bled that magician who, having forfeited the charm, could no longer lay the spirits he had raised. For the French Guards in those memorable days disobeyed orders, broke open their barracks, and, marched through the capital crying, "Vive le Tiers État! We are the soldiers of the nation."
After this defection of the army, the Royalists found nothing wiser to do than the dismissal and exile of Necker. Lafayette's message to him was: "If you are dismissed, thirty thousand Parisians will bring you back to Versailles." Round the news-shops—whence poured a very flood of papers and pamphlets—in the cafés and public places, crowds of men formed and dispersed and formed again, who all at once flashed into lightning-like action at the cry "To arms, to arms!" uttered by the young Camille Desmoulins, whom we might call the Gallic cock of the Revolution. It was then that the people in a sublime rage battered down the massive doors of the Bastile, and with tears of joy gave liberty to its prisoners; it was then that the National Assembly, kindling with the passion of humanity, abolished in one night—the sacred night of the 4th of August—the legalised wrongs of centuries. "Let those titles be brought to us," cried one representative, "which are an outrage to delicacy, an insult to humanity, titles which force men to harness themselves to carts like beasts of burden! Let those charters be brought to us in virtue of which men have passed long nights in beating the pools so that their frogs might not trouble the slumbers of a voluptuous seigneur!" A torrent of generous emotion swept over the assembled deputies: nobles, priests, dignitaries of the law and municipalities, all parties seemed carried away on that irresistible current. The feudal
