THE TWELFTH OF JULY 1789 was a Sunday. There had been riots and food was becoming more and more scarce. The dismissal of the minister, the defiance of the National Assembly, the stubbornness of the king, all conveyed a sense of impending disaster those first weeks of July. Now, the streets were all plastered with enormous-sized De Par le Roi inviting peaceable citizens to remain indoors.
From my window, I could look down the length of the Champs-Elysées—eight hundred and twenty double steps according to my master—to the place Louis XV. I could also see, around the bronze statue of Louis XV, the dragoons and hussars assembling in their red-and-white-and-yellow uniforms. All sorts of rumors ran rampant, and James went to the Palais Royal every day to see what he could find out. At twelve, the cannon went off as usual when the sun passed its meridian, but this day, its low thunder struck gloom and disquiet in the hearts of almost everyone.
Through my master’s telescope I watched in the distance as a growing crowd, festooned with green cockades, grew and like a flight of locusts filled the place Louis XV. There were some people armed with axes, staves, others with picks and pitchforks. I knew James was some-where in Paris. Perhaps even in the very mob which was now entering the square. I saw the crowd being charged upon by the German Hussars; I heard noises of shots, sabers flashed clearly, and puffs of smoke from muskets rose like tiny clouds over the heads of the men. Then the crowd exploded along what streets and alleys they could, and suddenly the square was empty with the soldiers pursuing agitators and Sunday strollers alike up the avenues. It was a fascinating spectacle and I sat by the window all day.
When darkness fell, all the roads out of the city, including our own Champs-Elysées, were blocked by pickets and barriers. There were stalled carriages and vehicles of all sorts. Traffic, wheel to wheel, immobile from the tollgate all the way to the place Louis XV.
On Monday, Paris was like a tomb. When James and my master went out to investigate, they found that no one had reported for work; all had joined the rebellion. Everything was closed, except for wine and bread shops. James was sent to prowl the Palais Royal he knew so well and to report back to the mansion. When he returned late that evening, he told us that the people were busily sewing cockades to be worn, not the green of d’Artois, but the red and blue of Paris, on a white background which stood for the constitution. They called it the “Tricolore.” Our ministry was ecstatic. The people of Paris had chosen the colors of the American Revolution.
Outside our house, the streets were deserted and silent. That evening, by a special new order, every window was lit in every house. I tried to imagine Paris, a maze of winding narrow streets, deserted, crossed by the large boulevards also deserted, except for the shadows of the National Guard patrolling with their torches and flares. All the lights of Paris, no more than a gathering of fireflies compared to the blazing lights of Versailles, where the National Assembly sat through the night. We slept little and by dawn on Tuesday both James and Thomas Jefferson had abandoned the mansion.
While the Hôtel de Langeac was locked and barred, the hot July sun rose and the National Guard prepared to march on the Hôtel des Invalides. By the end of the day, the Bastille, the fortress dungeon which was the very symbol of the king’s unlimited power, had been stormed and taken.
James was an eyewitness to that event, which had marked the turning point of the rebellion. Later on, James, like Monsieur de Tude, would often drink and dine out on the tale of the storming of the Bastille. That night, in the oval salon of the hôtel, servants and masters alike were held in thrall to the present. Even James’s own highly developed imagination could not embellish the drama of that siege. How much he actually saw and how much he heard about, I would never know, nor would any of his audience, but as he told his tale, we fully sensed the extent of the drama. We sat, Martha, Polly, Mr. Short, Petit, our professors, and all the other servants, spellbound while, in his strangely accented French, he recounted the Fourteenth of July.
He had slipped out of the mansion in the middle of the night and joined his comrades at one of the cafés near the Palais Royal. He had slept on the floor for the rest of the night, rising again at six. Hot rum had been served. Someone had pinned a tricolor cockade on him; the women had stayed up all night sewing. He had taken a butcher’s knife from the kitchen as his only arm, and now he joined the milling militia as they surged halfway up the Champs-Elysées and turned toward the Invalides, where someone had said there were arms to be had. James, still in the light-yellow livery of the Hôtel de Langeac, unwashed, already lightheaded on the morning’s rum like the rest, became one with the thousands of marching men and women. A strange elation had stolen over him, he said, his heart had beat in rhythm with that of his neighbor, as if everyone were one huge crawling animal of which he felt one particle of skin, one strand of hair.
The mob arrived at the walls of the Invalides, and the garrison did not fire upon them as the walls were scaled and the gates flung open. They had rushed in, spreading through all the rooms and passages of the great building. A roar went up as the place where arms had been was found and seized. Those nearest snatched, struggled, and clutched at them. There was no order, no leaders, no officers as James looked around him and saw thousands of firelocks hoisted onto thousands of shoulders with the cry of “On to the Bastille!” The dreaded prison-tomb with walls nine feet thick which was the Bastille had been battered down, the drawbridge lifted and manned with a cannon since Sunday. Since early morning the cry had been, “On to the Bastille!” and as the cry went up again the whole suburb of Saint-Antoine was marching as one man. The people, now armed, turned as a flock of wild geese, homing toward the eight grim towers that one could see over the rooftops of Paris from almost every point in the city. The new army arrived at the drawbridge of the Bastille at one o’clock. By five o’clock, all the soldiers were covered with blood. The wounded and the dead were being carried into the houses along the rue de la Cerisaie. For four hours the crowd howled before the gates.
Cannon and musket shots from the towers hit at random, crumpling men and women who sank and then were crushed under the weight of others pressing forward. The crowd increased until it spilled down and over the quais of the Pont Neuf. Then, without warning, a cry rumbled back like a wave over the sweating, bleating heads … the Bastille had surrendered.
The Bastille was taken. The Bastille had fallen.
James threw up his arms. We were all hanging on to his every word. The forward motion of the mob, like a wave, surged headlong toward its goal, and had not the National Guard wheeled around and leveled its guns against its own, the mob would have plunged suicidally by the thousands into the moat of the prison. The governor of the Bastille tried to kill himself but was taken prisoner. His captors meant to take him to the Hôtel de Ville through the cursing, clutching crowd; only his bloody scalp, held up in a victorious hand, arrived. The head, aloft on a pike, was now traveling through the streets. The rest of him had been torn to pieces.
The evening sun was setting, and James, feverish and exhausted, battered and dirty, fell quiet as did his awed audience. The word of the fall of the Bastille had begun to spread over Paris, and, amid gunfire, we heard the sound of music. The people of Paris were dancing in the streets.
We put James to bed and, despite the bath, the smell of the gunpowder hovered over him. He sat propped up on his pillows grinning. His eyes seemed to say this: This slave from Virginia’s made history today. This slave ran with the Revolution! His eyes said to me: I am mine. We are going to take ourselves to freedom. If God let me do this, then He will leave us take our freedom without running. Take ourselves, without stealing. We are going to be free. Everything is changed.
He smiled and I smiled back.