people to fall back a little, advanced themselves to make their demand
of the Governor, and in that instant a discharge from the Bastile killed
four people of those nearest to the deputies. The deputies retired:
the people rushed against the place, and almost in an instant were in
possession of a fortification, defended by one hundred men, of infinite
strength, which in other times had stood several regular sieges, and
had never been taken. How they got in, has as yet been impossible to
discover. Those who pretend to have been of the party tell so many
different stories, as to destroy the credit of them all. They took all
the arms, discharged the prisoners, and such of the garrison as were not
killed in the first moment of fury, carried the Governor and Lieutenant
Governor to the Greve (the place of public execution), cut off their
heads, and sent them through the city in triumph to the _Palais Royal_.
About the same instant, a treacherous correspondence having been
discovered in Monsieur de Flesselles, _Prévôt des Marchands_, they
seized him in the _Hotel de Ville_, where he was in the exercise of
his office, and cut off his head. These events, carried imperfectly
to Versailles, were the subject of two successive deputations from the
States to the King, to both of which he gave dry and hard answers; for
it has transpired, that it had been proposed and agitated in Council, to
seize on the principal members of the States General, to march the whole
army down upon Paris, and to suppress its tumults by the sword. But, at
night, the Duke de Liancourt forced his way into the King's bed-chamber,
and obliged him to hear a full and animated detail of the disasters of
the day in Paris. He went to bed deeply impressed. The decapitation
of De Launai worked powerfully through the night on the whole
aristocratical party, insomuch that, in the morning, those of the
greatest influence on the Count d'Artois, represented to him the
absolute necessity that the King should give up every thing to the
States. This according well enough with the dispositions of the King,