MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES« Origin of the name Madelonnettes. »The Prisons of Europe · Volume VIII
When the troupe of Molière awaited the scaffold beneath the clammy vaults of a refuge for fallen women.
Through the clammy mist of the night of the 3rd to the 4th of September, 1793, the heavy oak knocker of the Madelonnettes came down with a dull, hollow thud that startled the soot-streaked pigeons on the eaves. Tucked away at the bottom of the Rue des Fontaines, between the teeming alleys of the Marais and the forbidding precinct of the Temple, this ancient house of correction had been erected two centuries earlier by the pious Marguerite de Gondi to cloister penitent Magdalens. Yet in this Year II of the Republic, the holy tears of Mary Magdalene had given way to the foul exhalations of the Terror. That evening, the iron-ribbed leaves did not swing open to receive some common footpad or strumpet, but the very flower of French eloquence: the actors of the Comédie-Française, still clad in their town dress, seized as they stepped from the boards following a performance of François de Neufchâteau’s Paméla deemed overly royalist in sentiment.
Dazincourt, the incomparable Figaro who had once sent the entire Court into convulsions of laughter, wiped the gutter mud from his buckled pumps under the jeering stares of the sans-culottes. Behind him, Fleury, that prince of tragic declamation, gallantly supported Mademoiselle Contat, Paris’s adored Suzanne, whose delicate silks trailed upon a pavement foul with rotting straw. The warden Vaubertrand, a weary soul whose heavy ring of keys weighed almost as heavily as his conscience, held forth his one-eyed lantern. The registrar dipped his iron nib into the violet ink to open the jail-book. With a furious, slashing stroke, he entered the names of these courtiers of the stage, condemned to exchange the glow of the footlights for airless dungeons where the stench of human sweat contended with the saltpetre and damp mould of subterranean vaults.
Within the Madelonnettes, darkness was a living sepulchre. The narrow corridors, once paced by nuns with downcast eyes, were now severed by rough-hewn oak gates reinforced by monstrous bolts that the turnkeys shot home with deliberate theatricality. Marino, police administrator of the Commune, ruled this precinct like a hyena over its charnel house. With his sabre slapping against his calves and his tricolour-plumed bicorne cocked aggressively askew, he would ascend the stairs to terrify the captives, rattling the cell doors with his gunstock and swearing to dance the carmagnole over the graves of these powdered histrions.
« Cast them upon the dung-heap! The sovereign People have no further use for royal mountebanks; what they require is the blade to level every head! »
In no time, the prison degenerated into a pesthouse. More than three hundred souls were crammed into a warren fashioned for fifty. Typhus—which the official ledgers decorously styled “putrid fever”—crept beneath the warped thresholds. Good Dr. Dupontet, a practitioner of sublime devotion, moved from pallet to straw pallet with his sleeves rolled to the elbows, inhaling vinegar of the four thieves to preserve himself from the lethal miasma. At his side, the turnkey Vaubertrand shrank from Marino’s barbarous mandates. Courting the guillotine himself, the jailer and his wife sought to soften the lot of the artists: smuggling a bowl of warm broth to the lovely Mademoiselle Raucourt as she raved in delirium upon her soiled litter, secreting a clandestine billet, or slipping a warm woollen shawl to actresses shivering in the damp. Such Christian pity was doomed to be dearly bought: denounced as an accomplice of aristocrats, Vaubertrand saw the bolts slam shut one morning upon his own flesh and blood, hurled in their turn into the dungeons of the Rue des Fontaines.
Beyond the walls, the bloody engine worked at full throttle. Fouquier-Tinville clamoured tirelessly for his daily ration of heads for the Place du Trône-Renversé. Within the cardboard boxes of the Committee of Public Safety, a fatal bundle bided its time, ominously marked with the crimson letter “G”: the indictment of the Comédiens-Français, destined for the amalgam of the next tumbril. For Dazincourt, Fleury, and their companions, all hope seemed extinguished. Every morning, the heavy clatter of cart-horses echoed through the courtyard of the Madelonnettes, heralded by the dismal barking of the clerk who came to call out the roll of those bound for the Conciergerie—the waiting-room of the scaffold.
It was then that an act of miraculous daring unfolded within the labyrinthine offices of the Committee. A modest young man named Charles de Labussière, once a theatrical employee who had cleverly secured a post as a clerk handling criminal dossiers, gambled his neck to deliver his idols. Each evening, under cover of dusk as the bureaux emptied, Labussière locked himself within the room of sealed dockets. Feverishly rummaging through the green pasteboard files, he extracted the incriminating papers pertaining to the Madelonnettes, rolled them into tight pellets, and hid them deep within the pockets of his rough serge coat. Yet how was he to elude the sentries who searched every clerk departing the Tuileries?
His scheme was one of sheer, reckless audacity. Labussière made his way to the public bath-houses along the Seine, steeped the parchemins in buckets of warm water until the ink softened, and then either chewed them or tore them into a soggy, formless pulp, which he cast by handfuls into the black currents of the river. Night after night, the denunciations penned against the captives of the Madelonnettes dissolved into the Seine, carrying the capital charges out to sea.
By July 1794, the fury of Marino and Fouquier-Tinville had reached its zenith. The public prosecutor fumed: where had the indictment against the actors vanished? The offices of the Committee were turned inside out; clerks were threatened with the direst torments. Inside the Madelonnettes, the suspense had grown insupportable. Separated only by warped partitions, the players whispered the grand alexandrines of Racine to keep madness at bay, while the iron of bayonets scraped threateningly against the bars.
On the 8th of Thermidor, a police myrmidon thrust his sneering face into Fleury’s cell: the order to reconstruct the missing docket had just been signed, and the Revolutionary Tribunal would try them en bloc in two days’ time. The ensuing night was an agony of prayers and smothered weeping. Then, at midday on the 9th of Thermidor, the tocsin suddenly began to peal across the rooftops of Paris. A deep rumble, like the surge of a furious tide, rose from the faubourgs. In the Madelonnettes, the turnkeys dropped their heavy keys upon the office tables; the sans-culottes fled in terror. Robespierre had fallen at the Hôtel de Ville.
When the dungeon doors at last gave way beneath the onslaught of their deliverers, Dazincourt, Fleury, and their fellows stumbled blinking into the harsh, raw daylight of the courtyard, haggard and bewildered, saved by the washed ink of a clerk’s heroic devotion. Yet the stones of the Madelonnettes, steeped forever in the mortal anguish of the condemned and the tragic nobility of Vaubertrand, retained through the centuries a chill murmur of dread, which even the most thunderous bravos of the stage could never entirely dispel.