terrible, but temporary excesses which stained its progress have been so unduly magnified by reactionary politicians, while the cruelties of the White Terror[163] are passed by. [Footnote 161: It is difficult, however, to read the sober and irrefutable picture of their miserable condition, given in the famous Books II. and V. of Taine's _Ancien Regime_, without deep emotion.] [Footnote 162: See also Bodley's _France_, where the author favours the view that Robespierre was not a democrat with a thirst for blood, but rather a man of government, destroyed as a reactionary by surviving Revolutionists who saw their end coming.] [Footnote 163: After the Thermidorian reaction in 1795, ninety-seven Jacobins were massacred by the royalists at Lyons on 5th May; thirty at Aix on 11th May. Similar horrors were enacted at Avignon, Arles, and Marseilles, and at other places in the south.] Camille Desmoulins has described in his Memoirs how on 11th July he was lifted on the famous table, known as the tripod of the Revolution, in front of the Cafe Foy, in the garden of the Palais Royal, and delivered that short but pregnant oration which preceded the capture of the Bastille on the 14th, warning the people that a St. Bartholomew of patriots was contemplated, and that the Swiss and German troops in the Champ de Mars were ready for the butchery. As the crowd rushed to the Hotel de Ville, shouting "To arms!" they were charged by the Prince de Lambesc at the head of a German regiment, and the first blood of the Revolution in Paris was shed. The Bastille, like the monarchy, was the victim of its past sins. That grisly fortress, long useless as a defence of Paris, with the jaws of its rusty cannon opening on the most populous quarter of the city to overawe sedition, and its sinister memories of the Man in the Iron Mask,[164] symbolised in the popular mind all that was hateful in the old _regime_, though it had long ceased to be more than occasionally used as a state prison. If we would restore its aspect we must imagine the houses at the ends of the Rue St. Antoine and the Boulevard Henri IV. away and the huge mass erect on their site and on the lines marked in white stone on the present Place de la Bastille. A great portal, always open by day, yawned on the Rue St. Antoine opposite the Rue des Tournelles and gave access to the first quadrangle which was lined with shops and the houses of the _personnel_ of the prison: then came a second gate, with entrances for carriages and for foot passengers, each with its drawbridge. Beyond these a second quadrangle was entered, to the right of which stood the Governor's house and an armoury. Another double portal to the left gave entrance across the old fosse once fed by the waters of the Seine, to the prison fortress itself, with its eight tall blackened towers, each divided into five floors, and its crenelated ramparts.