It was the monks, as tradition wills it, who hollowed out the cruel cells of the Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-PrÈs. The architect Gomard, insisting that cells were not included in the bond, withdrew when he had put his last touches to the cloisters. But in 1630, or thereabouts, no monastery was complete without its oubliettes, and the prior commanded his brethren to finish the work of the too-scrupulous Gomard. Thus was the Abbaye equipped as an abbaye should be.

What power indeed, spiritual or temporal, had not the privilege in those days of setting up its pillory, its gallows, its pile of faggots built around a stake! In Paris alone at this date some twenty separate jurisdictions possessed the right to fatten victims for the scaffold, and it might almost be said that the municipal divisions of the capital had gibbets for their boundaries.

In 1674, however, the situation changed somewhat. The authority of the ChÂtelet was enlarged by royal edict, which gathered to it the rights and privileges of all the lesser corporations, and confiscated the halters and the faggots of private justice. This was a general blow, which none took more to heart than the prior of the Abbaye of Saint-Germain-of-the-Meadows. He had enjoyed the rights of "high," "middle," and "low" justice; he had imprisoned, tortured, and despatched at his holy pleasure. Forthwith, he composed and addressed to Louis XIV. un mÉmoire Éloquent, which touched that pious heart. The Royal will consented to restore to the prior a considerable portion of his ancient jurisdiction. Within the extensive bounds of the monastery and its appanages, the holy father might still consider himself gaoler, tormentor, and executioner.

But his prison was now large beyond his pious needs, and little by little the Abbaye took a more secular character. The cells which the restricted powers of the prior could no longer charge to the full, were set apart for young noblemen and others whose parents or guardians had an interest in narrowing their borders. It was an age when parents and guardians had an almost unlimited authority over sons, daughters, and wards; and when fathers and uncles seldom thought twice about applying for a lettre de cachet. Sometimes young rakes were put into temporary seclusion for quite satisfactory reasons; but very often the legal powers of parents and guardians were used with abominable cruelty; and young men were imprisoned for years, suffering the treatment of criminals, merely to gratify the rancour of a near relative; or were even, where there was a fortune in question, confined expressly with the design that they should be secretly got rid of. A father could or did authorise a gaoler to treat his innocent son with a rigour that goes almost beyond belief; to forbid him to petition anyone for release; to keep him in solitary confinement; to feed him on the most meagre rations. The nephew of a General Wurmser, who had designs upon the young man's fortune, had him imprisoned in the Abbaye on some vague charge of dissipation. The young man was only twenty years of age, but he entered the Abbaye with the fixed conviction that his uncle did not intend ever to release him, and this conviction was confirmed by the hint conveyed to him by a turnkey, that he was to be sent to the fortress of Pierre-Encise, or Ham. Within a week, he had committed suicide in his cell.

Occasionally, young bloods of the period did penance in the Abbaye for practical jokes of a rather questionable morality. A certain D——, a spend-thrift of the first rank (who, however, rose afterwards to great honour in the army), was at the last pinch to settle his gaming debts. An uncle from whom he expected a goodly legacy lay sick unto death in his HÔtel, and D—— gave out that the patient desired the attendance of a notary. The notary arrived, and the uncle dictated a will entirely in his nephew's favour. This being published, loans were forthcoming. But the sequel was less satisfactory; for D—— presently found himself a prisoner in the Abbaye, and his friend, the Chevalier de C——, in a cell of the Bastille; the former for having personated a moribund uncle, and the latter for having aided and abetted him in the swindle.

When Howard was making his memorable progress through the "Lazzarettos of Europe," the Abbaye was amongst the prisons which he visited. He notes that there were "five little cells in which as many as fifty men were sometimes massed together." The Abbaye had undergone yet another transformation, and was now the principal military prison of Paris. It was reserved chiefly for the soldiers, both officers and privates, of the Gardes FranÇaises; but delinquents of other regiments were sent there also; and a turbulent place the Abbaye seems to have been in the days before the Revolution. For, up to '89, the French army recruited itself as best it could, and principally from amongst the masses of the unemployed and the vagabond classes. They were bought by recruiting sergeants, or swept into the ranks by the press-gangs, and it may be supposed that the stuff out of which the rank-and-file was manufactured was sometimes of the rottenest. Moreover, there was little spirit amongst the officers to induce them to train up into good fighting-men and self-respecting citizens the peasants, beggars, and outcasts of whom they found themselves in command. The swaggering, aristocrat captain, lording it over the colonel, who was perhaps a mere soldier of fortune, scorned the men beneath him. His military rank, added to the colossal difference in social rank between the nobility and the people, gave him a double sense of superiority; there was no esprit de corps, no feeling of comradeship in arms; but, on the one side, a perpetual and galling assertion of authority, and, on the other, a continuous struggle to secure some amount of recognition and freedom.

Insubordinate soldiers were continually being thrust into the Abbaye, and there were strange scenes within those walls.

In the year 1784, say the authors of Les Prisons de l'Europe, two military prisoners were finishing their scanty meal.

"Our last day together, Desforges," said one. "You go to chÂteau Trompette, I to Valenciennes. "We're in for twenty years of it!"

"Yes, and for what, Dessaignes?" said the other. "For a quarrel with a clod of an officer risen from the ranks. Twenty years!"

"My dear Desforges," said the young aristocrat. "It is not a cheerful prospect.—Warm here, isn't it? Trees in leaf, and flowers smelling sweet—out there. Out there, where liberty lies, Desforges. Come, shall we be free?"

"Free! There are four bolts to the door, and another door at the end of the corridor."

"Who talks of forcing bolts?" said Dessaignes. "At what hour do they exercise us?"

"At six, as usual, I suppose."

"Yes; and once in the courtyard there is but one door to open."

"True; but the means of opening it?"

Dessaignes whipped up his mattrass, and displayed a pair of cavalry pistols (pistolets d'arcon) and a long dagger.

"Where—" began his friend.

"The barrister who came to see me yesterday conveyed the arsenal under his robe. Now, are these the keys to open a cage like ours?"

"None better! But I make one condition," said Desforges,—"that we are not to kill anyone."

"There will be no necessity. We shall go down armed to the courtyard; one of us will entice the concierge near the door, and the other will cover him with a pistol. A little determination is all we shall need."

Six o'clock struck, and the gaoler came to conduct the prisoners to the courtyard. They descended with their weapons in their pockets, and once in the yard Dessaignes was for losing not a moment. Their guard was the only attendant within sight, and as Desforges held him in talk, Dessaignes suddenly stepped behind and seized him by his coat-collar. The startled gaoler prepared to summon help, but before he could get out a word Dessaignes clapped a pistol to his forehead.

"Speak but one syllable," said he in a whisper, "and you will never utter another. Come, your keys!"

"Never!" replied the gaoler.

"Your soul to God, then, for your hour has come!"

The gaoler felt the muzzle at his forehead, and saw the glitter in the eyes of his captor. He hesitated.

"A second more, and I fire. Reflect!" said Dessaignes, quietly.

The gaoler's hand was already moving towards his keys when, all at once, his collar burst in the grip of Dessaignes, and he fell backwards. At the same instant, and by accident, Dessaignes' pistol exploded. The crack brought a dozen warders on the scene.

"Quick!" cried Dessaignes to his fellow-prisoner; "up-stairs again!"

They gained their cell, Dessaignes shut and bolted the door, and together they barricaded it with all the furniture they could lay hands on.

"How much powder have we?" asked Desforges, under his breath.

"About four charges, but we shall not need it," replied Dessaignes. "Wait; I'll give them their answer."

The warders hammered vainly at the door.

"Gentlemen," called Dessaignes, "we may be induced to capitulate, but we shall not yield to force. You had better desist. We have powder enough here to blow the Abbaye to the gate of heaven."

A murmur of alarm arose on the other side of the door, and silence followed.

"You see!" observed Dessaignes, "these pious chaps will not mount unprepared into the presence of their Maker!"

The posse of warders was, in fact, withdrawn.

"But what shall we do next?" asked Desforges.

"For the present," said Dessaignes, "we shall wait. They will be wanting to make terms with us."

But the night passed, and no offer of capitulation was received. Two other things lacking were, supper in the evening and breakfast in the morning. The enemy had apparently changed their tactics; the blockade of the prisoners was complete, and so was the famine. The day wore on, and night came again; but not the paltriest offer of terms, nor a bowl of thin soup. The next day broke with a prospect as barren.

Towards noon a deputation was heard approaching.

"If you don't give us something to eat," cried Dessaignes, "sooner than die of hunger we will blow up the prison."

"To the gate of heaven. You have already said so," replied the voice of the governor.

"Then you mean to sacrifice all the innocent persons in the place?"

"Not at all! We have made our dispositions. The other prisoners have been removed. You two can ascend heavenwards as soon as you please."

Dessaignes glanced at his friend, and the expressions on both faces must have been interesting.

"To be candid," said Desforges, "my stomach sounds a parley."

"My own offers the same advice," said Dessaignes.

"Let us follow it," said Desforges.

"Gentlemen," called Dessaignes through the key-hole, "the war is over. Some bread, if you please, a bottle of wine, and a plate of meat. Those are our simple conditions of capitulation."

Agreed to; and the door was opened. A legal gentleman came from the King to hold an enquiry; but as Dessaignes' pistol had done no harm to anyone, and as the two prisoners had conducted their little campaign in a modest and inoffensive manner, no addition was made to their sentence,—which indeed was the equivalent of a "life" sentence at the present day. They were transferred to the Conciergerie, where their bonds were not too tight; their families kept them in money, and they received and dined their friends.

Desforges, the younger of the pair, seemed willing to accept his fate; but Dessaignes, whose blood was always tingling, ached for liberty. He watched his visitors out of the prison with hungry eyes. After all, the least cruel of prisons is a cage, and the wings will beat against the bars. Who knows what freedom means but the man who hears his lock turned nightly by some other man's hand?

One night, the two young prisoners had been allowed (an affair of a bribe) to give a dinner to some friends. The looseness of the rules permitted the presence also of the principal warders, whom the hosts took care to fill with wine. The table was surrounded by men in the sleep of liquor, and Dessaignes and Desforges slipped out, and presented themselves at the inner door of the prison. It was past midnight, and the turnkey was asleep in his chair. Dessaignes took a key from his belt at a venture, and tried the lock. It creaked, and the turnkey awoke. Dessaignes turned and stabbed him, and he slept in death. The first door was passed.

At the second door the turnkey was awake. So much the worse for him. Dessaignes' dagger was out and in again, and the turnkey dropped. Another key, another lock; the second door was passed.

At the third and outer door, the warder stood beyond the grille, safe, and shouted the alarm. The prisoners turned to retreat, but the third warder's cry had summoned another, who, quick to see the situation, slammed the first door to; and between the first door and the third Dessaignes and Desforges were trapped.

One warder murdered outright, a second on the point of death,—the fate of the assassin and his comrade could not be long in doubt. A prisoner gave evidence that he had been bribed to drug the first gate-warder; and both Dessaignes and Desforges were sentenced to be "broken alive." The decree was passed on the 1st of October, 1784, signed by Louis XVI., at the express request of two of his ministers, and carried out publicly in every terrible detail.

But darker scenes than this are preparing at the Abbaye. It was here that the Revolution may be said to have begun, and here that some of its worst crimes were perpetrated.

In June of 1789, there lay in the Abbaye certain soldiers of the Gardes FranÇaises, charged with refusing to obey their orders, out of sympathy with the National Assembly. Their situation in the prison became known, and a clamour arose for their release. "À l'Abbaye! À l'Abbaye!" was the cry; two hundred men set out from the Palais-Royal, and four thousand arrived at the prison gates. Every door of defence was staved in, and in less than an hour from the commencement of the attack, the democratic Gardes were released, and borne in triumph through Paris. This was one of the first demonstrations of the popular will. How quickly that will felt and appreciated its strength, and in what abandonment of cruel passion it was to find expression, most readers have learned. There is nothing in the annals of the world to be compared with the series of events in the Paris prisons in '92, to which history has given the name of the September Massacres. In that deliberate slaughter, over one thousand men and women perished, hewn in pieces in the prisons or at the prison doors. The revolutionary committees had packed the gaols with "suspected" persons, mostly innocent of anything that could be laid to their charge; and there they awaited such death as might be decreed for them: salvation was all but hopeless. There was talk at first of burning them en masse in the prisons; then of thrusting all the prisoners into the subterranean cells, and drowning them slowly by pouring or pumping water on them. Assassination pure and simple seems to have been resolved upon "as a measure of indulgence." A mock form of trial was held at all the prisons, that the butcheries might be given an appearance of legality.

On Sunday, the 2d of September, '92, the barriers of the city were closed, and early in the afternoon the tocsin clanging from every steeple in Paris called up the butchers to their work. Some thirty priests were faring in five hackney carriages to the Abbaye prison, and with them the slaughter was begun. One coach reached the prison with a load of corpses; the occupants of the other four—AbbÉ Sicard excepted—were killed as they alighted. Prisoners in the Abbaye watched the carnage from behind their bars, and said: "It will be our turn next."

To one of these prisoners, Journiac Saint-MÉard, one time captain in the King's light infantry, we shall for the present attach ourselves. His Agony of Thirty-eight Hours (Mon agonie de trente-huit heures), much read at the beginning of the century, is amongst the best of the contemporary records, and from that I shall translate at some length.

This slow deliberate killing of the priests was done, he says, amid a silence inexpressibly horrible; and as each fell, a savage murmur went up, and a single shout of Vive la nation! Women were there encouraging the men, and fetching jugs of wine for them. Someone in the crowd pointed to the windows of the prison and said: "There are plenty of conspirators behind there; and not a single one must escape!"

Towards seven in the evening, two men with sabres, their hands steeped in blood, entered the prison, and began to carry out the prisoners for slaughter.

"The unfortunate Reding lay sick on his bed, and begged to be killed there. One of the men hesitated, but his companion said, 'Allons donc!' and he slung him across his shoulder to carry him out, and he was killed in the street."

"We looked at one another in silence, but presently the cries of fresh victims renewed our agitation, and we recalled the words of M. Chantereine as he plunged a knife into his heart: 'We are all destined to be massacred.'"

"At midnight, ten men armed with sabres, and preceded by two turnkeys with torches, came into our dungeon, and ordered us to range ourselves along the foot of our beds. They counted us, and told us that we were responsible for one another, swearing that if one of us escaped, the rest should be massacred, without being heard by the President. The last words gave us a little hope, for until then we had had no idea that we might be heard before being killed."

"At two o'clock on Monday morning, we heard them breaking in one of the prison doors, and thought at first that we were about to be slaughtered in our beds, but were a little reassured when we heard someone outside say that it was the door of a cell which some prisoners had tried to barricade. We learned afterwards that all who were found there had their throats cut."

"At ten, AbbÉ Lenfant, confessor of the King, and the AbbÉ de Chapt-Rastignac appeared in the pulpit of the chapel which served for our prison, and informing us that our last hour was approaching, invited us all to receive their blessing. An indefinable electric movement sent us all to our knees, and, with clasped hands, we received it. Those two white-haired old men with hands outstretched in prayer, death hovering above us, and on every side environing us: what a situation, what a moment, never to be forgotten!"

Saint-MÉard goes on to say how, during that morning, they discussed among themselves what was the easiest way in which to receive death. The slaughter in the streets never stopped, and some of them went from time to time to the window to observe and make reports.

"They reported that those certainly suffered the most and were the longest in dying who tried in any way to protect their heads, inasmuch as by so doing they warded off the sabre-cuts for a time, and sometimes lost both hands and arms before their heads were struck. Those who stood up with their hands behind their backs seemed to suffer least, and certainly died soonest.... On such horrible details did we deliberate."

Towards afternoon, overwhelmed by fatigue and anxiety, Saint-MÉard threw himself on his bed and slept. He awoke after a comforting dream, which he felt certain was an omen of good fortune. But he and the others were now consumed by thirst; it was twenty-six hours since they had had anything to drink. A gaoler fetched them a jug of water, but could tell them nothing as to their fate.

The long agony of waiting drew to an end.

"At eleven at night, several persons armed with swords and pistols ordered us to place ourselves in single file, and led us out to the second wicket, next to the place where the trials were being held. I got as near as I could to one of our guards, and managed little by little to engage him in conversation."

This man was an old soldier and a ProvenÇal, and when he found that Saint-MÉard could talk the rude patois of that district—scarcely intelligible in Paris—he grew quite friendly, fetched him a tumbler of wine to hearten him, and counselled him as to what he should tell the judges. The ProvenÇal let him stand where he had a glimpse of the court, and he saw two prisoners thrust to the bar and condemned almost unheard; a moment later, their death-cries reached his ears.

Two hours passed thus; it was one o'clock in the morning, but still the judges heard, condemned, and sent their victims out to die by sword and hatchet in the street, where in places the blood was ankle deep, and the dead lay in piles.

All at once Saint-MÉard heard his name called. "After having suffered an agony of thirty-seven hours, an agony as of death itself, the door opened and I was called. Three men laid hold of me, and haled me in."

By the glare of torches,

"I saw that dreadful judgment bar, where liberty or death lay for me. The President, in grey coat, sword at his side, stood leaning against a table, on which were papers, an ink-stand, pipes, and bottles. Around the table were ten persons, sitting or standing, two of whom were in sleeveless jackets and aprons; others were asleep, stretched on benches. Two men in shirts all smeared with blood kept the door; an old turnkey had his hand on the bolt....

"Here then stood I at this swift and bloody bar, where the best help was to be without all help, and where no resources of the mind were of avail that had not truth to rest upon.

"'Your name, your calling?' said the President, and one of the judges added: 'The smallest lie undoes you.'

"'My name,' I answered, 'is Journiac Saint-MÉard; I served twenty-five years as an officer in the army. I stand before you with the confidence of a man who has nothing to reproach himself with, and who is therefore not likely to utter falsehoods.'

"'It will be for us to judge of that,' responded the man in grey."

The trial proceeded. Saint-MÉard was accused of having edited the anti-revolutionary journal, De la cour et de la ville, but showed satisfactorily that he had not done so. Accused next of recruiting for the emigrants, at which there was an ominous murmur, "Gentlemen, gentlemen," pleaded the prisoner, "the word is with me at present, and I beg the President to maintain it for me,—I never needed it so sorely!" "That's true enough!" laughed the judges, and the court began to shew itself more sympathetic. Saint-MÉard, though, was not yet off the gridiron. "You tell us continually," said one impatient judge, "that you are not this and you are not that! Be good enough then to tell us what you are."—"I was once frankly a Royalist." Another and louder murmur; but the President put in: "We are not here to sit in judgment on opinions, but on their results"; words of precious augury for the prisoner, who went on to say that he was well aware the old rÉgime was done with, that there was no longer a Royalist cause, and that never had he been concerned in plots or Royalist conspiracies, for he had never in his life been concerned in public affairs of any kind. He was a Frenchman who loved his country above all things.

The questioning and cross-questioning came to an end, and the President removed his hat. "I can find nothing to suspect in Monsieur. What do you say; shall I release him?" and the voice of the judges was for liberty. Thus finished, at two o'clock in the morning, the "thirty-eight hours' agony" of Journiac Saint-MÉard. He survived it some twenty years.

Alas for the hundreds upon hundreds whose agony of yet longer duration finished under the arch of pikes!

The escapes were not many. AbbÉ Sicard, the benevolent founder of the Deaf-and-Dumb Institute, was set free on the earnest petition in writing of one of his pupils. Beaumarchais, author of the Mariage de Figaro, evaded the clutches of the judges after a terrible period of suspense in the Abbaye. The old Marquis de Sombreuil was saved by his daughter. She clung to his neck, imploring the cut-throats to spare him to her. "Say, then," said one of them, dipping a cup into the blood at his feet: "Wilt thou drink this?" The brave girl gulped it down; the mob threw up their weapons with a roar of applause, and opened out a way for both through their dripping ranks.

But few fared as these did. President Maillard, of the grey coat, who was so well satisfied with Saint-MÉard, did not release, perhaps, one in fifty amongst the accused at the Abbaye. He is accused of "carrying about heads, and cutting up dead bodies." Billaud-Varennes went about from group to group of the assassins who were massed in parties, encouraged them in the name of the tribunal, and promised that each man should be paid a louis for his "labour."

A contemporary sketch depicts him delivering a speech on "a table of corpses" against the door of the Abbaye: "Citizens, you are slaughtering the enemies of France. You are doing your duty." Indiscriminate killing had been the legal order of the day. There was no question of the guillotine during the September massacres. Every citizen who could arm himself was a Samson by privilege of the prison judges; and popular justice, called "severe justice of the people," made the butcheries of September a people's fÊte. It was not so much an act of patriotism to assist in them as a dereliction of duty to hold aloof. The "Septemberers" have been condemned as cannibals; but they were common ratepayers of Paris to whom the government of the day offered money to kill as many "enemies of the republic" as should be delivered to them. Most of these "enemies of the republic" were persons to whom the republic was scarcely known by name, and who asked only to be ignored by it. They were killed in batches during the September of '92, merely because they happened to be thrust out at one particular door of their prison. You came out at this door, and were received with cheers; you came out at the next door, and were hacked in pieces. Which door it was, depended upon the vote of the judges; and this, as a rule, was the determination of a moment. Saint-MÉard's trial of an hour was one of the longest.

The mere business of killing went forward until numbers had lost their significance, and the lists of the dead were but approximately reckoned. They are all set down in black and white, and may still be read—so many killed "in the heap" (en masse), so many "after judgment" (aprÈs jugement)—but the figures have never been proved; and one seeks in vain to reckon the total, after the "three hundred families belonging to the Faubourg St. Germain," who were "thrown into the Abbaye in a night"; and the "cartload of young girls, of whom the oldest was not eighteen," and who, "dressed all in white in the tumbril, looked like a basket of lilies." After this batch, were guillotined all the nuns of the convent of Montmartre.

Then there were the Swiss Guards, "remnants of the 10th of August," to whom Maillard said; "Gentlemen, you may find mercy outside, but I am afraid we cannot grant it to you here." The youngest of them, "in a blue frock-coat," elected to go first. "Since we must die," he said, "let me show the way"; then, dashing on his hat, he presented himself at the door where the butchers stood ready to receive him; a double row of them,—sabre, bayonet, hatchet, or pike in hand. For a moment he looked at them, quite coolly; then, seeing that all was prepared, he threw himself between their ranks, and "fell beneath a thousand blows."

When the killers began to flag, brandy mixed with gunpowder was served to them. A woman passes, carrying a basket of hot rolls; they beg them of her, and the bread, before being eaten, is "soaked in the wounds of the still breathing victims."^[19] The brigands of the Abbaye were not more than from thirty to forty in number. Amongst them, says Nougaret, "one youth, mounted on a post, distinguished himself by his ferocity in killing. He said that he had lost his two brothers on the 10th of August, and meant to avenge them. He boasted of having cut down fifty to his own weapon. Another brigand prided himself on a total of two hundred!"

Women looked on, adds the same authority, "sitting in carts on piles of dead bodies, like washerwomen on dirty linen. Others flung themselves upon the corpses, and tore them with their teeth, danced round them, and kicked them. Some of these Furies cut off the ears of the dead, and pinned them on their bosoms."

Some ten months after this carnage, tranquil amid the din of the Terror, lies beautiful Charlotte Corday, in her cell within the Abbaye walls. Her hour has not yet come; she bides it in perfect peace. By-and-bye she will go to the Conciergerie, and thence the next morning to the guillotine. Samson will lift the fair head when he has struck it off, and smite the cheek with his crimson paw, amid universal plaudits. "I have found the sweetest rest here these two days," she writes from prison; "I could not be better off, and my gaolers are the best people in the world." A memory of her lives as she tripped smiling up the steps of the scaffold, her hair cropped under a little close-fitting cap, and wearing, by order of her judges, a hideous red shirt, which descended to her feet. "She blushed and frowned on the executioner when he plucked the tippet from her bosom. Two moments after, the knife fell on her."

After the Revolution, the Abbaye was again a military prison, and its subterranean dungeons were in existence in 1814. "The principal of these," wrote one who had inspected it, "is as horrible as any in BicÊtre; sunk thirty feet below the level of the ground, and so fashioned that a man of average height could not stand up in it. One could scarcely remain here, says the doctor himself, more than four and twenty hours without being in danger of one's life."

The Abbaye was demolished in 1854.