And now followed those long months of imprisonment in the Temple,—months of unutterable suffering, while the king was on trial for his life. And then that sorrowful night of the 20th of January, when for the last time the king was permitted to behold his family. Ah! what prayers, what groans, what tears were heard and seen that night. Then came that awful morning of the 21st of January, 1793, and while the king was suffering upon the guillotine, the queen, with Madame Elizabeth and the children, remained in their prison, in the endurance of anguish as severe as could be laid on human hearts. As the deep booming of the artillery announced that the fatal axe had fallen, poor Marie Antoinette swooned dead away. But haste we on to the last act of the dreadful tragedy. On the 2d of August, 1793, Marie Antoinette Jeanne Josèphe de Lorraine, Queen of France and Navarre and Archduchess of Austria, the once brilliant sovereign of Versailles, now a prisoner and a widow, torn from her children and treated like a common felon, was removed from the prison of the Temple to that of the Conciergerie, there to linger until her release from human barbarity on the 16th of October. In one of the vast halls of this edifice, when occupied by the Parliament, Louis XIV. had entered during a sitting, booted and spurred, and declared that he was the state. “It was a strange fate that this building, once the dwelling-place of the sovereigns of the House of Capet, when holding their state in the capital, should see a captive within its walls, the widow of their descendant,—the ‘widow Capet,’ as the Jacobins described her in their blood-stained edicts.” The damp, foul dungeons were the most gloomy tombs imagination can conceive. Down the dripping and slimy steps the queen was led by the light of a tallow candle, until, through a labyrinth of corridors, she approached her iron door. The rusty hinges grated as the door was opened, and entering, she struck her forehead against the low beam. “Did you hurt yourself?” inquired the _gendarme_. “No, nothing can further harm me.” Poor Marie Antoinette! “The candle gave just light enough to reveal the horrors of her cell. The floor was covered with mud, and streams of water trickled down the stone walls. A miserable pallet, with a dirty covering of coarse and tattered cloth, a small pine table, and a chair, constituted the only furniture.” So deep was the fall from the _salons_ of Versailles!