gles stood the house called the grand-prior's palace.

This was the first stopping-place of the royal family, which had been
entrusted by Petion to the surveillance of the municipality and the
guard of Santerre. The municipal officers stayed close to the King,
kept their hats on, and gave him no title except "Monsieur." Louis
XVI., not doubting that the palace of the grand-prior was the residence
assigned him by the nation until the close of his career, began to
visit its apartments. While the municipal officers took a cruel
pleasure in this error, thinking of the still keener one they would
enjoy when they disabused him of it, he pleased himself by allotting
the different rooms in advance. The word palace had an unpleasant
sound to the persecutors of royalty. The Temple tower looked more like
a prison. Toward eleven o'clock, one of the commissioners ordered the
august captives to collect such linen and other clothing as they had
been able to procure, and follow him. They silently obeyed, and left
the palace. The night was very dark. They passed through a double row
of soldiers holding naked sabres. The municipal officers carried
lanterns. One of them broke the dismal silence he had observed
throughout the march. "Thy master," said he to M. Hue, "has been
accustomed to gilded canopies. Very well! he is going to find out how
we lodge the assassins of the people."

{341}

The lamps in the windows of the old quadrangular dungeon lighted up its
high pinnacles and turrets, its gigantic profile and gloomy bulk. The
immense tower, one hundred and fifty feet high, and with walls nine
feet thick, rose, menacing and fatal, amidst the darkness. Beside it
was another tower, narrower and not so high, but which was also flanked
by turrets. Thus the whole dungeon was composed of two distinct yet
united towers. The second of these, called the little tower, to
distinguish it from the great one, was selected as the prison of the
former hosts of Versailles, Fontainebleau, and the Tuileries.

The little tower of the Temple, which had no interior communication
with the great one against which it stood, was a long quadrangle
flanked by two turrets. Four steps led to the door, which was low and
narrow, and opened on a landing at the end of which began a winding
staircase shaped like a snail-shell. Wide from its base as far as the
first story, it grew narrower as it climbed up into the second. The
door, which was consid