By successive purifications, as they were called, all those who retained any sentiments of humanity, any tendency towards moderation, were expelled, and none left but men of iron, steeled against every approach to mercy. The Club in this way at length became the complete quintessence of cruelty, and the focus of the most fearful revolution the feelings of mercy. The national guard was universally devoted to their will, and proved the ready instrument of the most sanguinary measures. The armies, victorious on every side, warmly supported their energetic administration, and made the frontiers resound with the praise of the government. Strong in the support of such powerful bodies, the fanatical leaders of the Re-ary energy. It was its extraordinary volution boldly and universally began the work of extermination. The mandates of death issued from the capital, and a thousand guillotines were instantly raised throughout the towns and villages of France. Amidst the roar of cannon, the rolling of drums, and the sound of the tocsin, the suspected were everywhere arrested, while the young and active were marched off to the defence of the country. Fifteen hundred bastiles, spread through the departments, soon groaned with the multitude of captives; and these being insufficient to contain their numbers, the monasteries, the palaces, the chateaus, were generally employed as temporary places of confinement. The abodes of festivity, the palaces of kings, the temples of religion, were filled with victims; fast as the guillotine did its work, it could not reap the harvest of death which everywhere presented itself; and the crowded state of the prisons soon produced contagious fevers, which swept off thousands of their unhappy inmates. 15. To support these violent measures, the utmost care was taken to preserve in full vigour the democratic spirit in the Club of the Jacobins, the centre of the revolutionary action throughout France. "The tribunals ought to go direct to the point, and strike without pity all the conspirators; they ought also to be political tribunals; they ought to remember that the men who were not in favour of the Revolution were against it, and did nothing for their country. In a position of this kind, in dividual feeling ought to cease; it should expand so as to embrace the Republic. Every man who escapes from the national justice is a miscreant who will one day cause the death of republicans whom you ought to watch over. You have a great mission to fulfil; forget that nature made you a man with feeling. In the exercise of popular commissions, individual humanity, humanity which takes the veil of justice, is a crime."-PAYAN, juré révol. de Paris. Papiers trouvés chez Robespierre, ii. 370. energy and extensive influence, and the absolute direction it had obtained over all the affiliated clubs and departments, which constituted the real secret of Robespierre's power. Never had Turkish sultan so faithful a body of janizaries attached to his cause; never Romish pontiff so energetic a spiritual militia under his orders. It was the magnitude of their crimes against all classes, the certainty of punishment if he were overturned by any, which was the secret of their fidelity. The influence of this Club daily augmented in the latter stages of the Reign of Terror. As he approached the close of his career, Robespierre, suspicious of the Convention and the Mountain, rested almost entirely on that chosen band of adherents, whose emissaries ruled with absolute sway the municipality and the departments. 16. Eight thousand prisoners were soon accumulated in the different places of confinement in Paris; the number throughout France exceeded two hundred thousand. The condition of such a multitude of captives was necessarily miserable in the extreme; the prisons of the Conciergerie, of the Force, and the Mairie, were more horrible than any in Europe. All the comforts which, during the first months of the Reign of Terror, were allowed to the captives of fortune, had of late been withdrawn. Such luxuries, it was said, were an insupportable indulgence to the rich aristocrats, while, without the prison walls, the poor were starving for want. In consequence they established refectories, where the whole prisoners, of whatever rank or sex, were allowed only the coarsest and most unwholesome fare. None were permitted to purchase better provisions for themselves; and, to prevent the possibility of their doing so, a rigorous search was made for money of every description, The day before his execution, the poet which was all taken from the captives. Ducorneau composed a beautiful ode, Some were even denied the sad conso- which was sung in chorus by the whole lation of bearing their misfortunes to- prisoners, and repeated, with a slight gether; and to the terrors of solitary variation, after his execution.+ At confinement were added those of death, other times the scene changed; in the which daily became more urgent and midst of their ravings the prisoners inevitable. The prodigious numbers first destined for the scaffold were transwho were thrust into the prisons, far ported by the Phedon of Plato and the exceeding all possible accommodation, death of Socrates; infidelity in its last produced the most frightful filth in moments betook itself with delight to some places, the most insupportable the sublime belief of the immortality crowding in all: and, as the ineffable of the soul. The prisoners whose hearts result of these, joined to the scanty fare were overflowing with domestic sorrow, and deep depression of these gloomy were in a peculiar manner open to the abodes, contagion made rapid progress, generous emotions; friendships were and mercifully relieved many from their formed in a few hours; common dansufferings. But this only aggravated gers excited a universal and mutual the sufferings of the survivors; the bo- sympathy; even the passion of love was dies were overlooked or forgotten, and often felt on the verge of the tomb. often not removed for days together. The universal uncertainty of life, comNot content with the real terrors which bined with the multitude exposed to they presented, the ingenuity of the similar chances, induced both a warm jailers was exerted to produce imagin- sympathy in hearts which in other ary anxiety; the long nights were fre- circumstances might have remained quently interrupted by visits from the strangers to it, and a strange indifferexecutioners, solely intended to excite ence to individual fate. Religion penealarm; the few hours of sleep allowed trated those gloomy abodes, and often to the victims were broken by the rat- lent its never-failing support to suftling of chains and unbarring of doors, fering humanity and nothing astoto induce the belief that their fellow-nished the few who escaped from conprisoners were about to be led to the finement so much as the want of scaffold; and the warrants for death sympathy for the sufferings of managainst eighty persons in one place of kind which generally prevailed in the confinement, were made the means of world. keeping six hundred in agony. 17. Despair of life, recklessness of the future, produced their usual effects on the unhappy crowd of captives. Some sank into sullen indifference; others indulged in immoderate gaiety, and sought to amuse life even at the foot of the scaffold. The greater part walked about, unable to bear the torture of thought when sitting still; few remained at rest,— "Supin giaceva in terra alcuna gente; Alcuna si sedea tutta raccolta, Ed altra andava continuamente. Quella che giva intorno era più molta; E quella men che giaceva al tormento; Ma più al duolo avea la lingua sciolta."* "On the earth some lay supine, : 18. From the farthest extremities of France crowds of prisoners daily arrived at the gates of the Conciergerie, which successively sent forth its bands of victims to the scaffold. Grey hairs and youthful forms; countenances blooming with health, and faces worn with suffering; beauty and talent, rank and virtue, were indiscriminately rolled together to the fatal doors. With truth might have been written over the portals what Dante placed over the entrance of his Inferno: : In the transport of the moment another L'instant où s'unissent nos âmes! Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate." Sixty persons often arrived in a day, and as many were on the following morning sent out to execution. Night and day the cars incessantly discharged victims into the prisons: weeping mothers and trembling orphans, greyhaired sires and youthful innocents, were thrust in without mercy with the brave and the powerful: the young, the beautiful, the unfortunate, seemed in a peculiar manner the prey of the assassins. Nor were the means of emptying the prisons augmented in a less fearful progression. Fifteen only were at first placed on the chariot, but the number was soon augmented to thirty, and gradually rose to seventy or eighty persons, who daily were sent forth to the place of execution; when the fall of Robespierre put a stop to the murders, arrangements had been made for increasing the daily number to one hundred and fifty. An immense aqueduct, to remove the gore, had been dug from the Seine as far as the Place St Antoine, where latterly the executions took place; and four men were daily employed in emptying the blood of the victims into that reservoir.+ "Through me you pass into the city of woe; Through me you pass into eternal pain; Through me among the people lost for aye; All hope abandon, ye who enter here." DANTE, Inferno, iii. 1. "They had arranged everything, so as to be able to send 150 at a time to the place of execution. Already an immense aqueduct, to carry off the flow of blood, had been bored in the Place St Antoine. Every day human blood poured into buckets, and at the hour of exe cution four men were occupied in emptying them into this aqueduct."-RIOUFFE, Sur les Prisons, S4; Rév. Mémoires, xxiii. 84. + " Α, που ποτ' ἤγαγες με, προς ποίαν στέγην ; ESCHYLUS, Agum. 1050. "Whither do you lead me? To what bourne? To the house of the Atreides, if you do not already know it-dwelling abhorred of Heaven-human shamble-house, and floor blood-bespattered." Verily, says Bulwer, no prophet like the poet. VOL. III. 19. The female prisoners, on entering the jails, and frequently during the course of their detention, were subjected to indignities so shocking that they were often worse than death itself. Under the pretence of searching for concealed articles, money, or jewels, they were obliged to undress in presence of their brutal jailers, who, if they were young or handsome, subjected them to searches of the most rigorous and revolting description.§ This process was so common that it acquired a name, and was called " Rapiotage." Many monsters made their fortunes by this infamous robbery. A bed of straw alone awaited the prisoners when they arrived in their wretched cells: the heat was such, from the multitudes thrust into them, that they were to be seen crowding to the windows, with pale and cadaverous countenances, striving through the bars to inhale the fresh air. Fathers and mothers, surrounded by their weeping children, long remained locked in each other's arms, in agonies of grief, when the fatal hour of separation arrived. The parents were in general absorbed in the solemn reflections which the near approach of death seldom fails to awaken; but the children, with frantic grief, clung with their little hands round their necks, and loudly implored to be placed, still embraced in each other's arms, under the guillotine. 20. The condition of the prisoners in these jails of Paris, where above ten thousand persons were at last confined, was dreadful beyond what imagination could conceive. "La prisonnière en entrant est fouillée, volée: on ne lui laisse que son mouchoir; couteau, ciseaux, argent, assignats, or et bijoux-tout est pris: vous entrez nu et dépouillé. Ce brigandage s'appelle rapioter. Les femmes offraient à la brutalité des geoliers tout ce qui pouvait éveiller leurs féroces désirs et leurs dégoûtants propos: les plus jeunes étaient déshabillées, fouillées: la cupidité satisfaite, la lubricité s'éveille; et ces infortunées, les yeux baissés, tremblantes, éplorées dévant ces bandits, ne pouvaient cacher leurs yeux ce que la pudeur même dérobe à l'amour trop heureux. Cet affreux brigandage a fait la fortune de ces monstres. -Tableaux des Prisons de Paris pendant la Terreur, 1797, vol. ii. 84. " disgusting circumstances the only degradation which awaited the unhappy prisoners. No one could conceive the woeful state to which the human species can be reduced, who had not witnessed the calling of the roll in the evening, when three or four turnkeys, each with half a dozen fierce dogs held in a leash, call the unhappy prisoners to answer to their names, threatening, swearing, and insulting, while they are supplicating, weeping, imploring: often they ordered them to go out and come in three or four times over, till they were satisfied that the trembling troop was complete. The cells for the women were as horrid as those for the men, equally dark, humid, filthy, crowded, and suffocating: and it was there that all the rank and beauty of Paris was assembled." The following description is from an eyewitness of these horrors: the fastidiousness of modern manners may revolt at some of its details, but the truth of history requires that they should be recorded. "From the outer room, where examinations are conducted, you enter by two enormous doors into the dungeons-infected and damp abodes, where large rats carry on a continual war against the unhappy wretches who are there accumulated together, gnawing their ears, noses, and clothing, and depriving them of a moment's respite even by sleep. Hardly ever does daylight penetrate into these gloomy abodes: 21. It was three in the afternoon the straw which composes the litter of when the melancholy procession set out the prisoners soon becomes rotten from from the Conciergerie; the troop slowly want of air, and from the ordure and passed through the vaulted passages of excrement with which it is covered; the prison, amidst crowds of captives, and such is the stench thence arising, who gazed with insatiable avidity on that a stranger, on entering the door, the aspect of those about to undergo a feels as if he were suffocating. The fate which might so soon become their prisoners are all either in what are called own. The higher orders in general the straw chambers or in the dungeons. behaved with firmness and serenity; Thus poverty is there regarded as a silently they marched to death, with fresh crime, and leads to the most dread- their eyes fixed on the firmament, lest ful punishment; for a lengthened abode their looks should betray their indigin these horrid receptacles is worse nation. Numbers of the lower class than death itself. The dungeons are piteously bewailed their fate, and called never opened but for inspection, to give heaven and earth to witness their innofood to the prisoners, or to empty the cence. The pity of the spectators was vases. The superior class of chambers, in a peculiar manner excited by the called the straw apartments, do not bands of females led out together to differ from the dungeons except in this, execution; fourteen young women of that their inhabitants are permitted to Verdun, of the most attractive forms, go out at eight in the morning, and to were cut off together. "The day after remain out till an hour before sunset. their execution," says Riouffe," the During the intervening period, they court of the prison looked like a garden are allowed to walk in the court, or bereaved of its flowers by a tempest." huddle together in the galleries which On another occasion, twenty women of surround it, where they are suffocated Poitou, chiefly the wives of peasants, by infectious odours. There is the were placed together on the chariot; same accumulation of horror in their some died on the way, and the wretches sleeping chambers: no air, rotten straw, guillotined their lifeless remains; one and perhaps fifty prisoners thrust into kept her infant in her bosom till she one hole, with their heads lying on their reached the foot of the scaffold; the own filth, surrounded by every species executioners tore the innocent from her of dirt and contagion. Nor were these breast, as she suckled it for the last * Paradise Lost, i. 63. time, and the screams of maternal agony were only stifled with her life. In removing the prisoners from the jail of the Maison Lazare, one of the women declared herself with child, and on the point of delivery: the hard-hearted jailers compelled her to move on: she did so, uttering piercing shrieks, and at length fell on the ground, and was delivered of an infant in presence of her persecutors. * The tuneful feather'd kind forget their lays, roar, And freezing billows stiffen on the shore." LUCAN, Pharsalia, i. 258. Every one assumed the coarsest dress and the most squalid appearance; an elegant exterior would have been the certain forerunner of destruction. At one hour only were any symptoms of 22. Such accumulated horrors an- animation to be seen; it was when the nihilated all the charities and inter- victims were conveyed to execution. course of life. Before daybreak the The humane fled with horror from the shops of the provision merchants were sight; the infuriated rushed in crowds besieged by crowds of women and chil- to satiate their eyes with the spectacle dren clamouring for the food which the of human agony. Night came, but with law of the maximum in general prevent- it no diminution of the anxiety of the ed them from obtaining. The farmers people. Every family early assembled trembled to bring their produce to the its members; with trembling looks they market, the shopkeepers to expose it to gazed round the room, fearful that the sale. The richest quarters of the town very walls might harbour traitors.† The were deserted; no equipages or crowds of sound of a foot, the stroke of a hammer, passengers were to be seen on the streets; a voice in the streets, froze all hearts the sinister words, Propriété Nationale, with horror. If a knock was heard at imprinted in large characters on the the door, every one, in agonised suswalls, everywhere showed how far the pense, expected his fate. Unable to enwork of confiscation had proceeded. Pas-dure such protracted misery, numbers sengers hesitated to address their most committed suicide.+ "Had the reign intimate friends on meeting; the ex- of Robespierre," says Fréron, " contitent of calamity had rendered men sus-nued longer, multitudes would have picious even of those they loved the most. "In secret murmurs thus they sought relief, O'er all one deep, one horrid silence reigns; "In one of these removals devised for the purpose of harassing the miserable prisoners, Dumoutier arrived at four in the morning, followed by a large car to carry off the female prisoners. One of them, who was near her confinement, having been rudely awoke, felt symptoms indicating an immediate seizure. She implored to be permitted to remain a few days: she was accused of imposture; she was not listened to; her reiterated prayers, her tears, the entreaties of her companionsall were in vain: she had to march with the others. This youthful victim dragged herself along, supported by several men, uttering cries of agony and despair. Scarcely had she crossed the garden and reached the threshold of the door, when her pains returned with redoubled violence: there was barely time to get her conveyed to a neighbouring chamber: she fell upon a bed, and was delivered in the presence of this savage and his myrmidons." -Tableau de la Maison Lazare, p. 226, vol. xxiii.; Rév. Mém. thrown themselves under the guillotine; the first of social affections, the love of life, was already extinguished in almost every heart." 23. In the midst of these unparalleled atrocities, the Convention were occupied with the establishment of the civic virtues. Robespierre pronounced a discourse on the qualities suited to a republic. He dedicated a certain number "Omai le stragi, Le violenze, le rapine, l'onte, ALFIERI, Virginia, Act iii. scene 2: "Pars animam laqueo claudunt, mortisque timorem Morte fugant; ultroque vocant venientia fata. OVID, Metam. vii. 605. |