should set to work. The first blood shed was that of prisoners taken
from the mayoralty to the Abbey prison. The carriages containing them
passed along the Quai des Orfevres, the Pont-Neuf and rue Dauphine,
until it reached the Bussy square. Here there was a crowd assembled
around a platform where enlistments were going on. The throng impeded
the progress of the carriages. Thereupon one of the escort opened the
door of one of them, and standing on the step, plunged his sabre into
the breast of an aged priest. The multitude shuddered and fled in
affright. "That makes you afraid," said the assassin; "you will see
plenty more like it."
The rest of the escort followed the example set them. The carriages go
on again, and so do the massacres. They kill along the route, and they
kill on arriving at the Abbey. Towards five o'clock, Billaud-Varennes
presents himself there, wearing his municipal scarf. "People," says
he--what he calls {364} people is a band of salaried
assassins--"people, thou immolatest thine enemies, thou art doing thy
duty." Then he walks into the midst of the dead bodies, dipping his
feet in blood, and fraternizes with the murderers. "There is nothing
more to do here," exclaims Maillard; "let us go to the Carmelites."
At the Carmelites, one hundred and eighty priests, crowded into the
church and convent, were awaiting their fate with pious resignation.
Two days before, Manuel had said to them ironically: "In forty-eight
hours you will all be free. Get ready to go into a foreign country and
enjoy the repose you cannot find here." And on the previous day a
gendarme had said to the Archbishop of Arles, blowing the smoke from
his pipe into his face as he did so: "It is to-morrow, then, that they
are going to kill Your Grandeur." A short time before the massacre
began, the victims were sent into the garden. At the bottom of it was
an orangery which has since become a chapel. Mgr. Dulau, Archbishop of
Arles, and the Bishops of Beauvais and de Saintes, both of whom were
named de la Rochefoucauld, kneeled down with the other priests and
recited the last prayers. The murderers approached. The Archbishop of
Arles, who was upwards of eighty, advanced to meet them. "I am he whom
you seek," he said; "my sacrifice is made; but spare these worthy
priests; they will pray for you on earth, and I in heaven." They
insulted him before they struck him. "I have never done harm to any
one," said he. An assassin {365} responded: "Very well; I'll do some
to you," and killed him. The other priests were chased around the
garden from one tree to another, and shot down. During this infernal
hunt the murderers were shouting with laughter and singing their
favorite song: _Dansez la Carmagnole_!
The massacre of the Carmelites is over. "Let us go back to the Abbey!"
cries Maillard; "we shall find more game there." This time there is a
pretence of justice made. The tribunal is the vestibule of the Abbey;
Maillard, the chief cut-throat, is president; the assassins are the
judges, and the public, the Marseillais, the sans-culottes, the female
furies, and men to whom murder was a delightful spectacle. The
prisoners are summoned one after another. They enter the vestibule,
which has a wicket as a door of exit. They are questioned simply as a
matter of form. Their answers are not even listened to. "Conduct this
gentleman to the Force!" says the president. The prisoner thinks he is
safe; he does not know that this phrase has been agreed upon as the
signal of death. On reaching the wicket, hatchet and sabre strokes cut
him down in the midst of his dream. The Swiss officers and soldiers
who had survived August 10 were murdered thus. Their torture lasted a
longer or shorter time, and was accomplished with more or less cruel
refinements, according to the caprice of the assassins, who were nearly
all drunk.
Night came, and torches were lighted. No {366} shadows; a grand
illumination. They must see clearly in the slaughter house. Lanterns
were placed near the lakes of blood and heaps of dead bodies, so as
plainly to distinguish the work from the workmen. There were some who
were bent on losing no details of the carnage. The spectators wanted
to take things easy. They were tired of standing too long. Benches
for men and others for dames were got ready for them. The death-rattle
of the agonizing, the vociferations of the assassins, the emulation
between the executioners who kill slowly and the victims who are in
haste to die, give joy to the spectators. There is no interruption to
the human butchery. There has been so much blood spilled that the feet
of the murderers slip on the pavement. A litter is made of straw and
the clothes of the victims, and thereafter none are killed except upon
this mattress. In this way the work is more commodiously accomplished.
The assassins have plenty of assurance. Morning dawns on the
continuation of the murders, and the wives of the murderers bring them
something to eat.
On September 2, the only persons handed over to the cut-throats, were
at the Abbey, the Carmelites, and Saint-Firmin. On September 3, the
massacre became more general. The assassins had said: "If there is no
more work, we shall have to find some." Their desire realizes itself.
Work will not be lacking. There is still some at the Force, where the
Princess de Lamballe, the preferred victim, is {367} murdered. The
assassins, who at the Abbey had been paid at the rate of eight francs a
day, get only fifty sous at the Force. They work with undiminished
zeal, even at this reduction. If necessary, they would work for
nothing. To drink wine and shed blood is the essential thing. The
negro Delorme, servant to Fournier "the American," distinguishes
himself among them all. His black skin, reddened with blood, his white
teeth and ferocious eyes, his bestial laugh, his ravenous fury, make
him a choice assassin. There is work too at the Conciergerie, at the
great and little Chatelet, the Salpetriere, and the Bicetre. A great
number of those detained are people condemned or accused of private
crimes which had absolutely nothing in common with politics. No
matter; blood is wanted; they kill there as elsewhere. At the Grand
Chatelet, work is so plenty, and the assassins so few, that they
release several individuals imprisoned for theft, and impress them into
their service. One of these unfortunate accidental executioners begins
in a hesitating way, strikes a few undecided blows, and then throws
down the hatchet placed in his hands. "No, no," he cries, "I cannot.
No, no! Rather a victim than a murderer! I would rather receive death
from scoundrels like you, then give it to innocent, disarmed people.
Strike me!" And at once the veteran murderers kill the inexperienced
cut-throat. There was a woman, known on account of her charms as the
Beautiful Flower Girl, who was accused of having wounded {368} her
lover, a French guard, in a fit of jealousy. Theroigne de Mericourt,
an amazon of the gutters, was her rival. She pointed her out to the
assassins. They fastened her naked to a post, her legs apart and her
feet nailed to the ground. They burned her alive. They cut off her
breasts with sabre strokes. They impaled her on a hot iron. Her
shrieks carried dismay as far as the outer banks of the Seine.
Theroigne was at the height of felicity.
At the Salpetriere there was still another spectacle. This prison for
fallen women is a place of correction for the old, of amendment for the
young, and an asylum for those who are still children. More than forty
children of the lower classes were slain during these horrible days.
The delirium of murder reached its height. Gorged with wine mingled
with gunpowder, intoxicated with the fumes and reek of carnage, the
assassins experienced a devouring, inextinguishable thirst for blood
which nothing could quench. More blood, and yet more blood! And where
can it now be found? The prisons are empty. There are no more nobles,
no more priests, to put to death. Very well! for lack of anything
better, they will go to an asylum for the poor, the sick, and the
insane; to the Bicetre. Vagabonds, paupers, fools, thieves, steward,
chaplains, janitor, all is fish that comes to their net. The butchery
lasts five days and nights without stopping. Massacre takes every
form; some are drowned in the cellars, others shot in the courts.
Water, fire, and sword, every sort of torture.
{369}
The cut-throats can at last take some repose. They have worked all the
week. There are still some, however, who have not yet had enough, and
who are going to continue the massacres of Paris in the provinces. The
Communal Council of Surveillance has taken care to send to every
commune in France a circular bearing the seal of the Minister of
Justice, inviting them to follow the example of the capital.
September 9, the prisoners who had been detained at Orleans to be tried
there by the Superior Court, entered Versailles on carts. At the
moment when they approached the grating of the Orangery, assassins sent
from Paris under the lead of Fournier "the American" sprang upon them
and immolated every one. Thus perished the former Minister of Foreign
Affairs, de Lessart, and the Duke de Brissac, former commander of the
Constitutional Guard. Fournier "the American"[2] returned on horseback
to Paris and began to caracole on the Place Vendome; Danton loudly
felicitated him on the success of the expedition, from the balcony of
the Ministry of Justice.
During all this time, what efforts had the Assembly made to put a stop
to the murders? None, absolutely none. Never has any deliberative
body shown a like cowardice. Neither Vergniaud's voice nor that of any
other Girondin was heard in protest. Indignation, pity, found not a
single word to say. Speeches, {370} discussions, votes on different
questions, went on as usual. Concerning the massacres, not a syllable.
During that infamous week, neither the ministers, the virtuous Roland
not more than the others, neither Petion, the mayor of Paris, nor the
commander of the National Guard sent a picket guard of fifty men to any
quarter to prevent the murders. A population of eight hundred thousand
souls and a National Guard of fifty thousand men bent their necks under
the yoke of a handful of bandits, of two hundred and thirty-five
assassins (the exact number is known). People trembled. At the
Assembly the old moderate party had disappeared. There were not more
than two hundred odd deputies present at the shameful and powerless
sessions. Terrorized Paris was in a state of stupor and prostration.
The murderers ended by execrating themselves. Tormented by remorse,
they could see nothing before them but vivid faces, reeking entrails,
bleeding limbs. "Among the cut-throats," M. Louis Blanc has said,
"some gave signs of insanity that led to the supposition that some
mysterious and terrible drug had been mingled with the wine they
drank." Some of them became furious madmen. Others sought refuge in
suicide, killing themselves the moment they had no one else to kill.
Others enlisted. They were chased out of the army. Among these was
the man who had carried the head of the Princess de Lamballe on a pike.
One day when he was boasting of his murders, the soldiers became
indignant and {371} put him to death. Others still were tried as
Septembrists and sent to the scaffold. The guilty received their
punishment, even on this earth. Well! there are people nowadays who
would like to rehabilitate them! In vain has Lamartine, the founder of
the Second Republic, exclaimed in a burst of noble wrath: "Has human
speech an execration, an anathema, which is equal to the horror these
crimes of cannibals inspire in me, as in all civilized men?" In vain
have the most celebrated historians of democracy, Edgar Quinet and
Michelet, expressed in eloquent terms their indignation against these
crimes. In vain has M. Louis Blanc said: "Every murder is a suicide.
In the victim the body alone is killed; but what is killed in the
murderer is the soul." There are men who would not alone excuse, but
glorify the assassinations and the assassins!
[1] M. Mortimer-Ternaux, _Histoire de la Terreur_.
[2] Claude Fournier-Lheritier, was born in Auvergne, 1745, and served
as a volunteer in Santo Domingo, 1772-85, with Toussaint l'Ouverture,
whence his sobriquet "the American."
{372}
XXXVI.
MADAME ROLAND DURING THE MASSACRES.
Madame Roland's hatred was appeased. The ambitious _bourgeoise_
throned it for the second time at the Ministry of the Interior, and the
Queen groaned in captivity in the Temple tower. The Egeria of the
Girondins had not felt her heart swell with a single movement of pity
for Marie Antoinette. The fatal 10th of August had seemed to her a
personal triumph in which her pride delighted. The parvenue enjoyed
the humiliations of the daughter of the German Caesars. Her jealous
instincts feasted on the afflictions of the Queen of France and Navarre.
Lamartine, indignant at this cruelty on Madame Roland's part, has
repented of the eulogies he gave her in his _Histoire des Girondins_.
In his _Cours de Litterature_ (Volume XIII. Conversation XXIII.), he
says: "I glided over that medley of intrigue and pomposity which
composed the genius, both feminine and Roman, of this woman. In so
doing, I conceded more to popularity than to truth. I wanted to give a
Cornelia to the Republic. As a matter of fact, I do not know what
Cornelia was, that mother of the {373} Gracchi who brought up
conspirators against the Roman Senate, and trained them to sedition,
that virtue of ambitious commoners. As to Madame Roland, who inflated
a vulgar husband by the breath of her feminine anger against a court
she found odious because it did not open to her upstart vanity, there
was nothing really fine in her except her death. Her role had been a
mere parade of true greatness of soul." What Lamartine finds fault
with most of all is her hostility to the martyr Queen. He adds: "She
inspired the Girondins, her intimate friends, with an implacable hatred
against the Queen, already so humiliated and so menaced; she had
neither respect nor pity for this victim; she points her out to the
rebellious multitude. She is no longer a wife, a mother, or a
Frenchwoman. She poses as Nemesis at the door of the Temple, when the
Queen is groaning there over her husband, her children, and herself,
between the throne and the scaffold. This ostentatious stoicism of
implacability is what, in my view, kills the woman in this female
demagogue."
Alas! if Madame Roland was guilty, she was to be punished cruelly. The
colleague of the _virtuous_ Roland was the organizer of the September
massacres. The republican sheepfold dreamed of by the admirer of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was invaded by ferocious beasts. Human nature
had never appeared under a more execrable aspect than since its
so-called regeneration. Madame Roland was filled with a naive
astonishment. After having sown the wind she was {374} utterly
surprised to reap the whirlwind. What! she said to herself, my husband
is minister, or, to speak with great exactness, I am the minister
myself, and yet there are people in France who are dissatisfied!
Ungrateful nation, why dost thou not appreciate thy happiness? Madame
Roland resembled certain politicians, who, having attained to power,
would willingly disembarrass themselves of those by whose aid they
reached it. For the second time she had just arrived at the goal of
her ambition. Who dared, then, to pollute her joy? Why did that
marplot, Danton, come with his untimely massacres to destroy such
brilliant projects and banish such delightful dreams? The man who, as
if in derision and antithesis, allowed himself to be called the
Minister of Justice, produced the effect of a monster on Madame Roland.
The republic as conceived by him had not the head of a goddess, but of
a Gorgon. Its eyes glittered with a sinister lustre. The sword it
held was that of an assassin or a headsman.
Madame Roland was greatly astonished when, on Sunday, September 2,
1792, toward five in the evening, when the massacres had already begun,
she saw two hundred men of forbidding appearance arrive at the Ministry
of the Interior and ask for her husband, who was absent. Lucky for him
he was; for albeit a minister, they had come to arrest him in virtue of
a mandate of the Communal Council of Surveillance. Not finding Roland,
the two hundred men retired. One of them, with his shirt-sleeves
rolled up to his {375} elbows, and a sabre in his hand, declaimed
furiously against the treachery of ministers. A few minutes later,
Danton said to Petion: "Do you know what they have taken into their
heads? If they haven't issued a decree to arrest Roland!"--"Who did
that?" demanded the mayor.--"Eh! those devils of committeemen. I have
taken the mandate; hold! here it is!"
What was Madame Roland doing the next day, when the worst of the
massacres were going on? She gave a dinner, and allowed the Prussian,
Anacharsis Clootz, who came, moreover, uninvited, to make a regular
defence of these horrible murders. "The events of the day," she says
in her Memoirs, "formed the subject of conversation. Clootz pretended
to prove that it was an indispensable and salutary measure; he uttered
a good many commonplaces about the people's rights, the justice of
their vengeance, and of its utility to the welfare of the species; he
talked a long while and very loudly, ate still more, and fatigued more
than one listener."
And yet, revolutionary passions had not extinguished every notion of
humanity and justice in Madame Roland's soul. On that very day she
induced her husband to write a letter to the National Assembly
concerning the massacres. But how weak and undecided is this letter,
and how public opinion must have been lowered and debased when it could
regard Roland as a courageous minister! In place of scathing the
murderers with the energy of an {376} honest man, he pleads extenuating
circumstances in their favor. "It is in the nature of things and
according to the human heart," he said in his pale missive, "that
victory should lead to some excesses. The sea, agitated by a violent
storm, continues to roar long after the tempest; but everything has its
limits and must finally see them determined. Yesterday was a day over
whose events we ought, perhaps, to draw a veil. I know that the
terrible vengeance of the people carries with it a sort of justice; but
how easy it is for scoundrels and traitors to abuse this effervescence,
and how necessary it is to arrest it!" This language produced not the
least effect. The massacres went on, and Roland remained minister;
although in his letter of September 3 he had written: "I ask the
privilege of resigning if the silence of the laws does not permit me to
act." The _virtuous_ Roland sat in the Council beside his colleague,
the organizer of this human butchery. September 13, he addressed a
letter to the Parisians in which he burnt incense to himself, bragged
about his character, his actions, and his firmness, and carried his
infatuation so far as to write: "I have twice accepted a burden which I
felt myself able to bear." Ah! how difficult it is to renounce even a
shadow of power, and of what compromises with their consciences are not
ministers capable in order to retain for a few days longer the
portfolios that are slipping from their hands! In the depths of his
soul Roland, like his wife, had the profoundest horror of the murders
and {377} the murderers. And yet notice how he extenuates them in his
letter to the Parisians: "I admired August 10; I trembled over the
results of September 2; I carefully considered what the betrayed
patience of the people and their justice had produced, and I did not
blame a first impulse too inconsiderately; I believe that its further
progress should have been prevented, and that those who were seeking to
perpetuate it were deceived by their imagination or by cruel and
evil-minded men. If the erring brethren recognize that they have been
deceived, let them come; my arms are open to them." That was a very
prompt amnesty. Already the assassins are but erring brethren, and the
minister welcomes them to his arms!
The Gironde kept silence, or, if it spoke, it was to attribute, like
Vergniaud, the massacres "to the _emigres_ and the satellites of
Coblentz." Later on, they were horrified by the crimes, but it was
when others were to profit by them. Each taken by himself, the
Girondins did not hesitate to condemn the murders; but taken as a
whole, they considered merely the interests of their party. Were not
three of them still in the Ministerial Council? What had they to
complain of, then? The September massacres are the most striking
expression of what abominations the ambitious may commit or allow to be
committed in order to maintain themselves a few weeks longer in power.
But there is a voice in the depths of conscience {378} which neither
interest nor ambition can succeed in stifling. Madame Roland could not
blind herself. The odious reality appeared to her. At last she saw
the yawning gulf beneath her feet, and she uttered a cry of terror. A
secret voice warned her that her fate would be like that of the
September victims. After the 9th of that fatal month her imagination
was vividly impressed. Bloody phantoms rose before her. She wrote on
that day to Bancal des Issarts: "If you knew the frightful details of
these expeditions.... You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution; well,
I am ashamed of it; it has become hideous. In a week ... how do I know
what may happen? It is degrading to remain in office, and we are not
permitted to leave Paris. We are detained so that we may be destroyed
at the propitious moment."
From that time a rising anger and indignation took possession of the
mind and heart of the Egeria of the Girondins, and constantly increased
until the hour when she ascended the steps of the scaffold. She writes
in her Memoirs, apropos of the September massacres: "All Paris
witnessed these horrible scenes executed by a small number of wretches
(there were but fifteen at the Abbey, at the door of which only two
National Guards were stationed, in spite of the applications made to
the Commune and the commandant). All Paris permitted it to go on. All
Paris was accursed in my eyes, and I no longer hoped that liberty might
be established among cowards, insensible to the worst outrages that
could be perpetrated {379} against nature and humanity, cold spectators
of attempts which the courage of fifty armed men could have prevented
with ease.... It is not the first night that astonishes me; but four
days!--and inquisitive people going to see this spectacle! No, I know
nothing in the annals of the most barbarous peoples which can compare
with these atrocities."
What a striking lesson for those who play with anarchical passions and
end by falling themselves into the snares they have laid for others!
Nothing is more deserving of study than this retaliatory punishment
which is found, one may say, on every page of revolutionary histories.
The hour was coming when the Girondins and their heroine would repent
of the means they had employed to overset the throne. This was when
the same means were employed against them, when they recognized their
own weapons in the wounds they received. Then, when they had no more
interest in keeping silence, they sought to escape a complicity that
gained them nothing. Instead of the luminous heights which in their
golden dreams they had aspired to gain, they fell, crushed and
overwhelmed, into a dismal gulf, full of tears and blood. How bitter
then were their recriminations against men and things! It was only to
virtue that the dying Brutus said: "Thou art but a name." The
Girondins said it also to glory, to country, and to liberty. Those
among them who did not succeed in fleeing, disavowed, denounced, and
insulted each other before the revolutionary tribunal. At the {380}
Conciergerie they intoned the Marseillaise, but parodying the demagogic
chant in this wise:--
Contre nous de la tyrannie[1]
Le _couteau_ sanglant est leve.