The shrine of S. Geneviève was torn down and desecrated. The tombs of the kings of France at S. Denis were broken open, and the ashes scattered abroad with every species of insult. The Moniteur thus describes the spectacle the streets of Paris presented during the Festival of Reason: “Most of the people were drunk with the brandy they had swallowed out of Chalices—eating mackerel on the Patens!... They stopped at the doors of dramshops, held out Ciboriums, and the landlord, stoop in hand, had to fill them thrice.” Other things are recorded of this demoniacal saturnalia which had best be left unsaid—if happily they be yet unknown to Catholic hearts.
The provinces followed suit. Lyons sacked her churches, and drove a mitred ass through her streets, trailing the sacred volumes at his tail. The Loire was polluted with drowned bodies of priests. At Nantes ninety priests are embarked at dead of night under hatches; in the middle of the stream the boat is scuttled, and goes down with her human cargo. These are the noyades. Then follow others of more than a hundred at a time. Oh! these priests, these men of the Gospel of Christ, at any cost they must be got rid of! The guillotine is too slow; let us have fire and water to the rescue! So there are the fusillades; men, women, priests, and nuns fall under the showers of grapeshot as fast as they can be gathered and ranged in line—mothers with infants at their breasts, children clinging to one another—five hundred at a batch they go. The mother Revolution herself is turning sick of it. Robespierre alone shows no signs of squeamishness; but, whether from sagacity or some latent moral—perhaps even religious—instinct, he repudiated the sacrilegious excesses which inaugurated and followed the installation of the new goddess. He saw, too, that it was an arrow pointed at himself. He denounced Hébert at the Jacobin Club, ridiculed his new-fangled divinity, and declared that if “God did not exist, a wise law-giver would have invented him.” Hébert winced; Camille Desmoulins started the Vieux Cordelier, and began to broach the doctrine of clemency and the savage stupidity of useless blood-shedding. Never since the Revolution began had such theories been hinted at. The country was growing nauseated with wholesale butcheries; the daring words of the Vieux Cordelier were heard with wonder and welcomed with deep though silent applause. Robespierre might have tolerated the humane doctrines of the newspaper, if it had abstained from personal aggression; but Desmoulins used his weapon of sarcasm unsparingly against the tyrant, on one occasion twitting him, half facetiously, with his aristocratic origin, as proved by the discarded de formerly prefixed to his name. Robespierre grew pale—paler than his usual sea-green hue—on reading this, and Desmoulins' doom was sealed. Hébert went first; he, with nineteen of the faction, perished in one hour on the scaffold, in March, 1794. Ten days later Camille and Danton fell. It is yet a mystery why Danton was thus quickly sacrificed; he was apparently on good terms with Robespierre, and had pointed no witticisms at him like the editor of the Vieux Cordelier. The tyrant himself gives no explanation in his long-winded speeches on the hard necessity which compelled him “to sacrifice private friendship to the good of the country,” and so on. But whatever the motive may have been, the act drew upon its perpetrator the aversion and contempt of those who till then had been his staunchest followers and supporters. Every one was terrified for his own head. Danton's fall seemed to bring the axe to every man's door. Robespierre was now alone, more terribly alone than the lost traveller in the desert. His fellows shunned him, or shuddered when he passed. He lived in perpetual fear of being assassinated, though it is doubtful whether any attempt was ever made on his life. Several were trumped up with a view to uplifting his tottering popularity; but though the accused persons were guillotined with great pomp and éclat, the proofs of their intended crime were extremely doubtful. A last expedient yet remained.
Robespierre would re-establish the existence of God, and thus be a prophet as well as a king. He decreed, accordingly, a great meeting which should atone for Hébert's Feast of Reason and annihilate its brief triumph. It was to take place in the Tuileries gardens. Robespierre, while working the axe so assiduously, never bespattered himself with the blood of his instrument. In a time when sans-culottism made dirt and Bohemian gear the fashion, he remained a dandy, powdered and frizzled in the midst of legislators who prided themselves on dirty hands and begrimed linen. For this gala-day of his new religion he ordered a fine sky-blue silk coat, white-silk waistcoat embroidered with silver, white stockings, and gold shoe-buckles. Thus equipped, the Prophet of the Mountain sallied forth to patronize the Omnipotent and decree the existence of a Supreme Being. He ascended the rostrum with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, made a fulsome discourse in a vein of sentimental deism, and then proceeded to unveil the effigy of atheism, a hideous caricature, made of paste-board, besmeared with turpentine and other inflammable stuffs, to which he applied a lighted torch. The flame leaped up, and Atheism, amidst shouts and cracklings, burned itself to dust; then from the ashes rose up another effigy, the statue of Wisdom, supposed to symbolize the new religion, but sorrily smutted and begrimed by the subsiding smoke of Atheism. No wonder Billaud should exclaim, “Get thee gone! Thou art a bore, thyself and thy Etre Suprême.”
O merciful God! may heaven and earth praise thee, and all the creatures therein, for thou art verily a God of love, long suffering and patient!
And now that Robespierre has duly installed his Etre Suprême, and decreed, moreover, “that consoling principle, the immortality of the soul,” and obliterated from the graves of murdered citizens the hitherto obligatory inscription, “Death is an eternal sleep,” what is there left for him to do? Nothing, apparently, but to go on killing. The revolutionary tribunal must be made to work with greater speed, and so it is split into four fractions, each with its president, and empowered to try and condemn as fast as it can. Even the Mountain quaked when this proposition was uttered at its base; but the law was carried, and henceforth the guillotine quadruples its business. Fouquier-Tinville sets up one of “improved velocity,” and boasts of being able to make room for a batch of one hundred and fifty at one time. He wants to establish one in the Tuileries itself, but Collot protests that this would “demoralize the instrument.” It did not matter, apparently, how much the instrument demoralized the people. These sit at their windows watching for the tumbrels to pass, criticising the occupants, joking and enjoying themselves. Women fight for seats near the scaffold, where day after day they sit knitting, counting off the heads, as they fall, by the prick of a pin in a bit of card-board. These are the “furies of the guillotine.”
But to make the new law, called 22me Prairial, more fully available, it was necessary to provide extra work for the executioners. Fouquier-Tinville was equal to the occasion. He got up an accusation against the occupants of the prisons for “conspiring against the Convention.” Let us cast a glance into these prisons, where, at this crisis, twelve thousand human beings lie literally rotting to death. The memoirs [pg 684] of the time agree in describing the twelve houses of arrest (the original prisons had long since been increased to that number) as dens of noisome horror never equalled in any other clime or period. Noble dames, maidens of tender years, were huddled pell-mell with the worst and most wretched of their sex; nobles and shoe-blacks, priests and ruffians, nuns and actresses, crowded by day and night into the condemned cells, where every night the turnkey came and read his list for the morrow's “batch.” Then followed scenes such as no pen or painter's brush could adequately describe. “Men rush towards the grate; listen if their name be in it; ... one deep-drawn breath when it is not. We live still one day! And yet some score or scores of names were in. Quick these; they clasp their loved ones to their heart one last time. With brief adieu, wet-eyed or dry-eyed, they mount and are away. This night to the Conciergerie; through the palace, misnamed of Justice, to the guillotine to-morrow.” These were the persons whom Tinville's ready wit accused of getting up a plot to overthrow the Convention! But what did it signify whether the story was an impossibility as well as a lie? The four tribunals must have work, the guillotine must have food. In three days—the 7th, 9th, and 10th of July—one hundred and seventy-one prisoners were executed on the charge of conspiring from the depth of their squalid dungeons to overturn the state. So much did the newly-discovered Etre Suprême do towards softening the rule of Robespierre.
But, oh! are we not sick of the ghastly tale? It is now hurrying to a close.
Barère, one of the fiercest of the revolutionary gang who had so far escaped the guillotine, gave a bachelor's dinner at a suburban villa on a warm day in July, Robespierre being among the guests. The weather was intensely hot, and the company, unshackled by stiff conventionalities, threw off their coats, and sauntered out to sip their coffee under the trees in easy déshabillé. Carnot wanted his pocket-handkerchief, and went indoors to fetch it. While looking for his own coat he espied Robespierre's fantastic sky-blue garment, and, prompted by a sudden thought, put his hand into the pockets, wondering if any secret might be lurking there. What were his feelings on discovering a list of forty names told off for the guillotine, his own amongst the number! He carried off the paper, showed it discreetly to his friends, and they agreed that Robespierre must be made away with. Two days later he appears at the Convention, and is met by dark faces that scowl when he ascends the tribune, and show no docile acquiescence when he speaks. Terror for their own lives has at last stirred these dull, brutalized accomplices to raise their voice and protest against the tyrant. He is impeached by common acclamation. He defends himself in a passionate harangue, accusing Mr. Pitt and King George of having bribed the Convention to arrest him, after sowing calumnies against him in the minds of the people. The charges against him were numerous and heavy; he answered them all with vehemence and a certain wild, disjointed eloquence, and wound up by the following denunciation: “No, death is not an eternal sleep! The nation will not submit to a desperate and desolating doctrine that covers nature itself with a funereal shroud; that deprives virtue of hope, and misfortune of consolation, and insults even death itself. No; we will efface from our tombs your sacrilegious [pg 685] epitaph, and replace it with the consoling truth, ‘Death is the beginning of immortality!’ ” The speech produced an effect on the Assembly, but it did not secure a real success. The next day Saint-Just mounted the tribune to defend Robespierre; but he had hardly begun his discourse when cries of “Down with the tyrant!” forced him to give it up. Robespierre stood at his place, utterly abandoned by the members of the Assembly, where twenty-four hours ago he ruled with despotic and unrivalled sway. Not a voice was raised in his behalf. He strove to obtain a hearing, but his words were drowned in shouts of “Away with him! down with him!” He stood dumb and petrified at the sound of those words, bowed his head, and slowly descended the steps of the tribune; suddenly he looked up and cried, “Let me die, then, at once!” The younger Robespierre advances and takes his brother's arm, asking to share the same fate with him. This generous movement excites the Convention to still greater rage; it yells and bellows, gesticulating like so many madmen. The president puts on his hat, and calls for order; a temporary lull ensues. Robespierre again tries to make himself heard, but his voice is again drowned in shouts and hisses; he rushes up and down the steps and about the hall, clenching his fist and breathing menaces that now fall powerless and are met with taunts of triumphant hate. At last, over-mastered by his own emotions, he drops into a chair. The arrest of the two brothers is voted unanimously. The elder one endeavors to resist, but is seized and carried forcibly down to the bar. In the midst of this stormy ebullition, one of the deputies, seeing Robespierre unable to speak from the violence of his rage and terror, cried out: “It is Danton's blood that is choking him!” Stung by the taunt, Robespierre found breath and courage to retort, “Danton! Is it Danton that you regret? Cowards! why did you not defend him!” These spirited words were the last he ever uttered in public. He and his brother were now removed in custody to a hall close by the Convention, and with them Saint-Just, Couthon, and Lebas. It had been an arduous day's work for the Convention, and it is not surprising that the deputies “clamored for an adjournment, that they might repose themselves and dine”; for whether men live or die, legislators must dine. They were thoughtful enough to remember that the five in custody would also like to dine, even for the last time; so the guilty deputies had a good dinner provided for them, and immediately after were transferred to separate prisons: Robespierre to the Luxembourg, his brother to St. Lazare, Couthon to Port Royal (dubbed Port Libre since it had been turned into a prison!), Lebas to Le Force, and Saint-Just aux Ecossais. Henriot, who commanded the troops devoted to Robespierre, was seized in the act of attempting an attack on the Convention, bound, and locked up in one of the courts. Two bold friends of his rallied the soldiers, stormed the Convention, released him, and placed him again at the head of his men. Meantime, the jailer of the Luxembourg had refused to admit Robespierre, and the bailiffs had to take him to the Mairie, where he was received with acclamations of respect as the “father of the people.” Henriot and his band by midnight had set him and the other four deputies free, and they were installed at the Hôtel de Ville, with a large body of soldiers drawn round the edifice to protect them. But the Convention, on its side, had not been idle. Barras was placed in command [pg 686] of all the troops that could be mustered, and in company with twelve energetic leaders, at the head of the gendarmerie and the artillery, marched on the Hôtel de Ville, dispersed Henriot's troops, and penetrated into the building, where they found the five deputies and captured them. The younger Robespierre flung himself out of a window in a frantic effort to escape the more tragic death that was now a certainty; he was picked up horribly mutilated, but with life enough yet to realize the horrors of his position. Lebas, on hearing the gendarmes battering on the door of the room, blew his brains out with a pistol. Saint-Just was seized with a knife in his hand, which he was going to plunge into his heart; he gave it up without a word, and allowed himself to be bound. Couthon, who was nearly blind and half-paralyzed, being powerless to offer the slightest resistance, was flung into a wheelbarrow that chanced to be in the court-yard. Robespierre himself, the centre of this group of suicides and murderers, attempted to cheat the guillotine as Lebas had done; but either his cowardly hand trembled and betrayed his will or was seized as he pulled the trigger, for the bullet went through the cheek instead of through the forehead. The jaw was frightfully fractured, and hung loose from the face, held on only by the flesh. Some spectator had the humanity to help the unfortunate man to tie it up with a handkerchief, and in this miserable plight he and his companions were conveyed at about two o'clock in the morning to the Committee of Public Safety. The official report of the day gives the following graphic description of what then occurred: “Robespierre was brought in on a plank ... by several artillery-men and armed citizens. He was placed on the table of the ante-chamber which adjoins that where the Committee holds its sittings. A deal box, which contained some samples of the ammunition-bread sent to the army du Nord, was put under his head by way of pillow. He was for nearly an hour in a state of insensibility which made us think that he was no more; but after an hour he opened his eyes. Blood was running in abundance from the wound he had in the left lower jaw; the jaw was broken, and a ball had gone through the cheek. His shirt was bloody. He was without hat or neckcloth. He had on a sky-blue coat,[158] nankeen breeches, white stockings hanging down at his heels.... At six in the morning a surgeon who happened to be in the court-yard of the Tuileries was called in to dress the wound. By way of precaution he first put a key in Robespierre's mouth. He found the left jaw broken. He pulled out two or three teeth, bandaged up the wound, and got a basin of water, which he placed at his side.” All this time no word was spoken by the wounded man; not even a sigh escaped him when the teeth were being extracted, yet the agony he endured must have been terrific. There he lay, a spectacle to gods and men, in his sky-blue coat, a tiger caught in his own lair, barked at and cursed and triumphed over by a band of wolves. Who could pity him—he who had never known pity for man or woman? For more than twenty hours he lay there in this mental and bodily torture. Once he made a sign which was understood to express thirst. The burning fever of his wound had parched him till he gasped for breath: but no one was so merciful [pg 687] as to get him a glass of water. Vinegar and gall they gave him in abundance. Many cursed him as the murderer of their kith and kin, and bade him drink his own blood, if he was thirsty.
All this while the tocsin is ringing out the glad news to Paris. Crowds rush out on the house-tops, and wave signals to the prisoners in the Conciergerie that the hour of deliverance is at hand. The prisoners cannot understand; they think the tocsin is the signal for a new September massacre. The word flies from cell to cell, and all fall on their knees and prepare for instant death.
Others, too, are making ready for death, but not thus. The tumbrels jolt up to the Convention, and collect for the last time their “batch”; this time there are but twenty-three victims. Amongst them, by an exquisite touch of retributive justice, is Simon the Cordwainer, going to die with Robespierre! And now they are ready, and the tumbrels move on. The corpse of Lebas is flung in with Robespierre, as that of Valazé was with Brissot; the other three were so disfigured with blood and the traces of the death-scuffle in the town-hall that they are hardly to be recognized. The entire city is out, shouting itself hoarse with joy. The roofs of the houses are alive with human eyes, all watching for the figure of Robespierre. When it appears, the soldiers point to it with their swords—show the tyrant, bound and gagged, to the people. The sight causes a frantic thrill of exultation that finds utterance in a yell of something too unholy for joy, too fierce for laughter. A woman breaks through the crowd, dashes aside the bayonets of the escort, and leaps to the side of the tumbrel. “Ah! thou demon,” she cries, waving her hand above her head, “the death of thee is better than wine to my heart Wretch, get thee down to hell with the curses of all wives and mothers!”