The gendarmes guarded her last hours, sat there in the cell with her, though republican modesty allowed the intervention of a screen.
It is known what a sublime dignity sustained her to the end; and indeed almost the worst was over when she had quitted Fouquier-Tinville's bar, after the "hideous indictment" and the condemnation. She withdrew to die, and she could die as became a Queen. Louis had gone before her, and all the mother's dying thoughts and prayers must have been for the children who were to live after her—how long, she knew not. She sat in the dingy cell, clasping her crucifix, waiting her call to the tumbril; "dim, dim, as if in disastrous eclipse; like the pale kingdoms of Dis!"
From this time on to the end of the Reign of Terror, the Conciergerie offered such a spectacle as was never seen before within the walls of any prison. The guillotine
"smoked with bloody execution."
The Revolution was eating not her enemies only but her children, and those victims and prospective victims, men and women, old and young, filled the cells of the Conciergerie, the chambers, the corridors, and the yards. They swarmed there in disorder, dirt, and disease, guarded and bullied by drunken turnkeys, who had a pack of savage dogs to assist them. They went out by batches in the tumbrils, to leave their heads in Samson's basket, and ever fresh parties of proscribed ones took the places of the dead. "I remained six months in the Conciergerie," says Nougaret, one of the historians of the period, "and saw there nobles, priests, merchants, bankers, men of letters, artisans, agriculturists, and honest sans-culottes." Often as this population was decimated, Fouquier-Tinville filled up the gap; and throughout the whole of the Terror the condemned and the untried proscribed ones, herded together, seldom had space enough for the common decencies of life.
Then some sort of classification was attempted, and three orders were established in the prison. The Pistoliers were those who could afford to pay for the privilege of sleeping two in a bed. The Pailleux lay huddled in parties, in dens or lairs, on piles of stale straw, "at the risk of being devoured by rats and vermin." Nougaret remarks that in some cells the prisoners on the floor at night had to protect their faces with their hands, and leave the rest of their persons to the rats. The Secrets were the third class of prisoners, who made what shift they could in black and reeking cells beneath the level of the Seine.
And the sick in the infirmary? Listen once more to Nougaret in his Histoire des Prisons de Paris et des Départemens:
"There were frightful fevers there, and you took your chance of catching them. The patients, lying in pairs in filthy beds, were in as wretched a plight as ever mortals found themselves in. The doctors hardly condescended to examine them. They had one or two potions which, as they said, were 'saddles for all horses,' and which they administered quite indiscriminately. It was curious to see with what an air of contempt they made their rounds. One day, the head doctor approached a bed and felt the patient's pulse. 'Ah,' said he to the hospital warder, 'the man's better than he was yesterday.' 'Yes, doctor, he's a good deal better,—but it's not the same man. Yesterday's patient is dead; this one has taken his place.' 'Really?' said the doctor, 'that makes the difference! Well, mix this fellow his draught.'"
When the prisoners were to be locked in for the night, there was always a great to-do in getting the roll called. Three or four tipsy turnkeys, with half-a-dozen dogs at their heels, passed from hand to hand an incorrect list, which none of them could read. A wrong name was spelled out, which no one answered to; the turnkeys swore in chorus, and spelled out another name. In the end, the prisoners had to come to the assistance of the guards and call their own roll. Then the numbers had to be told over and over again, and the prisoners to be marched in and marched out three or four times, before their muddled keepers could satisfy themselves that the count was correct.
One seeks to know what the feeding was like in the "ante-chamber of the guillotine." When, in the midst of the Terror, Paris was pinched with hunger, the pinch was felt severely in the Conciergerie. Rations ran desperately short, and a common table was instituted. The aristocrats had to pay scot for the penniless, and came in these strange circumstances to "estimate their fortunes by the number of sans-culottes whom they fed, as formerly they had done by the numbers of their horses, mistresses, dogs, and lackeys."