MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES« Impassable sepulchres of Inquisition dungeons, clamorous cells of Bicêtre... »The Prisons of Europe · Volume I
Beneath the shrieks of the madhouse cells and the ring of the convict-forge, the damned quarry through limestone to wrench their liberty from the anteroom of oblivion.
There exist thresholds upon which the sun refuses to shine. High upon the windswept plateau of Gentilly, the towering, soot-black silhouette of Bicêtre reared its leprous ramparts—half fortress, half sepulchre—against the sullen mists of Paris. On this late winter twilight, when an east wind chilled the very bone, the massive iron-studded oak gates had just swung shut with a hollow, dreadful clang upon a fresh convoy of wretches and cutpurses. Bicêtre was no ordinary prison; it was a monstrous sewer of the Ancien Régime, an abyss wherein the Monarchy first, and subsequently the Republics and provostial courts, cast together pell-mell raving maniacs, highwaymen, royalist conspirators, and the discarded foundlings of the capital.
No sooner had one crossed the inner wicket than a low, unending uproar assailed the ears: an unnameable din of death-rattles, human baying, the clanking of iron, and furious blasphemies. It was the clamour of the lunatic pens stacked above the secret oubliettes, where spectral apparitions thrust emaciated arms through narrow slits in the stone to beg for a crust of mouldering bread. Over the great register of committals, bound in scuffed calfskin, a numbed-fingered clerk dipped his quill. Before him stood Nicolas, an old confederate of Cartouche’s gang, his gaze unyielding, his jaw set like stone. For him, as for a score of others, the sentence had fallen without appeal: the irons, the agony of awaiting the chain-gang, and the penal galleys of Brest at the far end of the bloody road.
Within the forbidding Cour Saint-Jean, the hard-packed earth was soaked in a pungent reek of cold sweat, oxidised iron, and burnt tinder. Twice a year, this courtyard became the theatre for the most harrowing spectacle known to human justice: the rivetting of the chain. Surrounded by a rabble of gaping onlookers drawn from Paris to feast their eyes on living tragedy, the galley-slaves sat in double rows, their bare legs shivering upon the greasy paving-stones.
« Impassable sepulchres of Inquisition dungeons, clamorous cells of Bicêtre... the traveller drawing near these ramparts imagines he hears the roar of the damned within the furnace. »
The King's smiths, their blackened leather aprons slapping against their shins, brought the rivets to a glowing white heat over braziers of burning coal. Nicolas caught the scorch of the embers even before the dead weight of the travelling anvil was forced hard against his nape. Two guards in glazed hats pinned him to the flags with grips of iron. The heavy hammer struck the red-hot rivet mere fractions of an inch from his throat. With every blow, the percussion jarred his spine, making his skull resonate like a struck bronze bell. A single flinch, and the head would be shattered. When the smith's assistant brought down the pin, quenching it in a deluge of vinegared water, a hiss of sulphurous steam rose to envelop the victim. Henceforth, Nicolas was nothing more than a link in a twenty-man chain, welded for eternity to corpses walking on reprieve.
Yet beneath the boots of the turnkeys and the stones of the Cour Saint-Jean lay an invisible realm: the ancient quarries of Gentilly, a maze of pitch-black galleries and limestone passages that Bicêtre had swallowed over the passing centuries. The lowest oubliettes, known as "the wells," plunged more than thirty feet underground, where foul water seeped down the slimy rockfaces and rats darted with brazen insolence across putrid straw.
It was within these subterranean bowels that the impossible dream took shape. Months before, the prisoners had managed to spirit away an iron wedge and a steel rod wrenched from an old restraint-bed. Night after night, shielded by the horrific din of the maniacs howling at the moon on the floors above, one man worked away at the rock. Stretched out flat on his stomach in the freezing mire, gasping in the mephitic air wherein tallow wicks flickered and died, Nicolas scraped at the soft limestone. The chalky stone yielded grain by grain, chunk by chunk. The rubble was patiently dispersed down the latrine shafts or concealed beneath straw pallets. Overhead, the heavy treads of the warders marked time with the implacable beat of a funeral pendulum; below, the void opened wide toward the freedom of the catacombs, those forgotten avenues winding their way beneath the earth as far as the Faubourg Saint-Jacques.
The night chosen to break open the tomb was one of furious April tempest. Peals of thunder muffled the clink of stone and metal, and sheets of torrential rain drowning the courtyard provided an impenetrable curtain against the sentries’ ears. With one desperate heave of their shoulders, Nicolas and three fellow conspirators dislodged the final block of stone. The breach yawned open with a gust of chilled, sepulchral air, revealing the utter blackness of the primeval quarries.
One after another, tearing their skin against the jagged limestone, the captives wriggled into the narrow passage. But just as the last convict dropped into the fissure, a dangling iron shackle struck the louvre of a ventilation grating. A clear, silvery chime rang out sharp as a razor, rising straight to the guardhouse. A shout shattered the night: "Turn out! Guards! Turn out!" The alarm bell of Bicêtre began to toll with frantic violently, rousing five hundred deranged souls who joined their shrill yelps to the general tumult.
Through the underground drifts, the fugitives fled blind, guided solely by the damp smell of earth and the distant memory of fresh air. Behind them, torches flared to life, casting colossal, undulating shadows against the stone vaults, while the bloodhounds howled in frenzy, spurred by the scent of blood and soaked leather. Crawling between sheets of stagnant ground-water, twenty times on the brink of being buried alive in sand-filled dead ends, Nicolas at last caught sight of a faint, pale-blue glimmer: the light-well of an open quarry opening onto the thickets of Gentilly. Shattering the final rusted grate with a superhuman effort, he pulled himself from the muddy earth just as the first musket balls whipped through the branches above his head. He had left behind the bottomless pits of Bicêtre; yet his soul, branded forever by the terror of those crypts, was never again to know the tranquil sleep of free men.