It was on the morning of the fourteenth of July that Billet opened oratorical fire against the monument which had for five centuries weighed like an incubus on the breast of France—a rock of Sisyphus. Less confident than the Titan in her power, France had never thought to throw it off.
The Bastile was the seal of feudalism on the brow of Paris.
The King was accounted too good to order people to be beheaded; but he sent people into the Bastile. Once there a man was forgotten, isolated, sequestered, buried alive, annihilated. He stayed there till the monarch remembered him, and kings have so many new matters to think of that they often forget the old ones.
There were twenty other Bastiles in France, the name being general for prison, so that, to this day, the tramp on the dusty road speaks of the "Steel," without perhaps knowing that the title of ignominy referred to the great French Statesprison.
The fortress by the St. Antoine Gate was the Bastile pre-eminently. It was alone worth all the others.
Some of the prisoners were perhaps great criminals; but others like Latude had done nothing to merit thirty years' captivity.
He had fallen in love with Lady Pompadour, the King's mistress, and wrote her a note which caused his imprisonment for a life-time.
It was not for nothing that the Bastile was hated by the people.
It was hated like a living thing—a monster like the dragoons who defy a people till a champion rises, like Billet, to show them how to attack it.
Hence one may comprehend Sebastian's hopeless grief at his father being incarcerated in the Bastile.