It soon became evident that Flesselles was trifling with the people, hoping to keep them unarmed until the troops should arrive to crush them mercilessly. He was well known as a dissolute man, hostile to popular liberty, and was undoubtedly a traitor, and a spy at the Hôtel de Ville, acting in communication with the court.[164] The electors now ordered thirty thousand pikes to be manufactured. Every smith was immediately employed, every forge was glowing, and for thirty-six hours, day and night, without intermission, the anvils rang till the pikes were finished. All this day of Monday the people thought only of defending themselves, but night again came, another night of terror, tumult, and sleeplessness. The Bastille was the great terror of Paris. While that remained in the hands of their enemies, with its impregnable walls and heavy guns commanding the city, there was no safety. As by an instinct, during the night of the 13th, the Parisians decided that the Bastille must be taken. With that fortress in their hands they could defend themselves and repel their foes. But how could the Bastille be taken? It was apparently as unassailable as Gibraltar's rock. Nothing could be more preposterous than the thought of storming the Bastille. "The idea," says Michelet, "was by no means reasonable. It was an act of faith." The Bastille stood in the very heart of the Faubourg St. Antoine, enormous, massive, and blackened with age, the gloomy emblem of royal prerogative, exciting by its mysterious power and menace the terror and the execration of every one who passed beneath the shadow of its towers. Even the sports of childhood dare not approach the empoisoned atmosphere with which it seemed to be enveloped. M. de Launey was governor of the fortress, He was no soldier, but a mean, mercenary man, despised by the Parisians. He contrived to draw from the establishment, by every species of cruelty and extortion, an income of twenty-five thousand dollars a year. He reduced the amount of fire-wood to which the shivering inmates were entitled; made a great profit on the wretched wine which he furnished to those who were able to buy, and even let out the little garden within the inclosure, thus depriving those prisoners who were not in dungeon confinement of the privilege of a walk there, which they had a right to claim. De Launey was not merely detested as Governor of the Bastille, but he was personally execrated as a greedy, sordid, merciless man. Linguet's Memoirs of the Bastille had rendered De Launey's name infamous throughout Europe. Such men are usually cowards. De Launey was both spiritless and imbecile. Had he not been both, the Bastille could not have been taken.[165]