The nine steps that put it on a level with the Cour du Mai were mounted by all the condemned victims of the Revolution. The Queen and Charlotte Corday, Madame Elizabeth and Hubért's widow, the virtuous Bailly and Madame du Bailly, Fouquier-Tinville and Monsieur de Malesherbes, Danton, Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins, the Abbess of Montmartre, Madame de Monaco and Anacharsis Clootz: princesses and Conventional, dukes and Hébertists, generals of the Republic and "Fouquiers sheep," the noblest, purest, bravest, the maddest and most miserable crossed this fateful threshold.
Sanson, with his death-lists in hand, waited at the top of the staircase, in front of the carts.
OPENING UP OF THE SPACE IN FRONT OF THE PALAIS DE JUSTICE
Meunier, pinxit
The guillotine "tricoteuses" and criers thronged the top-steps of the Palace and leaned forward, with shouts and abuse, and often with hand that cast filth, over the unhappy prisoners. The melancholy toilet of the condemned had been effected in the rotunda where the concierge had his quarters, near the small whitewashed room in which the clerk registered the arrival of the newcomers, and to which Sanson came to give his receipt for the successive deliveries of those that he conveyed to execution.
The clerk's arm-chair, and his table laden with registers, took up about half of the narrow room. Sorts of desks placed along the wall sufficed to receive the things which prisoners left behind, their sad relics, the hair that had been cut off. A wooden railing separated the clerk's office, properly so called, from a back portion of it, where these prisoners spent the weary hours that intervened before the fatal summons, so that those entering could talk with them. Fierce dogs came smelling round to recognise a master, mistress, or acquaintance, and friends or relatives could try to obtain from the gaoler's pity bits of news concerning dear ones still shut up in the dark prison.
"On the day of my arrival," wrote Beugnot in his Memoirs, "two men were waiting for the coming of the headsman. They were stripped of their garments, and already had their hair thinned out and their neck prepared. Their features were not changed. Either by accident or with design, they held their hands in the position ready to be tied, and were essaying attitudes of firmness and disdain. Mattresses down on the floor revealed that they had spent their night in the place, had already undergone this long punishment. By their side, were seen the remains of the meal they had eaten. Their clothes were flung here and there; and two candles that they had forgotten to extinguish cast back the daylight and seemed to be the sole funereal illumination of the scene."
In the hundreds of "Prison Souvenirs" which were published immediately after the fall of Robespierre, one may gain an idea of what sort of existence prisoners led, deprived of every necessity, devoured by vermin, brutally treated by drunken or cruel keepers; and one should see the gloomy courtyard where they came to get a breath of fresh air, a narrow triangular space of ground between the walls of the prison and the women's yard. This arrangement had one compensation; a simple iron railing separated the two enclosures, so that friends could exchange looks and language, and even the last kiss and embrace.