“He had dared to fall in love with Mlle. Poisson, Dame de Pompadour, the king’s mistress.
“He had written a note to her.
“This note, which a respectable woman would have sent back to the man who wrote it, was handed by Madame de Pompadour to M. de Sartines, the lieutenant-general of police.”
“To the Bastille!” was the cry upon which Dumas built up his story.
“‘To the Bastille!’
“Only that it was a senseless idea, as the soldiers had remarked, that the Bastille could be taken.
“The Bastille had provisions, a garrison, artillery.
“The Bastille had walls, which were fifteen feet thick at their summit, and forty at their base.
“The Bastille had a governor, whose name was De Launay, who had stored thirty thousand pounds of gunpowder in his cellars, and who had sworn, in case of being surprised by a coup de main, to blow up the Bastille, and with it half the Faubourg St. Antoine.”
Dumas was never more chary of tiresome description than in the opening chapters of this book. Chapter XVI. opens as follows: