1All France gave one cry of joy when the news arrived that the Bastille was taken.

2All the world knew the Bastille—that prison which has given its name to others.

3From one end of France to the other, all shook hands, congratulating each other on the event.

4And, strange to say, the Bastille was taken by those who had never entered it—in fact, it was a place of imprisonment for nobles only.

5One would have thought, from the fact of their attacking it, that it was a place which they themselves had to dread.

6Ah! it was a horrible den. You were not dead there; but what was worse, you were forgotten.

7Your father, wife, or brother dared not speak of you, for fear they should be sent there likewise.

8Once there, you no longer had a name, but a number. You died, and they buried you under a false name.

9No; the King did not deprive you of your head; he was too good for that; he only forgot you.

10Instead of dying in a moment, you suffered unutterable tortures for perhaps thirty years.

11In the reign of Louis XVI all the rigors of prisons were softened, with the exception of the Bastille, the discipline of which was harsher than ever. In former reigns they had barred the windows; but now they also stopped the promenades in the gardens.

12It is true that Louis XVI did not actually do this himself but he suffered it to be done, which is all the same.

13Louis XVI did not himself shut up the garden. No; it was De Launay, who was as unpopular as he well could be.

14At the Bastille all bought the places that they occupied, from the Governor down to the gaolers. Every situation was worth having, except that of the prisoners.

15The Governor had sixty thousand livres salary. He made a hundred and twenty thousand by his plunders.

16We have already spoken of the garden of the Bastille open to the prisoners. It was but a little plot of ground, planted, as it were, upon a bastion.

17A gardener offered a hundred francs a year for it; and this scoundrel, who was wringing from the pitiful allowances of the prisoners the sum of a hundred and twenty thousand francs per annum, actually, for the sake of this paltry sum, deprived the poor wretches under his rule of the breath of air that made life supportable, of the sole gleam of life that intervened ’twixt them and the tomb.

18He well knew that he would never survive the capture of the Bastille—this man of iron, who had a Bastille in place of a heart.

19The Governor’s hundred and thirty-five barrels of powder were placed in a vault, situated in the centre of the fortress. The Bastille blown into the air would astound Paris in its ascent, and utterly destroy it in its stupendous fall. This he knew. When the prison was entered by the people, he clapped a torch to the touch-string. An Invalide seized his arms; two sous-officers crossed bayonets across his breast. He snatched a knife from his belt; they took it out of his hands.

20Then he demanded to be allowed to march out with the honors of war.

21This demand met with a positive refusal.

22At last, he would be satisfied were he allowed to depart with life alone.

23Two of the conquerors of the Bastille—Hullin and Elie—promised this in the name of all.

24He begged them to conduct him to the Hotel de Ville, where he had some shadow of authority.

25In the meantime, whilst the people were dashing themselves against the granite and the oak, and demolishing the two stone slaves that supported the clock, and breaking open the dungeons, with the intention of liberating the prisoners confined therein, Hullin and Elie took away De Launay, hiding him as much as possible by placing themselves in front of him.

26But when he arrived at the gates, the Governor was recognised. He had no hat; Hullin, fearless of consequences, gave him his own.

27Turning into the Rue St. Antoine, one who had taken part in the combat, recognised the prisoner.

28Farther on, came some who had not yet been engaged in the siege, and who, as a matter of course, were more bloodthirsty now that the danger was over. They wished to massacre the prisoners. De Launay remained alive through the protection of Hullin and Elie.

29Elie, less powerful than Hullin, was carried away by the crowd, amongst whom he was lost sight of.

30At the Arcade St. Jean, Hullin himself lost sight of De Launay, but by a superhuman effort he separated the crowd, and regained him. He dragged him to some adjacent steps, but in the effort fell. Twice did he again raise himself, only to fall again. At the third time, De Launay had disappeared. He looked for him on all sides, and at last recognised his head fixed on the extremity of a pike, and borne above the crowd.

31That head Hullin would have saved, had it been possible, at the risk of his own.

32During this time, the mob had released the prisoners in the Bastille.

33There were nine.

34Two or three, on seeing the door open, cried out that the people had come to slay them, and prepared to defend themselves with chairs, but the intruders cried out in a loud voice, “Free! Free!”

35One could not understand it, and fell suffocating, pressing his heart with his two hands.

36Another stood speechless, with his eyes fixed on space; a venerable man was he, with a white beard descending to his breast. They took him for a spectre.

37The conquerors told him that he was free.

38He understood them not.

39“How is Louis the Fifteenth?” asked he.

40“He has been dead fifteen years.”

41“How long had he been in the Bastille?” they asked him.

42“I know nothing about it,” he replied.

43“Who are you?”

44“I am the Elder-born of Space.”

45He was mad.

46Under the staircase, in a sort of tomb, they found two skeletons. Who were they? No one knew. The workmen took them away, and buried them in the Cemetery of St. Paul.

47All the world wished to see the Bastille. They showed Latude’s ladder, that immense work of patience and of genius.

48For a month the old place was not emptied.

49They heard sighs. A report ran about that there were hidden dungeons known only to the Government, in which the unhappy prisoners were suffered to die of hunger.

50The architect of the city, Citizen Palloy, was ordered to pull down the old fortress. Of the best stones, he made eighty-six models of the Bastille, which he sent to eighty-six different departments.

51With the others, he built the Pont de la Revolution, on which the head of Louis XVI was exposed after execution.