Taking the Bastile; Or, Pitou the Peasant

by Alexandre Dumas

  CHAPTER XIV.

  THE TRIANGLE OF LIBERTY.

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

  One of the first feelings of the masses after a victory is fordestruction, unfortunately. The memorials of the prison were turnedout of the large room, where the records of all the prisoners sincea hundred years back were kept higgledy piggledy. The mob shut upthe papers with anger, seeming to think that they gave the prisonersfreedom by annulling the warrants.

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

  At this Pitou spied a boy, such a little hero as always pops up in thereign of King Mob, who was carrying on his head the volume to throwit into the fire. With his long legs he soon overtook him. It was theregister for 1789. The deal did not take long, for Ange announcedhimself as one who had captured the place and explained that a prisonerwanted the book. The boy gave it up with the comforting remark thatthere 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 dangerouswriter of public matters and philosophy: keep in solitary confinement."

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

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

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

  "Yes, my friend, and I upheld him. I am convinced that he is ignorantof 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 ofthe throng, whom Gilbert thanked without seeing who it was.

  "Friends," he said, "in the name of history, who will find thecondemnation of tyranny in these papers, cease such devastation, Ientreat you. Demolish the Bastile, stone by stone, till not a traceremains, but respect documents and books, for the light of the futureis in them."

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

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

  A fireman who had brought a small hand-engine into the fort, with halfa dozen comrades, directed the horse-butt at the fire which was aboutto repeat a conflagration of books like that of Alexandria, and theyput 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," headded after brief meditation.

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

  "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 thecountryman.

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

  Arrested in 1782, and shut up in Vincennes Castle on a blank warrantobtained by his father, he had been transferred to the Bastile, wherehe remained five years without having seen a magistrate or beingexamined once: his father had died two years back, and nobody askedafter him. Had not the Bastile been captured, he would probably havedied there unasked for.

  White was another wretch; he was sixty years old and jabberedincoherent words with a foreign accent. To the many questions hereplied that he was ignorant how long he had been detained and for whatcause. He remembered he was a kinsman of Chief of Police Sartines. Aturnkey recalled having seen Lord Sartines enter White's cell and forcehim to sign a power of attorney. But the prisoner had utterly forgottenthe incident.

  Tavernier was the oldest of all. He had been ten years imprisoned inanother states prison before coming to the Bastile for thirty years;he was in his ninetieth year, white in beard and hair; his eyes wereso used to the gloom that he could not bear the light. When they brokeopen his dungeon, he did not understand what they wanted to do. Whenthey spoke of liberty, he shook his head. When finally they said theBastile 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 thousandsof voices, having never heard two speaking at the same time while inthe prison. They had become accustomed to the slow and odd soundsof wood cracking with dampness, or the death-watch cricket, or thespider weaving its web, or the frightened rat gnawing his Majesty'sprisonwalls.

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

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

  "To the City Hall!" shouted everybody, and Gilbert was taken up on theshoulders of twenty fellows. In vain did Gilbert resist, and Billetand Pitou shower punches and cuffs on their brothers-in-arms; joy andenthusiasm had made the people's hide tough. Fisticuffs, digs with theelbow or thrusts with musket butts, all seemed soft as strokings andonly 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 theBastile to St. John's Arcade, a stormy sea which transported thedelivered captives amid billows crested with bloody swords, bayonetsand pikes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Elie, protected by his uniform and the part he had taken in theassault, marched at the head, having taken Launay's life under hisspecial care: he was admired for the manner in which he had bornehimself. On his swordpoint he carried the letter which Launay hadpassed out of the prison loophole to be taken by Maillard. After himcame the Tax-Commissioners Guards, carrying the keys of the royalfortress; then, Maillard, bearing the Bastile flag; then, a young manwho bore on a pike the Bastile's rules and regulations, an odiousrescript by virtue of which many a tear had been made to flow.

  Lastly came the governor, protected by Hullin and three or four others,but almost covered in with shaking fists, flourished blades andbrandished pikeheads.

  Beside this column, almost parallel, rolling up St. AntoineStreet, leading from the main avenue to the River Seine, was to bedistinguished another, no
less awful and menacing, dragging MajorLosme, whom we saw struggle against his superior for a space butsuccumb under the determination to resist to the last.

  He was a kind, good and brave man who had alleviated many miserieswithin the jail, but the general public did not know this. On accountof his showy uniform many took him to be the governor. The latter,clothed in grey, having torn off the embroidery and the St. Louisscarf, was shielded by some doubt from those who did not recognize him.

  This was the spectacle which Gilbert beheld with his gloomy, profoundand observant glance, amid the dangers foreseen by his powerfulorganization.

  On leaving the Bastile, Hullin had rallied his own friends the surestand most devoted, the most valiant soldiers of the day; these four orfive tried to second his generous design of shielding the governor.Impartial history had preserved the names of three: Arne, Chollat andLepine.

  These four, with Hullin and Maillard in advance, attempted to defendthe life for which a hundred thousand were clamoring.

  A few French Grenadiers, whose uniform had become popular within threedays, clustered round them. They were venerated by the mob.

  As long as his generous defenders could do it they beat off the blowsaimed at Count Launay; but he could not evade the hooting, the insultsand the curses.

  At Jouy Street corner, all the grenadiers had been brushed aside. Notthe crowd's excitement, but the calculation of murderers may have hadsomething to do with this; Gilbert had seen them plucked away as beadsare flipped off a string.

  He foresaw by this that the victory would be tarnished by bloodshed;he tried to get off the table but iron hands held him to it. In hisimpotence he sent Billet and Pitou to the defense of the governor, andobeying his voice they made efforts to reach the threatened one. Hisprotectors stood in strong need of reinforcement. Chollat, who hadeaten nothing since the evening before, fell with exhaustion, thoughhe tried to struggle on: had he not been assisted, he would have beentrodden under foot. His falling out of line made a breach in the livingwall.

  A man darted in by this crevasse in the dyke and clubbing his musket,delivered a crushing blow at the governor's bared head.

  Lepine saw the mace descending and had time to throw his arms aroundLaunay and receive the blow on his own forehead. Stunned by the shockand blinded by the blood, he staggered back and when he recovered, hewas twenty paces apart from the prisoner.

  This was the moment when Billet fought his way up, towing Pitou afterhim, like a steamship-of-war bringing up a sailing man-of-war intoaction.

  He noticed that what marked Launay out was his being without a hat: hesnatched off his own and put it on the count's head.

  The latter turned and recognized him.

  "I thank you," he said, "but whatever you do you cannot save me."

  "If I can get you inside the City Hall, I will answer for all," saidHullin.

  "Yes, but can you do it?" said the victim.

  "God helping us, we'll try it."

  They might hope this as they reached the City Hall Square, It waspacked with men with their arms bared to the pit, waving swords andspears. The rumor had run along that they were bringing the BastileGovernor and his major, and they were waiting for them like a pack ofwolfhounds held back from breaking up the quarry.

  As soon as they saw the party they rushed at it. Hullin saw that thiswas going to be the supreme peril and final struggle. If he could onlyget the governor up the steps and inside the building, he would savehim.

  "Help, Elie, and Millard, all men who hold our honor dear!" he shouted.

  Elie and Maillard forged onward but the mob closed in behind them andthey were isolated. The crowd saw the advantage it had won, and made afurious effort. Like a gigantic boa, it wound its coils round the knot:Billet was taken off his feet and swept away with Pitou, who stuck tohim. The same whirlwind made Hullin reel on the steps where he fell. Herose but was forced down anew, and Launay fell with him this time.

  He stayed down; up to the last he did not murmur or beg for mercy, buthe cried in a hoarse voice:

  "Do not at least keep me lingering, tigers that you are. Slay meoutright."

  Never had he issued an order executed more promptly than this prayer:in one instant, armed hands flourished round his stooped head. Fistsand plunging blades were seen: and then a head severed from the trunkrose disgustingly on the tip of a pike; it had preserved its cold andscornful smile.

  This was the first head lopped off by the Revolution.

  Gilbert had foreseen the atrocity: he had tried again to dart to therescue but a hundred hands held him down. He turned his head and sighed.

  This head was lifted with its eyes glaring, up to the window whereFlesselles stood, surrounded and supported by the electors--as if tobid him a last farewell. It would be hard to say which was the paler,his face or the corpses.

  All at once a deafening uproar burst from where the headless body lay.In searching it, in the vest pocket, was found the note addressed tohim by the Provost of the Traders, the one he had shown to Losme. Itwill be remembered as in these terms:

  "Hold out firmly; I will amuse the Parisians with cockades and promises. Before day is done, Bezenval will send you reinforcements."

  "FLESSELLES."

  A horrible yell of blasphemy rose from the pavement to the windowwhere the writer stood. Without divining the cause, he understood thethreat and threw himself back. But he had been seen and was known to bewithin; the rush for him was so universal that even the bearers of Dr.Gilbert left him to join the hunters.

  Gilbert sought to enter with them to protect Flesselles. He had not runup three steps before he felt himself pulled back by the coatskirts. Heturned to shake off the hand but saw they were of Billet and Pitou.

  From the higher standpoint he overlooked the square.

  "What is going on over there?" he inquired, pointing towards a spot ofcommotion.

  "Come, doctor, come," said the two countrymen together.

  "The butchers," said the doctor.

  At that instant Major Losme fell, struck down by a hatchet; in theirhatred the people confounded the persecutor of the prisoners with themerciful warden.

  "Let us begone," said the physician, "for I begin to be ashamed thatsuch murderers let me out."

  "Do not say that, doctor," reproved Billet, "those who stormed theBastile are not the cutthroats yonder."

  As they descended the steps which he had mounted to try to helpFlesselles, the throng which had flowed through the doorway, was hurledforth. In the midst of the battling gathering one man was struggling.

  "Take him to the Palais Royal," vociferated the thousands.

  "Yes, my friends, yes, my good friends, to the Palais Royal," gaspedthis wretch.

  But the human inundation rolled towards the river as though it intendedto drown him.

  "Another they mean to murder," shouted Gilbert; "let us try to save himat any rate."

  But he had hardly got the words out of his mouth before a pistol-shotresounded; Flesselles disappeared in the smoke.

  Gilbert covered his eyes, cursing the multitude, great but unable toremain pure, and sullying the victory by a triple murder.

  When he took his hands from his eyes, he beheld three heads on pikepoints: Flesselles', Launay's and Losme's. One rose on the City Hallsteps, another in the mouth of Tixeranderie Street and the last inPelletier Street, so that the trio formed a triangle. He remembered thesign in the Order of the Invisibles.

  "Oh, Balsamo," he muttered, "is this the emblem of Liberty?"

  And sighing, he fled up Vannerie Street, dragging Billet and Pitou withhim.