“What does the Convention intend to do with him?” asked Simon, when the innocent victim was placed in his clutches.  “Transport him?”

“No.”

“Kill him?”

“No.”

“Poison him?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

“Why, get rid of him.”

For such a purpose they could not have chosen their instruments better.  “Simon and his wife, cut off all those fair locks that had been his youthful glory and his mother’s pride.  This worthy pair stripped him of the mourning he wore for his father; and as they did so, they called it ‘playing at the game of the spoiled king.’  They alternately induced him to commit excesses, and then half starved him.  They beat him mercilessly; nor was the treatment by night less brutal than that by day.  As soon as the weary boy had sunk into his first profound sleep, they would loudly call him by name, ‘Capet!  Capet!’ Startled, nervous, bathed in perspiration, or sometimes trembling with cold, he would spring up, rush through the dark, and present himself at Simon’s bedside, murmuring, tremblingly, ‘I am here, citizen.’—­’Come nearer; let me feel you.’  He would approach the bed as he was ordered, although he knew the treatment that awaited him.  Simon would buffet him on the head, or kick him away, adding the remark, ’Get to bed again, wolfs cub; I only wanted to know that you were safe.’  On one of these occasions, when the child had fallen half stunned upon his own miserable couch, and lay there groaning and faint with pain, Simon roared out with a laugh, ’Suppose you were king, Capet, what would you do to me?’ The child thought of his father’s dying words, and said, ‘I would forgive you.’”—­[Thiers]

The change in the young Prince’s mode of life, and the cruelties and caprices to which he was subjected, soon made him fall ill, says his sister.  “Simon forced him to eat to excess, and to drink large quantities of wine, which he detested . . . .  He grew extremely fat without increasing in height or strength.”  His aunt and sister, deprived of the pleasure of tending him, had the pain of hearing his childish voice raised in the abominable songs his gaolers taught him.  The brutality of Simon “depraved at once the body and soul of his pupil.  He called him the young wolf of the Temple.  He treated him as the young of wild animals are treated when taken from the mother and reduced to captivity,—­at once intimidated by blows and enervated by taming.  He punished for sensibility; he rewarded meanness; he encouraged vice; he made the child wait on him at table, sometimes striking him on the face with a knotted towel, sometimes raising the poker and threatening to strike him with it.”

[Simon left the Temple to become a municipal officer.  He was involved in the overthrow of Robespierre, and guillotined the day after him, 29th July, 1794.]