Four months after the first trial of the "inimitable machine" Bicêtre paid its tribute of blood to the red days of September. In Bicêtre, as elsewhere in Paris, that Sunday, 2d of September, 1792, and the three days that followed were long remembered. "All France leaps distracted," says Carlyle, "like the winnowed Sahara waltzing in sand colonnades!" In Paris, "huge placards" going up on the walls, "all steeples clangouring, the alarm-gun booming from minute to minute, and lone Marat, the man forbid," seeing salvation in one thing only—in the fall of "two hundred and sixty thousand aristocrat heads." It was the beginning or presage of the Terror.
The hundred hours' massacre in the prisons of Paris, beginning on the Sunday afternoon, may be reckoned with the hours of St. Bartholomew. "The tocsin is pealing its loudest, the clocks inaudibly striking three." The massacre of priests was just over at the Abbaye prison; and there, and at La Force, and at the Châtelet, and the Conciergerie, in each of these prisons the strangest court—which could not be called of justice but of revenge—was hurriedly got together, and prisoner after prisoner, fetched from his cell and swiftly denounced as a "royalist plotter," was thrust out into a "howling sea" of _sans-culottes_ and hewn to pieces under an arch of pikes and sabres. "Man after man is cut down," says Carlyle; "the sabres need sharpening, the killers refresh themselves from wine-jugs." Dr. Moore, author of the _Journal during a Residence in France_, came upon one of the scenes of butchery, grew sick at the sight, and "turned into another street." Not fewer than a thousand and eighty-nine were slaughtered in the prisons.
The carnage at Bicêtre, on the Paris outskirts, was on the Monday, and here it seems to have been of longer duration and more terrible than elsewhere. Narratives of this butchery are not all in harmony. Prud'homme, author of the _Journal des Révolutions de Paris_, says that the mob started for Bicêtre towards three o'clock, taking with them seven pieces of cannon; that a manufactory of false paper-money (_assignats_) was discovered in full swing in the prison, and that all who were concerned in it were killed without mercy; that Lamotte, husband of the "Necklace Countess," was amongst the prisoners, and that the people "at once took him under their protection"; that the debtors and "the more wretched class of prisoners," were enlarged; and that the rest fell under pike, sabre, and club.