[17]. Histoire de la Révolution.
Peltier in his turn, royalist pamphleteer, gives his version of the tragedy. This Bicêtre, says Peltier, was "the den of all the vices," the sewer, so to speak, of Paris. "All were slain; impossible to figure up the number of the victims. I have heard it placed at as many as six thousand!" Peltier is not easily satisfied. "Eight days and eight nights, without one instant's pause, the work of death went forward." Pikes, sabres, and muskets "were not enough for the ferocious assassins, they had to bring cannon into play." It was not until a mere handful of the prisoners remained "that they had recourse again to their small-arms" (que l'on en revenait aux petites armes).
Doubtless the most accurate account of this merciless affair is contained in the statement made to Barthélemi Maurice by Père Richard, doyen of the warders of Bicêtre, and an eyewitness. It may be summarised from the pages of MM. Alhoy and Lurine:
"Master Richard traced on paper the three numbers, 166, 55, and 22,—What are those? I asked him.—166, that is the number of the dead.—And 55 and 22, what are they?—55 was the number of children in the prison, and only 22 were left us. The scoundrels killed 33 children, besides the 166 adults.—Tell me how it began.—They came bellowing up at ten that Monday morning, all in the prison so still that you might have heard a fly buzzing, though we had three thousand men in that morning.—But you had cannon they say; you defended yourselves.—Where did you get that tale, sir? We had no cannon, and we didn't attempt to defend ourselves.—What was the strength of the attacking party?—A good three thousand, I should say; but of those not more than about two hundred were active, so to speak. —Did they bring cannon?—It was said they did, but I saw none, though I looked out of the main gate more than once.—What were their arms, then?—Well, a few of them had second-hand muskets (de méchants fusils), others had swords, axes, bludgeons (bûches), and bills (crochets), but there were more pikes than anything else.—Were there any well-dressed people amongst them?—Oh, yes; the 'judges' especially; though the bulk of them were not much to look at.—How many 'judges' were there?—A dozen; but they relieved one another.—If there were judges, there was some sort of formality, I suppose. What was the procedure? How did they judge, acquit, and execute?—They sat in the clerk's office, a room down below, near the chapel. They made us fetch out the register; looked down the column of 'cause of imprisonment,' and then sent for the prisoner. If you were too frightened to feel your legs under you, or couldn't get a word out quick, it was 'guilty' on the spot.—And then?—Then the 'president' said: 'Let the citizen be taken to the Abbaye.' They knew outside what that meant. Two men seized him by the arm and led him out of the room. At the door he was face to face with a double row of cut-throats, a prod in the rear with a pike tossed him amongst them, and then ... well, there were some that took a good deal of finishing off.—They did not shoot them then?—No, there was no shooting.—And the acquittals?—Well, if it was simply, 'take the citizen to the Abbaye,' they killed him. If it was 'take him to the Abbaye,' with Vive la nation! he was acquitted. It wasn't over at nightfall. We passed the night of the 3d with the butchers inside the prison; they were just worn out. It began again on the morning of the 4th, but not quite with the same spirit. It was mostly the children who suffered on the Tuesday.—And the lunatics, and the patients, and the old creatures—did they get their throats cut too?—No, they were all herded in the dormitories, with the doors locked on them, and sentinels inside to keep them from looking out of window. All the killing was done in the prison.—And when did they leave you? At about three on Tuesday afternoon; and then we called the roll of the survivors.—And the dead?—We buried them in quicklime in our own cemetery."
The hideous mise-en-scène of Père Richard is, at the worst, a degree less reproachful than that of Prud'homme, Peltier, or M. Thiers.
There was one worthy man at Bicêtre, Dr. Pinel, whose devotion to humanitarian science (a form of devotion not over-common in such places at that day) very nearly cost him his life at the hands of the revolutionary judges. Dr. Pinel, who had the notion that disease of the mind was not best cured by whipping, was accused by the Committee of Public Safety (under whose rule, it may be observed, no public ever went in greater terror) of plotting with medical science for the restoration of the monarchy! It was a charge quite worthy of the wisdom and the tenderness for "public safety" of the Comité de Salut Public. Pinel, disdaining oratory, vouchsafed the simplest explanation of his treatment at Bicêtre,—and was permitted to continue it.
Not so charitable were the gods to Théroigne de Mericourt, a woman singular amongst the women of the Revolution. Readers of Carlyle will remember his almost gallant salutations of her (a handsome young woman of the streets, who took a passion for the popular cause, and rode on a gun-carriage in the famous outing to Versailles) as often as she starts upon the scene. When he misses her from the procession, in the fourth book of the first volume, it is:
"But where is the brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted Demoiselle Théroigne? Brown eloquent beauty, who, with thy winged words and glances, shalt thrill rough bosoms—whole steel battalions—and persuade an Austrian Kaiser, pike and helm lie provided for thee in due season, and alas! also strait waistcoat and long lodging in the Salpêtrière."
Théroigne was some beautiful village girl when the echo first reached her of the tocsin of the Revolution. She thought a woman was wanted there, and trudged hot-foot to Paris, perhaps through the self-same quiet lanes that saw the pilgrimage of Charlotte Corday. In Paris she took (for reasons of her own, one must suppose) the calling of "unfortunate female"—the euphemism will be remembered as Carlyle's—and dubbed herself the people's Aspasia—"l'Aspasie du peuple." In "tunic blue," over a "red petticoat," crossed with a tricolour scarf and crowned with the Phrygian cap, she roamed the streets, "criant, jurant, blasphémant," to the tune of the drum of rebellion. One day the women of the town, in a rage of fear or jealousy, fell upon her, stripped her, and beat her through the streets. She went mad, and in the first years of this century she was still an inmate of Bicêtre. When the "women's side" of Bicêtre was closed, in 1803, Théroigne was transferred to the Salpêtrière, where she died.