Part 23

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 Châtelet, the Salpêtrière, and the Bicêtre. 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 Châtelet, 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. Théroigne 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. Théroigne was at the height of felicity.

At the Salpêtrière 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 Bicêtre. 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.

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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 Vendôme; 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 Pétion, 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-Lhéritier, was born in Auvergne, 1745, and served as a volunteer in Santo Domingo, 1772-85, with Toussaint l'Ouverture, whence his sobriquet "the American."

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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 Cæsars. 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 Littérature_ (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 rôle 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 naïve 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 Pétion: "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 _émigrés_ 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 levé.