But the King, who had seen and heard more distinctly from his apartment, flew to that of the Queen.  That the horrid object might not escape observation, the monsters had mounted upon each other’s shoulders so as to lift the bleeding head quite up to the prison bars.  The King came just in time to snatch Her Majesty from the, spot, and thus she was prevented from seeing it.  He took her up in his arms and carried her to a distant part of the Temple, but the mob pursued her in her retreat, and howled the fatal truth even at her, very door, adding that her head would be the next, the nation would require.  Her Majesty fell into violent hysterics.  The butchers of human flesh continued in the interior of the Temple, parading the triumph of their assassination, until the shrieks of the Princesse Elizabeth at the state in which she saw the Queen, and serious fears for the safety of the royal prisoners, aroused the commandant to treble the national guards and chase the barbarians to the outside, where they remained for hours.

SECTION XIX.

It now remains for me to complete my record by a few facts and observations relating to the illustrious victims who a short time survived the Princesse de Lamballe.  I shall add to this painful narrative some details which have been mentioned to me concerning their remorseless persecutors, who were not long left unpursued by just and awful retribution.  Having done this, I shall dismiss the subject.

The execrable and sacrilegious modern French Pharisees, who butchered, on the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd of September, 1792, all the prisoners at Paris, by these massacres only gave the signal for the more diabolical machinations which led to the destruction of the still more sacred victims of the 21st of January, and the 16th of October, 1793, and the myriads who followed.

The King himself never had a doubt with regard to his ultimate fate.  His only wish was to make it the means of emancipation for the Queen and Royal Family.  It was his intention to appeal to the National Assembly upon the subject, after his trial.  Such also was the particular wish of his saint-like sister, the Princesse Elizabeth, who imagined that an appeal under such circumstances could not be resisted.  But the Queen strongly opposed the measure; and His Majesty said he should be loath, in the last moments of his painful existence, in anything to thwart one whom he loved so tenderly.

He had long accustomed himself, when he spoke of the Queen and royal infants, in deference to the temper of the times, only to say, “my wife and children.”  They, as he told Clery, formed a tie, and the only one remaining, which still bound him to earth.  Their last embraces, he said, went so to his aching heart, that he could even yet feel their little hands clinging about him, and see their streaming eyes, and hear their agonized and broken voices.  The day previous to the fatal catastrophe, when permitted