floor, with no sheets or covers. Food was provided for the first three days, after which the family was left to fend for itself. Chedly and Ben Salem were transferred to the prison of Kairouan on 11 August. Hassine, M'hamed and princess Soufia were freed several days later. The last son, Salah Eddine, was transferred to the civil prison in Tunis three months after his house arrest. Alone in the ruined palace, the old couple were not allowed to leave until October 1958, as Lamine's health had deteriorated very badly. They were then transferred to a small villa in La Soukra with a kitchen, a bathroom and two other rooms and given a monthly allowance of 80 dinars, roughly the same as the salary of a secondary school teacher. They remained under house arrest and were forbidden even to go into the garden outside – indeed a policeman remained on duty actually inside the villa. Their daughter princess Soufia was allowed to visit them whenever she wished however. On 8 September the trial of Tahar Ben Ammar came to an end, having worked up the public mood with accusations made, and later withdrawn, about the who possessed the jewels which had belonged to the Bey's wife, which had still not been found. Two years later, the search for the jewels was renewed and both the former King and his wife were summoned for interrogation. It may have been at this point that Salah Eddine, still confined in the civil prison of Tunis, was taken to his father, imprisoned in the same building, to say farewell to him. Summoned to the national security headquarters Lamine's wife was interrogated relentlessly for three days to the point where she could no longer speak and suffered an apoplexy as her son Salah Eddine recalled years later. 'As for mother, she never recovered from her arrest and most of all from the three days of interrogation on the fourth floor of the Ministry of the Interior, where the security forces questioned her endlessly about what happened to the family jewels. Whether she was maltreated or not, she came back with blood coming from her mouth and internal hemorrhages in her lower abdomen. She died later in my father's arms, still in shock, and without ever telling us what she had undergone during her interrogation.' Taken back to La Soukra in agony, she died two days