long before being transferred to the permanently appointed, well-paid jury, scaffold. The site of the old office can who could be trusted not to acquit. still be distinguished; there prisoners This arrangement smoothed the path of were received and their names recorded duty for l'homme couteau, for the ruthand inscribed. less accusateur. "La haine n'avait pas There was also the arrière greffe, besoin d'être convaincue; elle avait divided from the other part by strong condamné d'avance." It was sufficient bars, and in the office sat the terrible cause for death to have received" avec concierge Richard, upon whose favor indifférence la constitution républiso much depended. Here also prison-caine;" and it is pleasant to record ers waited for the arrival of Sanson that many meritorious and advanced and the tumbrils. The spot can be sans-culottes trod the bloody path traced at which the sentences of the merely as the victims of obscure private Tribunal were read out to those vic-hatreds.

tims, who then learned that they had Sanson and his valets arrived daily gained a prize in the lottery of the at the prison, always gay with the sainte guillotine. A certain significant prospect of a merry morning's — or mark was made with chalk on the afternoon's work. They never comdoors of the heavily barred, strongly plained of being overtasked. Yet the locked cells of the condemned; and problem which chiefly troubled the then it only remained for Sanson to heads of the Tribunal especially complete the work of liberty. The Robespierre- was how to slaughter extension of the law of suspected persons under which men or women might be suspected of being suspect filled the prisons of Paris at once with three thousand extra prisoners; and the Conciergerie became frightfully overcrowded. Happily the suspect had seldom to wait more than three or four days for the guillotine. The vestibule de la mort had to be speedily emptied in order to be again filled.

--

with sufficient rapidity, and in satisfactory numbers, the so-called aristocrats. Despite the most restless energy, aristocrats and enemies of the dictator so abounded that it was difficult, indeed almost impossible, to mow them down with reasonable celerity. Had Robespierre been spared, the Conciergerie would have seen daily fournées of one hundred and fifty victims; and it was indeed proposed, in influential quarters, that each Paris prison should have its guillotine working continuously every day; but, despite such eager desire, it remained a difficulty to overtake the necessary work. Robespierre had not Danton's colossal audacity of crime, and hesitated to repeat the wholesale massacre in the prisons. His pettier nature preferred the formalities of the guillotine if only the untiring machine could be driven fast enough- and much might be achieved with such mechanism. Happily, before Robespierre could guillotine all his enemies, some of them, like Tallien, when themselves in deadly danger, rose against the pitiless dictator and cut Such accidents were, how-short his career. His death put a full ever, very rare, and scarcely detract stop to that industry of wholesale murfrom Tinville's well-merited reputation. der, the development of which is one He followed implicitly the orders of of the most distinctive glories of the Robespierre, and was furnished with a Revolution. The place of Robespierre

A little door at the bottom of some steps, in the rue de Paris, gives access to the passage leading to the Revolutionary Tribunal. Fouquier-Tinville was virtually the governor of the Conciergerie, and this exemplary officer gave the greatest satisfaction to his master, Robespierre. Thoroughly zealous in the discharge of his functions, his work was to him a pleasure. He knew no pedantry, and he shunned no labor. Active and exact, his willingly rendered services were yet overtasked, and, despite all his care, he sometimes overlooked a prisoner - especially one whose name had not been registered - and, by mere inadvertence, let him live on.

never was, nor could be, supplied; and of the Revolution, gorged the prisons, "Liberty "shrieked as the Terror fell with him.

and wearied the knife, showed base pusillanimity when to him came his well-deserved doom.

With what royal heroism died Marie Antoinette, Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday! They all went to death from the Conciergerie. Fancy creates phantom figures flitting about the then crowded prison; voices that have so long been silent are heard again;

long vanished, are

almost

The courtyards and corridors seem now to be almost painfully silent, empty, deserted. They look desolate and bare; but how full of seething life they were during the Terror! The imagination finds it no hard task to repeople them. The void spaces of today were then swarming with haggard and feverish life - with life which hands lived so very near to death with an touched; void spaces are repeopled agonized, insecure existence haunted with swarms of fated victims and always by the ghastly red spectre of crowds of ruffianly jailers; and bright the guillotine. Both sexes and all eyes seem yet to glisten with tears of ranks mingled in the court, and even in anguish. We know so well how these the dungeous; early youth herded with ghosts of the past dressed and looked senility; ladies and cavaliers, generals, in life, that the shifting crowd lives senators, royalists, rogues, and strum- again in the imagination. The headspets and one most wretched queen men come; the tumbrils wait-and passed through the haunted prison on there are partings. To the morbid their way to the indiscriminate scaffold. fancy, depraved by dungeons, the unLoves, flirtations, friendships played a heeding sky, seen only in glimpses hurried, if sometimes intense, part in from the cavernous prison, seems lurid the tragic drama of the godless revo- with the crimson shadow of death. lution; and even song, gay with mock- Among the other faculties of fantasy, ery, fevered with despair, echoed the ear is sensitive; and as we wander through that dreary caravanserai of about court and vestibule, we seem to death, in which the whole area reeked hear the baying of deep-mouthed, great, and steamed with the scent and atmo- fierce dogs, - shepherds' dogs, as oue sphere of shambles. There was real might say, since their office was to heroism; there was gay intrepidity; guard the sheep for the slaughter. there were silent fortitude and defiant Several of these faithful canine animals desperation. French courage sprang were employed in the prison; but one up elastic beneath the horrible pressure of them, named Ravage, was distinof the inevitable; and French temper-guished for ferocity and sagacity. Jailament maintained its natural cheerful- ers slept at night near the cour de ness. There were, of course, hectic préau, and Ravage kept watch there excitement, factitious bravery, unnatural merriment among the many who were wantonly condemned to unmerited and violent death. Frivolity, brutality, heathen levity, were not wanting; and who can even imagine the sorrows, the sufferings, the agonies, the partings from the loved, of many of the hapless victims? Death can scarcely fail to be a fearful thing, but this was death, for no fault or reason, on a high scaffold, and by means of a blood-dripping axe. Among men the Duc de Châtelet alone showed abject cowardice; though Camille Desmoulins, who had stimulated the crimes

with his master. Some prisoners attempted to escape by boring a hole in the wall. Their chief danger of detection consisted in the watchfulness of Ravage; but, strangely enough, he was silent. His silence was explained, ou the following morning, by an assignat of one hundred sous which was tied to his tail, together with a little note on which was written: "On peut corrompre Ravage avec un assignat de cent sous et un paquet de pieds de mouton." The depraved dog walked about publishing his own infamy, and was hailed with shouts of laughter. He was immured, as a punishment, for

an apartment which, if

some hours in a cachot, and emerged | Conciergerie
with an air of deep humiliation.
Nor was
even play play of a
ghastly sort the sport natural to the
Terror wholly wanting. Parodies of
the dread Tribunal nay, even of
death by the guillotine were per-
formed with grim mirth and gay talent.
A plank taken from a bed served to
represent the fatal bascule of the scaf-
fold, a chair acted as the guillotine,
and all the details of an execution were
accurately reproduced. Fouquier-Tin-
ville and Sanson were well imitated;
and doomed men and women, in the
very jaws of the dreadful death which
they brightly mocked, surrounded at
the moment by jailers, spies, turnkeys,
huissiers, played a hideous game with ing conspired against the unity and

furniture and fittings be excepted, remains to-day in the same condition as it was when it was used for the last night of the Girondins - is the chapel. It is a large vaulted room, with square columns and iron gratings above the columns at one end, gratings which veil windows and suggest dungeons. The place bears few marks of the ecclesiastical character, and, if a chapel at all, could only be the chapel of a prison. Some of the party, notably Barbaroux, Buzot, Pétion, were despairing fugitives, hunted by Jacobin ferocity, and the virtuous Roland died by his own hand; but twenty-two adherents of the Gironde were condemned for hav

the dark fate which impended over indivisibility of the Republic, under an
them. The light French courage was acte d'accusation, drawn by Fouquier-
rendered morbid by the horrors of Rev- Tinville according to the directions of
olutionary murders. These terrible Robespierre and of St. Just, and repro-
sports took place in the comparative ducing the pamphlets which Camille
silence of midnight in the prison. The Desmoulins wrote to calumniate the
discipline of the brutal, drunken jailers Gironde. Against their better natures
must have been as lax as it was harsh. and convictions, the Girondins, actu-
"Notre rire avait l'air d'un vertige; "ated by a desire for power and popu-
and this fact may partly excuse the larity, and perhaps with a view to their
levity with which many prisoners own safety, had voted for the death of
treated mockingly "de la divinité de the king; but this unworthy concession
Marat, du sacerdoce de Robespierre, de did not save them from the king's fate.
la magistrature de Fouquier." The As a matter of course they were con-
two concierges, during the most terrible demned by ruthless rivals for the favor
time in the prison, were Le sieur Rich- of la Montagne. Valazé committed
ard (whose wife was killed by a des- suicide with a poniard; and his corpse,
perate prisoner) and Le sieur Bault. covered by a mantle, lay in an angle of
The latter reigned during a temporary the chapel in which his friends ate
suspension of Richard; and both men their last supper, and was guillotined
deserved the confidence of their em- with the living an instance of a sen-
ployers. What sights they must have tence carried out after death. The
seen! what agonies did they witness! deputy Bailleul provided for his friends
The côté des Douze and la Souricière a sumptuous supper. The Girondins
can now be only feebly recognized; kissed the cold hand of Valaze, and
but enough remains to show where covered the rigid face with a cloak be-
they were. "Les Nuits à la Concier- fore they sat down. Near to the chapel
gerie," is a sad, significant volume was the cell of the queen, and Marie
containing the verses which, sometimes Antoinette may have heard the loud
gay, sometimes despairing, often witty, voices and the singing of the excited
and always courageous, were wrung guests at that grim revel of approach-
from the hearts of French victims of ing death.
Jacobinism and Robespierreism. No Their talk and bearing were a little
one can read them now without wonder theatrical, frivolous, and insincere,
and emotion.
and fell below the dignity of the dark,
One of the memorable sites of the solemn hour. Brave they were; but

batch comprised seventy-eight victims. "Tiens, voilà ton extrait mortuaire," said the turnkey to the prisoner who received a summons to appear before the tribunal that never spared. One act of accusation served for fifty or sixty prisoners; and persons of different sexes, who held very differing opinions — but who were all innocent - were included in the same very gen

yet the last enemy had its doubts and called "trials" to their comrades in even terrors for some: "Que ferons- misfortune, a significant gesture — the nous demain à pareille heure?" asked hand drawn across the throat-intiDucos, with an awful curiosity which mated to the crowd of those who resembled the question of Richard III. waited for the same fate, that the vic"La meilleure démonstration de l'im-tim was sentenced. Fournées, during mortalité, n'est-ce pas nous ?" asked the Terror, consisted of thirty, forty, agnostic Vergniaud. Choice dishes, fifty, sixty heads a day; the last fine wines, rare flowers, and flaring flambeaux decked the table of the condemned guests. The Abbé Lambert was present, witnessed the scene, and saw the bearing of the men. He recorded the details of that strange festival, his record being, says Lamartine, "faithful as conscience, and exact as the memory of a last friend." Many of the doomed victims were pagans, and scepticism colored their latest eral indictment. The deed was often thoughts. Most refused the consola- illegible, and was shown-if shown at tions of religion; but a few received absolution from Lambert; while the non-juring Abbé Emery ministered to Fauchet. And the room in which all this took place still stands. At ten o'clock the headsmen came, to perform the toilette of the condemned. Five carts were waiting. The Girondins burst into the Marseillaise, and thought chiefly of the example of the death of Republicans. Arrived at the scaffold, they all embraced, and resumed their funeral song. Each time that the dripping knife fell, the chant was weakened by the loss of one voice forever hushed; and Vergniaud, who stood by to witness all these horrors, raised his weak song alone until he, the last executed, had joined his comrades. It seems almost an irony of fate that the grave of the Girondins, the founders of the Republic, should have been dug by the side of that of Louis XVI. The total expenses of their interment | cureur before the Tribunal. were two hundred and ten francs. Immersed in a revolutionary current too strong for them, they became victims of worse men; and Danton and Robespierre were, for the time, strengthened in power by their fall.

A staircase, now called l'escalier de la Reine, leads from the prison to the chamber in which the Revolutionary Tribunal sat and doomed. When the condemned descended from their so

all-to the accused at the last moment. If he wished to maintain or to prove his innocence (many prisoners thought in their simplicity that it would be sufficient to disprove the charge made against them), he was told, "Tu n'as pas la parole." The most usual charge was, that the accused had conspired against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic; the Tribunal judged in mass, sentenced in mass, murdered in mass. An act of accusation was drawn up in general terms, and any number of names filled in afterwards. The lists were submitted by Fouquier-Tinville to Robespierre, who, in his day of dictatorship, made a pencil mark against the names of those that he wished to destroy. Fouquier lived in the Palais, and rarely left his dwelling-place except to attend the Committee of Public Safety with lists of proscriptions, or to act as pro

The horrors of the prison tended to lessen the dread of death. "Dans les révolutions," said Danton, "l'autorité reste aux plus scélérats ;" and Robespierre, who endured no rival, had to destroy his former master and great competitor, Danton. To Robespierre himself no one could succeed. The last great act of Danton in the Conciergerie (always excepting his own death) occurred on the 2nd of September, 1792.

The massacres in the prisons were ceased with the death of Robespierre. carried out in the crowded Concier- It is a strange irony of fate that such a gerie, and in the Salle des Girondins is wretched creature should have held for shown a small door, walled up, but still so long a time the absolute power of very evident, through which the vic-life and death over so many of his tims were driven into the court where fellow-creatures! Few persons can rethe paid butchers awaited them. Five strain a feeling of exultation as they prisoners, in their despairing horror, stand in the dreary cell in which the hanged themselves in their cells when inhuman wretch was left to face the the massacre was imminent. It is hor- prospect of the same death which he rible to fancy the scene when the poor had inflicted on so many victims. Durprisoners were thrust into the sham-ing his last hours Robespierre may bles; blood everywhere on the arms have remembered that he himself had and weapons of the assassins; on the avowed some sort of belief in some hacked and mutilated corpses; on the kind of Supreme Being, though that red, slippery, wet floor. Cortet, one thought could hardly give him much of the assassins, himself killed thirty- comfort. Round the jaw, shattered by three of the victims. What expressions his own misdirected bullet, was tied a on the hideous faces of infrahuman bloody rag, to be snatched away by beasts excited by the rapture of such Sanson in order that the knife might carnage! What cries, sobs, struggles, not be obstructed. Robespierre's last on the part of the helpless victims utterance was not speech, but a scream. What fiendish cruelties were practised On the morning after the 9th Therupon the unfortunate woman, Made-midor, as Beaulieu tells us, “On n'osait leine-Josèphe Grederet, "femme Bap- pas encore dire hautement tout ce tiste, âgée de trente-deux ans, et qu'on pensait: mais on se serrait la bouquetière au Palais Royal"! But main, et l'on disait à voix basse, 'il her offence was not political. The est mort.'" After his fall, the jailers number massacred is given by Taine as three hundred and twenty-eight, but they tell an uncertain story in the Conciergerie. No full records were kept of the later butcheries, and it is more than probable that many more than the supposed number perished.

in the different prisons assumed a shambling semblance of humanity; and massacre was stopped. Chancellor Pasquier, arrested suddenly in the street, could not be tried on the day next after his arrest, and was therefore spared, because the next day after that was the day on which Robespierre fell, a singular instance of revolutionary good fortune. How many widows and orphans had Robespierre made! "Scélérat, go down to hell, with the curses of all wives and mothers!" That was, no doubt, the cry of a mother and

The chapel (Salle des Girondins) has a sacristy, and this is a small, hard, bare cell, which stands next to that of the queen. This cell is noteworthy, because within its walls were passed the last hours of the monster Robespierre. The world has seen many very wicked meu, but never perhaps one so con- a wife. Another woman springs on temptible as the dictator of the Terror. If he had lived a little longer, Couthon and St. Just, who happily died with him, would have been sacrificed as Danton was. The probable object of Robespierre was to continue and even to augment the Terror until he should have exterminated all his enemies; but this was necessarily a long process, which was cut short by the revolt of outraged humanity. As the sail drops when the mast snaps, so the Terror

the tumbril: "The death of thee gladdens my very heart!" And these women, if furious, were not "furies" of the Revolution. The tricoteuses are silent to-day; the Jacobin mob is cowed, but the people is glad. Gendarmes point out the bound dictator with the points of their swords. Public curiosity is blended with horror and loathing. A tent was large enough to hold the ghosts of those that Richard had slain; but not the little cell-nay,