XXXIX. Austrian armies, and their final entrance in the capital CHAP. with the exasperated émigrés.. We do not think that such idle vengeance was the dominant wish of either Marat or Robespierre. Both hoped that the massacres, begun in the prisons, might extend beyond them. It was notoriously the desire in some of the sections that the inmates of the Temple should be made away with. And Robespierre at the commune on the day of the massacres denounced a conspiracy in favour of the Bourbons, which enveloped Brissot and the Gironde in the category of suspects. A bill of arrest was expedited against the first. Marat launched another against Roland. To get at the royal family, and not only those who sympathised with them but those inclined to treat them with respect and commiseration, was part of the aim of at least the two chiefs of the assassination plot.* With the same view of exculpating the originators of the massacres, they are represented by one historian as a fortuitous event, sprung from the very impulse of the people, the unpremeditated vengeance of its passions excited by the news of the capture of Longwy, the probable capture of Verdun, and consequently the threatened arrival of the Prussians in Paris. These events naturally produced a good deal of excitement. The Girondists expressed their fears of the necessity of retreating south with the king and the legislature; Danton, on the contrary, maintained the necessity of staying in Paris, which he proposed defending by audacity, audacity, and still audacity. These were empty words, had the Prussian commander the talent, or even the zeal, for But the Duke of Brunswick, strange to say, war. * Robespierre afterwards pretended, and his admirers assert for him, that he took no part in the massacre, and merely attended the committee of surveillance in the council of the commune on that day. M. Granier de Cassagnac adduces CHAP. entertained a respect, mingled with awe, for the revoluXXXIX. tion and its armies, and allowed to them the fullest opportunity for an easy victory. Danton's expression of "audacity" did not mean placing himself at the head of a forlorn hope to repel the enemy. His audacity was merely to massacre the disarmed prisoners. And that he did meditate it, is irrefragably proved by his and Desmoulins' answer to Prudhomme, the bookseller, who came to expostulate. Desmoulins, not denying the project of massacre, observed that the innocent would not be confounded with the guilty, and appealed to Danton for the truth of what he said. The minister of justice and his acolytes were thus not only fully aware of the intended massacre, but of the mock forms of justice with which the murderers accompanied it. In some of the prisons the jailers well knew what was intended. They sent away their families, deprived their victims of knives and forks; and at the Abbaye the prisoners had their dinner two hours earlier than usual lest the meal should interfere with the slaughter. It must have been plain, indeed, to the prison authorities that the jails had not been filled with thousands, far beyond the capacity of containing them, in order for the prisoners to continue to inhabit them, or await trial. The barriers had been closed, and on a certain evening domiciliary visits were made by the police, under Marat's superintendence, to search for arms it was said, but really to arrest prisoners. All coming under the category of suspect, Lafayettists as well as royalists, were crowded together in the prison cells, evidently for massacre. The prisoners and their friends, indeed, fully saw through the whole scheme; and, of course, the latter made every effort to procure the liberation of those in whom they were interested. The rich in many instances succeeded, no doubt, in bribing the police. In this way Lally Tollendal, Beaumarchais, and Jaucourt were let XXXIX. out of the Abbaye. Daubigné, imprisoned at La Force CHAP. for having stolen 100,000 francs in the sack of the Tuileries, was released by his friend Marat. But the register of the deliberations in the sections afford ample proof of their being privy to, and accomplices in, the massacres about to commence.* The first deed of blood on this terrible Sunday, the 2nd of September, was the murder of twenty-four priests: these were a portion of the ecclesiastics arrested during the domiciliary visits. When the cannon of alarm, the signal for massacre, was fired at two o'clock, the victims were put in carriages and drawn to prison through crowded streets. The mob attacked them as they passed, and the fédérés, soldiers of Marseilles and Avignon, who guarded them, were foremost to cut them down. Pétion and others accused the poor priests of provoking their guards. This is little likely; at all events, the greater number of the priests arrived in the court of the old church of the Abbaye, where they were attacked, not by the mob, but by that band of cutthroats, with Maillard at their head, who were commissioned and paid by the executive council of the commune for the special work of slaughter. Of the twentyfour priests, three escaped from the massacre at first by rushing into the apartment occupied by the committee of the section then in permanence. Of these, the Abbé Sicard, then employed in the hospital of the deaf and dumb, and director of it, alone was preserved. When these priests had been despatched, Maillard cried out, "Aux Carmes!"—a convent not very distant, in which one hundred and twenty priests were confined. The same scene just described in the court of the Abbaye was repeated in the Carmes. The victims. * Granier de Cassagnac, Matthieu de la Varenne. M. Louis Blanc acquits the commune of any participation in the massacre, against the express assertions and bcast of the commune itself, which in its address СНАР. XXXIX. there were found in the church, and, fearing their fate, in the act of prayer. The assassins did not call them forth, but fell to slaughter them where they wereamong them the Bishop of Arles, for whom they asked, and who was pointed out. It took considerable time to perpetrate this second massacre, which, when concluded, was celebrated by a discharge of musketry in the church. The assassins then returned to the Abbaye, to quench their thirst and resume more regularly their fearful mission. Ordered to employ some forms in their despatch, they agreed to sit round a table, with Maillard as president. The prisoners were then called on one by one before this improvised judge, dripping with gore. After a question. or two, Maillard exclaimed, "A la Force." A door was then opened; but, instead of being conducted to another prison, the victim was assailed by the pikes and sabres that awaited without, and immolated on the spot. Some forty Swiss soldiers, those saved by the assembly and sent to the Abbaye, were amongst the first slain, and without even the proposed shade of trial. Some hesitated, till a young Swiss soldier demanded the doors to be opened, and flung himself upon the pikes. There were two issues of this kind, and both became blocked up outside with dead bodies. The last of the Swiss murdered was a colonel, of the well-known family of Reding. Wounded and suffering, pain forced cries from him as he was removed, to stifle which one fellow severed his neck asunder with his sabre. Night having by this time fallen, grease-pots and torches were procured; and a crowd of common people, many of them women, collected to enjoy the spectacle. M. de Montmorin, the ex-minister of the unfortunate Louis, was one of the victims brought forth. He was more fierce than resigned; and, when told that he was to go to La Force, he demanded a carriage. They pretended to send for it. On going forth he was slaughtered. Thierry, XXXIX. the king's valet, followed. He had the courage to cry CHAP. "Vive le Roi!" Deputies from the assembly made their appearance on the bloody scene- Bazire, Dussaulx, Isnard, Chabot, and others. They were not listened to, and even felt obliged themselves to take refuge in the section. Billaud Varennes, the friend of Danton, came too, but it was to encourage the assassins, not moderate their fury. The massacres of the Abbaye lasted all the following day, the 3rd. Wearied and inebriated, the assassin-judge and his assessors allowed a few to escape. The most remarkable was that of M. de Sombreuil. His daughter covered the old man with her arms, and clung to him so desperately that the executioners could not kill one without the other, and were too much struck with her filial courage to immolate her. She received several wounds, indeed. At last one of the men seized her, and held a cup to the bleeding head of the last victim. Some wine and powder were thrown into it, and the girl was told to drink that, and the victim should be saved. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil did not hesitate, swallowed the dreadful draught, and saved her father.* Mademoiselle Cazotte saved her parent by similar devotion and obstinacy, but it was only to remove him to the revolutionary tribunal, which sent him to the guillotine some days later. His terrible prophecy of his own fate and that of so many others is well known and attested. Jourgniac de Saint Meard managed to speak Provençal to one of the assassins who was of that province; and, thus interesting him, he succeeded in interesting Maillard himself by his boldness, and was acquitted. Four of his acolytes, with torches, conducted him safely through the band of executioners outside.† The same scenes of horror took place in the different prisons, in the Conciergerie, at La Force, the Letter of the lady's son, in Granier de Cassagnac. † Mon agonie de 38 heures. La Vérité Entière, par Felhemesi. |