CHAPTER VIII.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

On the fourth day of July, 1789, the United States kept her first birthday of liberty under the constitution. Ten days later, (on the fourteenth of the month), the French Revolution was formally opened by the destruction of that dread prison fortress, the hated Bastile of Paris; and to this day, the fourteenth of July is reckoned by the French people as the birthday of liberty in their land. It is to them the same as the "Glorious Fourth" is to the people of the United States.

From the sacred flame of American kindling, sparks traversed the broad Atlantic; there under the sunny skies of France, the land of romantic story, the heather caught fire and became a mighty conflagration, whose progress nothing could check.

"On the morning of July fourteen, one thousand, seven hundred and eighty-nine, Saint Antoine was a dusky mass of scarecrows heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above their billowy heads where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms struggled in the air like leafless branches of trees in a winter storm: all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance

of a weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.

"Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what agency, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could have told; but muskets were being distributed and cartridges, ball and powder-so were every weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who could lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and heart in Saint Antoine was on fever-high strain and at high-fever heat. Every living creature there held life as no account, and was demented with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.

""Come, then,' cried B- in a resounding voice, 'Patriots and friends, we are ready, The Bastile.'

"With a roar that sounded as if all the breath of France had been shaped into that detested word, the living sea arose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city to that place."

The sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack began, the alarm bells ringing and the drums beating.

B- -,

Deep ditches, double draw bridges, massive stone walls, eight great towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire, and through the smoke, in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast B—————, up against a cannon, and immediately he became a cannoneer, four fierce hours of service at this gun, a white flag from within the fortress, and a parley, this dimly perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it suddenly the sea arose wider and higher, and swept over the lowered draw bridge, past the massive outer walls,

in among the eight great towers surrendered. The Bastile fell.

Everywhere was tumult, exultation, deafening and maniacal bewilderment, astounding noise, yet wild dumb show. The prisoners: all scared:

These carried high on men's shoulders appeared more like skeletons of lost spirits than living men.

A cloud had been gathering for about fifteen hundred years; the darkness of it was heavy over Saint Antoine, cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence. Samples of people that had undergone a terrible grinding and re-grinding in the mill which ground young people old, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window. The children had ancient faces and grave voices and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age, and coming up afresh, was the sign "hunger." It was prevalent everywhere, hunger was pushed out of the tall houses in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; hunger was patched into them with straw and rag, wool and paper; hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small stick of firewood that the man sawed off; hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and stared up from the filthy street. Hunger stared from the baker's shelves, written in every loaf of his scanty stock of bad bread, at the sausage shop in every dead dog preparation that was offered for sale. Hunger was shred into atoms in every husky chip of potato fried with some reluctant drops of oil.

Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it; narrow, winding streets diverging, all peopled by rags and night caps, and

all smelling of rags and night caps; and all visible things with a brooding look upon them that looked ill.

At the same time a gala coach rolls by; a lackey before and a lackey behind.

It is the bishop, a prince of the church, one of those gilded men with heraldic bearings and revenues who have palaces, horses, servants, good table, good cheer, all the pleasures of life; in the name of Jesus, who had not where to lay His head.

In the hunted air of the people there was the wild beast thought of turning at bay. Depressed and slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted into the likeness of the gallows rope they mused about enduring, or inflicting. The people croaked over their scanty measure of thin wine and beer, and were glowingly confidential together. Nothing was represented in a flourishing condition save tools and weapons.

On the streets at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and pulley. At night the lamp lighter let these down; lighted and hoisted them again. The gaunt scarecrows had watched the lamp lighter with an idea of improving on his method and hauling up men by those ropes and pulleys to flare upon the darkness of their condition. But every wind that blew over France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds fine of song and feather gave no heed, they took no warning.

Now the time had come. The cloud which had been gathering for fifteen hundred years burst. The reign of terror began, the oppressed became the oppressor.

The storm of '89 and '93 raged in fury: Then the lords. the nobles and the ecclesiastics were greatly frightened and took to their noble heels, making all possible haste for some other land.

Monsieures were scattered far and wide.

The Reformation in billows of ideas flowing over the earth, under the broad blue sky, sparkling in the radiant sunshine, would have pacifically covered up and destroyed all error; it would have cured all the wounds and ills of the old world. By the force of kindly examination, to study evil amiably to prove its existence, then to cure it. This was the meaning of the Reformation. No violent remedy was necessary.

But the great church power would not allow this; she poured out a flood from the old pool system, reeking with the miasma of superstition, ignorance, degredation, hatred and prejudice; and when the poor old afflicted world could no longer endure the putrefaction and death arising from this stagnation-The swan arose with the wings of an eagle, and the scream of the eagle.

The little man of the faubourgs who only wished to be well dressed, and sufficient food to nourish the stomach, whose joy it was to stroll with his child in the park or by the seaside of a Sunday, the tiny hand of his child in his own: Suddenly he arose; his gaze became terrible and his breath a tempest; from his slender chest issued enough wind to disarrange the folds of the Alps.

Then, all at once frightened Europe lent an ear, armies put themselves in motion, parks of artillery rumbled, pontoons stretched over rivers, clouds of cavalry galloped in the storm; cries, tempests, a trembling of thrones in every direc