As soon as the court was empty, Marguerite flew to release her husband. Charles was listening intently to ascertain whether this hush was a treacherous calm, or whether he was indeed safe for the present, when he felt a breath of fresh air, and saw a glimmer of daylight fall into the midst of the vault, and heard a faint voice calling to him,—
“Come out, love! If you are safe, all is safe.”
Not all, Charles remembered, when he had time to think of any one but his wife. Before he even went to seek his children, and to recall[recall] the servants, he ascertained that Pierre had disappeared, and hurried out to learn his fate, bending his steps to the Place de Grêve, where he feared he was most likely to find his faithful servant, dead or alive. He found two bodies hanging, and cries of murderous exultation, which made his blood run cold, still echoing through the place; but Pierre was nowhere to be seen, and the bodies were those of soldiers. He saw more victims brought to the foot of the lamp-posts; but they came from the direction of the Bastille, and were evidently members of the invalid garrison. Through some unseen influence exerted in the crowd, these men were spared, which gave Charles the hope that Pierre, if yet living, would escape. In fact, he was safe enough, being at this moment employed in drawing the people to the attack upon that gloomy fortress, which was regarded with more detestation by Frenchmen than if it had been a pest-house. When Pierre had by his energy sufficiently attested his good citizenship to be allowed to depart whither he would, he ran homewards, met his master in search of him, embraced the children, kissed Marguerite’s hand, and hastened back again to assist the siege, as if nothing had happened to himself that morning. Charles did the same, having persuaded his wife that he should be safer before the Bastille than at home, and left her in the protection of Steele, who had returned from his fruitless errand to the magistrates; fruitless, because they could listen to no petitions for private succour while the grand work of the demolition of the state-fortress was going on under their sanction, and the control of their forces.
Steele had no more idea of remaining with the women and children on such an occasion, than his friend Charles. As soon as he had persuaded Marguerite to lie down, and had seen grandpapa and the children at play together again, and called in two stout porters of the establishment to keep watch below, he also disappeared. Often and vehemently did he protest in after years that he would not for any consideration have been absent from that siege; and of all his possessions, none were so valued by him as a link of the chain from which one of the captives had been released by Steele’s own hands; which link the Englishman carried about him to the day of his death.
While Marguerite slept, through pure exhaustion, occasionally starting at the sound of cannon, or scared with visions of the horrible faces she had seen in the court so lately, her husband was actively disproving, to as many as might observe him, his being a royalist. He lent a helping hand to one work after another; now assisting in letting down the drawbridges successively; now in hauling forward the cannon; now in demolishing the guard-houses; now in forcing an entrance into the gloomy place itself; and finally, shouting for the release of the prisoners. Everything was forgotten but the work before his eyes: hours flew like minutes, amidst the intenseness of the occupation; and yet, if his thoughts reverted for a moment to the events of the morning, they seemed of ancient date,—as if he had lived a lifetime in this one day.
The spectacles of a lifetime were indeed to be beheld within the compass of this one scene. The most vivid emotions to which all ranks and all ages are subject were here in full play: all the various grouping which life affords was here presented; the entire elements of the scenery of human character were here congregated in infinite and magnificent combinations. The appeals to eye and ear alone were of unprecedented force; those addressed to the spirit equalled in stimulus the devotion of Leonidas in his defile, and excelled in pathos the meditation of Marius among more extensive ruins than those which were now tumbling around. From the heights of the fortress might be seen a heaving ocean of upturned faces, when the breeze dispersed at intervals the clouds of smoke which veiled the sun, and gave a dun and murky hue to whatever lay beneath. If a flood of sunshine now and then poured in to make a hundred thousand weapons glitter over the heads of the crowd, the black row of cannon belched forth their red fires to extinguish the purer light. The foremost of the people, with glaring eyes, and blackened and grinning faces, looked scarcely human, in their excess of eagerness, activity, and strength. Yet more terrific were the sounds: the clang of the tocsin at regular intervals, the shouts of the besiegers, the shrieks of the wounded, the roar of the fire which was consuming the guard-houses, the crash of the ruins falling on all sides, a heavy splash in the moat from time to time, as some one was toppled from the ramparts to be smothered in its mud,—and above all these, the triumphant cries of victory and liberty achieved,—these were enough to dizzy weak brains, and give inspiration to strong ones. Here were also the terrors which sooner or later chill the marrow of despotism, and the stern joy with which its retribution fires the heart of the patriot. Here were the servants of tyranny quailing before the glance of the people; kneeling soldiers craving mercy of mechanics, of women, of some of every class whom, in the execution of their fancied duty, they had outraged. Here were men shrinking from violence with a craven horror, and women driven by a sense of wrong to show how disgusting physical courage may be made. Here were also sons led on to the attack by their hitherto anxious fathers; husbands thrust forward into danger by their wives; and little children upreared by their mothers amidst the fire and smoke, to take one last look of the hated edifice which was soon to be levelled with the ground. The towers of palaces might be seen afar, where princes were quaking at this final assurance of the downfall[downfall] of their despotic sway, knowing that the assumed sanctity of royalty was being wafted away with every puff of smoke which spread itself over the sky, and their irresponsibility melting in fires lighted by the hands which they had vainly attempted to fetter, and blown by the breath which they had imagined they could stifle. They had denied the birth of that liberty whose baptism in fire and in blood was now being celebrated in a many-voiced chaunt with which the earth should ring for centuries. Some from other lands were already present to hear and join in it; some free Britons to aid, some wondering slaves of other despots to slink homewards with whispered tidings of its import; for from that day to this, the history of the fall of the Bastille has been told as a secret in the vineyards of Portugal, and among the groves of Spain, and in the patriotic conclaves of the youth of Italy, while it has been loudly and joyfully proclaimed from one end to the other of Great Britain, till her lisping children are familiar with the tale.
The congregation would not have been complete without the presence of another class of witnesses whose very existence will perhaps be matter of incredulity in some future age of the world;—that class which man has taken upon himself to institute, and which will one day rise up against him in judgment of his abused power. There were captives present in this scene of lawless freedom,—or rather of freedom above the law. They were there, first trembling before the assailants, and then marvelling at the treatment they received, as the kid would marvel at being dandled by the lion. So it appeared to be with most of them, while one or two caught the tone of popular triumph before the doors of their cells were opened, and others received their deliverance in a manner that rent the heart of the deliverers.
When the capture of the place was complete, and its defenders had been carried off, some to be sacrificed for the sins of the government, and others to meet with mercy, Charles pressed forward, with a multitude of companions, to release the captives. It was hard labour to pull the clenched doors from their staples and hinges; and in some cases it was found easier to effect the work in a yet more irregular manner: as in one to which Steele called Charles’s attention when they accidentally met in the centre of the fortress, where the light of day, however, streamed upon them through the demolished roof. Steele’s face was working in strong emotion, and he appeared speechless while he seized his friend by the arm, and drew him to gaze on what made his heart’s blood boil. Steele pointed through a breach in the enormous wall, whose thickness shut out all sound from the inmate of the dungeon it inclosed; and there, with eyes drooped before the unwonted light,—a light which, however, only half displayed the squalid sickliness of his countenance, sat one who seemed to take no heed of any human presence. His expanded nostrils and half-opened mouth seemed to betoken that there had been passion and expectation within him; but the apathy and despondency of his attitude exhibited a strange contradiction to these evidences. When the first face appeared through the opening, he fumbled uneasily with his hands in his coarse dungeon dress; and when he was hailed, more and more loudly, under the idea that he was deaf, his beard was seen to stir upon his breast, and his lips to move, as if he was attempting in vain to articulate a sound. The endeavour presently ceased, though voice after voice was heard in importunity,—sometimes endearing, sometimes rallying,—that he would rise and help to free himself. It was a work of time to make a breach large enough to admit his deliverers; and at last, just before the first of them clambered in, the captive uplifted his broken and unmodulated voice in a few words, one or two of which Steele recognized to be English.
“O! he is a Briton!” cried he, clenching his hands above his head in the extremity of passion; and, staggering against the wall, he uttered a deep curse on the tyranny by which a countryman had been goaded into madness far from his own land, and from all who could know or avenge his state. Again and again he looked; again and again he withdrew, unable to bear the alternating aspects of idiotcy and gibbering madness. At last, he made trial of a new kind of stimulus; leaning through the breach, and calling to the captive,—
“O come, and take the hand of a brother once more! Look up, and tell us that your deliverers are welcome! Let it be crime, or let it be misery that has stricken you so deeply, the last day of your dungeon life is over. Come, and hear about England! Come and feel the fresh air——”