Although Pauline was safe, Madame de Tourzel was hauled before the same kangaroo court that had condemned the Princesse de Lamballe. However, by now, so many were very much the worse for drink that it had softened their “murderous lust for blood,” she wrote. “Those miserable people were so drunk they could no longer stand on their legs and were obliged to go home to sleep, and those who remained softened up considerably.” There were roars of
“Vive la Nation!”
and the marquise found herself discreetly ushered to the prison door by the same stranger who had rescued her daughter.
With the September massacres still all too vivid and with increasing fears for the awful unknowable future, the royal family took refuge in filling their
days with some semblance of order and meaning. “We kept busy in regulating our hours,” wrote Marie-Thérèse, “and passed the whole day together.” The family usually had breakfast together at nine, after which the king gave the dauphin his lessons. “His father taught him to recite passages from Corneille and Racine, gave him lessons in geography, and taught him to color maps,” wrote Cléry, who was impressed by the young dauphin’s memory. “The precocious intelligence of the young prince responded perfectly to the attentions of his father.” The queen, meanwhile, gave lessons to her daughter and in the late morning they would all go into the Temple compound, where they were permitted to walk along the avenue of horse chestnut trees. “I made the prince play either at quoits or football, or running, or other games of exercise,” said Cléry. In the afternoons, after the customary search of their rooms, they would play piquet or backgammon, or join Louis-Charles in ball games or shuttlecock.
After supper, the queen would hear the dauphin’s prayers. “He said one especially for the Princesse de Lamballe and another to protect the life of Madame de Tourzel,” wrote Cléry. “If the municipals were near, he took the precaution of saying these last two prayers in a very low voice.” While Louis-Charles was in the bathroom, Cléry seized his chance to pass on any news to the queen. Cléry’s wife had hired a street crier to come near the walls of the Temple every evening to shout out the main stories of the day. The king usually read well into the night, absorbed in the sizable library of books in the Little Tower. On one occasion, he pointed out the works of Voltaire and Rousseau to his valet! “These two men,” he said softly, “have been the ruin of France.” While the king took comfort in books, and the queen from her son, for Madame Élisabeth, religion had always been the framework of her life, and now more than ever. “How often have I seen Madame Élisabeth on her knees at her bedside, praying fervently,” observed Cléry.
The Commune required daily reports of this humdrum routine. Spies were recruited under cover of household servants to report on their conversations. The queen and Princess Élisabeth were attended by a cheerless, neurotic woman called Madame Tison, whose husband also did heavy work
around the Tower. Nobody was allowed to enter the Temple site without being provided with a special pass, which was to bear two seals with the words
Officier Municipal,
printed diagonally. To gain access to the prisoners, an additional visa was needed, stamped
Pour le Tour
. The royal family faced a daily battle to obtain brief moments of privacy against the constant and unrelenting scrutiny of the guards. The slightest incident could attract attention. Once, Cléry had drawn up a multiplication table to help the dauphin with his math. A municipal officer objected on the grounds that Louis-Charles was “being shown how to talk in cipher.” On another occasion, the queen was deprived of her tapestry work; she was making chair backs for her friends. To the suspicious eyes of their captors, this was surely hieroglyphics.
Many of the guards delighted at the chance to belittle the royal family. “Not only was my father no longer treated as king,” observed Marie-Thérèse, “but he was not even treated with simple respect.” One of the commissioners, who began to work at the Tower in early October 1792, was a shoemaker called Antoine Simon. According to Cléry, his eager enthusiasm for liberty and equality was matched by his “lowest insolence” whenever he was with the royal family. Invariably wearing his shabby old hat, he would address the king by the name of his distant forebears. “Cléry, ask
Capet
if he wants anything, for I can’t take the trouble to come up a second time.” The queen was “Madame Capet.” The term “Capet” was a deliberate, calculated insult. Simon wished to denote that Louis was no longer king; he was just a common man.
Each took a lead from the behavior of his peers and soon it became open season to hurl insults at them. One guard, named Rocher—
“d’une figure horrible,”
according to Cléry—was particularly dreaded. For Marie-Thérèse, Rocher was nothing less than “a monster, who roamed around us continually with dreadful glances” and never ceased “torturing my father in every way possible.” When it was time for the royal family to go out, Rocher revelled in keeping the royal party waiting by the door, as he “rattled his enormous bunch of keys with a frightful noise, pretending to find the right key.” Then he would hurry ahead “to take up a position by the last door, a long pipe
in his mouth, and puff his tobacco smoke in their faces, especially those of the princesses,” wrote Cléry. “Some of the guards who were amused by such insolence shouted with laughter at each puff of smoke and said the coarsest of things.” Sometimes they even brought chairs from the guardroom to obstruct the narrow passage still more and “enjoy the spectacle at their ease.” When the royal party returned from their walk, they could find violent graffiti on the Temple walls: “strangle the cubs,” or even, on one occasion, a drawing of a guillotine with the caption, “Louis spitting into the bucket.” Gradually, the little walk in the garden “became a torture,” said Cléry, and the king and queen only continued with it because they wanted their children to take the air.
For the dauphin all this was incomprehensible and distressing. By now aged seven and a half years, he had grown into a good-looking, healthy boy, with blue eyes and long strawberry-blond hair, who liked outdoor games. Yet he was becoming increasingly fretful and nervous. The people’s anger weighed heavily on his young mind. He just could not understand how his father had so completely lost the affection of his people, and why they were so hated when they had once lived so happily. His nightmares took on such a compelling reality that, on one occasion, he needed to see his mother to believe that she really was still alive. He was visibly distressed by the open hostility targeted at his family and even himself: the “son of a she-ape,” according to
Le Père Duchesne
, or “a little wolfling that should be strangled.” Although his family tried to shield him from the worst of it, there was no escaping the endless barrage. Guards were only too happy to leave distressing reports lying around; one guard stated pointedly that although the dauphin alone “caused him pity, being the son of a tyrant, he too, must die.”
On September 20, 1792, the newly elected Assembly, now known as the National Convention, met to draft a new constitution and determine the fate of the king. Their first step was to abolish the monarchy and proclaim France to be a republic. A week later, among a great flourish of trumpeters and mounted police, deputies arrived at the Tower to announce that the monarchy did not exist and the king had been stripped of his title. Inside,
the royal family could hear the proclamation quite distinctly. Jacques-René Hébert, a man who was consumed with a desire to see the royal family ruined, was now a powerful voice in the Commune and, as Deputy-Procurateur, had elected to be on guard that day to savor the king’s downfall. According to Cléry, he and the other guards “stared at the king, smiling treacherously.” The royal family was equally determined “not to add to their enjoyment.” The king, head bowed, did not look up from his book; the queen continued her sewing. Later that same day, when Cléry applied for warmer coverings for the dauphin’s bed as winter approached, he began with the usual introduction, “The king requests …” He was sharply reproved that the title had been abolished and he was insulting the French people. When new linens did arrive, they were marked with crowned letters and the guards made the princesses pick out the crowns.
The royal family’s increasingly fragile hopes that a foreign invasion of France might yet save them were dashed in late September when the Prussian army was defeated at Valmy, in the Argonne. As the foreign armies retreated, in Paris, the family’s enemies were closing in on them. Their little circle of safety was daily diminished and by late October, their massively fortified new prison was ready. The whole family was moved across to the Great Tower with the sounds of the echoing bolts behind them shutting out any thoughts of freedom.
The Great Tower, once a fortress occupied by the Knights Templar, was now metamorphosed into some grim and fearsome place, and made an ideal prison. It was an oppressive, square building, with high dark walls, nine feet thick, blotting out the sky, and at each corner of the square a smaller round turret. The royal family was led up to their rooms in one of the corner towers by a winding stone staircase. From the stairs, the king’s rooms on the second floor were approached through two doors, one in very thick oak, studded with nails, and the other of iron, both with a strong lock and several padlocked bolts. Originally, this floor had consisted of one large room, about thirty feet square, which had been hurriedly partitioned by cheap wooden boards into smaller rooms to detain the prisoner. The first room was a small
antechamber, furnished with some chairs, a card table and a poster of the Declaration of the Rights of Man by way of adornment. From the antechamber, separate doors opened onto to the king’s bedroom, which also contained a folding bed for the dauphin, Cléry’s bedroom and a dining room. Each of the rooms had a small window, but since the walls were so thick, inevitably the windows were very deeply set; heavy iron bars and shutters on the outside reduced the light still further, and prevented the air from circulating freely. The spiral staircase led on to the third floor where there was a similar arrangement of locked doors and small rooms for the queen, Marie-Thérèse and Princess Élisabeth. Beyond, past a storeroom on the fourth floor, the steps led through a series of wickets to a locked door leading to the battlements of the roof.
There were eight commissioners, selected by the Commune, on duty at any one time and housed in the Council Chamber on the ground floor. During the night, two commissioners were posted on night sentry duty outside the king’s and queen’s bedrooms. The commissioners were instructed “never to lose sight of the prisoners for a single instant, to speak to them only to answer questions, and never to tell them anything of what is happening.” Up to forty soldiers in the guardroom on the first floor provided additional security. Outside, a high wall surrounded the Great Tower with only two gates out to the Temple complex, each with two locks. Beyond, the Temple compound was protected by a garrison of around two hundred soldiers of the National Guard, with cannon, housed in Artois’s former palace. Escape, it seemed, was impossible.
Soon after their arrival, a mason came to fix yet another lock to the king’s rooms. Louis, trying to make light of their situation for his son’s benefit, started to show Louis-Charles how to use a hammer and chisel to make the holes in the wall to insert the bolts. “When you get out of here you can say that you worked yourself, at your own prison,” the mason quipped. “Ah,” Louis replied, “when and how shall I get out?” The little prince burst into tears, said Cléry. The king let his hammer and chisel fall, and went back into his room, where he “walked up and down with hasty strides.”
Marie-Antoinette lived in constant fear that the dauphin would be taken
from her and used as a pawn in some wider political game. She also feared that he might be kidnapped and killed by the murderous gangs that roamed Paris; the fate of her friend the Princesse de Lamballe was too terrible and too vivid a memory for her to have any peace of mind. The commissioners noticed her protective interest and the way “she devoted her existence to the care of her son and found some relief to her troubles in his affection and his caresses.” They decided to exert their authority. The day after their arrival in the Great Tower, the Commune approved an order that the dauphin should be removed from his mother for most of the day. Under the new regime, Cléry would look after him, under the supervision of the king; the queen could visit her son, but only at certain times and always with a commissioner in attendance. “Her distress was extreme,” wrote Cléry. “With what tenderness, she begged me to watch incessantly over his life.”
Nonetheless, the dauphin gradually adapted to the new regime and, according to some reports, his winning ways could apparently charm the most hardened and cruel of commissioners. Even Jacques-René Hébert, who publicly demonized the child as a “tyrant’s son” or a “wolf cub,” is reported to have told a friend, “He is as beautiful as the day and as interesting as can be. He plays with the king marvellously well … . The other day he asked me if the people are still unhappy. ‘That’s a pity,’ he replied, when I answered in the affirmative.” By his playful nature and his “little rogueries,” Louis-Charles often made “his parents forget for a moment their cruel situation,” wrote Cléry. “But he felt it himself; though young, he knew he was in a prison and watched by enemies. His behavior and his talk acquired that reserve which instinct, in presence of danger, inspires perhaps at any age. Never did I hear him mention the Tuileries, or Versailles, or any subject that might remind the queen or the king of painful memories.”
Cléry was also very touched by the young prince’s concern for others. As winter set in, confined in their dingy, airless rooms where the one stove on each floor failed to provide enough heat, the royal party rapidly succumbed to colds and flu. When Cléry also became too ill to leave his bed, the dauphin insisted on nursing him. “During that first day the Dauphin hardly left me,” wrote Cléry, “the august child made me drink.” Later, his Aunt Élisabeth
secretly gave Louis-Charles some soothing lozenges to pass on to their loyal valet. At eleven o’clock that night, Cléry was surprised to hear the Dauphin quietly calling him and expressed his concern that he was still awake. “The fact is,” replied Louis-Charles, “I did not want to fall asleep until I had given you this little box from my aunt. You were just in time. I’ve almost dozed off several times.”