MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES“The revolution begins at the Abbaye.”Prisons of Europe · Volume VII
At the height of the September Massacres of 1792, a royalist officer defies Maillard’s tribunal of butchers in the bowels of Paris’s most dreadful military prison.
Beneath the secular vaults of the Abbaye prison, silence was never anything more than terror’s mask. Built upon the ancient dependencies of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, this fortress with walls six feet thick had long served as a house of correction for wayward sons of noble blood and as a military gaol for undisciplined guards. Yet by late August 1792, the scent of the monks’ beeswax had long since vanished, supplanted by the sour sweat of suspects, the mildew of rotting straw, and the reek of rusted iron. Ever since the fall of the Tuileries on the Tenth of August, the registry clerk’s desk had known no respite. Packed together pell-mell were seditious pamphleteers, non-juring priests, gentlemen loyal to the Crown, and fallen ministers of state.
Among them languished François de Journiac Saint-Méard, formerly a captain in the King’s Own Infantry Regiment, seized for having published a royalist tract. Cast into a narrow garret chamber under the eaves, he listened night and day to the tumult without: patrols pounding the paving stones of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite, the heavy wooden clogs of the sentries, and the steady, grinding screech of the enormous locks turned by the gaoler Lavacquerie with imperturbable phlegm. Through the iron-barred wicket, the city roared like a tempest-tossed sea. Paris had just learned of the surrender of Longwy, the Prussian advance, and the fury of the populace was clamouring for the blood of the “traitors within.”
On Sunday, September 2, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the tocsin of Saint-Sulpice began to toll—a frantic, mournful knell. Soon, a low roar breached the outer gates. These were no rioters coming to liberate soldiers as in July of 1789, but a pack of men with bared arms, bristling with pikes, sabres, and cudgels, their cheeks blackened with gunpowder, their eyes glazed with brandy. Within minutes, the lower courtyard was transformed into an open-air slaughterhouse.
“The wine brought to us tasted of carnage; every blow of a sabre struck upon the cobblestones below reverberated through our marrow like the death-knell of our own passing.”
Amidst this tempest, one man imposed an icy method upon the butchery: Stanislas Maillard, hero of the Bastille, an emaciated silhouette clad in black. Taking his seat behind the registry table, he commanded the prison ledger to be flung open, seized a quill, and set himself up as the supreme judge of an improvised tribunal. Two corpses served as footstools for his makeshift assessors. The proceedings lasted but two minutes: the name was called, the charge recited, and Maillard posed two curt questions. If he uttered the fatal formula, “To the Force!”, the victim passed through the wicket only to be instantly hewn to pieces by the butchers waiting upon the threshold with raised sabres. Screams of agony rose to the high dormers of the upper storeys, where the survivors counted the fleeting seconds separating them from the void.
Inside the dim garret where Saint-Méard waited alongside a dozen companions in misfortune, the air had turned unbreathable. Terror had driven away all thought of sleep. Through the iron bars, the stench of warm blood and the sharp reek of vinegar poured out to quell the foulness rose in nauseating waves. Among the prisoners stood the aged Marquis de Cazotte, a visionary illuminé and unheeded prophet, as well as the venerable Governor of the Invalides, Sombreuil, whose daughter Mademoiselle de Sombreuil pleaded with the gaolers to allow her to perish by her father’s side.
Each time the hinges of the heavy, iron-plated door ground open, a deathly hush fell over the captives. The turnkey would enter, flanked by two men in blood-smeared doublets, bearing a smoking resinous torch. A name was barked out. The chosen man would rise, embrace his fellows, empty his pockets to leave a ring or a pocket-watch with those who remained behind, and descend the spiral stairs. Ten minutes later, a savage roar of triumph from the mob announced that the wretched soul had fallen beneath the pikes. Saint-Méard, resolved to dispute his life inch by inch, spent thirty-eight hours refining his defense, discerning the vulnerabilities of his judges through the whispers and echoes that reached his cell: gold was useless; supplication provoked only rage; nothing short of unflinching audacity could confound the madness of the slaughterers.
On Tuesday, September 4, at two o’clock in the morning, the bolts flew back one last time for Saint-Méard. Seized by two guards whose hands stuck to the leather of his coat, he was dragged down to the ground floor and thrust before the fatal table. The flickering yellow light of tallow candles illuminated the gaunt face of Maillard, whose quill was scratching across the ledger leaves. About them, a dozen sans-culottes leaning upon dripping pikes stared upon the aristocrat with sullen ferocity.
“Citizen, your name!” barked Maillard without lifting his eyes.
“François de Journiac Saint-Méard, ci-devant captain.”
“You wrote against liberty; you conspired with the émigrés!” shouted a voice from the shadows.
Saint-Méard did not avert his gaze. In a clear, soldierly voice that rang through the low-vaulted room, he replied:
“I served my King; it was my duty and my sworn allegiance. I have never betrayed my country, and no man here can prove that I have ever shed the blood of a patriot! I am a royalist because I took the oath, but I am neither a coward nor an agent of foreign despots!”
A murmur ran through the assembly of killers. This haughty candour, far from enraging them, struck a chord in these fanatical minds that held whimpering courtiers in utter contempt. Maillard took off his hat, consulted his comrades with a glance, and then slammed the great prison ledger shut, crying aloud:
“There is nothing against this man. I find him innocent. Give him his liberty!”
Instantly, the very hands that had just slaughtered his companions reached out to envelop him—not to strike, but to press him in fraternal, blood-drenched embraces. Shouting cries of “Vive la Nation!”, the butchers cleared a passage for him through the courtyard strewn with mutilated corpses, escorting him with torches held high all the way to the Rue Saint-Benoît like a trophy of their barbaric clemency. Saint-Méard had escaped the abyss of the Abbaye, carrying in his soul the indelible memory of the registry where the Revolution had carved its warrant in the flesh of men.