Paris, indeed, was the very crater of the Revolution. In the scholars’ attics on the left bank argument was growing loud where only whispers had been heard before; in the crowded tenements of the eastern quarter around the Saint Antoine Gate, and especially amid the fallen grandeurs of the once fashionable Marais people were talking now where once they had hardly dared to think. The mob that was soon to take unspeakable license in the name of Liberty was watching for an opportunity to test its strength. It made its first trial amid the excitements of the election to the States General which Louis was forced to summon when the Notables failed to suggest any solution of the country’s problems. It met in the spring of 1789, the first time in one hundred and seven-five years. Riots were frequent, prophetic of the struggle with the king which began as soon as the sitting opened at Versailles. Louis closed the hall to the assemblage and they met in the tennis court and took the famous oath by which they bound themselves not to disband until they had prepared a written constitution. They called themselves the National Constituent Assembly, the nobility and clergy joined them at the king’s request, and they voted thereafter not by classes but as individuals. Some of the Third Estate knew definitely what they wanted. A peasant declared that he was going to work for the abolition of three things--pigeons, because they ate the grain; rabbits, because they ate the sprouting corn; and monks, because they ate the sheaves. Three weeks after the Oath of the Tennis Court, Desmoulins, a young journalist, made an inflammatory speech in the garden of the Palais Royal, declaring that the fact of the king’s surrounding his family with Swiss soldiers was an introduction of force that made the wise regard the Bastille as a menace to the city. The facts seem to be that most of the prisoners were well cared for, so well fed that Bastille diet was a town joke, and, as a picture by Fragonard shows, might even entertain their friends. On July 14, 1789, two days after Desmoulins’ speech, the Parisians poured against the fortress a horde of citizens armed with weapons taken from the Hôtel des Invalides. They forced the first drawbridge, burned the governor’s house and easily compelled his surrender, since the garrison of which the people declared themselves in terror consisted only of about eighty men who were but scantily provided with ammunition. The crowd set free the prisoners, who numbered but a half dozen or so under Louis’ mild rule, seized the captain and hurried him to the Grève where they struck off his head and carried it about the city on a pike--the first of such hideous sights of which the Revolution was to know an appalling number. The destruction of the huge mass of masonry was begun the next day and lasted through five years. Lafayette sent one of the keys to General Washington.