4117 ([return])
[ Testimony of Representative Blanqui, imprisoned at La Force, and of Representative Beaulieu, imprisoned in the Luxembourg and at the Madelonettes.—Beaulieu, "Essais," V., 290: "The conciergerie was still full of wretches held for robbery and assassination, poverty-stricken and repulsive.—It was with these that counts, marquises, voluptuous financiers, elegant dandies, and more than one wretched philosopher, were shut up, pell-mell, in the foulest cells, waiting until the guillotine could make room in the chambers filled with camp-bedsteads. They were generally put with those on the straw, on entering, where they sometimes remained a fortnight... It was necessary to drink brandy with these persons; in the evening, after having dropped their excrement near their straw, they went to sleep in their filth.... I passed those three nights half-sitting, half-stretched out on a bench, one leg on the ground and leaning against the wall."—Wallon, "La Terreur," II., 87. (Report of Grandpré on the Conciergerie, March 17, 1793. "Twenty-six men collected into one room, sleeping on twenty-one mattresses, breathing the foulest air and covered with half-rotten rags." In another room forty-five men and ten straw-beds; in a third, thirty-nine poor creatures dying in nine bunks; in three other rooms, eighty miserable creatures on sixteen mattresses filled with vermin, and, as to the women, fifty-four having nine mattresses and standing up alternately.—The worst prisons in Paris were the Conciergerie, La Force, Le Plessis and Bicêtre.—"Tableau des Prisons de Toulouse," p. 316. "Dying with hunger, we contended with the dogs for the bones intended for them, and we pounded them up to make soup with.">[
4118 ([return])
[ "Recueil de Pièces, etc.," i., p.3. (Letter of Frédéric Burger, Prairial 2, year II.)]
4119 ([return])
[ Alfred Lallier, "Les Noyades de Nantes," p. 90.—Campardon, "Histoire de Tribunal Révolutionnaire de Paris," (trial of Carrier), II., 55. (Deposition of the health-officer, Thomas.) "I saw perish in the revolutionary hospital (at Nantes) seventy-five prisoners in two days. None but rotten mattresses were found there, on each of which the epidemic had consumed more than fifty persons. At the Entrepot, I found a number of corpses scattered about here and there. I saw children, still breathing, drowned in tubs full of human excrement.">[
4120 ([return])
[ Narrative of the sufferings of unsworn priests, deported in 1794, in the roadstead of Aix, passim.]
4121 ([return])
[ "Histoire des Prisons," I., 10. "Go and visit," says a contemporary, (at the Conciergerie), "the dungeons called 'the great Cæsar,' 'Bombie,' 'St. Vincent.' 'Bel Air,' etc., and say whether death is not preferable to such an abode." Some persons, indeed, the sooner to end the matter, wrote to the public prosecutor, accusing themselves, demanding a king and priests, and are at once guillotined, as they hoped to be.—Cf. the narrative of "La Translation des 132 à Nantois Paris," and Riouffe, "Mémoires," on the sufferings of prisoners on their way to their last prison.]