One warder murdered outright, a second on the point of death,—the fate of the assassin and his comrade could not be long in doubt. A prisoner gave evidence that he had been bribed to drug the first gate-warder; and both Dessaignes and Desforges were sentenced to be "broken alive." The decree was passed on the 1st of October, 1784, signed by Louis XVI., at the express request of two of his ministers, and carried out publicly in every terrible detail. But darker scenes than this are preparing at the Abbaye. It was here that the Revolution may be said to have begun, and here that some of its worst crimes were perpetrated. [Illustration: A STREET SCENE DURING THE MASSACRES.] In June of 1789, there lay in the Abbaye certain soldiers of the _Gardes Françaises_, charged with refusing to obey their orders, out of sympathy with the National Assembly. Their situation in the prison became known, and a clamour arose for their release. "À l'Abbaye! à l'Abbaye!" was the cry; two hundred men set out from the Palais-Royal, and four thousand arrived at the prison gates. Every door of defence was staved in, and in less than an hour from the commencement of the attack, the democratic _Gardes_ were released, and borne in triumph through Paris. This was one of the first demonstrations of the popular will. How quickly that will felt and appreciated its strength, and in what abandonment of cruel passion it was to find expression, most readers have learned. There is nothing in the annals of the world to be compared with the series of events in the Paris prisons in '92, to which history has given the name of the September Massacres. In that deliberate slaughter, over one thousand men and women perished, hewn in pieces in the prisons or at the prison doors. The revolutionary committees had packed the gaols with "suspected" persons, mostly innocent of anything that could be laid to their charge; and there they awaited such death as might be decreed for them: salvation was all but hopeless. There was talk at first of burning them _en masse_ in the prisons; then of thrusting all the prisoners into the subterranean cells, and drowning them slowly by pouring or pumping water on them. Assassination pure and simple seems to have been resolved upon "as a measure of indulgence." A mock form of trial was held at all the prisons, that the butcheries might be given an appearance of legality. On Sunday, the 2d of September, '92, the barriers of the city were closed, and early in the afternoon the tocsin clanging from every steeple in Paris called up the butchers to their work. Some thirty priests were faring in five hackney carriages to the Abbaye prison, and with them the slaughter was begun. One coach reached the prison with a load of corpses; the occupants of the other four—Abbé Sicard excepted—were killed as they alighted. Prisoners in the Abbaye watched the carnage from behind their bars, and said: "It will be our turn next."