Billot calls for a plank. Three are brought and are pushed across the ditch, but, being too short, did not reach the opposite side. A fourth is brought, which lodges on either side of the ditch.
Billot had them lashed together as he best could, and then ventured unhesitatingly upon the trembling bridge.
The whole crowd remained breathlessly silent; all eyes were fixed upon the man who appears suspended above the ditch, whose stagnant waters resemble those of the river Cocytus.
Pitou tremblingly seated himself on the edge of the slope, and hid his head between his knees.
His heart failed him, and he wept.
When Billot had got about two thirds of the way over the plank, it twisted beneath his feet. Billot extends his arms, falls, and disappears in the ditch.
Pitou utters a cry of horror and throws himself into the ditch, like a Newfoundland dog anxious to save his master.
A man then approached the plank from which Billot had just before been precipitated.
Without hesitation he walked across the temporary bridge. This man is Stanislaus Maillard, the usher of the Châtelet.
When he had reached the spot below which Pitou and Billot were struggling in the muddy ditch, he for a moment cast a glance upon them, and seeing that there was no doubt they would regain the shore in safety, he continued to walk on.
Half a minute afterwards he had reached the opposite side of the ditch, and had taken the letter which was held out to him on the point of a sword.
Then, with the same tranquillity, the same firmness of step, he recrossed the ditch.
But at the moment when the crowd were pressing round him to hear the letter read, a storm of musketballs rained down upon them from the battlements, and a frightful detonation was heard.
One only cry, but one of those cries which announce the vengeance of a whole people, issues from every mouth.
“Trust, then, in tyrants!” exclaimed Gonchon.
And then, without thinking any more of the capitulation, without thinking any more of the powder—magazine, without thinking of themselves or of the prisoners, without desiring, without demanding anything but vengeance, the people rushed into the courtyard, no longer by hundreds of men, but by thousands.
That which prevents the crowd from entering is no longer the musketry, but the gates, which are too narrow to admit them.
On hearing the detonation we have spoken of, the two soldiers who were still watching Monsieur de Launay threw themselves upon him; a third seized the match and extinguished it under his foot.
De Launay drew the sword which was concealed in his cane, and would have turned it against his own breast, but the soldiers plucked it from him and snapped it in two.
He then felt that all he could do was to abide the result; he therefore tranquilly awaited it.
The people rush forward; the garrison open their arms to them, and the Bastille is taken by assault,—by main force, without a capitulation.
The reason for this was that for more than a hundred years the royal fortress had not merely imprisoned inert matter within its walls, it had imprisoned thought also. Thought had thrown down the walls of the Bastille, and the people entered by the breach.
As to the discharge of musketry, which had taken place amid the general silence, during the suspension of hostilities,—as to this unforeseen aggression, as impolitic as it was murderous, it was never known who had ordered it, who had excited it, how it was accomplished.
There are moments when the destiny of a whole nation is being weighed in the scales of Fate. One of them weighs down the other. Every one already thinks he has attained the proposed end. Suddenly some invisible hand lets fall into the other scale the blade of a poniard or a pistol ball.
Then all changes, and one only cry is heard: “Woe to the vanquished!”
Chapter XVIII
Doctor Gilbert
WHILE the people were thus rushing into the fortress, howling at once with joy and rage, two men were struggling in the muddy waters of the ditch.
These men were Pitou and Billot.