This was the first stopping-place of the royal family, which had been entrusted by Pétion to the surveillance of the municipality and the guard of Santerre. The municipal officers stayed close to the King, kept their hats on, and gave him no title except "Monsieur." Louis XVI., not doubting that the palace of the grand-prior was the residence assigned him by the nation until the close of his career, began to visit its apartments. While the municipal officers took a cruel pleasure in this error, thinking of the still keener one they would enjoy when they disabused him of it, he pleased himself by allotting the different rooms in advance. The word palace had an unpleasant sound to the persecutors of royalty. The Temple tower looked more like a prison. Toward eleven o'clock, one of the commissioners ordered the august captives to collect such linen and other clothing as they had been able to procure, and follow him. They silently obeyed, and left the palace. The night was very dark. They passed through a double row of soldiers holding naked sabres. The municipal officers carried lanterns. One of them broke the dismal silence he had observed throughout the march. "Thy master," said he to M. Hue, "has been accustomed to gilded canopies. Very well! he is going to find out how we lodge the assassins of the people." {341} The lamps in the windows of the old quadrangular dungeon lighted up its high pinnacles and turrets, its gigantic profile and gloomy bulk. The immense tower, one hundred and fifty feet high, and with walls nine feet thick, rose, menacing and fatal, amidst the darkness. Beside it was another tower, narrower and not so high, but which was also flanked by turrets. Thus the whole dungeon was composed of two distinct yet united towers. The second of these, called the little tower, to distinguish it from the great one, was selected as the prison of the former hosts of Versailles, Fontainebleau, and the Tuileries. The little tower of the Temple, which had no interior communication with the great one against which it stood, was a long quadrangle flanked by two turrets. Four steps led to the door, which was low and narrow, and opened on a landing at the end of which began a winding staircase shaped like a snail-shell. Wide from its base as far as the first story, it grew narrower as it climbed up into the second. The door, which was considered too weak, was to be strengthened on the following day by heavy bars, and supplied with an enormous lock brought from the prisons of the Châtelet. The Queen was put on the second floor, and the King on the third. On entering his chamber, Louis XVI. found a miserable bed in an alcove without tapestry or curtains. He showed neither ill humor nor surprise. Engravings, indecent for the most part, covered the walls. He {342} took them down himself. "I will not leave such objects before my children's eyes," said he. Then he lay down and slept tranquilly.