The others had been calm throughout the journey. Hérault, the handsome philanderer, had nodded to various acquaintances and smiled as he saw a woman friend waving him goodbye from a window of the Garde-Meuble. Fabre d’Églantine appeared preoccupied with the thought that Billaud-Varenne would steal the manuscript of one of his unpublished plays and have it performed as his own. ‘There are such beautiful verses in it,’ he said. ‘Beautiful vers, indeed,’ Danton mocked him sarcastically, making outrageous play with the word that means worms as well as verses. ‘You’ll be making some beautiful vers next week!’
Danton’s ‘huge round head,’ so Frénilly said, ‘fixed its proud gaze on the crowds.’ He saw David, once his friend who had agitated for his death, calmly sketching him and the other prisoners from a café table, and shouted an insult at him. He had cursed and ranted a good deal in prison. ‘I’m leaving everything in a frightful mess,’ he had called to one of the other accused in the next cell. ‘There’s not a single one of them who knows the first thing about government…If I left my balls to that eunuch Robespierre and my legs to Couthon the Committee of Public Safety might last a bit longer. But…as it is…Robespierre is bound to follow me, dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than muck about with politics.’
He was quite composed now, though. ‘Oh, my wife, my dear wife,’ he murmured. ‘Shall I ever see you again?’ But then he checked himself, stamping his foot as though in irritation at this outburst. ‘Come, Danton. Courage. No weakness.’ Hérault came up to kiss him goodbye. But the executioner separated them and pulled Hérault towards the steps. ‘Coquin!’ Danton shouted. ‘You’ll not be able to prevent our heads touching each other in the basket.’
He was the last to be beheaded; and night was falling as he stepped up on to the platform, ‘soaked with the blood of his friends, as though emerging from the tomb instead of about to enter it’, so one observer recorded of a scene which time would never erase from his memory. ‘I recall the full force of my feelings at Danton’s last words which I did not hear myself but which were passed round with horror and admiration: “Above all, don’t forget to show my head to the people. It’s well worth having a look at.”’
A week later more blood was shed. Chaumette was guillotined. So was Archbishop Gobel who, claimed by the Hébertists as one of their supporters, was condemned by Robespierre as an atheist. So was the widow of Hébert who was sentenced to death as an accomplice of her husband. And so was the pretty, twenty-three-year old widow of Camille Desmoulins, her one offence being a devoted attachment to her husband on whose behalf she had appealed in vain to Robespierre who was godfather to their baby son, Horace.
It is not enough for you to have murdered your best friend [her mother wrote to Robespierre when judgement upon Lucille had been pronounced]. You must have his wife’s blood as well. Your monster, Fouquier-Tinville, has just ordered Lucille to be carried away to the scaffold. In less than two hours she will be dead…If Camille’s blood has not driven you mad, if you can still remember the happy evenings you once spent before our fire holding our little Horace, spare an innocent victim. If not, then make haste and take us all, Horace, me and my other daughter, Adèle. Hurry up and tear us apart with your claws that still drip with Camille’s blood…Hurry, hurry, so mat we can all rest in the same grave.
The appeal went unanswered. Lucille Desmoulins prepared herself for death with a bravery which aroused the deepest admiration and sympathy even amongst her husband’s bitterest enemies. ‘I shall in a few hours again meet my husband,’ she had exclaimed to her accusers when sentence of death was pronounced. ‘In departing from this world, in which nothing now remains to engage my affections, I am far less the object of pity than you are.’ Dressed with ‘uncommon attention and taste’, she climbed the steps to the scaffold with what was described as ‘unaffected pleasure’ and ‘received the fatal blow without appearing to notice what the executioner was doing.’
‘In heaven’s name,’ asked one who saw her die, ‘when will all this bloodshed cease?’
It was not to cease yet. In June 1794 the Committee of Public Safety passed a decree, known as the law of 22 Prairial, which both greatly increased the numbers of those who could be regarded as ‘public enemies’ and expedited the processes by which they could be condemned to death – the only punishment now to be inflicted – by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Defence lawyers were dispensed with; so were witnesses unless ‘the formality’ of calling them was considered ‘necessary to discover accomplices or for other important considerations of public interest’. The Tribunal was no longer required to interrogate the accused before their public trial, since this merely ‘confused the conscience of the judges’; now, in the absence of positive proof, juries must be satisfied with ‘moral proof’. ‘For a citizen to become suspect,’ said Georges Couthon who had been elected President of the Convention the previous December, ‘it is sufficient that rumour accuses him.’ After the law of 22 Prairial everything, indeed, went on much better, in the opinion of Fouquier-Tinville: heads fell ‘like tiles’. ‘Next week,’ he said one day, ‘I’ll be able to take the tops off three or four hundred.’
In several provincial towns trials were conducted as expeditiously and summarily as they were in Paris. In Orange, for example, where one judge expressed his exasperation with another who had ‘to have proofs just like in the courts of the ancien régime,’ a commission established on 10 May had condemned 332 people to death by the end of July. It was in Paris, however, that most of the executions took place in that stiflingly hot summer. In an effort to centralize revolutionary justice, the Committee of Public Safety had suppressed various provincial courts and had brought those awaiting trial to the capital whose prisons were consequently crammed with ‘enemies of the Republic’ whom, so Couthon insisted, it was ‘less a question of punishing than of annihilating’.
Many noblemen and noblewomen who had previously been spared were now brought to trial. One of them was the Princesse de Monaco who claimed to be with child since pregnant women were usually spared until their babies were born. While waiting for the prison doctor to examine her she cut off her hair which she succeeded in smuggling out of the prison for her children. She then wrote to Fouquier-Tinville: ‘I inform you, citizen, that I am not pregnant. I did not tell this lie for fear of death…but because I wanted to secure a day’s grace so that I, rather than the executioner, could cut my hair. It is the only legacy that I can leave my children. It should at least be pure.’
Another noblewoman who was guillotined at this time was the aged widow of Maréchal the Duc de Noailles, Marie Antoinette’s ‘Madame L’Étiquette’, whose senile eccentricity it had become to write long letters to the Virgin Mary on the subject of prudence and protocol in Heaven. They were answered by her confessor who signed himself Mary but who, on one occasion, committed on Her behalf some solecism which to led the Duchess to comment, ‘But then one ought not to expect too much of Her. She was after all only a bourgeoise from Nazareth. It was through marriage that she became a connection of the House of David. Her husband, Joseph, would have known better.’
The old, demented Duchess was arrested in July with her daughter-in-law, the Duchesse d’Ayen, and her grand-daughter, the Vicomtesse de Noailles. They were taken to the guillotine watched by the Abbé Carichon who took advantage of a blinding rainstorm which slowed down the carts to give them absolution.