Taking the Bastile

Launay laid the match by his side and began to write the terms of surrender on his knee. The French Veterans and the Swiss, aware that their safety was at stake, silently looked at him in superstitious terror. When he turned, before writing the document out fair, all the yards were clear.

In a twinkling all the concourse outside had learnt what was proceeding. As Losme had said, it was the population which issued from beneath the flagstones and pavement. Not only workmen and beggars, the homeless and the imperfectly clad, but citizens of the better classes. Not only men but women and children. Each had a weapon and uttered a war-cry.

From spot to spot, amid groups, was seen a woman, disheveled, wringing her hands and waving her arms, howling curses at the giant of stone: it was a mother, a wife or a sweetheart whose dearest one had been incarcerated in its flanks.

But since a short space the giant had ceased to vomit flame and scowl in the smoke; the fire was extinct and the whole mute as a tomb. On the blackened walls the bullet grazes stood out white and were above count; everybody had wanted to leave his mark on the granite brow of his personification of tyranny.

They could hardly believe that the Bastile was about to be turned over to them; that its governor would surrender.

In the midst of this general doubt, as none ventured to congratulate another, and all waited in silence, a letter stuck on a spearpoint was seen thrust through a loophole.

Between the despatch and the besiegers was the great moat deep and wide and full of water.

Billet called for a plank, but three were too short, and the fourth, while long enough, was ill adjusted. Still he balanced himself as well as he could and unhesitatingly risked himself on the bending bridge.

All in dumbness fixed their eyes on the man who seemed suspended over the stagnant water, while Pitou, quivering, sat on the brink and hid his face.

All of a sudden, when Billet was two-thirds over, the plank shifted, and throwing up his arms he fell in the moat where he sank out of sight.

Pitou uttered a roar and dived after his master like a Newfoundland dog.

A man went right out on the plank, without hesitation, choosing the same road as Billet: it was Stanislas Maillard, the prison clerk. On reaching the point beneath which he saw two men struggling, he looked, but seeing that they could swim ashore, he continued his way.

In half a minute he was across and took the letter off the pike.

With the same tranquil nerve and steadiness of gait, he passed back over the plank.

But at the very second when all crowded round him to read the message, a hail of bullets rained down from the battlements at the same time as a tremendous report was heard.

From all breasts a cry arose, one announcing that the people meant to have revenge.

"Trust the tyrants again," said Gonchon.

Nobody cared any more about capitulations, the powder, the prisoners or himself – nothing was wanted but retaliation and the besiegers strewed into the yards not by hundreds but by thousands. The only thing preventing them entering still faster was not the muskets but the narrowness of the doorways.

On hearing the firing, the two soldiers who had not gone away from their commander, jumped at him and a third set his foot on the slow-match, and crushed it out. Launay drew the sword hidden in his cane and tried to stab with it but it was wrenched off from him and broken, while in his grip.

He was convinced that he could do no more, and he waited for his doom.

The mobs rushing in met the soldiers, holding out their hands to them – and so the Bastile was not taken under a surrender but by assault.

This came from the royal castle having ceased to enclose inert matter: latterly the King had shut up human brain there and the spirit had burst the vessel.

The people entered at the breach.

As for the treacherous volley fired in the midst of silence during the suspension of hostilities, and unforeseen, impolitic and deadly aggression, it will never be known who gave the order, inspired it and accomplished it.

There are moments when the future of a nation is exactly poised in the scales of Fate. One of the plates bears up the other, even while each party thinks his side will make the other kick the beam. An invisible hand has flung into the dish a dagger or a pistol and all changes. The only cry heard is:

"Woe to the vanquished!"

CHAPTER XIII.

DOWN IN THE DUNGEONS

While the multitude poured, roaring with delight and anger at the same time, into the yards of the prison, two men were floundering in the ditch: Billet and Pitou. The latter was keeping up the other whom no bullet or blow had struck, but the fall had a trifle stunned him. Ropes were thrown to them and poles thrust down.

In five minutes they were rescued, and were hugged and carried in triumph, muddy though they were.

One gave Billet a drink of brandy, another crammed the younger peasant with bread and sausage. A third dried them off and led them into the sunshine.

Suddenly an idea or rather a memory crossed the good farmer's mind: he tore himself from the friendly arms and ran towards the fort.

"The prisoners, help the prisoners!" he shouted.

"Yes, the prisoners," repeated Pitou, darting into the tower after his leader.

Only thinking of the jailers, the mob now shuddered on remembering the captives. The cries were reiterated. A fresh flood of assailants burst any remaining barriers and seemed to enlarge the flanks of the prison to expand it with liberty.

A frightful scene was presented to Billet and his friend. The mob crowded into the court, enraged, drunken and furious. The first soldier falling under hand was torn to pieces.

Gonchon looked on quietly, no doubt thinking that popular wrath is like a great river, doing more mischief if one tries to dam it than if letting it make its course. On the contrary, Elie and Hullin leaped in between defenders and attackers; they prayed and supplicated, vociferating the holy lie that the soldiers were promised their lives.

Billet and Pitou's arrival was reinforcement to them.

Billet whom they were revenging, was alive; not even hurt; the plank had swerved underfoot and he was clear with a mud bath, that was all.

The Swiss were most detested: but they were not to be found. They had time to put on overalls and smockfrocks of dull linen, and they passed off as servants.

With sledges the invaders broke the captive images on the clock face. They raced up to the turret tops to kick the cannon which had belched death on them. They laid hands on the stones and endeavored to dislodge them.

When the first of the conquerors were seen on the battlements, all without, below, a hundred thousand or so, cast up an immense clamor.

It spread over Paris, and flew over France like a swiftwinged eagle:

"The Bastile is taken!"

At this news, hearts melted, eyes were moist with tears of gladness, and hands clasped; no longer were there opposition parties or inimical castes, for all Parisians understood that they were brothers and all men that they were free.

A million of men mutually embraced.

Billet and Pitou wanted no part in the rejoicing, they sought the liberation of the prisoners.

Traversing Government yard, they passed near a man in grey clothes, calmly leaning on a gold-headed cane: it was the governor, quietly waiting for his friends to save him or his foes to lay him low.

Billet recognized him at sight, and uttered an outcry. He walked straight up to him. Launay knew him again, also; but folded his arms and looked at Billet as much as to say:

"Is it you who will deal me the first stab?"

"If I speak to him," thought the farmer, "they will know him, and then he will be killed."

Yet how would he find Dr. Gilbert in this chaos? how wrest from the Bastile the grim secret enshrouded in its womb? Launay understood all this heroic hesitation and scruple.

"What do you want?" asked he, in an undertone.

"Nothing," rejoined Billet, pointing out that the doorways are doorless all the way to the street, "nothing; but I should like to find Dr. Gilbert."

"No. Three, Bertaudiere Tower," replied the count in a gentle voice, almost softened, but he would not flee.

At this juncture a voice behind Billet pronounced these words:

"Halloa, here is the governor!"

The voice was as emotionless as though spoken by no being of this world but every syllable was a dagger-blade cruelly dug into Launay's bosom. The voice was Gonchon's.

At the denunciation, as if from an alarm bell ringing, all the men athirst for vengeance, started and turned their flaring eyes on Launay at whom they flung themselves.

"He is lost, unless we can save him," said Billet to Elie and Hullin.

"Help us," they answered.

"I must stay here, as I have a task to do."

In a flash, Launay was taken up by numerous hands and carried out.

Elie and his comrade hurried after, calling: "Stop, he was promised his life for surrendering."

This was not true, but the sublime falsehood rushed from both of the noble hearts. In a second the governor, followed by the pair, disappeared in the corridor opening on the square, amid shouts:

"Take him to the City Hall!"

As a living prey Launay was in the eyes of most equal to the dead prey, the prison, overrun.

Strange was the sight of this sad and silent edifice, for four centuries threaded solely by the warden and his turnkeys, become the strolling ground of any tatterdemalion: the crowd roamed over the garden, up and down the stairs, buzzing like a swarm of bees, and filling the granite hive with bustle and uproar.

Billet for an instant watched Launay, carried rather than dragged, seeming to hover over the multitude. But he was gone in a space. Billet sighed and looking round him and seeing Pitou, said as he darted towards a tower:

"The Third Bertaudiere."

A trembling jailer was in the way.

"Here you are, captain," he answered: "but I have not the keys, they were taken from me."

"Brother, lend me your ax," said Billet of a neighbor.

"I give it you, for it is not wanted now we have taken the old den."

Grasping the weapon, Billet dashed into a stairway, conducted by the warder. The latter stopped before a door.

"This is No. Three, Bertaudiere Tower," said he.

"Is the prisoner here, Dr. Gilbert?"

"Don't know the names."

"Only put here a few days ago?"

"Don't know."

"Well, I shall," rejoined the farmer, attacking the door with the ax.

It was of oak, but the splinters flew freely under the chops of the vigorous yeoman. In a short time one could peep into the room. Billet looked in at the cleft. In the beam of light from a grated window in the yard a man was visible in the cell, standing a little back, holding one of his bedslates, he was in the attitude of defense, ready to knock down any one intruding.

Spite of his long beard, pale face and his hair being close cropped, Billet recognized Gilbert.

"Doctor, doctor, is it you? It is Billet who calls, your friend."

"Are you here, Billet, here?"

"Yes, yes, that's Billet, right here!" shouted the crowd; "we are here, in the Bastile, for we have taken it. You are free!"

"The Bastile is taken and I am free?" repeated the doctor.

Running both hands through the bars of the door he shook it so forcibly that the hinges and lock-bolt seemed likely to shoot out of the pockets. One of the split panels, shattered by Billet, fell clean out and was left in the prisoner's hands.

"Wait, wait," said the rescuer, seeing that such another exertion would exhaust the man's powers, too much excited; "wait."

He redoubled his blows. Through the gap the prisoner could be seen, fallen on his stool, pale as a sceptre and incapable of moving the broken beam again with which he had tried like a Samson to shake the Bastile down.

"Billet," he kept on saying.

"And me with him, doctor, poor Pitou, whom you must remember from having placed me for board and lodging at Aunt Angelique's – I came along to get you out."

"But I cannot get through that crack," objected the prisoner.

"We will widen it," cried the bystanders.

In a common effort each brought his effort to bear: while one inserted a crowbar between the wall and the door-jamb, another got a purchase on the lock with the lever, and others put their shoulders to the woodwork; the oak gave a last crack, and the stones scaled off, so that by the removed door and the crumbling stone, the torrent plunged within the prison.

Gilbert was soon in the arms of his friends.

Gilbert, who was a little peasant boy on the Taverney estate, where he conceived an undying and life-long passion for his master's daughter Andrea, was now a man of thirty-five. Philip of Taverney, who tried to kill him in a cave in the Azores Islands because he had accomplished the love-design of his existence in giving Andrea the title of mother to little Sebastian Gilbert, would not recognize him he left bathed in blood. Pale without sickliness, with black hair and steady though animated eyes, one could tell that he, like his teacher Balsamo-Cagliostro, was endowed with the power of magnetism. As he could now mesmerize Andrea, he could mentally master most men.

When his gaze was idle, it did not wander in vacancy but retired into his meditations and became the gloomier and deeper.

His nose was straight, coming down from the brow in a direct line: it surmounted a disdainful lip, showing the dazzling enamel of his teeth.

Commonly he was clad with Quaker-like simplicity; but it approached elegance from its extreme primness. His stature, above the middle height, was well formed; and we have seen how strong he could be when he roused all his nervous force.

Although a week in jail, he had taken the usual care of himself. Though his beard had grown long, it was combed out and set off his clear skin, indicating by its length, not his neglect but the refusal of a razor or a shave.

After thanking Billet and Pitou, he turned to the crowd in the cell. As if he recovered all his command in a twinkling, he said:

"Then the long looked-for day has come! I thank you, all my friends, and I thank the Eternal Spirit which watches over the liberty of peoples."

He held out his hands, but they shrank from touching them, so lofty was his glance, and his voice so dignified as of a superior man.

Leaving the dungeon, he walked out before them all, leaning on the farmer and the country boy.

After Gilbert's first impulse of gratitude and friendship, a second had established the first distance between him and the subordinates.

At the door, Gilbert stopped, dazzled by the sunshine.

He stopped, folded his arms, and said as he gazed upwards:

"Hail, beautiful Liberty! I saw you spring into life in the New World, and we are old friends and battlefield comrades. Hail!"

The smile he wore showed that the cheers of a free people were not a novelty to him.

"Billet," he said, after collecting his thoughts, "Have the people overcome despotism?"

"They have."

"And you came to liberate me? how did you know of my arrest?"

"Your son told me this morning."

"Poor Emile-Sebastian! have you seen him? is he at peace in the school?"

"I left him being carried to the sick ward as he had a fit. He was wild because we would not let him have a share in the fighting to get you out."

The physician smiled, for the boy was his hope, and had borne himself as he hoped.

"I said that as you were in the Bastile we would have to take the Bastile," went on the farmer, "and now we have taken it. But that is not all: the casket is stolen which you entrusted to me."

"Stolen by whom?"

"By men wearing black, who broke into the house under guise of seizing the pamphlet which you sent me; locking me up in a room, they searched the whole house and found the casket."

"Yesterday? then there is a coincidence between my arrest and this purloining. The same person caused this arrest and abstraction. I must know whom. Where are the books of the jail?" demanded the doctor, turning round to the jailer who kept close.

"In Government yard," replied he. "Oh, master, let me go with you or say a good word to these gentlemen who will otherwise knock me about."

"Just so," replied Gilbert; "Friends, I want you not to do any harm to this poor fellow who only did his duty in opening doors and locking them; he was always gentle with the prisoners."

"Good," cried the voices all round, as they surrounded him in respect mingled with curiosity; "he need not be scared, but can come along."

"Thank you, sir," said the jailer; "but we had better make haste, for they are burning the papers."

"Then there is not an instant to be lost," cried the physician. "To the Archives."

He darted off towards the office, drawing the mob with him, at the head of which still marched Billet and Pitou.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE TRIANGLE OF LIBERTY

At the door of the Register Hall they had made a bonfire of the documents.

One of the first feelings of the masses after a victory is for destruction, unfortunately. The memorials of the prison were turned out of the large room, where the records of all the prisoners since a hundred years back were kept higgledy piggledy. The mob shut up the papers with anger, seeming to think that they gave the prisoners freedom by annulling the warrants.

Gilbert, assisted by Pitou, looked at the registers, but the present year's was missing. Though a calm and cool man, the doctor stamped his foot with impatience while he turned blanched.

At this Pitou spied a boy, such a little hero as always pops up in the reign of King Mob, who was carrying on his head the volume to throw it into the fire. With his long legs he soon overtook him. It was the register for 1789. The deal did not take long, for Ange announced himself as one who had captured the place and explained that a prisoner wanted the book. The boy gave it up with the comforting remark that there were lots more where it came from.

Pitou opened the book and on the last page he saw the entry:

"This day, ninth of July, 1789, enters Dr. Gilbert, a most dangerous writer of public matters and philosophy: keep in solitary confinement."

He carried the register to the physician. It was of course what he sought. Looking whence the order emanated, he exclaimed:

"The warrant to arrest me signed by my friend Necker? then there must be some trick played on him."

"Necker your friend?" ejaculated the crowd, for the name had great influence over them.

"Yes, my friend, and I upheld him. I am convinced that he is ignorant of my being in prison. But I will go and find him, and – "

"He is not at Versailles," said Billet, "but at Brussels; he is exiled."

"His daughter lives in the country out by St. Ouen," suggested one of the throng, whom Gilbert thanked without seeing who it was.

"Friends," he said, "in the name of history, who will find the condemnation of tyranny in these papers, cease such devastation, I entreat you. Demolish the Bastile, stone by stone, till not a trace remains, but respect documents and books, for the light of the future is in them."

The multitude had scarce heard the rebuke than its high intelligence gauged he was correct.

"The doctor is right," cried a hundred voices; "no more spoiling. Let us take these papers to the City Hall."

A fireman who had brought a small hand-engine into the fort, with half a dozen comrades, directed the horse-butt at the fire which was about to repeat a conflagration of books like that of Alexandria, and they put it out.

"At whose request were you arrested?" inquired the farmer.

"Just what I was looking for but the name is blank. I shall learn," he added after brief meditation.

Tearing out the leaf concerning himself, he folded it up and pocketed it.

"Let us be off, friends," said he, "we have no farther business here."

"It is easier to say, let us go, than manage it," remarked the countryman.

Indeed, the concourse, entering the Castle by all openings, choked up the doorways. They had liberated eight prisoners, including Gilbert. Four excited no interest; they had been locked up on a charge of forging a bank draft, without any evidence, which leads to the premise that it was a false charge; they had been in jail only two years. The next was Count Solange, a man of thirty, who was in rapture: he hugged his liberators, exalted their victory and related his captivity.

Arrested in 1782, and shut up in Vincennes Castle on a blank warrant obtained by his father, he had been transferred to the Bastile, where he remained five years without having seen a magistrate or being examined once: his father had died two years back, and nobody asked after him. Had not the Bastile been captured, he would probably have died there unasked for.

White was another wretch; he was sixty years old and jabbered incoherent words with a foreign accent. To the many questions he replied that he was ignorant how long he had been detained and for what cause. He remembered he was a kinsman of Chief of Police Sartines. A turnkey recalled having seen Lord Sartines enter White's cell and force him to sign a power of attorney. But the prisoner had utterly forgotten the incident.

Tavernier was the oldest of all. He had been ten years imprisoned in another states prison before coming to the Bastile for thirty years; he was in his ninetieth year, white in beard and hair; his eyes were so used to the gloom that he could not bear the light. When they broke open his dungeon, he did not understand what they wanted to do. When they spoke of liberty, he shook his head. When finally they said the Bastile was taken by the people, he cried:

"What will Louis XV. say?"

White was crazed, but Tavernier was an idiot.

The delight of the rest was terrible to view, so close was it to alarm; it called for vengeance.

Two or three were almost ready to expire, amid the hubbub of thousands of voices, having never heard two speaking at the same time while in the prison. They had become accustomed to the slow and odd sounds of wood cracking with dampness, or the death-watch cricket, or the spider weaving its web, or the frightened rat gnawing his Majesty's prisonwalls.

As Gilbert appeared, the resolution was unanimously adopted that the rescued ones should be carried in triumph through the town.

Gilbert wished to elude this ovation but he could not do so, as he was recognized as well as Billet and his comrade.

"To the City Hall!" shouted everybody, and Gilbert was taken up on the shoulders of twenty fellows. In vain did Gilbert resist, and Billet and Pitou shower punches and cuffs on their brothers-in-arms; joy and enthusiasm had made the people's hide tough. Fisticuffs, digs with the elbow or thrusts with musket butts, all seemed soft as strokings and only enhanced their glee.

A spear was stuck in a table and Gilbert placed on it to be carried. Thus he was above the level of the sea of heads, undulating from the Bastile to St. John's Arcade, a stormy sea which transported the delivered captives amid billows crested with bloody swords, bayonets and pikes.

At the same time another sea roiled terribly and irresistibly, a group closely serried around the prisoner Launay.

Around him the shouts were as loud and hearty as for the liberated prisoners, but they were of death not of triumph.

Gilbert, from his elevated stand, did not lose an incident of the horrible occurrence. Alone, among all his fellow captives, he enjoyed the fulness of his faculties, because five days' imprisonment was but a black speck in his career. His eye had not had time to be dimmed by the Bastile's darkness.

Usually fighting makes men hardhearted only during the action. Men coming out of the fire with their own lives intact, feel kindly towards their foes.

But in great popular uprisings, such as France had seen many from the Jacquerie or Peasants' Outbreak in 1358, those whom fear kept in the rear during the conflict, but were irritated by the turbulence, are ferocious cowards who seek after the victory to redden their hands in the blood of those they dared not face in the combat. They take their share in the reprisal.

Since he was dragged out of his castle the march of the governor was a dolorous one.