Prisoners in the rue de Sévres and the "Croix-Rouge"
revolutionary committee.—The young Dauphin and Simon his
preceptor.—Judges, and those under their jurisdiction.
—Trenchard and Coffinhal, Lavoisier and André Chénier.
Here we have, on one side, the élite of France, almost every person of rank, fortune, family, and merit, those eminent for intelligence, culture, talent and virtue, all deprived of common rights, in exile, in prison, under pikes, and on the scaffold. On the other side, those above common law, possessing every office and omnipotent in the irresponsible dictatorship, in the despotic proconsulships, in the sovereignty of justice, a horde of the outcasts of all classes, the parvenus of fanaticism, charlatanism, imbecility and crime. Often, when these personalities meet, one sees the contrast between the governed and the governors in such strong relief that one almost regards it as calculated and arranged beforehand; the colors and brush of the painter, rather than words, are necessary to represent it. In the western section of Paris, in the prisons of the rue de Sévres[41151] the prisoners consist of the most distinguished personages of the Quartier Saint Germain, prelates, officers, grand-seigniors, and noble ladies,—Monseigneur de Clermont-Tonnerre, Monseigneur de Crussol d'Amboise, Monseigneur de Hersaint, Monseigneur de Saint Simon, bishop of Agde, the Comtesse de Narbonne-Pelet, the Duchesse de Choiseul, the Princesse de Chimay, the Comtesse de Raymond-Narbonne and her daughter, two years of age, in short, the flower of that refined society which Europe admired and imitated and which, in its exquisite perfection, equalled or surpassed all that Greece, Rome and Italy had produced in brilliancy, polish and amiability. Contrast with these the arbiters of their lives and deaths, the potentates of the same quarter who issue the warrants of arrest against them, who pen them in to speculate on them, and who revel at their expense and before their eyes: these consist of the members of the revolutionary committee of the Croix-Rouge, the eighteen convicted rogues and debauchees previously described,[41152] ex-cab-drivers, porters, cobblers, street-messengers, stevedores, bankrupts, counterfeiters, former or future jail-birds, all clients of the police or alms-house riff-raff.—At the other end of Paris, in the east, in the tower of the Temple, separated from his sister and torn from his mother, still lives the little Dauphin: no one in France merits more pity or respect than him. For, if France exists, it is owing to the thirty-five military chiefs and crowned kings of which he is the last direct scion; without their thousand years of hereditary rule and preserving policy the intruders into the Tuileries who have just profaned their tombs at St. Denis and thrown their bones into a common ditch,[41153] would not be Frenchmen. At this moment, were suffrages free, the immense majority of the people, nineteen Frenchmen out of twenty, would recognize this innocent and precious child for their King, the heir of the people of which their nation and country is formed, a child of eight years, of rare precociousness, as intelligent as he is good, and of a gentle and winning expression. Look at the other figure alongside of him, his fist raised and with insults on his lips, with a hang-dog face, bloated with brandy, titular governor, official preceptor, and absolute master of this child, the cobbler Simon, malignant, foul-mouthed, mean in every way, forcing him to become intoxicated, starving him, preventing him from sleeping, thrashing him, and who, obeying orders, instinctively visits on him all his brutality and corruption that he may pervert, degrade and deprave him.[41154]—In the Palais de Justice, midway between the tower of the Temple and the prison in the rue de Sèvres, an almost similar contrast, transposing the merits and demerits, daily brings together in opposition the innocent with the vile. There are days when the contrast, still more striking, seats criminals on the judges' bench and judges on the bench of criminals. On the first and second of Floréal, the old representatives and trustees of liberty under the monarchy, twenty-five magistrates of the Paris and Toulouse parliaments, many of them being eminent intellects of the highest culture and noblest character, embracing the greatest historical names of the French magistracy,—Etienne Pasquier, Lefèvre d'Ormesson, Molé de Champlatreux, De Lamoignon, de Malesherbes,—are sent to the guillotine[41155] by the judges and juries familiar to us, assassins or brutes who do not take the trouble, or who have not the capacity, to give proper color to their sentences. M. de Malesherbes exclaims, after reading his indictment, "If that were only common-sense!"—In effect those who pronounce judgment are, by their own admission, "substantial jurymen, good sans-culottes, natural people." And such a nature! One of these, Trenchard, an Auvergnat carpenter, portrays himself accurately in the following note addressed to his wife before the trial comes on:
"If you are not alone, and the companion can work, you may come, my dear, and see the twenty-four gentlemen condemned, all of them former presidents or councillors in the parliaments of Toulouse and Paris. I recommend you to bring something along with you (to eat), it will be three hours before we finish. I embrace you, my dear friend and wife."[41156]
In the same court, Lavoisier, the founder and organizer of chemistry, the great discoverer, and condemned to death, asks for a reprieve of his sentence for a fortnight to complete an experiment, and the president, Coffinhal, another Auvergnat, replies,
"The Republic has no need of savants."[41157]
And it has no need of poets. The first poet of the epoch, André Chénier, the delicate and superior artist who reopens antique sources of inspiration and starts the modern current, is guillotined; we possess the original manuscript indictment of his examination, a veritable master-piece of gibberish and barbarism, of which a full copy is necessary to convey an idea of its "turpitudes of sense and orthography."[41158] The reader may there see, if he pleases, a man of genius delivered up to brutes, coarse, angry, despotic animals, who listen to nothing, who comprehend nothing, who do not even understand terms in common use, who stumble through their queries, and who, to ape intelligence, draggle their pens along in supreme stupidity.
The overthrow is complete. France, subject to the Revolutionary Government, resembles a human being forced to walk with his head down and to think with his feet.
4101 ([return])
[ Cf. "The Revolution," book I., ch. 3, and book III., chs. 9 and 10.]