A Journal of the Terror

This volume joins two eyewitness records of Louis XVI's last months. Jean-Baptiste Cléry, the king's valet, keeps a journal of life in the Temple after the royal family is imprisoned there in 1792: the rooms, the guards, the searches, the lessons given to the boy, and the successive separations that isolate the king. The Abbé de Firmont, who attends Louis as confessor, describes the night and morning of the execution in January 1793, the last communion, the farewell, and the journey to the scaffold. Together the texts are a close, day-by-day account of captivity during the Terror.

Quarter bound in burgundy buckram with paper covers featuring the executioner holding aloft Louis Capet's guillotined head. Dark red slipcase.