CHAPTER IX.
THE LUXEMBOURG IN '93.
This was, above all others, the aristocratic prison of the Revolution. It was fitly chosen for the reception of that brilliant contingent of nobles, just ready to fly the country, whom the famous Law of the Suspects had routed from their hôtels in Paris. To confine them in the Luxembourg, converting that ancient and renowned palace into a dungeon of aristocrats, was in itself an apt stroke of vengeance on the part of the people. Few indeed of the historic dwellings of Paris could have put them more forcibly in mind of the tyrannies of kings and regents, of the splendid and licentious fêtes and orgies of princes and princesses of the blood, the cost of which was wrung from the lean pockets of those who were told to eat cake when there was no bread in the cupboard! Had not Marie de Médicis passed here, and Gaston de France, and Duchesse de Montpensier, and Elizabeth d'Orléans, who gave it to Louis XIV., and Louis XVI., who gave it, in 1779, to Monsieur his brother, who after the days of storm and terror was to reign, not too satisfactorily, as Louis XVIII.? Was it not here that Duchesse de Berri, in the early years of the eighteenth century, held those surprising revels the details of which may be read only in secret and unpublished memoirs? Sedate historians merely hint at them.[[20]] And, palace though it was, the revolutionary judges might have found ready to their hands at the Luxembourg, bars, bolts, fetters and dungeons enow. For that "symbolic hierarchy" of palace, cloister, and prison, proper to all princely and noble dwellings of the old régime, had existed at the Luxembourg; and during long years the penal justice of priest and monk had passed that way.
[20]. "Dans son Palais-Royal, au Palais de Luxembourg où demeurait la duchesse de B——, se célébraient le plus ordinairement ces parties de débauche. L'on y voyait les acteurs figurer quelquefois avec un costume qui consistait à n'en point avoir; et les princes, les princesses, se livrer sans pudeur aux désordres les plus dégoûtans."—Dulaure, vol. viii., p. 187.
This was the place to which the noble and courtly suspects were conveyed by hundreds in August, 1793. One can imagine, though but very faintly, with what feelings they resigned themselves into the hands of concierge Benoît. Their King had been decapitated; their Queen, a prisoner elsewhere, was expecting her husband's fate. They knew how little their sovereign's life had weighed in the people's balance; was it likely that theirs would be of greater weight? Judgment and death disquieted them.
"A diverting spectacle in its way," wrote one sarcastic prisoner, "to see arriving in a miserable hackney-coach two marquises, a duchess, a marchioness, and a count; all ready to faint on alighting, and all seized with the megrims on entering." Dames of great rank came with their brisk femmes de chambre, old noblemen with their valets, youths separated from their governors and tutors,—children even; whole battalions of the most distinguished suspects, the very flower of the aristocracy of France. The dungeons were not requisitioned, but hasty preparations had been made for them. Under concierge Benoît's polite and sympathetic conduct, they mounted the splendid staircase—up which had flitted in a costume of no weight at all the unblushing guests of De Berri—to the splendid chambers, picture-gallery, ball-room, salon, dining-room, and the whole sumptuous suite, which rude partitions of naked lath and timber had converted into some semblance of prison lodgings. The wide windows had been armed with iron bars, and guards were posted at every story.
The gallant company of French suspects found some of the chambers in the occupation of a party of English suspects, who had been placed under arrest some weeks earlier, "as a response to the insults offered by the English government to the Republic" (pour répondre aux insultes dirigées par le gouvernement anglais contre la République). Amongst them were Miss Maria Williams, who had gone to France, pen in hand, to see what liberty, equality, and fraternity were like in practice (and who returned to write one of the dullest books on record); and Thomas Paine, who was studying "The Rights of Man" under alarming aspects.
This was the first Battue; the royalist suspects of Republican France were the second.
The salons of the palace, made into prison chambers, were named afresh. Miss Williams and her sister occupied the chamber of Cincinnatus; hard by were the chambers of Brutus, Socrates, and Solon; and the derisive name of Liberty was given to the room in which nobles under special guard were confined in the strictest privacy. High personages, whose titles but a little while before might have made their gaolers tremble, were lodged in every quarter of the palace. In this cabinet were Marshal de Mouchy and his wife, "rigorous observers of courtly etiquette"; a little way off, in chambers no bigger than prison cells, the Comte de Mirepoix, the Marquis de Fleury, President Nicolai, M. de Noailles, and the Duc de Lévi.
Parlous in a high degree as the situation was for all of them, they did not at this date suffer any special discomfort, the deprivation of liberty excepted. Their captors were satisfied at having them under lock and key, and did not insult their captivity. A gossiping history, which may be history or fable, describes a visit of Latude to one of the political prisoners, a certain M. Roger. The great prison-breaker laughed the Luxembourg to scorn: "A prison? You call this a prison, mon cher? I call it a bonbonnière, a boudoir!"