Dillon and Simon, nevertheless, were delivered over to Samson. The terror had begun for the prisoners of the Luxembourg.
An unexpected calamity succeeded. Benoît, most humane and benevolent of concierges, was arrested. It was as if the father had been snatched from his family, and the suspects were inconsolable; they had lost their best friend within the prison. The tribunal acquitted him, but he did not return to his post. Benoît had two successors at the Luxembourg within a space of weeks, the second of whom was a man who would have been regarded with terror in any French prison at that epoch. This was Guiard, who had been fetched expressly from Lyons, where he had acquired a hideous celebrity as gaoler of the "Cellar of the Dead," the name bestowed upon the dungeon or black hole in which the victims of the commission populaire passed their last hours between condemnation and execution.
A few days after the removal of Benoît, the prisoners awoke one morning to find that sentinels had been posted at every door. A stolid police officer named Wilcheritz, a Pole by birth, who had been nominated to a principal post in the prison, came round with the order that there was to be no communication between the suspects. They, believing that they were on the eve of another September massacre, prepared to bid each other farewell. On this occasion, however, it was merely a question of stripping them of their belongings. Money, paper notes, rings, studs, pins, shoebuckles, penknives, razors, scissors, keys, were gathered in cell after cell, and deposited in a heap in one of the larger rooms; no notes or inventory being taken. Wilcheritz and his inquisitors were the objects of some pleasantries which, it is said, "annoyed them greatly." One prisoner, after handing over his writing-case was asked for his ring. "What!" said he, "isn't the stationery enough? Are you setting up in the jewellery line too?" Another, when it was pointed out to him that he had retained the gold buckles of his garters, replied: "I think, citizens, you had better undress me at once." They entered the cell of the playwright Parisau. "Citizens," said the author, "I am really distressed; you have come too late. I had three hundred livres here, but another citizen has just relieved me of them. I hope that you will have better luck elsewhere. They tell me, however, that you are leaving us fifty livres apiece, and as I have only just five and twenty, no doubt you will make up the sum to me." "Oh no, citizen," returned the stolid Pole.—"Ah! I see. You are merely 'on the make,' citizen. It is unfortunate in that case that there are gentry in the prison more active than you. However, if you follow the other citizen, I dare say you will catch him up, and then you can settle accounts with him. You are the ocean, citizen, and all the little tributaries will join themselves to you."
In another apartment it was proposed to carry off his silver coffee-pot from a prisoner, who, to preserve it, explained that it was "not exactly silver," but "some sort of English metal." That was possible, observed Wilcheritz, for he had one just like it himself. "Ah!" returned the prisoner, "now that you mention it, I remember there was another like mine in the prison!"
Suspects belonging to the working-classes,—tailors shoemakers, engravers, and the like—were allowed to retain the tools of their crafts; and the barbers received their razors in the morning, returning them to the gaolers at night.
To all requests addressed to him by the prisoners, imploring information as to their fate, the phlegmatic Pole made answer: "Patience! Justice is just. This durance will not endure for ever. Patience!"
Patriots and nobles were now massed in hundreds within the same walls, shared the same chambers, and were fed from the same kitchen; and all alike were now in the same state of siege. What news penetrated within the palace-prison was not the most inspiriting; the tumbrils were moving steadily to the guillotine, and in the copies of the Courrier Republicain which were smuggled into the Luxembourg, the principal intelligence was the "Judgment of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which has condemned to death" thirty, forty, fifty, or sixty "conspirators."
Word was passed that the commissions populaires were to take in hand the cases of the suspects, which was more comforting to the patriots than to the nobles; but the days crept on, and nothing happened.
The prisoners amused themselves by teasing Wilcheritz, a fair butt for raillery, who carried out his orders imperturbably, but was never a bully. The day came of the "Feast of the Supreme Being," and citizen Wilcheritz honoured it with a radiant suit. His big feet were cramped in a pair of new shoes with the finest of silver buckles. One of the despoiled suspects fancied or pretended that he recognised the buckles, and a whisper went round. The prisoner whose coffee-pot had been appropriated came to the rescue. "Citizens," he said, "those buckles don't look to me like silver. They are a sort of English metal." "They have been in my family for three generations, citizens, I assure you. I had them long before the visitation," stammered Wilcheritz. "The visitation" had grown to be the polite mode of reference to the act of spoliation. "Citizen," said the defender of Wilcheritz, "your answer is complete. You told us the other day that no good Republican should stoop to wear jewellery, but no citizen here would have the heart to claim your shoebuckles."
The coming of Guiard as concierge (cet homme féroce is Nougaret's dismissal of him) quenched all pleasantries, and made the palace-prison a prison complete. Two suspects hopeless of being brought to the bar, had committed suicide by throwing themselves from their windows; Guiard ordered that no prisoner should approach within a yard of his window. The sentries had orders to enter every cell and chamber, with drawn sabres, at midnight, rouse the occupants from their beds, and count them. At intervals, all through the night, they were to hail one another loudly in every corridor: "Sentinelles, prenez-garde à nous!" so that there should be no sleep for the prisoners. No letters were allowed to pass out from or into the prison; and no visitors were admitted.