MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES“The conjugation of the verb to be suspect.”The Prisons of Europe · Volume VIII
When Marie de Médicis' gilded halls became the antechamber to the scaffold for Danton and the broken lovers of the Terror.
Beneath the freezing drizzle of Germinal Year II, the Palais du Luxembourg retained of Marie de Médicis’ Florentine splendour nothing save a derisive and desecrated magnificence. Behind its towering wrought-iron grilles, the galleries where Rubens had once immortalized the apotheosis of queens now echoed only with the crash of musket-butts and the sullen clatter of ironmongery. In the space of a few months, the Convention had metamorphosed this masterpiece of the Renaissance into the capital’s most formidable man-trap. Everywhere, carved boiseries vanished beneath thick partitions of rough pine; monumental hearths, where royal oak had formerly blazed, were sealed behind iron gratings; marquetry parquets rotted beneath the fetid straw doled out to the captives.
Upon the gaol registers, blackened with hasty ink by the concierge Benoit, all France came to rehearse its agony. Thrown together in indiscriminate heaps were the gold-braided dukes of yesterday, non-juring bishops, aged illiterate scullery-maids convicted of having wept for their masters, and English seamen captured upon the high seas. The “Law of Suspects” ground on at full throttle, turning the conjugation of the verb to be suspect into a deferred sentence of death. Yet, on the night between the 10th and 11th of Germinal, a shudder of an unexampled kind ran through the choked corridors: the tumbril of the National Guards had just disgorged at the greffe the very man who, eighteen months before, had embodied in his single person the fury and the voice of the Republic. Georges-Jacques Danton crossed the threshold of the Luxembourg.
Entering the abyss in his wake, Camille Desmoulins faltered, his complexion waxy, his gaze wild and haggard. The brilliant pamphleteer of Le Vieux Cordelier, who had fancied he might disarm the Terror with a stroke of his pen, was now but a shivering wraith pressing to his breast a lock of the fair hair of his young wife, Lucile. Before them loomed the hideous figure of their new master: the turnkey Verney. The evil genius of the Revolutionary Tribunal within the palace walls, Verney stalked through the dormitories flanked by a savage mastiff and bearing a bunch of keys that clanked like a passing-bell. This man unbolted locks only with curses, prodded the straw pallets with vicious blows of his cudgel, and lay in wait for the faintest whisper of rebellion to earn the gratuities of Fouquier-Tinville.
While Camille, sobbing, was thrust into a garret hovel beneath the rafters, whence one could scarcely catch a glimpse of the rooftops of the Rue de l'Odéon, Danton refused to bend the neck. His Herculean frame filled the doorway of the cell. To the incredulous aristocrats who surveyed him in silence, struck dumb to behold their executioner of yesterday sharing their dungeon, the colossus addressed a raw, grating laugh that made the grimy windowpanes rattle:
“Gentlemen, I had indeed hoped to see you out of this place; yet here I am among you, and how the business will end, I cannot tell... At this very season, I brought about the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal; I ask pardon for it of God and of men!”
The confinement of the Dantonists could not endure: the Committee of Public Safety knew full well that Danton's voice, should it thunder too long before the tribunal, might rouse the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and overturn the guillotine upon its masters. To break the prisoners before the hearings could even open, an infernal engine was forged in the gloom of the Luxembourg corridors: the infamous “Prisons Conspiracy.” Verney and the suborned spies, slipped among the inmates under the sinister name of “sheep,” spread the rumour that an aristocratic plot was preparing to burst the palace gates, butcher the patriotic guards, and march upon the Convention to deliver the Indulgent chiefs.
This bloody fable furnished the Public Accuser with the pretext he desired. Summary interrogations followed one upon another in an antechamber reeking of the vinegar splashed about to ward off typhus. Danton clamoured vehemently for his witnesses, roared defiance at Saint-Just and Robespierre, yet the clerk refused to record his defense. The moment the prisoner attempted to raise his voice, a decree striking down all liberty declared him excluded from the debates for “contempt of justice.” The snare had snapped shut. Within the Luxembourg, Verney gloated: in the paved courtyard, the carts were already backing in, their tailboards turned toward the great gates, ready to take on their human harvest.
On the 16th of Germinal Year II (April 5, 1794), at three of the afternoon, a dismal drum-roll shook the galleries. Danton, Fabre d'Églantine, Hérault de Séchelles, and Camille Desmoulins were torn from their cells. Their hands pinioned behind their backs with rough hempen cords, their shirt-collars cut wide over the nape, the condemned men descended the grand staircase. Camille struggled, screaming his wife’s name and beseeching heaven, while Danton, holding high his scarred and rugged head, muttered to him with brotherly gruffness: “Be calm, then, and leave that rabble be!”
Yet the hatred of the inquisitors was not quenched upon the Place de la Révolution. Eight days later, fresh prey crossed the Luxembourg threshold: Lucile Desmoulins herself, barely twenty-three years of age, arrested upon the grotesque charge of having sought to corrupt the turnkeys with English gold to rescue her husband. In those stone passages where the fragrance of Camille still seemed to linger, the young woman did not quail. She knew she went to rejoin him. Placed side by side with the widow of Jacques-René Hébert—her husband’s sworn enemy, united now by the absurdity of the blade—she ascended toward the scaffold with the ecstatic smile of a bride walking to the altar.
The Luxembourg was to remain this yawning gulf, swallowing whole batallions of the aged and the young, until the incandescent day of the 9th of Thermidor. At noon that day, when the tocsin sounded at last the downfall of the Incorruptible, the prisoners gathered in the yards refused at first to credit their deliverance, listening in terror to the heavy tread of Verney fleeing down the lane. Silence settled at length upon the palace of stone, leaving forever embedded in its flagstones the mingled phantoms of those who had willed the Revolution and those whom it crushed within its brazen womb.