quickness and decision, and with a not less certain
aim. On the 12th it became known that Necker had been sent out of the
country, and that the armaments were in the hands of men who meant to
employ them against the people. Paris was in disorder, but the middle
class provided a civic guard for its protection. There were encounters
with the troops, and some blood was shed.

New men began to appear who represented the rising classes: Camille
Desmoulins, a rhetorical journalist, with literary but not political
talent, harangued the people in the garden of the Palais Royal; and
one of the strong men of history, Danton, showed that he knew how to
manage and to direct the masses.

The 13th was a day wasted by Government, spent by Paris in busy
preparation. Men talked wildly of destroying the Bastille, as a sign
that would be understood. Early on July 14 a body of men made their
way to the Invalides, and seized 28,000 stand of arms and some cannon.
At the other extremity of Paris the ancient fortress of the Bastille
towered over the workmen's quarter and commanded the city. Whenever
the guns thundered from its lofty battlements, resistance would be
over, and the conquered arms would be unavailing.

The Bastille not only overshadowed the capital, but it darkened the
hearts of men, for it had been notorious for centuries as the
instrument and the emblem of tyranny. The captives behind its bars
were few and uninteresting; but the wide world knew the horror of its
history, the blighted lives, the ruined families, the three thousand
dishonoured graves within the precincts, and the common voice called
for its destruction as the sign of deliverance. At the elections both
nobles and commons demanded that it should be levelled with the
ground.

As early as the 4th of July Besenval received notice that it would be
attacked. He sent a detachment of Swiss, that raised the garrison to
one hundred and thirty-eight, and he did no more. During the morning
hours, while the invaders of the Invalides were distributing the
plundered arms and ammunition, emissaries penetrated into the
Bastille, under various pretexts, to observe the defences. One
fair-spoken visitor was taken to the top of the dreaded towers, where
he saw that the guns with which the embrasures had bristled, which
were beyond the range of marksmen, and had Paris at their mercy, were
dismantled and could not be fired.

About the middle of the day, when this was known, the att