"Madam," said the doctor at last, "I have seen Paris, and you have not even been out of the palace to see Versailles, Do you know what Paris is about?"
"Storming some other Bastile," jeered the Queen.
"Assuredly not; but Paris knows there is another fortress between it and the King. The city is collecting the deputies of its forty-eight wards and sending them here."
"Let them come," said the Queen, with fierce joy. "They will be hotly received."
"Take care, madam, for they come not alone but escorted by twenty thousand National Guards."
"What is that?"
"Do not speak lightly of an institution which will be a power one day. It will bind and unbind."
"My lord," you have ten thousand men who are equal to these twenty thousand," said the Queen: "call them up to give these blackguards their chastisement, and the example which all this revolutionary spawn has need of. I would sweep them all away in a week, if I were listened to."
"How deceived you are—by others," said Gilbert, shaking his head, sadly. "Alas! think of civil war excited by a queen. Only one did so, and she went down to the grave with the epithet of the Foreigner."
"Excited by me? what do you mean? did I fire on the Bastile without provocation?"