know not whom to strike, and they strike at random. They spare the
Swiss soldiers who have fired at them, and who, in their blue
smocks, seem to them to be prisoners; on the other hand, by way of
compensation, they fall furiously on the invalides who opened the
gates to them; the man who prevented the governor from blowing up
the fortress has his wrist severed by the blow of a saber, is twice
pierced with a sword and is hung, and the hand which had saved one
of the districts of Paris is promenaded through the streets in
triumph. The officers are dragged along and five of them are
killed, with three soldiers, on the spot, or on the way. During the
long hours of firing, the murderous instinct has become aroused, and
the wish to kill, changed into a fixed idea, spreads afar among the
crowd which has hitherto remained inactive. It is convinced by its
own clamor; a hue and cry is all that it now needs; the moment one
strikes, all want to strike. "Those who had no arms," says an
officer, "threw stones at me;[47] the women ground their teeth and
shook their fists at me. Two of my men had already been
assassinated behind me. I finally got to within some hundreds of
paces of the Hôtel-de-Ville, amidst a general cry that I should be
hung, when a head, stuck on a pike, was presented to me to look at,
while at. the same moment I was told that it was that of M. de
Launay," the governor. - The latter, on going out, had received
the cut of a sword on his right shoulder; n reaching the Rue Saint-
Antoine "everybody pulled his hair out and struck him." Under the
arcade of Saint-Jean he was already "severely wounded." Around him,
some said, "his head ought to be struck off;" others, "let him be
hung;" and others, "he ought to be tied to a horse's tail." Then, in
despair, and wishing to put an end to his torments, he cried out,
"Kill me," and, in struggling, kicked one of the men who held him in
the lower abdomen. On the instant he is pierced with bayonets,