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.