Days and weeks and months did pass, and as they passed brought increasing langour, and weakness, and illness.  The want of fresh air, the abandonment and the solitude, had all had their effect, and the unfortunate dauphin could scarcely lift the heavy earthenware platter which contained his food, or the heavier jar in which his water was brought.  He soon left off sweeping his room, and never tried to move the palliasse off his bed.  He could not change his filthy sheets, and his blanket was worn into tatters.  He wore his ragged jacket and trousers—­Simon’s legacy—­both day and night, and although he felt all this misery he could not cry.  Loathsome creatures crawled in his den and over his person until even the little scullion who attended him shuddered with horror as he glanced into the place and muttered, “Everything is alive in that room.”  “Yes,” says Beauchesne, “everything was alive except the boy they were killing by inches, and murdering in detail.  This beautiful child, so admired at Versailles and at the Tuileries, would not recognise himself, his form is scarcely human—­it is something that vegetates—­a moving mass of bones and skin.  Never could any state of misery have been conceived more desolate, more lonely, more threatening than this!...  And all that I here relate is true!  These troubles, insults, and torments were heaped on the head of a child.  I show them to you, like indeed to what they were, but far short of the reality.  Cowardly and cruel men, why did you stop in your frenzy of murder?  It would have been better to drink that last drop of royal blood, than to mingle it with gall and venom and poison; it would have been better to smother the child, as was done by the emissaries of Richard III. in the Tower of London, than to degrade and sully his intellect by that slow method of assassination which killed the mind before it slew the body.  He should have been struck a year or two before; his little feet should have been aided to mount the rude steps of the guillotine!  Ah, if she could have known the fate you were reserving for him, the daughter of Maria-Theresa would have asked to take her child in her arms:  she would have shared her very last victory with him; and the angels would have prepared at once the crown of the martyred and that of the innocent victim!  Alas, history is fain to regret for Louis XVII. the scaffold of his mother!”

But the end of the torture was very near.  Robespierre fell, and Simon, the Barbarous, accompanied him in the same tumbril to the guillotine, and shared his fate.  Barras, the new dictator, made it almost his first care to visit the Temple; and, from what his colleagues and himself saw there, they came to the conclusion that some more judicious control was needed than that of the rough guards who had charge of the royal children—­that a permanent agent must be appointed to watch the watchers.  Accordingly, without consulting him, they delegated the citizen Laurent to take charge of the dauphin and his sister.  Laurent was a humane man, and accepted the appointment willingly.  Indeed he dared not have refused it; but, in common with the rest of the public, he had heard that the boy was miserably ill and was totally uncared for, and seems to have had a notion that he could better his condition.