The Temple Prison

The Temple tower, despite its grim reputation, initially provided the royal family with a peculiar domesticity. They occupied several rooms, had servants (though under guard), and could maintain family routines. Marie Antoinette organized their days: lessons for the children, meals together, evening prayers. She mended clothes, taught her daughter, and played with her son.

The guards, drawn from Paris sections, varied widely in their treatment of the prisoners. Some showed rough kindness, others deliberate cruelty. Marie Antoinette's dignity often disarmed hostility. One guard, won over by her maternal devotion, smuggled out her last letter. Another, moved by the dauphin's innocence, brought toys. But others delighted in petty humiliations: smoking in her presence, using coarse language, forcing her to taste food first to prove it wasn't poisoned.

The execution of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, shattered this fragile stability. Marie Antoinette was refused a final meeting with her husband, learning of his death only when guards mockingly called her "Widow Capet." Her grief was private but profound. Witnesses described her emerging from her room the next day aged and broken, but still maintaining royal bearing.

After the king's death, conditions worsened dramatically. The dauphin was separated from his mother and sister, placed under the care of the cobbler Simon, who was tasked with making him forget his royal origins. Marie Antoinette could sometimes hear her son playing in the courtyard below but was forbidden contact. This separation was perhaps her cruelest punishment.

Marie Antoinette's final months in the Temple were spent in increasing isolation with her daughter and sister-in-law. They prayed, did needlework, and sustained each other through faith. The former queen's health deteriorated—she suffered severe hemorrhaging and showed signs of uterine cancer. Yet she maintained dignity, never begging or complaining to her captors.