The next day Louis had gone to receive the reward promised to the merciful, to those who return love for hate, blessings for curses. When the guillotine had done its work, the shouts of the infuriated city announced to the queen that she was a widow. Her agony was inconsolable. In the afternoon of this awful day she asked to see Cléry, hoping that he might have some message for her from the king, with whom he had remained till his departure from the Temple. She guessed right; the faithful servant had been entrusted with a ring, which the king desired him to deliver to her with the assurance that he never would have parted with it but with his life. But Cléry was not allowed the mournful privilege of fulfilling his trust in person; he was kept a month in the Temple, and then released. “We had now a little more freedom,” continues Mme. Royale. “The guards even believed that we were about to be sent out of France; but nothing could calm the agony of the queen. No hope could touch her heart; life was indifferent to her, and she did not fear death.” Her son, meanwhile, had nominally become King of France. The armies of La Vendée proclaimed him as Louis XVII., under the regency of his uncle, the Comte de Provence. He was King of France everywhere except in France, where he was the victim of a blind ferocity unexampled in the history of the most wicked periods of the world. The “freedom” which the Duchesse d’Angoulême speaks of lasted but a few days; the royal family were all now in the queen’s apartment, but kept under, if possible, more rigid and humiliating supervision than before. Their only attendants were a certain Tison and his wife, who had hitherto been employed in the most menial household work of the Temple. They were coarse and ignorant by nature, and soon the confinement to which they were themselves condemned so soured their temper that they grew cruel and insolent, and avenged their own privations on their unhappy prisoners. They denounced three of the municipals whom they detected in some signs of respect and sympathy for the queen, and these men were all guillotined on the strength of the Tisons’ evidence. The woman went mad with remorse when she beheld the mischief her denunciations had done. At first she sank into a black melancholy. Marie Antoinette and the Princess Elizabeth attended on her, and did their utmost to soothe her during the first stage of the malady; but their gentle charity was like coals of fire on the head of their persecutor. She soon became furious, and had to be carried away by force to a mad-house.