The governor turned his back on him.
Gonchon might have put up with a threat but he would not bear contempt: he lifted his gun and fired at him. A man near him fell. Instantly a hundred, nay, a thousand gunshots sounded, as if it were awaited as a signal, and the grey towers were striped with white.
A few seconds' silence succeeded this discharge, as if the assailants were frightened at what they had done.
Then a gush of flame lost in a cloud of smoke crowned the crest of one tower. A detonation thundered. Shrieks of pain were heard in the throngs closely pressed. The first cannonshot had been fired by the royalists, the first blood shed.
The battle between people and Bastile was begun.
An instant previously menacing, the multitudes felt something like terror. By defending itself with so little of its weapons the Bastile seemed impregnable. In this period of concession the majority had no doubt supposed that they would always have their way.
That was a mistake: this cannonshot fired into them gave the measure of the Titanic work they had undertaken.
A firing of muskets, well aimed, from the platform, immediately followed.
The fresh silence was broken by renewed screams, groans and a few complaints. But nobody thought to flee, and had the thought struck any one, he must have been ashamed seeing the numbers.
Indeed all the thoroughfares were streams of human beings: the square an immense sea, with each billow a human head; the eyes flamed and the mouths hurled curses.