THE CONCIERGERIE.
If walls had tongues, those of the Conciergerie might rehearse a
wretched story. This is, I believe, the oldest prison in Europe; it
would speak with the twofold authority of age and black experience. Give
these walls a voice, and they might say:
"Look at the buildings we enclose. There is a little of every style in
our architecture, reflecting the many ages we have witnessed. Paris and
France, in all the reigns of all the Kings, have been locked in here,
starved here, tortured here, and sent from here to die by hanging, by
beheading, by dismembering by horses, by fire, and by the guillotine. We
have found chains and a bitter portion for the victims of all the
tyrannies of France,—those of the Feudal Ages, those of the Absolute
Monarchy, those of the Revolution, and those of the Restoration. There
is no discord, trouble, passion, or revolution in France which is not
recorded in our annals. Politics, religion, feuds of parties and of
houses, private rancours and the enmities of queens, the vengeance of
kings and the jealousies of their ministers, have filled in turn the
vaults of this little city of the dead-in-life. We have seen the killing
of the innocent; the torment of a Queen; the tears of a Dubarry and the
stoicism of a hideous Cartouche; the collapse of a Marquise de
Brinvilliers under torture and the silent heroism of a Charlotte Corday
on her way to the guillotine; the bold immodesty of a La Voisin on the
rack and the solemn abandon of the 'last supper' of the Girondins. We
have seen the worst that France could shew of wickedness and the best
that it could shew of patriotism; we have seen the beginning and the end
of everything that makes the history of a prison."
Most French writers who have touched upon the Conciergerie seem to have
felt the oppression of the place; their recollections or impressions are
recorded in a spirit of melancholy or indignation.
"Ah, that Conciergerie!" exclaims Philarète Chasles; "there is a
sense of suffocation in its buildings; one thinks of the prisoner,
innocent or guilty, crushed beneath the weight of society. Here are
the oldest dungeons of France; Paris has scarcely begun to be when
those dungeons are opened."
The strain of Dulaure, the historian of Paris, is not less depressing:
"The Conciergerie, the most ancient and the most formidable of all
our prisons, which forms a part of the buildings of the Palais de
Justice, one time palace of the kings, has preserved to this day the
hideous character of the feudal ages. Its towers, its courtyard, and
the dim passage by which the prisoners are admitted, have tears in
their very aspect. Pity on the wight who, condemned to sojourn
there, has not the wherewithal to pay for the hire of a bed! For him
a lodging on the straw in some dark and mouldy chamber, cheek by
jowl with wretches penniless like himself."[1]
Footnote 1:
_Histoire de Paris._
[Illustration: MADAME DUBARRY.]
In the days when Paris had not so much as a gate to shut in the face of
the invader, the citizen raftsmen of the Seine thought it well to have a
prison, and "dug a hole in the middle of their isle." This, it seems,
was the sorry beginning of the Conciergerie; but the details of that
vanished epoch are scant. Palace and prison are thought to have been
constructed at about the same date: the palace, which was principally a
fortress, was the residence of the kings; the Conciergerie was their
dungeon. Rebuilt by Saint Louis, the Conciergerie became in part—as its
name implies—the dwelling of the Concierge of the palace. According to
Larousse, the Concierge "was in some sort the governor of the royal
house, and had the keeping of the King's prisoners, with the right of
_low_ and _middle_ justice" (_basse et moyenne justice_). In 1348, the
Concierge took the official title of _bailli_; the functions and
privileges of the office were enlarged, and it was held by many persons
of distinction, amongst whom was Jacques Coictier, the famous doctor of
Louis XI. As the practice was, in an age when every gaoler "exploited"
his prisoners, the concierge-bailli taxed the victuals he supplied them
with, and charged what he pleased for the hire of beds and other
cell-equipments; while it happened more than once, says Larousse, "that
prisoners who were entitled to be released on a judge's order, were
detained until they had paid all prison fees." On such a system were the
old French gaols administered. The office of concierge-bailli, with its
voluminous powers, and its manifold abuses, was in existence until the
era of the Revolution.
Justice under the old régime counted sex as nothing. The physical
weakness and finer nervous organisation of woman were allowed no claim
upon its mercy. Primary or capital punishment, as to burning and
beheading, was the same for women as for men, and the shocking apparatus
of the torture chamber served for both sexes. The elaborate rules for
the application of the Question published in Louis XIV.'s reign (and
abolished only in the reign of Louis XVI.) specified the costume which
women _and girls_ should wear in the hands of the torturer.[2]
Footnote 2:
"Si c'est une femme ou fille, lui sera laissé une jupe avec sa chemise
et sera sa jupe liée aux genoux."
The black walls of the torture chamber in the Conciergerie, with their
ring-bolts and benches of stone, gave back the groans of many thousands
of mutilated sufferers. There were the "Question ordinary" and the
"Question extraordinary"; and if the first failed to extract a
confession, the second seems almost always to have been applied. The
extravagant cruelty of the age frequently added sentence of torture to
the death sentence; and this was probably done in every case in which
the condemned was thought to be withholding the name of an accomplice.
Far on into the history of France these sentences were dealt out to, and
executed upon, women as well as men; and with as artistic a disregard of
human pain or shame in the one sex as in the other.
We are in the presence of a high civilisation, or at least a highly
boasted one, in the days of Louis XIV.; but public sentiment is not
offended by the knowledge that a woman is being tortured by the
_questionnaire_ and his assistants in the Conciergerie; nor are many
persons shocked by seeing a woman on the scaffold semi-nude in the
coarse hands of the headsman, or struggling amid blazing faggots in a
Paris square. Nowadays, whether in France or in England, the _mauvais
quart d'heure_ (which, at the guillotine or on the gallows, is usually a
half-minute at the utmost) pays the score of the worst of criminals; but
in the advanced and cultured France of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries a Marquise de Brinvilliers must pass through the torture
chamber on her way to the block, and a Ravaillac and a Damiens (after a
like ordeal) are put to death in a manner which sends a thrill of horror
through Europe, and which is not afterwards outdone in any camp of
American Red Indians.
The extraordinary criminal drama of the Marquise de Brinvilliers has
been vulgarised not a little by legend, by romance, and by the stage;
but is there cause for wonder that a series of crimes which made Paris
quake from its royal boudoirs to the extremities of its darkest alleys
should have inspired writers to the fourth and fifth generations?
In the hands of De Brinvilliers and her lover and accomplice, the Gascon
officer Sainte-Croix, poison became a polite art; and the accident of
marriage associated the Marchioness with an industrial art which was of
great renown in Paris,—I mean, the Gobelin Manufacture, or Royal
Manufacture of Crown Tapestries. From the fourteenth century, in the
Faubourg Saint-Marcel and on the Bièvre River—the water of which was
considered specially good for dyeing purposes,—there were established
certain drapers and wool-dyers; and amongst them, in 1450, was a wealthy
dyer named Jean Gobelin, who had acquired large possessions on the banks
of the river. His business, after his death, was continued by his son
Philibert, who made it more than ever profitable, and who on his
death-bed bequeathed handsome portions to his sons. The family divided
between them, in 1510, ten mansions, gardens, orchards, and lands. Not
less fruitful were the labours of their successors, and when the name of
Gobelin had grown into celebrity, the popular voice bestowed it, says
Dulaure, upon the district in which their establishment was situated.
Immensely enriched, the Gobelins ceased to occupy themselves with
business, and took over various employments in the magistracy, army, and
finance. Some of them succeeded in obtaining the rank and title of
Marquis. From the middle of the sixteenth to the middle of the
seventeenth century, the Gobelins held high offices, or married into
office; and were notable amongst the merchant princes whose illustrious
coffers and power to assert themselves won places for them amid the
hereditary aristocracy of France. Into this family entered by marriage,
in 1651, Marie Marguerite d'Aubrai, daughter of the _Lieutenant Civil_,
or Civil Magistrate of Paris. Her husband, Antoine Gobelin, was the
Marquis de Brinvilliers; a title which she was to cover with an infamy
as great and enduring as the fame of the Gobelin Tapestries.
The Marquise's gallantries (a term which in the seventeenth century
embraced a greater variety of moral eccentricities than the Decalogue
has provided for) were quite eclipsed by her celebrity as a poisoner.
With her performances in this art—in which she seems to have been
trained by Sainte-Croix—began that incredible series of murders, and
attempted murders, known as _L'Affaire des Poisons_, which both
characterised and lent a _special_ character to the morals of the age of
the Grand Monarque.
It was the accidental death of her lover, in 1675, which exposed and
brought the vengeance of the law on La Brinvilliers. Sainte-Croix was
conducting some experiment with poisons in his laboratory, when the
glass mask with which he had covered his face suddenly broke, and he
fell dead on the spot. Letters of Mme. de Brinvilliers were amongst the
suspicious objects found in the laboratory by the police, and she fled
to London. One of Sainte-Croix' servants was put to the Question, and
his confession did not improve the situation of the Marquise. Leaving
London, she hid by turns in Brussels and Liège; and in a convent in the
latter town she was discovered by the detective Desgrais, who got her
out by a ruse, and brought her back to Paris. Her appearance in the
torture chamber of the Conciergerie was not long delayed. All her
fascinations failed her with those bloodless cross-examiners, and as she
persisted in denying one charge after another, she saw the executioner
and his attendants make ready the apparatus for the torture by water.
She summoned a little shew of raillery: "Surely, gentlemen, you don't
think that with a figure like mine I can swallow those three buckets of
water! Do you mean to drown me? I simply cannot drink it." "Madame,"
replied the examiner-in-chief, "we shall see"; and the Marchioness was
bound upon the trestle.
For a time her courage sustained her, but, as the torture grew sharper,
avowals came slowly, which must have amazed the hardened ears that
received them.
"Who was your first victim?"
"M. d'Aubrai—my father."
"You were very devout at this time, attending church and visiting
hospitals?"
"I was testing the powers of our science on the patients. I gave
poisoned biscuits to the sick."
"You had two brothers?"
"Yes ... we were two too many in my family. Lachaussée, Sainte-Croix'
valet, had instructions to poison my brothers; they died in the country,
with some of their friends, after eating a pigeon-pie which Lachaussée
used to make to perfection."
"You poisoned one of your children?"
"Sainte-Croix hated it!"
"You wanted to poison your husband?"
"Sainte-Croix for some reason prevented it. After I had administered the
poison, he would give my husband an antidote."
Before she was released from the trestle, Madame's confession was
complete. Sainte-Croix, imprisoned in the Bastille, on a
_lettre-de-cachet_ obtained by M. de Brinvilliers, had there made the
acquaintance of an Italian chemist, named Exili, who had taught him the
whole art and mystery of poison. Exili's cell in the Bastille was the
first laboratory of Sainte-Croix, who proved afterwards so apt a pupil
that, as his mistress and accomplice avowed, he could conceal a deadly
poison in a flower, an orange, a letter, a glove, "or in nothing at
all."
After sentence of death had been passed on this most miserable woman,
she was denied the consolations of the Church, but a priest found
courage to give her absolution as she was carried to the scaffold. The
Marchioness was followed to her death by the husband whom she had tried
in vain to send to _his_ death, and who, it is said, wept beside her the
whole way from the Conciergerie to the Place de Grève. Conspicuous in
the enormous crowd assembled in the square were women of fashion and
rank, whom the noble murderess rallied on the spectacle she had provided
for them. One of the ladies was that distinguished gossip, Madame de
Sévigné, who wrote the whole scene down for her daughter on the
following day. De Brinvilliers was beheaded, and her body burnt to
ashes.
This signal example—the torture, beheading, and burning of a peeress of
France—was signally void of effect.
The secrets of Sainte-Croix and La Brinvilliers had not been buried with
the one, nor scattered with the ashes of the other. Four years later,
Paris talked of nothing but poison and the revival of the "black art"
which was associated with it; and, in 1680, the King established at the
Arsenal a court specially charged to try cases of poisoning and magic.
The notoriety of the widow Montvoisin, more commonly known as La Voisin,
who dealt extensively in both arts, was inferior only to that of the
Brinvilliers. Duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, and other high dames
of the Court were concerned in this scandal, and Louis himself was
active in seeking to bring the culprits of title to justice,—or to get
them out of the way. He sent a private message to the Comtesse de
Soissons, advising her that if she were innocent she should go to the
Bastille for a time, in which case he would stand by her, and that if
she were guilty, it would be well for her to quit Paris without delay.
The Comtesse, who was "famous at the Court of Louis XIV. for her
dissolute habits," fled and was exiled to Brussels; the Marquise
d'Alluye or d'Allaye was banished to Amboise, Mme. de Bouillon to
Nevers, and M. de Luxembourg was imprisoned for two years in the
Bastille. A far more terrible expiation was prepared for La Voisin.
Outwardly, this was a woman of a grosser type than the Marchioness
Brinvilliers. The Marchioness, is described as "_gracieuse, élégante,
spirituelle et polie_." La Voisin was a repellent fat creature, as
coarse in speech as in appearance. Yet she lived as a woman of society
(_en femme de qualitè_); and composed and sold to the beauties and
gallants of the Court, poisons, charms, philters, and secrets to procure
lovers or to outwit rivals; she called up spirits for a fee, and would
shew the Devil if one paid the tariff for a glimpse of that
celebrity.[3]
Footnote 3:
Dulaure.
Her attitude in the Salle de la Question of the Conciergerie became her
well. She cursed, flouted the examiners, and "swore that she would keep
on swearing" if they racked her to pieces. "Here's your health!" she
cried, when the first vessel of water was forced down her throat; and,
as they fastened her on the rack,—"That's right! One should always be
growing. I have complained all my life of being too short." It is said
that, having been made to drink fourteen pots of water during the water
torture, she drank fourteen bottles of wine with the turnkeys in her
cell at night. Her sentence was death at the stake, and on her way to
the place of execution she jeered at the priest who accompanied her,
refused to make the _amende honorable_ at Notre-Dame, and fought like a
tigress with the executioners on descending from the cart. Tied and
fettered on the pile, she threw off five or six times the straw which
was heaped on her. Sévigné, who looked on, detailed the scene with
animation, and without a touch of feeling, in a letter to her daughter.
Confounding the real crimes with chimerical ones, the new court
continued to prosecute poisoners and "sorcerers" together; and even at
that credulous and superstitious date, when judges listened gravely to
the most baseless and fantastic accusations, there were persons
interrogated on charges of sorcery who had the spirit to laugh both
judges and accusers in the face. Mme. de Bouillon said aloud, on the
conclusion of her examination, that she had never in her life heard so
much nonsense so solemnly spoken (_n'avait jamais tant ouïdire de
sottises d'un ton si grave_); whereat, it is chronicled, his Majesty
"was very angry." It was not until the bench itself began to treat as
mere charlatans the wizards of both sexes who appeared before it, that
trials for sorcery and "black magic" fell away and gradually ceased.
It was the Conciergerie which presided over the examination, torture,
and atrocious punishment of Ravaillac, the assassin of Henri IV., and
Damiens, who attempted the life of Louis XV. Ravaillac, the first to
occupy it, left his name to a tower of the prison.
"You shiver even now in the Tower of Ravaillac," say MM. Alhoy and
Lurine in _Les Prisons de Paris_,—"that cold and dreadful place.
Thought conjures up a multitude of fearful images, and is aghast at
all the tragedies and all the dramas which have culminated in the
old Conciergerie, between the judge, the victim, and the
executioner. What tears and lamentations, what cries and
maledictions, what blasphemies and vain threats has it not heard,
that pitiless _doyenne_ of the prisons of Paris!"
Ravaillac, most fearless of fanatics and devotees, said, when
interrogated before Parliament as to his estate and calling, "I teach
children to read, write, and pray to God." At his third examination, he
wrote beneath the signature which he had affixed to his testimony the
following distich:
"Que toujours, dans mon cœur,
Jésus soit le vainqueur!"
and a member of Parliament exclaimed on reading it, "Where the devil
will religion lodge next!"
He was condemned by Parliament on the 2d of May, 1610, to a death so
appalling that one wonders how the mere words of the sentence can have
been pronounced. Our own ancient penalty for high treason was a mild
infliction in comparison with this. Before being led to execution,
Ravaillac did penance in the streets of Paris, wearing a shirt only and
carrying a lighted torch or candle, two pounds in weight. Taken next to
the Place de Grève, he was stripped for execution, and the dagger with
which he had twice struck the King was placed in his right hand. He was
then put to death in the following manner. His flesh was torn in eight
places with red-hot pincers, and molten lead, pitch, brimstone, wax, and
boiling oil were poured upon the wounds. This done, his body was torn
asunder by four horses; the trunk and limbs were burned to ashes, and
the ashes were scattered to the winds.
Eight assassins had preceded Ravaillac in attempts on the life of Henri
IV., and six of them had paid this outrageous forfeit. The torments of
the Conciergerie and the Place de Grève were bequeathed by these to the
regicide of 1610, and Ravaillac left them a legacy to Robert François
Damiens.
The _Tower of Ravaillac_ was equally the _Tower of Damiens_. François
Damiens, a bilious and pious creature of the Jesuits, not unfamiliar
with crime, pricked Louis, as his Majesty was starting for a drive, with
a weapon scarcely more formidable than a penknife. He was seized on the
spot, and there were found on him another and a larger knife,
thirty-seven louis d'or, some silver, and a book of devotions,—the
assassins of the Kings of France were always pious men. "Horribly
tortured," he confessed nothing at first, and it is by no means certain
what was the nature or importance of his subsequent avowals. But,
although there is little question that Damiens was merely the instrument
of a conspiracy more or less redoubtable, no effort was made to arraign,
arrest, or discover his supposed accomplices. The examination and trial,
conducted with none of the publicity which such a crime demanded, were
in the hands of persons chosen by the court, "persons suspected of
partiality," says Dulaure, "and bidden to condemn the assassin without
concerning themselves about those who had set him on—which gives colour
to the belief, that they were too high to be touched" (_que ces derniers
étaient puissans_).
One hundred and forty-seven years had passed since the Paris
Parliament's inhuman sentence on Ravaillac, but not a detail of it was
spared to Damiens on the 28th of March, 1757. Enough of such atrocities.
In the days of the Regency there was in one of the suburbs of Paris a
tea-garden which was at once popular and fashionable under the name of
La Courtille. In the groves of La Courtille, on summer evenings, amid
lights and music, russet-coated burghers might almost touch elbows with
"high-rouged dames of the palace"; and here one night Mesdames de
Parabère and de Prie brought a party of elegant revellers. As one of the
guests strolled apart, humming an air, he was approached softly from
behind, and a hand was laid upon his shoulder.
"My gallant mask, I know you! So you have left Normandy, eh? Well, you
have made us suffer much, but I fancy it will be our turn now. One of
our cells has long been ready for you, and you shall sleep at the
Conciergerie to-night. Cartouche!"
Yes, it was indeed the great Cartouche whom a deft detective had trapped
on the sward of La Courtille. The capture was a notable one, and the
next day and for many days to come Paris could not make enough of
it,—Paris which had suffered beatings, plunderings, and assassinations
at the hands of Cartouche and his band for ten years past. He lay three
months at the Conciergerie, and every day his fame increased. The
Regent's finances and the "ministerial rigours" of Dubois were
disregarded; Cartouche was a godsend to rhymesters, journalists, wits,
and diners-out; pretty lips repeated the dubious history of his amours,
and a theatrical gentleman announced a "comedy" named after the
distinguished cut-throat. Cartouche awaited stoically enough death by
breaking on the wheel. It required a severe application of the Question
to bring him to a betrayal of his band, but "his tongue once loosed, he
passed an entire night in naming the companions of his crimes." The
villain even denounced "three pretty women who had been his mistresses."
He consented one day to the visit of a person whose indiscreet candour
was passing cruel. This was the dramatist Legrand who, with his
_Cartouche_ comedy in preparation, sought the "local colour" of the
condemned cell. Cartouche had the vanity which characterises the great
criminal, and willingly allowed himself to be "interviewed"; he answered
all Legrand's questions, and then asked one himself: "When is your piece
to be represented?" "On the day of your execution, my dear Monsieur
Cartouche." "Ah, indeed! Then you had better interview the executioner
also; he will come in at the climax, you see."
Having entertained the playwright with his wit, the murderer next
essayed the part of patriot, and said to his Jesuit confessor, Guignard,
in speaking of the assassination of Henri IV.:
"All the crimes that I have ever committed were the merest
peccadilloes (_de légères peccadilles_) in comparison with those
which your Order is stained with. Is there any crime more enormous
than to take the life of your King, and such a King as that was? The
noblest prince in the universe, the glory of France, the father of
his country! I tell you that if a man whom I were pursuing had taken
refuge at the foot of the statue of Henri IV., I should not have
dared to kill him."
The condition of the Conciergerie at this date was at all events better
than it had been two or three centuries earlier. No Mediæval prisons
were fit to live in. Sanitation was a science as yet undreamed of in
Europe, and even had there been such a science, it is improbable that
the inmates of prisons would have tasted its advantages. In the Middle
Ages, nothing was more remote from the official mind, from the minds of
all judges, magistrates, governors, gaolers, and concierges, than the
notion that prisoners should live in wholesome and decent surroundings.
Two very definite ideas the Middle Ages had about prisons, and only two:
the first was, that they should be impregnable, and the second was, that
they should be "gey ill" to live in; and their one idea regarding the
lot of all prisoners and captives was, that it should be beyond every
other lot wretched and unendurable.
In the age we live in, civilised governments setting about the building
of a new prison do not say to their architects, "You must build a
fortress which prisoners cannot break, and you must put into it a
certain quantity of conical cells below the level of the ground, in
which prisoners may be suffocated within a given number of days," but,
"You must build a prison of sufficient strength; and in planning your
cells you must secure for every prisoner an ample provision of space,
air, and light." Those are the supreme differences between ancient and
modern gaols. Prison in the old days was of all places the least healthy
to live in; nowadays, it is often the most healthy. Good control and
strict surveillance confer security upon prisons which are not built as
fortresses; but nothing gives such immense distinction to the new
system, by contrast with all the earlier ones, as the elaborate and
minute regard of everything which may make for the physical well-being
of the prisoners.
Then comes the moral question; and from the standpoint of morals the
situation tells even more in favour of the modern system. Imprisonment
should never be cruel; but, when the prisoner is fairly tried and justly
sentenced, it should always be both irksome and disgraceful. The
disgrace of prison, however, depends upon the absolute impartiality of
the tribunal and the soundness of public sentiment. Nobody is disgraced
by being sent into prison in a society in which arrest is arbitrary, and
in which arraignment at the bar is not followed by an honest examination
of the facts. Princes of the blood, nobles, ministers, and judges and
magistrates themselves were equally liable with the commonest offenders
against the common law to be spirited into prison, and left there,
without accusation and without trial, during many centuries of French
history. Most tribunals were corrupt, and during many ages all were at
the mercy of the Crown. A Daniel on the bench was rare, and in great
danger of being hanged; and public sentiment was not yet articulate.
In such insecurity of justice, imprisonment could carry with it no
social stigma, as it carries inevitably in these days. But, where there
is no shame in imprisonment, there is no question of the reform of the
prisoner, and this—one of the main endeavours of modern penal
systems—was not only quite ignored by the old régime, but was an aspect
of the matter to which it was entirely indifferent, and which had
evidently no place whatever in its conceptions. In the progress of
civilisation, no institution has been so completely transformed as the
prison. It was an instrument of vengeance; it is seeking, not at present
too successfully, to be an instrument of grace.
Prisons neglected or encumbered with filth are natural hotbeds of
disease, and epidemic sicknesses were frequent. In 1548, the plague
broke out in the Conciergerie, and then for the first time an infirmary
was established in the prison, though I cannot find that it made greatly
for the comfort of the sick. Doctor's work was grudgingly and carelessly
done in the prisons of those days, and there was no great disposition to
hinder the sick from yielding up the ghost; the bed or the share of a
bed allotted to the patient was always wanted. The Conciergerie was
devastated by fire in 1776, and this visitation resulted in a royal
command to rehabilitate the whole interior of the prison. In this
attempt to realise the generous thought of his minister Turgot, Louis
XVI. did not imagine, we may be sure, that he was preparing a last
lodging for Marie Antoinette!
Here then we stand on the threshold of the Conciergerie of the
Revolution—the ante-chamber of the scaffold, in the fit words of
Fouquier-Tinville.
It was at four o'clock on the morning of the 14th of October, 1793, at
the close of the sitting of the revolutionary tribunal, that the
dethroned and widowed Queen was brought to the Conciergerie. Poor,
abandoned, outraged Queen, they thrust her into one of their common
cells, and gave her for attendant a galley-slave named Barasin. This
must have been a brave, good fellow, with a loyal heart under his
galley-slave's vest, for at the risk of his life he waited devoutly and
devotedly on the queenly woman, a queen no longer, who could in nothing
reward his devotion. One should name also the concierge Richard, who
shewed himself not less a man in his care of the "beautiful high-born,"
and who for his humanity to her was stripped of all his goods.
The gendarmes guarded her last hours, sat there in the cell with her,
though republican modesty allowed the intervention of a screen.
It is known what a sublime dignity sustained her to the end; and indeed
almost the worst was over when she had quitted Fouquier-Tinville's bar,
after the "hideous indictment" and the condemnation. She withdrew to
die, and she could die as became a Queen. Louis had gone before her, and
all the mother's dying thoughts and prayers must have been for the
children who were to live after her—how long, she knew not. She sat in
the dingy cell, clasping her crucifix, waiting her call to the tumbril;
"dim, dim, as if in disastrous eclipse; like the pale kingdoms of Dis!"
From this time on to the end of the Reign of Terror, the Conciergerie
offered such a spectacle as was never seen before within the walls of
any prison. The guillotine
"smoked with bloody execution."
The Revolution was eating not her enemies only but her children, and
those victims and prospective victims, men and women, old and young,
filled the cells of the Conciergerie, the chambers, the corridors, and
the yards. They swarmed there in disorder, dirt, and disease, guarded
and bullied by drunken turnkeys, who had a pack of savage dogs to assist
them. They went out by batches in the tumbrils, to leave their heads in
Samson's basket, and ever fresh parties of proscribed ones took the
places of the dead. "I remained six months in the Conciergerie," says
Nougaret, one of the historians of the period, "and saw there nobles,
priests, merchants, bankers, men of letters, artisans, agriculturists,
and honest _sans-culottes_." Often as this population was decimated,
Fouquier-Tinville filled up the gap; and throughout the whole of the
Terror the condemned and the untried proscribed ones, herded together,
seldom had space enough for the common decencies of life.
Then some sort of classification was attempted, and three orders were
established in the prison. The _Pistoliers_ were those who could afford
to pay for the privilege of sleeping two in a bed. The _Pailleux_ lay
huddled in parties, in dens or lairs, on piles of stale straw, "at the
risk of being devoured by rats and vermin." Nougaret remarks that in
some cells the prisoners on the floor at night had to protect their
faces with their hands, and leave the rest of their persons to the rats.
The _Secrets_ were the third class of prisoners, who made what shift
they could in black and reeking cells beneath the level of the Seine.
And the sick in the infirmary? Listen once more to Nougaret in his
_Histoire des Prisons de Paris et des Départemens_:
"There were frightful fevers there, and you took your chance of
catching them. The patients, lying in pairs in filthy beds, were in
as wretched a plight as ever mortals found themselves in. The
doctors hardly condescended to examine them. They had one or two
potions which, as they said, were 'saddles for all horses,' and
which they administered quite indiscriminately. It was curious to
see with what an air of contempt they made their rounds. One day,
the head doctor approached a bed and felt the patient's pulse. 'Ah,'
said he to the hospital warder, 'the man's better than he was
yesterday.' 'Yes, doctor, he's a good deal better,—but it's not the
same man. Yesterday's patient is dead; this one has taken his
place.' 'Really?' said the doctor, 'that makes the difference! Well,
mix this fellow his draught.'"
When the prisoners were to be locked in for the night, there was always
a great to-do in getting the roll called. Three or four tipsy turnkeys,
with half-a-dozen dogs at their heels, passed from hand to hand an
incorrect list, which none of them could read. A wrong name was spelled
out, which no one answered to; the turnkeys swore in chorus, and spelled
out another name. In the end, the prisoners had to come to the
assistance of the guards and call their own roll. Then the numbers had
to be told over and over again, and the prisoners to be marched in and
marched out three or four times, before their muddled keepers could
satisfy themselves that the count was correct.
One seeks to know what the feeding was like in the "ante-chamber of the
guillotine." When, in the midst of the Terror, Paris was pinched with
hunger, the pinch was felt severely in the Conciergerie. Rations ran
desperately short, and a common table was instituted. The aristocrats
had to pay scot for the penniless, and came in these strange
circumstances to "estimate their fortunes by the number of
_sans-culottes_ whom they fed, as formerly they had done by the numbers
of their horses, mistresses, dogs, and lackeys."
All histories, memoirs, chronicles, and legends are agreed that the
Conciergerie of the Revolution was a frightful place. The political
prisoners endured all the horrors, physical and mental, of an
unparalleled régime. Sick and unattended, hungry and barely fed, cold
and left to shiver in dark and naked cells—these were amongst the ills
of the body. But greater by far than these must have been the pangs of
the mind.
Nearly all of these prisoners, men and women both, regarded death as a
certainty; before ever they were tried, from the moment that the outer
door of the prison had closed behind them, the guillotine was as good as
promised to them. They had no help to count on from without, they had
not even the animating hope of a fair hearing by an upright judge. The
judgment bar of Fouquier-Tinville did not pretend to be impartial.
Nevertheless, though the blade of the guillotine was suspended over all
heads, and fell daily upon many, an air of mingled serenity and
exaltation reigned throughout the gaol. There were few tears, and there
was no weak repining. Morning and evening, the political prisoners
chanted in chorus the hymns of the Revolution, and these were varied by
witty verses on the guillotine, composed in some instances by prisoners
on the eve of passing beneath the knife. Some had brought in with them
their favourite books, and reading led to long discussions, of which
literature, science, religion, and politics were alternately the themes.
Devoted priests like the Abbé Emory went about making converts, and
opposing their efforts to those of the militant atheist, Anacharsis
Clootz, who styled himself the "personal enemy of Jesus Christ." For
recreation, old games were played and new ones invented. Imagine a crowd
of prisoners of both sexes, living in daily expectation of the scaffold,
who played for hours together at the _guillotine_! A hall of the prison
was transformed into Tinville's tribunal, a Tinville was placed on the
bench who could parody the voice and manner of the terrible original,
the prisoner was arraigned, there were eloquent counsel on both sides,
and witnesses; and when the trial was finished, and the inevitable
sentence had been pronounced, the guillotine of chairs and laths was set
up, and amid a tumult of applause the wooden blade was loosed and the
victim rolled into the basket. Sometimes the game was interrupted, and
there was a general rush to the window to catch the voice of the crier
in the street,—"Here's the list of the brigands who have won to-day at
the lottery of the blessed guillotine!"
Famous figures, and a few sublime ones, detach themselves from the
groups: a Duc d'Orléans, a Duc de Lauzun, a General Beauharnais (who
writes to his wife Josephine that letter of farewell which she shewed to
Bonaparte at her first interview with him), Charlotte Corday, the great
chemist Lavoisier (on whose death Lagrange exclaimed, "It took but a
moment to sever that head, and a hundred years will not produce one like
it"), Danton the Titan of the Revolution, Camille Desmoulins, and
Robespierre himself.
One evening, a few days after the death of Marie Antoinette, the
twenty-two Girondins, condemned to die in twenty-four hours, passed into
the keeping of Concierge Richard. These were some of the most heroic men
of the Revolution, "the once flower of French patriotism," Carlyle calls
them; tribunes, prelates, men of war, men of ancient and noble stock,
poets, lawyers. One of their number had killed himself in court on
receiving sentence, and the dead body was carried to the prison, and lay
in a corner of the room in which the twenty-two spent their last night.
They gathered at a long deal table for a farewell supper, at which, says
Thiers, they were by turns, "gay, serious, and eloquent." They drank to
the glory of France, and the happiness of all friends. They sang
solemnly the great songs of the Revolution, and at five in the morning,
when the turnkey came to call the last roll, one of them arose and
declaimed the _Marseillaise_. A few hours later, the twenty-two went
chanting to their death; and the chant was sustained until the last head
had fallen.
These are amongst the loftier memories of those bloody days. It is
impossible within the limits of a chapter to give a tithe even of the
names that were written in the registers of the _maison de justice_ of
the Revolution. Well, indeed, might Fouquier-Tinville have named it the
ante-chamber of the guillotine, for two thousand prisoners, drawn from
all the other gaols of Paris, went to the scaffold from the
Conciergerie. And they died, most of them, as children of a Revolution
should die; virgin girls were no longer timid, women were weak no
longer, when their turn came to mount the steps of the scaffold. A sense
of patriotism so high and pure and penetrating as to resemble the
spiritual exaltation and abandonment of the Christian martyrs seemed to
extinguish in the frailest breasts the natural fear of death. "_On meurt
en riant, on meurt en chantant, on meurt en criant: Vive la France!_"
The fierce political interests of the revolutionary period absorb all
others; those who are not Fouquier-Tinville's victims languish obscurely
in their cells, or travel towards the guillotine almost unnoticed. But
who is this in a condemned cell of the Conciergerie in the year '94, not
sent there by sentence of Tinville? It is honest, unfortunate Joseph
Lesurques, unjustly convicted of the murder of a courier of Lyons,—one
of the saddest miscarriages of justice. English play-goers are familiar
with the dramatic version of the story, which gave Sir Henry Irving the
material of one of his most remarkable creations. In the drama,
playwright's justice snatches Lesurques from the tumbril within sight of
the guillotine, but the Lesurques of real life fared otherwise. He died,
innocent and ignorant of the crime, but the shade of the murdered
courier had a double vengeance, for the actual assassin, Dubosc, was
taken later, and duly stretched on the _bascule_.
In the Napoleonic era, the Conciergerie lost two-thirds of its
lugubrious importance. It continued to receive prisoners of note, but
their sojourn was brief; the prison of the Terror passed them on to
Sainte-Pélagie, Bicêtre, the Temple, or the Bastille. With the return to
France of the dynasty of Louis XVI., the old gaol went suddenly into
mourning, as one may say, for Marie Antoinette. When Louis XVIII.
commanded the erection of an "expiatory monument" in the Rue d'Anjou,
the authorities of the Conciergerie made haste to blot out within its
walls all traces of the Queen's captivity. They broke up the mean and
meagre furniture of her cell, the wooden table, the two straw chairs,
the shabby stump bedstead, the screen behind which her gaolers had
gossiped in whispers; and the cell itself ceased its existence in that
form, and was converted into a little chapel or sacristy. Some poor
prisoner with a thought above his own distresses may be praying there
to-day for the soul of Marie Antoinette.
[Illustration: CELL OF MARIE ANTOINETTE IN THE CONCIERGERIE.]
A ghostly souvenir of 1815 may give us pause for a moment. There is no
need to rehearse the story of Marshal Ney, bravest of the sons of
France, Napoleon's _le brave des braves_, whose surpassing services in
the field might have spared him a traitor's end. A few days after he had
"gathered into his bosom" the bullets of a file of soldiers in the
Avenue de l'Observatoire, behind the Luxembourg, the public prosecutor,
M. Bellart, was entertaining at dinner the great men of the bar, the
army, and society. At midnight, the door of the inner salon was suddenly
thrown open, and a footman announced: _Le Maréchal Ney!_
M. Bellart and his guests, smitten to stone, looked dumbly towards the
door. The talk stopped in every corner, the music stopped, the play at
the card-tables stopped. In a moment, the tension passed. It was not the
great Marshal, nor his astral. It was a blunder of the footman, who had
confounded the name with that of a friend of the family, M. Maréchal
Aîné.
[Illustration]
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[Illustration]