This agony of a season was dissolved in an hour. The "walking corpses" (_les cadavres ambulans_) of the Luxembourg were recalled to life by the revolution of the 9th of Thermidor. It came with the din of the tocsin, and the beat to arms which, until that day had gathered the rabble to follow the tumbrils to the guillotine. The tocsin continued, and the rattle of the drums increased, and the trampling of feet towards the Luxembourg grew louder. The remnant of the suspects gathered in the gallery: the last massacre was to come. No! The doors were burst open; a shout went up. Robespierre had fallen. The Reign of Terror was finished. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] CHAPTER X. THE BASTILLE. "... if once it were left in the power of any, the highest, magistrate to imprison arbitrarily whomever he or his officers thought proper (as in France is daily practised by the Crown), there would soon be an end of all other rights and immunities."—BLACKSTONE. After enduring for centuries an oppression as rigorous and as cruel as any nation had ever been subjected to, this idea dawned, almost in an hour, upon the mind of France. It did not matter that the King who occupied the throne at this time was, if not at all a wise one, at least one of the most humane, and distinctly the best intentioned, and the only French sovereign who had ever really cared to soften the lot of his prisoners. He did not soften their lot in the least, because he was weak and indolent, and in the hands of the least honest of his ministers; but his predecessors, almost without exception, had lent their efforts or their sanction to the support of that old malignant policy, descended from the feudal times, that prison was properly a place of torment. The quick aspiration of liberty, born at last of a wretchedness that was past enduring, inflamed the heart of the whole nation. It took Paris, as it were, by the throat. What thing in Paris opposed itself most visibly to the "natural rights" and liberty of man? Paris said: The Bastille! Up then, and let the Bastille go down. They went there, a very ordinary crowd of rioters, and overturned it. The Bastille, which the superstitious fears of ages had thought impregnable, fell like an old ruined house (which it was) in a midsummer gust. But the fall of it shook Europe to its foundations, and before the dust had vanished, it was seen that the Bastille had carried with it the throne of France, and every shred and vestige of the system which that throne represented.