longed for liberating death.
Their attitude, which inspired foreign journals with admiration,[226] exasperated the Versaillese ferocity. "In seeing the convoys of insurgent women," said the Figaro, "one feels in spite of oneself a kind of pity; but one is reassured by thinking that all the brothels of the capital have been thrown open by the National Guards, who patronised them, and that the majority of these ladies were inhabitants of these establishments."
Panting, covered with filth, idiotic with fatigue, hunger, and thirst, burnt by the sun, the convoys dragged themselves along for hours in the overheated dust of the roads, harassed by the cries, the blows from the mounted chasseurs. The Prussians had not thus cruelly treated these soldiers when, prisoners themselves some months before, they had been led away from Sedan or Metz. The captives who fell were sometimes shot, sometimes they were only thrown into the carts that followed.
At the entry into Versailles the crowd awaited them, always the élite of French society, deputies, functionaries, priests, officers, women of all sorts. The fury of the 4th April and the preceding convoys were as much surpassed as the sea swells at the equinoctial tide. The Avenues de Paris and De St. Cloud were lined by savages, who followed the convoys with vociferations, blows, covered them with filth and broken pieces of bottle. "One sees," said the Liberal-Conservative newspaper, the Siècle, of the 30th May, "women, not prostitutes, but elegant ladies, insult the prisoners on their passage, and even strike them with their sunshades." Woe to whoever did not insult the vanquished! Woe to him who allowed a movement of commiseration to escape him! He was at once seized, led to the post,[227] or else simply forced into the convoy. Frightful retrogradation of human nature, all the more hideous that it contrasted with the elegance of the costume! Prussian officers came from St. Denis once more to see what governing classes they had had to oppose them.
The first convoys were promenaded about as a spectacle in the streets of Versailles; others were stationed for hours at the torrid Place d'Armes, a few steps from the large trees, whose shade was refused them. The prisoners were then distributed in four depots, the cellars of the Grandes-Ecuries, the Orangerie of the castle, the docks of Satory, and the manèges of the Ecole de St. Cyr. Into these damp, nauseous cellars, where light and air only penetrated by some narrow openings, men, children, of whom some were not more than ten years old, were crowded without straw during the first days. When they did get some, it was soon reduced to mere dung. No water to wash with; no means of changing their rags, as the relations who brought linen were brutally sent back. Twice a day, in a trough, they got a yellowish liquid, a porridge. The gendarmes sold tobacco at exorbitant prices, and confiscated it in order to sell it over again. There were no doctors. Gangrene attacked the wounded; ophthalmia broke out; deliriousness became chronic. In the night were heard the shrieks of the fever-stricken and the mad. Opposite, the gendarmes remained impassive, their guns loaded.
Even these horrors were outdone by the Fosse-aux-Lions, a vault without air, absolutely dark, the antechamber of the tomb, under the large red marble staircase of the terrace. Whoever was noted as dangerous, or whoever had simply displeased the corporal, was thrown into it. The most robust could only bear up against it a few days. On leaving it, giddy, the mind a blank, dazzled by the broad daylight, they swooned. Happy he who met the look of his wife. The wives of the captives pressed against the outer rails of the Orangerie, striving to distinguish some one amidst the dimly seen herd. They tore their hair, implored the gendarmes, who thrust them back, struck them, called them infamous names.
The hell of open daylight was the docks of the plateau of Satory, a vast parallelogram enclosed by walls. The soil is clayey, and the least rain soaks it. The first arrivals were placed within the buildings, which could contain about thirteen hundred persons, the others remained outside, bareheaded, for their hats had been knocked off at Paris or at Versailles. The gendarmes were on duty, being more reliable, more hardened than the soldiers.
On the Thursday evening at eight o'clock a convoy, composed chiefly of women, arrived at the dock. "Many of us," one of them has reported to me, the wife of a chef-de-légion, "had died on the way; we had had nothing since morning.
"It was still daylight. We saw a great multitude of prisoners. The women were apart in a hut at the entrance. We joined them.
"We were told that there was a pond, and, dying of thirst, we rushed thither. The first who drank uttered a loud cry, vomited. 'Oh, the wretches! they make us drink the blood of our own people.' For since evening the wounded went there to bathe their wounds; but thirst tormented us so cruelly, that some had the courage to rinse out their mouths with this bloody water.