第145章 THE PLAN OF THE ESCAPE.(7)

"Hush!" interrupted Tison, commandingly, "I am not your 'dear woman,' I am the wife of Citizen Tison, and I want none of your confidence, for confidence from such persons as you are, might easily bring me to the scaffold."

She now passed through the whole room with her slow, stealthy tread, let the light fall upon every article of furniture and the floor, examined all the objects that lay upon the table, and then, after one last threatening look at the beds of the two ladies, went slowly out. She stopped again at the cribs of the children, and looked at them with a touch of gentleness. "How quietly they sleep!" the whispered. "They lie there exactly as they lay before. One would think they were smiling in their sleep--I suppose they are playing with angels. I should like to know how angels come into this old, horrid Temple, and what Simon's wife would say if she knew they came in here at night without her permission. See, see," she continued, "the boy is laughing again, and spreading out his hands, as if he wanted to catch the angels. Ah! I should like to know if my dear little Solange is sleeping as soundly as these children, and whether she smiles in her sleep and plays with angels; I should like to know if she dreams of her parents, my dear little Solange, and whether she sometimes sees her poor mother, who loves her so and yearns toward her so tenderly that" [Footnote: This Mistress Tison, the cruel keeper of the queen, soon after this fell into lunacy, owing both to her longings after her daughter and her compunctions of conscience for her treatment of the queen. The first token of her insanity was her falling upon her knees before Marie Antoinette, and begging pardon for all the pain she had occasioned, and amid floods of tears accusing herself as the one who would be answerable for the death of the queen. She then fell into such dreadful spasms, that four men were scarcely able to hold her. They carried her into the Hotel Dieu, where she died after two days of the most dreadful sufferings and bitter reproaches of herself.--See Goncourt, p. 280.

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She could not go on; tears extinguished her utterance, and she hastened out, to silence her longings on the pillow of her bed.

The ladies listened a long time in perfect silence; then, when every thing was still again, they raised themselves up softly, and began to talk to each other in the faintest of whispers, and to make their final preparations for the flight of the morrow. They then rose and drew from the various hiding-places the garments which they were to use, placed the various suits together, and then tried to put them on. A fearful, awful picture, such as a painter of hell, such as Breugel could not surpass in horror!--a queen and a princess, two tender, pale, harmless women, busied, deep in the night, as if dressing for a masquerade, in transforming themselves into those very officials who had led the king to the scaffold, and who, with their pitiless iron hands, were detaining the royal family in prison!

There they stood, a queen, a princess, clad in the coarse, threadbare garments of republican officials, the tri-colored sashes of the "one indivisible republic" around their bodies, their heads covered with the three-cornered hats, on which the tri-colored cockade glittered. They stood and viewed each other with sad looks and heavy sighs. Ah, what bright, joyous laughter would have sprung from the lips of the queen in the days of her happiness, if she had wanted to hide her beauty in such attire for some pleasant masquerade at Trianon! What charming sport it would have been then and there! How would her friends and courtiers have laughed! How they would have admired the queen in her original costume, which might well have been thought to belong to the realm of dreams and fantasies! A tri-colored cockade--a figment of the brain--a tri-colored sash--a merry dream! The lilies rule over France, and will rule forever!

No laughter resounded in the desolate room, scantily lighted with the dim taper--no laughter as the queen and the princess put on their strange, fearful attire. It was no masquerade, but a dreadful, horrible reality; and as they looked at each other wearing the costume of revolutionists, tears started from the eyes of the queen; the princess folded her hands and prayed; and she too could not keep back the drops that slowly coursed over her cheeks.

The lilies of France are faded and torn from the ground! From the palace of the Tuileries waved the tri-color of the republic, and in the palace of the former Knights Templars is a pale, sad woman, with gray hair and sunken eyes, a broken heart, and a bowed form. This pale, sad shadow of the past is Marie Antoinette, once the Queen of France, the renowned beauty, the first woman in a great kingdom, now the widow of an executed man, she herself probably with one foot--

No, no, she will be saved! God has sent her a deliverer, a friend, and this friend, this helper in her need, has made every thing ready for her flight.