In exitu Israel

by S. Baring-Gould

But Bonnemère had not abandoned the unfortunate girl; regardless of the blows showered upon him, and the opposition he met with, the brave man plunged through the ferocious band that surrounded her, he trod out the flames, and raising her insensible form in his nervous arms, bore her away to a house in the Rue S. Antoine, where she could be in safety, and then returned to his place at the head of the besiegers. Maillard, Élie, and Hullin, finding that the burning straw obscured the view of the drawbridge, and prevented them from taking accurate aim, displaced the carts, and by means of poles strewed the flaming straw about the yard, where it was stamped out by the militia, who now filled it.

They then advanced to the edge of the moat and shouted to the governor to lower the bridge. M. de Flue, the officer commanding the Swiss, replied through the battlements that the garrison would yield if they were allowed to march forth with all the honours of war.

'No,' was the answer; 'no more arms for those who have butchered the people.'

To account for this readiness to entertain the idea of capitulation, we must visit the interior of the citadel.

Upon the death of Monsigny, the invalids had refused to continue the defence. They could not forget that they were Frenchmen, and that those whose blood they were shedding were their countrymen.

De Launay, finding it impossible to hold out, when the majority of his garrison were mutinous, in the insanity of rage and fear, rushed to the powder magazine with a lighted match to blow up the castle and destroy with it the assailants and the besieged. A soldier, Ferrand by name, was sentinel at the door. Divining the purpose of the governor, he refused to give him admission to the magazine, snatched the match from his hand, and extinguished it with his foot.

When the terms of surrender proposed by M. de Flue had been refused, the officer consented to lay down his arms on condition that no harm should be offered to the garrison. A tumult of contradictory answers arose. Some promised what was demanded, others required unconditional surrender. At last, after several minutes of uproar, a scrap of paper was passed though an embrasure in the wall. A plank was run across the moat, but, as there was no resting-place for the end on the farther side, a number of men jumped upon that portion which rested on the pavement of the yard and sustained the plank in its horizontal position, whilst one of the crowd ran along it and reached his hand towards the paper. But whether his situation rendered him giddy, or whether the counterpoise was not effectually maintained, is uncertain; he reeled and fell over into the fosse and perished. The huge Maillard sprang upon the plank in his place, and succeeded in possessing himself of the note which he remitted to Élie. It contained these words:—

'We have twenty thousand charges of gunpowder. Unless you accept our terms of capitulation, we will blow up the garrison and the whole quarter of the town.'

'I accept, on the word of honour of an officer,' called Élie; 'lower the drawbridge.'

But the crowd protested against this capitulation, being exasperated against the garrison for having thinned their numbers with their bullets; and running the cannon forward to the brink of the fosse, they pointed it, and prepared to fire, when a young and beautiful girl, wearing a peasant's scarlet cap, to which was pinned the national rosette, and holding a musket in one hand, and a blue cloak over her other arm, suddenly cast her bonnet upon the touch-hole, and held it resolutely there.