XII The Massacre of the Prisons
The next morning Nicole and Geneviève, having breakfasted at noon near the Temple, where the throng collected daily to insult the ears of the royal family, returned slowly toward the Tuileries through the hushed and apprehensive city.
Toward three o’clock the long-awaited tocsin sounded from the other side of the river, then the chance burst of a musket and the assembling roll of drums. But this time, in contrast to the night of the 9th of August, there came no spontaneous outpouring into the streets. As the tocsin continued to disturb the air with its violent voice, timid faces appeared at the windows, searching with anxious glances the streets, the opposite walls, in doubt of their neighbors; even the air, as though to discover the reason of the uproar.
The streets were emptied; small groups wavered in the entrances, waiting for the first rumors to guide them. As the two girls hesitated, a woman appeared, running toward them, dragging a child at either side. From window and doorway a clamor of questions arose, while many, running into the street, surrounded her and sought to stop her progress. But the woman, resisting all entreaties, cleft the crowd and disappeared, repeating frantically:
“They are massacring the prisoners!”
The street grew noisy with exclamation and conjecture, while those above, in the windows, screamed down for the rumors that flew from lip to lip. A little later another messenger arrived,—a waif of the slums, to whom the marks of poverty and vice had given the semblance of an incongruous manhood. The boy came romping down the street, bare-legged, disheveled, brandishing a knife. At times he flung up his hands and screamed in childish treble:
“To the Abbaye, citoyens, to the Abbaye! The tyrants are being exterminated. The justice of the people is beginning! To the Abbaye! To the Abbaye!”
Behind the frenzied boy there fell a silence, and the crowd, in a sudden, senseless panic, retreated indoors.
“The Abbaye!” Nicole cried in consternation. “And Dossonville! We must hurry there.”
A baker’s wife, seeing them hastening on, cried:
“Are you going to the Abbaye, citoyennes? Is there any danger?”
“Not for us.”
“Wait, I’ll join you.”
A cobbler made a fourth, then two apprentices from a cloth-merchant attached themselves, then a fishwife and a tow-headed newsboy. As they crossed the Seine the crowd increased, while horrid figures of depravity and suffering, vermin of Paris, broke past them. Cutlasses and pikes appeared, and from the panting throng shouts burst out:
“Death to the traitors!”
“Death to the betrayers of Longwy!”
“Death to all aristocrats!”
“Death to priests!”
At the Abbaye they found the sanguinary remnants of the prisoners who, transferred from the Conciergerie, had been swept from the carts into the maw of the mob at the very gates that opened to shelter them. On the prison itself there had been as yet no attack. The mob, seeking vengeance on the priests, had swept on to the convent of Les Carmes.
At the sight of the strewn corpses and the blood-bespattered pavements the baker’s wife halted, crying:
“I’ve seen enough; I’m going back.”
The cobbler hesitated, listening across the houses to the faint cries of the mob in the Rue Vaugirard. The apprentices sprang forward, while the newsboy exclaimed impudently:
“Come on, comrades, we must see what’s doing!”
Nicole, who had come solely to assure herself of Dossonville’s safety, likewise recoiling before the spectacle of butchery, was yet so impelled by the subtle, morbid fascination which such scenes exercise over the human mind, that without a thought she hastened on. The fishwife and the cobbler joined them; even the woman who had already started to retreat acceded to the common curiosity and returned, protesting:
“It’s too horrible! Turn back.”
“After all,” the cobbler answered, “that’s what the aristocrats would like to do to us!”
“Aye, citoyen, you’ve hit it right!”
“And the women?”
“They’ll leave them alone.”
“We’ll see.”
About the convent a loose throng was churning, bristling with pikes and crudely fashioned spears.
“Keep together,” the cobbler cried, “and bear toward the wall!”
By this manœuver they penetrated to the front, where, their band disintegrating, Geneviève and Nicole succeeded in reaching a position at a grill in the wall.
In the garden, not thirty feet away, a black mass dotted with the white of human faces was huddled together, shrinking from the gates and apertures that swarmed with axes, scythes, swords, and barbarous faces more pitiless than the steel.
At Nicole’s side a mason extended his cutlass toward the priests, bellowing:
“Eh, you fat fellow over there! Wait till they let us in! I’ll carve you!”
Another shouted:
“I choose to shave the tall one; I’ll make a true monk of him!”
The priests encouraged one another; some knelt, others lifted their arms, their voices, and their eyes serenely above. A few blanched before the approach of martyrdom, while others in whom youth’s natural impulse to life was strong calculated the surroundings and weighed the desperate chances of escape.
All at once there was an upheaval in the herd of the besieged, a swaying toward the walls, and a sudden parting that opened a path to the chapel beyond, where a swarm of the populace, who had broken through, was spreading over the steps. From the crowd without a wild shout went up; those at the locked gates, stretching their arms through, strove to prod the victims with their pikes.
On the steps, face to face with their prey, the new assailants hesitated, seeking some pretext before striking. But one, more impatient than the rest, burst from the back and fired point-blank into the herd. The impulse once given, the assassins fell upon their victims, who on their knees welcomed the end.
Forty or fifty of the younger members, revolting at such surrender to death, bounded away to scale the farther walls. A very few passed over and escaped to outer courts before the bandits flung themselves on the fleeing. Then everywhere could be seen bodies clutching at the brim of the wall, tumbling and pitching backward in the horror of the overtaking fate. Arms that grasped liberty suddenly contracted in the convulsions of despair; faces that already looked on life appeared a moment above the wall and fell back with the sharp summons to death.
“Shall we go?” cried Nicole, suffocated.
“Yes.”
But they could not move. The scene enchained them.
The hunt consummated, the hunters flung themselves on the unresisting, and as though to stifle the smallest spark of pity, redoubled their fury and their cries.
In front of the two girls a Marseillais felled a priest with two strokes across the scalp, and drove his pike into the stomach with such ferocity that the point refused to move. The assassin, in rage jumping on the lifeless body, stamped and tugged, cursing the resistance of the corpse which sought to retain the weapon that had struck it down. Everywhere the butchers, not content with the death-dealing blow, flung themselves on the lifeless bodies, piercing them with infuriated stabs, as though the last insult was this mutilation of the dead.
Finally, despairing of satisfying their vengeance on this inert mass, the leaders forced those who remained into the church, some who still breathed being borne on the arms of those who but deferred their murder. Two by two they were led out and butchered.
From this moment the massacre, in its clock-like procession, abated its fury. The executioners themselves, exhausted and listless, struck mechanically.
The crowd, grumbling at the monotony, moved away. Nicole and Geneviève found themselves in the street, packed in the press, beside their late companions. The crowd, animated by the lust of curiosity, became that most fearful of the manifestations of humanity—a mob.
Geneviève and Nicole, no longer individuals, but atoms, became cold, pitiless, maddened with sensations, hungry for new; invaded by a fury which they did not understand, an anger and a hatred of which they knew not the cause.
Some one cried:
“On to St. Firmin. There are eighty priests there!” A hundred voices took up the cry, and the mass, set in motion, rolled toward the prison.
The fishwife, with streaming hair, bellowed:
“Cut the throats of every one. No priest must escape!”
Farther on in the press of bodies, Nicole saw the two apprentices, transformed with the frenzy.
The cobbler had armed himself with some weapon; even the tow-headed newsboy near them screamed hysterically:
“À la mort! À la mort!”
“I can go no farther!” Nicole protested.
“Yes, yes,” Geneviève cried, seizing her arms and impelling her, but half resisting, into the rush of the multitude. “We must see it! We must see everything!”
She was a child no longer, but a savage akin in fury to the beast enraged by the red flash of blood.
At St. Firmin’s the vanguard broke into the prison. The night was filled with shrieks of terror and of furious exultation. Body after body, dead or dying, was hurled from the window, to be pounced upon below and torn to pieces. More than eighty lay quivering in mounds.
Then at last the mob, by that strange organization by which it moves without commands, turned face and, sparkling with torches, inundated the narrow street that led down to the Boulevard St. Germain, and returned to the prison of the Abbaye. It was now deep into the night, and for hours a semblance of a trial had been going on within the court. The mob, thus balked by the routine of justice, softened and dissipated into a throng of spectators, bewildered and recovering slowly from their delirium.
Nicole, fearing for Dossonville, pressed forward for a nearer view. About the gates were a score of executioners, so saturated with blood that at first glance the butchers seemed more like the butchered. Eight or ten waited in two rows the arrival of the new victim. As many more leaned wearily against the wall with nodding heads. One stooped to light fresh torches.
Suddenly the gates disclosed to Nicole the flaring courtyard and the wild figure of a prisoner propelled to destruction by two guards. At first he marched to his death with firm tread; but all at once, with a horrid heave of his breast, he stretched out his hands before his face to hide the hideous doom. Shoved forward, his arms raised in the instinct of self-preservation, he suffered untold tortures: his arms, hacked to spouting stumps, received a dozen gashes, while the revolting body sought to strike back against the sting, until the last blow silenced the shriek on shriek that called on merciful death.
Two men dragged aside the half-naked corpse and flung it on the mound of bodies. At the shock of the new arrival there was a sudden settling and shifting in this inert mass, a quivering adjustment that gave the ghastly semblance of life, as though a hideous welcome of the dead to the dead. Geneviève, with throbbing pulses and dilated nostrils, shuddered and turned to Nicole. She was so rigid, so ghastly with the horror, that Geneviève seized her arm.
“Ah! ah! ah!”
At her clutch Nicole screamed in mortal dread, then burst into hysterical weeping. Geneviève put her arm around her and drew her away, through the morbid crowd, seeing dimly the baker’s wife pressing feverishly forward to seize their place. Then Nicole, covering her eyes, began to scream:
“Take me away, away, away!”
But at every tenth step she stopped and struggled to go back, her glance seeking the caldron. The third time, to her horror, the gates opened once more, and, heavily borne between two guards, she saw the figure of Dossonville.