MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES“The truth regarding his captivity and death (André Chénier).”Prisons of Europe · Volume VII
In the inferno of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, a father cheats the scaffold for his son, while a poet entrusts his final verses to the washerwomen of death.
In the sweltering depths of the summer of 1794, the ancient enclosure of the Lazarist fathers bore no longer the faintest semblance of a sanctuary. Once a medieval leper-house, then a pious retreat where Saint Vincent de Paul had ministered to the miseries of the flesh, Saint-Lazare had become the most teeming antechamber of the Revolutionary Tribunal. Behind the soaring ramparts of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, eight hundred captives rotted within the former monastic dormitories, huddled together in a feverish squalor where the stench of tallow, rotting straw, and vinegar struggled in vain to mask the odor of despair. The massive oak doors, plated with iron bands, no longer swung open for prayer, but yielded only to the booted kicks of turnkey guards whose heavy rings of keys clattered like funeral knells.
When night descended, the vaulted corridors echoed with the whispered councils of prison spies. It was here that the infamous Manini operated—an adventurer in the pay of Fouquier-Tinville, charged with fabricating the grotesque myth of the “prison conspiracies” out of whole cloth. The design was ever the same: to allege that the prisoners, in the shadows of their cells, were whetting daggers to breach the gates, cut the throats of the sentries, and overthrow the National Convention. In the gaol registers, upon the grease-stained desks of the clerk’s office, the minions of the Public Prosecutor struck out names with a stroke of red ink. Every soul within those walls knew the meaning of that crimson mark: the tumbril at daybreak.
Within this cloister turned deathtrap, two men defied the terror through the nobility of letters: Jean-Antoine Roucher, the gentle cantor of Les Mois, and the young André Chénier, a former embassy secretary whose trenchant quill had dared lash the September executioners. Confined since Ventôse to a narrow cell overlooking the women’s courtyard, Chénier paced with a nervous stride beneath the austere arcades, his eyes blazing with a suppressed fury. He knew his head was forfeit, yet he refused to bend the knee before the tyranny of the committees.
Each evening, beneath the meager glow of a tallow candle, Chénier wrote with ink darkened with pulverized charcoal. He possessed only scraps of coarse paper, strips torn from the margins of the volumes he kept by his pallet. There, amid the oppressive silence broken only by the hobnailed boots of the National Guards, were born the vengeful verses of the Iambes—masterpieces of French poetry forged upon the very rim of the common pit:
“As to the bleating lamb the gloomy slaughterhouse / Throws wide its caverns of death, / Shepherd, butcher, and hound, the whole foul fraternity, / Ask naught of its dying breath...”
To shield these scraps from the systematic searches of the turnkeys, Chénier resorted to the humblest of subterfuges: he concealed the tightly rolled manuscripts in the bottoms of the soiled linen baskets that the washerwomen bore away each week to deliver to his grief-stricken father. Every word that passed beyond the gates of Saint-Lazare was a victory wrested from the falling blade.
On the night of the 6th to the 7th Thermidor, Year II, a deceptive coolness settled over the slate roofs of Saint-Lazare. Toward two in the morning, the iron bolts shrieked violently along the corridors of the first floor. Verney, the court clerk, escorted by four turnkeys bearing smoking torches, strode into the common ward. A sepulchral silence fell upon the hall; breath caught in throats, and clasped hands tightened white against the straw pallets. The reading of the fatal roll began.
In a thick, indifferent voice, the officer droned out the names of the condemned who were to appear at dawn before Dumas and Coffinhal. Suddenly, a name reverberated beneath the damp vaults:
— Jean-Simon Loizerolles, former lieutenant of the bailiwick, aged twenty-two years!
At the far end of the gallery, a gentleman of sixty-one gave a start. It was Jean de Loizerolles. He cast his eyes upon a shadowed cot where his son, young Jean-Simon, broken by dysentery and despair, lay in a leaden sleep, oblivious to the tumult. The father grasped the hideous blunder in an instant: the Public Prosecutor had demanded the son; the surname was identical; the Republic hungered for blood and cared nothing for faces. Without a tremor, the father slipped from his sheets, pressed a finger to his lips to enjoin the silence of his terrified fellows, and stepped directly into the circle of torchlight:
— Present, the old man murmured.
The clerk scarcely lifted his eyes, troubling himself neither with the white hair nor the deep furrows that belied the twenty-two years inscribed upon the warrant. The day’s business required its tale of heads. The father held out his wrists to the cord, mounted the steps to the condemned cell with an unfaltering step, and, at the price of his own throat, ransomed the morrow for his child.
At seven o’clock that morning, the great courtyard of Saint-Lazare filled with the sharp clatter of iron-shod hooves against the paving stones. Two long carts, painted a washed-out red, waited before the ancient gate. The condemned filed down the steps, their hair sheared close at the nape, their shirt collars torn away according to the grim ritual of the toilet of the dead. André Chénier walked with an even pace beside Roucher. They linked arms, murmuring verses from Racine to drown out the jeers of the rabble clustered at the grille.
Upon the mounting-step of the tumbril, the poet turned for an instant toward the austere facade of the convent that had witnessed his agony. He raised a hand to his pale forehead and whispered to his companion that immortal phrase which Maquet and Alboize engraved forever into the martyrology of the Revolution: “’Tis a pity... Yet there was something there!”
The axles groaned, and the convoy set itself in motion toward the Barrière du Trône, where the guillotine awaited its thirty-eight victims of the day. Forty-eight hours later, on the 9th Thermidor, the tocsin of the Hôtel de Ville would toll the downfall of Robespierre and shatter forever the bolts of the Great Terror. But for Chénier, for Loizerolles, and for the martyrs of Saint-Lazare, deliverance came two days too late.
Long after the storms of the Revolution had passed, the convent hallowed by tears assumed a new purpose without surrendering its gloom: in the nineteenth century, Saint-Lazare became the infamous women’s prison of Paris, where prostitutes, thieves, and avenging furies came in their turn to scratch their laments upon the very stones that had once drunk the ink of André Chénier.