Nearly at the same time that de Jars was set free, the gates of the Bastile were opened to admit three citizens of Paris, who had been guilty of a crime which could not be overlooked; they had dared to remonstrate, perhaps somewhat too roughly, against being robbed of the means of subsistence. “They went,” says Guy Patin, “to M. Cornuel, and in some degree threatened him, on a report being spread, that the payment of the annuities receivable at the Town Hall was about to be suspended, and the money to be applied _in usus bellicos_. The names of these three annuitants are Bourges, Chenu, and Celoron, and they are all three _boni viri optimeque mihi noti_. God grant, I pray, that no misfortune may happen to them.” Whether the kind prayer of Patin was heard, we are not told. That such things should occur in a country governed as France was, is quite natural. Richelieu brooked not even the shadow of opposition; and, Louis, submissive slave though he was to an imperious minister, had all the brutal pride of an Oriental despot. In two instances (out of many which might be quoted), the one not long before, and the other shortly after, this period, the monarch, to whom parasites prostituted the title of “the just,” did not scruple to treat with contumelious insolence the parliament of Paris, a body of magistrates, eminent for their learning and other qualities. On the first occasion, having taken offence at a request which they made, he told them that, “in future, whenever he came to them, he should expect to be received outside the door of their hall, by four presidents on their knees, as the custom had formerly been.” The second time, when, with respect to the duke de Valette’s trial, the president Bellièvre, in decorous but dignified language, remonstrated with Louis on his gross violation of justice and proper feeling, in wishing the judges to sit in his own palace, while he was present to overawe them, he furiously replied, that he detested all those who opposed his trying a duke and peer wherever he pleased. They were, he told them, ignorant beings, unfit for their office, and he did not know whether he should not put others in their place. “I will be obeyed,” said he; “and I will soon make you see plainly that all privileges are founded only on a bad custom, and that I will not hear them talked about any more.” But from this—which, however, can scarcely be called a digression—let us return to his captives in the Bastile.