[164] A whole library has been written concerning the identity of this famous prisoner. There is little doubt that the mask was of velvet and not of iron, and that the mysterious captive who died on 19th November 1703 in the Bastille, was Count Mattioli of Bologna, who was secretly arrested for having betrayed the confidence of Louis XIV.
[165] Only five francs were allowed for a bourgeois; a man of letters was granted ten; a Marshal of France obtained the maximum.
[166] When Sir S. Romilly called on Franklin in 1783, the latter expressed his amazement that the French Government had permitted the publication of the American Constitution, which produced a great impression in Paris. The music of Ça ira, taken from a dance tune, Le Carillon National, very popular in the guinguettes of Paris, has been published in the Révolution Française for 16th December 1898.
[167] It was composed by one of the émigrés, M. de Limon, approved by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, and signed, against his better judgment, by the Duke of Brunswick.
[168] The numbers have been variously estimated from 100 to 5000 killed on the popular side.
[169] The Académie d'Équitation was an expensive and exclusive establishment where the young nobles and gentlemen of fortune were taught fencing, riding and dancing. It was long and narrow, 240 feet by 60, and only the most powerful voices could be heard in the Assembly. The Rue de Rivoli between the Rues d'Alger and de Castiglione cuts through the site.
[170] "Sew we, spin we, sew we well, behold the coats we have made for the winter that is coming. Soldiers of the Fatherland, ye shall want for nothing."
[171] The term implied rather an excess than a defect of nether garment and was applied in scorn by the fashionable wearers of culottes to the plebeian wearers of trousers.
[172] Inferno, XV. 76-78.—"In whom lives again the seed of those Romans who remained there when the nest (Florence) of so much wickedness was made."
[173] Mlle Curchod, for whom Gibbon "sighed as a lover but renounced as a son."