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THE TAKING OF THE BASTILLE.

Palais Royal did everything, and that Orleans paid for all. A puerile explanation. Is it possible to bribe millions of men? Had the duke paid also the insurrections at Lyons and in Dauphiné, which, at that very moment, had loudly refused to pay the taxes? Had he bribed the cities of Brittany, which were rising up in arms, or the soldiers, who, at Rennes, refused to fire upon the citizens?

The prince's effigy had, it is true, been carried in triumph. But the prince himself had come to Versailles to surrender to his enemies, and to protest that he was as much afraid of the riot as anybody, or even more so. He was requested to have the goodness to sleep at the castle. The court, having him under its hand, thought it held fast the fabricator of the whole machination, and felt more at its ease. The old marshal, to whom all the military forces were intrusted at that moment, surrounded himself well with troops, held the king in safety, put Versailles, which nobody thought of, in a state of defence, and looking upon the insurrection of Paris as so much smoke, left it to subside of itself.

CHAPTER VII.

THE TAKING OF THE BASTILLE, JULY 14, 1789.

Difficulty of taking the Bastille.-The Idea of the Attack belongs to the People.-Hatred of the People towards the Bastille.-The Joy of the World on hearing of the taking of the Bastille.-The People carry off the Guns from the Invalides.-The Bastille was in a State of Defence.Thuriot summons the Bastille to surrender.-The Electors send to it uselessly several Deputations.-Last Attack; Elie, Hulin.-Danger of Delay. The People believe themselves betrayed; they menace the Provost and the Electors.-The Conquerors at the Hôtel-de-Ville.— How the Bastille surrendered.-Death of the Governor.-Prisoners put to Death.-Prisoners Pardoned.-Clemency of the People.

VERSAILLES, with an organised government, a king, ministers, a general, and an army, was all hesitation, doubt, uncertainty, and in a state of the most complete moral anarchy.

Paris, all commotion, destitute of every legal authority, and in the utmost confusion, attained, on the 14th of July, what is morally the highest degree of order,-unanimity of feeling.

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On the 13th, Paris thought only of defending itself; on the 14th, it attacked.

On the evening of the 13th, some doubt still existed, but none remained in the morning. The evening had been stormy, agitated by a whirlwind of ungovernable frenzy. The morning was still and serene,- —an awful calm.

With daylight, one idea dawned upon Paris, and all were illumined with the same ray of hope. A light broke upon every mind, and the same voice thrilled through every heart: "Go! and thou shalt take the Bastille !" That was impossible, unreasonable, preposterous. And yet everybody believed it. And the thing was done.

The Bastille, though an old fortress, was nevertheless impregnable, unless besieged for several days and with an abundance of artillery. The people had, in that crisis, neither the time nor the means to make a regular siege. Had they done so, the Bastille had no cause for fear, having enough provisions to wait for succour so near at hand, and an immense supply of ammunition. Its walls, ten feet thick at the top of the towers, and thirty or forty at the base, might long laugh at cannon-balls; and its batteries firing down upon Paris, could, in the meantime, demolish the whole of the Marais and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Its towers, pierced with windows and loop-holes, protected by double and triple gratings, enabled the garrison, in full security, to make a dreadful carnage of its assailants.

The attack on the Bastille was by no means reasonable. It was an act of faith.

Nobody proposed; but all believed, and all acted. Along the streets, the quays, the bridges, and the boulevards, the crowd shouted to the crowd: "To the Bastille! The Bastille!" And the tolling of the tocsin thundered in every ear: "à la Bastille!"

Nobody, I repeat, gave the impulse. The orators of the Palais Royal passed the time in drawing up a list of proscription, in condemning the queen to death, as well as Madame de Polignac, Artois, Flesselles the provost, and others. The names of the

conquerors of the Bastille do not include one of these makers of motions. The Palais Royal was not the starting-point, neither was it to the Palais Royal that the conquerors brought back the spoils and prisoners.

THE IDEA OF THE ATTACK BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE.

Still less had the electors, assembled in the Hôtel-de-Ville, the idea of the attack. On the contrary, in order to prevent it, as well as the carnage which the Bastille could so easily make, they went so far as to promise the governor, that if he withdrew his cannon he should not be attacked. The electors did not behave treacherously, though they were accused of having done so; but they had no faith.

Who had? They who had also the devotion and the strength to accomplish their faith. Who? Why, the people, -everybody.

Old men who have had the happiness and the misery to see all that has happened in this unprecedented half century, in which ages seem to be crowded together, declare, that the grand and national achievements of the Republic and the Empire, had nevertheless a partial non-unanimous character, but that the 14th of July alone was the day of the whole people. Then let that grand day remain ever one of the eternal fêtes of the human race, not only as having been the first of deliverance, but as having been superlatively the day of concord!

What had happened during that short night, on which nobody slept, for every uncertainty and difference of opinion to disappear with the shades of darkness, and all to have the same thoughts in the morning?

What took place at the Palais Royal and the Hôtel-deVille is well known; but what would be far more important to know, is, what took place on the domestic hearth of the people.

For there indeed, as we may sufficiently divine by what followed, there every heart summoned the past to its day of judgment, and every one, before a blow was struck, pronounced its irrevocable condemnation. History returned that night a long history of sufferings to the avenging instinct of the people. The souls of fathers who, for so many ages, had suffered and died in silence, descended into their sons, and spoke.

O brave men, you who till then had been so patient, so pacific, who, on that day, were to inflict the heavy blow of Providence, did not the sight of your families, whose only resource is in you, daunt your hearts? Far from it: gazing once more at your slumbering children, those children for

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whom that day was to create a destiny, your expanding minds embraced the free generations arising from their cradle, and felt at that moment the whole battle of the future!

The future and the past both gave the same reply; both cried Advance! And what is beyond all time,-beyond the future and the past,-immutable right said the same. The immortal sentiment of the Just imparted a temper of adamant to the fluttering heart of man; it said to him: "Go in peace; what matters? Whatever may happen, I am with thee, in death or victory!" The lower orders

And yet what was the Bastille to them? seldom or never entered it. Justice spoke to them, and, a voice that speaks still louder to the heart, the voice of humanity and mercy; that still small voice which seems so weak but that overthrows towers, had, for ten years, been shaking the very foundations of the doomed Bastille.

Let the truth be told; if any one had the glory of causing its downfall, it was that intrepid woman who wrought so long for the deliverance of Latude against all the powers in the world. Royalty refused, and the nation forced it to pardon; that woman, or that hero, was crowned in a public solemnity. To crown her who had, so to speak, forced open the stateprisons, was already branding them with infamy, devoting them to public execration, and demolishing them in the hearts and desires of men. That woman had shaken the Bastille to its foundations.

From that day, the people of the town and the faubourg, who, in that much-frequented quarter, were ever passing and repassing in its shadow, never failed to curse it.* And well did it deserve their hatred. There were many other prisons, but this one was the abode of capricious arbitrariness, wanton despotism, and ecclesiastical and bureaucratical inquisition. The court, so devoid of religion in that age, had made the Bastille a dungeon for free minds, the prison of thought. Less crowded during the reign of Louis XVI., it had become more cruel; the prisoners were deprived of their walk more rigorous, and no less unjust: we blush for France, to be

Elle écrasait la rue Saint-Antoine, is Linguet's energetical expression, p. 147. The best known conquerors of the Bastille were, either men of the Faubourg, or of the quarter Saint-Paul, of the Culture-Sainte-Catherine.

L

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JOY OF THE WORLD AT ITS CAFTURE.

obliged to say that the crime of one of the prisoners was to have given a useful secret to our navy! They were afraid lest he should tell it elsewhere.

The Bastille was known and detested by the whole world. Bastille and tyranny were, in every language, synonymous terms. Every nation, at the news of its destruction, believed it had recovered its liberty.

In Russia, that empire of mystery and silence,—that monstrous Bastille between Europe and Asia, scarcely had the news arrived when you might have seen men of every nation shouting and weeping for joy in the open streets; they rushed into each other's arms to tell the news: "Who can help weeping for joy? The Bastille is taken."*

On the very morning of that great day, the people had as yet no arms.

The powder they had taken from the arsenal the night before, and put in the Hôtel-de-Ville, was slowly distributed to them, during the night, by only three men. The distribution

having ceased for a moment, about two o'clock, the desperate crowd hammered down the doors of the magazine, every blow striking fire on the nails.

No guns!-It was necessary to go and take them, to carry them off from the Invalides; that was very hazardous. The Hotel des Invalides is, it is true, an open mansion; but Sombreuil, the governor, a brave old soldier, had received a strong detachment of artillery and some cannon, without counting those he had already. Should those cannon be brought to act, the crowd might be taken in the flank, and easily dispersed by the regiments that Besenval had at the military school. Would those foreign regiments have refused to act? spite of what Besenval says to the contrary, there is reason to doubt it. What is much plainer, is, that being left without orders, he was himself full of hesitation, and appeared paralysed in mind. At five o'clock that same morning, he had received a strange visit ;—a man rushed in; his countenance was livid, his eyes flashed fire, his language was impetuous and brief, and

In

*This fact is related by a witness above suspicion, Count de Ségur, ambassador at the court of Russia, who was far from sharing that enthusiasm: "This madness which I can hardly believe whilst relating it," &c. Ségur, Mémoires iii., p. 508.