Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 02.djvu/240

210 Élie's; harangues are delivered. A Body of Bastille Heroes, tolerably complete, did get together;—comparable to the Argonauts; hoping to endure like them. But in little more than a year the whirlpool of things threw them asunder again, and they sank. So many highest superlatives achieved by man are followed by new higher; and dwindle into comparatives and positives! The Siege of the Bastille, weighed with which, in the Historical balance, most other sieges, including that of Troy Town, are gossamer, cost, as we find, in killed and mortally wounded, on the part of the Besiegers, some Eighty-three persons: on the part of the Besieged, after all that straw-burning, fire-pumping, and deluge of musketry, One poor solitary Invalid, shot stone-dead (roide-mort) on the battlements! The Bastille Fortress, like the City of Jericho, was overturned by miraculous sound.