Notwithstanding his moderation, and his wish to save the monarchy, and give freedom to the people at the same time, Monsieur Jacques went hand-in-hand with Madame Gosner, and threw himself into this fearful work with equal energy and unswerving determination. He, too, believed that a wicked deception had been practiced upon a long-suffering woman, and could find no way of accounting for it which did not implicate the King and Queen of France. Sometimes, when he thought of the honest, kind face of Louis the Sixteenth, of the simplicity of his words, the shy gentleness of his manner, this belief became almost an impossibility to him. Nor could he think of the queen, so earnest, so generous and beautiful, without recoiling in his heart and reason from the thought that she could have known and sanctioned an act so full of dishonor, so bitterly cruel. But the fact still remained, no matter where the blame lay. A terrible wrong had been done, a human life worse than sacrificed. More than this, out of that awful place one soul had made its cries of agony heard; but how many others lay in those vaults, unknown. Those awful walls, with their seven feet in thickness, were built thus massively, that the cries of human anguish might never penetrate them. What became of the hundreds on hundreds who had crossed that draw-bridge, never to be heard of again? Had they been carried out in the silence of midnight to unknown graves, or were they still chained to those reeking walls, and crouching in cells so far beneath the earth that they possessed all the horrors of a grave, without its peacefulness? The fire spread. Mirabeau heard the story from his foster-brother, and thundered it through the clubs. It burned like a romance on his lips, and glowed out in words of fire on the pages of his journal. In less than three days all Paris was in a storm of indignation, and poured itself tumultuously into the streets. If human ingenuity could have imagined anything more terrible than the horrors of that man’s fate, the passions of an ignorant people would have invented something more awful than the truth; but here the bitterest passion failed, and the simple fact was far more powerful than exaggeration ever could have been. Monsieur Jacques told the story, and in his own stirring language described the scenes he had himself witnessed in the Bastille. Madame Gosner pleaded with a woman’s pathos and a man’s power for the husband who had been torn from her in his youth, and was now perishing in the cells of that hideous prison. All the terrible traditions of the old kingly fortress were nothing to the story of this man, as it came from the lips of his wife. Through the work-shops, the markets, the quays, and the clubs, the fact of a man’s incarceration, after a pardon had been granted, and his death proclaimed, sped like fire along a train of powder.