all dignity and fortitude; and his struggles
were such that it required the strength of three executioners to
overpower him, and fulfil the sentence. It is to be hoped that his
family never knew this; and the mass of the crowd did not see what
happened on the scaffold; but some who did see the whole, have proved
beyond a doubt that Louis the Sixteenth showed, at last, no more dignity
in his death than in his life.

How much hope he imparted to his family during their evening interview
can now never be known; but his legal advisers and his servants gave him
such abundant assurances that the sentence could never be really
executed upon a king, that the hopes of his family were probably
sustained by their words. Not a sound, however, was heard by Clery
outside the door. The king sat between his wife and sister, and kept
Louis standing between his knees,--the Princess Royal sitting nearly in
front. There was much weeping; and most that was said was by the king.
He desired his boy to harbour no revenge against the authors of his
death, and then gave him his blessing.

When the peasant-child sees his father dying on his fever-bed, and knows
that the question is in the heart of both parents, what is to become of
the widow and her children, he may feel his little heart bursting with
fear and sorrow, and may think that no one can be more unhappy than he.
But Louis was more unhappy. Here was his father, in the full vigour of
his years, about to die a violent death, amidst the hatred of millions
of men who, if all had done right, should have been attached to him, and
have defended his life at the peril of their own. For the peasant-child
there is comfort in prospect. His father's grave is respected in the
churchyard; the neighbours are kind; there is the consolation of work
for those who survive, and the free air, and the spring flowers, and the
mowing, and the harvest, and all the pleasures which cannot be withheld
from those who live at liberty in the country. For the princely child
there were none of these comforts. As far as he could see, his father
and mother had no friends; he and his family were in a dismal prison,
with insulting enemies about them, and no prospect of any change for the
better, when his father should have been thus violently torn away.
Never, perhaps, was there a more miserable child than Louis was now.

The queen much wished to remain with the king all night; but the king
saw that it was better