The

the more tremendous insurrection and massa- | by a single small door in one of the turrets, cre of the 10th of August swept away even opening on a winding stone staircase. the mockery of monarchy, and sent them door was so low that when the Queen, after prisoners to the Temple-an ancient fortress the King's death, was torn from her children, of the Knights Templars, built in 1812, into and dragged through it to her last prison in the dungeons of which, uninhabited for ages, the Conciergerie, she struck her forehead and less fit for their decent reception than violently against it. On being asked if she any common prison, they were promiscuously was hurt, she only said, "Nothing can hurt hurried. me now." This portion of the tower had in Of this edifice, and its internal divisions latter times merely served as a depository and distributions for its new destiny, M. de for lumber. The second division of the Beauchesne has given us half-a-dozen plans, edifice, called, when any distinction was made, somewhat larger, but hardly so satisfactory the Little Tower, was attached, but without as we already possessed in Cléry's work. It any internal communication, to the north side was a huge and massive tower, not unlike of its greater neighbor; it was a narrow ob"the tower of Julius, London's lasting long, with smaller turrets at its salient angles. shame," and stood like it in a large inclosure Both the towers had in a marked degree the of inferior and more modern constructions. dungeon character of their age, but the lesser One of these, though called the Palace, was had been subdivided into apartments for the in truth only the "Hotel" of the Prior of residence of the Keeper of the archives of the Order, in right of which nominal office it the Order. It was into this side of the buildhad been for several years the abode of the ing, scantily supplied by the modest furniture penultimate Prince de Conti, and is frequent- of the archivist, that the Royal family were ly mentioned in the letters of Walpole and offensively crowded during two or three Madame du Deffand, and all the memoirs of months, while internal alterations-wholly the time. It was latterly the town residence inadequate for comfort or even decency, and of the Comte d'Artois. Here the Royal ridiculously superflous as to security-were family arrived at seven in the evening of in progress in the large tower, destined for Monday, the 13th of August, and supposed their ultimate reception. The Gothic dunthey were to be lodged-the King even ex- geon was not, however, thought sufficiently amined the apartments with a view to their secure; bars, bolts, and blinds additionally future distribution; but this would have been obscured the embrasure windows-doors of too great an indulgence, and when bedtime ancient oak were made thicker or reinforced came they were painfully surprised at being with iron, and new ones were put up on the transferred to the more inconvenient, rigor- corkscrew stairs already difficult enough to ous, and above all, insulting incarceration of mount. The Abbé Edgeworth, who attendthe Tower. ed the King in his last moments, thus describes the access to his apartment :

"I was led across the court to the door of the

The Tower was so surrounded by its own appurtenances and by the neighboring houses that it was not easily visible from the adjoin-tower, which, though very narrow and very low, ing streets, and it may be doubted whether was so overcharged with iron bolts and bars that any of its new inhabitants (unless perhaps it opened with a horrible noise. I was conductthe King) had ever set eyes upon it. M.ed up a winding stairs so narrow that two persons Hue tells us that when he was conducted to would have difficulty in getting past each other. At it that night to prepare a bed for the King, short distances these stairs were cut across by he had no idea what it was, and was lost in barriers, at each of which was a sentinel-these wonder at the dark and gigantic object, so sentinels were all true sans culottes, generally drunk and their atrocious acclamations, redillerent from anything he had seen before. echoed by the vast vaults which covered every Though appearing to be one, and general- story of the tower, were really terrifying." ly called the Tower, it was composed of two distinct parts. The greater of the two was a massive square, divided into five or six stories, and above 150 feet high, exclusive of a lofty pyramidal roof, and it had at each of its four angles, large circular turrets with conical roofs, so sharp that M. Hue at first mistook them for steeples. This tower had been of old the keep-the treasury and arsenal of the knights, and was accessible only

Considerable works were also undertaken for external security. The Towers were isolated by the destruction of all the lesser buildings immediately near them, and the walls round the whole inclosure were strengthened and raised. The execution of the plans was intrusted, as a boon for his revolutionary zeal, to a mason who had acquired the distinctive appellation of the Patriot Pallay by

mune or Common Council of the City of Paris. To this corporation, which arose out of the 10th of August, and directed the massacres of September, the Convention as a body owed its existence, and its most prominent Members their individual elections. Inflated with these successes, it arrogated to itself, under its municipal title, a power insultingly independent even of the Assembly and the Government. It was composed, with rare exceptions, of tradesmen of a secondary order-men only known even in their own low circles by the blind and noisy violence of their patriotism-by a rancorous enmity to all that they called aristocracy, and by the most intense and ignorant prejudices against the persons and characters of the royal family. To the tender mercies of these vulgar, illiterate, and furious dema

the noisy activity which he displayed in the removal of the ruins of the Bastile, for which he had obtained a contract. On the subject of these works, a remark of the young Prince is related by M. de Beauchesne, which may be taken as one example out of many of the caution with which his anecdotes must be received. When told that Pallay was the person employed to raise the walls, the Prince is reported to have observed that "it was odd that he who had become so famous for levelling one prison should be employed to build another."* The observation, though obvious enough, seems to us above a child of that age, and, moreover, we find it made by M. Hue as his own in a note in his memoirs, and he certainly cannot be suspected of pilfering a bon mot from the Dauphin. The selection of this dungeon for the Royal family, and the wanton and almost in-gogues, that family was implicitly delivered credible brutality with which from first to last they were all treated by their various jailers, constitute altogether a systematic series of outrages which we have never seen satisfactorily, nor even probably, accounted for. The heads of the King, Queen, and Madame Elizabeth fell, we know, in the desperate struggle of Brissot, Roland, Danton, and Robespierre to take each other's and to save their own. But why these royal victims, and after them the two children, should have been deprived of the common decencies and necessaries of life-why they should have been exposed to the most sordid wants, to the lowest personal indignities, to the vulgar despotism of people taken (as it were for the purpose) from the lowest orders of society that is the enigma; and this is our conjectural explanation.

The National Assembly which had sent the King to prison, and its successor, the Convention, which deposed him, seemed to the eyes of the world sufficiently audacious, tyrannical, and brutal, but there was a power which exceeded them in all such qualities, and under which those terrible Assemblies themselves quailed and trembled the com

It is worth observing that at the taking the Bastile on the 14th July, 1789, there were found but six or seven prisoners, three of them insane, who were afterwards sent to madhouses; the rest

for forgery and scandalous offences unfit for public trial. There was no State prisoner. On the 27th of the same month of July, in 1794, the fifth year of liberty, the prisons of Paris contained 8913 prisoners; to this number must be added 2637, who had passed in the preceding year from the prisons to the scaffold. When Bonaparte demolished the Temple, which he had previously used as a State prison, there were seventeen prisoners removed to Vincennes

over-they it was, that, contrary to the origi[nal intention of the ministers and the Convention, assigned the Tower of the Temple as the royal prison-they it was that named from amongst themselves all the official authorities, who selected them for their brutality, and changed them with the most capricious jealousy so as to ensure not merely the safe custody of the prisoners, but the wanton infliction of every kind of personal indignity. And to such a degree of insolent independence had they arrived, that even Committees of the Convention which visited the Temple on special occasions were controlled, contradicted, rebuked, and set at defiance by the shoemakers, carpenters, and chandlers who happened to be for the moment the delegates of the commune. The parties in the Convention were so perilously struggling for the destruction of each other, that they had neither leisure nor courage grapple with the Commune, and they all, and especially the more moderate, already trembling for their own heads, were not sorry to leave to those obscure agents the responsibility and odium of such a persecu

tion.

"Assensere omnes ; et quæ sibi quisque timebat, Unius in miseri exitium conversa tulere. Jamque dies infanda aderat!"

to

But the infanda dies-the 21st January in which they all thus concurred, did not save the Girondins from the 31st Octobernor the Dantonists from the 16th Germinal -nor Robespierre from the Neuf Thermidor!

To the usurped but conceded supremacy of the Commune, and the vulgar habits and rancorous feeling of the majority of its mem

bers, may, we suspect, be more immediately | 26th October a fresh decree directed that the attributed the otherwise inexplicable brutalities of the Temple.

Every page of the works of Hue, Clèry, Madame Royale, and M. de Beauchesne exhibit proofs of the wanton outrages of the Commune and their tools. The last gives us, from the archives of that body, an early instance, which we quote the rather because it was not a mere individual caprice but an official deliberation. In reading it, we must keep in remembrance the peculiar character of the prison.

"Commune de Paris, 29th Sep. 1792, the fourth year of Liberty and first of Equality and the Republic.

prince should be removed from his mother's to his father's apartment, under the pretext that the boy was too old (seven years and six months,) to be left in the hands of women; but the real object was to afflict and insult the Queen.

For a short time after the whole family had been located in the great tower, though separated at night and for a great portion of the day, they were less unhappy-they had their meals together and were allowed to meet in the garden, though always strictly watched and habitually insulted. They bore all such outrages with admirable patience, and found consolation in the exercise of whatever was still possible of their respective duties. The King pursued a regular course of instruction for his son-in writing, arithFrance-the ladies carried on the education of the young princess, and were reduced to the necessity of mending not only their own clothes, but even those of the King and prince; which, as they had each but one suit, Madame Elizabeth used to do after they were in bed.

"Considering that the custody of the prisoners of the Temple becomes every day more diffi-metic, geography, Latin, and the history of cult by the concert and designs which they may form amongst themselves, the Council General of the Commune feel it their imperious duty to prevent the abuses which might facilitate the evasion of those traitors: they

therefore decree

"1. That Louis and Antoinette shall be separated.

"2. That each prisoner shall have a separate dungeon (cachot)

"3. That the valet de chambre shall be placed in confinement.

power to

This mode of life lasted only to the first week in December, with a view no doubt to the infanda dies, a new set of Commissaries was installed, who watched the prisoners day and night with increased insolence and rigor. "4. That the citizen Hébert [the infamous At last, on the 11th of December, the young Hébert, of whose crimes even Robespierre prince was taken back to the apartment of and Danton grew tired or afraid shall be his mother-the King was summoned to the added to the five existing Commissaries. bar of the Convention, and, on his return in "5. That the decree shall be carried into the evening, was met by an order for his toeffect this evening-immediately-even to tal separation from the whole of his family. taking from them the plate and other table The absurdity of such an order surprised, utensils (argenterie et les accessoires de and its cruelty revolted, even his patience. las buoche.) In a word, the Council Gen- He addressed a strong remonstrance to the eral gives the Commissaries full Convention on the barbarous interdiction : do whatever their prudence may suggest that Assembly, on the 1st of December, came for the safe custody of these hostages." to a resolution allowing him to communicate with his family; but it was hardly passed Soup-spoons and silver forks a means of when it was objected to by Tallien, who auescape! In virtue of this decree the King daciously announced that, even if they adwas removed that night to the second story hered to the vote, the commune would not (the third, reckoning the ground floor) of obey it. This was conclusive, and the debate the great tower (his family remaining in the terminated in a declaration "that the King smaller one,) where no furniture had been might, till the definitive judgment on his prepared for his use but a temporary bed, case, see his children, on condition, however, while his valet-de-chambre sat up in a chair. that they should have no communication with The dispersion of the rest was postponed; either their mother or their aunt." The conand they were for some time permitted, not dition rendered the permission derisory as to without difficulty, to dine with the King. A his daughter, and the King was so convinced month later the ladies and children were also of the grief that a renewed separation from transferred to an apartment in the great tow-her son would cause to the Queen, that he er, immediately over the King's. On the sacrificed his own feelings, and the decree

became, as it was meant to be, wholly inoperative. He never saw any of his family again till the eve of his death.

To what we already knew of that scene, M. de Beauchesne has added an anecdote new to us, for which he quotes in his text the direct authority of the Duchess of Angou

lême:

"My father, at the moment of parting from us forever, made us promise never to think of avenging his death. He was well satisfied that we should hold sacred these his last instructions; but the extreme youth of my brother made him desirons of producing a still stronger impression on him. He took him on his knee and said to him, My son, you have heard what I have said, but as an oath has something more sacred than words, hold up your hand, and swear that you will accomplish the last wish of your father.' My brother obeyed, bursting out into tears, and this touching goodness redoubled ours."-p. 448.

cue.

with his executioner, and endeavored to prolong the scene in the expectation of a resWe have against such injurious imputations the sacred evidence of that single friend-the official testimony of the Jacobin Commissioners, who were appointed to su perintend the execution, and the acquiescence of the vast assemblage that encircled the scaffold. But M. de Beauchesne has discovered at once the source of this calumny and its complete refutation, in two contemporaneous documents, so curious in every way, that we think them worth producing in extenso, though the fact is already superabundantly established without them.

In a newspaper, called Le Thermomètre du Jour, of the 13th February, 1793 (three weeks only after the execution), there appeared this anecdote :

"When the condamné ascended the scaffold' (it is Sanson the executioner himself who has related the fact, and who has employed the term condamné), 'I was surprised at his assurance and courage; but at the roll of the drums which my assistdrowned his voice at the movement of changed, and he exclaimed hastily three times, I ants to lay hold of him, his countenance suddenly am lost' (je suis perdu)! This circumstance, corroborated by another which Sanson equally narrated-namely, that the condamné had sup ped heartily the preceding evening and breakfasted with equal appetite that morning-shows that to the very moment of his death he had reckoned on being saved. Those who kept him in this delusion had no doubt the design of giving him an appearance of courage that might deceive the spectators and posterity-but the roll of the drums dissipated this false courage, and contemporaries and posterity may now appreciate the real feelings of the guilty tyrant."-i. 479.

There can be no doubt that this anecdote represents truly the sentiments of the Kingas he had already expressed them in that portion of his will which was specially addressed to his son-but we own that the somewhat dramatic scene here described seems hardly reconcilable with the age of the child or the sober simplicity of his father's character. Nor are we satisfied with M. de Beauchesne's statement of his authority; for, after giving it in the text as directly from the lips or pen of the Duchess d'Angoulême herself, he adds in a foot-note a reference to Fragments of unpublished Memoirs of the Duchess of Tourzel." But as Cléry, who was an anxious eye-witness, and describes minutely the position and attitudes of all the parties, does not mention any such demonWe--who now know from the evidence of stration or gesture, we suspect that this cer- the Abbé Edgeworth and Cléry how the emony of an oath is an embroidery on the king passed that evening, night, and mornplain fact as stated by Madame Royale.-ing, and that the only break of his fast was Royal Mem., p. 200.*

The next day Louis XVI. ceased to live. He died under the eyes of an hundred thousand enemies and of but one solitary friend -his confessor; yet there was no second opinion in this hostile crowd as to the courage and dignity of his deportment from first to last, and it is only within these few years that we have heard insinuations, and even assertions (contradictory in themselves,) that he exhibited both fear and fury-struggled

by the reception of the Holy Communionare dispensed from exposing the falsehood and absurdity of this statement; but it met an earlier and even more striking refutation.

Our readers may recollect (Q. R., Dec. 1843, v. 73, p. 250), that Sanson (Charles Henry) was a man more civilized both in manners and mind than might be expected from his terrible occupation. On reading this article in the paper, Sanson addressed the following letter to the editor, which appeared in the Thermomètre of the 21st:-

"Paris, 20th Feb. 1793, 1st year of the French Republic. "CITIZEN-A short absence has prevented my sooner replying to your article concerning Louis Capet. But here is the exact truth as to what