No woman took her place, and the Princesses themselves made their beds, swept their rooms, and waited upon the Queen.

Far worse punishments than menial work were prepared for them.  On 3d July a decree of the Convention ordered that the Dauphin should be separated from his family and “placed in the most secure apartment of the Tower.”  As soon as he heard this decree pronounced, says his sister, “he threw himself into my mother’s arms, and with violent cries entreated not to be parted from her.  My mother would not let her son go, and she actually defended against the efforts of the officers the bed in which she had placed him.  The men threatened to call up the guard and use violence.  My mother exclaimed that they had better kill her than tear her child from her.  At last they threatened our lives, and my mother’s maternal tenderness forced her to the sacrifice.  My aunt and I dressed the child, for my poor mother had no longer strength for anything.  Nevertheless, when he was dressed, she took him up in her arms and delivered him herself to the officers, bathing him with her tears, foreseeing that she was never to behold him again.  The poor little fellow embraced us all tenderly, and was carried away in a flood of tears.  My mother’s horror was extreme when she heard that Simon, a shoemaker by trade, whom she had seen as a municipal officer in the Temple, was the person to whom her child was confided . . . .  The officers now no longer remained in my mother’s apartment; they only came three times a day to bring our meals and examine the bolts and bars of our windows; we were locked up together night and day.  We often went up to the Tower, because my brother went, too, from the other side.  The only pleasure my mother enjoyed was seeing him through a crevice as he passed at a distance.  She would watch for hours together to see him as he passed.  It was her only hope, her only thought.”

The Queen was soon deprived even of this melancholy consolation.  On 1st August, 1793, it was resolved that she should be tried.  Robespierre opposed the measure, but Barere roused into action that deep-rooted hatred of the Queen which not even the sacrifice of her life availed to eradicate.  “Why do the enemies of the Republic still hope for success?” he asked.  “Is it because we have too long forgotten the crimes of the Austrian?  The children of Louis the Conspirator are hostages for the Republic . . .but behind them lurks a woman who has been the cause of all the disasters of France.”

At two o’clock on the morning of the following day, the municipal officers “awoke us,” says Madame Royale, “to read to my mother the decree of the Convention, which ordered her removal to the Conciergerie,

[The Conciergerie was originally, as its name implies, the porter’s lodge of the ancient Palace of Justice, and became in time a prison, from the custom of confining there persons who had committed trifling offences about the Court.]