"La Guillotine," having proved the sharpness of her tooth, was speedily promoted from Place de Grève to a larger stage in Place de la Réunion, now Place du Carrousel, and thence in May, 1793—that she might not be under the windows of the Convention—to Place de la Révolution, formerly Place de Louis XV., at present Place de la Concorde. This wide space, just beyond the moat of the Tuileries gardens, had in its centre, where now is the obelisk of Luxor, a statue of the late "well-beloved," then altogether-detested, King for whom the place had been named; and a little to the east of that point the scaffold was set up. Lamartine puts it on the site of the southern fountain, for the effect he gets of the flowing of water and of blood; this is one of his magniloquent phrases, which scorn exactness. On January 21, 1793, for the execution of Louis XVI., the guillotine was removed to a spot just westward of the centre, that it might be well protected by the troops deploying about the western side of the place, and into the Champs Élysées and Cours la Reine. For a while in 1794, the guillotine was transferred to the present Place de la Nation—where we shall find it in a later chapter—to come back to Place de la Révolution in time to greet Robespierre and his friends.
Standing here, we are near the other centre of Revolutionary Paris, made so by the Club of the Jacobins, that met first in the refectory, later in the church of the monastery from which it took its name. The site of these buildings is covered by the little Marché Saint-Honoré and by the space about. The club of the more moderate men, headed by Bailly and Lafayette, had its quarters in the monastery of the Feuillants, which gave its name to the club, and which extended along the south side of Rue Saint-Honoré, eastwardly from Rue de Castiglione; this street being then the narrow Passage des Feuillants, leading from Rue Saint-Honoré to the royal gardens, and to the much-trodden Terrasse on the northern side of those gardens facing the Manège. This building had been erected for the equestrian education of the youth who afterward became Louis XV., and was converted into a hall for the sitting of the Assembly, after that body had been crowded for about three weeks, on coming to Paris from Versailles, into the inadequate hall of the Archbishop's palace, on the southern shore of the City Island, alongside Notre-Dame. The Convention took over the Manège from the Assembly, and there remained until May, 1793, when it removed to the more commodious quarters, and more befitting surroundings, of the Tuileries. The old riding-school, whose site is marked by a tablet on the railing of the garden opposite No. 230 Rue de Rivoli, was swept away by the cutting of the western end of that street, under the Consulate in 1802.
When Maximilien Robespierre came up from Arras—where he had resigned his functions in the Criminal Court, because of his conscientious objections to capital punishment—he found squalid quarters, suiting his purse—which remained empty all through life—in Rue Saintonge. That street, named for a province of old France, remains almost as he saw it, one of the few Paris streets that retain their original buildings and ancient atmosphere. The high and sombre house, wherein he lodged from October, 1789, to July, 1791, is quite unaltered, save for its number, which was then 8 and is now 64. From here, Robespierre was snatched away, suddenly and without premeditation on his part, and planted in the bosom of the Duplay family. They had worshipped him from afar, and when, from their windows, they saw him surrounded by the acclaiming crowd, on the day after the so-called massacres of the Champ-de-Mars of July 17, 1791, the peaceful carpenter ran out and dragged the shrinking great man into his court-yard for temporary shelter. The house was then No. 366 Rue Saint-Honoré. If any reader wishes to decide for himself whether the modern No. 398 is built on the site of the Duplay house, of which no stone is left, as M. Ernest Hamel asserts; or whether the present tall structure there is an elevation on the walls of the old house, every stone of which is left, as M. Sardou insists; he must study the pamphlets issued by these earnest and erudite controversialists. There is nothing more delightful in topographical sparring. The authors of this book can give no aid to the solicitous student; for they have read all that has been written concerning the subject, they have explored the house, and they have settled in silence in the opposing camps!
In the Duplay household, to which he brought misery then and afterward, Robespierre was worshipped during life and deified after death. To that misguided family, "this cat's head, with the prominent cheekbones, seamed by small-pox; his bilious complexion; his green eyes rimmed with red, behind blue spectacles; his harsh voice; his dry, pedantic, snappish, imperious language; his disdainful carriage; his convulsive gestures—all this was effaced, recast, and transformed into the gentle figure of an apostle and a martyr to his faith for the salvation of men." From their house, it was but a step to the sittings of the Assembly. It was but a few steps farther to the garden of the Tuileries and to the "fête de l'Être Suprême," planned by him, when he had induced the Convention to decree the existence of God and of an immortal soul in man. He cast himself for the rôle of High Priest of Heaven, and headed the procession on June 8, 1794, clad in a blue velvet coat, a white waistcoat, yellow breeches and top-boots; carrying in his hand flowers and wheat-ears. He addressed the crowd, in "the scraggiest prophetic discourse ever uttered by man," and they had games, and burned in effigy Atheism and Selfishness and Vice! Such of the stage-setting of this farce as was constructed in stone remains intact to-day, for our wonder at such childishness, and our admiration of the architectural perfection of the out-of-door arena.
From this Duplay house, Robespierre used to go on his solitary strolls, accompanied only by his dogs, in the woods of Monceaux and Montmorenci, where he picked wild-flowers. From this house he went to his last appearance in the Convention on the 9 Thermidor, and past it he was carted to the scaffold, on the following day, July 28, 1794. He had followed Danton within a few months, as Danton had predicted. They were of the same age at the time of their death, each having thirty-five years; the younger Robespierre was thirty-two, Saint-Just was twenty-six, Desmoulins thirty-four, when their heads fell. Mirabeau died at the age of forty-two, Marat was forty-nine when stabbed. Not one of the conspicuous leaders of the Revolution and of the Terror had come to fifty years!
The Carré d'Atalante in the Tuileries Gardens.
When the tumbrils and their burdens did not go along the quays to Place de la Révolution, they went through Rue Saint-Honoré, that being the only thoroughfare on that side of the river. From the Conciergerie they crossed Pont au Change, and made their way by narrow and devious turnings to the eastern end of Rue Saint-Honoré, and through its length to Rue du Chemin-du-Rempart—now Rue Royale—and so to the scaffold. Short Rue Saint-Florentin was then Rue de l'Orangerie, and was crowded by sightseers hurrying to the place. Those of the victims not already confined in the Conciergerie were sent to the condemned cells there, for the night between sentence and execution. The trustworthy history of the prisons of Paris during the Revolution remains to be written, and there is wealth of material for it. There were many smaller prisons not commonly known, and of the larger ones that we do know, there are several, quite unchanged to-day, well worth unofficial inspection. The Salpêtrière, filling a vast space south of the Jardin des Plantes, was built for the manufacture of saltpetre, by Louis XIII.; and, by his son, was converted into a branch, for women, of the General Hospital. A portion of its buildings was set apart for young women of bad character, and here Manon Lescaut was imprisoned. The great establishment is now known as the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, and is famous for its treatment of women afflicted with nervous maladies, and with insanity. The present Hospice de la Maternité was also perverted to prison usages during the Revolution. Its formal cloisters and steep tiled roofs cluster about its old-time square, but its ancient gardens, and their great trees, are almost all buried beneath new masonry. The façade of the chapel, the work of Lepautre, is no longer used as the entrance, and may be seen over the wall on Boulevard de Port-Royal. Another prison was that of Saint-Lazare, first a lazar-house and then a convent, whose weather-worn roofs and dormers show above the wall on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. On the dingy yellow plaster of the arched entrance-gate one may read, in thick black letters: "Maison d'Arrêt et de Correction." Unaltered, too, is the prison in the grounds of the Carmelites, to be visited later in company with Dumas; and the Luxembourg, that was reserved for choice captives. The prison of the Abbey of Saint-Germain was swept away by the boulevard of that name. Its main entrance for wheeled vehicles was through Rue Sainte-Marguerite, the short section left of that street being now named Gozlin. Of the other buildings of the abbey, there remain only the church itself, the bishop's palace behind in Rue de l'Abbaye, and the presbytery glued to the southern side of the church-porch. Its windows saw the massacres of the priests and the prisoners, which took place on the steps of the church and in its front court. When you walk from those steps across the open place, to take the tram for Fontenay-aux-Roses, you step above soil that was soaked with blood in the early days of September, 1792. Some few of the abbey prisoners were slaughtered in the garden, of which a portion remains on the south side of the church, where the statue of Bernard Palissy, by Barrias, stands now. In other chapters, the destruction of the Grand- and the Petit-Châtelet has been noted. La Force has gone, and Sainte-Pélagie is soon to go. And the Conciergerie has been altered, almost beyond recognition, as to its entrances and its courts and its cells. Only the Cour des Femmes remains at all as it was in those days.
There are three victims of the Terror who have had the unstinted pity of later generations, and who have happily left traces of their presence on Paris brick and mortar. The last of these three to die was André-Marie de Chénier, and we will go first to his dwelling. It is an oddly shaped house, No. 97 Rue de Cléry—Corneille's street for many years—at its junction with Rue Beauregard; and a tablet in its wall tells of de Chénier's residence there. Born in Constantinople in 1762, of a French father—a man of genius in mercantile affairs—and a Greek mother, the boy was brought to Paris with his younger brother, Joseph-Marie, in 1767. They lived with their mother in various streets in the Marais, before settling in this final home. Here Madame de Chénier, a poet and artist in spirit, filled the rooms with the poets and artists and savants of the time, the friends of her gifted sons. Hither came David, gross of body, his active mind busied with schemes for his annual exhibitions of paintings, the continuation of those begun by Colbert, and the progenitor of the present Salons; Alfieri, the poet and splendid adventurer; Lavoisier, absorbed in chemical discovery. Here in his earlier years, and later, when he hurried home from the French Embassy in London on the outbreak of the Revolution, André de Chénier produced the verse that revived the love of nature, dead in France since Ronsard, and brought a lyric freshness to poetry that shamed the dry artificialities so long in vogue. That poetry was the forerunner of the Romantic movement. In his tranquil soul, he hoped for the pacific triumph of liberty and equality, and his delicate spirit abhorred the excesses of the party with whose principles he sympathized. He was taken into custody at Passy, early in 1794, while visiting a lady, against whose arrest he had struggled, locked up in Saint-Lazare for months, convicted, and sent to the Conciergerie. He was guillotined in Place de la Nation on July 26, 1794, only the day before Robespierre's fall, and was one of the last and noblest sacrifices to the Terror. We shall look on his burial-place in our later rambles. Müller has made André de Chénier the central figure of his "Roll-Call," now in the Louvre. He sits looking toward us with eyes that see visions, and his expression seems full of the thought to which he gave utterance when led out to execution: "I have done nothing for posterity, and yet," tapping his forehead, "I had something here!"