasant boy of St. Michel was forgotten. He had grown into his teens full of the bitterness which irresponsible and spasmodic patronage can so vigorously breed. During the days of October he had been recognised among the wildest of those who attacked the palace in Versailles; he had shouted for the Nation; he had enlisted and was there at Jemappes, an obscure volunteer among the thousands whom Dumouriez forced forward upon the frontier. He was present upon the 6th of November upon the bank of the Haine when the mixed battalions charged, singing: a bullet struck him and he fell down dead. She, the Queen, was there a prisoner in her dimly-lit room at night—separated from the father of the children who slept near by: her mind was big with the new doom of his Indictment and Trial which the dull day had brought her. Eighteen years before she had caught up that peasant baby in the Louveciennes road and kissed it, her eyes full of tears, and in her heart a violent yearning half-virginal, half-maternal: he, however, lay dead that same night in the Hainault mud with the autumn rain upon his body: his name was Jacques Amand.

With December there was some little respite, for a new Municipality had been elected that was a trifle more moderate than the old; but in general this life of hers, with its calm, its dread and its monotony, continued. Now it contained some act of humiliation, as when all razors and sharp-edged things were taken from the King (upon the 7th); now some indulgence, as when (upon the 9th) a clavecin was allowed the Queen—and it is said that from curiosity she played upon this, later, the new notes of the Marseillaise.

For a few hours the Dauphin was taken from her. It was her turn to ask questions of the guards, and theirs to be silent; she asked distractedly: they did not reply: but the child returned.

The affair of the Trial proceeded rapidly. The briefs were gathered; the King’s counsel met the King day after day in the apartment below, and she stayed above there alone with her children and was still. She had no communications with him at all save when at Christmas, after he had drafted his will, he wrote to the Convention and caused a short message to be conveyed to the Queen. It was perhaps during these days that she wrote upon a fly-leaf which is still preserved in St. Germain, “Oportet unum mori pro populo.”

Louis, as the new year broke, saluted it sadly. Within a fortnight he had been pronounced guilty at the bar of the Parliament before which he was arraigned—guilty, that is, of intrigue with the foreigner and of abetting the invasion. Upon the 17th of January 1793 it was known in his prison that his penalty would be death. Again did Marie Antoinette hear in the room below the step of Malesherbes, her husband’s counsel, coming upon that day to confer with the King, but this time he came to speak not of defence but of death. A respite was denied to Louis. Upon the 20th his prayer for three days in which he might prepare to meet God was again refused, and his execution was fixed for the morrow. His sentence was read to him in his prison: he heard it quietly: and thus upon that 20th of January (a Sunday), a murky evening and cold, when it was quite dark the Princesses heard in the street a newspaper-seller crying the news that the King must die; the hollow word “la mort,” very deep and lugubrious, repeated and repeated in the chanting tones of that trade, floated up from the winter streets.

It was eight o’clock when they were told that they might go down with the children and see the King.

The Family met together and for a little time were silent.

The spell was on them which we never mention—one which the inmost mind refuses—I mean that fear....

During this long isolation of theirs they had become very fixed upon the matter of the Catholic Faith, but that fear pervaded them as the Church has said that it must always pervade the last hours. This human curse, too sacred for rhetoric and too bewildering to occupy a just and reasonable prose, I will abandon, content only to have written it down—for it was the air and the horror of that night.

For not quite two hours they sat together, not speaking much, for all understood, except the little boy: he was sad as children are, up to their usual pitch of sadness, for any loss, great or small, which they do not understand: he saw his own sister, a child older than he, and all his grown-up elders thus crushed, and he also was full of his little sorrow. He knew at least that his father was going away.

The King, seated with his wife on his left and his sister at his right hand, drew the boy towards him and made him stand between his knees. He recited to him, as it is proper to recite to children, words whose simplicity they retain but whose full purport they cannot for the moment understand. He told the child never to avenge his death, and, since oaths are more sacred than repeated words, he took and lifted up his small right hand. Then, knowing that the will of the sufferer alone can put a due term to such scenes, he rose. His wife he pressed to his shoulder. She caught and grasped to her body her little children—to hold so much at least firm in this world that was breaking from around her. She knew that Louis desired them to leave, and she said, after she had wildly sworn that she would stay all night and the children with her (which he would not have):

“Promise that you will see us again?”

“I will see you in the morning,” he answered, “before ... I go. At eight.”

“It must be earlier,” she said, not yet releasing him.

“It shall be earlier, by half-an-hour.”

“Promise me.”

He repeated his promise, and the two women turned to the great oaken, nail-studded door; helping the fainting girl, and taking the child by the hand, they went out to the winding stair of stone. It was a little after ten.

When the iron outer door had shut and he knew the women and the children to be above, out of hearing, Louis turned to his guards and gave this order, that, in spite of what he had said, the women should not be told in the morning of his departure, for that neither he nor they could suffer it.

Then he went into the turret chamber where the Priest was, and said: “Let me address myself to the unique affair.”

But above, from the room whose misery could just be heard, the Queen, when she had put her boy to bed and kissed him bitterly, threw herself upon her own bed all dressed, and throughout the darkness of the whole night long her daughter could hear her shuddering with cold and anguish.

That night there was a murmur all around the Tower, for very many in Paris were watching, and through the drizzling mist there came, hour by hour, the distant rumble of cannon, and the sharp cries of command, and men marching by companies up the narrow Temple lane.

It was the very January dark, barely six of the morning, when a guard from the King’s room came up the stair. The Queen from above heard him coming. Her candle was lit—her fixed gaze expected him.... He entered, but as he spoke her heart failed her: he had not come for the summons, he had but come for the King’s book of prayers. She waited the full hour until seven struck in the steeples of the town, and the pale light began to grow: she waited past the moment of her husband’s promise, till eight, till the full day—but no one came. Still she sat on, not knowing what might not have come between to delay their meeting: doors opening below, steps coming and going on the stairs, held all her mind. But no one sent for her, no one called her. It was nine when a more general movement made her half hope, half fear. The sound of that movement, which was the movement of many men, passed downward to the first storeys, to the ground, and was lost. An emptiness fell upon the Tower. Then she knew that her hope had departed.

For a moment there were voices in the courtyard, the tramp of many men upon the damp gravel, the creaking of the door, more distant steps in the garden, and the wheels of the coach far away at the outer porch. Then the confused noise of a following crowd dwindling westward till nothing remained but a complete silence in those populous streets, now deserted upon so great a public occasion.

For yet another hour the silence endured unbroken: ten o’clock struck amid that silence, and the quarter.... The Queen heard through the shuttered window the curious and dreadful sound of a crowd that roars far off, and she knew that the thing had been done.

Life returned into the streets beneath, the loud shrill call of the news-men, crying the news accursedly, came much too shrill and too distinct against the walls. All day long, on to the early closing of the darkness, the mists gathered and lay thick over Paris and around her high abandoned place.