During the revolutionary period the number of prisoners shut up in the Conciergerie sometimes rose to 1,200. At the time of the September massacre this prison was the scene of a horrible slaughter. According to documents of indisputable exactness, close on three hundred persons fell, at the Conciergerie, beneath the weapons of the agents of popular vengeance. The “Septembrisseurs,” however, spared all the women, with one exception. A poor wretch, known as the “pretty flower-girl” of the Palais Royal, had, in a moment of furious jealousy, mutilated a French guard, her lover; and she was now put to death with unheard-of cruelty. According to Pelletier’s account she was attached to a stake, naked, her feet nailed to the ground, her breasts were cut off with blows from a sabre, and various other atrocious tortures inflicted upon her before she expired.
INTERIOR OF LA SANTÉ.
Whilst the Revolutionary tribunal was accomplishing its bloody work, the Conciergerie served, so to say, as the antechamber to the scaffold. Most of the proscribed were shut up in this prison, whence they issued only to mount the fatal cart which was to convey them to their slaughter. At this period, the chambers being too small, prisoners were huddled together, to the number of fifty, in a space of twenty feet square, without distinction of social position, age, or sex. Big dogs, let loose at night in the[{136}] courtyards, completed the system of surveillance; these were the most dreaded gaolers of all. At a time when famine threatened the capital, the prisoners’ rations were reduced. Soon a regulation was made that all meals should be taken in common, at a cost of two francs a head, and that the rich and aristocratic prisoners should pay for the rest. “Drolly enough,” says Mercier, “the estimation in which these gentlemen were held depended on the number of ragged wretches they fed, just as it formerly did in the world on the number of their horses, their mistresses, their dogs, and their lackeys.” Despite the horror of their situation, the prisoners of the Conciergerie preserved the frivolous and licentious habits of the epicurean society of the eighteenth century. They threw away the last hours of their lives on games of all kinds, or on amorous intrigues; they laughed at everything—even the guillotine. Royalists, aristocrats, and popular leaders were carried to the Conciergerie by the flux or reflux of the Revolution, and they lived together in a fatal state of indifference, disdaining to dispute their head with the executioner. Few took the trouble even to curse their judges; many died singing a song. It was in the midst of this general intrepidity that Beauharnais, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Queen Marie Antoinette, Madame Elizabeth, her sister, and a host of other less distinguished victims, passed from the Conciergerie to the scaffold. In this same prison, at a later date, Robespierre and his partisans awaited the hour of their execution. Under the Restoration the chamber in which Marie Antoinette was confined was turned into a chapel; the pavement alone remaining as it was in 1794. Since the Reign of Terror the Conciergerie has received many prisoners who have become historical, with Louvel among them, the assassin of the Duke of Berri.
THE GAOLERS’ MESS-ROOM, LA SANTÉ.
The torture which many of the wretched prisoners underwent was inflicted for the most part in the famous Bombec Tower, beneath which existed what were called oubliettes, or dungeons in which prisoners were subjected to diabolical cruelty. These dungeons bristled everywhere with sharp sword-blades; they were inhabited by rats and loathsome reptiles; and the wretch who was thrown into them found, amidst other horrors, that the waters of the Seine crept in upon him as the tide rose. One of the cells of this tower, into which no light could penetrate, had been occupied by Ravaillac.
In modern times the Conciergerie has been[{137}] rendered habitable. The dark and humid cells constructed at the foot of the towers have been either filled up or suppressed. Already some years ago it was boasted that, with one exception, the Conciergerie contained no dungeon into which the light of day could not steal.