Simon’s work it was to deprave the body and soul of the wretched child. He forced him to drink strong wine, and made him answer to the name of “Wolf.” He beat him if he wept, encouraged him to every possible disgusting act, and compelled him to sing obscene songs, while he (his master) smoked and drank. Once, he nearly destroyed one of the poor Prince’s eyes; at another, he raised a poker against him. Sometimes he was kind; and, upon one occasion, he said, “Capet, if the soldiers come and deliver you, what will you do?” “Forgive you,” said the child. The man Simon actually wept, but he cried immediately afterwards, “There’s some of the blood of the lion in the whelp.” In the middle of the night of the 2nd of August, the Queen was awakened, and told she was to be removed _alone_, to another prison. In vain the women threw themselves at the feet of the men. They had but their duty to do. The Queen was compelled to dress before them, while they ransacked the room, and seized every little object the Queen still retained. The miserable creatures left her a handkerchief. And now, exactly as Louis XVI had told his children to forgive their enemies, so now desolate Marie Antoinette told her daughter, in her last words to the poor child, to forgive those who parted them. “I give my children to you, sister. Be a second mother to them.” For precisely as Louis appears to have had no conception of the monstrosity of putting a woman to death, so the Queen, in leaving the Temple, appears not to have supposed for one moment that the Princess Elizabeth would be claimed by the scaffold,—she who had led the life of a true woman, who had nursed and helped the people, and never joined in the frivolities of the Court. The Queen was taken to the prison of the Conciergerie, which is composed of the dungeons below high water mark, to be found amongst the foundations of the Palace of Justice. To a wretched cell, having in one corner a straw bed, and by the light of one candle, was the ex-Queen taken. A woman desirous of death in the dungeon of a stronghold, and yet they only believed her safe when two soldiers, swords drawn, stood at the outer door watching, with orders not to lose sight of the Widow Capet, even when asleep. Madam Richard, that good woman who tended Charlotte Corday in her last moments, was the Queen’s most humane gaoler. She found something like furniture for the cell, procured wholesome food for the captive, and often brought a low-whispered message from the royal prisoners still in the Temple. A little while, and the dampness of the cell rotted the Queen’s only dresses—two very common ones; and her underclothing becoming in tatters, she was half naked. CHAPTER LIX. MARIE ANTOINETTE FINDS PEACE AT LAST.