pinion for several generations. It was so long since the States-General
had been convoked that the very forms and ceremonies incidental to or
essential to its convocation had passed out of living memory, and had to
be painfully ascertained by much groping after authority and precedent.
In the end, however, authority and precedent were ascertained, and the
States-General, composed of representatives of the three estates of the
realm--the Church, the Nobility, and the People--met with much ceremony
at Versailles. They were called together for the ostensible purpose of
dealing with the financial difficulties that threatened to make the
country bankrupt. But it was soon clear that they, or at least the
majority of their members, intended to accomplish much more than that.
The news that travelled slowly in those days from the capital of France
to the capital of England grew to be interesting and important with an
interest and an importance that were not to cease in steady activity for
more than a quarter of a century. Event followed event with startling
rapidity. The members of the Third Estate severed themselves from the
Church and the Nobility, met in the Tennis Court in Versailles, and
declared themselves a National Assembly. The people of Paris, profoundly
agitated, and fearing that the King intended to suppress the insurgent
National Assembly by force, broke out into riots, which culminated in an
attack upon the famous and detested prison in the Faubourg St. Antoine,
the Bastille. The Bastille had not for many years been a serious
instrument of oppression, but its record was an evil record, and it
represented in the eyes of the people of Paris all that was most detested
and most detestable in the old order. The Bastille was captured; its few
prisoners were borne in triumph through the streets, while its commander,
De Launay, was decapitated and his head carried about on the point of a
pike.

[Sidenote: 1789--The French Revolution]

If the King of France had been a different man from {295} Louis the
Sixteenth he might have faced the rising storm with some hope of success.
But he could do nothing, would do nothing. His advisers, his intimates,
his kinsmen, his captains, despairing at his vacillation and fearing that
they would be abandoned to the fury of insurgent Paris, fled for their
lives from a country that seemed to them as if possessed by a devil. The
country was possessed, possessed by the spirit of revol