Chapter 47: Bastille Fortress (3)
Chapter 47: Bastille Fortress (3)
“…Deputy Warden. Am I seeing things right now?”
“…No. If I can see it too, then it doesn’t seem to be a hallucination.”
René de Launay—commander of the Bastille fortress and warden of the Bastille prison—kept blinking hard.
Because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and because he didn’t want to.
“…What does that look like to you?”
“You mean the Parisians waving red flags?”
“No. The thing they’re holding along with the flags.”
At Launay’s words, the two men could only stare blankly at the hundreds—no, thousands—of figures encamped twenty-four meters below, beneath the thick summit of the Bastille.
• Wave the red flag, citizens of Paris!
• Cut down the enemy who blocks our future—the future of the people!
• To punish the enemy, it takes courage once, and courage twice.
• We are not a mob—we are a citizens’ militia!
• If we win, we are innocent; if we fail, we are guilty, so we will not retreat before we die.
“…W-what are you people!? This is a military hospital! There are patients here!”
“If you don’t want to die, shut up and open the armory door. It’s a military facility, so there should be emergency supplies.”
“No—what on earth are you planning to use that for!?”
“Doctor, you don’t need to know any more. Ten seconds. Open it.”
The armory of Les Invalides military hospital was opened.
Thousands of unidentified people came out of the armory, gripping guns and swords in their hands.
“Everyone, I’ll say one last thing! Some of us will die.
No—we will definitely die! But unless we die, we can’t break the chains fastened to our feet! So what must we do!?”
“Danton! Danton! Danton!”
“Stand up! Stand up and shoot the chains apart with the guns in your hands! Before they trample us under their boots and kill us, let’s trample them under our feet and kill them!”
“Waaaaaah!”
“We’re going to the Bastille! We will tear off that monstrous chain the king forged—bound to Paris’s feet by the king himself!”
Grenelle, Mars, Champs-Élysées, Saint-Gervais, Louvre, Notre-Dame. Every street filled with people.
• Blue is liberty! White is equality! Red shall be fraternity!
• You there, madam—won’t you pin this flower to your hat? Pin the tricolor flower and go with us!
• A red cap and a red flag—we are all one beneath fraternity!
A middle-aged man in his forties wearing a yellowed, faded ochre jacket—
A girl who had only just passed puberty, peach fuzz still not gone from her face—
A housewife who used to grumble that her children ate too much—
An eight-year-old little boy who turned a factory machine belt—
Each time the red flags surged from one street to the next, they multiplied.
Some held muskets, some held sickles, some held swords, some held brooms.
The people gathered before the Bastille.
“…Is this all?”
“…Yes. It is.”
At Commander Launay’s words—no, Bastille fortress commander Launay’s words—the adjutant answered weakly.
“Only a hundred soldiers total, and fifteen cannons. Hahaha!”
Commander Launay laughed in disbelief. In his eyes, the sea of red flags and silhouettes outside the fortress stung.
“…At least we have plenty of ammunition. We won’t have to charge that number with bayonets, at any rate.”
As he spoke, the commander placed his hand against the solid wall of the Bastille.
A fortress narrow but solid—24 meters high, 68 meters long, 27 meters wide.
A fortress no one could even think to break without proper siege engines, or something like the Ottoman Urban cannon said to have blasted down Constantinople’s walls.
Today, that wall felt even more reliable to Commander Launay.
“Adjutant—do you know how much advantage a defender has over an attacker?”
“Yes. At least threefold, at most tenfold.”
At the adjutant’s answer, Launay turned his eyes from the wall to the adjutant and said,
“That’s right. And what if the attacker is a militia?”
“…Then perhaps the defender’s advantage could be more than twentyfold.”
“Yes. That’s probably right.”
Launay lifted his gaze toward the sky.
“…Damn. It’s a miserable kind of blue.”
“Yes?”
“No…”
At the adjutant’s words, Launay raised a hand to stop him, and held the sky in his eyes for a moment—brief, but clear.
July Paris was, as always, painfully bright.
After some time, Commander Launay lowered his gaze from the sky and looked to the adjutant.
“Load grapeshot into the cannons.”
“Yes, Commander.”
For some reason, there seemed to be sorrow in Commander Launay’s words.
“Hoo… hoo. I can do it. I can do it!”
For some reason, the woman wearing men’s clothes tugged down the red hood that nearly slipped off her head and spoke.
Cold sweat streamed from her hands, trickling down from her little finger along the musket’s stock and dripping onto the ground.
Her fiancé had begged her to stay home, but when had she ever listened to anyone?
When the spirit of an era was breathing like this, how could anyone stay shut inside their house?
So Anne-Josèphe Théroigne stood firm and shouted with the others.
“Long live the citizens of Paris! Long live the National Assembly!”
“Long live the citizens of Paris! Long live the National Assembly!”
How long had they shouted?
Someone walked out atop the fortress wall and waved his hat.
But unlike the friendly gesture, the man’s voice from the wall was firm.
“Citizens of Paris! Return home at once! This is the final warning! You are threatening a military facility!”
Naturally, excitement boiled up around Théroigne.
“What!? You should be the ones coming down from the wall!”
“Is wiping the asses of filthy pigs what a soldier’s supposed to do!?”
“Long live the National Assembly!”
The man on the wall stared at the scene for a long while, then disappeared from view again.
“See!? They’re definitely scared of us!”
“Long live the citizens of France!”
“Waaah!!!”
The crowd cheered, raising the red flags, the tricolor flags, and their weapons high.
But in their obsession with cheering, they failed to notice the cannon embrasures in the fortress wall—blocked by wooden planks—were opening.
“Grapeshot loading complete!”
“Now push it up to the embrasure!”
Clunk!
As three soldiers shoved the cannon into the embrasure between the bulging stone walls with a grunt, the wooden wheels rolled and the heavy cannon made a deep, weighty sound.
“All batteries—prepare to fire!”
“Prepare!”
At the officer’s command behind the cannons, the soldiers holding them repeated the order.
“All batteries, aim squarely into the middle of those rebels!”
Kiiii-kikikik—
As the soldiers rotated the muzzles and adjusted their aim, the wooden wheels scraped against stone with an unpleasant sound.
Then, with the sharp ring of a blade leaving its scabbard, the officer behind them swung his sword and roared,
“All guns! Fire grapeshot!”
“Fire!”
KWA-KWA-KWANG!
With a thunderous blast, the cannons recoiled backward.
“…Huh—what is this?”
It was Théroigne’s first words after collapsing to the ground.
The sky was spinning in her eyes.
With her numb body, she barely managed to lift herself and look around.
Objects blurred into three and four. Her head spun, and nausea kept rising in her throat, like she was riding in a carriage.
Even so, one thing was unmistakable to her eyes.
Red.
“Uweeeek!”
In the end, Théroigne couldn’t hold it back and vomited what was in her stomach.
As her hearing gradually returned, the scene before her sharpened.
The whole world was blood-red.
The people in the first row—where had they gone? They were gone now.
The people in the second row were half there.
The people in the third row had chunks missing from their bodies, rolling on the ground.
The people in the fourth row stood like Théroigne—vacant, barely upright.
“W-we have to help—!”
At that moment, the man standing beside Théroigne couldn’t finish his words and collapsed.
Ratatatatang!!!
Behind that man, more than a dozen people toppled backward. They would never rise again.
With trembling eyes, Théroigne slowly looked up at the wall.
Dozens of soldiers were reloading.
“…To crush the enemy, it takes courage once, and courage twice…”
Théroigne picked up the tricolor flag clutched in the hand of the man who had fallen beside her and spoke in a small, quiet voice.
“To crush the enemy, it takes courage once! Courage twice!”
At some point, the tricolor in her hand was whipping high in the air.
The grip was slick and slipping—soaked with cold sweat and the blood of the flag’s original owner. Her flag-bearing hand trembled. But Théroigne shook it with all her strength.
And with that, the thousands behind her surged forward.
“Courage once! Courage twice!”
Kicking off the ground reddened with citizens’ blood, they ran and shouted.
“Long live France! Long live the citizens of Paris!”
July 14, 1789.
The Bastille fortress fell to the “mob.”
July 15, 1789.
Bastille fortress commander Launay was shot by the “revolutionary army.”