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The queen was driven almost to madness by this unexpected decree, and when men came to take Louis away from her and carry him to another part of the Tower, she frantically placed herself in front of his bed, and insisted that he should not be taken, but power and force were on the wrong side, and at last, the officers tore the child from his mother’s arms and carried him dazed and trembling with fright to his new apartment.

King of France was little Louis in title, but the most lonely, most frightened of all children in the land. For two days and two nights he refused food and held out his arms to his so-called tutor, constantly pleading to be taken back to his mother and sister. And who was his “tutor”? No other than Simon, the cobbler, he whose brawny arms had once stopped the Dauphin’s way in the garden of the Tuileries. Simon and his wife had been chosen to guard and care for the little King of France, because they were staunch revolutionists who could be relied on to protect the interests of their party. Historians differ in their accounts of the treatment of the young King by this rough couple, but it seems pretty sure now that during their stay in the Temple they were not altogether cruel to little Louis. He was allowed to play both in his rooms and in the garden, had a billiard table, and a case of mechanical birds for his amusement, and when he grieved for his sister’s companionship, another little companion of his own age was found to play with him, and it is also known that during his two sicknesses, Simon and his wife cared for him with as much devotion as if he had been their own child. Whether this was because of the fine salary attached to the position, or from some native kindness underneath his coarse rough exterior, we do not know, but be this as it may, Simon evidently gave only such measure of cruelty to his charge as was insisted on by those who employed him, and it was doubtless, they who forced Simon to do what he did to destroy the child’s mental and bodily faculties. Louis was made to share their political opinions, to imitate their coarse manners and even to sing their revolutionary songs, while in place of the mourning he had worn for his father, he now wore the coarsest garments and the red cap of the Jacobins, and was often made to drink and eat far more than was good for him, until at last he was in a condition of body and mind such as his tormentors desired, when he could be made a tool to suit their own ends, because of his weakened and abnormal condition.

No page of history is written in so black an ink nor with so many blots as that on which is recorded the imprisonment and torture of little Louis Seventeenth, the King who never reigned, and no page of history offers a more bewildering puzzle for solution, from the moment of his being taken from his mother’s care–a puzzle to which there have been more answers, and about which as much mystery hangs, as about any other incident on the pages of history, and no page has been oftener read and re-read than this which offers for solution the problem of the ending of this little King who never reigned.

We see him last as a prisoner; thin, haggard, sick unto death, with no sparkle in his lustreless eyes, no motion in his swollen joints, no pretty retort on his lips as of old, and with a sigh we turn from the ghastly sight to the pages of French history where we again read in detail the accounts of his life and death, and then it is for us to decide upon our answer to this riddle which offers more than one solution.