This was true with regard to Louis the Sixteenth. It required a gigantic mind even to comprehend the dangers that had each year crowded closer and closer to his throne; and he had no ministers capable of giving him thorough enlightenment, because they did not themselves understand these terrible signs of the future. Was it strange, then, that he received the suggestions of this singular man with astonishment; that his kind heart swelled to his rude eloquence, and he felt, for the time, ready to lead his people on to the broader liberty they asked for? Was it strange, either, that while the man was talking, the influences which had surrounded the king for life came back and stifled the generous impulse? He knew that in order to benefit a class of which he knew little, he must first enter into bitter contest with those who had been the friends and supporters of his house since it was royally planted on the throne! “These are vast questions, and involve much which my people do not understand,” said Louis, a little impatiently; for if his reason had not been convinced, it certainly was disturbed. “I am not sorry, even in this way, to meet one of the people who dares to speak the truth. Had it been a courtier, now, or even a minister, who ventured so far, I am not sure that he would have been a stranger to our prison of the Bastille to-morrow morning.” The locksmith shuddered. “Ah! that fearful prison, sire, planted in the very heart of Paris, it has become so hateful to the people, that they mutter curses on it in passing.” “That bespeaks them unreasoning and factious. Nations that build up thrones, at the same time lay the foundation of prisons; crime must be punished that the people may live. The palace in which I stand is not more an appendage of royalty than the prison of the Bastille.” Louis spoke the truth; despotism had no monument more closely allied to itself than the Bastille. It had so long been an appendage to royalty, that no king, not even the kind-hearted Louis, ever thought of its horrors, save as necessary to the punishment of those who were considered as his enemies. “Sire,” answered the locksmith, turning pale under the memories that crowded upon him, “I have been in the Bastille, and know all the horrors of its dungeons. Has any man ever told your highness of the deep, fetid caves and cells that are dug to a level with the common-sewers of the city, where men born, perhaps, to luxury, have to struggle with toads, rats, and every species of foul vermin, for the privilege of breathing the pestilential air? Have they told you of strong men chained by the waist to walls reeking with slime, till they become little better than skeletons; when the rusty girdles were unclasped, and they were carried, in the dead of night, to the cemetery of St. Paul, and buried without name and without record, save some rude inscription scratched upon the walls of a dungeon by the rusted nail, which some poor wretch had hoarded as a treasure?”