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“It is not possible,” the man continued, “that you don’t know about the attempt to break you out made this very night. Who is behind it?” Nothing but silence from the prisoner.

“Answer, Antoinette,” Santerre2 said, coming closer, without noticing the shiver of horror that gripped the young woman at the sight of this man who, on the morning of the twenty-first of January, had come to the Temple to take Louis XVI to the guillotine. “Answer. Last night someone conspired against the Republic, they tried to release you from a captivity that the will of the people has imposed upon you while you await punishment for your crimes. Tell us, did you know about this conspiracy?”

Marie Antoinette trembled on hearing this voice, which she seemed to be trying to escape by shrinking back to the very edge of her chair. But she no more answered this question than the previous ones, took no more notice of Santerre than she had of the municipal officer.

“So you don’t feel like answering?” said Santerre, stamping his foot violently.

The prisoner took a third volume from the table.

Santerre spun on his heels. The brute power of this man, who commanded eighty thousand men and only needed to wave his hand to drown out the voice of the dying Louis XVI, was shattered by the dignity of a poor woman prisoner whose head he could also cause to roll but whose spirit he could not break.

Addressing the other woman, who had interrupted her tapestry for a moment to join her hands in prayer—prayer directed not to such men as these but to God—Santerre thundered, “What about you, Elisabeth,3 will you answer?”

“I do not know what you are asking,” she said. “So I cannot answer you.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake! Citizeness Capet,”4 said Santerre getting hot under the collar now. “What I am saying is perfectly clear. I’m saying that during the night an attempt was made to break you out of here and that you must know who the guilty parties are.”

“We have no communication with the outside world, monsieur; so we cannot know either what is being done for us or what is being done against us.”

“All right, then; have it your way,” said the municipal officer. “We’ll see what your nephew has to say on the subject.”

With that he walked over to the Dauphin’s bed.5 But Marie Antoinette shot to her feet at this threat. “Monsieur,” she said. “My son is ill and he is sleeping.… Do not wake him.”

“Well then, answer.”

“I know nothing.”

At that, the municipal officer leapt to the bed where, as we said earlier, the little captive was feigning sleep. “Snap out of it, Capet!” the man said, shaking him roughly. The child opened his eyes and smiled as the municipal officers surrounded his bed. Rocked by pain and fear, the Queen signaled to her daughter, who took advantage of the moment to slip unnoticed into the room next door, where she opened one of the stove doors, took out the note, and burned it before immediately returning to the main room and giving her mother a reassuring look.

“What do you want?” the little boy asked.

“We want to know if you heard anything last night.”

“No. I was sleeping.”

“You really like sleeping, it would seem.”

“I do, because when I sleep I dream.”

“And what do you dream about?”

“That I see my father again, even though you have killed him.”

“So you heard nothing?” Santerre snapped.

“Nothing.”

“The cubs are certainly in league with the wolf,” said the officer, furious. “And yet there was definitely a plot.”

The Queen smiled.

“She’s laughing at us, the Austrian woman!”6 cried the municipal officer. “I reckon, since that’s how it is, we should carry out the Commune decree to the letter. Up you go, Capet.”

“What are you going to do?” cried the Queen, forgetting herself completely. “Can’t you see that my son is sick, that he has a fever? Do you want to kill him?”

“Your son,” said the municipal officer, “is a constant cause for alarm for the Council of the Temple. He is the target of all the conspirators. They flatter themselves they’ll get you all out of here. Well, let