their _Invalide_
musketry, their paving-stones and cannon-mouths, still soar aloft
intact;--Ditch yawning impassable, stone-faced; the inner Drawbridge
with its _back_ toward us; the Bastille is still to take!

To describe this Siege of the Bastille (thought to be one of the most
important in History) perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. Could
one but, after infinite reading, get to understand so much as the plan
of the building! But there is open Esplanade at the end of the Rue
Saint-Antoine; there are such Forecourts (_Cour Avance_), _Cour de
l'Orme_, arched gateway (where Louis Tournay now fights); then new
drawbridges, dormant-bridges, rampart-bastions, and the grim Eight
Towers: a labyrinthic Mass, high-frowning there, of all ages from
twenty years to four hundred and twenty;--beleaguered, in this its
last hour, as we said, by mere Chaos come again! Ordnance of all
calibres; throats of all capacities; men of all plans, every man his
own engineer; seldom since the war of Pygmies and Cranes was there
seen so anomalous a thing. Half-pay Elie is home for a suit of
regimentals; no one would heed him in colored clothes; half-pay Hulin
is haranguing Gardes Francaises in the Place de Greve. Frantic
patriots pick up the grape-shots; bear them, still hot (or seemingly
so), to the Hotel-de-Ville:--Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt!
Flesselles is "pale to the very lips," for the roar of the multitude
grows deep. Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled,
all ways, by panic madness. At every street-barricade, there whirls
simmering a minor whirlpool,--strengthening the barricade, since God
knows what is coming; and all minor whirlpools play distractedly into
that grand Fire-Maelstrom which is lashing round the Bastille.

And so it lashes and it roars. Cholat the wine-merchant has become an
impromptu cannoneer. See Georget of the marine service, fresh from
Brest, ply the King of Siam's cannon. Singular (if we were not used to
the like). Georget lay, last night, taking his ease at his inn; the
King of Siam's cannon also lay, knowing nothing of _him_, for a
hundred years; yet now, at the right instant, they have got together,
and discourse eloquent music. For hearing what was toward, Georget
sprang from the Brest Diligence, and ran. Gardes Francaises, also,
will be here, with real artillery: were not the walls so
thick!--Upward from the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighboring
roofs and windows, flashes