And so it goes plunging through court and corridor; billowing uncontrollable, firing from windows—­on itself:  in hot frenzy of triumph, of grief and vengeance for its slain.  The poor Invalides will fare ill; one Swiss, running off in his white smock, is driven back, with a death-thrust.  Let all prisoners be marched to the Townhall, to be judged!—­Alas, already one poor Invalide has his right hand slashed off him; his maimed body dragged to the Place de Greve, and hanged there.  This same right hand, it is said, turned back de Launay from the Powder-Magazine, and saved Paris.

De Launay, ‘discovered in gray frock with poppy-coloured riband,’ is for killing himself with the sword of his cane.  He shall to the Hotel-de-Ville; Hulin Maillard and others escorting him; Elie marching foremost ‘with the capitulation-paper on his sword’s point.’  Through roarings and cursings; through hustlings, clutchings, and at last through strokes!  Your escort is hustled aside, felled down; Hulin sinks exhausted on a heap of stones.  Miserable de Launay!  He shall never enter the Hotel de Ville:  only his ’bloody hair-queue, held up in a bloody hand;’ that shall enter, for a sign.  The bleeding trunk lies on the steps there; the head is off through the streets; ghastly, aloft on a pike.

Rigorous de Launay has died; crying out, “O friends, kill me fast!” Merciful de Losme must die; though Gratitude embraces him, in this fearful hour, and will die for him; it avails not.  Brothers, your wrath is cruel!  Your Place de Greve is become a Throat of the Tiger; full of mere fierce bellowings, and thirst of blood.  One other officer is massacred; one other Invalide is hanged on the Lamp-iron:  with difficulty, with generous perseverance, the Gardes Francaises will save the rest.  Provost Flesselles stricken long since with the paleness of death, must descend from his seat, ’to be judged at the Palais Royal:’—­alas, to be shot dead, by an unknown hand, at the turning of the first street!—­

O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on Balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace are even now dancing with double-jacketted Hussar-Officers;—­and also on this roaring Hell porch of a Hotel-de-Ville!  Babel Tower, with the confusion of tongues, were not Bedlam added with the conflagration of thoughts, was no type of it.  One forest of distracted steel bristles, endless, in front of an Electoral Committee; points itself, in horrid radii, against this and the other accused breast.  It was the Titans warring with Olympus; and they scarcely crediting it, have conquered:  prodigy of prodigies; delirious,—­as it could not but be.  Denunciation, vengeance; blaze of triumph on a dark ground of terror:  all outward, all inward things fallen into one general wreck of madness!