Louison asked these questions of herself as she wandered among the black masses of rock that had once been a prison, so grim and awful, that the very children had run away terrified by a sight of its walls. A wild craving for liberty had hitherto filled her being; a blind ambition to be the leading spirit of any tumult that might spring out of the starvation and discontent which filled all France with tears and menaces. But now another and more bitter feeling possessed her; personal hate mingled itself with the fanaticism which had lifted liberty into the semblance of a god, at whose feet both religion and common sense must be hurled. She longed to crush the beautiful queen as she had helped to cast those stones down from their ponderous hold in the prison towers. She had no object in coming there but that of feasting her eyes on the ruin, which was a proof and a pledge of the greater overthrow yet to come. The time was near when crowns should be trodden under foot, and thrones hurled from their base as those rocks had been. In this place the demons of envy and hate entered that woman’s soul, and she called them patriotism. Among the gaunt shadows that filled the ruins of the Bastille, there was one spot more dreary than the rest, hollowed out like an exhausted volcano, and partly choked up with rocks, black and rugged as consolidated lava. The moonbeams penetrated into this abyss, and played whitely around its jagged edges. Louison could hear the trickle of water, as it filtered from the moat, and crept downward among the stones. This sight more weird and dismal than anything she had seen, fascinated the woman, and she paused to look upon it. Above the slow trickle of waters she heard a human voice, utterly at variance with the place, for its tones were low and sweet as the murmur of a south wind when the flowers are budding, but plaintive as that same wind when it sighs among autumn leaves. What could this sound mean? Had some prisoner been left among the subterranean dungeons, unable to make himself heard when that multitude of spoilers swept over the prison? Louison was fearless; and this thought stirred all the humanity in her bosom. She sprung from the fragment of rock on which she stood, and leaped from point to point down into the chasm. She came at last to a platform, which had once been a corridor far beneath the level of the moat. This was partly filled with the rubbish of broken doors and rusted iron, rent from the walls when the mob were raging like wild beasts through the foundations of the prison, making impossible efforts to annihilate the space which could only be filled up by the ruin going on above. More than one black hole in the wall revealed to her where a cell had been; and her progress was again and again impeded by the links of some broken chain, coiling like a serpent in her path.