Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira;
Les aristocrates on les pendra.
"By to-morrow night there'll be no need of sentries!" he broke off.
"It's long, eh, when there's no one to keep you company? The devil take
the woman!" He shouldered his musket. "Citoyen, Salut et Fraternité."
He turned on his heel and joined the darkness, while back came the
unmusical voice:
"Dansons la carmagnole,
Vive le son, vive le son!
Dansons la carmagnole,
Vive le son--"
The rest lost itself faintly among distant roofs.
Barabant, recommencing his tedious pacing, returned to the Rue St.
Antoine, where the sound of light footsteps warned him of the approach
of a woman or a child.
"Can it be Nicole?" he thought hopefully, but his spirits fell as the
woman came on doubtfully in a wavering line.
"Good evening, citoyenne," he said gallantly. "There are not many of
your sex abroad to-night, and alone."
The woman gave the countersign, "The 10th of August."
Barabant, seeing that she was not inclined to enter into a
conversation, cried:
"Take pity on the patriot, citoyenne. The hours are dull."
But the woman, with only a slight shake of her head, passed quickly on.
Barabant, thus repulsed, grumbled to himself:
"She is neither young nor pretty or she would have stopped." But
remembering the sentry he had left, he continued: "Perhaps it is the
fair one with the broken head. If it is, she doesn't seem any too
eager. No, she's turned away."
Suddenly he drew himself up with an exclamation. He saw the woman halt
as with the twinkle of a lantern the figure of a man joined her, while
to his astonishment she drew back in evident shrinking from her new
companion.
Barabant, who had followed this scene with such intentness as to have
become unaware of his surroundings, suddenly bounded back at the touch
of a hand on his shoulder.
"What vigilance, Citoyen Barabant! What a model sentry!"
It was Louison who had stolen on him silently, and now stood mocking
him. To Barabant the apparition was so in keeping with the strange
impression which the girl had made on him that he was too startled to
answer immediately.
"Why are you always afraid of me?" Louison said impatiently. "It isn't
pleasant to inspire terror."
Barabant excused himself, recounting the scene he had just witnessed;
but Louison, not to be put off, returned to her question. "So I inspire
you with fear?"
"The expression is exaggerated," Barabant returned evasively.
"Come, frankly, there is something about me that has repelled you?"
She continued seeking the answer herself. "Was it the day we went to
the flower-market and I pretended anger? That was but play." Her eyes
sought his face, as though she could find its expression despite the
darkness. All at once she said, "It was at the guillotine?"
"That's true."
"I knew it; but why? I don't understand," she said almost angrily.
"What is there about me that gives such an impression? I am not
conscious of it."
"First, answer me this," Barabant said, "and frankly. At an execution
you have no feeling of pity or horror, have you?"
"No," she answered thoughtfully. "Why?"
"Because it is too evident."
"How do I seem?" she said quickly.
"You seem utterly indifferent to any human suffering."
"That is true," she said slowly.
"It is not only that," Barabant continued, "but--how shall I say it?
There seemed to be almost a fascination to you in the spectacle that
ordinarily sickens the human heart."
"What!" the girl exclaimed, astonished, "are you not curious to see how
a man can die?"
"Curious, yes; but the spectacle is disagreeable to me."
"Why? What is more ordinary and commonplace than death?"
Barabant, in despair of making her understand, remained silent.
"How curious! And when I am at an execution I look different from this?"
"Yes."
"I seem--?"
"Unhuman."
She tossed her head in displeasure and said sharply:
"I do not like that."
"I am frank."
Louison remained thoughtfully silent, perturbed and frowning. Then
lifting her head, she said gaily, in quite a different manner:
"Very well, then; I shall take care how you see me in future."
She turned in the direction of the Bastille, and fastening her glance
upon the ring of light, said:
"It seems to be going away. Perhaps we shall see the woman now."
"She comes faster this time," Barabant said as the sound of footsteps
warned them of her approach.
The next moment a bundle of draperies passed them as a ship scudding
before a storm. Louison, watching the woman, closed her hand over
Barabant's wrist, allowing an exclamation to escape her. Then,
springing forward, she cried:
"Eh, mother! Wait a moment!"
The fleeting figure turned as though stung, then dashed wildly into
the darkness. Louison, with a bound, sprang after her, but suddenly
clapping her hand to her forehead, turned and broke past Barabant, who
heard only, as she shot on toward the Bastille, the words:
"The man with the lantern!"
XII
THE MASSACRE OF THE PRISONS
The next morning Nicole and Geneviève, having breakfasted at noon near
the Temple, where the throng collected daily to insult the ears of the
royal family, returned slowly toward the Tuileries through the hushed
and apprehensive city.
Toward three o'clock the long-awaited tocsin sounded from the other
side of the river, then the chance burst of a musket and the assembling
roll of drums. But this time, in contrast to the night of the 9th of
August, there came no spontaneous outpouring into the streets. As the
tocsin continued to disturb the air with its violent voice, timid faces
appeared at the windows, searching with anxious glances the streets,
the opposite walls, in doubt of their neighbors; even the air, as
though to discover the reason of the uproar.
The streets were emptied; small groups wavered in the entrances,
waiting for the first rumors to guide them. As the two girls
hesitated, a woman appeared, running toward them, dragging a child at
either side. From window and doorway a clamor of questions arose, while
many, running into the street, surrounded her and sought to stop her
progress. But the woman, resisting all entreaties, cleft the crowd and
disappeared, repeating frantically:
"They are massacring the prisoners!"
The street grew noisy with exclamation and conjecture, while those
above, in the windows, screamed down for the rumors that flew from lip
to lip. A little later another messenger arrived,--a waif of the slums,
to whom the marks of poverty and vice had given the semblance of an
incongruous manhood. The boy came romping down the street, bare-legged,
disheveled, brandishing a knife. At times he flung up his hands and
screamed in childish treble:
"To the Abbaye, citoyens, to the Abbaye! The tyrants are being
exterminated. The justice of the people is beginning! To the Abbaye! To
the Abbaye!"
Behind the frenzied boy there fell a silence, and the crowd, in a
sudden, senseless panic, retreated indoors.
"The Abbaye!" Nicole cried in consternation. "And Dossonville! We must
hurry there."
A baker's wife, seeing them hastening on, cried:
"Are you going to the Abbaye, citoyennes? Is there any danger?"
"Not for us."
"Wait, I'll join you."
A cobbler made a fourth, then two apprentices from a cloth-merchant
attached themselves, then a fishwife and a tow-headed newsboy. As
they crossed the Seine the crowd increased, while horrid figures of
depravity and suffering, vermin of Paris, broke past them. Cutlasses
and pikes appeared, and from the panting throng shouts burst out:
"Death to the traitors!"
"Death to the betrayers of Longwy!"
"Death to all aristocrats!"
"Death to priests!"
At the Abbaye they found the sanguinary remnants of the prisoners who,
transferred from the Conciergerie, had been swept from the carts into
the maw of the mob at the very gates that opened to shelter them. On
the prison itself there had been as yet no attack. The mob, seeking
vengeance on the priests, had swept on to the convent of Les Carmes.
At the sight of the strewn corpses and the blood-bespattered pavements
the baker's wife halted, crying:
"I've seen enough; I'm going back."
The cobbler hesitated, listening across the houses to the faint cries
of the mob in the Rue Vaugirard. The apprentices sprang forward, while
the newsboy exclaimed impudently:
"Come on, comrades, we must see what's doing!"
Nicole, who had come solely to assure herself of Dossonville's safety,
likewise recoiling before the spectacle of butchery, was yet so
impelled by the subtle, morbid fascination which such scenes exercise
over the human mind, that without a thought she hastened on. The
fishwife and the cobbler joined them; even the woman who had already
started to retreat acceded to the common curiosity and returned,
protesting:
"It's too horrible! Turn back."
"After all," the cobbler answered, "that's what the aristocrats would
like to do to us!"
"Aye, citoyen, you've hit it right!"
"And the women?"
"They'll leave them alone."
"We'll see."
About the convent a loose throng was churning, bristling with pikes and
crudely fashioned spears.
"Keep together," the cobbler cried, "and bear toward the wall!"
By this manoeuver they penetrated to the front, where, their band
disintegrating, Geneviève and Nicole succeeded in reaching a position
at a grill in the wall.
In the garden, not thirty feet away, a black mass dotted with the white
of human faces was huddled together, shrinking from the gates and
apertures that swarmed with axes, scythes, swords, and barbarous faces
more pitiless than the steel.
At Nicole's side a mason extended his cutlass toward the priests,
bellowing:
"Eh, you fat fellow over there! Wait till they let us in! I'll carve
you!"
Another shouted:
"I choose to shave the tall one; I'll make a true monk of him!"
The priests encouraged one another; some knelt, others lifted their
arms, their voices, and their eyes serenely above. A few blanched
before the approach of martyrdom, while others in whom youth's natural
impulse to life was strong calculated the surroundings and weighed the
desperate chances of escape.
All at once there was an upheaval in the herd of the besieged, a
swaying toward the walls, and a sudden parting that opened a path
to the chapel beyond, where a swarm of the populace, who had broken
through, was spreading over the steps. From the crowd without a
wild shout went up; those at the locked gates, stretching their arms
through, strove to prod the victims with their pikes.
On the steps, face to face with their prey, the new assailants
hesitated, seeking some pretext before striking. But one, more
impatient than the rest, burst from the back and fired point-blank
into the herd. The impulse once given, the assassins fell upon their
victims, who on their knees welcomed the end.
Forty or fifty of the younger members, revolting at such surrender
to death, bounded away to scale the farther walls. A very few passed
over and escaped to outer courts before the bandits flung themselves
on the fleeing. Then everywhere could be seen bodies clutching at the
brim of the wall, tumbling and pitching backward in the horror of the
overtaking fate. Arms that grasped liberty suddenly contracted in the
convulsions of despair; faces that already looked on life appeared a
moment above the wall and fell back with the sharp summons to death.
"Shall we go?" cried Nicole, suffocated.
"Yes."
But they could not move. The scene enchained them.
The hunt consummated, the hunters flung themselves on the unresisting,
and as though to stifle the smallest spark of pity, redoubled their
fury and their cries.
In front of the two girls a Marseillais felled a priest with two
strokes across the scalp, and drove his pike into the stomach with such
ferocity that the point refused to move. The assassin, in rage jumping
on the lifeless body, stamped and tugged, cursing the resistance of
the corpse which sought to retain the weapon that had struck it down.
Everywhere the butchers, not content with the death-dealing blow, flung
themselves on the lifeless bodies, piercing them with infuriated stabs,
as though the last insult was this mutilation of the dead.
Finally, despairing of satisfying their vengeance on this inert mass,
the leaders forced those who remained into the church, some who still
breathed being borne on the arms of those who but deferred their
murder. Two by two they were led out and butchered.
From this moment the massacre, in its clock-like procession, abated
its fury. The executioners themselves, exhausted and listless, struck
mechanically.
The crowd, grumbling at the monotony, moved away. Nicole and Geneviève
found themselves in the street, packed in the press, beside their late
companions. The crowd, animated by the lust of curiosity, became that
most fearful of the manifestations of humanity--a mob.
Geneviève and Nicole, no longer individuals, but atoms, became cold,
pitiless, maddened with sensations, hungry for new; invaded by a fury
which they did not understand, an anger and a hatred of which they knew
not the cause.
Some one cried:
"On to St. Firmin. There are eighty priests there!" A hundred voices
took up the cry, and the mass, set in motion, rolled toward the prison.
The fishwife, with streaming hair, bellowed:
"Cut the throats of every one. No priest must escape!"
Farther on in the press of bodies, Nicole saw the two apprentices,
transformed with the frenzy.
The cobbler had armed himself with some weapon; even the tow-headed
newsboy near them screamed hysterically:
"À la mort! À la mort!"
"I can go no farther!" Nicole protested.
"Yes, yes," Geneviève cried, seizing her arms and impelling her, but
half resisting, into the rush of the multitude. "We must see it! We
must see everything!"
She was a child no longer, but a savage akin in fury to the beast
enraged by the red flash of blood.
At St. Firmin's the vanguard broke into the prison. The night was
filled with shrieks of terror and of furious exultation. Body after
body, dead or dying, was hurled from the window, to be pounced upon
below and torn to pieces. More than eighty lay quivering in mounds.
Then at last the mob, by that strange organization by which it moves
without commands, turned face and, sparkling with torches, inundated
the narrow street that led down to the Boulevard St. Germain, and
returned to the prison of the Abbaye. It was now deep into the night,
and for hours a semblance of a trial had been going on within the
court. The mob, thus balked by the routine of justice, softened and
dissipated into a throng of spectators, bewildered and recovering
slowly from their delirium.
Nicole, fearing for Dossonville, pressed forward for a nearer view.
About the gates were a score of executioners, so saturated with blood
that at first glance the butchers seemed more like the butchered. Eight
or ten waited in two rows the arrival of the new victim. As many more
leaned wearily against the wall with nodding heads. One stooped to
light fresh torches.
Suddenly the gates disclosed to Nicole the flaring courtyard and the
wild figure of a prisoner propelled to destruction by two guards. At
first he marched to his death with firm tread; but all at once, with
a horrid heave of his breast, he stretched out his hands before his
face to hide the hideous doom. Shoved forward, his arms raised in the
instinct of self-preservation, he suffered untold tortures: his arms,
hacked to spouting stumps, received a dozen gashes, while the revolting
body sought to strike back against the sting, until the last blow
silenced the shriek on shriek that called on merciful death.
Two men dragged aside the half-naked corpse and flung it on the mound
of bodies. At the shock of the new arrival there was a sudden settling
and shifting in this inert mass, a quivering adjustment that gave the
ghastly semblance of life, as though a hideous welcome of the dead
to the dead. Geneviève, with throbbing pulses and dilated nostrils,
shuddered and turned to Nicole. She was so rigid, so ghastly with the
horror, that Geneviève seized her arm.
"Ah! ah! ah!"
At her clutch Nicole screamed in mortal dread, then burst into
hysterical weeping. Geneviève put her arm around her and drew her
away, through the morbid crowd, seeing dimly the baker's wife pressing
feverishly forward to seize their place. Then Nicole, covering her
eyes, began to scream:
"Take me away, away, away!"
But at every tenth step she stopped and struggled to go back, her
glance seeking the caldron. The third time, to her horror, the gates
opened once more, and, heavily borne between two guards, she saw the
figure of Dossonville.
XIII
DOSSONVILLE IN PERIL
"The Citoyen Dossonville to the bar! The Citoyen Dos-son-ville!"
The call, resounding along the stone corridors, reached the prisoners
huddled in the main hall of the Abbaye.
"The Citoyen Dos-son-ville!"
A turnkey under a snarling torch penetrated the group, drawing one
after another to him with rough hand.
"The Citoyen Dossonville! I summon all on peril of their lives to
discover to me the Citoyen Dossonville!"
Out of the mass extended a hand with long, accusing forefinger, and a
voice exclaimed:
"Over there."
The hand was snatched back, while a fomenting in the crowd showed where
the informer was burying himself from recognition.
The turnkey stopped before a figure stretched in sleep, and
incredulously thrust his torch into the face. But the sleeper
continued to inhale long breaths methodically, until, convinced of the
genuineness of the sleep, the turnkey proceeded to wake him with a
vigorous thrust of his foot.
Dossonville started to a sitting position, opening his eyes on the
suspicious visage above him and the background of fellow-prisoners who,
afraid to show too much interest, held themselves at a distance and
followed from the corners of their eyes.
"What do you want with me?"
"Are you the Citoyen Dossonville?"
"I am."
"The Nation summons you to appear before the bar of the popular
justice!"
"At eleven o'clock at night? The justice of the people never sleeps,
then?"
"Be quick!"
Dossonville lifted himself to an upright position, restoring his pillow
to its rightful function of cloak.
"I will not bother about my other possessions now," he cried
sarcastically. "Citoyennes and citoyens, to the pleasure of seeing you
again, or not, as you prefer. Now for the justice of the people!"
Under the lightness of his manner, his mind worked with the
desperation of an animal at bay. Of what he was approaching he knew
nothing. Yet as he advanced along the reverberant corridors, his mind
assembled a dozen stratagems to meet either a whirlwind of assassins
or the travesty of a trial. His eye, meanwhile alert for every detail,
enveloped each portion of the journey at a glance, running the walls as
a wild animal tracks his cage.
Gradually his waiting ear distinguished a muffled hum, a buzz of
voices, increasing in volume until out of it escaped the piercing
shriek of a woman.
The next moment there burst upon his hearing a hundred cries,--shrieks
of terror, shouts of vengeance, cries of pity, commands and groans,
drunken and maddened notes,--sharp to the ear, rushing over his mind in
a storm of confusion. The gate opened and the volume smote him with the
fury of a blast.
He stood in the courtyard, blinking at strange forms and the crossing
and recrossing of torches, striving to collect his wits. Two guards
had seized him, presenting the points of their reddened swords to his
breast.
His eye went to the center of the courtyard, to a table flanked by
torches, littered with papers, bottles, and the glint of steel; behind
which, installed as judge, Dossonville recognized the huissier
Maillard. A score of Marseillais, stained with blood, reeling from
sleep or drunkenness, churned about this improvised tribunal,
interrupting with their revilings the testimony of the accused, or
swaggered back and forth through the gate that led to the mob. Some
clustered in corners to drink from the bottles that a wine-merchant
constantly renewed; others nonchalantly lighted pipes, stretched
their arms and yawned. In the lull between executions Dossonville
heard a snore. Amid this carnage one man, stretched on a bench, was
unconcernedly asleep.
"There's a man who's not disturbed by trifles," he muttered.
At the slight shift he made, one of his guards pricked him with his
sword, crying angrily:
"Move again, and I'll cut you to ribbons!"
"I am become a statue," Dossonville answered coolly. "Only, do not bear
too hard. I am ticklish."
Ahead of him, a priest without hope told his beads; while before the
tribunal was a man so bowed with years that he had to be supported on
either side.
All at once, seeking in the crowd, Dossonville perceived Javogues.
"Aïe! aïe!" he mumbled uneasily at the sight of that gloating face.
"What ferocity! He is bound to make sure of me. The animal!"
He turned stoically from the Marseillais to the judges, where, to his
amazement, he perceived a movement of clemency toward the accused.
Suddenly the voice of Maillard appealed to the crowd:
"Citoyens, whatever the condition or the crimes of this feeble
plaything of time, I declare to you that it is unworthy of the Republic
to pursue here its vengeance! When nature, for eighty years, has spared
one from peril of sickness, shock of accident, and the din of battles,
man cannot show himself more pitiless than nature. Citoyens, I demand
the handful of years for this venerable man."
An approving murmur saluted this oratorical appeal, broken by the
strident voice of Javogues:
"Traitors have no age. If he is an aristocrat, let him die!"
Maillard, encouraged by the cries of dissent, extended his arm over the
broken figure and said impressively:
"Whatever this man has been, exists no more. The Republic can take no
vengeance here, for it can deprive this man of nothing. Citoyens, let
him be acquitted."
"Well said."
"He speaks well."
"Free him!"
"Bravo. Free him!"
The acquitted man, aware of what had happened, was led away by the
guards. The priest was put in his place, Dossonville moving nearer.
But now the executioners without the gates, growing impatient, smote
the air with their cries:
"More victims!"
"Hurry up!"
"No ceremony with the aristocrat!"
"Hurry up! More! More!"
"Give us more! We want more!"
"Maillard, we are thirsty!"
The judge, addressing the quiet victim, proceeded methodically:
"Jean Marie Latour?"
"I am he."
"Called Brother Francis?"
"Yes."
"Priest?"
"Yes."
"You refused the oath of allegiance to the Nation?"
"I did."
At this a howl more of triumph than of anger burst from the listeners,
and the judge, recognizing the hopelessness of the case, said shortly:
"To La Force."
Three men seized him and bore him, unresisting, to the shambles, while
two more propelled Dossonville roughly forward.
Hardly was he in position when three piercing shrieks announced the
death of the priest. Dossonville, shuddering despite his will, heard a
voice cry boisterously:
"Eh, what a squeal the animal gave!"
The guards fell back, guarding his retreat, while Dossonville,
disdaining to notice, felt rather than saw the Marseillais take his
position at his side.
"Armand Roger Dossonville?"
"The same."
"Lieutenant in the National Guard?"
"Yes."
"You are accused of being in the Tuileries on the tenth day of August
and of firing upon the Nation."
"Who accuses me?"
"I accuse you."
"And I."
Dossonville turned, met the angry eyes of Javogues, and seeking the
second speaker, recognized one of those who had arrested him. He turned
to the tribunal.
"The witnesses are mistaken. I was not at the Tuileries."
His accusers burst into a roar of denunciation, but Maillard, quelling
them, said quietly:
"That should not be difficult to prove. With whom were you on the tenth
day of August?"
Dossonville nodded his head in assent. Then, seeing the trap into which
he was being led, he asked:
"First, does not that register relate that on my arrest I claimed an
alibi with the Citoyen Marat and later renounced it at this prison,
giving as a reason that I used it as a protection to insure my reaching
prison and a trial?"
Javogues broke in furiously: