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.
Elie, protected by his uniform and the part he had taken in the
assault, marched at the head, having taken Launay's life under his
special care: he was admired for the manner in which he had borne
himself. On his swordpoint he carried the letter which Launay had
passed out of the prison loophole to be taken by Maillard. After him
came the Tax-Commissioners Guards, carrying the keys of the royal
fortress; then, Maillard, bearing the Bastile flag; then, a young man
who bore on a pike the Bastile's rules and regulations, an odious
rescript 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 and
brandished pikeheads.
Beside this column, almost parallel, rolling up St. Antoine
Street, leading from the main avenue to the River Seine, was to be
distinguished another, no less awful and menacing, dragging Major
Losme, whom we saw struggle against his superior for a space but
succumb under the determination to resist to the last.
He was a kind, good and brave man who had alleviated many miseries
within the jail, but the general public did not know this. On account
of his showy uniform many took him to be the governor. The latter,
clothed in grey, having torn off the embroidery and the St. Louis
scarf, was shielded by some doubt from those who did not recognize him.
This was the spectacle which Gilbert beheld with his gloomy, profound
and observant glance, amid the dangers foreseen by his powerful
organization.
On leaving the Bastile, Hullin had rallied his own friends the surest
and most devoted, the most valiant soldiers of the day; these four or
five tried to second his generous design of shielding the governor.
Impartial history had preserved the names of three: Arne, Chollat and
Lepine.
These four, with Hullin and Maillard in advance, attempted to defend
the life for which a hundred thousand were clamoring.
A few French Grenadiers, whose uniform had become popular within three
days, clustered round them. They were venerated by the mob.
As long as his generous defenders could do it they beat off the blows
aimed at Count Launay; but he could not evade the hooting, the insults
and the curses.
At Jouy Street corner, all the grenadiers had been brushed aside. Not
the crowd's excitement, but the calculation of murderers may have had
something to do with this; Gilbert had seen them plucked away as beads
are 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 his
impotence he sent Billet and Pitou to the defense of the governor, and
obeying his voice they made efforts to reach the threatened one. His
protectors stood in strong need of reinforcement. Chollat, who had
eaten nothing since the evening before, fell with exhaustion, though
he tried to struggle on: had he not been assisted, he would have been
trodden under foot. His falling out of line made a breach in the living
wall.
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 around
Launay and receive the blow on his own forehead. Stunned by the shock
and blinded by the blood, he staggered back and when he recovered, he
was twenty paces apart from the prisoner.
This was the moment when Billet fought his way up, towing Pitou after
him, like a steamship-of-war bringing up a sailing man-of-war into
action.
He noticed that what marked Launay out was his being without a hat: he
snatched 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," said
Hullin.
"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 was
packed with men with their arms bared to the pit, waving swords and
spears. The rumor had run along that they were bringing the Bastile
Governor and his major, and they were waiting for them like a pack of
wolfhounds held back from breaking up the quarry.
As soon as they saw the party they rushed at it. Hullin saw that this
was going to be the supreme peril and final struggle. If he could only
get the governor up the steps and inside the building, he would save
him.
"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 and
they were isolated. The crowd saw the advantage it had won, and made a
furious 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 to
him. The same whirlwind made Hullin reel on the steps where he fell. He
rose 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, but
he cried in a hoarse voice:
"Do not at least keep me lingering, tigers that you are. Slay me
outright."
Never had he issued an order executed more promptly than this prayer:
in one instant, armed hands flourished round his stooped head. Fists
and plunging blades were seen: and then a head severed from the trunk
rose disgustingly on the tip of a pike; it had preserved its cold and
scornful smile.
This was the first head lopped off by the Revolution.
Gilbert had foreseen the atrocity: he had tried again to dart to the
rescue 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 where
Flesselles stood, surrounded and supported by the electors--as if to
bid 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 to
him by the Provost of the Traders, the one he had shown to Losme. It
will 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 window
where the writer stood. Without divining the cause, he understood the
threat and threw himself back. But he had been seen and was known to be
within; 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 run
up three steps before he felt himself pulled back by the coatskirts. He
turned 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 of
commotion.
"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 their
hatred the people confounded the persecutor of the prisoners with the
merciful warden.
"Let us begone," said the physician, "for I begin to be ashamed that
such murderers let me out."
"Do not say that, doctor," reproved Billet, "those who stormed the
Bastile are not the cutthroats yonder."
As they descended the steps which he had mounted to try to help
Flesselles, the throng which had flowed through the doorway, was hurled
forth. 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," gasped
this wretch.
But the human inundation rolled towards the river as though it intended
to drown him.
"Another they mean to murder," shouted Gilbert; "let us try to save him
at any rate."
But he had hardly got the words out of his mouth before a pistol-shot
resounded; Flesselles disappeared in the smoke.
Gilbert covered his eyes, cursing the multitude, great but unable to
remain pure, and sullying the victory by a triple murder.
When he took his hands from his eyes, he beheld three heads on pike
points: Flesselles', Launay's and Losme's. One rose on the City Hall
steps, another in the mouth of Tixeranderie Street and the last in
Pelletier Street, so that the trio formed a triangle. He remembered the
sign 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 with
him.