The demand was evaded by the king; the soldiery were largely increased and concentrated; the arrests of the more revolutionary deputies, including, of course, Mirabeau, were decided on; Necker was summarily dismissed: but on the other side able and active emissaries roused Paris by statements the most exciting, and taking all characters, with the costumes of either sex, caressed, feted, and partially won over the soldiery, and before the court could take one step toward its purposes, Paris was in full insurrection, the troops corrupted or overpowered, the Bastile taken, and under the plea of anarchical excuse, the whole _bourgeoisie_ of Paris placed in a few hours under arms as National Guards. The king, taught that it was not revolt but revolution, preferred, as every body foresaw, submission to civil war, recalled Necker, and visited triumphant Paris, at once the hostage and conquest of a popular triumph. Mirabeau, more or less connected with the Orleanists, had speculated with them on the chances of confusion; for to him it was a small thing, provided he had bread, that it was baked in an oven warmed with the conflagration of an empire. Looking forward with complacency to every contingency of revolutionary crises, assured that a common danger, flinging aside, as unimportant, questions of personal character, would make power the prey of genius and audacity, he was correspondingly annoyed by a re-arrangement that promised for a time a well-grounded tranquillity. The destruction of the Bastile securing that of "The Syllas of thought," he now transformed into a full political newspaper, his weekly "Letter to his Constituents," under which title he had evaded, from the first assembly of the States-General, the censorship on the press. Aware, from a knowledge of Wilkes and his history, of the power of journalism to a politician, and above all, to a demagogue in a free country, he was, in the full sense of the term, the first newspaper editor of France, and owed to the vigorous use of this novel agency, not only useful additions to his pecuniary resources, but a great portion of that popular idolatry that followed him to the grave. The court which, in calling together the States, had no higher aim than to regenerate the finances of the country, and, as one step, to obtain the help of the people in stripping a numerous aristocracy of their baneful exemption from state-burdens, had already found out its own share in the peril of the experiment, and now sought, by a close alliance with the _noblesse_, to avert the ruin that too evidently menaced both. But the torrent had but accumulated at each irresistible concession, and every day's work added to the democratic elements of a constitution that had already made royalty a cipher, and annihilated, as political institutions, the church and aristocracy.