All histories, memoirs, chronicles, and legends are agreed that the Conciergerie of the Revolution was a frightful place. The political prisoners endured all the horrors, physical and mental, of an unparalleled régime. Sick and unattended, hungry and barely fed, cold and left to shiver in dark and naked cells—these were amongst the ills of the body. But greater by far than these must have been the pangs of the mind.
Nearly all of these prisoners, men and women both, regarded death as a certainty; before ever they were tried, from the moment that the outer door of the prison had closed behind them, the guillotine was as good as promised to them. They had no help to count on from without, they had not even the animating hope of a fair hearing by an upright judge. The judgment bar of Fouquier-Tinville did not pretend to be impartial.
Nevertheless, though the blade of the guillotine was suspended over all heads, and fell daily upon many, an air of mingled serenity and exaltation reigned throughout the gaol. There were few tears, and there was no weak repining. Morning and evening, the political prisoners chanted in chorus the hymns of the Revolution, and these were varied by witty verses on the guillotine, composed in some instances by prisoners on the eve of passing beneath the knife. Some had brought in with them their favourite books, and reading led to long discussions, of which literature, science, religion, and politics were alternately the themes. Devoted priests like the Abbé Emory went about making converts, and opposing their efforts to those of the militant atheist, Anacharsis Clootz, who styled himself the "personal enemy of Jesus Christ." For recreation, old games were played and new ones invented. Imagine a crowd of prisoners of both sexes, living in daily expectation of the scaffold, who played for hours together at the guillotine! A hall of the prison was transformed into Tinville's tribunal, a Tinville was placed on the bench who could parody the voice and manner of the terrible original, the prisoner was arraigned, there were eloquent counsel on both sides, and witnesses; and when the trial was finished, and the inevitable sentence had been pronounced, the guillotine of chairs and laths was set up, and amid a tumult of applause the wooden blade was loosed and the victim rolled into the basket. Sometimes the game was interrupted, and there was a general rush to the window to catch the voice of the crier in the street,—"Here's the list of the brigands who have won to-day at the lottery of the blessed guillotine!"
Famous figures, and a few sublime ones, detach themselves from the groups: a Duc d'Orléans, a Duc de Lauzun, a General Beauharnais (who writes to his wife Josephine that letter of farewell which she shewed to Bonaparte at her first interview with him), Charlotte Corday, the great chemist Lavoisier (on whose death Lagrange exclaimed, "It took but a moment to sever that head, and a hundred years will not produce one like it"), Danton the Titan of the Revolution, Camille Desmoulins, and Robespierre himself.
One evening, a few days after the death of Marie Antoinette, the twenty-two Girondins, condemned to die in twenty-four hours, passed into the keeping of Concierge Richard. These were some of the most heroic men of the Revolution, "the once flower of French patriotism," Carlyle calls them; tribunes, prelates, men of war, men of ancient and noble stock, poets, lawyers. One of their number had killed himself in court on receiving sentence, and the dead body was carried to the prison, and lay in a corner of the room in which the twenty-two spent their last night. They gathered at a long deal table for a farewell supper, at which, says Thiers, they were by turns, "gay, serious, and eloquent." They drank to the glory of France, and the happiness of all friends. They sang solemnly the great songs of the Revolution, and at five in the morning, when the turnkey came to call the last roll, one of them arose and declaimed the Marseillaise. A few hours later, the twenty-two went chanting to their death; and the chant was sustained until the last head had fallen.
These are amongst the loftier memories of those bloody days. It is impossible within the limits of a chapter to give a tithe even of the names that were written in the registers of the maison de justice of the Revolution. Well, indeed, might Fouquier-Tinville have named it the ante-chamber of the guillotine, for two thousand prisoners, drawn from all the other gaols of Paris, went to the scaffold from the Conciergerie. And they died, most of them, as children of a Revolution should die; virgin girls were no longer timid, women were weak no longer, when their turn came to mount the steps of the scaffold. A sense of patriotism so high and pure and penetrating as to resemble the spiritual exaltation and abandonment of the Christian martyrs seemed to extinguish in the frailest breasts the natural fear of death. "On meurt en riant, on meurt en chantant, on meurt en criant: Vive la France!"
The fierce political interests of the revolutionary period absorb all others; those who are not Fouquier-Tinville's victims languish obscurely in their cells, or travel towards the guillotine almost unnoticed. But who is this in a condemned cell of the Conciergerie in the year '94, not sent there by sentence of Tinville? It is honest, unfortunate Joseph Lesurques, unjustly convicted of the murder of a courier of Lyons,—one of the saddest miscarriages of justice. English play-goers are familiar with the dramatic version of the story, which gave Sir Henry Irving the material of one of his most remarkable creations. In the drama, playwright's justice snatches Lesurques from the tumbril within sight of the guillotine, but the Lesurques of real life fared otherwise. He died, innocent and ignorant of the crime, but the shade of the murdered courier had a double vengeance, for the actual assassin, Dubosc, was taken later, and duly stretched on the bascule.
In the Napoleonic era, the Conciergerie lost two-thirds of its lugubrious importance. It continued to receive prisoners of note, but their sojourn was brief; the prison of the Terror passed them on to Sainte-Pélagie, Bicêtre, the Temple, or the Bastille. With the return to France of the dynasty of Louis XVI., the old gaol went suddenly into mourning, as one may say, for Marie Antoinette. When Louis XVIII. commanded the erection of an "expiatory monument" in the Rue d'Anjou, the authorities of the Conciergerie made haste to blot out within its walls all traces of the Queen's captivity. They broke up the mean and meagre furniture of her cell, the wooden table, the two straw chairs, the shabby stump bedstead, the screen behind which her gaolers had gossiped in whispers; and the cell itself ceased its existence in that form, and was converted into a little chapel or sacristy. Some poor prisoner with a thought above his own distresses may be praying there to-day for the soul of Marie Antoinette.
CELL OF MARIE ANTOINETTE IN THE CONCIERGERIE.