This superstition and fanaticism so strong in the populace now and then burst forth in untamable fury and riot. So that when, on the sixteenth of December 1792, the gay morning was suddenly overcast, and a black curtain was drawn over the bright sun, the people of Jersey, working in the fields, vraicking among the rocks, or knitting in their doorways, stood aghast, and knew not what was upon them.
Some began to say the Lord’s Prayer, some in superstitious terror ran to the secret hole in the wall, to the chimney, or to the bedstead, or dug up the earthen floor, to find the stocking full of notes and gold, which might, perchance, come with them safe through any cataclysm, or start them again in business in another world. Some began fearfully to sing hymns, and a few to swear freely. These latter were chiefly carters, whose salutations to each other were mainly oaths, because of the extreme narrowness of the island roads, and sailors to whom profanity was as daily bread.
In St. Heliers, after the first stupefaction, people poured into the streets. They gathered most where met the Rue d’Driere and the Rue d’Egypte. Here stood the old prison, and the spot was called the Place du Vier Prison.
Men and women with breakfast still in their mouths mumbled their terror to each other. A lobster-woman shrieking that the Day of Judgment was come, instinctively straightened her cap, smoothed out her dress of molleton, and put on her sabots. A carpenter, hearing her terrified exclamations, put on his sabots also, stooped whimpering to the stream running from the Rue d’Egypte, and began to wash his face. A dozen of his neighbours did the same. Some of the women, however, went on knitting hard, as they gabbled prayers and looked at the fast-blackening sun. Knitting was to Jersey women, like breathing or tale-bearing, life itself. With their eyes closing upon earth they would have gone on knitting and dropped no stitches.
A dusk came down like that over Pompeii and Herculaneum. The tragedy of fear went hand in hand with burlesque commonplace. The grey stone walls of the houses grew darker and darker, and seemed to close in on the dumfounded, hysterical crowd. Here some one was shouting command to imaginary militia; there an aged crone was offering, without price, simnels and black butter, as a sort of propitiation for an imperfect past; and from a window a notorious evil-liver was frenziedly crying that she had heard the devil and his Rocbert witches revelling in the prison dungeons the night before. Thereupon a long-haired fanatic, once a barber, with a gift for mad preaching, sprang upon the Pompe des Brigands, and declaring that the Last Day was come, shrieked:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me! He hath sent me to proclaim
liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that
are bound!”
Some one thrust into his hand a torch. He waved it to and fro in his wild harangue; he threw up his arms towards the ominous gloom, and with blatant fury ordered open the prison doors. Other torches and candles appeared, and the mob trembled to and fro in delirium.
“The prison! Open the Vier Prison! Break down the doors! Gatd’en’ale—drive out the devils! Free the prisoners—the poor vauriens!” the crowd shouted, rushing forward with sticks and weapons.
The prison arched the street as Temple Bar once spanned the Strand. They crowded under the archway, overpowered the terror-stricken jailer, and, battering open the door in frenzy, called the inmates forth.
They looked to see issue some sailor seized for whistling of a Sabbath, some profane peasant who had presumed to wear pattens in church, some profaner peasant who had not doffed his hat to the Connetable, or some slip-shod militiaman who had gone to parade in his sabots, thereby offending the red-robed dignity of the Royal Court.