It was at four o'clock on the morning of the 14th of October, 1793, at the close of the sitting of the revolutionary tribunal, that the dethroned and widowed Queen was brought to the Conciergerie. Poor, abandoned, outraged Queen, they thrust her into one of their common cells, and gave her for attendant a galley-slave named Barasin. This must have been a brave, good fellow, with a loyal heart under his galley-slave's vest, for at the risk of his life he waited devoutly and devotedly on the queenly woman, a queen no longer, who could in nothing reward his devotion. One should name also the concierge Richard, who shewed himself not less a man in his care of the "beautiful high-born," and who for his humanity to her was stripped of all his goods. The gendarmes guarded her last hours, sat there in the cell with her, though republican modesty allowed the intervention of a screen. It is known what a sublime dignity sustained her to the end; and indeed almost the worst was over when she had quitted Fouquier-Tinville's bar, after the "hideous indictment" and the condemnation. She withdrew to die, and she could die as became a Queen. Louis had gone before her, and all the mother's dying thoughts and prayers must have been for the children who were to live after her—how long, she knew not. She sat in the dingy cell, clasping her crucifix, waiting her call to the tumbril; "dim, dim, as if in disastrous eclipse; like the pale kingdoms of Dis!" From this time on to the end of the Reign of Terror, the Conciergerie offered such a spectacle as was never seen before within the walls of any prison. The guillotine "smoked with bloody execution." The Revolution was eating not her enemies only but her children, and those victims and prospective victims, men and women, old and young, filled the cells of the Conciergerie, the chambers, the corridors, and the yards. They swarmed there in disorder, dirt, and disease, guarded and bullied by drunken turnkeys, who had a pack of savage dogs to assist them. They went out by batches in the tumbrils, to leave their heads in Samson's basket, and ever fresh parties of proscribed ones took the places of the dead. "I remained six months in the Conciergerie," says Nougaret, one of the historians of the period, "and saw there nobles, priests, merchants, bankers, men of letters, artisans, agriculturists, and honest _sans-culottes_." Often as this population was decimated, Fouquier-Tinville filled up the gap; and throughout the whole of the Terror the condemned and the untried proscribed ones, herded together, seldom had space enough for the common decencies of life.