While the trial lasted, the queen and those with her had been kept in almost absolute ignorance of what was taking place.  They never, however, doubted what the result would be,[6] so that it was scarcely a shock to them when they heard the news-men crying the sentence under their windows —­the only mercy that was shown to either the prisoner who was to die, or to those who were to survive him, being that they were allowed once more to meet on earth.  At eight in the evening the queen, his children, and his sister were to be allowed to visit him.  He prepared for the interview with astonishing calmness, making the arrangements so deliberately that, when he noticed that Clery had placed a bottle of iced water on the table, he bid him change it, lest, if the queen should require any, the chill should prove injurious to her health.  Even that last interview was not allowed to pass wholly without witnesses, since the Municipal Council refused, even on such an occasion, to relax their regulation that their guards were never to lose sight-of the king; and all that was permitted was that he might retire with his family into an inner room which had a glass door, so that, though what passed must be seen, their last words might not be overheard.  His daughter, Madame Royale, now a girl of fourteen, and old enough, as her mother had said a few months before, to realize the misery of the scenes which she daily saw around her, has left us an account of the interview, necessarily a brief one, for the queen and princess were too wretched to say much.  Louis wept when he announced to them how short was the time which he had to live, but his tears were those of pity for the desolation of those he loved, and not of fear for himself.  He was even, in some sense, a willing victim, for, as he told them, it had been proposed to save him by appealing to the primary Assemblies of the nation; but he had refused his consent to a step which must throw the whole country into confusion, and might be the cause of civil war.  He would rather die than risk the bringing of such calamities on his people.  He even sought to comfort the queen by making some excuses for the monsters who had condemned him; and his last words to his family were an entreaty to forgive them; to his son, an injunction never to seek to revenge his death, even, if some change of fortune should enable him to do so.

The queen said nothing, but sat clinging to him in speechless agony.  At last he begged them to retire, that he might seek rest to prepare himself for the morrow; and then she spoke, to beg that at least they might meet again the next morning.  “Yes,” said he, “at eight o’clock.”  “Why not at seven?” asked she.  “Well, then, at seven.”  But, after she had left him he determined to avoid this second meeting, not so much because he feared its unnerving himself, but because he felt that the second parting must be too terrible for her.

When she returned to her own chamber she had scarcely strength left to place the dauphin in his bed.  She threw herself, dressed as she was, on her own bed, where her sister-in-law and daughter heard her, as the little princess describes her state, “shivering with cold and grief the whole night long.[7]”