The prisoners were fortunate in their concierge, Benoît. A veteran of seventy, gentle and genial, with a heart as fine as the manners of his royalist prisoners, he smoothed all paths, and ushered in a new-comer to a lodging of four bare walls and a naked floor with an apology that transformed it into a royal boudoir. He seemed to know all his guests as they arrived, and placed them where he thought they would find the easiest entertainment and the most congenial company. He played the part of master of ceremonies, and put each guest into his proper niche. In Benoît's hands, the marquis who had arrived without his valet found himself handling the broom, fetching water, and taking his turn at the spit, as if the custom of a lifetime had used him to those offices. It was Benoît who learned at once what money a prisoner had brought in with him, and who saved the needy suspect the humiliation of begging his meals, by a whisper in the ear of a good-natured noble.
By-and-bye, the suspects had the gratification of knowing that their perils, present and to come, were shared by the enemy himself. There arrived as a prisoner one evening a president of the revolutionary tribunal. It was one Kalmer, a German Jew, and reputed millionaire (he had an income of about £8000), who had been active in filling the chamber-cells of the Luxembourg. He presented himself in sabots and a costume of the shabbiest simplicity, and his reception was of the coolest. He displayed from the first a voracious appetite, and every day an ass laden with provisions was brought for him to the palace door. The ex-president seemed well disposed to end his days eating and drinking in the Luxembourg, and was not a little shocked on receiving the news that he had been sentenced to death, "for conspiring secretly with the enemy abroad." He went to the guillotine without a benediction.
Came next the much more notable Chaumette, ex-sailor, ex-priest, and recently Procureur of the Commune, in which capacity he had been foremost in demanding and promoting the Law of the Suspects. He was as chapfallen as a wolf in a snare, but he did not escape the mordant jests of the company. It was Chaumette who had declared in the Chamber that "you might almost recognise a suspect by the look of him." He himself was recognised on the instant.
"Sublime Procureur!" exclaimed one, "thanks to that famous requisition of yours, I am suspect, thou art suspect, he is suspect; we are suspect, you are suspect, they are all suspect"—which indeed was the case, for at that date, as Carlyle says, "if suspect of nothing else, you may grow," as came to be a saying, "Suspect of being Suspect."
One night, the wildest rumour circulated in the prison. It was said that Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Hérault de Séchelle, Lacroix, Philippeaux, and others, the head and front of the party of the Moderates, had been arrested by Robespierre's order, and were to be sent forthwith to the Luxembourg. It was even so; and the next night the news sped through every corridor of the palace that Danton and his fellows had arrived, and were with the concierge. The prisoners swarmed to the reception room, and gratified their eyes with that unlooked-for spectacle. The brilliant Camille, whose young wife was a prisoner with him, was denouncing the tribunal in a storm of passion; Danton bade him be calm: "When men act with folly," he said, "one should know how to laugh at them." Then, recognising Thomas Paine, he said: "What you have done for the liberty of your country, I have tried to do for mine. I have been less fortunate than you! They will send me to the scaffold; well, I shall go there cheerfully enough!" Camille Desmoulins had brought with him some rather melancholy reading—Hervey's Meditations and Young's Night Thoughts. The merry Réal, who had arrived a day or two earlier, exclaimed against these works: "Do you want to die before your time? Here, take my book, La Pucelle d'Orléans; that will keep your spirits up!"
General Dillon, who was of the earliest batch of suspects, was amongst the first to visit the imprisoned Moderates in the chamber which had been set apart for them.[[21]] Camille was still fuming, and Danton playing the part of moderator. Lacroix was debating with himself whether he should cut his hair, or wait till Samson dressed it for him. Another of the party, Fabre d'Eglantine, lay sick in bed, tenderly nursed by his comrades. He was saved for the scaffold, for the turn of the Moderates was not long delayed. At the brief trial of the party, Danton and Camille showed a characteristic front to their judges. "You ask my name!" thundered the Titan of the Revolution. "You should know it! It is Danton, a name tolerably familiar in the Revolution. As for my abode, it will soon be the Unknown, but I shall live in the Pantheon of history!" "My age," answered Camille, "is the age of the good sans-culotte Jesus Christ; an age fatal to Revolutionists!" Returning to the Luxembourg after condemnation, he said to Benoît: "I am condemned for having shed a tear or two over the fate of other unfortunates. My only regret is that I was not able to be of better service to them." Camille wrote with one of the wittiest pens of his day, and busied himself in the Luxembourg with a comedy called The Orange, the model of which was Sheridan's School for Scandal. He had evoked in a greater degree than any other of the Moderates the sympathies of the suspects in the Luxembourg, and up to the last there was a general belief in the prison that both he and Danton would be saved by the intervention of Robespierre. But Robespierre could not, if he would. Executioner Samson received in due course his order to proceed with them—a document drawn up in the style and almost in the terms of a commercial invoice—and made his own note in pencil at the foot: "One cart will be enough." Even at the steps of the guillotine, Camille turned to denounce the crowd. "Leave that canaille!" said Danton, quietly; "we are done with it." To the headsman Danton said, as he stood on the scaffold: "You must show my head to the people. It is a head worth looking at."
[21]. "This general," says Nougaret, in his dry way, "drank a great deal. In his sober moments, he played at trictrac."—Vol. ii., p. 61.
This hecatomb of the Moderates sent a thrill of fear through the Luxembourg. Whose turn next?
Up to this date, the principal political prisoners had enjoyed unrestrained communication with their friends outside, and General Dillon had private news twice a day from the tribunal. Two days after the bloody despatch of the Moderates, the prisoners of the Luxembourg were confined to their chambers. Evening receptions and parties of trictrac (in one's sober intervals) were suppressed; communication of every kind was forbidden; and the journals of the day, which had been freely circulated in the prison, were no longer admitted. The prisoners awaited "in silence and fear" the explanation of this rigorous consigne.
It was the outcome of the first of those rumours of a "plot in the prison." A certain Lafflotte, a suspect of low origin, denounced General Dillon and one Simon (nicknamed in the prison Simon-Limon) as the author of a secret conspiracy. The revolutionary journals were full of the affair, but it was never very clearly explained, nor, for that matter, was any precise explanation ever offered of other prison plots so-called. There were pretended discoveries and expositions of plots in the Luxembourg, Saint-Lazare, Bicêtre, and the Carmes. That the prisoners of the Revolution in all these goals were eager to recover their liberty, is a statement which may pass without dispute; and it is no less natural to suppose that they would have seized upon any means that offered a reasonable hope of escape. But the truth seems to have been, and it is rather curious in the circumstances (though the presence of so many women and children would have multiplied the difficulties) that no concerted efforts to break prison were ever made by the suspects. Statements or rumours to the effect that they were planning a forcible release for themselves, and that, once out of prison, they intended to put Paris to the sword, should have been regarded as quite too silly for credence. Surely those poor aristocrats had given proof enough of their weakness! Of all the enemies of the Republic, they were the least capable of harming it.