In the Name of Liberty: A Story of the Terror by Owen Johnson
XII
THE MASSACRE OF THE PRISONS
The next morning Nicole and Genevieve, having breakfasted at noon nearthe Temple, where the throng collected daily to insult the ears of theroyal family, returned slowly toward the Tuileries through the hushedand apprehensive city.
Toward three o'clock the long-awaited tocsin sounded from the otherside of the river, then the chance burst of a musket and the assemblingroll of drums. But this time, in contrast to the night of the 9th ofAugust, there came no spontaneous outpouring into the streets. As thetocsin continued to disturb the air with its violent voice, timid facesappeared at the windows, searching with anxious glances the streets,the opposite walls, in doubt of their neighbors; even the air, asthough 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 girlshesitated, a woman appeared, running toward them, dragging a child ateither side. From window and doorway a clamor of questions arose, whilemany, running into the street, surrounded her and sought to stop herprogress. But the woman, resisting all entreaties, cleft the crowd anddisappeared, repeating frantically:
"They are massacring the prisoners!"
The street grew noisy with exclamation and conjecture, while thoseabove, in the windows, screamed down for the rumors that flew from lipto 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 anincongruous manhood. The boy came romping down the street, bare-legged,disheveled, brandishing a knife. At times he flung up his hands andscreamed in childish treble:
"To the Abbaye, citoyens, to the Abbaye! The tyrants are beingexterminated. The justice of the people is beginning! To the Abbaye! Tothe Abbaye!"
Behind the frenzied boy there fell a silence, and the crowd, in asudden, senseless panic, retreated indoors.
"The Abbaye!" Nicole cried in consternation. "And Dossonville! We musthurry 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-merchantattached themselves, then a fishwife and a tow-headed newsboy. Asthey crossed the Seine the crowd increased, while horrid figures ofdepravity and suffering, vermin of Paris, broke past them. Cutlassesand 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 intothe maw of the mob at the very gates that opened to shelter them. Onthe prison itself there had been as yet no attack. The mob, seekingvengeance on the priests, had swept on to the convent of Les Carmes.
At the sight of the strewn corpses and the blood-bespattered pavementsthe baker's wife halted, crying:
"I've seen enough; I'm going back."
The cobbler hesitated, listening across the houses to the faint criesof the mob in the Rue Vaugirard. The apprentices sprang forward, whilethe 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 soimpelled by the subtle, morbid fascination which such scenes exerciseover the human mind, that without a thought she hastened on. Thefishwife and the cobbler joined them; even the woman who had alreadystarted 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 wouldlike 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 andcrudely fashioned spears.
"Keep together," the cobbler cried, "and bear toward the wall!"
By this manoeuver they penetrated to the front, where, their banddisintegrating, Genevieve and Nicole succeeded in reaching a positionat a grill in the wall.
In the garden, not thirty feet away, a black mass dotted with the whiteof human faces was huddled together, shrinking from the gates andapertures that swarmed with axes, scythes, swords, and barbarous facesmore 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 carveyou!"
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 theirarms, their voices, and their eyes serenely above. A few blanchedbefore the approach of martyrdom, while others in whom youth's naturalimpulse to life was strong calculated the surroundings and weighed thedesperate chances of escape.
All at once there was an upheaval in the herd of the besieged, aswaying toward the walls, and a sudden parting that opened a pathto the chapel beyond, where a swarm of the populace, who had brokenthrough, was spreading over the steps. From the crowd without awild shout went up; those at the locked gates, stretching their armsthrough, strove to prod the victims with their pikes.
On the steps, face to face with their prey, the new assailantshesitated, seeking some pretext before striking. But one, moreimpatient than the rest, burst from the back and fired point-blankinto the herd. The impulse once given, the assassins fell upon theirvictims, who on their knees welcomed the end.
Forty or fifty of the younger members, revolting at such surrenderto death, bounded away to scale the farther walls. A very few passedover and escaped to outer courts before the bandits flung themselveson the fleeing. Then everywhere could be seen bodies clutching at thebrim of the wall, tumbling and pitching backward in the horror of theovertaking fate. Arms that grasped liberty suddenly contracted in theconvulsions of despair; faces that already looked on life appeared amoment 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 theirfury and their cries.
In front of the two girls a Marseillais felled a priest with twostrokes across the scalp, and drove his pike into the stomach with suchferocity that the point refused to move. The assassin, in rage jumpingon the lifeless body, stamped and tugged, cursing the resistance ofthe corpse which sought to retain the weapon that had struck it down.Everywhere the butchers, not content with the death-dealing blow, flungthemselves 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 stillbreathed being borne on the arms of those who but deferred theirmurder. Two by two they were led out and butchered.
From this moment the massacre, in its clock-like procession, abatedits fury. The executioners themselves, exhausted and listless, struckmechanically.
The crowd, grumbling at the monotony, moved away. Nicole and Genevievefound themselves in the street, packed in the press, beside their latecompanions. The crowd, animated by the lust of curiosity, became thatmost fearful of the manifestations of humanity--a mob.
Genevieve and Nicole, no longer individuals, but atoms, became cold,pitiless, maddened with sensations, hungry for new; invaded by a furywhich they did not understand, an anger and a hatred of which they kne
Some one cried:
"On to St. Firmin. There are eighty priests there!" A hundred voicestook 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-headednewsboy near them screamed hysterically:
"A la mort! A la mort!"
"I can go no farther!" Nicole protested.
"Yes, yes," Genevieve cried, seizing her arms and impelling her, buthalf resisting, into the rush of the multitude. "We must see it! Wemust see everything!"
She was a child no longer, but a savage akin in fury to the beastenraged by the red flash of blood.
At St. Firmin's the vanguard broke into the prison. The night wasfilled with shrieks of terror and of furious exultation. Body afterbody, dead or dying, was hurled from the window, to be pounced uponbelow and torn to pieces. More than eighty lay quivering in mounds.
Then at last the mob, by that strange organization by which it moveswithout commands, turned face and, sparkling with torches, inundatedthe narrow street that led down to the Boulevard St. Germain, andreturned 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 thecourt. The mob, thus balked by the routine of justice, softened anddissipated into a throng of spectators, bewildered and recoveringslowly from their delirium.
Nicole, fearing for Dossonville, pressed forward for a nearer view.About the gates were a score of executioners, so saturated with bloodthat at first glance the butchers seemed more like the butchered. Eightor ten waited in two rows the arrival of the new victim. As many moreleaned wearily against the wall with nodding heads. One stooped tolight fresh torches.
Suddenly the gates disclosed to Nicole the flaring courtyard and thewild figure of a prisoner propelled to destruction by two guards. Atfirst he marched to his death with firm tread; but all at once, witha horrid heave of his breast, he stretched out his hands before hisface to hide the hideous doom. Shoved forward, his arms raised in theinstinct of self-preservation, he suffered untold tortures: his arms,hacked to spouting stumps, received a dozen gashes, while the revoltingbody sought to strike back against the sting, until the last blowsilenced the shriek on shriek that called on merciful death.
Two men dragged aside the half-naked corpse and flung it on the moundof bodies. At the shock of the new arrival there was a sudden settlingand shifting in this inert mass, a quivering adjustment that gave theghastly semblance of life, as though a hideous welcome of the deadto the dead. Genevieve, with throbbing pulses and dilated nostrils,shuddered and turned to Nicole. She was so rigid, so ghastly with thehorror, that Genevieve seized her arm.
"Ah! ah! ah!"
At her clutch Nicole screamed in mortal dread, then burst intohysterical weeping. Genevieve put her arm around her and drew heraway, through the morbid crowd, seeing dimly the baker's wife pressingfeverishly forward to seize their place. Then Nicole, covering hereyes, began to scream:
"Take me away, away, away!"
But at every tenth step she stopped and struggled to go back, herglance seeking the caldron. The third time, to her horror, the gatesopened once more, and, heavily borne between two guards, she saw thefigure of Dossonville.