Prise de la BASTILLE. L.A.S. by Cointeraux [probably Lyon-born architect François Cointeraux (1740-1830)], Paris July 18, 1789 "Lendemain de la venûe du Roi à Paris"; 4 pages in-4 (one corner slightly gnawed without loss of text). Interesting account of Louis XVI's visit to Paris on July 17, after the storming of the Bastille. Rumors were contradictory about the King's possible visit, patrols were multiplying, trenches were going up in the bare streets of the suburbs, sometimes with cannons... "we didn't know what to think, what to become"... But at the news that the King would enter, Parisians "went his way", and some 400,000 men of the bourgeois guard formed a hedge from the Hôtel de Ville to Sèvres: "all the weapons of the Bastille and the Invalides had passed into their hands"... Around 10 a.m. arrived the municipal body, Mayor Bailly, keys in hand, then the aldermen and officers of the Municipal Guard... Deputies came to meet the King, and waited with great trepidation for several hours: the King had only left Versailles at 11 a.m., "the Versailles militia had wanted to accompany him; indeed, the bourgeois handed over to the Parisians His Majesty, who had no other guard than his people. The guet on horseback preceded; then a small troop of poissardes, then an endless line of bourgeois on horseback, with a few dragoons and cavalrymen; then came the corps municipal on foot with its guard; as well as the deputies also on foot, the latter immediately joined the King's carriage, which looked at all these people from one side to the other; he was accompanied by three persons of note whose title I don't know. So many soldiers armed with rifles, axes, halberds, pistols, pikes and other weapons of all kinds, must have caused a sensation for the monarch, with a crowd of spectators four times more numerous than the guard. The King left the Hôtel de Ville at six o'clock in the evening", to shouts of "Vive le Roi, Vive la Nation. The cannons in the streets and squares saluted him, along with a number of rifle shots [...] A cordon bleu pulled half his body out of his carriage to tell the people, Mr Necker rappellé, tous les ministres renvoyés"... Cointeraux adds that the Bastille governors Launey and Du Puget, and M. de Flesselles, provost of the merchants, "had their heads cut off by the people. [...] yesterday I saw more than 400 workmen on the towers of the Bastille who were demolishing this citadel, impregnable by anyone other than the Parisians, the workmen working with joy and courage, hurriedly throwing the heaviest quarters of dressed stone into the ditches. It is said that six carriages [...] filled with Polignacs and ministers left on the seventeenth or eighteenth. They did not think it necessary to wait for the return of the National Assembly, which could have decided to stop them"... Former Patrice Hennessy collection (1958, no. 12).