d by
Andre-Louis."

With little time now in which to go abroad it was from his pupils
and the newspapers--of which a flood had risen in Paris with the
establishment of the freedom of the Press--that he learnt of the
revolutionary processes around him, following upon, as a measure of
anticlimax, the fall of the Bastille. That had happened whilst M. des
Amis lay dead, on the day before they buried him, and was indeed the
chief reason of the delay in his burial. It was an event that had its
inspiration in that ill-considered charge of Prince Lambesc in which the
fencing-master had been killed.

The outraged people had besieged the electors in the Hotel de Ville,
demanding arms with which to defend their lives from these foreign
murderers hired by despotism. And in the end the electors had consented
to give them arms, or, rather--for arms it had none to give--to permit
them to arm themselves. Also it had given them a cockade, of red and
blue, the colours of Paris. Because these colours were also those of the
liveries of the Duke of Orleans, white was added to them--the white of
the ancient standard of France--and thus was the tricolour born. Further,
a permanent committee of electors was appointed to watch over public
order.

Thus empowered the people went to work with such good effect that within
thirty-six hours sixty thousand pikes had been forged. At nine o'clock
on Tuesday morning thirty thousand men were before the Invalides. By
eleven o'clock they had ravished it of its store of arms amounting to
some thirty thousand muskets, whilst others had seized the Arsenal and
possessed themselves of powder.

Thus they prepared to resist the attack that from seven points was to
be launched that evening upon the city. But Paris did not wait for the
attack. It took the initiative. Mad with enthusiasm it conceived the
insane project of taking that terrible menacing fortress, the Bastille,
and, what is more, it succeeded, as you know, before five o'clock that
night, aided in the enterprise by the French Guards with cannon.

The news of it, borne to Versailles by Lambesc in flight with his
dragoons before the vast armed force that had sprouted from the
paving-stones of Paris, gave the Court pause. The people were in
possession of the guns captured from the Bastille. They were erecting
barricades in the streets, and mounting these guns upon them. The attack
had been too long delayed. It must be abandoned since now it could lead