Probably of all the cruelties inflicted upon this unhappy woman, none caused her such anguish as the testimony of her son before the Revolutionary Tribunal, that he had heard his mother say she “hated the French people.”  Placed under the care of the brutal Simon after his father’s removal from the Temple, the child had become a physical and mental wreck.  The queen, in her last letter to her sister the Princess Elizabeth, makes pitiful allusion to the incident, begging her to remember what he must have suffered before he said this; also reminding her how children may be taught to utter words they do not comprehend.  His lesson, no doubt, had been learned by cruel tortures; and, rendered half imbecile, it was recited when the time came.  None but his keeper was ever permitted to see the boy.  His condition, final illness, and death are shrouded in mystery.  In June, 1794, eight months after his mother’s execution, it was announced that he was dead.  It would be difficult to prove this event before a court of justice.  There were no witnesses whose testimony would have any weight.  No one was permitted to see the child who was put into that obscure grave; and many circumstances give rise to a suspicion that the boy, who might have been a source of political embarrassment in the rehabilitation of France, was disposed of in another way—­dropped into an obscurity which would serve as well as death.

There was a surfeit of killing, and a waning Revolution.  We are far from saying that such a thing happened.  But ambitious royalists might have thought their money well expended in removing the son of the murdered king from the scene.  The claim of the American dauphin, Eleazer Williams, may have been fanciful, or even false; but what safer and more effectual plan could be devised than to drop the half-imbecile heir to a throne into the heart of a tribe of Indians in an American wilderness?

When Louis XVIII. occupied his brother’s throne, in 1814, and erected over the dishonored graves of his family that beautiful Chapelle Expiatoire, he also gave orders for masses to be said for the repose of the souls of his murdered kindred, whom he designated by name:  Louis XVI., king; Marie Antoinette, queen, and the Princess Elizabeth, his sister.  If it is true, as has been said, that the name of the dauphin was not included in this list, it is a most suggestive omission.  Technically, this boy was king from the moment of his father’s death until his own, and on the lists of sovereigns is called Louis XVII.  Then why was there no mention of him as one of that martyred group?

Twenty-two of the Girondists who had helped to dethrone the king on that 10th of August, and later consented to his death, were now facing the same doom to which they had sent him only six months before, and by a strange fatality were under the same roof with the queen.  Only a few feet, and two thin partitions, separated them; and in her cell she must have heard their impassioned voices during that dramatic banquet, the last night of their lives.  And the next day this group of extraordinary men—­men singularly gifted and fascinating—­were all lying in one tomb, at the side of Louis XVI.