"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.