Where could she go? In what place had that helpless man hid himself? Two nights he had already been absent; had he perished in the street, or wandered off into some village of the open country? All at once a thought struck the girl. The Bastille had some weird fascination which carried that lonely man back to his dungeon, as birds return to the cages from which they have been set free, feeling the broad, blue dome of the sky too vast for the trial of their worn and crippled wings. This thought was scarcely more rapid than the action that followed it. CHAPTER LXVII. LOUISON BRISOT IN THE RUINS. Louison Brisot had been foremost among the women who brought the king and the queen almost prisoners from Versailles to the Tuileries. Flushed with her triumph, weary with excitement, a few nights after this outrage she found herself in the street, doubtful whether to make her way to the Cordelier Club, or find some church in which she might listen to vespers, and, perhaps, seek other religious help; for this woman, who was devoid of the first principles of morality, gave herself up at intervals to superstitions, which she absolutely believed to be religious. She did not turn toward the club, but walked on at random, threading one street after another until she reached the Bastille, which lay under the pale moonlight, heaped in ruins. The moat, half choked up with fragments of the broken walls, still coiled around the old foundations, lapping the huge stones, and seeming to writhe under them like a wounded serpent, with a slimy, green back, on which the calm moon was shining in fitful glimpses. It was a scene of wild devastation. Here and there patches of white plaster gleamed against the blackness of the broken stones like ghosts crouching in the shadows, and a part of the draw-bridge loomed up, as yet unbroken, from which huge chains were dangling like fetters from a gibbet. Weird and terrible as the scene really was, Louison regarded it with feelings of wild satisfaction. She had helped to tear down those mighty walls with her own hands. Her voice had led a phalanx of women on to that awful attack, when despotism received its first fatal blow. She felt keen delight in roaming about this ghostly ruin, which was so fearfully typical of the fate which impended over the nation. In those disjointed stones she saw the real power which lay in the people, and the weakness of kings when that power chose to exert itself. If the people of France were strong enough to wrest this stronghold from the crown, what could prevent them from tearing away the very foundations of the throne itself?