But... a new, Fourteenth morning dawns. | ing, our National Volunteers rolling in long Under all roofs of this distracted City is the wide flood, south-westward to the Hôtel des noduse of a drama, not untragical, crowding Invalides; in search of the one thing needful. towards solution. The bustlings and preparings, the tremors and menaces; the tears that fell from old eyes! This day, my sons, ye shall quit you like men. By the memory of your fathers' wrongs, by the hope of your children's rights! Tyranny impends in red wrath: help for you is none, if not in your own right hands. This day ye must do or die.

From earliest light, a sleepless Permanent Committee has heard the old cry, now waxing almost frantic, mutinous: Arms! Arms! Provost Flesselles, or what traitors there are among you, may think of those Charleville Boxes. A hundred-and-fifty-thousand of us; and but the third man furnished with so much as a pike! Arms are the one thing needful: with arms we are an unconquerable man-defying National Guard; without arms, a rabble to be whiffed with grapeshot.

Happily the word has arisen, for no secret can be kept,-that there lie muskets at the Hôtel des Invalides. Thither will we: King's Procureurs M. Ethys de Corny, and whatsoever of authority a Permanent Committee can lend, shall go with us. Besenval's Camp is there; perhaps he will not fire on us; if he kill us, we shall but die.

King's Procureur M. Ethys de Corny and officials are there; the Curé of Saint-Etienne du Mont marches unpacific, at the head of his militant Parish; the Clerks of the Basoche12 in red coats we see marching, now Volunteers of the Basoche; the Volunteers of the Palais Royal:-National Volunteers, numerable by tens of thousands; of one heart and mind. The King's muskets are the Nation's; think, old M. de Sombreuil, how, in this extremity, thou wilt refuse them!. Old M. de Sombreuil would fain hold parley, send couriers; but it skills13 not: the walls are scaled, no Invalide firing a shot; the gates must be flung open. Patriotism rushes in, tumultuous, from grunsel14 up to ridge-tile, through all rooms and passages; rummaging distractedly for arms. What cellar, or what cranny can escape it? The arms are found; all safe there; lying packed in straw,apparently with a view to being burnt! More ravenous than famishing lions over dead prey, the multitude, with clangour and vociferation, pounces on them; struggling, dashing, clutching:-to the jamming-up, to the pressure, fracture and probable extinction of the weaker Patriot. And so, with such protracted crash of deafening, most discordant Orchestra-music, the Scene is changed; and eight-and-twenty thousand sufficient firelocks are on the shoulders of as many National Guards, lifted thereby out of darkness into fiery light.

Alas, poor Besenval, with his troops melting away in that manner, has not the smallest humour to fire! At five o'clock this morning, as he lay dreaming, oblivious in the École Militaire, a 'figure' stood suddenly at his bedside; 'with face rather handsome; eyes inflamed, muskets, as they flash by: Gardes Françaises, Let Besenval look at the glitter of these speech rapid and curt, air audacious;' such a it is said, have cannon levelled on him; ready figure drew Priam's curtains! 10 The message to open, if need were, from the other side of and monition of the figure was, that resistance would be hopeless; that if blood flowed, woe to the River. Motionless sits he; astonished,' him who shed it. Thus spoke the figure: and one may flatter oneself, at the proud bearing vanished. 'Withal there was a kind of elo- (fière contenance) of the Parisians.'—And now to the Bastille, ye intrepid Parisians! There quence that struck one.' Besenval admits that he should have arrested him, but did not. Who grapeshot still threatens: thither all men's this figure with inflamed eyes, with speech rapid thoughts and steps are now tending. and curt, might be? Besenval knows, but mentions not. Camille Desmoulins? Pythagorean Marquis Valadi,11 inflamed with 'violent motions all night at the Palais Royal?'. Fame names him, 'Young M. Meillar'; then shuts her lips about him forever.

In any case, behold, about nine in the morn

6 "knot." tangle, plot

7 acquit

8 Attorney

9 Military School; by the Champs de Mars.

his interior' soon after midnight of Sunday. Old De Launay, as we hinted, withdrew into He remains there ever since, hampered, as all military gentlemen now are, in the saddest con

flict of uncertainties. The Hôtel-de-Ville 'invites' him to admit National Soldiers, which is a soft name for surrendering. On the other hand, His Majesty's orders were precise. His garrison is but eighty-two old Invalides, reinforced by thirty-two young Swiss; his walls

10 Cp. Goldsmith's The Haunch of Venison, 1. 110 indeed are nine feet thick, he has cannon and

and note.

11 Another of the nobles who had joined the peo

ple.

12 A collective term for "the Law."
13 avails

14 groundsill

blood (for there were deaths by that sputter of fire), into endless rolling explosion of musketry, distraction, execration;-and over head, from the Fortress, let one great gun, with its grapeshot, go booming, to show what we could do. The Bastille is besieged!

powder; but, alas, only one day's provision of |—which latter, on walls nine feet thick, cannot vietuals. The city, too, is French, the poor do execution. The Outer Drawbridge has been garrison mostly French. Rigorous old De lowered for Thuriot; new deputation of citi Launay, think what thou wilt do! zens (it is the third, and noisiest of all) peneAll morning, since nine, there has been a cry trates that way into the Outer Court: soft every where: To the Bastille! Repeated speeches producing no clearance of these, De 'deputations of citizens' have been here, pas- Launay gives fire; pulls up his Drawbridge. A sionate for arms; whom De Launay has got slight sputter;-which has kindled the too comdismissed by soft speeches through portholes.bustible chaos; made it a roaring fire-chaos! Towards noon, Elector Thuriot de la Rosière Bursts forth Insurrection, at sight of its own gains admittance; finds De Launay indisposed for surrender; nay, disposed for blowing up the place rather. Thuriot mounts with him to the battlements: heaps of paving-stones, old iron and missiles lie piled; cannon all duly levelled; in every embrasure a cannon,-only drawn back a little! But outwards, behold, O Thuriot, how the multitude flows on, welling through every street; tocsin furiously pealing, all drums beating the générale1: the Suburb Saint-Antoine rolling hitherward wholly, as one man!* Such vision (spectral yet real) thou, O Thuriot, as from thy Mount of Vision, beholdest in this moment: prophetic of what other Phantasmagories, and loud-gibbering Spectral Realities, which thou yet beholdest not, but shalt! "Que voulez-vous?''2 said De Launay, turning pale at the sight, with an air of reproach, almost of menace. "Monsieur," said Thuriot, rising into the moral sublime, "what mean you? Consider if I could not precipitate both of us from this height," say only a hundred feet, exclusive of the walled ditch! Whereupon De Launay fell silent. Thuriot shows himself from some pinnacle, to comfort the multitude becoming suspicious, fremescent: then descends; departs with protest; with warning addressed also to the Invalides,-on whom however, it produces but a mixed indistinct impression. The old heads are none of the clearest; besides, it is said, De Launay has been profuse of beverages (prodigua des buissons). They think they will not fire,-if not fired on, if they can help it; but must, on the whole, be ruled considerably by circumstances.

Wo to thee, De Launay, in such an hour, if thou canst not, taking some one firm decision, rule circumstances! Soft speeches will not serve; hard grapeshot is questionable; but hovering between the two is unquestionable. Ever wilder swells the tide of men; their infinite hum waxing ever louder, into imprecations, perhaps into crackle of stray musketry,

On, then, all Frenchmen, that have hearts in your bodies! Roar with all your throats, of cartilage and metal, ye Sons of Liberty; stir spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in you, soul, body, or spirit; for it is the hour! Smite, thou Louis Tournay, cartwright of the Marais,3 old-soldier of the Regiment Dauphiné; smite at that Outer Drawbridge chain, though the fiery hail whistles round thee! Never, over nave or felloe, did thy axe strike such a stroke. Down with it, man; down with it to Orcus: 4 let the whole accursed Edifice sink thither, and Tyranny be swallowed up forever! Mounted, some say, on the roof of the guard-room, some 'on bayonets stuck into joints of the wall,' Louis Tournay smites, brave Aubin Bonnemère (also an old soldier) seconding him; the chain yields, breaks; the huge drawbridge slams down, thundering (avec fracas). Glorious: and yet, alas, it is still but the outworks. The Eight grim Towers, with their Invalide musketry, their paving stones and cannon-mouths, still soar aloft intact;-Ditch yawning impassable, stone-faced; the inner Drawbridge with its back towards us: the Bastille is still to take!

To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of the most important in History) perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. Could one but, after infinite reading, get to understand so much as the plan of the building! But there is open Esplanade, at the end of the Rue Saint-Antoine; there are such Forecourts, Cour Avancée, Cour de l'Orme, arched Gateway (where Louis Tournay now fights); then new drawbridges, dormant-bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight Towers; a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from twenty years to four hundred and twenty;-beleaguered. in this its last hour, as

1 The signal for assembling, or of alarm.
2 "What do you want? What do you mean?"
The Faubourg St. Antoine, or east side of Paris,
much like the east side of London, is mainly 3 A manufacturing quarter of Paris.
a residence of the lower classes.

4 Hades,

we said, by mere Chaos come again! Ordnance out of him (butt of musket on pit of stomach), of all calibres; throats of all capacities; men overturned barrels, and stayed the devouring of all plans, every man his own engineer: sel- element. A young beautiful lady, seized escapdom since the war of Pygmies and Cranes was ing in these Outer Courts, and thought falsely there seen so anomalous a thing. Half-pay to be De Launay's daughter, shall be burnt in Elie is home for a suit of regimentals;* no De Launay's sight; she lies swooned on a one would heed him in coloured clothes: half- paillasse; 11 but again a Patriot, it is brave pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Françaises in Aubin Bonnemère the old soldier, dashes in, the Place de Grève. Frantic Patriots pick up and rescues her. Straw is burnt; three cartloads the grapeshots; bear them, still hot (or seem- of it, hauled thither, go up in white smoke: ingly so), to the Hôtel-de-Ville;-Paris, you almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so perceive, is to be burnt! Flesselles is 'pale to that Elie had, with singed brows, to drag back the very lips,' for the roar of the multitude one cart; and Réole the 'gigantic haberdasher' grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme another. Smoke as of Tophet; confusion as of of its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic mad- Babel; noise as of the Crack of Doom! ness. At every street-barricade, there whirls simmering a minor whirlpool,-strengthening the barricade, since God knows what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into that grand Fire-Mahlstrome which is lashing round the Bastille.

Blood flows; the aliment of new madness. The wounded are carried into houses of the Rue Cerisaie; the dying leave their last mandate not to yield till the accursed Stronghold fall. And yet, alas, how fall? The walls are so thick! Deputations, three in number, arrive And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the from the Hôtel-de-Ville; Abbé Fauchat (who wine-merchant has become an impromptu can- was of one) can say, with what almost supernoneer. See Georget, of the Marine Service, human courage of benevolence. These wave fresh from Brest, ply the King of Siam's their Town-flag in the arched Gateway; and cannon. Singular (if we were not used to the stand, rolling their drum; but to no purpose. like): Georget lay, last night, taking his ease In such Crack of Doom, De Launay cannot hear at his inn; the King of Siam's cannon also them, dare not believe them: they return, with lay, knowing nothing of him, for a hundred justified rage, the whew of lead still singing in years. Yet now, at the right instant, they have their ears. What to do? The Firemen are got together, and discourse eloquent music. here, squirting with their fire pumps on the For, hearing what was toward, Georget sprang Invalides cannon, to wet the touchholes; they from the Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes unfortunately cannot squirt so high; but proFrançaises also will be here, with real duce only clouds of spray. Individuals of artillery were not the walls so thick!-Up-classical knowledge propose catapults. Sanwards from the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighbouring roofs and windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry, without effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively at their ease from behind stone; hardly through portholes show the tip of a nose. We fall, shot; and make no impression!

Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guard-rooms are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted 'Peruke-maker with two fiery torches' is for burning 'the salt petres of the Arsenal; '—had not a woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy,10 instantly struck the wind

5 An ancient fable; see Iliad, III, 5.

6 maëlstrom, whirlpool

7 The principal naval port of France.

terre, the sonorous Brewer of the Suburb SaintAntoine, advises rather that the place be fired, by a 'mixture of phosphorus and oil-of-turpentine spouted up through forcing pumps: '. 0 Spinola-Santerre,† hast thou the mixture ready? Every man his own engineer! And still the fire-deluge abates not: even women are firing, and Turks; at least one woman (with her sweetheart), and one Turk. Gardes Françaises have come: real cannon, real cannoneers. Usher12 Maillard is busy; half-pay Elie, halfpay Hulin rage in the midst of thousands.

How the great Bastille Clock ticks (inaudible) in its Inner Court there, at its ease, hour after hour; as if nothing special, for it or the world, were passing! It tolled One when the firing began; and is now pointing towards Five,

8 "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?" 1 and still the firing slakes not.-Far down, in Henry IV., III, iii, 93.

9 stage-coach

10 some knowledge of physics

Carlyle is here merely reporting a glimpse of
Elie as he gets it from some record. He has
earlier described these two captains, Elie and
Hulin, as "both with an air of half-pay."

their vaults, the seven Prisoners hear muffled

11 straw mattress

12 huissier, constable

General Spinola in 1625 took the fortress of
Breda in Holland.

66

din as of earthquakes; their Turnkeys answer Bread! Bread! Great is the combined voice vaguely. of men; the utterance of their instincts, which are truer than their thoughts: it is the greatest a man encounters, among the sounds and shadows which make up this World of Time. He who can resist that, has his footing somewhere beyond Time. De Launay could not do it. Distracted, he hovers between two; hopes in the middle of despair; surrenders not his Fortress; declares that he will blow it up, seizes torches to blow it up, and does not blow it. Unhappy old De Launay, it is the deathagony of thy Bastille and thee! Jail, Jailoring, and Jailor, all three, such as they may have been, must finish.

Wo to thee, De Launay, with thy poor hundred Invalides! Broglie is distant, and his ears heavy: Besenval hears, but can send no help. One poor troop of Hussars has crept, reconnoitering, cautiously along the Quais, as far as the Pont Neuf.13 We are come to join you," said the Captain; for the crowd seems shoreless. A large-headed dwarfish individual of smoke-bleared aspect, shambles forward, opening his blue lips, for there is sense in him; and croaks: "Alight then, and give up your arms!" The Hussar-Captain is too happy to be escorted to the Barriers, and dismissed on parole. Who the squat individual was? Men answer, It is M. Marat, author of the excellent pacific Avis au Peuple!14 Great truly, O thou remarkable Dogleech, is this thy day of emergence and new-birth: and yet this same day come four years!-But let the curtains of the Future hang.15

What shall De Launay do? One thing only De Launay could have done: what he said he would do. Fancy him sitting, from the first, with lighted taper, within arm's length of the Powder-Magazine; motionless, like old Roman Senator, or Bronze Lamp-holder; coldly apprising Thuriot, and all men, by a slight motion of his eye, what his resolution was:-Harmless, he sat there, while unharmed; but the King's Fortress, meanwhile, could, might, would, or should, in nowise be surrendered, save to the King's Messenger: one old man's life is worthless, so it be lost with honour; but think, ye brawling canaille, 16 how will it be when a whole Bastille springs skyward!-In such statuesque, taper-holding attitude, one fancies De Launay might have left Thuriot, the red Clerks of the Basoche, Curé of Saint-Stephen and all the tag-rag-and-bobtail of the world, to work their will.

And yet, withal, he could not do it. Hast thou considered how each man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? How their shriek of indignation palsies the strong soul; their howl of contumely withers with unfelt pangs? The Ritter Gluck 17 confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage, in one of his noblest Operas, was the voice of the Populace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser:

For four hours now has the World-Bedlam roared: call it the World-Chimæra, blowing fire! The poor Invalides have sunk under their battlements, or rise only with reversed muskets: they have made a white flag of napkins; go beating the chamade, 18 or seeming to beat, for one can hear nothing. The very Swiss at the Portcullis look weary of firing; disheartened in the fire-deluge: a porthole at the drawbridge is opened, as by one that would speak. See Huissier Maillard, the shifty man! On his plank, swinging over the abyss of that stone Ditch; plank resting on parapet, balanced by weight of Patriots,-he hovers perilous: such a Dove towards such an Ark! Deftly, thou shifty Usher; one man already fell; and lies smashed, far down there, against the masonry; Usher Maillard falls not; deftly, unerring he walks, with outspread palm. The Swiss holds a paper through his porthole; the shifty Usher snatches it, and returns. Terms of surrender: Pardon, immunity to all! Are they accepted?" Foi d' officier, On the word of an officer,'' answers half-pay Hulin, or half-pay Elie, for men do not agree on it, "they are!" Sinks the drawbridge,-Usher Maillard bolting it when down; rushes-in the living deluge: the Bastille is fallen! Victoire! La Bastille est prise!19

We should greatly err if we were to suppose that any of the streets and squares then bore the same aspect as at present. The great majority of the houses, indeed, have, since that time, been wholly, or in great part, rebuilt. If the most fashionable parts of the capital could be placed before us, such as they then were, we should be disgusted by their squalid appearance, and poisoned by their noisome atmosphere. In Covent Gardens a filthy and noisy market was held close to the dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought, cabbage stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the thresholds of the Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of Durham.

The town did not, as now, fade by imperceptible | laid there till two generations had passed withdegrees into the country. No long avenues of out any return of the pestilence, and till the villas, embowered in lilacs and laburnums, ex-ghastly spot had long been surrounded by buiidtended from the great centre of wealth and ings. civilization almost to the boundaries of Middlesex and far into the heart of Kent and Surrey. In the east, no part of the immense line of warehouses and artificial lakes which now stretches from the Tower to Blackwall had even been projected. On the west, scarcely one of those stately piles of building which are inhabited by the noble and wealthy was in existence; and Chelsea, which is now peopled by more than forty thousand human beings, was a quiet country village with about a thousand inhabitants. On the north, cattle fed, and sportsmen wandered with dogs and guns, over the site of the borough of Marylebone, and over far the greater part of the space now covered by the boroughs of Finsbury and of The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fieldse was an the Tower Hamlets. Islington was almost a open space where the rabble congregated every solitude; and poets loved to contrast its silence evening, within a few yards of Cardigan House and repose with the din and turmoil of the and Winchester House, to hear mountebanks monster London.2 On the south the capital is harangue, to see bears dance, and to set dogs now connected with its suburb by several at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every part of the bridges, not inferior in magnificence and solid-area. Horses were exercised there. The begity to the noblest works of the Cæsars. In gars were as noisy and importunate as in the 1685, a single line of irregular arches, over-worst governed cities of the Continent. A Linhung by piles of mean and crazy houses, and garnished, after a fashion, worthy of the naked barbarians of Dahomy,3 with scores of mouldering heads, impeded the navigation of the river.

He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded part of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and was sometimes so fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock. On the north the Oxford road ran between hedges. Three or four hundred yards to the south were the garden walls of a few great houses which were considered as quite out of town. On the west was a meadow renowned for a spring from which, long afterwards, Conduit Street was named. On the east was a field not to be passed without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as in a place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years before, when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the dead-carts had nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly believed that the earth was deeply tainted with infection, and could not be disturbed without imminent risk to human life. No foundations were

1 Popularly pronounced Marlibun, or Maribun. 2 Cp. Cowley: Discourse of Solitude.

3 In West Africa. (This is a description of the famous old London Bridge.)

4 A fashionable shopping district in West London.

coln's Inn mumper7 was a proverb. The whole fraternity knew the arms and liveries of every charitably disposed grandee in the neighbourhood, and, as soon as his lordship's coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in crowds to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite of many accidents, and of some legal proceedings, till, in the reign of George the Second, Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, was knocked down and nearly killed in the middle of the square. Then at length palisades were set up, and a pleasant garden laid out.

Saint James's Squares was a receptacle for all the offal and cinders, for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. At one time a cudgel player10 kept the ring there. At another time an impudent squatter settled himself there, and built a shed for rubbish under the windows of the gilded saloons in which the first magnates of the realm, Norfolk, Ormond,