The tocsin rang, as Danton had ordered; alarm guns were fired; drummers woke the echoes of the streets and of the squares, and presently the deed of supreme audacity and of supreme horror began to come into being. Crowds collected about the prisons. Groups forced a way in. More or less improvised committees took possession, and massacre began. The massacre of September is one of the most lurid events of the Revolution, easier therefore for the romancist to deal with than for the historian. Its horrors are quite beyond question. At one point, Bicetre, the killing continued until late on the 6th, nearly four days. The {152} total number of victims was very large, possibly between 2,000 and 3,000. At many places the slaughter was indiscriminate, accompanied by nameless barbarities, carried out by gangs of brutal ruffians who were soon intoxicated with gore and with wine. But alongside of these aspects were others more difficult to do justice to, but the careful weighing of which is necessary if any just estimate of the event is to be reached. The massacring was carried out by a small number of individuals, perhaps two or three hundred in all, and of these a considerable proportion undoubtedly acted in a spirit of blind political and social rage, and in the belief that they were carrying out an act of justice. A large mass of citizens gave the massacres their approval by forming crowds about the prison doors. As to these crowds there are two salient facts. The first is that on the first day they were large and excited, and afforded that moral support without which the massacres could hardly have been carried out. After the first day they diminished rapidly; and by the end of the third day all popular support was gone, and a feeling of horror had seized on the city and supplanted everything else. Then again the mob, as it crowded about the {153} prison doors, showed a marked attitude. Many of the prisoners, those who were so lucky as to pass for good citizens and friends of the people, were released. As these came out the crowd received them with every sign of joy and of fraternization. When on the contrary it was a victim coming out to be slaughtered, there was silence, no shouting, no exultation. In other words, the event was, with most, an act of popular justice, and this was the appearance it had even when seen from the interior of the prisons. At l'Abbaye Maillard presided over the self-appointed tribunal, and it is impossible to doubt that, whenever he was satisfied that the prisoner deserved his freedom, he attempted to secure his life. The case of St. Meard, an aristocrat, a colonel, who had enough good sense and courage to speak plainly to the judges, avowing himself a royalist but persuading them that he took no part in anti-revolutionary schemes, is most illuminating. Maillard declared he saw no harm in him; he was acquitted; and was fraternally embraced by the crowd when he safely passed the fatal door.