The two likened souls raised their glasses, toasting their newfound kinship.
* * *
It stood at the end of the Rue Saint-Antoine. The gray stone castle rose up as a black silhouette against the murky sky: a huddled giant, ominous and imposing. Its tall towers reached for the firmament like hands reaching out from a grave.
The three-hundred-year-old Bastille fortress had been built as part of the defensive structure of Paris. The Mad Monarch, Charles VI, had turned it into a prison, a penitentiary of such abominable affliction, the mere mention of its name pierced the heart with abject fear. Once it had housed only political and religious prisoners and society"s everyday criminals. Under the Sun King and his father, it had come to devour seditious writers and young rakes taken at the requ
