We know how this promise was kept, in spite of the heroic efforts of Elie and Hulin, to whom posterity owes enthusiastic homage. Is the mob to be reproached for these atrocious crimes? It was a savage horde, the scum of the population. De Launey, whose confidence and kindness had never faltered, was massacred with every circumstance of horror. "The Abbé Lefèvre," says Dusaulx, "was an involuntary witness of his last moments: 'I saw him fall,' he told me, 'without being able to help him; he defended himself like a lion, and if only ten men had behaved as he did at the Bastille, it would not have been taken.'" His murderers slowly severed his head from his trunk with a penknife. The operation was performed by a cook's apprentice named Desnot, "who knew, as he afterwards proudly said, how to manage a joint." The deposition of this brute should be read. It has been published by M. Guiffrey in the _Revue historique_. To give himself courage, Desnot had gulped down brandy mixed with gunpowder, and he added that what he had done was done in the hope of obtaining a medal. "We learnt by-and-by," continues Dusaulx, "of the death of M. de Losme-Salbray, which all good men deplored." De Losme had been the good angel of the prisoners during his term of office as major of the Bastille: there are touching details showing to what lengths he carried his kindliness and delicacy of feeling. At the moment when the mob was hacking at him, there happened to pass the Marquis de Pelleport, who had been imprisoned in the Bastille for several years; he sprang forward to save him: "Stop!" he cried, "you are killing the best of men." But he fell badly wounded, as also did the Chevalier de Jean, who had joined him in the attempt to rescue the unfortunate man from the hands of the mob. The adjutant Miray, Person the lieutenant of the Invalides, and Dumont, one of the Invalides, were massacred. Miray was led to the Grève, where the mob had resolved to execute him. Struck with fists and clubs, stabbed with knives, he crawled along in his death agony. He expired, "done to death with pin-pricks," before arriving at the place of execution. The Invalides Asselin and Béquart were hanged. It was Béquart who had prevented de Launey from blowing up the Bastille. "He was gashed with two sword-strokes," we read in the _Moniteur_, "and a sabre cut had lopped off his wrist. They carried the hand in triumph through the streets of the city--the very hand to which so many citizens owed their safety." "After I had passed the arcade of the Hôtel de Ville," says Restif de la Bretonne, who has left so curious a page about the 14th of July, "I came upon some cannibals: one--I saw him with my own eyes--brought home to me the meaning of a horrible word heard so often since: he was carrying at the end of a _taille-cime_[56] the bleeding entrails of a victim of the mob's fury, and this horrible top-knot caused no one to turn a hair. Farther on I met the captured