Up this staircase and through this door, and along this gangway, and so through an opening of the balustrade into the criminal dock, there is brought, between two gendarmes, a woman of middle age, with abundant hair which has turned quite grey lately, and features which retain a few--a very few--traces of former comeliness. She is barely eight-and-thirty, and she looks full fifty. She is miserably clad in an old, patched, threadbare gown of black serge, which has been mended for her innumerable times by a compassionate girl named Rosalie, the daughter of the gaoler. Her shoes are old, full of holes, and down at heel. She wears black cotton stockings, and about her shoulders is arranged a kind of tippet, or pelérine, of frayed white muslin. As yet she wears no cap; and her long tresses have been carefully dressed and oiled this morning by the pitying Rosalie. Obviously, she is in mourning for her husband, sometime King of France and Navarre; but the Revolutionary Tribunal knows nothing of such titles, and in the Act of Accusation, which is read in a monotonous sing-song by the _Greffier_, the prisoner is arraigned as “Marie Antoinette, of Austria and Lorraine, widow of Louis Capet.” The indictment goes on to say that the widow Capet has by her crimes rendered herself the worthy compeer of Brunéhaut, Fredegonde, and Catherine de Medicis; that since she has had her abode in France she has been the scourge and bloodsucker of her adopted country; and that even before “the Happy Revolution which gave the French their sovereignty” she entered into political correspondence with “the man calling himself King of Bohemia and Hungary”--this is the Emperor of Austria her brother--that, in conjunction with the brothers of Louis Capet, and “the execrable and infamous Calonne” she had squandered the resources of France (the fruit of the sweat of the people) in a dreadful manner, “to satisfy inordinate pleasures and to pay the agents of her criminal intrigues.” In another count of the indictment she is charged with being “an adept in all sorts of crimes.” One of these “crimes” is, that on the evening of the famous banquet to the Garde du Corps, and the Regiment de Flanders, in the Opera House at Versailles, she, with the King and a numerous and brilliant following, had passed between the lines of tables, distributing white cockades to the officers and encouraging them to trample the national or tri-coloured cockade under foot. “Prisoner,” thunders the President, “were you there when the band played the air, ‘_Oh, Richard, oh mon Roi_’?” “I do not recollect,” replies the Queen. “Were you there when the toast of ‘The Nation’ was proposed and refused?” “I do not think that I was.” “Did not your husband read his speech to the representatives to you half-an-hour before he delivered it?” “My husband had great confidence in me, and that made him read his speech to me; but I made no observations.”