eeing
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 s
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