After some period of feverish sleep I was awakened by a strange murmur, which, mixing with my dreams, had given me the comfortless idea of hearing the roar of the multitude at some of the horrid displays of the guillotine; and as I half opened my unwilling eyes, still heavy with sleep, I saw a long procession of figures, in flowing mantles and draperies, moving down the huge hall. A semicircle of beds filled the extremity of the chapel, which had been vacated by a draft of unfortunate beings, carried off during the day to that dreadful tribunal, whose sole employment seemed to be the supply of the axe, and from which no one was ever expected to return. While my eyes, with a strange and almost superstitious anxiety—such is the influence of time and place—followed this extraordinary train, I saw it take possession of the range of beds; each new possessor sitting wrapt in his pale vesture, and perfectly motionless. I can scarcely describe the singular sensations with which I continued to gaze on the spectacle. My eyes sometimes closed, and I almost conceived that the whole was a dream; but the forms were too distinct for this conjecture, and the question with me now became, "are they flesh and blood?" I had not sunk so far into reverie as to imagine that they were the actual spectres of the unhappy tenants of those beds on the night before, all of whom were now, doubtless, in the grave; but the silence, the distance, the dimness perplexed me, and I left the question to be settled by the event. At a gesture from the central figure they all stood up—and a man loaded with fetters was brought forward in front of their line. I now found that a trial was going on: the group were the judges, the man was the presumed criminal; there was an accuser, there was an advocate—in short, all the general process of a trial was passing before my view. Curiosity would naturally have made me spring from my bed and approach this extraordinary spectacle; but I am not ashamed now to acknowledge, that I felt a nervelessness and inability to speak or move, which for the time wholly awed me. All that I could discover was, that the accused was charged with incivisme, and that, defying the court and disdaining the charge, he was pronounced guilty—the whole circle, standing up as the sentence was pronounced, and with a solemn waving of their arms and murmur of their voices, assenting to the act of the judge. The victim was then seized on, swept away into the darkness, and after a brief pause I heard a shriek and a crash; the sentence had been fulfilled—all was over. The court now covered their heads with their mantles, as if in sorrow for this formidable necessity.
But how shall I speak of the closing scene? However it surprised and absorbed me in that moment of nervous excitement, I can allude to it now only as characteristic of a time when every mind in France was half lunatic. I saw a figure enveloped in star-coloured light emerge from the darkness, slowly ascend, in a vesture floating round it like the robes which Raphael or Guido gives to the beings of another sphere, and, accompanied by a burst of harmony as it rose, ascend to the roof, where it suddenly disappeared. All was instantly the silence and the darkness of the grave.
Daylight brought back my senses, and I was convinced that the pantomimic spirit of the people, however unaccountably it might disregard proprieties, had been busy with the scene. I should now certainly have abandoned the supernatural portion of the conjecture altogether; but on mentioning it to Cassini, he let me into the solution at once.
"Have you never observed," said he, "the passion of all people for walking on the edge of a precipice, climbing a church tower, looking down from a battlement, or doing any one thing which gives them the nearest possible chance of breaking their necks?—then you can comprehend the performance of last night. There we are, like fowls in a coop: every day sees some of us taken out; and the amusement of the remaining fowls is to imagine how the heads of the others were taken from their bodies." The prisoners were practising a trial.
I gave an involuntary look of surprise at this species of amusement, and remarked something on the violation of common feeling—to say nothing of the almost profaneness which it involved.
"As to the feeling," said Cassini, with that shrug which no shoulders but those of a Frenchman can ever give, "it is a matter of taste; and perhaps we have no right to dictate in such matters to persons who would think a week a long lease of life, and who, instead of seven days, may not have so many hours. As to the profanation, if your English scruples made you sensitive on such points, I can assure you that you might have seen some things much more calculated to excite your sensibilities. The display last night was simply the trial of a royalist; and as we are all more or less angry with republicanism at this moment, and with some small reason too, the royalist, though he was condemned, as every body now is, was suffered to have his apotheosis. But I have seen exhibitions in which the republican was the criminal, and the scene that followed was really startling even to my rather callous conceptions. Sometimes we even had one of the colossal ruffians who are now lording it over France. I have seen St Just, Couthon, Caier, Danton, nay Robespierre himself; arraigned before our midnight tribunal; for this amusement is the only one which we can enjoy without fear of interruption from our jailers. Thus we enjoy it with the greater gusto, and revenge ourselves for the tribulations of the day by trying our tormentors at night."
"I am satisfied with the reason, although I am not yet quite reconciled to the performance. Who were the actors?"
"You are now nearer the truth than you suspected. We have men of every trade here, and, among the rest, we have actors enough to stock the Comédie Française. If you remain long enough among us, you will see some of the best farces of the best time played uncommonly well by our fellow détenus. But in the interim—for our stage is permitted by the municipality to open in the St Lazare only four times a month—a piece of cruelty which we all regard as intolerable—our actors refresh their faculties with all kinds of displays. You acknowledge that the scene last night was well got up; and if you should see the trial of some of our 'Grands Democrats,' be assured that your admiration will not be attracted by showy vesture, blue lights, or the harmonies of the old asthmatic organ in yonder gallery; our pattern will be taken from the last scene of 'Il Don Giovanni.' You will have no pasteboard figure suspended from the roof, and wafted upward in starlight or moonlight. But if you wish to see the exhibition, I am concerned to tell you that you must wait, for to-night all our artistes are busy. In what, do you conceive?"
I professed my inability to fathom "the infinite resources of the native mind, where amusement was the question."
"Well then—not to keep you in suspense—we are to have a masquerade."