"Oh," said Billet when upon the tower top, "you have not dismounted the cannon, but merely drawn them in. I shall have to tell the people so."
"The cannon were mounted here by the King's command and by that alone can they be dismounted."
"Governor Launay," returned Billet, feeling himself rise to the level of the emergency, "the true sovereign is yonder and I counsel you to obey it."
He pointed to the grey-looking masses, spotted with blood from the night's battling, and reflecting the dying sunlight on their weapons up to the very moats.
"Friend, a man cannot know two masters," replied the royalist, holding his head up haughtily: "I, the Governor of the Bastile, know but one: the Sixteenth Louis, who put his sign-manual at the foot of the patent which made me the commander over men and material here."
"Are you not a French citizen?" demanded Billet warmly.
"I am a French nobleman," said the Count of Launay.
"True, you are a soldier, and speak like one."
"You are right," said the gentleman bowing. "I am a soldier and carry out my orders."
"Well, I am a citizen," went on Billet, "and as my duty as such is opposed to yours as the King's soldier, one of us must die. He who fulfills his orders or his duties."
"So you are determined to fire on the people?"
"Not unless I am fired at. I pledged myself to that effect to Lord Provost Flesselles' deputation. You see the guns have been retired, but at the first shot, I will roll one--say this one--forward out of the embrasure with my own hands, train it and point it, and fire with the slow-match you see there."
"If I believed that," said Billet, "before you could commit such a crime----"
"I have told you that I am a soldier and know nothing outside my orders."
"Then, look!" said Billet, drawing Launay to the gap in the battlements and pointing alternately in two different directions--the main street from the town and the street through the suburbs, "behold those who will henceforth give you orders."
Launay saw two black, dense, roaring bodies, undulating like snakes, with head and bodies in sight but the rearmost coils still waving onwards till lost in the hollows of the ground. All the bodies of these immense reptiles glittered with the scales. These were the two armies to which Billet had given the Bastile as the meeting-place, Marat's men and Gonchon's beggars. As they surged forward they brandished their weapons and yelled blood-curdling cries.