So thoroughly did the Bastille symbolize oppression in the public mind of France that the anniversary of the day of its fall has been made the national holiday. One of the schemes proposed for the decoration of the vacant square was the erection of an enormous elephant to be made from guns taken in battle by Napoleon. A plaster model stood in the _place_ for several years, the same animal which served as a refuge for the street urchin, Gavroche, in Victor Hugo’s “Les Misérables.” After 1830 the present “July Column” was erected to the memory of the victims of the “Three Glorious Days” of the Revolution of that year. Upon hearing of the Fall of the Bastille the king made concessions to the Assembly and then went to Paris accompanied by a huge and motley crowd armed with guns and scythes. The mayor went through the ceremony of presenting him with the keys of the city in token of its loyalty, while at almost the same time Lafayette was organizing the citizens into the National Guard, who wore a cockade made up not only of red and blue, the colors of Paris, but of white, the royal hue. The nobles, awakened to the danger of a general insurrection, tried to put a stop to the rioting and incendiarism that was spreading over the country by offering to yield their privileges. This concession proved but a sop, for the people’s hunger was now unappeasable. Louis continued to spend most of his time at Versailles to the dissatisfaction of the Parisians. When they heard of the expressions of loyalty uttered by the king’s body-guard at a banquet they voted that the court had no right to feast while Paris was suffering for bread, marched to Versailles and forced the king, the queen, and the little dauphin--the baker and his wife and the baker’s boy, they called them--to go back with them to town. Marie Antoinette had succeeded in making herself extremely unpopular, both with the nobility who objected to her independence of the laws of etiquette to which they were accustomed, and with the people, who called her the “Austrian Wolf,” and who really believed her to be sinister and wicked instead of a gay and affectionate young woman, whose worst fault was thoughtlessness. If she had had before but small knowledge of the opinion in which she was held by her subjects she discovered it during this ten-mile drive when her carriage was surrounded by east-end roughs and disheveled women from the Halles who had only been deterred from killing her as she stood beside her husband at Versailles by her display of dauntless courage, and who crowded upon her now, yelling indecencies and shaking their fists at the king and the uncomprehending little prince and his sister. This return to Paris was called the “Joyous Entry.”