History of the Girondists, Volume I / Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution

by Alphonse de Lamartine

During this period, by one of those chances that appear like the premeditated vengeances of destiny, she recognised in Paris the young Belgian gentleman who had seduced and abandoned her. Her look told him how great was his danger, and he sought to avert it by imploring her pardon. "My pardon," said she; "at what price can you purchase it? My innocence gone—my family lost to me—my brothers and sisters pursued in their own country by the jeers and sarcasms of their kindred; the malediction of my father—my exile from my native land—my enrolment amongst the infamous caste of courtezans; the blood with which my days have been and will be stained; that imperishable curse attached to my name, instead of that immortality of virtue which you have taught me to doubt. It is for this that you would purchase my forgiveness. Do you know any price on earth capable of purchasing it?" The young man made no reply. Théroigne had not the generosity to forgive him, and he perished in the massacres of September. In proportion as the Revolution became more bloody, she plunged deeper into it. She could no longer exist, without the feverish excitement of public emotion. However, her early leaning to the Girondist party again displayed itself, and she also wished to stay the progress of the Revolution. But there were women whose power was superior even to her own. These women, called the furies of the guillotine, stripped the belle Liégoise of her attire, and publicly flogged her on the terrace of the Tuileries, on the 31st of May. This punishment, more terrible than death, turned her brain, and she was conveyed to a mad-house, where she lived twenty years, which were but one long paroxysm of fury. Shameless and blood-thirsty in her delirium, she refused to wear any garments, as a souvenir of the outrage she had undergone. She dragged herself, only covered by her long white hair, along the flags of her cell, or clung with her wasted hands to the bars of the window, from whence she addressed an imaginary people, and demanded the blood of Suleau.

XII.

After Théroigne de Méricourt came other demagogues, less widely known, but already celebrated in their own quartiers, such as Rossignol, the working goldsmith; Brièrre, a wine-seller; Gonor, the conqueror of the Bastille; Jourdan, surnamed Coupe-tête; the famous Polish Jacobin, Lozouski, afterwards buried by the people at the Carrousel; and Henriot, afterwards the confidential general of the convention. As the columns penetrated into Paris, they were swelled by new groups, that poured forth from the crowded streets that open on the boulevards and the quays. At each influx of these new recruits, a shout of joy burst from the columns, the military bands struck up the air of the Ça Ira, the Marseillaise of assassins, whilst the insurgents sang the chorus, and brandished their arms threateningly at the windows of those suspected of being aristocrates.

These weapons did not resemble the arms of regular troops, which excite at once terror and admiration; they were strange and uncouth arms, caught up by the people in the first impulse of fury or defence.[24] Pikes, lances, spits, cutlasses, carpenters' axes, masons' hammers, shoemakers' knives, paviours' levers, saws, wedges, mattocks, crow-bars, the commonest household utensils of the poor, and the rusty iron exposed for sale on the quays, were alike seized upon by the people; and these different weapons, rusted, black, hideous, each of which presented a different manner of inflicting a wound, seemed to increase the horror of death by displaying it in a thousand terrible and unwonted forms. The mixture of all sexes, ages, and conditions; the confusion of costumes and rags beside uniforms, old men beside young; even children, some carried in their mothers' arms, others holding their father's hand or his garments; common prostitutes, their silken dresses soiled and torn, indecency on their brow, and insult on their lips, hundreds of women of the lowest description, and from the dregs of the people, recruited to swell the cortège, and excite commiseration from the garrets of the faubourgs, clothed in tattered finery, pale, emaciated, their eyes hollow, and their cheeks sunken from misery, the personifications of want, in fact the people, in all the disorder, the confusion, the exposure of a city suddenly summoned from its houses, its workshops, its garrets, its scenes and haunts of debauch and infamy; such was the aspect of intimidation which the conspirators wished to give to this scene.

Here and there flags waved above the heads of the multitude. On one was written Sanction or death; on another, The recall of the patriot ministers; on the third, Tremble tyrant, thine hour is come. A man, his arms bared to the shoulders, bore a gibbet, from which hung the effigy of a crowned female, with the inscription, Beware the lantern. Farther on a group of hags raised a guillotine, with a card bearing the words, National Justice on tyrants; death for Veto and his wife. Amidst all this apparent disorder, a secret system of order was visible. Men in rags, yet whose white hands and shirts of the finest linen pointed them out as of superior rank, wore hats, on which signs of recognition were drawn with white chalk; the crowd regulated their march by them, and followed wherever they went.

The principal body thus marched by the Rue Saint Antoine, and the dark and central avenues of Paris, to the Rue Saint Honoré, the population of these quartiers swelling its numbers at each instant. The more this living torrent increased the more furious it became. Now a band of butchers joined it, each bearing a pike, on which was stuck the bleeding heart of a calf, with the words, Cœur d'aristocrate. Next came a band of Chiffoniers dressed in rags, and displaying a lance, from which floated a tattered garment, with the inscription, Tremble tyrants, here are the sans culottes. The insult which the aristocracy had cast at poverty, now, when adopted by the people, became the weapon of the nation against the rich.

This army defiled during three hours along the Rue Saint Honoré. Sometimes a terrible silence, only broken by the sound of thousands of feet on the pavement, oppressed the imagination, as the sign of concentrated rage of this multitude; then solitary voices, insulting speeches, and atrocious sarcasms, were mingled with the laughter of the crowd; then sudden and confused murmurs burst from this human sea, and rising to the roofs of the houses, left only the last syllables of their prolonged acclamations audible: Long live the nation! Long live the sans culottes! Down with the veto! This tumult reached the salle du Manège, where the Legislative Assembly was then sitting. The head of the cortège stopped at the doors, the columns inundated the court of the Feuillants, the court of the Manège, and all the openings of the salle. These courts, these avenues, these passages, which then masked the terrace of the garden, occupied the space which now extends between the garden of the Tuileries and the Rue Saint Honoré—that central artery of Paris. It was mid-day.

XIII.

Rœderer, the procureur syndic of the directory of the department, a post which in '92 corresponded with that of prefect de Paris, was at this moment at the bar of the Assembly. Rœderer, a partisan of the constitution, of the school of Mirabeau and Talleyrand, was a courageous enemy of anarchy. He found in the constitution the point of reconciliation between his fidelity to the people and his loyalty to the king; and he sought to defend this constitution with every weapon of the law which sedition had not broken in his grasp. "Armed mobs threaten to violate the constitution, the Chamber of Representatives, and the dwelling of the king," said Rœderer at the bar; "the reports of the night are alarming; the minister of the interior calls on us to march troops immediately to defend the château. The law forbids armed assemblies, and yet they advance—they demand admittance; but if you yourselves set an example by suffering them to enter, what will become of the force of the law in our hands? your indulgence will destroy all public force in the hands of the magistrates. We demand to be charged with the fulfilment of all our duties: let the responsibility also be ours, and let nothing diminish the obligation we are under of dying to preserve and defend public tranquillity." These words, worthy the chancellor L'Hôpital, or Mathieu Molé, were coldly listened to by the Assembly, and saluted by ironical laughter from the tribunes. Vergniaud affected to bow to them, and weakened their effect. "Yes, doubtless," said this orator, destined to be torn from the tribune, a year later, by an armed mob,—"Doubtless, we should have done better never to have received armed men, for if to-day patriotism brings good citizens hither, aristocracy may to-morrow bring its janissaries. But the error we have committed authorises that of the people. The Assembly, formed up to the present time, appears sanctioned by the silence of the law. It is true that the magistrates demand force to put them down: but what should you do in such circumstances? I think that it would be an excess of severity to be inflexible to a fault, the origin of which is in your decrees: it would be an insult to the citizens to imagine they had any evil designs. It is said that this Assembly wishes to present an address at the château: I do not believe that the citizens who compose it will demand to be presented with arms in their hands to the king: I think that they will obey the laws, and that they will go unarmed, and like simple petitioners. I demand that these citizens be instantly permitted, to defile before us." Dumolard and Raymond, indignant at the perfidy or the cowardice of these words, energetically opposed this weakness or complicity of the Assembly. "The best homage to pay the people of Paris," cried Raymond, "is to make them obey their own laws. I demand that before these citizens are introduced they lay down their arms." "Why," returned Guadet, "do you talk of disobedience to the law, when you have so often disobeyed it yourself? you would commit a revolting injustice; you would resemble that Roman emperor who, in order to find more guilty persons, caused the laws to be written in letters so obscure that no one could read them."

The deputation of the insurgents entered at these last words, amidst the bursts of applause and the indignant murmurs of the Assembly.