“I have a husband in one of those hideous dungeons; for years and years they have buried him from my sight. When we parted, he took me in his arms, and promised with many a farewell kiss, to return within the month. My hair was bright with the gloss of youth then—look at it now; I have not seen his face since then. But I do not plead for him alone; other women have husbands to lose—other women, for ages on ages have been made widows, knowing their husbands living, but buried far from the light of day, as mine is. It is for them I plead and implore you to shatter these enormous walls, and let God’s free sunshine into those hideous vaults. “Every stone of those blackened towers is cemented with blood and saturated with groans. I ask you to sweep an awful plague spot from the bosom of France. Let us tear it away, stone by stone—uproot it, rock by rock; break through those rugged walls, and choke up the festering moat with their ruins. Citizens, the strong arms of your fathers built this prison, which your kings have turned into a place of torment that fiends would shrink from. Are your arms weaker than theirs? What they built have not you the strength to pull down, or shall the women of France show you the way?” A yell went up from that portion of the crowd which surrounded Gosner’s wife, for there the women of Paris had assembled in the greatest numbers. “Give us arms—give us arms, and we will take the prison ourselves,” shrieked the infuriated women. “There are plenty of arms at the Hôtel des Invalides—will the men of France get them for us? or shall we storm the place ourselves?” These women were answered with one simultaneous shout. “To the Invalides! to the Invalides!” A huge mass of the people left the Place de Grève, shouting this cry. In half an hour they were thundering at the gates of the Invalides. The governor would have temporized, but some one cried out, “He only wants time to defeat us!” That cry was enough to set the whole crowd in motion. They leaped the ditches, disarmed the sentinels, and plunged headlong into the vaults below where the arms were stored. The confusion was fearful. These men crowded on each other in masses, the torches were extinguished, the weak were trampled down by the strong, but through it all twenty thousand muskets and some pieces of cannon were taken into the streets of Paris. CHAPTER LIX. THE FIRST DRAW-BRIDGE. As an ocean broken and heaving with the underswell of a continued tempest, rushes upon some rock-bound coast, the people of Paris poured themselves upon the Bastille, wave upon wave, thousands upon thousands, armed and unarmed. Some cool and resolute, others noisy and clamorous as bloodhounds, men, women and children, swarmed through the streets and threw themselves in tumultuous masses on the grim old prison.