The Little Old Portrait

"As a rule, news, even of great importance, travelled very slowly in those days. But not long after the return of Nanette there came to Valmont, as to even far remoter corners of France, with a rush like that of a mighty wind, tidings of the first tremendous outburst of the great storm -- the assault and taking of the prison of the Bastille by the infuriated mob. My mother well remembers that day in Paris. The terror which spread through all classes -- the strange stories which were afloat about the wretched prisoners released from the dungeons, where some of them had been confined till they had forgotten not only the crime -- imaginary in many cases -- for which they had been punished, but even their own names and histories! The destruction of the terrible Bastille can never be regretted, but it was accompanied by dreadful deeds. The murder of the governor and other officers who were but doing their duty; for the people, maddened by hunger as well as by their many wrongs, did not stop to consider which were the guilty and which the innocent. I have said to my mother that from this point I wish she would take this narrative into her own hands. It seems to me that as an eye-witness -- for in this year 1789, she was an intelligent girl of nearly thirteen -- she could describe with much more force and vividness many of the scenes which followed. But she begs me to continue as I have begun. The story concerns my father quite as much as herself, she says, and she wishes it to be written as much from his recollections, which he has often related to me, as from her own. So I must do my best, sadly imperfect though I feel it to be.

"The taking of the Bastille was the signal for outrages through many parts of the country. Chateaux were burnt, convents sacked and destroyed, many even among the superior farmer class, who had had nothing to do with the government or the oppression of the poor, whose only crime was that through their industry and economy they had grown richer than their neighbours, suffered as well as their betters. In Paris itself many of the most conspicuous among the nobility were dragged by the mob from their houses and put to death in a horrible way, by being hanged on the street lamps. These I have always thought much more to be pitied than those later sufferers who perished by the famous guillotine; for this first manner of death united insult to barbarity.