THE clamor, which kept on constantly increasing from the square, clearly proved that the exasperation of the mob was becoming greater. It was no longer hatred that they felt; it was abhorrence. They no longer merely threatened; they foamed.
The cries of “Down with Foulon! Death to Foulon!” crossed each other in the air, like projectiles in a bombardment. The crowd, which was still augmenting, pressed nearer to the entrance of the Hôtel de Ville, till they, as it may be said, almost suffocated the civic guards at their posts.
And already there began to circulate among the crowd, and to increase in volume, those rumors which are the precursors of violence.
These rumors no longer threatened Foulon only, but the electors who protected him.
“They have let the prisoner escape!” said some.
“Let us go in! let us go in!” said others.
“Let us set fire to the Hôtel de Ville!”
Bailly felt that as Monsieur de Lafayette did not arrive, there was only one resource left to them.
And this was that the electors should themselves go down, mix in with the groups, and endeavor to pacify the most furious among them.
Such was the incessant cry, the constant roaring of those furious waves.
A general assault was preparing; the walls could not have resisted it.
“Sir,” said Bailly to Foulon, “if you do not show yourself to the crowd, they will naturally believe that we have allowed you to escape. Then they will force the door, and will come in here; and when once here, should they find you, I can no longer be responsible for anything.”
“Oh, I did not know that I was so much execrated!” exclaimed Foulon.
And supported by Bailly, he dragged himself to the window.
A fearful cry resounded immediately on his presenting himself. The guards were driven back; the doors broken in; a torrent of men precipitated themselves up the staircase into the corridors, into the rooms, which were invaded in an instant.
Bailly threw around the prisoner all the guards who were within call, and then he began to harangue the crowd.
He wished to make these men understand that to assassinate might sometimes be doing justice, but that it was never an act of justice.
He succeeded, after having made the most strenuous efforts, after having twenty times perilled his own existence.
“Yes, yes,” cried the assailants, “let him be tried! let him be tried! but let him be hanged!”
They were at this point in the argument when General de Lafayette reached the Hôtel de Ville, conducted there by Billot.
The sight of his tricolored plume—one of the first which had been worn—at once assuaged their anger, and the tumult ceased.
The commander-in-chief of the National Guard had the way cleared for him, and addressing the crowd, repeated, though in more energetic terms, every argument that Bailly had endeavored to enforce.
His speech produced a great effect on all those who were near enough to hear it, and the cause of Foulon was completely gained in the electors' hall.
But on the square were twenty thousand furious people who had not heard Monsieur de Lafayette, and who remained implacable in their frenzy.
“Come, now,” said Lafayette, at the conclusion of his oration, very naturally imagining that the effect he had produced on those who surrounded him had extended to all outside,—“come, now, this man must be tried.”
“And consequently I order that he be taken to prison,” added Lafayette.
“To prison! to prison!” howled the mob.
At the same time the general made a sign to the guards of the Hôtel de Ville, who led the prisoner forward.
The crowd outside understood nothing of all that was going on, excepting that their prey was about to appear. They had not even an idea that any one had the slightest hope of disputing it with them.
They scented, if we may be permitted the expression, the odor of the human flesh which was descending the staircase.
Billot had placed himself at the window with several electors, whom Bailly also joined in order to follow the prisoner with their eyes while he was crossing the square, escorted by the civic guards.
On the way, Foulon here and there addressed a few incoherent words to those around him, which, although they were protestations of confidence, clearly evinced the most profound and ill-disguised terror.
“Noble people,” said he, while descending the staircase, “I fear nothing; I am in the midst of my fellow-citizens.”
And already bantering laughs and insults were being uttered around him, when suddenly he found himself outside of the gloomy archway at the top of the stone steps which led into the square, and felt on his face the wind and sunshine.
Immediately one general cry—a cry of rage, a howling threat, a roar of hatred—burst from twenty thousand lungs. On this explosion of the public feeling, the guards conducting the prisoner are lifted from the ground, broken, dispersed; Foulon is seized by twenty powerful arms, raised above their shoulders, and carried into the fatal corner under the lamp-post,—ignoble and brutal executioner of the anger of the people, which they termed their justice.
Billot from his window saw all this, and cried out against it; the electors also did all they could to stimulate the guards, but they were powerless.
Lafayette, in despair, rushed out of the Hôtel de Ville, but he could not break through the first rank of that crowd, which spread out like an immense lake between him and the victim.
The mere spectators of this scene jumped upon posts, on window-sills, on every jutting part of a building, in order to gain a better view; and they encouraged by their savage shouts the frightful effervescence of the actors.
The latter were playing with their victim, as would a troop of tigers with an inoffensive prey.
They were disputing who should hang Foulon; at last they understood that if they wished to enjoy his agony, it was necessary that their several functions should be agreed upon.
But for that he would have been torn to pieces.
Some of them raised up Foulon, who had no longer strength enough to cry out.
Others, who had taken off his cravat and torn off his coat, placed a rope round his neck.
And others, who had climbed up the lamp-post, had handed to their companions below the rope which they put round the neck of the ex-minister.
For a moment they raised Foulon above their heads and showed him thus to the crowd,—a rope twined round his neck, and his hands tied behind him.
Then, when the crowd had had due time to contemplate the sufferer; when they had clapped their hands sufficiently,—the signal was given, and Foulon, pale and bleeding, was hoisted up to a level with the lantern, amid a hooting which was more terrible even than death.
All those who, up to that time, had not been able to see anything, then perceived the public enemy raised above the heads of the crowd.
New shouts were then heard; but these were against the executioners. Were they about to kill Foulon so expeditiously?
The executioners merely shrugged their shoulders, and pointed to the rope.
The rope was old; it could be seen to give way, strand by strand. The movements which Foulon made in his desperate agony at length broke the last strand; and Foulon, only half strangled, fell heavily upon the pavement.
He was only at the preface of his torments; he had only penetrated into the vestibule of death.
They all rushed towards the sufferer; they were perfectly secure with regard to him. There was no chance of his escaping them; in falling he had broken his leg a little below the knee.
And yet some imprecations arose, imprecations which were unintelligible and calumniatory. The executioners were accused; they were considered as clumsy and unskilful,—they who, on the contrary, had been so ingenious that they had expressly chosen an old worn-out rope, in the hope that it would break.
A hope which the event, as has been related, had fully realized.
They made a knot in the rope, and again fixed it round the neck of the unhappy man, who, half dead, with haggard eyes looked around, endeavoring to discover whether in that city which is called the centre of the civilized universe,—whether one of the bayonets of that king whose minister he had been, and who had a hundred thousand, would not be raised in his defence amid that horde of cannibals.
But there was nothing there to meet his eyes but hatred, but insult, but death.
“At least, kill me at once, without making me endure these atrocious torments!” cried the despairing Foulon.
“Well, now,” replied a jeering voice, “why should we abridge your torments? you have made ours last long enough.”
“And besides,” said another, “you have not yet had time enough to digest your nettles.”
“Wait, wait a little!” cried a third; “his son-in-law, Berthier, will be brought to him; there is room enough for him on the opposite lamp-post.”
“We shall see what wry faces the father-in-law and son-in-law will make at each other,” added another.
“Finish me; finish me at once!” cried the wretched man.
During this time, Bailly and Lafayette were begging, supplicating, exclaiming, and endeavoring to get through the crowd; suddenly, Foulon was again hoisted by the rope, which again broke, and their prayers, their supplications, their agony, no less painful than that of the sufferer himself, were lost, confounded, and extinguished amid the universal laugh which accompanied this second fall.
Bailly and Lafayette, who three days before had been the sovereign arbiters of the will of six hundred thousand Parisians,—a child now would not listen to them; the people even murmured at them; they were in their way; they were interrupting this great spectacle.
Billot had vainly given them all the aid of his uncommon strength; the powerful athlete had knocked down twenty men, but in order to reach Foulon it would be necessary to knock down fifty, a hundred, two hundred; and his strength is exhausted, and when he pauses to wipe from his brow the perspiration and the blood which is streaming from it, Foulon is raised a third time to the pulley of the lamp-post.
This time they had taken compassion upon him; the rope was a new one.
At last the condemned is dead; the victim no longer suffers.
Half a minute had sufficed to the crowd to assure itself that the vital spark was extinguished. And now that the tiger has killed, he may devour his prey.
The body, thrown from the top of the lamp-post, did not even fall to the ground. It was torn to pieces before it reached it.
The head was separated from the trunk in a second, and in another second raised on the end of a pike. It was very much in fashion in those days to carry the heads of one's enemies in that way.
At this sanguinary spectacle Bailly was horrified. That head appeared to him to be the head of the Medusa of ancient days.
Lafayette, pale, his drawn sword in his hand, with disgust repulsed the guards who had surrounded him, to excuse themselves for not having been the strongest.
Billot, stamping his feet with rage, and kicking right and left, like one of own fiery Perche horses, returned into the Hôtel de Ville, that he might see no more of what was passing on that ensanguined square.
As to Pitou, his fieriness of popular vengeance was changed into a convulsive movement; and he had fled to the river's bank, where he closed his eyes and stopped his ears, that he might neither see nor hear.
Consternation reigned in the Hôtel de Ville; the electors began to comprehend that they would never be able to direct the movements of the people, save in the manner which should suit the people.
All at once, while the furious mob were amusing themselves with dragging the mutilated remains of Foulon through the gutters, a new cry, a new shout, rolling like distant thunder, was heard, proceeding from the opposite side of the river.
A courier was seen galloping over the bridge. The news he was bringing was already known to the crowd. They had guessed it from the signs of their most skilful leaders, as a pack of hounds take up the scent from the inspiration of their finest-nosed and best-practised bloodhounds.
The crowd rush to meet this courier, whom they surround; they scent that he has touched their new prey; they feel that he is going to speak of Monsieur Berthier.
Interrogated by ten thousand voices, all howling at once, the courier is compelled to reply to them.
“Monsieur Berthier de Savigny has been arrested at Compiègne.”
Then he proceeds into the Hôtel de Ville, where he announces the same tidings to Lafayette and to Bailly.
“Good; good! I knew it,” said Lafayette.
“We knew it,” said Bailly, “and orders have been given that he should be kept there.”
“Kept there?” repeated the courier.
“Undoubtedly; I have sent two commissaries with an escort.”
“An escort of two hundred and fifty men, was it not?” said an elector; “it is more than sufficient.”
“Gentlemen,” replied the courier, “this is precisely what I was sent to tell you. The escort has been dispersed and the prisoner carried off by the multitude.”
“Carried off!” exclaimed Lafayette. “Has the escort allowed the prisoner to be carried off?”
“Do not blame them, General; all that it was possible to do, they did.”
“But Monsieur Berthier?” anxiously inquired Bailly.
“They are bringing him to Paris; and he is at Bourget by this time.”
“But should they bring him here,” cried Billot, “he is lost.”
“Quick! quick!” cried Lafayette, “five hundred men to Bourget. Let the commissioners and Monsieur Berthier stop there; let them sleep there! During the night we will consider what is to be done.”
“But who would venture to undertake such a commission?” said the courier, who was looking with terror at that waving sea of heads, every wave of which sent forth its threatening roar.
“I will!” cried Billot; “at least, I will save him.”
“But you would perish in the attempt,” cried the courier; “the road is black with people.”
“I will go, nevertheless,” said the farmer.
“It is useless now,” murmured Bailly, who had been listening to the noises from without. “Hush! Do you not hear that?”
They then heard, from the direction of the Porte St. Martin, a rushing noise like that of the sea when beating over the shingles on a beach.
This frenzied howl came to them over the roofs like steam over the sides of a boiling caldron.
“It is too late,” said Lafayette.
“They are coming! they are coming!” murmured the courier. “Do you not hear them?”
“A regiment! a regiment!” cried Lafayette, with that generous ebullition of humanity which was the most brilliant feature of his character.
“What! By God's death!” exclaimed Bailly, who swore perhaps for the first time in his life, “you seem to forget that our army—ours!—is precisely that crowd whom you wish to fight.”
And he hid his face in his hands.
The shouts which had been heard in the distance were re-echoed by the people in the streets, and thus communicated to the crowd upon the square with the rapidity of a train of gunpowder.
