"'My name,' I answered, 'is Journiac Saint-Méard; I served twenty-five years as an officer in the army. I stand before you with the confidence of a man who has nothing to reproach himself with, and who is therefore not likely to utter falsehoods.'
"'It will be for us to judge of that,' responded the man in grey."
The trial proceeded. Saint-Méard was accused of having edited the anti-revolutionary journal, De la cour et de la ville, but showed satisfactorily that he had not done so. Accused next of recruiting for the emigrants, at which there was an ominous murmur, "Gentlemen, gentlemen," pleaded the prisoner, "the word is with me at present, and I beg the President to maintain it for me,—I never needed it so sorely!" "That's true enough!" laughed the judges, and the court began to shew itself more sympathetic. Saint-Méard, though, was not yet off the gridiron. "You tell us continually," said one impatient judge, "that you are not this and you are not that! Be good enough then to tell us what you are."—"I was once frankly a Royalist." Another and louder murmur; but the President put in: "We are not here to sit in judgment on opinions, but on their results"; words of precious augury for the prisoner, who went on to say that he was well aware the old régime was done with, that there was no longer a Royalist cause, and that never had he been concerned in plots or Royalist conspiracies, for he had never in his life been concerned in public affairs of any kind. He was a Frenchman who loved his country above all things.
The questioning and cross-questioning came to an end, and the President removed his hat. "I can find nothing to suspect in Monsieur. What do you say; shall I release him?" and the voice of the judges was for liberty. Thus finished, at two o'clock in the morning, the "thirty-eight hours' agony" of Journiac Saint-Méard. He survived it some twenty years.
Alas for the hundreds upon hundreds whose agony of yet longer duration finished under the arch of pikes!
The escapes were not many. Abbé Sicard, the benevolent founder of the Deaf-and-Dumb Institute, was set free on the earnest petition in writing of one of his pupils. Beaumarchais, author of the Mariage de Figaro, evaded the clutches of the judges after a terrible period of suspense in the Abbaye. The old Marquis de Sombreuil was saved by his daughter. She clung to his neck, imploring the cut-throats to spare him to her. "Say, then," said one of them, dipping a cup into the blood at his feet: "Wilt thou drink this?" The brave girl gulped it down; the mob threw up their weapons with a roar of applause, and opened out a way for both through their dripping ranks.
But few fared as these did. President Maillard, of the grey coat, who was so well satisfied with Saint-Méard, did not release, perhaps, one in fifty amongst the accused at the Abbaye. He is accused of "carrying about heads, and cutting up dead bodies." Billaud-Varennes went about from group to group of the assassins who were massed in parties, encouraged them in the name of the tribunal, and promised that each man should be paid a louis for his "labour."
A contemporary sketch depicts him delivering a speech on "a table of corpses" against the door of the Abbaye: "Citizens, you are slaughtering the enemies of France. You are doing your duty." Indiscriminate killing had been the legal order of the day. There was no question of the guillotine during the September massacres. Every citizen who could arm himself was a Samson by privilege of the prison judges; and popular justice, called "severe justice of the people," made the butcheries of September a people's fête. It was not so much an act of patriotism to assist in them as a dereliction of duty to hold aloof. The "Septemberers" have been condemned as cannibals; but they were common ratepayers of Paris to whom the government of the day offered money to kill as many "enemies of the republic" as should be delivered to them. Most of these "enemies of the republic" were persons to whom the republic was scarcely known by name, and who asked only to be ignored by it. They were killed in batches during the September of '92, merely because they happened to be thrust out at one particular door of their prison. You came out at this door, and were received with cheers; you came out at the next door, and were hacked in pieces. Which door it was, depended upon the vote of the judges; and this, as a rule, was the determination of a moment. Saint-Méard's trial of an hour was one of the longest.
The mere business of killing went forward until numbers had lost their significance, and the lists of the dead were but approximately reckoned. They are all set down in black and white, and may still be read—so many killed "in the heap" (en masse), so many "after judgment" (après jugement)—but the figures have never been proved; and one seeks in vain to reckon the total, after the "three hundred families belonging to the Faubourg St. Germain," who were "thrown into the Abbaye in a night"; and the "cartload of young girls, of whom the oldest was not eighteen," and who, "dressed all in white in the tumbril, looked like a basket of lilies." After this batch, were guillotined all the nuns of the convent of Montmartre.
Then there were the Swiss Guards, "remnants of the 10th of August," to whom Maillard said; "Gentlemen, you may find mercy outside, but I am afraid we cannot grant it to you here." The youngest of them, "in a blue frock-coat," elected to go first. "Since we must die," he said, "let me show the way"; then, dashing on his hat, he presented himself at the door where the butchers stood ready to receive him; a double row of them,—sabre, bayonet, hatchet, or pike in hand. For a moment he looked at them, quite coolly; then, seeing that all was prepared, he threw himself between their ranks, and "fell beneath a thousand blows."