"[17] They starve them, bully them, and vex them purposely as if
they meant to exhaust their patience and drive them into a revolt, so
as to get rid of them in a mass, or, at least, to justify the
increasing rapid strokes of the guillotine. They are huddled together
in tens, twenties and thirties, in one room at La Force, "eight in a
chamber, fourteen feet square," where all the beds touch, and many
overlap each other, where two out of the eight inmates are obliged to
sleep on the floor, where vermin swarm, where the closed sky-lights,
the standing tub, and the crowding together of bodies poisons the
atmosphere. - In many places, the proportion of the sick and dying is
greater than in the hold of a slave-ship. "Of ninety individuals with
whom I was shut up two months ago," writes a prisoner at Strasbourg,
"sixty-six were taken to the hospital in the space of eight days."[18]
In the prisons of Nantes, 3000 out 13,000 prisoners die of typhoid
fever and of the rot in two months.[19] 400 priests[20] confined on a
vessel between decks, in the roadstead of Aix, stowed on top of each
other, wasted with hunger, eaten up by vermin, suffocated for lack of
air, half-frozen, beaten, mocked at, and constantly threatened with
death, suffer still more than Negroes in a slave-hold; for, through
interest in his freight, the captain of the slaver tries to keep his
human consignment in good health, whilst, through revolutionary
fanaticism, the crew of the Aix vessel detests its cargo of "black-
frocks" and would gladly send them to the bottom.
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