At that time the upper rooms of the vast galleries, now converted into handsome restaurants, were devoted to gaming, and it was no child's play, then, either. Here the excitable nobles, fascinated by the green cloth, lived in a constant whirl of excitement. The stakes ran high. Fortunes were made and lost in a night, and the Seine never did so good a business in the way of suicide. While these elegantly furnished and brilliantly lighted salons witnessed the demonstrative joy of the lucky winner or the gloomy despondency of the unhappy loser, scenes of an entirely different nature, and far more terrible in their results were being enacted in the cafés below. In these cafés met the leaders of the people who were organizing for the destruction of the thoughtless revelers above their heads. It was the old story over again. The _canaille_, as the nobles termed the people, were groaning under the loads imposed upon them. The life-blood of the French people was being drained by the parasites of royalty--it was waste on the one hand and starvation on the other. Every gold piece that passed upon the tables above represented so much unpaid for sweat from the many below. Absolute power had, as it always does, run into unbridled license, and unbridled license had made the people desperate. They might not succeed, but they could no more than die, and the life they had was not worth the having. It was in these cafés that Camille Desmoulins organized the people, and with such arms as they could seize on that memorable morning in July, marched upon the Bastille. They did not need arms. That mob, so led, could have torn down the hoary old wrong with their bare hands. There was not a man or woman in the throng that surged out of the Palais that morning who had not some especial reason for its destruction. Confined within its walls had died their brothers and fathers. To them it was royalty, and to royalty they owed every woe that afflicted them. Desperate, determined men they were, crazed with excitement, and caring for nothing. They reached the Bastille and hurled themselves against its stubborn sides. Again and again were they beaten back by the garrison within, but each repulse only served to more determined efforts, and finally on the 14th of July the Bastille was swept from the face of the earth. Nothing was left of it but the terrible memories of the bloody past. [Sidenote: THE COMMUNE.] In 1801-7 the first Napoleon assembled the Tribunate in the Palais-Royal, and in 1815, Lucien Bonaparte made it his residence during the "One Hundred Days." From 1815 to 1830 it was again in the possession of Orleans family, and Louis Philippe occupied it until his ascension to the throne. Eighteen [Illustration: VISION OF THE COMMUNE.]