In the name of your mother, monsieur, cover me.

—the last words of Madame Elisabeth, the sister of Louis XVI, to her executioner; her neckerchief had come loose and fallen to the ground as she was strapped to the plank of the guillotine.

Marie-Thérèse Charlotte on her final parting with her aunt, Madame Elisabeth, on May 9th, 1794:

… just as we were going to bed the bolts were withdrawn and some one knocked at our door. My aunt replied that she would put on her dress; they answered that she must not be so long, and they rapped so hard that we thought the door would burst in. She opened it when she was dressed.

They said to her: “Citoyenne, you will please come down.”

“And my niece?”

“We will attend to her later.”

My aunt kissed me and told me to be calm for she would soon return.

“No, citoyenne, you will not return,” they said to her; “take your cap and come down.” They loaded her then with insults and coarse speeches; she bore it all with patience, took her cap; kissed me again, and told me to have courage and firmness, to hope always in God, to practise the good principles of religion given me by my parents, and not to fail in the last instructions given to me by my father and by my mother.

An account of the death of Madame Elisabeth, sister of Louis XVI, on May 10th, 1794:

At the foot of the scaffold was a long bench on which the victims were told to sit. By a refinement of cruelty Madame Élisabeth was placed nearest the steps to the scaffold, but she was the last of the twenty-five called to ascend them; she was to see and hear the killing of them all before her turn should come. During that time she never ceased to say the De profundis; she who was about to die prayed for the dead.

The first to be called was Mme. de Crussol. She rose immediately; as she passed Madame Élisabeth she curtsied, and then, bending forward, asked to be allowed to kiss her. “Willingly, and with all my heart,” replied the princess. All the other women, ten in number, did likewise. The men, as they passed her, each bowed low the head that an instant later was to fall into the basket. When the twenty-fourth bowed thus before her, she said: “Courage, and faith in God’s mercy.” Then she rose herself, to be ready at the call of the executioner. She mounted firmly the steps of the scaffold. Again the man offered his hand, but withdrew it, seeing from her bearing that she needed no help.

With an upward look to heaven, she gave herself into the hands of the executioner. As he fastened her to the fatal plank, her neckerchief came loose and fell to the ground. “In the name of your mother, monsieur, cover me,” she said. Those were her last words.

A short story of Madame Elisabeth, written by me, based on a concept used in Severance: Stories by Robert Olen Butler:

The human head is believed to remain in a state of consciousness for one and one-half minutes after decapitation. In a heightened state of emotion, people speak at the rate of 160 words per minute. Inspired by the intersection of these two seemingly unrelated concepts, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler wrote sixty-two stories, each exactly 240 words in length, capturing the flow of thoughts and feelings that go through a person’s mind after their head has been severed.

Madame Elisabeth: Princess of France, guillotined by order of the Revolutionary Tribunal, 1794

The flowers in my garden dance with the wind and I watch Madame Jacques who tends to my farm so well and like my cows she is pregnant and I admire her growing stomach as she milks and I envy it—yes it is a sin–but she is full and round and pink with a child from the marriage bed and she wipes her brow that is wet from the heat of work in the sun though I am dutiful and quiet and will share these feelings inside my breast with no one—no one—not even my dear Bombelles oh my Bombelinette who writes me and loves me and she is my dear heart there is no one in my heart before her and Raigecourt but God and my brother who will not leave his apartments now except to hunt and to weep with the queen o the queen over the sick and dead children and his face is lined from God’s trials like the stones that lead to Montreuil where I am quiet and safe and there is no one but God and myself and the children I give them milk and bread and the ache from watching Madame Jacques does not hurt so but I am content with flowers and reading and God and I catch a lily in my hands and tickle my neck with it but God o my God I cover my chest

An excerpt from the indictment of Madame Elisabeth:

Élisabeth has … co-operated in all the plots, the conspiracies formed by her infamous brothers, by the wicked and impure Antoinetter … It was she who in the month of June, 1791, sent diamonds, the property of the nation, to the infamous d’Artois, her brother, to put him in a condition to execute projects concerted with him, and to hire assassins of the nation.

… Élisabeth meditated with Capet and Antoinette the massacre of the citizens of Paris on the immortal day of the 10th of August. She watched all night hoping to witness the nocturnal carnage. She helped the barbarous Antoinette to bite the cartridges; she encouraged by her language, young girls whom fanatical priests had brought to the château for that horrible occupation.

Finally, disappointed in the hope of all this horde of conspirators, namely,–that the citizens who came to overthrow tyranny would be massacred,–she fled in the morning, with the tyrant and his wife, and went to await in the temple of National sovereignty that the horde of slaves, paid and committed to the crimes of that parricide Court, should drown Liberty in the blood of citizens and cut the throats of its representatives among whom she had sought a refuge.

… Finally, we have seen her, since the well-deserved punishment of the most guilty of the tyrants who have ever dishonoured human nature, promoting the re-establishment of tyranny by lavishing, with Antoinette, on the son of Capet homage to royalty and the pretended honours of a king.