MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES« The towers of the Temple became a state prison until the founding of the Bastille. »The Prisons of Europe · Volume II
How Paris’s most formidable keep, haunted by royal spectres, became the bloody tomb of General Pichegru before being razed by Bonaparte’s dread.
In the very heart of Paris there once stood a monster of limestone and iron upon which the populace never gazed without a shudder. Reared in the Middle Ages beneath the white mantle of the Templars, the Keep of the Temple thrust its four pepper-pot turrets more than sixty feet above the marshy cobblestones of the Marais. Its walls, nine feet thick, seemed cast in a single block to defy eternity and swallow the living whole. Ever since Philip the Fair and the pyre of Jacques de Molay, the edifice had oozed a dull, relentless curse. The centuries had heaped within it muffled screams, dying gasps, and the stubborn rust of triple bolts that the winds of the Revolution had only stoked.
In this waning winter of 1804, the air within was more suffocating still than in the mournful days of Louis XVI and the martyred little Dauphin. The fortress belonged no longer to kings nor to the Convention, but to the high police of the First Consul. Under the pitiless eye of the turnkey Fauconnier, the iron wickets ground without cease. Bonaparte, still draped in his consular purple yet already haunted by the imperial crown, had just cast into its depths the masterminds of a titanic conspiracy: Georges Cadoudal, the eagle-eyed Chouan colossus, and General Jean-Charles Pichegru, former conqueror of Holland, who had turned to the Royalists to overthrow the master of France.
On the first floor of the tower, in a low-vaulted chamber girded with lead-sealed iron bars, Pichegru paced the red floor-tiles. Every step of the general echoed against the decayed wainscoting that had once sheltered the final prayers of Marie-Antoinette. The man had been hunted down, betrayed in a shadowy alley, sold for a hundred thousand crowns by his own friend. For forty days he had been subjected to the moral rack, to the relentless interrogations of Étienne Réal, Fouché’s sinister familiar. They sought to wring from him the names of his accomplices, to extract an admission of Moreau’s complicity, to shatter the steel of his fallen Republican pride.
Yet Pichegru remained silent, or spoke only to threaten a terrible outburst at the impending public trial. He knew the machinery of nascent power only too well. He knew that the Duke of Enghien had just been shot in the ditches of Vincennes by lantern-light. Below, in the subterranean dungeon, Cadoudal sang Breton hymns in a stentorian voice that made the very hinges of the keep tremble. Pichegru, for his part, took solace in reading. Upon his wretched deal table lay an open volume of Seneca’s tragedies, turned to the passage where the Roman philosopher declared that despair is sometimes the sole refuge of stout hearts. Yet at each change of the guard, the sentries caught the selfsame sharp sound: the soldier striking his fist against the masonry, swearing they would hear him roar before the tribunal.
The night of April 5 to 6, 1804, descended upon the Temple, heavy with an impenetrable fog that drowned the Seine and the Parisian rooftops. At eleven o’clock, the turnkey on duty made his customary rounds. The key turned with its familiar groan in the double-bitted lock. Through the barred peephole, the warder glimpsed Pichegru, clad in his dark frock coat, still seated beside the flickering candle. All appeared tranquil. The soldier snapped the hatch shut. Yet in the murky corridors, strangers to the prison had been spotted hours earlier: armed men in the secret pay of Savary, the chosen instrument of the Consulate’s foulest deeds.
« The silence of this tower is never a good omen; when the bolts cease their shrieking, it means death has taken the key. »
Towards seven in the morning, as the pallid gray light of dawn crept through the cobwebbed embrasures, the turnkey’s boy came up bearing the prisoner’s coffee. The cell door was bolted from within—an unnatural circumstance that chilled the guards to the bone. They had to force the bolt with crowbars. When the heavy oak door yielded with a doleful splintering groan, a petrifying sight met the jailers’ eyes: Pichegru lay upon his pallet, turned on his left side, his eyes starting from their sockets, his face blackened and swollen by a monstrous asphyxiation.
Around his thick neck, a black silk cravat had been drawn tight enough to bite into the flesh. To complete the torment, a small stick of white wood, half a foot in length, had been slipped into the fabric and twisted like a tourniquet against his throat, held fast in place by the weight of his own slumped cheek. Never could a man, his hands spasming in the agony of suffocation, have maintained such a garrote by his own strength until life slipped away, without once slackening his grip. Upon the table, Seneca still lay open. The pen had not trembled. The suicide of a cornered Roman, blared the police gazette; state-sanctioned murder to stifle the public trial of a dangerous rival, whispered a terrified Paris in the shadows.
Pichegru’s corpse was hastily bundled into a shroud of unbleached cloth and cast into the common grave of the Sainte-Catherine cemetery, without a single priest daring to bless his burial. A few weeks later, Georges Cadoudal mounted the scaffold on the Place de Grève, shouting his defiance, while Bonaparte placed the crown of the Caesars upon his own brow at Notre-Dame. Yet the new master of the world could no longer endure the towering silhouette that cast its shadow over the eastern quarters of his capital. Every stone of the Temple reminded him of the scaffold of the Bourbons, the murky end of Pichegru, and the frailty of human dynasties.
In 1808, Napoleon signed the fatal decree: the Keep of the Temple was to be wiped from the face of the earth. Under the pickaxes of the demolitioners, the colossal towers tumbled section by section in a cloud of white dust. The crypts were filled in, the moats leveled, the ironwork melted down, and across this charnel ground of centuries were laid a mundane market and rectilinear avenues. The Empire believed it had obliterated the memory of its crimes and its captives. Yet for anyone walking the quiet paths of the Square du Temple today, when the April fog rises from the gutters, one might still fancy hearing the dull turning of a wooden rod twisting silk, and the choked murmur of the tower’s final martyr.