Marie Antoinette by Hilaire Belloc — Read

THAT night the prisoners in the Tower did not sleep, saving the little Dauphin: he slept soundly; and it is said of his mother that, watching him, she murmured that he was of the age at which his brother had died, at Meudon, and that those of her family who died earliest were the most blessed. In the last silences of the January night, till past two in the morning, the woman Tison, who was in part their gaoleress and in part a spy upon them, heard them talking still, and when she came to them Madame Elizabeth said: "For God's sake leave us."

Cléry, the dead master's valet, was taken away, still noting as he went the new look in the Queen's eyes. And in this same week there came the mourning clothes which they had asked of the authorities and which had been granted them. The Princess Royal fell ill. The Queen would no longer walk in the garden now, and the child, lacking exercise-and with bad blood-suffered. Her legs swelled badly. The authorities allowed the man who had been the family doctor of the children in the old days to come and visit them now. Brunier was his name, and in the old days Marie Antoinette had affected to ridicule his middle-class energy: she thought he lacked respect to the clay of which she and her children were made. She was glad enough to see him now, and he was devoted. He was allowed to call in a surgeon and to bring in linen.