"On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in their bodies! Roar with all your throats, of cartilage and metal, ye sons of liberty; stir spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in you, soul, body, or spirit; for it is the hour! Smite thou, Louis Tournay, cart-wright of the Marais, old soldier of the regiment Dauphiné: smite at that outer drawbridge chain, though the fiery hail whistles round thee! Never, over nave or felloe, did thy axe (_q._ hammer?) strike such a stroke. Down with it, man: down with it to Orcus: let the whole accursed edifice sink thither, and tyranny be swallowed up for ever! Mounted, some say, on the roof of the guard-room, some 'on bayonets stuck into the joints of the wall,' Louis Tournay smites brave Aubin Bonnemère (also an old soldier) seconding him: the chain yields, breaks; the huge drawbridge slams down thundering, (_avec fracas_.) Glorious: and yet, alas, it is still but the outworks! The eight grim towers, with their Invalides' musketry, their paving stones and cannon-mouths, still roar aloft intact; ditch yawning impassable, stone-faced; the inner drawbridge with its _back_ towards us; the Bastile is still to take! "To describe this siege of the Bastile (thought to be one of the most important in history) perhaps transcends the talent of mortals. Could one but, after infinite leading, 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 Fore-courts, _Cour avancé, 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 pigmies 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 coloured clothes: half-pay Hulin is haranguing Gardes Françaises in the Place de Grève. Frantic patriots pick up the grape-shots; bear them, still hot, (or seemingly so,) to the Hôtel de Ville:--Paris, you perceive, is to be burnt!--Paris wholly has got to the acme of its frenzy; whirled, all ways, by panic madness.