That all this splendour collapsed suddenly with the revolution was not the most serious thing that faced the Queen--misfortune pursued her into her most intimate family life. She, who loved her children above all else and who, when the gathering disasters grew closer and closer to her husband, saw the collapse of one pillar after another of her very existence. Her youngest child died in his eleventh month. The Dauphin, a gifted and charming lad of seven, sickened. How could the mother who lay sobbing across the death-bed of her son at Meudon worry over the gathering storms in Paris through which pealed the knell announcing the Dauphin’s death? Then came the days when the mob hung threateningly around the palace and forced her to leave Versailles for Paris in its triumphant train. When the populace stormed the Tuilleries and she feared for the fate of her other children how deeply offended was the dignity which she possessed in the same measure that the King lacked it. When the Royal family were brought back from their unlucky flight to Varennes amid the abuse and insults of the mob, the King accepted it all with his usual calm and even tried to converse with his followers. The Queen, on the contrary, suffered so horribly under the humiliation that her hair turned white over night. This, however, was but the beginning. Then came the parting with the King who was led to the scaffold (January 21, 1793); there was the even more painful parting with her children, and the torture of almost a year in prison without news of them, within sight of the bloody heads which, like that of her friend the Princesse de Lamballe, were carried past her window on pikes. When she was haled before the Tribunal, where she made answer calmly to all accusations, she was but a shadow of herself. David made a drawing of her on her way to the scaffold (October 16, 1793)--a horrifying sketch (Fig. 9). Does there perhaps speak from it the injured vanity of an artist whose work had once been ignored by this former Queen? What a study in contrasts! This was she who only a few years previously had been the lovely model for the most charming portrait of the court painters.