“Exterminez, grandes Dieux, de la terre ou nous sommes
Quiconque avec plaisir repand le sang des hommes,”—
and historians and romancists have made profuse use of the recollections which hang about its grim walls.
To-day it stands for much that it formerly represented, but without the terrible inquisitorial methods. In fact, in the Palais de Justice, which now entirely surrounds all but the turreted façade of tourelles, which fronts the Quai de l’Horloge, has so tempered its mercies that within the past year it has taken down that wonderful crucifix and triptych, so that those who may finally call upon the court of last appeal may not be unduly or superstitiously affected.
The Place de la Grève opposite was famous for something more than its commercial reputation, as readers of the Valois romances of Dumas, and of Hugo’s “Dernier Jour d’un Condamné” will recall. It was a veritable Gehenna, a sort of Tower Hill, where a series of events as dark and bloody as those of any spot in Europe held forth, from 1310, when a poor unfortunate, Marguerite Porette, was burned as a heretic, until 1830,—well within the scope of this book,—when the headsmen, stakesmen, and hangmen, who had plied their trade here for five centuries, were abolished in favour of a less public barrière on the outskirts, or else the platform of the prison near the Cimetière du Père la Chaise.
It was in 1830 that a low thief and murderer, Lacenaire, who was brought to the scaffold for his crimes, published in one of the Parisian papers some verses which were intended to extract sympathy for him as un homme de lettres. In reality they were the work of a barrister, Lemarquier by name, and failed utterly of their purpose, though their graphic lines might well have evoked sympathy, had the hoax carried:
“Slow wanes the long night, when the criminal wakes;
And he curses the morn that his slumber breaks;
For he dream’d of other days.
“His eyes he may close,—but the cold icy touch
Of a frozen hand, and a corpse on his couch,
Still comes to wither his soul.
“And the headsman’s voice, and hammer’d blows
Of nails that the jointed gibbet close,
And the solemn chant of the dead!”
La Conciergerie was perhaps one of the greatest show-places of the city for the morbidly inclined, and permission à visiter was at that time granted avec toutes facilités, being something more than is allowed to-day.
The associations connected with this doleful building are great indeed, as all histories of France and the guide-books tell. It was in the chapel of this edifice that the victims of the Terror foregathered, to hear the names read out for execution, till all should have been made away.
Müller’s painting in the Louvre depicts, with singular graphicness, this dreadful place of detention, where princes and princesses, counts, marquises, bishops, and all ranks were herded amid an excruciating agony.
In “The Queen’s Necklace” we read of the Conciergerie—as we do of the Bastille. When that gang of conspirators, headed by Madame de la Motte,—Jeanne de St. Remy de Valois,—appeared for trial, they were brought from the Bastille to the Conciergerie.