XV. 1794. 52. Carrier at CHAP. vengeance was to be inflicted on the Royalists of the western provinces, was still more relentless.* One of the depots containing the prisoners contained fifteen hundred women and children, who, without either beds or straw, were huddled together on the damp floor, and often kept two days without food. The men purchased their lives only by bribery, the women by prostitution. Such as withstood the advances of their oppressors were sent without mercy to the scaffold: the children, who had neither money nor pleasure to offer, were all sacrificed. Repeated fusillades cut them down. Five hundred of these innocents of both sexes, the eldest of whom was not fourteen years old, were on one occasion led out to the same spot to be shot. Never was so deplorable a spectacle witnessed. The littleness of their stature caused most of the bullets, at the first discharge, to fly over their heads; they broke their bonds, rushed into the ranks of the executioners, clung round their knees, and, with supplicating hands and agonised looks, sought for mercy. Nothing could soften these assassins; they put them to death even when lying at their feet. A large party of women, most of whom were with child, and many with babes at their breast, were put on board the boats in the Loire. The innocent caresses, the unconscious smiles of these little innocents, filled their mothers' breasts with inexpressible anguish ; they fondly pressed them to their bosoms, weeping over them for the last time. One of them was delivered of an infant on the quay; hardly were the agonies of childbed * "Tout sans exception est incendié, massacré, dévasté; des villes, des bourgs, des villages, habités par des patriotes, ont disparu, et le fer a acheté ce que la flamme épargnait. C'est ainsi qu'on a resuscité la Vendée."-Rapport de JULIEN fils à ROBESPIERRE, 30 Ventôse 1794; Papiers Inédits trouvés chez ROBESPIERRE, No. 83. XV. 1794. over, when she was pushed, with the new-born innocent, CHAP. into the galley. After being stripped naked, their hands were tied behind their backs; their shrieks and lamentations were answered by strokes of the sabre; and while struggling betwixt terror and shame to conceal their nudity from the gaze of the executioners, the signal was given, the planks cut, and the shrieking victims buried in the waves. Carrier himself had a vessel elegantly fitted up, which plied on the Loire, and in which, surrounded by a number of friends and courtesans, he enjoyed the spectacle of the sufferings of the Royalists. Female jealousy added to the zest of the abandoned ministers of his pleasures; they enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing their rivals destroyed. The shrieks of some hundred victims precipitated into the waves did not interrupt for more than a minute or two the revels in this floating palace of wine and licentiousness. Human cruelty, it would be supposed, could hardly go beyond these executions; but they were surpassed by Lebon* at Bordeaux. A woman was accused of having wept at the execution of her husband; she was condemned, amidst the applauses of the multitude, to sit several hours under v. 27. Chathe suspended blade, which shed upon her, drop by drop, Hist. i. 102. the blood of the deceased, whose corpse was above her on Lam. Hist. the scaffold, before she was released by death from her 321, 323. agony.1+ One of the most extraordinary features of these terrible Infantis miseri nascentia rumpere fata. Sed satis est, jam posse mori-trahit ipse furoris * Son of the Lebon at Arras. + The principle of the commissaries at Bordeaux was to destroy the mercantile aristocracy. Il faut tuer l'aristocratie mercantile comme on a tué celle des prêtres et des nobles. Les commissaires frappent à coup sûr; ils ne font grâce à personne; parcequ'ils sont convaincus que si les aristocrates n'ont pas pris une part active dans les conspirations, ils n'ont pas moins appelé la contrerévolution dans leur cœur."-Papiers Inédits trouvés chez ROBESPIERRE ; DAILLET, No. 84; BAISSART, No. 85; and Rapport de COURTOIS, vol. i. 75, 76. 1 Prudhom. teaub. Etud. Louvet, 123. des Gir. vii. XV. 1794. 53. CHAP. times, was the apathy which the better classes, both in Paris and the provinces, evinced, and the universal disposition to bury anxiety in the delirium of present enjoyGeneral ment. The people who escaped death went to the operas the class of without intermission, with equal unconcern whether proprietors. thirty or a hundred heads had fallen during the day. Strassburg, The class of proprietors at Bordeaux, Marseilles, and all at Bordeaux. the principal towns, timid and vacillating, could not be apathy of Just at and Tallien prevailed on to quit their hearths; while the Jacobins, ardent, reckless, and indefatigable, inured to crime, plunged a merciless sword into the bosom of the country. The soldiers every where supported their tyranny: the prospect of ransacking cellars, ravishing women, and plundering coffers, made them universally faithful to the government. St Just, when sent down by Robespierre to Strassburg, wrote to him that the excess of cruelty had blunted men to its effects.* The career of Tallien at Bordeaux at first was equally sanguinary; in a short time seven hundred victims perished on the scaffold. But he was at length awakened to more humane feelings by the influence of his beautiful mistress, whom he afterwards married, Madame de Fontenay, one of those Mercier's singular characters whom the Revolution raised to eminence, and who had the virtue to apply the influence which her personal charms gave her to the purposes of humanity. 1+ "When in a country which we all conceived to be on the point of regeneration," says 1 Louvet, 124, 125. Tab. de Paris, iv. 372. Lam. Hist. des Gir. viii. 343, 344. * 66 L'usage de la Terreur a blasé le crime comme les fortes liqueurs blasent le palis. Sans doute, il n'est pas temps encore de faire le bien : le bien particulier que l'on fait n'est qu'un palliatif. Il faut attendre un mal général assez grand pour que l'opinion éprouve une réaction."-ST JUST à ROBESPIERRE, April 14, 1794; LAMARTINE, vii. 343. Madame de Fontenay, whose humanity, not less than her beauty, renders her deserving a place in the portrait gallery of the Revolution, was the daughter of the Count of Cabarus, a Frenchman by descent, but who had long been established in Spain, and was born at Madrid in 1784. Her mother was a Valencian lady, whom Cabarus had seduced. She united in her person and character the beauty and fire of the sunny province where her mother first drew breath, with the grace and spirit of coquetry of that where her father was born. Like Cleopatra or Theodora, she seemed born to rule the world by subduing its conquerors. The enthusiasm of the Revolution soon drew her from Spain to Louvet, "the men of property were every where so timid, and the wicked so audacious, it became evident that all assemblages of men, once dignified with the name of the people by such fools as myself, are, in truth, nothing more than an imbecile herd, too happy to be permitted to crouch under the yoke of a despotic master." СНАР. XV. 1794. 54. Efforts of the Com Public Sal increase the The Committee of Public Salvation incessantly urged Fouquier Tinville, the public accuser, to accelerate the executions. He himself declared, on his subsequent trial, mittee of "That on one occasion they ordered him to increase vation to them to one hundred and fifty a-day, and that the pro- massacres. posal filled his mind with such horror, that, as he returned by the Seine, the river appeared to run red with blood, and the pavement on the streets to be strewn with decapitated human heads." The pretended conspiracy in the prisons served as an excuse for a frightful multiplication in the number of victims. One hundred and sixty were denounced in the prison of the Luxembourg alone, and from one to two hundred in the other prisons of Paris. A fabricated attempt at escape in the prison of la Force, was made the ground for sending several hundreds to the Revolutionary Tribunal. Amis, xii. Fouquier Tinville had made such an enlargement of the 365,374. Th. vi. 363, hall of that dreaded court, that room was afforded for 364. Lac.ii. one hundred and sixty to be tried at once; and he pro- de la Conv. posed to place at the bar the whole prisoners charged with the conspiracy in the Luxembourg at one sitting. Bordeaux, where she soon attracted general notice by the brilliancy of her dress, her dazzling beauty, and the vehemence with which, like Théroigne de Méricourt at Paris, she espoused the cause of the Revolution. Dressed as an Amazon, with her dark locks surmounted by a tricolor plume, she was to be seen at the clubs, the theatres, and on horseback in the streets, where she pronounced several eloquent speeches in favour of the Revolution. But, unlike Théroigne, she had a heart. Suffering never failed to melt her; and when she acquired an influence over Tallien, which she did the moment he arrived as one of the commissioners of the Convention at Bordeaux, she exerted it entirely to save victims from the vengeance of the Republicans. Her influence soon after had no small share in bringing about the 9th Thermidor and fall of Robespierre, in which Tallien bore so prominent a part.-LAMARTINE, Histoire des Girondins, vii. 333, 334. 1 Deux 161. Hist. iii. 386, 388. Duval, Souv. reur, iv. 381. de la Ter XV. 1794. 55. length ex the executions. June 2. June 7. He even went so far as to erect a guillotine in the courtroom, in order to execute the prisoners the moment the sentence was pronounced; but Collot d'Herbois objected to this, as tending " to demoralise punishment." A guillotine had been prepared, however, with four blades placed crossways, which could behead four prisoners at once. But there is a limit to human suffering, an hour Horror at when indignant nature will no longer submit, and courage cited by the arises out of despair. That avenging hour was fast number and approaching. The lengthened files of prisoners daily led to the scaffold, had long excited the commiseration of the better classes in Paris; the shops in the Rue St Honoré were shut, and its pavement deserted, when the melancholy procession, moving towards the Place de la Révolution, passed along. Alarmed at these signs of dissatisfaction, the Committee changed as already mentioned the place of execution, and fixed it first on the Place St. Antoine, and soon after at the Barrière du Trône, in the Faubourg St Antoine. But even the workmen of that revolutionary district ere long manifested impatience at the constant repetition of the dismal spectacle. The middle classes, who constituted the strength of the national guard in Paris, began to be alarmed at the rapid progress and evident descent of the proscriptions. At first the nobles and ecclesiastics only were included; by degrees the whole landed proprietors were reached; but now the work of destruction seemed to be fast approaching every class above the lowest. On the lists of the Revolutionary Tribunal, in the latter days of the Reign of Terror, are to be found tailors, shoemakers, hairdressers, butchers, farmers, mechanics, and workmen, accused of anti-revolutionary principles. From the 10th June to the 17th July, that court had sentenced twelve hundred and eightyfive persons to death. The people felt pity for these proscriptions, not only from their frequency, but their |