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Bastille   /bˈæstɪl/  /bˌæstˈɪl/   Listen
Bastille

noun
1.
A fortress built in Paris in the 14th century and used as a prison in the 17th and 18th centuries; it was destroyed July 14, 1789 at the start of the French Revolution.
2.
A jail or prison (especially one that is run in a tyrannical manner).



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"Bastille" Quotes from Famous Books



... Ranger spoke without facing her. "I've read a good bit, ma'am, and I'm a noble listener. I remember good, too. Why, I had a picture of the Bastille once." He pronounced it "Bastilly," and his hearer settled back. "That was some calaboose, now, wasn't it?" A moment later he inquired, ingenuously, "I don't suppose you ever ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... to determine the fate of Louis. Since the capture of the Bastille in the first days of the Revolution the National Government had with difficulty supported itself against the populace of the capital; and, even before the foreigner threatened Paris with fire and sword, Paris had learnt to look ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... June they declared themselves a national assembly, and commenced work upon a constitution under the direction of Siyes, who well merited the epithet, "indefatigable constitution-grinder," applied to Paine by Cobbett. Not long after, the attempted coup d'tat of Louis XVI. failed, the Bastille was demolished, and the political Saturnalia ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... were hoarded for the particular enjoyment of the worm, whose feast was only at rare intervals disturbed by some student regardless of difficulties. To the poor, worn, unheeded authors of those days, serenely starving in garrets, assuredly the British Museum must have been as impenetrable as a Bastille. We imagine the prim under-librarian glancing with a supercilious expression upon the names and addresses of many poor, aspiring, honourable men—men, whose "condition," to use the phrase of the trustees, ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... a lion. How we youngsters applauded him! He told Richelieu to his face that he would be delighted to have him visit Perigny and dance the saraband before his peasant girls. He was always breaking the edicts, and but for the king he would have spent most of his time in the Bastille. He hasn't been to ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... 1789.—A collision between Prince de Lambesc's regiment and the people became the signal for the destruction of the Bastille. ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner

... [Means of restraint.] Prison.— N. prison, prison house; jail, gaol, cage, coop, den, cell; stronghold, fortress, keep, donjon, dungeon, Bastille, oubliette, bridewell[obs3], house of correction, hulks, tollbooth, panopticon[obs3], penitentiary, guardroom, lockup, hold; round house, watch house, station house, sponging house; station; house of detention, black hole, pen, fold, pound; inclosure &c. 232; isolation ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... skipped himself with satisfaction into the monstrous matrimonial bed: it could only be mounted by means of a stool and chair. But the poor, secluded little woman, older than he, must have climbed up with a heavy heart, to lie and face the gloomy Bastille of mahogany, the great cupboard opposite, or to turn wearily sideways to the great cheval mirror, which performed a perpetual and hideous bow before her grace. Such furniture! It could never be ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... part of Paula's journey in which Somerset did not think of her. He imagined her in the hotel at Havre, in her brief rest at Paris; her drive past the Place de la Bastille to the Boulevart Mazas to take the train for Lyons; her tedious progress through the dark of a winter night till she crossed the isothermal line which told of the beginning of a southern atmosphere, and onwards to the ancient ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... WITH THE MASK, is first known to us from a kind of notebook kept by du Junca, Lieutenant of the Bastille. On September 18, 1698, he records the arrival of the new Governor of the Bastille, M. de Saint-Mars, bringing with him, from his last place, the Isles Sainte-Marguerite, in the bay of Cannes, 'an old prisoner whom he had at Pignerol. He keeps the prisoner always ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... your spiders." Referring, I suppose, to Paul Pellisson-Fontanier, the academician, and a famous prisoner in the Bastille, who trained a spider to eat flies ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... a French adventurer, the Chevalier de Saint-Lubin, who had a loathing for food and abstained from every kind of meat and drink for fifty-eight days. Saint-Sauver, at that time Lieutenant of the Bastille, put a close watch on this man and certified to the verity of the fast. The European Magazine in 1783 contained an account of the Calabria earthquake, at which time a girl of eighteen was buried under ruins for six days. The edge of a barrel fell on her ankle and partly separated it, the dust and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... Conde, in which she pointed out to the latter the necessity of an alliance against the Guises. Informed of this intrigue, the Guises entered the queen's chamber for the purpose of compelling her to issue an order consigning the vidame to the Bastille, and Catherine, to save herself, was under the hard necessity of obeying them. After a captivity of some months, the vidame died on the very day he left prison, which was shortly before the conspiracy of Amboise. Such was the conclusion of the ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... of muddlement for archaeologists to come. Indeed, such a thing almost happened in France at the Revolution. It is said that in some French schools now you find children with a vague idea that things more or less began with the taking of the Bastille: that there was a misty indefinable period between the 12th of October (or on whatever day it was Eve's apple ripened) and the glorious 14th of July:—an age of prehistory, wandered through by unimportant legendary figures such as Jeanne ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... society; and so, six months after the abolition of the guilds, the king was empowered to revoke this edict and to reestablish the guilds. Nothing but the Revolution could overthrow (and it did overthrow in one day, by the capture of the Bastille) that which in Germany had been vainly assailed since 1672 and in France since 1614—for almost two centuries—by ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... us, "The marrow is formed by a reunion of cells."—Yes, and so is Newgate, and so was the Bastille. But what does it matter whether the marrow is made of a reunion of cells, or cellars, or walls, or floors, or ceilings? I want to know what's the use of it? why doesn't it grow bigger with the rest of the tree? when does the tree 'consolidate itself'? when is it finally consolidated? and how ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin

... ministers in all the countries of Europe affords no lack of examples, it was resolved to raise a screen between the ministry and popular hatred by the cruel and disgraceful destruction of Lally. On his arrival in France he was thrown into the Bastille, and this place being deemed too honourable for him, he was subsequently thrown into a common prison. An accusation, consisting of vague or frivolous imputations, was preferred against him; and nothing whatever was proved, except that his conduct did not come up to the very perfection ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... London, and had accumulated money enough for my project, I determined not to be hampered by this unexplainable softness of the English toward an accused person. I therefore reconstructed my flat, and placed in the centre of it a dark room strong as any Bastille cell. It was twelve feet square, and contained no furniture except a number of shelves, a lavatory in one corner, and a pallet on the floor. It was ventilated by two flues from the centre of the ceiling, in one of which operated an electric fan, which, when the room was ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... any thing. We were simply ignorant. I knew all these facts, because I have passed a part of every year since 1847 in Paris; because I walked along the Boulevards on the 20th of December 1851, and saw the walls of every house, from the Bastille to the Madeleine, covered with the marks of musket-balls; because I heard in every society of the thousands who had been massacred, and of the tens of thousands who had been deportes; but the untravelled English, and even the travelled English, except the few who live in France among the ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville

... you a short account of our visit to Fountain Elephant, which if ever finished, with its concomitant streets, &c., will be an 8th wonder of the world. Its History is this: On the Site of the Bastille (of which not a vestige remains) Buonaparte thought he would erect a fountain, and looking at the Plans of Paris, he conceived the splendid idea of knocking down all the houses between the Thuilleries and this Fountain and forming one wide, straight street, ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley

... from his office. The nation were determined to have him back again; but, having once risen in rebellion, they aimed at more achievements than one. On the 14th of July the people of Paris besieged and took the Bastille, the great state-prison, where, for hundreds of years, victims had suffered cruel imprisonments, often without having been tried. The very sight of this gloomy castle was odious to the people; and they pulled it down, leaving not one brick upon another, and ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau

... detachments which scoured the city in automobiles and hunted down the police as though they were wild animals. The jails and prisons too were broken into and all the political prisoners liberated. And so fell the notorious Peter and Paul Fortress, the Bastille of Russia, in which some of the finest minds of the Russian revolutionary movement, both men and women, had been done to death with horrible torture. In the confusion some criminals also escaped, but in spite of their presence in the fighting crowds, there was very little looting or disorder, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... Sandy replied. "I have heard it talked over scores of times by men who were in the regiment that was once his, and none doubted that if he were still alive he was lying in the Bastille, or Vincennes, or one of the other cages where they keep those whose presence the king or his favourites find inconvenient. It's just a stroke of the pen, without question or trial, and they are gone, and even their best friends darena ask a question concerning them. In most ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty

... times, the utter vanishing of persons who incurred police disfavor was no uncommon incident. Often no public charge was made; merely the gossiped whisper that So-and-So lay in Bastille or La Salpetriere "at the royal pleasure," kept the unfortunate faintly in memory till the lapse of years caused him or her to be forgotten. And, sometimes, even, at the prison gate, identity vanished. Did not the celebrated and mysterious Man in the ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... which raged in England, and bringing up my son in the same sentiments. Nay, I was called the Firebrand of the Bocage! If these had been the days of the great Cardinal de Richelieu, my brother assured me, I should probably have been by this time in the Bastille, and my son would have been ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... she had already suggested, to do the noblest deed that had ever yet been done for Christianity? That same evening she rode forth with her little train; and placing herself on the town end of the bridge (which had been broken in the middle), as near as the breach would permit to the bastille, or fort of the Tourelles, which was built across the further end of the bridge, on the left side of the Loire—called out to the enemy, summoning them once more to withdraw while there was time. She ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... able to subdue, and so he bade farewell to army life and hired for himself a small furnished room next the roof of a tall apartment house in the Rue des Orties, at the top of the butte des Moulins, whence he had an outlook over the immense sea of roofs from the Tuileries to the Bastille. An old friend, whom he had known while pursuing his law studies, had loaned him a hundred francs. In addition to that he had caused his name to be inscribed on the roster of a battalion of National Guards as soon as he was settled ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... the mob, when nobody else dared to go. She sometimes headed troops, and escorted ladies and gentlemen when they were afraid to go alone. Once she relieved a town, and once she took the command of the cannon of the Bastille, and issued her orders to fire with it upon the troops, with a composure which would have done honor to any veteran officer of artillery. We can not go into all these things here in detail, as they ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott

... or three occasions his friends had obtained for him a chance to earn his living as manager of a club or a cafe as an inspector in great warehouses, at the 'Phares de la Bastille' or the 'Colosse de Rhodes.' All that was necessary was to have good manners. Delobelle was not lacking in that respect, God knows! And yet every suggestion that was made to him the great man ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... subsequent fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their employers. The Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just a little less noble than heretofore. When the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his study, lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... Bellecour—the spring of 1789, a short three months before the fall of the Bastille came to give the nobles pause, and make them realise that these new philosophies, which so long they have derided, were by no means the idle vapours ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... pray very devoutly. He resolved to persevere until he should be able to publish a grammar, dictionary and translation of the Bible. He writes in 1764, "I am fully determined that nothing but sickness or the Bastille shall impede me in this useful service." Two years later he sent to England the first volume of his native grammar, with a Micmac translation of the Creed, Lord's Prayer, etc. He was now able to minister to the ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond

... house of correction, clink, bastille.—v. imprison, incarcerate. Associated Words: mittimus, commit, commitment, turnkey, warden, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... king's printer and dedicated to Louvois, which points to the probability that the government did not disapprove of it. It appeared in March 1676, and provoked a warm protest from the Venetian ambassador, Giustiniani. The author was sent to the Bastille, where he remained, however, only six weeks (Archives de la Bastille, vol. viii. pp. 93 and 94). A second edition with a supplement, published immediately after, drew forth fresh protestations, and the edition was suppressed. This persecution ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... including the Governor of Fort St. George, and conveyed them with all circumstances of public ignominy to Pondicherry. As for La Bourdonnais, who had taken so gallant a step to secure French supremacy in India, he was placed under arrest and sent to France, where the Bastille awaited him; he had ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... he was unable for a long time to get into that great prison house which then existed called the Bastille. Try as he would, he could gain no admittance. One day when he was passing he went to the gate of the prison, rang the bell and marched in. After passing the sentry he stopped and took a good look at the building, then he had to beat a hasty retreat, and narrowly escaped capture; but by that ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross

... failure as far as the vast majority of Nationalist Ireland was concerned. There was practically no response whatever from the people: it seemed the very antithesis of the emancipation of a race as we see it, say, in the capture of the Bastille in the French Revolution. They looked on partly with amazement, partly with curiosity—waiting for ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... apprehension,—the Dauphin himself, his son-in-law, then only sixteen years of age. This prince, persuaded that during his father's illness the government could of right belong to no one but himself, resolved to secure his own. He gained over the governor of the Bastille, and seized that fortress. The Parisians flew to arms at the secret instigation of the Duke of Burgundy. A surgeon, named John of Troyes, at the head of ten or twelve thousand men, forced the gates of the Dauphin's ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... clock-maker by appointment, named Peter de St. Beathe. Several of the Paris monuments, churches, or buildings for public use were undertaken or completed under his care. He began the building of the Bastille, that fortress which was then so necessary for the safety of Paris, where it was to be, four centuries later, the object of the wrath and earliest excesses on the part of the populace. Charles the Wise, from whatever point of view he may be regarded, is, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... millions, but two hundred thousand are electors. Out of four hundred and sixty deputies, one-third hold places under the Government, the aggregate of whose salaries would sustain thousands of starving families at their very doors. Paris, despite every struggle of freedom, is, at this hour, a Bastille. The line of fortification is complete. Wherever the eye turns battlements frown, ordnance protrudes, bayonets bristle. Corruption stalks unblushingly abroad in the highest places, and the frauds of Gisquet all Paris knows are but those of an individual. The civil list, ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg

... XVI. American Revolution Turgot Necker States-General Summoned National Assembly Destruction of Bastille Revolution Lafayette Varennes The Temple Triumphant Jacobins Execution of the King Charlotte Corday Execution of Queen Fate of the Dauphin Girondists ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele

... Napoleon, Emperor"; but it survived as a mere ghost. Nevertheless, the Emperor was anxious to celebrate in 1804 the Republican festival of July 14; but the object of this festival was so modified that it would have been hard to see in it the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille and of the first federation. In the celebration, not a single word was said about these two events. The official eulogy of the Revolution was replaced by a formal distribution of crosses ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... Port St. Denis, Port St. Martin, the site of the Bastille, and the most gay, beautiful, and bustling boulevards ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... ought, to be some pretext, a mimic war ought to be organized, and the banners would be awarded to the troops as a reward. I had an idea about which I wrote to the minister; but he has not deigned to answer me. As the taking of the Bastille has been chosen for the date of the national celebration, a reproduction of this event might be made; there would be a pasteboard Bastille, fixed up by a scene-painter and concealing within its walls the whole Column of July. Then, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... hereditary obstinacy, Charles preferred a useless resistance to a dignified submission, and, by a series of idle bravadoes, laid the French court under the necessity of arresting their late ally, and sending him to close confinement in the Bastille, from which he was afterwards sent out of the French dominions, much in the manner in which a convict is transported to the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... the solemn oath in the tennis-court—the jeu de paume. At the queen's foolish urging the king fell back on force; filled Paris with troops under De Broglie; dismissed Neckar. The people at once took to arms. The 14th of July saw the fall of the hated Bastille. On the 22nd the people hanged Foulon to the street-lamp at the corner of the Place de Greve—and thenceforth the terrible shout a la lanterne! became ...
— Vigee Le Brun • Haldane MacFall

... a copy of De Bure's Sale Catalogue, 1786, now in the Huth Library, occurs a peculiarly striking exception, however, in the shape of a MS. note in the handwriting of Louis XVI., only three years prior to the fall of the Bastille, "Marquer les livres que je desire ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... own, moving forever as in a twilight air, woven of the pride, the pathos, all the sombre yet undecaying memories of their fabulous past—to the Moslem populations whose "Book" proclaimed the political equality of men twelve centuries before Mirabeau spoke or the Bastille fell? ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... inventive genius, and possessed in a higher degree than any of his contemporaries the art of inventing surprises for the society that lived on novelty. When, on account of his devotion to Fouquet, he was imprisoned in the Bastille, Mlle. de Scudery managed to persuade Colbert to brighten his confinement by permitting him to see friends and relatives. Part of every day she spent in his prison, conversing and reading; and this is but one instance ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme

... born at Saluzzo, in North Italy, in the year of the fall of the Bastille, 1789. His health as a child was feeble, his temper gentle, and he had the instincts of a poet. Before he was ten years old he had written a tragedy on a theme taken from Macpherson's Ossian. His ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico

... (overseas department of France) Independence: none (overseas department of France) Constitution: 28 September 1958 (French Constitution) Legal system: French legal system National holiday: National Day, Taking of the Bastille, 14 July (1789) Political parties and leaders: Guianese Socialist Party (PSG), Gerard HOLDER; Rally for the Republic (RPR), Paulin BRUNE; Union of the Center Rally (URC); Union for French Democracy ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... that struck at Versailles was felt at Paris. On July 14 the Bastille was taken. I was present as a spectator at this event. If the gates had been kept shut the fortress would never have been taken. De Launay, dragged from his dungeon, was murdered on the steps of the Hotel de Ville. Flesselles, the prevot des ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... dear, the King himself is compelled to smile graciously on men he would fain put in the Bastille,—if we still had a Bastille and the ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... score Docks labor's little mite, Bestows on the poor at the temple door, But robb'd them over night. The very shilling he hoped to save, As health and morals fail, Shall visit me in the new Bastille, The ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... could get so far the ushers would have dragged you away for brawling, or for maligning an honour-able gentlemen. You would have to finish your speech in the Bastille, and it would be well if even your English friends could get ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... and opprobrious more To France than all her losses and defeats, Old or of later date, by sea or land, Her house of bondage worse than that of old Which God avenged on Pharaoh—the Bastille! Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts, Ye dungeons and ye cages of despair, That monarchs have supplied from age to age With music such as suits their sovereign ears, The sighs and groans of ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... prisoner of the Bastille," declared Madame, shrugging her shoulders, "where only echoes reach me. Now, Mr. Harley, tell me of this ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer

... the Bastille was a culminating event in the history not only of France, but of all Europe; and inaugurated a new epoch in the history ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... of themselves. This French ship had been in these English waters some time; and on a recent passage there was gun-firing, and the movement of men, to celebrate, as the captain learned, the taking of the Bastille. On the opposite coast is a little cove, in which a British ship got ashore, and was stripped by the local pirates of everything. Captain Smith took off the crew and reported the piracy; but nothing seems to have been done. A British war-ship is never seen in these distant ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin

... occurred another operation not so creditable. Rodney had spent a large part of his life dodging creditors, and it was due to the generous loan of a French gentleman in Paris that he did not drag out the years of this war in the Bastille for debt. When Holland entered the war he saw an opportunity to make a fortune by seizing the island of St. Eustatius, which had been the chief depot in the West Indies for smuggling contraband into America. ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott

... almost horrible ensued," says Miss Burney. "She was too much enraged for disguise, and uttered the most furious expressions of indignant contempt at our proceedings. I am sure she would gladly have confined us both in the Bastille, had England such a misery, as a fit place to bring us to ourselves, from a daring so outrageous against imperial wishes." This passage deserves notice, as being the only one in the Diary, so far as we have observed, which shows Miss Burney to have been aware that she was the native ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... arrangements of high-minded and devoted wife, husband, and lover, all living together on charming terms, and provided, in case of disagreement, each with a lettre de cachet which should lock the other up in the Bastille. A Queen of England by right divine, keeping open house in company with a ferociously republican Piedmontese poet, was indeed a new and perhaps a questionable case; but the pre-revolutionary society of Paris was too philosophical to be surprised at anything; and, after very little hesitation, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... to live in a little street which probably is not known to you—the Rue de Lesdiguieres. It is a turning out of the Rue Saint-Antoine, beginning just opposite a fountain near the Place de la Bastille, and ending in the Rue de la Cerisaie. Love of knowledge stranded me in a garret; my nights I spent in work, my days in reading at the Bibliotheque d'Orleans, close by. I lived frugally; I had accepted the conditions of the monastic life, necessary conditions ...
— Facino Cane • Honore de Balzac

... against the Liberal Dissenters; and, in Birmingham, it was intensified and specially directed towards Priestley by a local controversy, in which he had engaged with his usual vigour. In 1791, the celebration of the second anniversary of the taking of the Bastille by a public dinner, with which Priestley had nothing whatever to do, gave the signal to the loyal and pious mob, who, unchecked, and indeed to some extent encouraged, by those who were responsible for order, had the town at their mercy for three days. The chapels ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley

... the most curious affairs in this connection is the mystery of the Man with the Iron Mask, who was placed in the Ile Sainte-Marguerite just after Mazarin's death, was removed to the Bastille in 1690, and died in 1703. His identity has never been revealed. That he was a person of very great consideration is clear from the way in which he was treated; yet no such person disappeared from public life. Those ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee

... Scotch regiment was playing to the delectation of a small but select audience of urchins and little girls. A Dublin mob, never so little in earnest and led by a dozen really determined men, ought to be able to make as short work of it as the hordes of the Faubourgs in Paris made of the Bastille, with its handful of invalids, on that memorable 14th of July, about which so many lies have passed into history, and so much effervescent nonsense is still annually talked ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert

... of distinguished character having been lampooned by some obscure scribbler, who could not be discovered, the ministry, in consequence of her complaint, ordered no fewer than five-and-twenty abbes to be apprehended and sent to the Bastille, on the maxim of Herod, when he commanded the innocents to be murdered, hoping that the principal object of his cruelty would not escape in the general calamity; and the friends of those unhappy prisoners durst not even complain ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... the moral superiority; the love adventures at Fontainebleau, with St. Aignan's story of the dryad and the business of de Guiche, de Wardes, and Manicamp; Aramis made general of the Jesuits; Aramis at the Bastille; the night talk in the forest of Senart; Belle Isle again, with the death of Porthos; and last, but not least, the taming of d'Artagnan the untamable, under the lash of the young King. What other novel has such epic variety and nobility of incident? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... "where be your companions, your peaked men of countries, as your favorite Shakespeare has it? You must be content with the spider and the rat, to crawl and scratch round your flock bed! I have known prisoners in the Bastille to feed them for companions,—why don't you begin your task? I have known a spider to descend at the tap of a finger, and a rat to come forth when the daily meal was brought, to share it with his fellow prisoner!—How delightful to have vermin for your guests! Aye, and when the feast ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... true. He had his lord high constable executed, and he could execute him, right or wrong; but he had the innocent children of the constable, one seven and the other eight years old, placed under the scaffold so that the warm blood of their father spurted over them, and then he had them sent to the Bastille, and shut up in iron cages, where not even a coverlet was given them to protect them from the cold. And King Louis sent the executioner to them every week, and had a tooth pulled out of the head of each, that they might not be too comfortable; and the elder of the boys said, 'My mother would ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... my thirty pieces of silver, the price of my treachery," de Valence returned bitterly; "men die in the Bastille ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson

... my existence. You can do nothing for me in the way of money. I have all I need. I have grown so used to the poverty of my surroundings that, if I were raised out of them I should feel like the prisoner released from the Bastille, and weep for my cell and the prison rations. But you can do something for someone in whom ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice

... right," he muttered philosophically. "The moment I set eyes on the confounded thing, it reminded me of the Bastille; it is now proving its likeness to a worse place: easy enough to get into, but no redemption ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... before yesterday Henry and I decided to go to Petit Val. I looked forward with delight to seeing my beautiful home again. Mrs. Moulton promised to drive out and bring me back to Paris late in the afternoon. We drove to the Gare de la Bastille and took our tickets for La Varenne. The station was so horribly dirty, it looked as if it had not been swept or cleaned since the commencement of the war, and as for the first-class compartment we entered I really ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... indignation rises to the highest pitch in his discussion of the Interstate Commerce Act. He fears that it will cause the downfall of our liberties and sees in the background the Venetian Bridge of Sighs and the French Bastille. He asks: "Why should for any public reasons—for any reason of public safety—the Interstate Commerce Law have come to stay?" He then berates the act as follows: "To begin with, the present act abounds in punishments for and prohibitions against an industry chartered by ...
— The Railroad Question - A historical and practical treatise on railroads, and - remedies for their abuses • William Larrabee

... Deism," born in Paris, son of a lawyer; trained to scoff at religion from his boyhood, and began his literary career as a satirist and in the production of lampoons which cost him twice over imprisonment in the Bastille, on his release from which he left France in 1726 and went to England, where he stayed three years, and got acquainted with the free-thinking class there; on his return to Paris he engaged in some profitable ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... at this hour, of no more concern to Sam and Penrod than was the other side of the moon. That unfortunate bonded prisoner had been long since utterly effaced from their fields of consciousness, and the dark secret of their Bastille troubled them not—for the main and simple reason ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington

... is no republic there; but the sovereignty of the people, the prime principle of the French Revolution, has founded the right of Charles to rule.... And what of England? Fox had rejoiced at the fall of the Bastille. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey had sung of liberty, exulting in the emancipation of peoples from tyranny. Then they had changed. Liberalism had come under the heel again. Revolution was feared ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... Mecklenburg, lodged in one of the last houses near the Porte St. Honore, and at the noise made by the coaches, put, her head to the window, and coolly looked at the whole of the combat. It soon made a great noise. My father was complimented everywhere. M. de Vardes was sent for ten or twelve days to the Bastille. My father and he afterwards became ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... Louis Le Maistre, better known under the name of de Sacy, was imprisoned in the Bastille on account of his opinions and also for his French translation of the New Testament, published at Mons, in 1667, and entitled Le Nouveau Testament de N.S.J.C., traduit en francais selon l'edition Vulgate, avec les differences ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield

... newspaper-reporting. Compare, for instance, the most imaginative piece to be found in any part of Macaulay's writings with that sudden and lovely apostrophe in Carlyle, after describing the bloody horrors that followed the fall of the Bastille in 1789:—'O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on balls at the Orangerie at Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley

... consequences like a man; while his colleagues left their dupes to the tender mercies of broadswords and bayonets, and decamped in the disguise of sailors, old women, and dissenting preachers. He had sat three months in Lancaster Castle, the Bastille of England, one day perhaps to fall like that Parisian one, for a libel which he never wrote, because he would not betray his cowardly contributor. He had twice pleaded his own cause, without help of attorney, and showed ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... ever been propounded or ever can be. But while his examination of the different theories is singularly free from bias he is evidently impressed by the ingenious view of Dr. Amos Stoot, the eminent Chicago alienist, that the masked inmate of the Bastille immured himself voluntarily in order to investigate the conditions of French prison life at the time, but, owing to the homicidal development of his subliminal consciousness, was detained indefinitely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various

... caged starling, by its repeated cry, "I can't get out! I can't get out!" cured Yorick of his sentimental yearnings for imprisonment in the Bastille. See Sterne's Sentimental Journey, ed. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... distinguished author's sympathies are naturally enlisted in this subject. He quotes with just appreciation the answer of the young Prince of Conde, Henri de Bourbon, to Charles IX after the massacre, when the king summoned him before him and curtly gave him his choice: "Messe, mort, ou Bastille?" (the mass, death, or the Bastile.) "God will not permit, my king and my seigneur, that I should select the first. As for the other two, they are at your discretion, which may God temper ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton

... they appeared in England, where a reviewer supposed them to be a satire on the ministry." I remember to have read when a boy (I think in The Percy Anecdotes), that the book was written by an Englishman who was styled "M——," and was described as having been long a prisoner in the Bastille. ...
— Notes and Queries, Issue No. 61, December 28, 1850 • Various

... ... not much louder, but it was louder. And now they're all moving toward the Bastille ... and I make bold to say they have followed my call. I swear to you before the evening is out we ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various

... Francois Leturc, and for six months I was with the man who sings and plays upon a cord of catgut between the lanterns at the Place de la Bastille. I sang the refrain with him, and after that I called, 'Here's all the new songs, ten centimes, two sous!' He was always drunk, and used to beat me. That is why the police picked me up the other night. Before that ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee

... de Nova Island, New Caledonia, Tromelin Island, Wallis and Futuna note: the US does not recognize claims to Antarctica Legal system: civil law system with indigenous concepts; review of administrative but not legislative acts National holiday: Taking of the Bastille, 14 July (1789) Executive branch: president, prime minister, Council of Ministers (cabinet) Legislative branch: bicameral Parliament (Parlement) consists of an upper house or Senate (Senat) and a lower house or National Assembly (Assemblee Nationale) Judicial branch: Constitutional ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... that chant ushered in, Falling of thrones and baubles and crowns— Bastille walls and guillotine, Sack of Tuileries, Temple frowns. Heard that Chant of the Marseillais, "Le jour ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various

... boy of nine years old (S——) the following story, which she had just met with in "The Curiosities of Literature." An officer, who was confined in the Bastille, used to amuse himself by playing on the flute: one day he observed, that a number of spiders came down from their webs, and hung round him as if listening to his music; a number of mice also came from their holes, and retired as soon as he stopped. The officer had a great dislike to mice; he ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... be rich, Madame! We are ruined, ruined! Mon Dieu! we poor folk! We had the hope to be persons of quality. 'Tis all the work of this villain Jean L'as. May the Bastille get him, or the people, and make him ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... three days of February. VICTOR HUGO is not merely a spectator of this great drama, he is an actor in it. He is in the streets, he makes speeches to the people, he seeks to restrain them; he believes, with too good reason, that the Republic is premature, and, in the Place de la Bastille, before the evolutionary Faubourg Saint Antoine, he dares ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo

... Hugo replied, dropping into his chair, 'I would sooner see the whole blessed place fall like the Bastille than see it "limited."' ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett

... motion, I turned on my heel and walked, more dead than alive, to the opposite door, where my own was awaiting me. Mr. Danquerville was missing. He was sought for, found, and dragged down stairs. We were crammed into the carriage, like recruits for the Bastille, and not having soul enough to give orders to the coachman, he presumed Paris our destination, and drove off. After a considerable interval, silence was broke, with a 'Je suis vraiment afflige du depart de ces bons gens.' This was a signal for mutual confession ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... menaced his throne, and would have despoiled the Parliament of the right of remonstrance; would have imposed on the Jansenists the yoke of Papal supremacy; would have burned the books of the philosophers, and have sent their authors to work out their system within the gloomy dungeons of the Bastille;" but he had not the courage, nor the moral strength, nor the power of will. He was enslaved by his vices, and by those who pandered to them; and he could not act either the king or the man. Seeing the dangers, but feeling his impotence, he affected levity, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord

... back to his dismal house in the rue du Murier. Like a snail, whose life is so firmly attached to its shell, he admitted to the king that he was never at ease except under the bolts and behind the vermiculated stones of his little bastille; yet he knew very well that whenever Louis XI. died, the place would be the most dangerous spot on earth ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac

... vis a vis to Joe Hume, while Louis Philippe but shares attention with the rivalling models of the Bastille ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 5, 1841 • Various

... laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of your books, and dwell in the company of Dumas's men—so gallant, so frank, so indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen. Like M. de Rochefort in "Vingt Ans Apres," like that prisoner of the Bastille, your genius "n'est que d'un parti, c'est du parti ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... subsequent siege, conducted by Talbot himself in person, in 1442, only added to their military character. During this siege, which was of great length, the English general erected the formidable fortress, known by the name of the Bastille, in the suburb of Pollet. The following year saw the French become in their turn the assailants: Louis II. then dauphin, joined the troops of the Comte de Dunois in Dieppe, and the Bastille fell, after a most murderous attack. It was afterwards levelled with the ground in 1689, though, at a ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman

... an individual multiplied. It makes plans and Circumstances comes and upsets them—or enlarges them. Some patriots throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a Bastille. The PLANS stop there; then Circumstance comes in, quite unexpectedly, and turns these modest riots ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... enabled, through the kindness of Mr. J. T. Tussaud, to embellish the present collection by an ancient cast of the hand of the Comte de Lorge, a famous prisoner in the Bastille. This cast was taken, together with a death mask, after death, by the great-grandmother of the sculptor, to whom both relics ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... between the foot of the walls and the river, which served as a market, where hucksters of all sorts plied their trade; then entering the next gate on the wall they walked down the street to the Place de la Bastille, which had been ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty

... than of the wrath of Faustina or Valentinian. What do you see in this fact? You see how religious ideas had permeated the minds even of soldiers. They were not strong enough or brave enough to fight the ideas of their age. Why did not the troops of Louis XVI. defend the Bastille? They were strong enough; its cannon could have demolished the whole Faubourg St. Antoine. Alas! the soldiers who defended that fortress had caught the ideas of the people. They fraternized with them, rather than with the Government; they were afraid of opposing ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord

... flimsy);—La Beaumelle the professed Perpetrator; 'who received for the job 7 pounds 10s. net!' [Ib. xx.] asseverates the well-informed Voltaire. Oh, M. de Voltaire, and why not leave it to him, then? Poor devil, he got put into the Bastille too, by and by; Royal Persons being touched by ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle

... more than a year to obtain news of you from everybody, but nobody can give me any. M. de la Bastille tells me that you are in good health, but adds, that if you have no more lovers, you are satisfied to have a ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... which the French Revolution may be considered. We may look at the great events which astonished and horrified Europe and America: the storming of the Bastille, the march on Versailles, the massacres of September, the Terror, and the restoration of order by Napoleon. The study of these events must always be both interesting and profitable, and we cannot wonder that historians, scenting the approaching battle, have sometimes ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell

... the Revolution, because he could not find it in himself. Dickens knew less of the Revolution, but he had more of it. When Dickens attacked abuses, he battered them down with exactly that sort of cheery and quite one-sided satisfaction with which the French mob battered down the Bastille. Dickens utterly and innocently believed in certain things; he would, I think, have drawn the sword for them. Carlyle half believed in half a hundred things; he was at once more of a mystic and more of a sceptic. Carlyle was the perfect type of the grumbling servant; the ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... to his feet. We shall live in a free country of our own before long, Barry, my boy—free because she has learned to help herself, and will remain the plaything or the slave of others no longer. France is free; she has learned to help herself. We in Ireland have our Bastille to storm ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed

... artistic revolt on the continent was closely connected with changes in the political world. The originators of the romantic literature in Italy, for the most part, died in Spielberg or in exile. The same revolution which levelled the Bastille, and converted Versailles and the Trianon—the classic school in stone and terrace—into a moral Herculaneum and Pompeii, drove the models of the so-called Augustan ages into a museum of antiquarians. In our own country, the movement initiated by Chatterton, ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... fight than the cause justified. That summer he went to all the farmers' picnics in his district, spoke wherever he was invited to speak, and spoke well; whatever charm he had he called to his aid. When the French of South Harvey celebrated the Fall of the Bastille, Judge Van Dorn spoke most beautifully of liberty, and led off when they sung the Marseillaise; on Labor Day he was the orator of the occasion, and made a great impression among the workers by his remarks upon the dignity of labor. He quoted Carlyle and Ruskin and William Morris, and ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... first to give the Palace up to the Parlement, then a new institution, and went to reside in the famous Hotel Saint-Pol, under the protection of the Bastille. The Palais des Tournelles was subsequently erected backing on to the Hotel Saint-Pol. Thus, under the later Valois, the kings came back from the Bastille to the Louvre, which had been ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... in 1789 composed some stanzas "On the Destruction of the Bastille," but these were ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... or two more the Hochmeister's Official Envoys, Dignitaries of the Order; led them through the streets, amid universal storm of execrations, hootings and unclean projectiles, straight, to jail; and besieged the Hochmeister's Burg (BASTILLE of Thorn, with a few Ritters in it), all the artillery and all the throats and hearts of the place raging deliriously upon it. So that the poor Bitters, who had no chance in resisting, were in few days obliged ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... how to cauterize a wound, but we know of no treatment as yet for the stab of a phrase. As every other woman in the house looked by turns at her and at the Marquis, Foedora would have consigned them all to the oubliettes of some Bastille; for in spite of her capacity for dissimulation, her discomfiture was discerned by her rivals. Her unfailing consolation had slipped from her at last. The delicious thought, "I am the most beautiful," the thought that at all times had soothed ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... it is to put energy into a will that has been enfeebled by long compliance. Like prisoners brought out of the Bastille. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren



Words linked to "Bastille" :   prison house, Paris, gaol, jail, fort, pokey, poky, French capital, slammer, jailhouse, Bastille Day, prison, French Republic, City of Light, fortress, France, clink, capital of France



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