If this poor creature had done his duty, and Besenval had done his, things would have had quite a different complexion. That is not to say that the Revolution would have been averted--far from it! The Revolution was legitimate, desirable, and, under the generous impulse of a whole nation, irresistible. But it would have followed another bent, and would have triumphed at a slighter cost, with less ruin and less bloodshed. The consequences of the 14th of July were disastrous. The mere words, "The Bastille is taken!" were the signal for the most frightful disorders throughout France. It seemed as though those old walls were dragging down with them in their fall all authority, all respect, all discipline; as though the floodgates were being opened to every kind of excess. Peasants went about in bands, ravaging, pillaging, firing the châteaux, the burghers' houses, and burning alive those who fell into their hands. The soldiers mutinied, insulted their chiefs, and fell to carousing with the malefactors whom they set free. There was not a town or village where the mob did not put on menacing airs, where decent people were not molested by the brawlers of the clubs and the street-corners. Such violence led to a rapid reaction, and there were numerous defections--of men who, on the very eve of the outbreak, among the magistracy, the army, the clergy, the nobility, though sympathizing with the new ideas, abruptly cut themselves loose from the movement, like the good Duke de la Rochefoucauld, who exclaimed, "Liberty is not entered by such a door as this!" Hovering between the desire and the fear of granting the promised reforms, urged on one side to resistance, on the other to submission, and more than ever destitute of all political acumen and all will power, the king went to Paris, and, bending before the revolt, approved of the assassination of his most faithful servants--and took, on that fatal day, his first step towards the scaffold! Henceforth, under the pressure of the populace, to whom its first success had shown the measure of its strength, and who became every day more exacting, more threatening, the Revolution was to go on in its perverse course, stumbling at every step, until it came to the orgy of '93, which, properly speaking, was only the systematizing of brigandage. Malouet was right indeed: what we symbolize in our festival of the 14th of July is not the rising sun, the dawn of Liberty; it is the first lurid lightning flash of the Terror!