A body of men, however, were permitted to enter the courtyard, for which purpose the drawbridge had been lowered: once in that trap, De Launay fired upon them and shot them down. There is no evidence, nor ever will be, as to the motives of that extraordinary act; but to the general people who were gathering and gathering all about in the narrow streets, it was an act of deliberate treason, part of that spirit with which our own time is not unfamiliar, and which has ruined a hundred reforms,—I mean the sentiment that there is no honour to be kept between government and insurrection. The misfortune or crime of De Launay struck a clear note in the crowd; if after that they failed, the blow that was being struck for the Parliament would fail also. Thus it was that, under a dull grey sky, the whole of Paris, as it were, ran up together to the siege of the fortress. Curés were there gathering up their soutanes and joining the multitude, notably the man who had once been Danton’s parish priest, the vicar of St. Germains, with his flock at his heels, like the good Curé of Bazeilles in later times, or the humorous Bishop of Beauvais six centuries before. Lawyers, students, shopkeepers, merchants, the big brewer of the quarter, the pedants, the clerks in the offices, soldiers and their officers, the young nobles even—there was nothing in Paris that did not catch the fever. The castle fell at last, because its garrison sympathised with the mob (of itself it was impregnable); the old governor made a futile attempt to blow up his stronghold and his command; some few who still obeyed him (probably the twenty Swiss) fired on the mob just after the white flag had been hoisted on the Bazinière tower, and a great tide of men mad with a double treason swirled up the fortress. Second on the wall was a man with whom this book will have to deal again—Hérault de Séchelles, young, beautiful, and of great family, beloved at the court and even pampered with special privilege, the friend and companion of Danton, and destined five years later to stand in the cart with him when they all went up to the scaffold together on a clear April evening in the best time of their youth.