"This is serious with a vengeance. You call a successful revolt the ruin of royalty? Because the Bastile is taken, Lord Charny, do you say royalty is abolished? You do not reflect that the Bastile has been built but in the Fourteenth Century while royalty struck in its roots six thousand years ago all over the globe."
"I would I could deceive," said the lieutenant sadly, "and proclaim consoling news instead of saddening your Majesty. Unfortunately the instrument gives forth no other sounds than it was shaped to send."
"Stay, I will set you to a cheerier tune! though I am but a woman. You say the Parisians have revolted. In what proportion?"
"Twelve out of fifteen: the calculation is easy. The populace stand in that proportion to the classes, the other two fifteenths being the nobility and the clergy."
"But six of the rate are women, and——"
"Women and children are not the least of your foes. You are proud and courageous yourself, do not omit the women and the children. One day you may reckon them as demons."
"What do you mean, count?"
"Do you not know the part the women and children play in civil commotions? I will tell you and you will own that a woman is equal two soldiers."
"Are you mad, my lord?"
"Had you seen your sex at the taking of the Bastile," he said with a mournful smile: "hounding the men on to arm themselves, while under the fire, threatening with their naked fist your Swiss soldiers caparisoned for war, yelling maledictions over the slain in a voice which made the living bound unto death. Had you seen them boiling pitch, rolling cannon, giving the fighting men cartridges and the more timid a kiss with the cartridges! Do you know that as many women as men dashed across the Bastile draw-bridges, and that if its stones are coming down now, the picks are wielded by female hands? Oh, my lady, you must include the women, and the children who cast the bullets, sharpen the swords and hurl paving-stones from the roofs. The bullet cast by a boy will kill your best general from afar; the sword he sharpened will hamstring your finest war-horse; the blind pebble from this David's sling will put out the eye of your Dragoon Samson and your Lifeguards Goliath.