PALAIS-ROYAL.
Later on, Philippe Egalité, exceeding the excesses of his grandfather, Philippe d’Orléans, made the Palais-Royal the scene of wilder disorders than had ever been seen there before, as bad as it had been. He was so reckless that his princely income was not enough to keep him in ready money. In fact his coffers were well nigh exhausted when he conceived the idea of deriving a revenue from some of the property that surrounded the Palais, which up to that time had been used simply for ornamentation. So he caused a number of shops to be erected around the garden adjoining the Palais, and from the rents paid for these was enabled to keep up his former manner of life until that (to him) memorable morning in November, 1793, when he took a walk to the Place de la Concorde, up a short flight of stairs, and for once in his life laid his head on a hard pillow. The deadly guillotine did its work, and the riotous life of Philippe Egalité came to a sudden end.
At that time the upper rooms of the vast galleries, now converted into handsome restaurants, were devoted to gaming, and it was no child’s play, then, either. Here the excitable nobles, fascinated by the green cloth, lived in a constant whirl of excitement. The stakes ran high. Fortunes were made and lost in a night, and the Seine never did so good a business in the way of suicide. While these elegantly furnished and brilliantly lighted salons witnessed the demonstrative joy of the lucky winner or the gloomy despondency of the unhappy loser, scenes of an entirely different nature, and far more terrible in their results were being enacted in the cafés below.
In these cafés met the leaders of the people who were organizing for the destruction of the thoughtless revelers above their heads. It was the old story over again. The canaille, as the nobles termed the people, were groaning under the loads imposed upon them. The life-blood of the French people was being drained by the parasites of royalty—it was waste on the one hand and starvation on the other. Every gold piece that passed upon the tables above represented so much unpaid for sweat from the many below. Absolute power had, as it always does, run into unbridled license, and unbridled license had made the people desperate. They might not succeed, but they could no more than die, and the life they had was not worth the having.
It was in these cafés that Camille Desmoulins organized the people, and with such arms as they could seize on that memorable morning in July, marched upon the Bastille. They did not need arms. That mob, so led, could have torn down the hoary old wrong with their bare hands. There was not a man or woman in the throng that surged out of the Palais that morning who had not some especial reason for its destruction. Confined within its walls had died their brothers and fathers. To them it was royalty, and to royalty they owed every woe that afflicted them.
Desperate, determined men they were, crazed with excitement, and caring for nothing. They reached the Bastille and hurled themselves against its stubborn sides. Again and again were they beaten back by the garrison within, but each repulse only served to more determined efforts, and finally on the 14th of July the Bastille was swept from the face of the earth. Nothing was left of it but the terrible memories of the bloody past.
THE COMMUNE.