As soon as the court was empty, Marguerite flew to release her husband. Charles was listening intently to ascertain whether this hush was a treacherous calm, or whether he was indeed safe for the present, when he felt a breath of fresh air, and saw a glimmer of daylight fall into the midst of the vault, and heard a faint voice calling to him,— “Come out, love! If you are safe, all is safe.” Not all, Charles remembered, when he had time to think of any one but his wife. Before he even went to seek his children, and to recall the servants, he ascertained that Pierre had disappeared, and hurried out to learn his fate, bending his steps to the Place de Grêve, where he feared he was most likely to find his faithful servant, dead or alive. He found two bodies hanging, and cries of murderous exultation, which made his blood run cold, still echoing through the place; but Pierre was nowhere to be seen, and the bodies were those of soldiers. He saw more victims brought to the foot of the lamp-posts; but they came from the direction of the Bastille, and were evidently members of the invalid garrison. Through some unseen influence exerted in the crowd, these men were spared, which gave Charles the hope that Pierre, if yet living, would escape. In fact, he was safe enough, being at this moment employed in drawing the people to the attack upon that gloomy fortress, which was regarded with more detestation by Frenchmen than if it had been a pest-house. When Pierre had by his energy sufficiently attested his good citizenship to be allowed to depart whither he would, he ran homewards, met his master in search of him, embraced the children, kissed Marguerite’s hand, and hastened back again to assist the siege, as if nothing had happened to himself that morning. Charles did the same, having persuaded his wife that he should be safer before the Bastille than at home, and left her in the protection of Steele, who had returned from his fruitless errand to the magistrates; fruitless, because they could listen to no petitions for private succour while the grand work of the demolition of the state-fortress was going on under their sanction, and the control of their forces. Steele had no more idea of remaining with the women and children on such an occasion, than his friend Charles. As soon as he had persuaded Marguerite to lie down, and had seen grandpapa and the children at play together again, and called in two stout porters of the establishment to keep watch below, he also disappeared. Often and vehemently did he protest in after years that he would not for any consideration have been absent from that siege; and of all his possessions, none were so valued by him as a link of the chain from which one of the captives had been released by Steele’s own hands; which link the Englishman carried about him to the day of his death.