THE GALLANT SWISS.
When the killers began to flag, brandy mixed with gunpowder was served to them. A woman passes, carrying a basket of hot rolls; they beg them of her, and the bread, before being eaten, is "soaked in the wounds of the still breathing victims."[[19]] The brigands of the Abbaye were not more than from thirty to forty in number. Amongst them, says Nougaret, "one youth, mounted on a post, distinguished himself by his ferocity in killing. He said that he had lost his two brothers on the 10th of August, and meant to avenge them. He boasted of having cut down fifty to his own weapon. Another brigand prided himself on a total of two hundred!"
[19]. Nougaret.
Women looked on, adds the same authority, "sitting in carts on piles of dead bodies, like washerwomen on dirty linen. Others flung themselves upon the corpses, and tore them with their teeth, danced round them, and kicked them. Some of these Furies cut off the ears of the dead, and pinned them on their bosoms."
Some ten months after this carnage, tranquil amid the din of the Terror, lies beautiful Charlotte Corday, in her cell within the Abbaye walls. Her hour has not yet come; she bides it in perfect peace. By-and-bye she will go to the Conciergerie, and thence the next morning to the guillotine. Samson will lift the fair head when he has struck it off, and smite the cheek with his crimson paw, amid universal plaudits. "I have found the sweetest rest here these two days," she writes from prison; "I could not be better off, and my gaolers are the best people in the world." A memory of her lives as she tripped smiling up the steps of the scaffold, her hair cropped under a little close-fitting cap, and wearing, by order of her judges, a hideous red shirt, which descended to her feet. "She blushed and frowned on the executioner when he plucked the tippet from her bosom. Two moments after, the knife fell on her."
After the Revolution, the Abbaye was again a military prison, and its subterranean dungeons were in existence in 1814. "The principal of these," wrote one who had inspected it, "is as horrible as any in Bicêtre; sunk thirty feet below the level of the ground, and so fashioned that a man of average height could not stand up in it. One could scarcely remain here, says the doctor himself, more than four and twenty hours without being in danger of one's life."
The Abbaye was demolished in 1854.
