Loud murmurs rose from the crowd which filled and surrounded the hall. Some one proposed that Flesselles should be taken to the Palais Royal to be tried by the people. The clamor was increasing and his peril imminent. Pallid with fear he descended from the platform, and, accompanied by a vast throng, set out for the Palais Royal. At the turning of the first street an unknown man approached, and with a pistol shot him dead. Infuriate wretches immediately cut off his head, and it was borne upon a pike in savage triumph through the streets.
The French Guards, with the great body of the people, did what they could to repress these bloody acts. The French and Swiss soldiers took the oath of fidelity to the nation, and under the protection of the French Guard were marched to places of safety where they were supplied with lodgings and food. Thus terminated this eventful day. The fall of the Bastille broke the right arm of the monarchy, paralyzed its nerves of action, and struck it a death blow. The monarch of France, from his palace at Versailles, heard the distant thunders of the cannonade, and yet inscribed upon his puerile journal "Nothing!"[175]
FOOTNOTES:
[152] "Thus Paris, without courts of justice, without police, without a guard, at the mercy of one hundred thousand men who were wandering idly in the middle of the night, and for the most part wanting bread, believed itself on the point of being besieged from without and pillaged from within; believed that twenty-five thousand soldiers were posted around to blockade it and cut off all supplies of provisions, and that it would be a prey to a starving populace."—Memoirs of Marmontel.
[153] Hist. Phil. de la Rev. Fr., par Ant. Fantin Desodoards, t. i., p. 148.
[154] Professor William Smyth, in his very able and candid lectures, delivered at the University of Cambridge, England, though his sympathies are with the court in this conflict, writes:
"On the whole, it appears to me that there can be no doubt that a great design had been formed by the court for the dissolution of the National Assembly and the assertion of the power of the crown. That military force was to have been produced, and according to the measure of its success would, in all probability, have been the depression of the spirit of liberty, even of national liberty, then existing in France. Less than this can not well be supposed; much more may be believed."—Lectures on the French Revolution, vol. i., p. 251.
[155] The Old Régime and the Revolution, by M. de Tocqueville, p. 190.
[156] Michelet, vol. i., p. 136.
[157] "They were going to make payments with a paper money, without any other guarantee than the signature of an insolvent king."—Michelet, vol. i., p. 137.