nd determine: as for
himself, not having closed an eye these two nights, he demands, before
all things, to have sleep. Leaden sleep, thou miserable Berthier! Guards
rise with him, in motion towards the Abbaye. At the very door of the
Hotel-de-Ville, they are clutched; flung asunder, as by a vortex of mad
arms; Berthier whirls towards the Lanterne. He snatches a musket; fells
and strikes, defending himself like a mad lion; is borne down, trampled,
hanged, mangled: his Head too, and even his Heart, flies over the City
on a pike.

Horrible, in Lands that had known equal justice! Not so unnatural in
Lands that had never known it. Le sang qui coule est-il donc si pure?
asks Barnave; intimating that the Gallows, though by irregular methods,
has its own.--Thou thyself, O Reader, when thou turnest that corner of
the Rue de la Vannerie, and discernest still that same grim Bracket
of old Iron, wilt not want for reflections. 'Over a grocer's shop,' or
otherwise; with 'a bust of Louis XIV. in the niche under it,' or now
no longer in the niche,--it still sticks there: still holding out an
ineffectual light, of fish-oil; and has seen worlds wrecked, and says
nothing.

But to the eye of enlightened Patriotism, what a thunder-cloud was this;
suddenly shaping itself in the radiance of the halcyon weather! Cloud
of Erebus blackness: betokening latent electricity without limit. Mayor
Bailly, General Lafayette throw up their commissions, in an indignant
manner;--need to be flattered back again. The cloud disappears, as
thunder-clouds do. The halcyon weather returns, though of a grayer
complexion; of a character more and more evidently not supernatural.

Thus, in any case, with what rubs soever, shall the Bastille be
abolished from our Earth; and with it, Feudalism, Despotism; and, one
hopes, Scoundrelism generally, and all hard usage of man by his brother
man. Alas, the Scoundrelism and hard usage are not so easy of abolition!
But as for the Bastille, it sinks day after day, and month after month;
its ashlars and boulders tumbling down continually, by express order of
our Municipals. Crowds of the curious roam through its caverns; gaze on
the skeletons found walled up, on the oubliettes, iron cages, monstrous
stone-blocks with padlock chains. One day we discern Mirabeau there;
along with the Genevese Dumont. (Dumont, Souvenirs sur Mirabeau, p.
305.) Workers and onlookers make reverent way for him; fling verses,
flowers on his path, Bast