The French guards had fraternised with the mob and gave to a small portion of it something like organization. So they came on, armed with spears, axes, bludgeons and muskets, dragging cannons and carrying hammers, a fierce, wild, terrible crowd, thundering at the outer gates like a besieging army. The draw-bridge which led to the Cour de Gouvernment, was closed against them; its massive timbers barred their progress, as rocks drive back the waves of an ocean. But this only swelled their numbers and inspired their courage. Every hour made their power more formidable. The governor had been summoned, and refusing to give up one foot of his fortress, retreated into the deeper security of the prison itself. Thuriot, commissioned by the city authorities, was allowed to pass in alone. Directly he was seen by the insurgents on the battlements of La Bazinière, a lofty tower that overlooked the arsenal and the whole vast length of the Faubourg St. Antoine, which was black from end to end with human beings, wild, fierce, terrible! whose menaces rolled and gathered like thunder, around the tower on which that doomed man stood. The cannons, pointed and ready for action, ranged upon the towers and guarding the entrance, drove the people mad. When Thuriot came down and addressed the crowd from a window of the governor’s house, the general rage turned on him, and he barely escaped with his life. The Bastille was wholly surrounded; every foot of ground was covered. The outward pressure drove those before it forward, with irresistible force; there was no retreat and no wish for retreat, but to advance seemed impossible. Before them was a lifted draw-bridge, a double row of sentinels, and two guard houses crowded with soldiers. Some small houses were to be seen close to the walls of the outer court; their windows choked up with wrathful faces—their roofs black with human beings, who swarmed over them till their rotten timbers threatened to give way. All at once, a wild shout rang up from the crowd. Two men had dropped down from one of these roofs to the wall, which joined the guard house, and creeping cautiously over it, leaped into the court. One of these men was Monsieur Jacques, whom the people recognized. Two old soldiers followed these bold men, and directly a yell of delight answered the reverberation of four ponderous axes, crashing against the chains of the draw-bridge. The great mass of iron-bound timbers fell with a thundering sound, and the crowd rushed over it, trampling each other down, like wild beasts, in their furious haste. A volley of musketry was poured in among them. Some men fell dead—others were wounded, which completed the rage of the insurgents, who filled the Cour de Gouvernment with cries for vengeance.