To these are added
Sieyes, Louvet, &c. men not only eager to retain their power, but known
to have been of the Orleans faction, and who, if they are royalists, are
not loyalists, and the last persons to whose care a son of Louis the
Sixteenth ought to have been intrusted.
At this crisis, then, when the Convention could no longer temporize with
the expectations it raised--when the government was divided between one
party who had deposed the King to gratify their own ambition, and another
who had lent their assistance in order to facilitate the pretensions of
an usurper--and when the hopes of the country were anxiously fixed on
him, died Louis the Seventeenth. At an age which, in common life, is
perhaps the only portion of our existence unalloyed by misery, this
innocent child had suffered more than is often the lot of extended years
and mature guilt. He lived to see his father sent to the scaffold--to be
torn from his mother and family--to drudge in the service of brutality
and insolence--and to want those cares and necessaries which are not
refused even to the infant mendicant, whose wretchedness contributes to
the support of his parents.*
* It is unnecessary to remind the reader, that the Dauphin had been
under the care of one Simon, a shoemaker, who employed him to clean
his (Simon's) shoes, and in any other drudgery of which his close
confinement admitted.
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