Does not the Coalition, like a fire-tide, pour in; Prussia
      through the opened North-East; Austria, England through the
      North-West? General Houchard prospers no better there than
      General Custine did: let him look to it! Through the Eastern and
      the Western Pyrenees Spain has deployed itself; spreads, rustling
      with Bourbon banners, over the face of the South. Ashes and
      embers of confused Girondin civil war covered that region
      already. Marseilles is damped down, not quenched; to be quenched
      in blood. Toulon, terrorstruck, too far gone for turning, has
      flung itself, ye righteous Powers,—into the hands of the English!
      On Toulon Arsenal there flies a Flag,—nay not even the
      Fleur-de-lys of a Louis Pretender; there flies that accursed St.
      George’s Cross of the English and Admiral Hood! What remnants of
      sea-craft, arsenals, roperies, war-navy France had, has given
      itself to these enemies of human nature, “_ennemis du genre
      humain_.” Beleaguer it, bombard it, ye Commissioners Barras,
      Fréron, Robespierre Junior; thou General Cartaux, General
      Dugommier; above all, thou remarkable Artillery-Major, Napoleon
      Buonaparte! Hood is fortifying himself, victualling himself;
      means, apparently, to make a new Gibraltar of it.

      But lo, in the Autumn night, late night, among the last of
      August, what sudden red sunblaze is this that has risen over
      Lyons City; with a noise to deafen the world? It is the
      Powder-tower of Lyons, nay the Arsenal with four Powder-towers,
      which has caught fire in the Bombardment; and sprung into the
      air, carrying “a hundred and seventeen houses” after it. With a
      light, one fancies, as of the noon sun; with a roar second only
      to the Last Trumpet! All living sleepers far and wide it has
      awakened. What a sight was that, which the eye of History saw, in
      the sudden nocturnal sunblaze! The roofs of hapless Lyons, and
      all its domes and steeples made momentarily clear; Rhone and
      Saone streams flashing suddenly visible; and height and hollow,
      hamlet and smooth stubblefield, and all the region
      round;—heights, alas, all scarped and counterscarped, into
      trenches, curtains, redouts; blue Artillery-men, little
      Powder-devilkins, plying their hell-trade there, through the
      _not_ ambrosial night! Let the darkness cover it again; for it
      pains the eye. Of a truth, Chalier’s death is costing this City
      dear. Convention Commissioners, Lyons Congresses have come and
      gone; and action there was and reaction; bad ever growing worse;
      till it has come to this: Commissioner Dubois-Crancé, “with
      seventy thousand men, and all the Artillery of several
      Provinces,” bombarding Lyons day and night.

      Worse things still are in store. Famine is in Lyons, and ruin,
      and fire. Desperate are the sallies of the besieged; brave Précy,
      their National Colonel and Commandant, doing what is in man:
      desperate but ineffectual. Provisions cut off; nothing entering
      our city but shot and shells! The Arsenal has roared aloft; the
      very Hospital will be battered down, and the sick buried alive. A
      Black Flag hung on this latter noble Edifice, appealing to the
      pity of the beseigers; for though maddened, were they not still
      our brethren? In their blind wrath, they took it for a flag of
      defiance, and aimed thitherward the more. Bad is growing ever
      worse here: and how will the worse stop, till it have grown worst
      of all? Commissioner Dubois will listen to no pleading, to no
      speech, save this only, “We surrender at discretion.” Lyons
      contains in it subdued Jacobins; dominant Girondins; secret
      Royalists. And now, mere deaf madness and cannon-shot enveloping
      them, will not the desperate Municipality fly, at last, into the
      arms of Royalism itself? Majesty of Sardinia was to bring help,
      but it failed. Emigrant Autichamp, in name of the Two Pretender
      Royal Highnesses, is coming through Switzerland with help;
      coming, not yet come: Précy hoists the Fleur-de-lys!

      At sight of which, all true Girondins sorrowfully fling down
      their arms:—Let our Tricolor brethren storm us, then, and slay us
      in their wrath: with _you_ we conquer not. The famishing women
      and children are sent forth: deaf Dubois sends them back;—rains
      in mere fire and madness. Our “redouts of cotton-bags” are taken,
      retaken; Précy under his Fleur-de-lys is valiant as Despair. What
      will become of Lyons? It is a siege of seventy days.[675]

      Or see, in these same weeks, far in the Western waters: breasting
      through the Bay of Biscay, a greasy dingy little Merchantship,
      with Scotch skipper; under hatches whereof sit, disconsolate,—the
      last forlorn nucleus of Girondism, the Deputies from Quimper!
      Several have dissipated themselves, whithersoever they could.
      Poor Riouffe fell into the talons of Revolutionary Committee, and
      Paris Prison. The rest sit here under hatches; reverend Pétion
      with his grey hair, angry Buzot, suspicious Louvet, brave young
      Barbaroux, and others. They have escaped from Quimper, in this
      sad craft; are now tacking and struggling; in danger from the
      waves, in danger from the English, in still worse danger from the
      French;—banished by Heaven and Earth to the greasy belly of this
      Scotch skipper’s Merchant-vessel, unfruitful Atlantic raving
      round. They are for Bourdeaux, if peradventure hope yet linger
      there. Enter not Bourdeaux, O Friends! Bloody Convention
      Representatives, Tallien and such like, with their Edicts, with
      their Guillotine, have arrived there; Respectability is driven
      under ground; Jacobinism lords it on high. From that Réole
      landingplace, or _Beak of Ambès_, as it were, Pale Death, waving
      his Revolutionary Sword of sharpness, waves you elsewhither!

      On one side or the other of that Bec d’Ambès, the Scotch Skipper
      with difficulty moors, a dexterous greasy man; with difficulty
      lands his Girondins;—who, after reconnoitring, must rapidly
      burrow in the Earth; and so, in subterranean ways, in friends’
      back-closets, in cellars, barn-lofts, in Caves of Saint-Emilion
      and Libourne, stave off cruel Death.[676] Unhappiest of all
      Senators!

      Chapter 3.4.VI.
      Risen against Tyrants.

      Against all which incalculable impediments, horrors and
      disasters, what can a Jacobin Convention oppose? The
      uncalculating Spirit of Jacobinism, and Sansculottic
      sans-formulistic Frenzy! Our Enemies press in on us, says Danton,
      but they shall not conquer us, ‘we will burn France to ashes
      rather, _nous brûlerons la France_.’

      Committees, of _Sureté_ or _Salut_, have raised themselves “_à la
      hauteur_, to the height of circumstances.” Let all mortals raise
      themselves _à la hauteur_. Let the Forty-four thousand Sections
      and their Revolutionary Committees stir every fibre of the
      Republic; and every Frenchman feel that he is to do or die. They
      are the life-circulation of Jacobinism, these Sections and
      Committees: Danton, through the organ of Barrère and _Salut
      Public_, gets decreed, That there be in Paris, by law, two
      meetings of Section weekly; also, that the Poorer Citizen be
      _paid_ for attending, and have his day’s-wages of Forty
      Sous.[677] This is the celebrated “Law of the Forty Sous;”
      fiercely stimulant to Sansculottism, to the life-circulation of
      Jacobinism.

      On the twenty-third of August, Committee of Public Salvation, as
      usual through Barrère, had promulgated, in words not unworthy of
      remembering, their Report, which is soon made into a Law, of
      _Levy in Mass_. “All France, and whatsoever it contains of men or
      resources, is put under requisition,” says Barrère; really in
      Tyrtæan words, the best we know of his. “The Republic is one vast
      besieged city.” Two hundred and fifty Forges shall, in these
      days, be set up in the Luxembourg Garden, and round the outer
      wall of the Tuileries; to make gun-barrels; in sight of Earth and
      Heaven! From all hamlets, towards their Departmental Town; from
      all their Departmental Towns, towards the appointed Camp and seat
      of war, the Sons of Freedom shall march; their banner is to bear:
      “_Le Peuple Français debout contres les Tyrans_, The French
      People risen against Tyrants.” “The young men shall go to the
      battle; it is their task to conquer: the married men shall forge
      arms, transport baggage and artillery; provide subsistence: the
      women shall work at soldiers’ clothes, make tents; serve in the
      hospitals. The children shall scrape old-linen into
      surgeon’s-lint: the aged men shall have themselves carried into
      public places; and there, by their words, excite the courage of
      the young; preach hatred to Kings and unity to the
      Republic.”[678] Tyrtæan words, which tingle through all French
      hearts.

      In this humour, then, since no other serves, will France rush
      against its enemies. Headlong, reckoning no cost or consequence;
      heeding no law or rule but that supreme law, Salvation of the
      People! The weapons are all the iron that is in France; the
      strength is that of all the men, women and children that are in
      France. There, in their two hundred and fifty shed-smithies, in
      Garden of Luxembourg or Tuileries, let them forge gun-barrels, in
      sight of Heaven and Earth.

      Nor with heroic daring against the Foreign foe, can black
      vengeance against the Domestic be wanting. Life-circulation of
      the Revolutionary Committees being quickened by that _Law of the
      Forty Sous_, Deputy Merlin, not the Thionviller, whom we saw ride
      out of Mentz, but Merlin of Douai, named subsequently Merlin
      _Suspect_,—comes, about a week after, with his world-famous _Law
      of the Suspect:_ ordering all Sections, by their Committees,
      instantly to arrest all Persons Suspect; and explaining withal
      who the Arrestable and Suspect specially are. ‘Are Suspect,’ says
      he, ‘all who by their actions, by their connexions, speakings,
      writings have’—in short become Suspect.[679] Nay Chaumette,
      illuminating the matter still further, in his Municipal Placards
      and Proclamations, will bring it about that you may almost
      recognise a Suspect on the streets, and clutch him there,—off to
      Committee, and Prison. Watch well your words, watch well your
      looks: if Suspect of nothing else, you may grow, as came to be a
      saying, “Suspect of being Suspect!” For are we not in a State of
      Revolution?

      No frightfuller Law ever ruled in a Nation of men. All Prisons
      and Houses of Arrest in French land are getting crowded to the
      ridge-tile: Forty-four thousand Committees, like as many
      companies of reapers or gleaners, gleaning France, are gathering
      their harvest, and storing it in these Houses. Harvest of
      Aristocrat tares! Nay, lest the Forty-four thousand, each on its
      own harvest-field, prove insufficient, we are to have an ambulant
      “Revolutionary Army:” six thousand strong, under right captains,
      this shall perambulate the country at large, and strike in
      wherever it finds such harvest-work slack. So have Municipality
      and Mother Society petitioned; so has Convention decreed.[680]
      Let Aristocrats, Federalists, Monsieurs vanish, and all men
      tremble: “The Soil of Liberty shall be purged,”—with a vengeance!

      Neither hitherto has the Revolutionary Tribunal been keeping
      holyday. Blanchelande, for losing Saint-Domingo; “Conspirators of
      Orleans,” for “assassinating,” for assaulting the sacred Deputy
      Leonard-Bourdon: these with many Nameless, to whom life was
      sweet, have died. Daily the great Guillotine has its due. Like a
      black Spectre, daily at eventide, glides the Death-tumbril
      through the variegated throng of things. The variegated street
      shudders at it, for the moment; next moment forgets it: The
      Aristocrats! They were guilty against the Republic; their death,
      were it only that their goods are confiscated, will be useful to
      the Republic; _Vive la République!_

      In the last days of August, fell a notabler head: General
      Custine’s. Custine was accused of harshness, of unskilfulness,
      perfidiousness; accused of many things: found guilty, we may say,
      of one thing, unsuccessfulness. Hearing his unexpected Sentence,
      “Custine fell down before the Crucifix,” silent for the space of
      two hours: he fared, with moist eyes and a book of prayer,
      towards the Place de la Révolution; glanced upwards at the clear
      suspended axe; then mounted swiftly aloft,[681] swiftly was
      struck away from the lists of the Living. He had fought in
      America; he was a proud, brave man; and his fortune led him
      _hither_.

      On the 2nd of this same month, at three in the morning, a vehicle
      rolled off, with closed blinds, from the Temple to the
      Conciergerie. Within it were two Municipals; and
      Marie-Antoinette, once Queen of France! There in that
      Conciergerie, in ignominious dreary cell, she, cut off from
      children, kindred, friend and hope, sits long weeks; expecting
      when the end will be.[682]

      The Guillotine, we find, gets always a quicker motion, as other
      things are quickening. The Guillotine, by its speed of going,
      will give index of the general velocity of the Republic. The
      clanking of its huge axe, rising and falling there, in horrid
      systole-diastole, is portion of the whole enormous Life-movement
      and pulsation of the Sansculottic System!—“Orléans Conspirators”
      and Assaulters had to die, in spite of much weeping and
      entreating; so sacred is the person of a Deputy. Yet the sacred
      can become desecrated: your very Deputy is not greater than the
      Guillotine. Poor Deputy Journalist Gorsas: we saw him hide at
      Rennes, when the Calvados War burnt priming. He stole afterwards,
      in August, to Paris; lurked several weeks about the Palais
      _ci-devant_ Royal; was seen there, one day; was clutched,
      identified, and without ceremony, being already “out of the Law,”
      was sent to the Place de la Révolution. He died, recommending his
      wife and children to the pity of the Republic. It is the ninth
      day of October 1793. Gorsas is the first Deputy that dies on the
      scaffold; he will not be the last.

      Ex-Mayor Bailly is in prison; Ex-Procureur Manuel. Brissot and
      our poor Arrested Girondins have become Incarcerated Indicted
      Girondins; universal Jacobinism clamouring for their punishment.
      Duperret’s Seals are _broken!_ Those Seventy-three Secret
      Protesters, suddenly one day, are reported upon, are decreed
      accused; the Convention-doors being “previously shut,” that none
      implicated might escape. They were marched, in a very rough
      manner, to Prison that evening. Happy those of them who chanced
      to be absent! Condorcet has vanished into darkness; perhaps, like
      Rabaut, sits between two walls, in the house of a friend.

      Chapter 3.4.VII.
      Marie-Antoinette.

      On Monday the Fourteenth of October, 1793, a Cause is pending in
      the Palais de Justice, in the new Revolutionary Court, such as
      these old stone-walls never witnessed: the Trial of
      Marie-Antoinette. The once brightest of Queens, now tarnished,
      defaced, forsaken, stands here at Fouquier Tinville’s
      Judgment-bar; answering for her life! The Indictment was
      delivered her last night.[683] To such changes of human fortune
      what words are adequate? Silence alone is adequate.

      There are few Printed things one meets with, of such tragic
      almost ghastly significance as those bald Pages of the _Bulletin
      du Tribunal Révolutionnaire_, which bear title, _Trial of the
      Widow Capet_. Dim, dim, as if in disastrous eclipse; like the
      pale kingdoms of Dis! Plutonic Judges, Plutonic Tinville;
      encircled, nine times, with Styx and Lethe, with Fire-Phlegethon
      and Cocytus named of Lamentation! The very witnesses summoned are
      like Ghosts: exculpatory, inculpatory, they themselves are all
      hovering over death and doom; they are known, in our imagination,
      as the prey of the Guillotine. Tall _ci-devant_ Count d’Estaing,
      anxious to shew himself Patriot, cannot escape; nor Bailly, who,
      when asked If he knows the Accused, answers with a reverent
      inclination towards her, ‘Ah, yes, I know Madame.’ Ex-Patriots
      are here, sharply dealt with, as Procureur Manuel; Ex-Ministers,
      shorn of their splendour. We have cold Aristocratic impassivity,
      faithful to itself even in Tartarus; rabid stupidity, of Patriot
      Corporals, Patriot Washerwomen, who have much to say of Plots,
      Treasons, August Tenth, old Insurrection of Women. For all now
      has become a crime, in her who has _lost_.

      Marie-Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment and hour of
      extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her
      look, they say, as that hideous Indictment was reading, continued
      calm; “she was sometimes observed moving her fingers, as when one
      plays on the Piano.” You discern, not without interest, across
      that dim Revolutionary Bulletin itself, how she bears herself
      queenlike. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of Laconic
      brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing
      to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. ‘You persist then in
      denial?’—‘My plan is not denial: it is the truth I have said, and
      I persist in that.’ Scandalous Hébert has borne his testimony as
      to many things: as to one thing, concerning Marie-Antoinette and
      her little Son,—wherewith Human Speech had better not further be
      soiled. She has answered Hébert; a Juryman begs to observe that
      she has not answered as to this. ‘I have not answered,’ she
      exclaims with noble emotion, ‘because Nature refuses to answer
      such a charge brought against a Mother. I appeal to all the
      Mothers that are here.’ Robespierre, when he heard of it, broke
      out into something almost like swearing at the brutish
      blockheadism of this Hébert;[684] on whose foul head his foul lie
      has recoiled. At four o’clock on Wednesday morning, after two
      days and two nights of interrogating, jury-charging, and other
      darkening of counsel, the result comes out: Sentence of Death.
      ‘Have you anything to say?’ The Accused shook her head, without
      speech. Night’s candles are burning out; and with her too Time is
      finishing, and it will be Eternity and Day. This Hall of
      Tinville’s is dark, ill-lighted except where she stands. Silently
      she withdraws from it, to die.

      Two Processions, or Royal Progresses, three-and-twenty years
      apart, have often struck us with a strange feeling of contrast.
      The first is of a beautiful Archduchess and Dauphiness, quitting
      her Mother’s City, at the age of Fifteen; towards hopes such as
      no other Daughter of Eve then had: “On the morrow,” says Weber an
      eye witness, “the Dauphiness left Vienna. The whole City crowded
      out; at first with a sorrow which was silent. She appeared: you
      saw her sunk back into her carriage; her face bathed in tears;
      hiding her eyes now with her handkerchief, now with her hands;
      several times putting out her head to see yet again this Palace
      of her Fathers, whither she was to return no more. She motioned
      her regret, her gratitude to the good Nation, which was crowding
      here to bid her farewell. Then arose not only tears; but piercing
      cries, on all sides. Men and women alike abandoned themselves to
      such expression of their sorrow. It was an audible sound of wail,
      in the streets and avenues of Vienna. The last Courier that
      followed her disappeared, and the crowd melted away.”[685]

      The young imperial Maiden of Fifteen has now become a worn
      discrowned Widow of Thirty-eight; grey before her time: this is
      the last Procession: “Few minutes after the Trial ended, the
      drums were beating to arms in all Sections; at sunrise the armed
      force was on foot, cannons getting placed at the extremities of
      the Bridges, in the Squares, Crossways, all along from the Palais
      de Justice to the Place de la Révolution. By ten o’clock,
      numerous patrols were circulating in the Streets; thirty thousand
      foot and horse drawn up under arms. At eleven, Marie-Antoinette
      was brought out. She had on an undress of _piqué blanc:_ she was
      led to the place of execution, in the same manner as an ordinary
      criminal; bound, on a Cart; accompanied by a Constitutional
      Priest in Lay dress; escorted by numerous detachments of infantry
      and cavalry. These, and the double row of troops all along her
      road, she appeared to regard with indifference. On her
      countenance there was visible neither abashment nor pride. To the
      cries of _Vive la République_ and _Down with Tyranny_, which
      attended her all the way, she seemed to pay no heed. She spoke
      little to her Confessor. The tricolor Streamers on the housetops
      occupied her attention, in the Streets du Roule and Saint-Honoré;
      she also noticed the Inscriptions on the house-fronts. On
      reaching the Place de la Révolution, her looks turned towards the
      _Jardin National_, whilom Tuileries; her face at that moment gave
      signs of lively emotion. She mounted the Scaffold with courage
      enough; at a quarter past Twelve, her head fell; the Executioner
      shewed it to the people, amid universal long-continued cries of
      “_Vive la République_.”[686]

      Chapter 3.4.VIII.
      The Twenty-two.

      Whom next, O Tinville? The next are of a different colour: our
      poor Arrested Girondin Deputies. What of them could still be laid
      hold of; our Vergniaud, Brissot, Fauchet, Valazé, Gensonné; the
      once flower of French Patriotism, Twenty-two by the tale:
      _hither_, at Tinville’s Bar, onward from “safeguard of the French
      People,” from confinement in the Luxembourg, imprisonment in the
      Conciergerie, have they now, by the course of things, arrived.
      Fouquier Tinville must give what account of them he can.

      Undoubtedly this Trial of the Girondins is the greatest that
      Fouquier has yet had to do. Twenty-two, all chief Republicans,
      ranged in a line there; the most eloquent in France; Lawyers too;
      not without friends in the auditory. How will Tinville prove
      these men guilty of Royalism, Federalism, Conspiracy against the
      Republic? Vergniaud’s eloquence awakes once more; “draws tears,”
      they say. And Journalists report, and the Trial lengthens itself
      out day after day; “threatens to become eternal,” murmur many.
      Jacobinism and Municipality rise to the aid of Fouquier. On the
      28th of the month, Hébert and others come in deputation to inform
      a Patriot Convention that the Revolutionary Tribunal is quite
      “shackled by forms of Law;” that a Patriot Jury ought to have
      “the power of cutting short, of _terminer les débats_, when they
      feel themselves convinced.” Which pregnant suggestion, of cutting
      short, passes itself, with all despatch, into a Decree.

      Accordingly, at ten o’clock on the night of the 30th of October,
      the Twenty-two, summoned back once more, receive this
      information, That the Jury feeling themselves convinced have cut
      short, have brought in their verdict; that the Accused are found
      guilty, and the Sentence on one and all of them is Death with
      confiscation of goods.

      Loud natural clamour rises among the poor Girondins; tumult;
      which can only be repressed by the gendarmes. Valazé stabs
      himself; falls down dead on the spot. The rest, amid loud clamour
      and confusion, are driven back to their Conciergerie; Lasource
      exclaiming, ‘I die on the day when the People have lost their
      reason; ye will die when they recover it.’[687] No help! Yielding
      to violence, the Doomed uplift the Hymn of the Marseillese;
      return singing to their dungeon.

      Riouffe, who was their Prison-mate in these last days, has
      lovingly recorded what death they made. To our notions, it is not
      an edifying death. Gay satirical _Pot-pourri_ by Ducos; rhymed
      Scenes of Tragedy, wherein Barrère and Robespierre discourse with
      Satan; death’s eve spent in “singing” and “sallies of gaiety,”
      with “discourses on the happiness of peoples:” these things, and
      the like of these, we have to accept for what they are worth. It
      is the manner in which the Girondins make _their_ Last Supper.
      Valazé, with bloody breast, sleeps cold in death; hears not their
      singing. Vergniaud has his dose of poison; but it is not enough
      for his friends, it is enough only for himself; wherefore he
      flings it from him; presides at this Last Supper of the
      Girondins, with wild coruscations of eloquence, with song and
      mirth. Poor human Will struggles to assert itself; if not in this
      way, then in that.[688]

      But on the morrow morning all Paris is out; such a crowd as no
      man had seen. The Death-carts, Valazé’s cold corpse stretched
      among the yet living Twenty-one, roll along. Bareheaded, hands
      bound; in their shirt-sleeves, coat flung loosely round the neck:
      so fare the eloquent of France; bemurmured, beshouted. To the
      shouts of _Vive la République_, some of them keep answering with
      counter-shouts of _Vive la République_. Others, as Brissot, sit
      sunk in silence. At the foot of the scaffold they again strike
      up, with appropriate variations, the Hymn of the Marseillese.
      Such an act of music; conceive it well! The yet Living chant
      there; the chorus so rapidly wearing weak! Samson’s axe is rapid;
      one head per minute, or little less. The chorus is worn out;
      farewell for evermore ye Girondins. Te-Deum Fauchet has become
      silent; Valazé’s dead head is lopped: the sickle of the
      Guillotine has reaped the Girondins all away. “The eloquent, the
      young, the beautiful and brave!” exclaims Riouffe. O Death, what
      feast is toward in thy ghastly Halls?

      Nor alas, in the far Bourdeaux region, will Girondism fare
      better. In caves of Saint-Emilion, in loft and cellar, the
      weariest months, roll on; apparel worn, purse empty; wintry
      November come; under Tallien and his Guillotine, all hope now
      gone. Danger drawing ever nigher, difficulty pressing ever
      straiter, they determine to separate. Not unpathetic the
      farewell; tall Barbaroux, cheeriest of brave men, stoops to clasp
      his Louvet: ‘In what place soever thou findest my mother,’ cries
      he, ‘try to be instead of a son to her: no resource of mine but I
      will share with thy Wife, should chance ever lead me where she
      is.’[689]

      Louvet went with Guadet, with Salles and Valady; Barbaroux with
      Buzot and Pétion. Valady soon went southward, on a way of his
      own. The two friends and Louvet had a miserable day and night;
      the 14th of November month, 1793. Sunk in wet, weariness and
      hunger, they knock, on the morrow, for help, at a friend’s
      country-house; the fainthearted friend refuses to admit them.
      They stood therefore under trees, in the pouring rain. Flying
      desperate, Louvet thereupon will to Paris. He sets forth, there
      and then, splashing the mud on each side of him, with a fresh
      strength gathered from fury or frenzy. He passes villages,
      finding “the sentry asleep in his box in the thick rain;” he is
      gone, before the man can call after him. He bilks Revolutionary
      Committees; rides in carriers’ carts, covered carts and open;
      lies hidden in one, under knapsacks and cloaks of soldiers’ wives
      on the Street of Orléans, while men search for him: has
      hairbreadth escapes that would fill three romances: finally he
      gets to Paris to his fair Helpmate; gets to Switzerland, and
      waits better days.

      Poor Guadet and Salles were both taken, ere long; they died by
      the Guillotine in Bourdeaux; drums beating to drown their voice.
      Valady also is caught, and guillotined. Barbaroux and his two
      comrades weathered it longer, into the summer of 1794; but not
      long enough. One July morning, changing their hiding place, as
      they have often to do, “about a league from Saint-Emilion, they
      observe a great crowd of country-people;” doubtless Jacobins come
      to take them? Barbaroux draws a pistol, shoots himself dead.
      Alas, and it was not Jacobins; it was harmless villagers going to
      a village wake. Two days afterwards, Buzot and Pétion were found
      in a Cornfield, their bodies half-eaten with dogs.[690]

      Such was the end of Girondism. They arose to regenerate France,
      these men; and have accomplished _this_. Alas, whatever quarrel
      we had with them, has not their cruel fate abolished it? Pity
      only survives. So many excellent souls of heroes sent down to
      Hades; they themselves given as a prey of dogs and all manner of
      birds! But, here too, the will of the Supreme Power was
      accomplished. As Vergniaud said: “The Revolution, like Saturn, is
      devouring its own children.”

      BOOK 3.V.
      TERROR THE ORDER OF THE DAY

      Chapter 3.5.I.
      Rushing down.

      We are now, therefore, got to that black precipitous Abyss;
      whither all things have long been tending; where, having now
      arrived on the giddy verge, they hurl down, in confused ruin;
      headlong, pellmell, down, down;—till Sansculottism have
      consummated itself; and in this wondrous French Revolution, as in
      a Doomsday, a World have been rapidly, if not born again, yet
      destroyed and engulphed. Terror has long been terrible: but to
      the actors themselves it has now become manifest that their
      appointed course is one of Terror; and they say, Be it so. ‘_Que
      la Terreur soit a l’ordre du jour_.’

      So many centuries, say only from Hugh Capet downwards, had been
      adding together, century transmitting it with increase to
      century, the sum of Wickedness, of Falsehood, Oppression of man
      by man. Kings were sinners, and Priests were, and People.
      Open-Scoundrels rode triumphant, bediademed, becoronetted,
      bemitred; or the still fataller species of Secret-Scoundrels, in
      their fair-sounding formulas, speciosities, respectabilities,
      hollow within: the race of Quacks was grown many as the sands of
      the sea. Till at length such a sum of Quackery had accumulated
      itself as, in brief, the Earth and the Heavens were weary of.
      Slow seemed the Day of Settlement: coming on, all imperceptible,
      across the bluster and fanfaronade of Courtierisms,
      Conquering-Heroisms, Most-Christian _Grand Monarque_-isms.
      Well-beloved Pompadourisms: yet behold it was always coming;
      behold it has come, suddenly, unlooked for by any man! The
      harvest of long centuries was ripening and whitening so rapidly
      of late; and now it is grown _white_, and is reaped rapidly, as
      it were, in one day. Reaped, in this Reign of Terror; and carried
      home, to Hades and the Pit!—Unhappy Sons of Adam: it is ever so;
      and never do they know it, nor will they know it. With cheerfully
      smoothed countenances, day after day, and generation after
      generation, they, calling cheerfully to one another,
      ‘Well-speed-ye,’ are at work, _sowing the wind_. And yet, as God
      lives, they _shall reap the whirlwind:_ no other thing, we say,
      is possible,—since God is a Truth and His World is a Truth.

      History, however, in dealing with this Reign of Terror, has had
      her own difficulties. While the Phenomenon continued in its
      primary state, as mere “Horrors of the French Revolution,” there
      was abundance to be said and shrieked. With and also without
      profit. Heaven knows there were terrors and horrors enough: yet
      that was not all the Phenomenon; nay, more properly, that was not
      the Phenomenon at all, but rather was the _shadow_ of it, the
      negative part of it. And now, in a new stage of the business,
      when History, ceasing to shriek, would try rather to include
      under her old Forms of speech or speculation this new amazing
      Thing; that so some accredited scientific Law of Nature might
      suffice for the unexpected Product of Nature, and History might
      get to speak of it articulately, and draw inferences and profit
      from it; in this new stage, History, we must say, babbles and
      flounders perhaps in a still painfuller manner. Take, for
      example, the latest Form of speech we have seen propounded on the
      subject as adequate to it, almost in these months, by our worthy
      M. Roux, in his _Histoire Parlementaire_. The latest and the
      strangest: that the French Revolution was a dead-lift effort,
      after eighteen hundred years of preparation, to realise—the
      Christian Religion![691] _Unity, Indivisibility, Brotherhood or
      Death_ did indeed stand printed on all Houses of the Living;
      also, on Cemeteries, or Houses of the Dead, stood printed, by
      order of Procureur Chaumette, Here is eternal Sleep:[692] but a
      Christian Religion realised by the Guillotine and Death-Eternal,
      “is suspect to me,” as Robespierre was wont to say, “_m’est
      suspecte._”

      Alas, no, M. Roux! A Gospel of Brotherhood, not according to any
      of the Four old Evangelists, and calling on men to repent, and
      amend _each his own_ wicked existence, that they might be saved;
      but a Gospel rather, as we often hint, according to a new Fifth
      Evangelist Jean-Jacques, calling on men to amend _each the whole
      world’s_ wicked existence, and be saved by making the
      Constitution. A thing different and distant _toto cœlo_, as they
      say: the whole breadth of the sky, and further if possible!—It is
      thus, however, that History, and indeed all human Speech and
      Reason does yet, what Father Adam began life by doing: strive to
      _name_ the new Things it sees of Nature’s producing,—often
      helplessly enough.

      But what if History were to admit, for once, that all the Names
      and Theorems yet known to her fall short? That this grand Product
      of Nature was even grand, and new, in that it came not to range
      itself under old recorded Laws-of-Nature at all; but to disclose
      new ones? In that case, History renouncing the pretention to
      _name_ it at present, will _look_ honestly at it, and name what
      she can of it! Any approximation to the right Name has value:
      were the right name itself once here, the Thing is known
      thenceforth; the Thing is then ours, and can be dealt with.

      Now surely not realization, of Christianity, or of aught earthly,
      do we discern in this Reign of Terror, in this French Revolution
      of which it is the consummating. Destruction rather we discern—of
      all that was destructible. It is as if Twenty-five millions,
      risen at length into the Pythian mood, had stood up
      simultaneously to say, with a sound which goes through far lands
      and times, that this Untruth of an Existence had become
      insupportable. O ye Hypocrisies and Speciosities, Royal mantles,
      Cardinal plushcloaks, ye Credos, Formulas, Respectabilities,
      fair-painted Sepulchres full of dead men’s bones,—behold, ye
      appear to us to be altogether a Lie. Yet our Life is not a Lie;
      yet our Hunger and Misery is not a Lie! Behold we lift up, one
      and all, our Twenty-five million right-hands; and take the
      Heavens, and the Earth and also the Pit of Tophet to witness,
      that either ye shall be abolished, or else we shall be abolished!

      No inconsiderable Oath, truly; forming, as has been often said,
      the most remarkable transaction in these last thousand years.
      Wherefrom likewise there follow, and will follow, results. The
      fulfilment of this Oath; that is to say, the black desperate
      battle of Men against their whole Condition and Environment,—a
      battle, alas, withal, against the Sin and Darkness that was in
      themselves as in others: this is the Reign of Terror.
      Transcendental despair was the purport of it, though not
      consciously so. False hopes, of Fraternity, Political Millennium,
      and what not, we have always seen: but the unseen heart of the
      whole, the transcendental despair, was not false; neither has it
      been of no effect. Despair, pushed far enough, completes the
      circle, so to speak; and becomes a kind of genuine productive
      hope again.

      Doctrine of Fraternity, out of old Catholicism, does, it is true,
      very strangely in the vehicle of a Jean-Jacques Evangel, suddenly
      plump down out of its cloud-firmament; and from a theorem
      determine to make itself a practice. But just so do all creeds,
      intentions, customs, knowledges, thoughts and things, which the
      French have, suddenly plump down; Catholicism, Classicism,
      Sentimentalism, Cannibalism: all _isms_ that make up Man in
      France, are rushing and roaring in that gulf; and the theorem has
      become a practice, and whatsoever cannot swim sinks. Not
      Evangelist Jean-Jacques alone; there is not a Village
      Schoolmaster but has contributed his quota: do we not _thou_ one
      another, according to the Free Peoples of Antiquity? The French
      Patriot, in red phrygian nightcap of Liberty, christens his poor
      little red infant Cato,—Censor, or else of Utica. Gracchus has
      become Baboeuf and edits Newspapers; Mutius Scaevola, Cordwainer
      of that ilk, presides in the Section Mutius-Scaevola: and in
      brief, there is a world wholly jumbling itself, to try what will
      swim!

      Wherefore we will, at all events, call this Reign of Terror a
      very strange one. Dominant Sansculottism makes, as it were, free
      arena; one of the strangest temporary states Humanity was ever
      seen in. A nation of men, full of wants and void of habits! The
      old habits are gone to wreck because they were old: men, driven
      forward by Necessity and fierce Pythian Madness, have, on the
      spur of the instant, to devise for the want the _way_ of
      satisfying it. The wonted tumbles down; by imitation, by
      invention, the Unwonted hastily builds itself up. What the French
      National head has in it comes out: if not a great result, surely
      one of the strangest.

      Neither shall the reader fancy that it was all blank, this Reign
      of Terror: far from it. How many hammermen and squaremen, bakers
      and brewers, washers and wringers, over this France, must ply
      their old daily work, let the Government be one of Terror or one
      of Joy! In this Paris there are Twenty-three Theatres nightly;
      some count as many as Sixty Places of Dancing.[693] The
      Playwright manufactures: pieces of a strictly Republican
      character. Ever fresh Novelgarbage, as of old, fodders the
      Circulating Libraries.[694] The “Cesspool of _Agio_,” now in the
      time of Paper Money, works with a vivacity unexampled,
      unimagined; exhales from itself “sudden fortunes,” like
      Alladin-Palaces: really a kind of miraculous Fata-Morganas, since
      you _can_ live in them, for a time. Terror is as a sable ground,
      on which the most variegated of scenes paints itself. In
      startling transitions, in colours all intensated, the sublime,
      the ludicrous, the horrible succeed one another; or rather, in
      crowding tumult, accompany one another.

      Here, accordingly, if anywhere, the “hundred tongues,” which the
      old Poets often clamour for, were of supreme service! In defect
      of any such organ on our part, let the Reader stir up his own
      imaginative organ: let us snatch for him this or the other
      significant glimpse of things, in the fittest sequence we can.

      Chapter 3.5.II.
      Death.

      In the early days of November, there is one transient glimpse of
      things that is to be noted: the last transit to his long home of
      Philippe d’Orléans Egalité. Philippe was “decreed accused,” along
      with the Girondins, much to his and their surprise; but not tried
      along with them. They are doomed and dead, some three days, when
      Philippe, after his long half-year of durance at Marseilles,
      arrives in Paris. It is, as we calculate, the third of November
      1793.

      On which same day, two notable Female Prisoners are also put in
      ward there: Dame Dubarry and Josephine Beauharnais! Dame whilom
      Countess Dubarry, Unfortunate-female, had returned from London;
      they snatched her, not only as Ex-harlot of a whilom Majesty, and
      therefore suspect; but as having “furnished the Emigrants with
      money.” Contemporaneously with whom, there comes the wife of
      Beauharnais, soon to be the widow: she that is Josephine Tascher
      Beauharnais; that shall be Josephine Empress Buonaparte, for a
      black Divineress of the Tropics prophesied long since that she
      should be a Queen and more. Likewise, in the same hours, poor
      Adam Lux, nigh turned in the head, who, according to Foster, “has
      taken no food these three weeks,” marches to the Guillotine for
      his Pamphlet on Charlotte Corday: he “sprang to the scaffold;”
      said he “died for her with great joy.” Amid such
      fellow-travellers does Philippe arrive. For, be the month named
      Brumaire year 2 of Liberty, or November year 1793 of Slavery, the
      Guillotine goes always, _Guillotine va toujours_.

      Enough, Philippe’s indictment is soon drawn, his jury soon
      convinced. He finds himself made guilty of Royalism, Conspiracy
      and much else; nay, it is a guilt in him that he voted Louis’s
      Death, though he answers, ‘I voted in my soul and conscience.’
      The doom he finds is death forthwith; this present sixth dim day
      of November is the last day that Philippe is to see. Philippe,
      says Montgaillard, thereupon called for breakfast: sufficiency of
      “oysters, two cutlets, best part of an excellent bottle of
      claret;” and consumed the same with apparent relish. A
      Revolutionary Judge, or some official Convention Emissary, then
      arrived, to signify that he might still do the State some service
      by revealing the truth about a plot or two. Philippe answered
      that, on him, in the pass things had come to, the State had, he
      thought, small claim; that nevertheless, in the interest of
      Liberty, he, having still some leisure on his hands, was willing,
      were a reasonable question asked him, to give reasonable answer.
      And so, says Montgaillard, he lent his elbow on the mantel-piece,
      and conversed in an under-tone, with great seeming composure;
      till the leisure was done, or the Emissary went his ways.

      At the door of the Conciergerie, Philippe’s attitude was erect
      and easy, almost commanding. It is five years, all but a few
      days, since Philippe, within these same stone walls, stood up
      with an air of graciosity, and asked King Louis, ‘Whether it was
      a Royal Session, then, or a Bed of Justice?’ O Heaven!—Three poor
      blackguards were to ride and die with him: some say, they
      objected to such company, and had to be flung in, neck and
      heels;[695] but it seems not true. Objecting or not objecting,
      the gallows-vehicle gets under way. Philippe’s dress is remarked
      for its elegance; greenfrock, waistcoat of white _piqué_, yellow
      buckskins, boots clear as Warren: his air, as before, entirely
      composed, impassive, not to say easy and Brummellean-polite.
      Through street after street; slowly, amid execrations;—past the
      Palais Egalité whilom Palais-Royal! The cruel Populace stopped
      him there, some minutes: Dame de Buffon, it is said, looked out
      on him, in Jezebel head-tire; along the ashlar Wall, there ran
      these words in huge tricolor print, REPUBLIC ONE AND INDIVISIBLE;
      LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY OR DEATH: _National Property_.
      Philippe’s eyes flashed hellfire, one instant; but the next
      instant it was gone, and he sat impassive, Brummellean-polite. On
      the scaffold, Samson was for drawing of his boots: ‘tush,’ said
      Philippe, ‘they will come better off _after;_ let us have done,
      _dépêchons-nous!_’

      So Philippe was not without virtue, then? God forbid that there
      should be any living man without it! He had the virtue to keep
      living for five-and-forty years;—other virtues perhaps more than
      we know of. Probably no mortal ever had such things recorded of
      him: such facts, and also such lies. For he was a _Jacobin Prince
      of the Blood;_ consider what a combination! Also, unlike any
      Nero, any Borgia, he lived in the Age of Pamphlets. Enough for
      us: Chaos _has_ reabsorbed him; may it late or never bear his
      like again!—Brave young Orleans Egalité, deprived of all, only
      not deprived of himself, is gone to Coire in the Grisons, under
      the name of Corby, to teach Mathematics. The Egalité Family is at
      the darkest depths of the Nadir.

      A far nobler Victim follows; one who will claim remembrance from
      several centuries: Jeanne-Marie Phlipon, the Wife of Roland.
      Queenly, sublime in her uncomplaining sorrow, seemed she to
      Riouffe in her Prison. “Something more than is usually found in
      the looks of women painted itself,” says Riouffe,[696] “in those
      large black eyes of hers, full of expression and sweetness. She
      spoke to me often, at the Grate: we were all attentive round her,
      in a sort of admiration and astonishment; she expressed herself
      with a purity, with a harmony and prosody that made her language
      like music, of which the ear could never have enough. Her
      conversation was serious, not cold; coming from the mouth of a
      beautiful woman, it was frank and courageous as that of a great
      men.” “And yet her maid said: ‘Before you, she collects her
      strength; but in her own room, she will sit three hours
      sometimes, leaning on the window, and weeping.’” She had been in
      Prison, liberated once, but recaptured the same hour, ever since
      the first of June: in agitation and uncertainty; which has
      gradually settled down into the last stern certainty, that of
      death. In the Abbaye Prison, she occupied Charlotte Corday’s
      apartment. Here in the Conciergerie, she speaks with Riouffe,
      with Ex-Minister Clavière; calls the beheaded Twenty-two ‘_Nos
      amis_, our Friends,’—whom we are soon to follow. During these
      five months, those _Memoirs_ of hers were written, which all the
      world still reads.

      But now, on the 8th of November, “clad in white,” says Riouffe,
      “with her long black hair hanging down to her girdle,” she is
      gone to the Judgment Bar. She returned with a quick step; lifted
      her finger, to signify to us that she was doomed: her eyes seemed
      to have been wet. Fouquier-Tinville’s questions had been
      “brutal;” offended female honour flung them back on him, with
      scorn, not without tears. And now, short preparation soon done,
      she shall go her last road. There went with her a certain
      Lamarche, “Director of Assignat printing;” whose dejection she
      endeavoured to cheer. Arrived at the foot of the scaffold, she
      asked for pen and paper, ‘to write the strange thoughts that were
      rising in her;’[697] a remarkable request; which was refused.
      Looking at the Statue of Liberty which stands there, she says
      bitterly: ‘O Liberty, what things are done in thy name!’ For
      Lamarche’s sake, she will die first; shew him how easy it is to
      die: ‘Contrary to the order’ said Samson.—‘Pshaw, you cannot
      refuse the last request of a Lady;’ and Samson yielded.

      Noble white Vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud
      eyes, long black hair flowing down to the girdle; and as brave a
      heart as ever beat in woman’s bosom! Like a white Grecian Statue,
      serenely complete, she shines in that black wreck of things;—long
      memorable. Honour to great Nature who, in Paris City, in the Era
      of Noble-Sentiment and Pompadourism, can make a Jeanne Phlipon,
      and nourish her to clear perennial Womanhood, though but on
      Logics, _Encyclopédies_, and the Gospel according to
      Jean-Jacques! Biography will long remember that trait of asking
      for a pen ‘to write the strange thoughts that were rising in
      her.’ It is as a little light-beam, shedding softness, and a kind
      of sacredness, over all that preceded: so in her too there was an
      Unnameable; she too was a Daughter of the Infinite; there were
      mysteries which Philosophism had not dreamt of!—She left long
      written counsels to her little Girl; she said her Husband would
      not survive her.

      Still crueller was the fate of poor Bailly, First National
      President, First Mayor of Paris: doomed now for Royalism,
      Fayettism; for that Red-Flag Business of the Champ-de-Mars;—one
      may say in general, for leaving his Astronomy to meddle with
      Revolution. It is the 10th of November 1793, a cold bitter
      drizzling rain, as poor Bailly is led through the streets;
      howling Populace covering him with curses, with mud; waving over
      his face a burning or smoking mockery of a Red Flag. Silent,
      unpitied, sits the innocent old man. Slow faring through the
      sleety drizzle, they have got to the Champ-de-Mars: Not there!
      vociferates the cursing Populace; Such blood ought not to stain
      an Altar of the Fatherland; not there; but on that dungheap by
      the River-side! So vociferates the cursing Populace; Officiality
      gives ear to them. The Guillotine is taken down, though with
      hands numbed by the sleety drizzle; is carried to the River-side,
      is there set up again, with slow numbness; pulse after pulse
      still counting itself out in the old man’s weary heart. For hours
      long; amid curses and bitter frost-rain! ‘Bailly, thou
      tremblest,’ said one. ‘_Mon ami_, it is for cold,’ said Bailly,
      ‘_c’est de froid_.’ Crueller end had no mortal.[698]

      Some days afterwards, Roland hearing the news of what happened on
      the 8th, embraces his kind Friends at Rouen, leaves their kind
      house which had given him refuge; goes forth, with farewell too
      sad for tears. On the morrow morning, 16th of the month, “some
      four leagues from Rouen, Paris-ward, near Bourg-Baudoin, in M.
      Normand’s Avenue,” there is seen sitting leant against a tree,
      the figure of rigorous wrinkled man; stiff now in the rigour of
      death; a cane-sword run through his heart; and at his feet this
      writing: “Whoever thou art that findest me lying, respect my
      remains: they are those of a man who consecrated all his life to
      being useful; and who has died as he lived, virtuous and honest.”
      “Not fear, but indignation, made me quit my retreat, on learning
      that my Wife had been murdered. I wished not to remain longer on
      an Earth polluted with crimes.”[699]

      Barnave’s appearance at the Revolutionary Tribunal was of the
      bravest; but it could not stead him. They have sent for him from
      Grenoble; to pay the common smart, Vain is eloquence, forensic or
      other, against the dumb Clotho-shears of Tinville. He is still
      but two-and-thirty, this Barnave, and has known such changes.
      Short while ago, we saw him at the top of Fortune’s Wheel, his
      word a law to all Patriots: and now surely he is at the _bottom_
      of the Wheel; in stormful altercation with a Tinville Tribunal,
      which is dooming him to die![700] And Pétion, once also of the
      Extreme Left, and named _Pétion Virtue_, where is he? Civilly
      dead; in the Caves of Saint-Emilion; to be devoured of dogs. And
      Robespierre, who rode along with him on the shoulders of the
      people, is in Committee of _Salut;_ civilly alive: not to live
      always. So giddy-swift whirls and spins this immeasurable
      _tormentum_ of a Revolution; wild-booming; not to be followed by
      the eye. Barnave, on the Scaffold, stamped his foot; and looking
      upwards was heard to ejaculate, ‘This then is my reward?’

      Deputy Ex-Procureur Manuel is already gone; and Deputy Osselin,
      famed also in August and September, is about to go: and Rabaut,
      discovered treacherously between his two walls, and the Brother
      of Rabaut. National Deputies not a few! And Generals: the memory
      of General Custine cannot be defended by his Son; his Son is
      already guillotined. Custine the Ex-Noble was replaced by
      Houchard the Plebeian: he too could not prosper in the North; for
      him too there was no mercy; he has perished in the Place de la
      Revolution, after attempting suicide in Prison. And Generals
      Biron, Beauharnais, Brunet, whatsoever General prospers not;
      tough old Lückner, with his eyes grown rheumy; Alsatian
      Westermann, valiant and diligent in La Vendée: _none of them
      can_, as the Psalmist sings, _his soul from death deliver_.

      How busy are the Revolutionary Committees; Sections with their
      Forty Halfpence a-day! Arrestment on arrestment falls quick,
      continual; followed by death. Ex-Minister Clavière has killed
      himself in Prison. Ex-Minister Lebrun, seized in a hayloft, under
      the disguise of a working man, is instantly conducted to
      death.[701] Nay, withal, is it not what Barrère calls “coining
      money on the Place de la Révolution?” For always the “property of
      the guilty, if property he have,” is confiscated. To avoid
      accidents, we even make a Law that suicide shall not defraud us;
      that a criminal who kills himself does not the less incur
      forfeiture of goods. Let the guilty tremble, therefore, and the
      suspect, and the rich, and in a word all manner of culottic men!
      Luxembourg Palace, once Monsieur’s, has become a huge loathsome
      Prison; Chantilly Palace too, once Condé’s:—and their Landlords
      are at Blankenberg, on the wrong side of the Rhine. In Paris are
      now some Twelve Prisons; in France some Forty-four Thousand:
      thitherward, thick as brown leaves in Autumn, rustle and travel
      the suspect; shaken down by Revolutionary Committees, they are
      swept thitherward, as into their storehouse,—to be consumed by
      Samson and Tinville. “The Guillotine goes not ill, _ La
      Guillotine ne va pas mal_.”

      Chapter 3.5.III.
      Destruction.

      The suspect may well tremble; but how much more the open
      rebels;—the Girondin Cities of the South! Revolutionary Army is
      gone forth, under Ronsin the Playwright; six thousand strong; in
      “red nightcap, in tricolor waistcoat, in black-shag trousers,
      black-shag spencer, with enormous moustachioes, enormous
      sabre,—in _carmagnole complète;_”[702] and has portable
      guillotines. Representative Carrier has got to Nantes, by the
      edge of blazing La Vendée, which Rossignol has literally set on
      fire: Carrier will try what captives you make, what accomplices
      they have, Royalist or Girondin: his guillotine goes always, _va
      toujours;_ and his wool-capped “Company of Marat.” Little
      children are guillotined, and aged men. Swift as the machine is,
      it will not serve; the Headsman and all his valets sink, worn
      down with work; declare that the human muscles can no more.[703]
      Whereupon you must try fusillading; to which perhaps still
      frightfuller methods may succeed.

      In Brest, to like purpose, rules Jean-Bon Saint-André; with an
      Army of Red Nightcaps. In Bourdeaux rules Tallien, with his
      Isabeau and henchmen: Guadets, Cussys, Salleses, may fall; the
      bloody Pike and Nightcap bearing supreme sway; the Guillotine
      coining money. Bristly fox-haired Tallien, once Able Editor,
      still young in years, is now become most gloomy, potent; a Pluto
      on Earth, and has the keys of Tartarus. One remarks, however,
      that a certain Senhorina Cabarus, or call her rather _Senhora_
      and wedded not yet widowed _Dame de Fontenai_, brown beautiful
      woman, daughter of Cabarus the Spanish merchant,—has softened the
      red bristly countenance; pleading for herself and friends; and
      prevailing. The keys of Tartarus, or any kind of power, are
      something to a woman; gloomy Pluto himself is not insensible to
      love. Like a new Proserpine, she, by this red gloomy Dis, is
      gathered; and, they say, softens his stone heart a little.

      Maignet, at Orange in the South; Lebon, at Arras in the North,
      become world’s wonders. Jacobin Popular Tribunal, with its
      National Representative, perhaps where Girondin Popular Tribunal
      had lately been, rises here and rises there; wheresoever needed.
      Fouchés, Maignets, Barrases, Frérons scour the Southern
      Departments; like reapers, with their guillotine-sickle. Many are
      the labourers, great is the harvest. By the hundred and the
      thousand, men’s lives are cropt; cast like brands into the
      burning.

      Marseilles is taken, and put under martial law: lo, at
      Marseilles, what one besmutted red-bearded corn-ear is this which
      they cut;—one gross Man, we mean, with copper-studded face;
      plenteous beard, or beard-stubble, of a tile-colour? By Nemesis
      and the Fatal Sisters, it is Jourdan Coupe-tête! Him they have
      clutched, in these martial-law districts; him too, with their
      “national razor,” their _rasoir national_, they sternly shave
      away. Low now is Jourdan the Headsman’s own head;—low as
      Deshuttes’s and Varigny’s, which he sent on pikes, in the
      Insurrection of Women! No more shall he, as a copper Portent, be
      seen gyrating through the Cities of the South; no more sit
      judging, with pipes and brandy, in the Ice-tower of Avignon. The
      all-hiding Earth has received him, the bloated Tilebeard: may we
      never look upon his like again!—Jourdan one names; the other
      Hundreds are not named. Alas, they, like confused faggots, lie
      massed together for us; counted by the cartload: and yet not an
      individual faggot-twig of them but had a Life and History; and
      was cut, not without pangs as when a Kaiser dies!

      Least of all cities can Lyons escape. Lyons, which we saw in
      dread sunblaze, that Autumn night when the Powder-tower sprang
      aloft, was clearly verging towards a sad end. Inevitable: what
      could desperate valour and Précy do; Dubois-Crancé, deaf as
      Destiny, stern as Doom, capturing their “redouts of cotton-bags;”
      hemming them in, ever closer, with his Artillery-lava? Never
      would that _ci-devant_ d’Autichamp arrive; never any help from
      Blankenberg. The Lyons Jacobins were hidden in cellars; the
      Girondin Municipality waxed pale, in famine, treason and red
      fire. Précy drew his sword, and some Fifteen Hundred with him;
      sprang to saddle, to cut their way to Switzerland. They cut
      fiercely; and were fiercely cut, and cut down; not hundreds,
      hardly units of them ever saw Switzerland.[704] Lyons, on the 9th
      of October, surrenders at discretion; it is become a devoted
      Town. Abbé Lamourette, now Bishop Lamourette, whilom Legislator,
      he of the old _Baiser-l’Amourette_ or Delilah-Kiss, is seized
      here, is sent to Paris to be guillotined: “he made the sign of
      the cross,” they say when Tinville intimated his death-sentence
      to him; and died as an eloquent Constitutional Bishop. But wo now
      to all Bishops, Priests, Aristocrats and Federalists that are in
      Lyons! The _manes_ of Chalier are to be appeased; the Republic,
      maddened to the Sibylline pitch, has bared her right arm. Behold!
      Representative Fouché, it is Fouché of Nantes, a name to become
      well known; he with a Patriot company goes duly, in wondrous
      Procession, to raise the corpse of Chalier. An Ass, housed in
      Priest’s cloak, with a mitre on its head, and trailing the
      Mass-Books, some say the very Bible, at its tail, paces through
      Lyons streets; escorted by multitudinous Patriotism, by clangour
      as of the Pit; towards the grave of Martyr Chalier. The body is
      dug up and burnt: the ashes are collected in an Urn; to be
      worshipped of Paris Patriotism. The Holy Books were part of the
      funeral pile; their ashes are scattered to the wind. Amid cries
      of ‘Vengeance! Vengeance!’—which, writes Fouché, shall be
      satisfied.[705]

      Lyons in fact is a Town to be abolished; not Lyons henceforth but
      “_Commune Affranchie_, Township Freed;” the very name of it shall
      perish. It is to be razed, this once great City, if Jacobinism
      prophesy right; and a Pillar to be erected on the ruins, with
      this Inscription, _Lyons rebelled against the Republic; Lyons is
      no more_. Fouché, Couthon, Collot, Convention Representatives
      succeed one another: there is work for the hangman; work for the
      hammerman, _not_ in building. The very Houses of Aristocrats, we
      say, are doomed. Paralytic Couthon, borne in a chair, taps on the
      wall, with emblematic mallet, saying, ‘_La Loi te frappe_, The
      Law strikes thee;’ masons, with wedge and crowbar, begin
      demolition. Crash of downfall, dim ruin and dust-clouds fly in
      the winter wind. Had Lyons been of soft stuff, it had all
      vanished in those weeks, and the Jacobin prophecy had been
      fulfilled. But Towns are not built of soap-froth; Lyons Town is
      built of stone. Lyons, though it rebelled against the Republic,
      _is_ to this day.

      Neither have the Lyons Girondins all one neck, that you could
      despatch it at one swoop. Revolutionary Tribunal here, and
      Military Commission, guillotining, fusillading, do what they can:
      the kennels of the Place des Terreaux run red; mangled corpses
      roll down the Rhone. Collot d’Herbois, they say, was once hissed
      on the Lyons stage: but with what sibilation, of world-catcall or
      hoarse Tartarean Trumpet, will ye hiss him now, in this his new
      character of Convention Representative,—not to be repeated! Two
      hundred and nine men are marched forth over the River, to be shot
      in mass, by musket and cannon, in the Promenade of the Brotteaux.
      It is the second of such scenes; the first was of some Seventy.
      The corpses of the first were flung into the Rhone, but the Rhone
      stranded some; so these now, of the second lot, are to be buried
      on land. Their one long grave is dug; they stand ranked, by the
      loose mould-ridge; the younger of them singing the Marseillaise.
      Jacobin National Guards give fire; but have again to give fire,
      and again; and to take the bayonet and the spade, for though the
      doomed all fall, they do not all die;—and it becomes a butchery
      too horrible for speech. So that the very Nationals, as they
      fire, turn away their faces. Collot, snatching the musket from
      one such National, and levelling it with unmoved countenance,
      says ‘It is thus a Republican ought to fire.’

      This is the second Fusillade, and happily the last: it is found
      too hideous; even inconvenient. They were Two hundred and nine
      marched out; one escaped at the end of the Bridge: yet behold,
      when you count the corpses, they are Two hundred and _ten_. Rede
      us this riddle, O Collot? After long guessing, it is called to
      mind that two individuals, here in the Brotteaux ground, did
      attempt to leave the rank, protesting with agony that they were
      not condemned men, that they were Police Commissaries: which two
      we repulsed, and disbelieved, and shot with the rest![706] Such
      is the vengeance of an enraged Republic. Surely this, according
      to Barrère’s phrase, is Justice “under rough forms, _sous des
      formes acerbes_.” But the Republic, as Fouché says, must ‘march
      to Liberty over corpses.’ Or again as Barrère has it: ‘None but
      the dead do not come back, _Il n’y a que les morts qui ne
      reviennent pas_.’ Terror hovers far and wide: “The Guillotine
      goes not ill.”

      But before quitting those Southern regions, over which History
      can cast only glances from aloft, she will alight for a moment,
      and look fixedly at one point: the Siege of Toulon. Much
      battering and bombarding, heating of balls in furnaces or
      farm-houses, serving of artillery well and ill, attacking of
      Ollioules Passes, Forts Malbosquet, there has been: as yet to
      small purpose. We have had General Cartaux here, a whilom Painter
      elevated in the troubles of Marseilles; General Doppet, a whilom
      Medical man elevated in the troubles of Piemont, who, under
      Crancé, took Lyons, but cannot take Toulon. Finally we have
      General Dugommier, a pupil of Washington. Convention
      _Représentans_ also we have had; Barrases, Salicettis,
      Robespierres the Younger:—also an Artillery _Chef de brigade_, of
      extreme diligence, who often takes his nap of sleep among the
      guns; a short taciturn, olive-complexioned young man, not unknown
      to us, by name Buonaparte: one of the best Artillery-officers yet
      met with. And still Toulon is not taken. It is the fourth month
      now; December, in slave-style; _Frostarious_ or _Frimaire_, in
      new-style: and still their cursed Red-Blue Flag flies there. They
      are provisioned from the Sea; they have seized all heights,
      felling wood, and fortifying themselves; like the coney, they
      have built their nest in the rocks.

      Meanwhile, _Frostarious_ is not yet become _Snowous_ or _Nivose_,
      when a Council of War is called; Instructions have just arrived
      from Government and _Salut Public_. Carnot, in _Salut Public_,
      has sent us a plan of siege: on which plan General Dugommier has
      this criticism to make, Commissioner Salicetti has that; and
      criticisms and plans are very various; when that young Artillery
      Officer ventures to speak; the same whom we saw snatching sleep
      among the guns, who has emerged several times in this
      History,—the name of him Napoleon Buonaparte. It is his humble
      opinion, for he has been gliding about with spy-glasses, with
      thoughts, That a certain Fort l’Eguillette can be clutched, as
      with lion-spring, on the sudden; wherefrom, were it once ours,
      the very heart of Toulon might be battered, the English Lines
      were, so to speak, turned inside out, and Hood and our Natural
      Enemies must next day either put to sea, or be burnt to ashes.
      Commissioners arch their eyebrows, with negatory sniff: who is
      this young gentleman with more wit than we all? Brave veteran
      Dugommier, however, thinks the idea worth a word; questions the
      young gentleman; becomes convinced; and there is for issue, Try
      it.

      On the taciturn bronze-countenance, therefore, things being now
      all ready, there sits a grimmer gravity than ever, compressing a
      hotter central-fire than ever. Yonder, thou seest, is Fort
      l’Eguillette; a desperate lion-spring, yet a possible one; this
      day to be tried!—Tried it is; and found _good_. By stratagem and
      valour, stealing through ravines, plunging fiery through the
      fire-tempest, Fort l’Eguillette is clutched at, is carried; the
      smoke having cleared, wiser the Tricolor fly on it: the
      bronze-complexioned young man was right. Next morning, Hood,
      finding the interior of his lines exposed, his defences turned
      inside out, makes for his shipping. Taking such Royalists as
      wished it on board with him, he weighs anchor: on this 19th of
      December 1793, Toulon is once more the Republic’s!

      Cannonading has ceased at Toulon; and now the guillotining and
      fusillading may begin. Civil horrors, truly: but at least that
      infamy of an English domination is purged away. Let there be
      Civic Feast universally over France: so reports Barrère, or
      Painter David; and the Convention assist in a body.[707] Nay, it
      is said, these infamous English (with an attention rather to
      their own interests than to ours) set fire to our store-houses,
      arsenals, warships in Toulon Harbour, before weighing; some score
      of brave warships, the only ones we now had! However, it did not
      prosper, though the flame spread far and high; some two ships
      were burnt, not more; the very galley-slaves ran with buckets to
      quench. These same proud Ships, Ships _l’Orient_ and the rest,
      have to carry this same young Man to Egypt first: not yet can
      they be changed to ashes, or to Sea-Nymphs; not yet to
      sky-rockets, O Ship _l’Orient_, nor became the prey of
      England,—before their time!

      And so, over France universally, there is Civic Feast and
      high-tide: and Toulon sees fusillading, grape-shotting in mass,
      as Lyons saw; and “death is poured out in great floods, _vomie à
      grands flots_” and Twelve thousand Masons are requisitioned from
      the neighbouring country, to raze Toulon from the face of the
      Earth. For it is to be razed, so reports Barrère; all but the
      National Shipping Establishments; and to be called henceforth not
      Toulon, but _Port of the Mountain_. There in black death-cloud we
      must leave it;—hoping only that Toulon too is built of stone;
      that perhaps even Twelve thousand Masons cannot pull it down,
      till the fit pass.

      One begins to be sick of “death vomited in great floods.”
      Nevertheless hearest thou not, O reader (for the sound reaches
      through centuries), in the dead December and January nights, over
      Nantes Town,—confused noises, as of musketry and tumult, as of
      rage and lamentation; mingling with the everlasting moan of the
      Loire waters there? Nantes Town is sunk in sleep; but
      _Représentant_ Carrier is not sleeping, the wool-capped Company
      of Marat is not sleeping. Why unmoors that flatbottomed craft,
      that _gabarre;_ about eleven at night; with Ninety Priests under
      hatches? They are going to Belle Isle? In the middle of the Loire
      stream, on signal given, the gabarre is scuttled; she sinks with
      all her cargo. “Sentence of Deportation,” writes Carrier, “was
      executed _vertically_.” The Ninety Priests, with their
      gabarre-coffin, lie deep! It is the first of the _Noyades_, what
      we may call _Drownages_, of Carrier; which have become famous
      forever.

      Guillotining there was at Nantes, till the Headsman sank worn
      out: then fusillading “in the Plain of Saint-Mauve;” little
      children fusilladed, and women with children at the breast;
      children and women, by the hundred and twenty; and by the five
      hundred, so hot is La Vendée: till the very Jacobins grew sick,
      and all but the Company of Marat cried, Hold! Wherefore now we
      have got Noyading; and on the 24th night of _Frostarious_ year 2,
      which is 14th of December 1793, we have a second Noyade:
      consisting of “a Hundred and Thirty-eight persons.”[708]

      Or why waste a gabarre, sinking it with them? Fling them out;
      fling them out, with their hands tied: pour a continual hail of
      lead over all the space, till the last struggler of them be sunk!
      Unsound sleepers of Nantes, and the Sea-Villages thereabouts,
      hear the musketry amid the night-winds; wonder what the meaning
      of it is. And women were in that gabarre; whom the Red Nightcaps
      were stripping naked; who begged, in their agony, that their
      smocks might not be stript from them. And young children were
      thrown in, their mothers vainly pleading: ‘Wolflings,’ answered
      the Company of Marat, ‘who would grow to be wolves.’

      By degrees, daylight itself witnesses Noyades: women and men are
      tied together, feet and feet, hands and hands: and flung in: this
      they call _Mariage Républicain_, Republican Marriage. Cruel is
      the panther of the woods, the she-bear bereaved of her whelps:
      but there is in man a hatred crueller than that. Dumb, out of
      suffering now, as pale swoln corpses, the victims tumble
      confusedly seaward along the Loire stream; the tide rolling them
      back: clouds of ravens darken the River; wolves prowl on the
      shoal-places: Carrier writes, “_Quel torrent révolutionnaire_,
      What a torrent of Revolution!” For the man is rabid; and the Time
      is rabid. These are the Noyades of Carrier; twenty-five by the
      tale, for what is done in darkness comes to be investigated in
      sunlight:[709] not to be forgotten for centuries,—We will turn to
      another aspect of the Consummation of Sansculottism; leaving this
      as the blackest.

      But indeed men are all rabid; as the Time is. Representative
      Lebon, at Arras, dashes his sword into the blood flowing from the
      Guillotine; exclaims, ‘How I like it!’ Mothers, they say, by his
      order, have to stand by while the Guillotine devours their
      children: a band of music is stationed near; and, at the fall of
      every head, strikes up its _ça-ira_.[710] In the Burgh of
      Bedouin, in the Orange region, the Liberty-tree has been cut down
      over night. Representative Maignet, at Orange, hears of it; burns
      Bedouin Burgh to the last dog-hutch; guillotines the inhabitants,
      or drives them into the caves and hills.[711] Republic One and
      Indivisible! She is the newest Birth of Nature’s waste inorganic
      Deep, which men name Orcus, Chaos, primeval Night; and knows one
      law, that of self-preservation. _Tigresse Nationale:_ meddle not
      with a whisker of her! Swift-crushing is her stroke; look what a
      paw she spreads;—pity has not entered her heart.

      Prudhomme, the dull-blustering Printer and Able Editor, as yet a
      Jacobin Editor, will become a renegade one, and publish large
      volumes on these matters, _Crimes of the Revolution;_ adding
      innumerable lies withal, as if the truth were not sufficient. We,
      for our part, find it more edifying to know, one good time, that
      this Republic and National Tigress _is_ a New Birth; a Fact of
      Nature among Formulas, in an Age of Formulas; and to look,
      oftenest in silence, how the so genuine Nature-Fact will demean
      itself among these. For the Formulas are partly genuine, partly
      delusive, supposititious: we call them, in the language of
      metaphor, regulated modelled _shapes;_ some of which have bodies
      and life still in them; most of which, according to a German
      Writer, have only emptiness, “glass-eyes glaring on you with a
      ghastly affectation of life, and in their interior unclean
      accumulation of beetles and spiders!” But the Fact, let all men
      observe, is a genuine and sincere one; the sincerest of Facts:
      terrible in its sincerity, as very Death. Whatsoever is equally
      sincere may front it, and beard it; but whatsoever is _not?_—

      Chapter 3.5.IV.
      Carmagnole complete.

      Simultaneously with this Tophet-black aspect, there unfolds
      itself another aspect, which one may call a Tophet-red aspect:
      the Destruction of the Catholic Religion; and indeed, for the
      time being of Religion itself. We saw Romme’s New Calendar
      establish its _Tenth_ Day of Rest; and asked, what would become
      of the Christian Sabbath? The Calendar is hardly a month old,
      till all this is set at rest. Very singular, as Mercier observes:
      last _Corpus-Christi_ Day 1792, the whole world, and Sovereign
      Authority itself, walked in religious gala, with a quite devout
      air;—Butcher Legendre, supposed to be irreverent, was like to be
      massacred in his Gig, as the thing went by. A Gallican Hierarchy,
      and Church, and Church Formulas seemed to flourish, a little
      brown-leaved or so, but not browner than of late years or
      decades; to flourish, far and wide, in the sympathies of an
      unsophisticated People; defying Philosophism, Legislature and the
      Encyclopédie. Far and wide, alas, like a brown-leaved
      Vallombrosa; which waits but one whirlblast of the November wind,
      and in an hour stands bare! Since that _Corpus-Christi_ Day,
      Brunswick has come, and the Emigrants, and La Vendée, and
      eighteen months of Time: to all flourishing, especially to
      brown-leaved flourishing, there comes, were it never so slowly,
      an end.

      On the 7th of November, a certain Citoyen Parens, Curate of
      Boissise-le-Bertrand, writes to the Convention that he has all
      his life been preaching a lie, and is grown weary of doing it;
      wherefore he will now lay down his Curacy and stipend, and begs
      that an august Convention would give him something else to live
      upon. “_Mention honorable_,” shall we give him? Or “reference to
      Committee of Finances?” Hardly is this got decided, when goose
      Gobel, Constitutional Bishop of Paris, with his Chapter, with
      Municipal and Departmental escort in red nightcaps, makes his
      appearance, to do as Parens has done. Goose Gobel will now
      acknowledge “no Religion but Liberty;” therefore he doffs his
      Priest-gear, and receives the Fraternal embrace. To the joy of
      Departmental Momoro, of Municipal Chaumettes and Héberts, of
      Vincent and the Revolutionary Army! Chaumette asks, Ought there
      not, in these circumstances, to be among our intercalary Days
      Sans-breeches, a Feast of Reason?[712] Proper surely! Let Atheist
      Maréchal, Lalande, and little Atheist Naigeon rejoice; let
      Clootz, Speaker of Mankind, present to the Convention his
      _Evidences of the Mahometan Religion_, “a work evincing the
      nullity of all Religions,”—with thanks. There shall be Universal
      Republic now, thinks Clootz; and “one God only, _Le Peuple_.”

      The French Nation is of gregarious imitative nature; it needed
      but a fugle-motion in this matter; and goose Gobel, driven by
      Municipality and force of circumstances, has given one. What Curé
      will be behind him of Boissise; what Bishop behind him of Paris?
      Bishop Grégoire, indeed, courageously declines; to the sound of
      ‘We force no one; let Grégoire consult his conscience;’ but
      Protestant and Romish by the hundred volunteer and assent. From
      far and near, all through November into December, till the work
      is accomplished, come Letters of renegation, come Curates who are
      “learning to be Carpenters,” Curates with their new-wedded Nuns:
      has not the Day of Reason dawned, very swiftly, and become noon?
      From sequestered Townships comes Addresses, stating plainly,
      though in Patois dialect, That “they will have no more to do with
      the black animal called Curay, _animal noir, appellé
      Curay_.”[713]

      Above all things there come Patriotic Gifts, of Church-furniture.
      The remnant of bells, except for tocsin, descend from their
      belfries, into the National meltingpot, to make cannon. Censers
      and all sacred vessels are beaten broad; of silver, they are fit
      for the poverty-stricken Mint; of pewter, let them become bullets
      to shoot the “enemies of _du genre humain_.” Dalmatics of plush
      make breeches for him who has none; linen stoles will clip into
      shirts for the Defenders of the Country: old-clothesmen, Jew or
      Heathen, drive the briskest trade. Chalier’s Ass Procession, at
      Lyons, was but a type of what went on, in those same days, in all
      Towns. In all Towns and Townships as quick as the guillotine may
      go, so quick goes the axe and the wrench: sacristies, lutrins,
      altar-rails are pulled down; the Mass Books torn into cartridge
      papers: men dance the Carmagnole all night about the bonfire. All
      highways jingle with metallic Priest-tackle, beaten broad; sent
      to the Convention, to the poverty-stricken Mint. Good Sainte
      Geneviève’s _Chasse_ is let down: alas, to be burst open, this
      time, and burnt on the Place de Grève. Saint Louis’s shirt is
      burnt;—might not a Defender of the Country have had it? At
      Saint-Denis Town, no longer Saint-Denis but _Franciade_,
      Patriotism has been down among the Tombs, rummaging; the
      Revolutionary Army has taken spoil. This, accordingly, is what
      the streets of Paris saw:

      “Most of these persons were still drunk, with the brandy they had
      swallowed out of chalices;—eating mackerel on the patenas!
      Mounted on Asses, which were housed with Priests’ cloaks, they
      reined them with Priests’ stoles: they held clutched with the
      same hand communion-cup and sacred wafer. They stopped at the
      doors of Dramshops; held out ciboriums: and the landlord, stoop
      in hand, had to fill them thrice. Next came Mules high-laden with
      crosses, chandeliers, censers, holy-water vessels,
      hyssops;—recalling to mind the Priests of Cybele, whose panniers,
      filled with the instruments of their worship, served at once as
      storehouse, sacristy and temple. In such equipage did these
      profaners advance towards the Convention. They enter there, in an
      immense train, ranged in two rows; all masked like mummers in
      fantastic sacerdotal vestments; bearing on hand-barrows their
      heaped plunder,—ciboriums, suns, candelabras, plates of gold and
      silver.”[714]

      The Address we do not give; for indeed it was in strophes, sung
      _vivâ voce_, with all the parts;—Danton glooming considerably, in
      his place; and demanding that there be prose and decency in
      future.[715] Nevertheless the captors of such _spolia opima_
      crave, not untouched with liquor, permission to dance the
      Carmagnole also on the spot: whereto an exhilarated Convention
      cannot but accede. Nay, “several Members,” continues the
      exaggerative Mercier, who was not there to witness, being in
      Limbo now, as one of Duperret’s _Seventy-three_, “several
      Members, quitting their curule chairs, took the hand of girls
      flaunting in Priest’s vestures, and danced the Carmagnole along
      with them.” Such Old-Hallow-tide have they, in this year, once
      named of Grace, 1793.

      Out of which strange fall of Formulas, tumbling there in confused
      welter, betrampled by the Patriotic dance, is it not passing
      strange to see a _new_ Formula arise? For the human tongue is not
      adequate to speak what “triviality run distracted” there is in
      human nature. Black Mumbo-Jumbo of the woods, and most Indian
      Wau-waus, one can understand: but this of Procureur _Anaxagoras_
      whilom John-Peter Chaumette? We will say only: Man is a born
      idol-worshipper, _sight_-worshipper, so sensuous-imaginative is
      he; and also partakes much of the nature of the ape.

      For the same day, while this brave Carmagnole dance has hardly
      jigged itself out, there arrive Procureur Chaumette and
      Municipals and Departmentals, and with them the strangest
      freightage: a New Religion! Demoiselle Candeille, of the Opera; a
      woman fair to look upon, when well rouged: she, borne on
      palanquin shoulder-high; with red woolen nightcap; in azure
      mantle; garlanded with oak; holding in her hand the Pike of the
      Jupiter-_Peuple_, sails in; heralded by white young women girt in
      tricolor. Let the world consider it! This, O National Convention
      wonder of the universe, is our New Divinity; _Goddess of Reason_,
      worthy, and alone worthy of revering. Nay, were it too much to
      ask of an august National Representation that it also went with
      us to the _ci-devant_ Cathedral called of Notre-Dame, and
      executed a few strophes in worship of her?

      President and Secretaries give Goddess Candeille, borne at due
      height round their platform, successively the fraternal kiss;
      whereupon she, by decree, sails to the right-hand of the
      President and there alights. And now, after due pause and
      flourishes of oratory, the Convention, gathering its limbs, does
      get under way in the required procession towards
      Notre-Dame;—Reason, again in her litter, sitting in the van of
      them, borne, as one judges, by men in the Roman costume; escorted
      by wind-music, red nightcaps, and the madness of the world. And
      so straightway, Reason taking seat on the high-altar of
      Notre-Dame, the requisite worship or quasi-worship is, say the
      Newspapers, _executed;_ National Convention chanting “the _Hymn
      to Liberty_, words by Chénier, music by Gossec.” It is the first
      of the _Feasts of Reason;_ first communion-service of the New
      Religion of Chaumette.

      “The corresponding Festival in the Church of Saint-Eustache,”
      says Mercier, “offered the spectacle of a great tavern. The
      interior of the choir represented a landscape decorated with
      cottages and boskets of trees. Round the choir stood tables
      over-loaded with bottles, with sausages, pork-puddings, pastries
      and other meats. The guests flowed in and out through all doors:
      whosoever presented himself took part of the good things:
      children of eight, girls as well as boys, put hand to plate, in
      sign of Liberty; they drank also of the bottles, and their prompt
      intoxication created laughter. Reason sat in azure mantle aloft,
      in a serene manner; Cannoneers, pipe in mouth, serving her as
      acolytes. And out of doors,” continues the exaggerative man,
      “were mad multitudes dancing round the bonfire of
      Chapel-balustrades, of Priests’ and Canons’ stalls; and the
      dancers, I exaggerate nothing, the dancers nigh bare of breeches,
      neck and breast naked, stockings down, went whirling and
      spinning, like those Dust-vortexes, forerunners of Tempest and
      Destruction.”[716] At Saint-Gervais Church again there was a
      terrible “smell of herrings;” Section or Municipality having
      provided no food, no condiment, but left it to chance. Other
      mysteries, seemingly of a Cabiric or even Paphian character, we
      heave under the Veil, which appropriately stretches itself “along
      the pillars of the aisles,”—not to be lifted aside by the hand of
      History.

      But there is one thing we should like almost better to understand
      than any other: what Reason herself thought of it, all the while.
      What articulate words poor Mrs. Momoro, for example, uttered;
      when she had become ungoddessed again, and the Bibliopolist and
      she sat quiet at home, at supper? For he was an earnest man,
      Bookseller Momoro; and had notions of Agrarian Law. Mrs. Momoro,
      it is admitted, made one of the best Goddesses of Reason; though
      her teeth were a little defective. And now if the reader will
      represent to himself that such visible Adoration of Reason went
      on “all over the Republic,” through these November and December
      weeks, till the Church woodwork was burnt out, and the business
      otherwise completed, he will feel sufficiently what an adoring
      Republic it was, and without reluctance quit this part of the
      subject.

      Such gifts of Church-spoil are chiefly the work of the _Armée
      Révolutionnaire;_ raised, as we said, some time ago. It is an
      Army with portable guillotine: commanded by Playwright Ronsin in
      terrible moustachioes; and even by some uncertain shadow of Usher
      Maillard, the old Bastille Hero, Leader of the Menads, September
      Man in Grey! Clerk Vincent of the War-Office, one of Pache’s old
      Clerks, “with a head heated by the ancient orators,” had a main
      hand in the appointments, at least in the staff-appointments.

      But of the marchings and retreatings of these Six Thousand no
      Xenophon exists. Nothing, but an inarticulate hum, of cursing and
      sooty frenzy, surviving dubious in the memory of ages! They scour
      the country round Paris; seeking Prisoners; raising Requisitions;
      seeing that Edicts are executed, that the Farmers have thrashed
      sufficiently; lowering Church-bells or metallic Virgins.
      Detachments shoot forth dim, towards remote parts of France; nay
      new Provincial Revolutionary Armies rise dim, here and there, as
      Carrier’s Company of Marat, as Tallien’s Bourdeaux Troop; like
      sympathetic clouds in an atmosphere all electric. Ronsin, they
      say, admitted, in candid moments, that his troops were the elixir
      of the Rascality of the Earth. One sees them drawn up in
      market-places; travel-plashed, rough-bearded, in _carmagnole
      complète:_ the first exploit is to prostrate what Royal or
      Ecclesiastical monument, crucifix or the like, there may be; to
      plant a cannon at the steeple, fetch down the bell without
      climbing for it, bell and belfry together. This, however, it is
      said, depends somewhat on the size of the town: if the town
      contains much population, and these perhaps of a dubious choleric
      aspect, the Revolutionary Army will do its work gently, by ladder
      and wrench; nay perhaps will take its billet without work at all;
      and, refreshing itself with a little liquor and sleep, pass on to
      the next stage.[717] Pipe in cheek, sabre on thigh; in carmagnole
      complete!

      Such things have been; and may again be. Charles Second sent out
      his Highland Host over the Western Scotch Whigs; Jamaica Planters
      got Dogs from the Spanish Main to hunt their Maroons with: France
      too is bescoured with a Devil’s Pack, the baying of which, at
      this distance of half a century, still sounds in the mind’s ear.

      Chapter 3.5.V.
      Like a Thunder-Cloud.

      But the grand, and indeed substantially primary and generic
      aspect of the Consummation of Terror remains still to be looked
      at; nay blinkard History has for most part all but _over_looked
      this aspect, the soul of the whole: that which makes it terrible
      to the Enemies of France. Let Despotism and Cimmerian Coalitions
      consider. All French men and French things are in a State of
      Requisition; Fourteen Armies are got on foot; Patriotism, with
      all that it has of faculty in heart or in head, in soul or body
      or breeches-pocket, is rushing to the frontiers, to prevail or
      die! Busy sits Carnot, in _Salut Public;_ busy for his share, in
      “organising victory.” Not swifter pulses that Guillotine, in
      dread systole-diastole in the Place de la Révolution, than smites
      the Sword of Patriotism, smiting Cimmeria back to its own
      borders, from the sacred soil.

      In fact the Government is what we can call Revolutionary; and
      some men are “_à la hauteur_,” on a level with the circumstances;
      and others are not _à la hauteur_,—so much the worse for them.
      But the Anarchy, we may say, has _organised_ itself: Society is
      literally overset; its old forces working with mad activity, but
      in the inverse order; destructive and self-destructive.

      Curious to see how all still refers itself to some head and
      fountain; not even an Anarchy but must have a centre to revolve
      round. It is now some six months since the Committee of _Salut
      Public_ came into existence: some three months since Danton
      proposed that all power should be given it and “a sum of fifty
      millions,” and the “Government be declared Revolutionary.” He
      himself, since that day, would take no hand in it, though again
      and again solicited; but sits private in his place on the
      Mountain. Since that day, the Nine, or if they should even rise
      to Twelve have become permanent, always re-elected when their
      term runs out; _Salut Public, Sûreté Générale_ have assumed their
      ulterior form and mode of operating.

      Committee of Public Salvation, as supreme; of General Surety, as
      subaltern: these like a Lesser and Greater Council, most
      harmonious hitherto, have become the centre of all things. They
      ride this Whirlwind; they, raised by force of circumstances,
      insensibly, very strangely, thither to that dread height;—and
      guide it, and seem to guide it. Stranger set of Cloud-Compellers
      the Earth never saw. A Robespierre, a Billaud, a Collot, Couthon,
      Saint-Just; not to mention still meaner Amars, Vadiers, in
      _Sûreté Générale:_ these are your Cloud-Compellers. Small
      intellectual talent is necessary: indeed where among them, except
      in the head of Carnot, busied organising victory, would you find
      any? The talent is one of instinct rather. It is that of divining
      aright what this great dumb Whirlwind wishes and wills; that of
      willing, with more frenzy than any one, what all the world wills.
      To stand at no obstacles; to heed no considerations human or
      divine; to know well that, of divine or human, there is one thing
      needful, Triumph of the Republic, Destruction of the Enemies of
      the Republic! With this one spiritual endowment, and so few
      others, it is strange to see how a dumb inarticulately storming
      Whirlwind of things puts, as it were, its reins into your hand,
      and invites and compels you to be leader of it.

      Hard by, sits a Municipality of Paris; all in red nightcaps since
      the fourth of November last: a set of men fully “on a level with
      circumstances,” or even beyond it. Sleek Mayor Pache, studious to
      be safe in the middle; Chaumettes, Héberts, Varlets, and Henriot
      their great Commandant; not to speak of Vincent the War-clerk, of
      Momoros, Dobsents, and such like: all intent to have Churches
      plundered, to have Reason adored, Suspects cut down, and the
      Revolution triumph. Perhaps carrying the matter _too_ far? Danton
      was heard to grumble at the civic strophes; and to recommend
      prose and decency. Robespierre also grumbles that in overturning
      Superstition we did not mean to make a religion of Atheism. In
      fact, your Chaumette and Company constitute a kind of
      Hyper-Jacobinism, or rabid “Faction _des Enragés;_” which has
      given orthodox Patriotism some umbrage, of late months. To “know
      a Suspect on the streets:” what is this but bringing the _Law of
      the Suspect_ itself into ill odour? Men half-frantic, men zealous
      overmuch,—they toil there, in their red nightcaps, restlessly,
      rapidly, accomplishing what of Life is allotted them.

      And the Forty-four Thousand other Townships, each with
      revolutionary Committee, based on Jacobin Daughter Society;
      enlightened by the spirit of Jacobinism; quickened by the Forty
      Sous a-day!—The French Constitution spurned always at any thing
      like Two Chambers; and yet behold, has it not verily got Two
      Chambers? National Convention, elected for one; Mother of
      Patriotism, self-elected, for another! Mother of Patriotism has
      her Debates reported in the _Moniteur_, as important
      state-procedures; which indisputably they are. A Second Chamber
      of Legislature we call this Mother Society;—if perhaps it were
      not rather comparable to that old Scotch Body named _Lords of the
      Articles_, without whose origination, and signal given, the
      so-called Parliament could introduce no bill, could do no work?
      Robespierre himself, whose words are a law, opens his
      incorruptible lips copiously in the Jacobins Hall. Smaller
      Council of _Salut Public_, Greater Council of _Sûreté Générale_,
      all active Parties, come here to plead; to shape beforehand what
      decision they must arrive at, what destiny they have to expect.
      Now if a question arose, Which of those Two Chambers, Convention,
      or Lords of the Articles, was the _stronger?_ Happily they as yet
      go hand in hand.

      As for the National Convention, truly it has become a most
      composed Body. Quenched now the old effervescence; the
      Seventy-three locked in ward; once noisy Friends of the Girondins
      sunk all into silent men of the Plain, called even “Frogs of the
      Marsh,” _Crapauds du Marais!_ Addresses come, Revolutionary
      Church-plunder comes; Deputations, with prose, or strophes: these
      the Convention receives. But beyond this, the Convention has one
      thing mainly to do: to listen what _Salut Public_ proposes, and
      say, Yea.

      Bazire followed by Chabot, with some impetuosity, declared, one
      morning, that this was not the way of a Free Assembly. ‘There
      ought to be an Opposition side, a _Côté Droit_,’ cried Chabot;
      ‘if none else will form it, I will: people say to me, You will
      all get guillotined in your turn, first you and Bazire, then
      Danton, then Robespierre himself.’[718] So spake the Disfrocked,
      with a loud voice: next week, Bazire and he lie in the Abbaye;
      wending, one may fear, towards Tinville and the Axe; and “people
      say to me”—what seems to be proving true! Bazire’s blood was all
      inflamed with Revolution fever; with coffee and spasmodic
      dreams.[719] Chabot, again, how happy with his rich Jew-Austrian
      wife, late Fraulein Frey! But he lies in Prison; and his two
      Jew-Austrian Brothers-in-Law, the Bankers Frey, lie with him;
      waiting the urn of doom. Let a National Convention, therefore,
      take warning, and know its function. Let the Convention, all as
      one man, set its shoulder to the work; not with bursts of
      Parliamentary eloquence, but in quite other and serviceable ways!

      Convention Commissioners, what we ought to call Representatives,
      “_Représentans_ on mission,” fly, like the Herald Mercury, to all
      points of the Territory; carrying your behests far and wide. In
      their “round hat plumed with tricolor feathers, girt with flowing
      tricolor taffeta; in close frock, tricolor sash, sword and
      jack-boots,” these men are powerfuller than King or Kaiser. They
      say to whomso they meet, Do; and he must do it: all men’s goods
      are at their disposal; for France is as one huge City in Siege.
      They smite with Requisitions, and Forced-loan; they have the
      power of life and death. Saint-Just and Lebas order the rich
      classes of Strasburg to “strip off their shoes,” and send them to
      the Armies where as many as “ten thousand pairs” are needed.
      Also, that within four and twenty hours, “a thousand beds” are to
      be got ready;[720] wrapt in matting, and sent under way. For the
      time presses!—Like swift bolts, issuing from the fuliginous
      Olympus of _Salut Public_ rush these men, oftenest in pairs;
      scatter your thunder-orders over France; make France one enormous
      Revolutionary thunder-cloud.

      Chapter 3.5.VI.
      Do thy Duty.

      Accordingly alongside of these bonfires of Church balustrades,
      and sounds of fusillading and noyading, there rise quite another
      sort of fires and sounds: Smithy-fires and Proof-volleys for the
      manufacture of arms.

      Cut off from Sweden and the world, the Republic must learn to
      make steel for itself; and, by aid of Chemists, she has learnt
      it. Towns that knew only iron, now know steel: from their new
      dungeons at Chantilly, Aristocrats may hear the rustle of our new
      steel furnace there. Do not bells transmute themselves into
      cannon; iron stancheons into the white-weapon (_arme blanche_),
      by sword-cutlery? The wheels of Langres scream, amid their
      sputtering fire halo; grinding mere swords. The stithies of
      Charleville ring with gun-making. What say we, Charleville? Two
      hundred and fifty-eight Forges stand in the open spaces of Paris
      itself; a hundred and forty of them in the Esplanade of the
      Invalides, fifty-four in the Luxembourg Garden: so many Forges
      stand; grim Smiths beating and forging at lock and barrel there.
      The Clockmakers have come, requisitioned, to do the touch-holes,
      the hard-solder and filework. Five great Barges swing at anchor
      on the Seine Stream, loud with boring; the great press-drills
      grating harsh thunder to the general ear and heart. And deft
      Stock-makers do gouge and rasp; and all men bestir themselves,
      according to their cunning:—in the language of hope, it is
      reckoned that a “thousand finished muskets can be delivered
      daily.”[721] Chemists of the Republic have taught us miracles of
      swift tanning;[722] the cordwainer bores and stitches;—_not_ of
      “wood and pasteboard,” or he shall answer it to Tinville! The
      women sew tents and coats, the children scrape surgeon’s-lint,
      the old men sit in the market-places; able men are on march; all
      men in requisition: from Town to Town flutters, on the Heaven’s
      winds, this Banner, THE FRENCH PEOPLE RISEN AGAINST TYRANTS.

      All which is well. But now arises the question: What is to be
      done for saltpetre? Interrupted Commerce and the English Navy
      shut us out from saltpetre; and without saltpetre there is no
      gunpowder. Republican Science again sits meditative; discovers
      that saltpetre exists here and there, though in attenuated
      quantity: that old plaster of walls holds a sprinkling of
      it;—that the earth of the Paris Cellars holds a sprinkling of it,
      diffused through the common rubbish; that were these dug up and
      washed, saltpetre might be had. Whereupon swiftly, see! the
      Citoyens, with upshoved _bonnet rouge_, or with doffed bonnet,
      and hair toil-wetted; digging fiercely, each in his own cellar,
      for saltpetre. The Earth-heap rises at every door; the Citoyennes
      with hod and bucket carrying it up; the Citoyens, pith in every
      muscle, shovelling and digging: for life and saltpetre. Dig my
      _braves;_ and right well speed ye. What of saltpetre is essential
      the Republic shall not want.

      Consummation of Sansculottism has many aspects and tints: but the
      brightest tint, really of a solar or stellar brightness, is this
      which the Armies give it. That same fervour of Jacobinism which
      internally fills France with hatred, suspicions, scaffolds and
      Reason-worship, does, on the Frontiers, shew itself as a glorious
      _Pro patria mori_. Ever since Dumouriez’s defection, three
      Convention Representatives attend every General. Committee of
      _Salut_ has sent them, often with this Laconic order only: ‘Do
      thy duty, _Fais ton devoir_.’ It is strange, under what
      impediments the fire of Jacobinism, like other such fires, will
      burn. These Soldiers have shoes of wood and pasteboard, or go
      booted in hayropes, in dead of winter; they skewer a bass mat
      round their shoulders, and are destitute of most things. What
      then? It is for Rights of Frenchhood, of Manhood, that they
      fight: the unquenchable spirit, here as elsewhere, works
      miracles. ‘With steel and bread,’ says the Convention
      Representative, ‘one may get to China.’ The Generals go fast to
      the guillotine; justly and unjustly. From which what inference?
      This among others: That ill-success is death; that in victory
      alone is life! To conquer or die is no theatrical palabra, in
      these circumstances: but a practical truth and necessity. All
      Girondism, Halfness, Compromise is swept away. Forward, ye
      Soldiers of the Republic, captain and man! Dash with your Gaelic
      impetuosity, on Austria, England, Prussia, Spain, Sardinia; Pitt,
      Cobourg, York, and the Devil and the World! Behind us is but the
      Guillotine; before us is Victory, Apotheosis and Millennium
      without end!

      See accordingly, on all Frontiers, how the Sons of Night,
      astonished after short triumph, do recoil;—the Sons of the
      Republic flying at them, with wild _Ça-ira_ or Marseillese _Aux
      armes_, with the temper of cat-o’-mountain, or demon incarnate;
      which no Son of Night can stand! Spain, which came bursting
      through the Pyrenees, rustling with Bourbon banners, and went
      conquering here and there for a season, falters at such
      cat-o’-mountain welcome; draws itself in again; too happy now
      were the Pyrenees impassable. Not only does Dugommier, conqueror
      of Toulon, drive Spain back; he invades Spain. General Dugommier
      invades it by the Eastern Pyrenees; General Muller shall invade
      it by the Western. _Shall_, that is the word: Committee of _Salut
      Public_ has said it; Representative Cavaignac, on mission there,
      must see it done. Impossible! cries Muller,—Infallible! answers
      Cavaignac. Difficulty, impossibility, is to no purpose. ‘The
      Committee is deaf on that side of its head,’ answers Cavaignac,
      ‘_n’entend pas de cette oreille là_. How many wantest thou, of
      men, of horses, cannons? Thou shalt have them. Conquerors,
      conquered or hanged, forward we must.’[723] Which things also,
      even as the Representative spake them, were _done_. The Spring of
      the new Year sees Spain invaded: and redoubts are carried, and
      Passes and Heights of the most scarped description; Spanish
      Field-officerism struck mute at such cat-o’-mountain spirit, the
      cannon forgetting to fire.[724] Swept are the Pyrenees; Town
      after Town flies up, burst by terror or the petard. In the course
      of another year, Spain will crave Peace; acknowledge its sins and
      the Republic; nay, in Madrid, there will be joy as for a victory,
      that even Peace is got.

      Few things, we repeat, can be notabler than these Convention
      Representatives, with their power more than kingly. Nay at bottom
      are they not Kings, _Able-men_, of a sort; chosen from the Seven
      Hundred and Forty-nine French Kings; with this order, Do thy
      duty? Representative Levasseur, of small stature, by trade a mere
      pacific Surgeon-Accoucheur, has mutinies to quell; mad hosts (mad
      at the Doom of Custine) bellowing far and wide; he alone amid
      them, the one small Representative,—small, but as hard as flint,
      which also carries _fire_ in it! So too, at Hondschooten, far in
      the afternoon, he declares that the battle is not lost; that it
      must be gained; and fights, himself, with his own obstetric
      hand;—horse shot under him, or say on foot, “up to the haunches
      in tide-water;” cutting stoccado and passado there, in defiance
      of Water, Earth, Air and Fire, the choleric little Representative
      that he was! Whereby, as natural, Royal Highness of York had to
      withdraw,—occasionally at full gallop; like to be swallowed by
      the tide: and his Siege of Dunkirk became a dream, realising only
      much loss of beautiful siege-artillery and of brave lives.[725]

      General Houchard, it would appear, stood behind a hedge, on this
      Hondschooten occasion; wherefore they have since guillotined him.
      A new General Jourdan, late Serjeant Jourdan, commands in his
      stead: he, in long-winded Battles of Watigny, “murderous
      artillery-fire mingling itself with sound of Revolutionary
      battle-hymns,” forces Austria behind the Sambre again; has hopes
      of purging the soil of Liberty. With hard wrestling, with
      artillerying and _ça-ira_-ing, it shall be done. In the course of
      a new Summer, Valenciennes will see itself beleaguered; Condé
      beleaguered; whatsoever is yet in the hands of Austria
      beleaguered and bombarded: nay, by Convention Decree, we even
      summon them _all_ “either to surrender in twenty-four hours, or
      else be put to the sword;”—a high saying, which, though it
      remains unfulfilled, may shew what spirit one is of.

      Representative Drouet, as an Old-Dragoon, could fight by a kind
      of second nature; but he was unlucky. Him, in a night-foray at
      Maubeuge, the Austrians took alive, in October last. They stript
      him almost naked, he says; making a shew of him, as King-taker of
      Varennes. They flung him into carts; sent him far into the
      interior of Cimmeria, to “a Fortress called Spitzberg” on the
      Danube River; and left him there, at an elevation of perhaps a
      hundred and fifty feet, to his own bitter reflections.
      Reflections; and also devices! For the indomitable Old-dragoon
      constructs wing-machinery, of Paperkite; saws window-bars:
      determines to fly down. He will seize a boat, will follow the
      River’s course: land somewhere in Crim Tartary, in the Black Sea
      or Constantinople region: _à la_ Sindbad! Authentic History,
      accordingly, looking far into Cimmeria, discerns dimly a
      phenomenon. In the dead night-watches, the Spitzberg sentry is
      near fainting with terror: Is it a huge vague Portent descending
      through the night air? It is a huge National Representative
      Old-dragoon, descending by Paperkite; too rapidly, alas! For
      Drouet had taken with him “a small provision-store, twenty pounds
      weight or thereby;” which proved accelerative: so he fell,
      fracturing his leg; and lay there, moaning, till day dawned, till
      you could discern clearly that he was not a Portent but a
      Representative![726]

      Or see Saint-Just, in the Lines of Weissembourg, though
      physically of a timid apprehensive nature, how he charges with
      his “Alsatian Peasants armed hastily” for the nonce; the solemn
      face of him blazing into flame; his black hair and tricolor
      hat-taffeta flowing in the breeze; These our Lines of
      Weissembourg were indeed forced, and Prussia and the Emigrants
      rolled through: but we _re_-force the Lines of Weissembourg; and
      Prussia and the Emigrants roll back again still faster,—hurled
      with bayonet charges and fiery _ça-ira_-ing.

      _Ci-devant_ Sergeant Pichegru, _ci-devant_ Sergeant Hoche, risen
      now to be Generals, have done wonders here. Tall Pichegru was
      meant for the Church; was Teacher of Mathematics once, in Brienne
      School,—his remarkablest Pupil there was the Boy Napoleon
      Buonaparte. He then, not in the sweetest humour, enlisted
      exchanging ferula for musket; and had got the length of the
      halberd, beyond which nothing could be hoped; when the Bastille
      barriers falling made passage for him, and he is here. Hoche bore
      a hand at the literal overturn of the Bastille; he was, as we
      saw, a Serjeant of the _Gardes Françaises_, spending his pay in
      rushlights and cheap editions of books. How the Mountains are
      burst, and many an Enceladus is disemprisoned: and Captains
      founding on Four parchments of Nobility, are blown with their
      parchments across the Rhine, into Lunar Limbo!

      What high feats of arms, therefore, were done in these Fourteen
      Armies; and how, for love of Liberty and hope of Promotion,
      low-born valour cut its desperate way to Generalship; and, from
      the central Carnot in _Salut Public_ to the outmost drummer on
      the Frontiers, men strove for their Republic, let readers fancy.
      The snows of Winter, the flowers of Summer continue to be stained
      with warlike blood. Gaelic impetuosity mounts ever higher with
      victory; spirit of Jacobinism weds itself to national vanity: the
      Soldiers of the Republic are becoming, as we prophesied, very
      Sons of Fire. Barefooted, barebacked: but with bread and iron you
      can get to China! It is one Nation against the whole world; but
      the Nation has that within her which the whole world will not
      conquer. Cimmeria, astonished, recoils faster or slower; all
      round the Republic there rises fiery, as it were, a magic ring of
      musket-volleying and _ça-ira_-ing. Majesty of Prussia, as Majesty
      of Spain, will by and by acknowledge his sins and the Republic:
      and make a Peace of Bâle.

      Foreign Commerce, Colonies, Factories in the East and in the
      West, are fallen or falling into the hands of sea-ruling Pitt,
      enemy of human nature. Nevertheless what sound is this that we
      hear, on the first of June, 1794; sound of as war-thunder borne
      from the Ocean too; of tone most piercing? War-thunder from off
      the Brest waters: Villaret-Joyeuse and English Howe, after long
      manœuvring have ranked themselves there; and are belching fire.
      The enemies of human nature are on their own element; cannot be
      conquered; cannot be kept from conquering. Twelve hours of raging
      cannonade; sun now sinking westward through the battle-smoke: six
      French Ships taken, the Battle lost; what Ship soever can still
      sail, making off! But how is it, then, with that _Vengeur_ Ship,
      she neither strikes nor makes off? She is lamed, she cannot make
      off; strike she will not. Fire rakes her fore and aft, from
      victorious enemies; the _Vengeur_ is sinking. Strong are ye,
      Tyrants of the Sea; yet we also, are we weak? Lo! all flags,
      streamers, jacks, every rag of tricolor that will yet run on
      rope, fly rustling aloft: the whole crew crowds to the upper
      deck; and, with universal soul-maddening yell, shouts _Vive la
      République_,—sinking, sinking. She staggers, she lurches, her
      last drunk whirl; Ocean yawns abysmal: down rushes the _Vengeur_,
      carrying _Vive la République_ along with her, unconquerable, into
      Eternity![727] Let foreign Despots think of that. There is an
      Unconquerable in man, when he stands on his Rights of Man: let
      Despots and Slaves and all people know this, and only them that
      stand on the Wrongs of Man tremble to know it.—So has History
      written, nothing doubting, of the sunk _Vengeur_.

      —Reader! Mendez Pinto, Münchausen, Cagliostro, Psalmanazar have
      been great; but they are not the greatest. O Barrère, Barrère,
      Anacreon of the Guillotine! must inquisitive pictorial History,
      in a new edition, ask again, “How _is_ it with the _Vengeur_,” in
      this its glorious suicidal sinking; and, with resentful brush,
      dash a bend-sinister of contumelious lamp-black through thee and
      it? Alas, alas! The _Vengeur_, after fighting bravely, did sink
      altogether as other ships do, her captain and above two-hundred
      of her crew escaping gladly in British boats; and this same
      enormous inspiring Feat, and rumour “of sound most piercing,”
      turns out to be an enormous inspiring Non-entity, extant nowhere
      save, as falsehood, in the brain of Barrère! Actually so.[728]
      Founded, like the World itself, on _Nothing;_ proved by
      Convention Report, by solemn Convention Decree and Decrees, and
      wooden “_Model of the Vengeur;_” believed, bewept, besung by the
      whole French People to this hour, it may be regarded as Barrère’s
      masterpiece; the largest, most inspiring piece of _blague_
      manufactured, for some centuries, by any man or nation. As such,
      and not otherwise, be it henceforth memorable.

      Chapter 3.5.VII.
      Flame-Picture.

      In this manner, mad-blazing with flame of all imaginable tints,
      from the red of Tophet to the stellar-bright, blazes off this
      Consummation of Sansculottism.

      But the hundredth part of the things that were done, and the
      thousandth part of the things that were projected and decreed to
      be done, would tire the tongue of History. Statue of the _Peuple
      Souverain_, high as Strasburg Steeple; which shall fling its
      shadow from the Pont Neuf over Jardin National and Convention
      Hall;—enormous, in Painter David’s head! With other the like
      enormous Statues not a few: realised in paper Decree. For,
      indeed, the Statue of Liberty herself is still but Plaster in the
      Place de la Révolution! Then Equalisation of Weights and
      Measures, with decimal division; Institutions, of Music and of
      much else; Institute in general; School of Arts, School of Mars,
      _Elèves de la Patrie_, Normal Schools: amid such Gun-boring,
      Altar-burning, Saltpetre-digging, and miraculous improvements in
      Tannery!

      What, for example, is this that Engineer Chappe is doing, in the
      Park of Vincennes? In the Park of Vincennes; and onwards, they
      say, in the Park of Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau the assassinated
      Deputy; and still onwards to the Heights of Ecouen and further,
      he has scaffolding set up, has posts driven in; wooden arms with
      elbow joints are jerking and fugling in the air, in the most
      rapid mysterious manner! Citoyens ran up suspicious. Yes, O
      Citoyens, we are signaling: it is a device this, worthy of the
      Republic; a thing for what we will call _Far-writing_ without the
      aid of postbags; in Greek, it shall be named
      Telegraph.—_Télégraphe sacré!_ answers Citoyenism: For writing to
      Traitors, to Austria?—and tears it down. Chappe had to escape,
      and get a new Legislative Decree. Nevertheless he has
      accomplished it, the indefatigable Chappe: this his _Far-writer_,
      with its wooden arms and elbow-joints, can intelligibly signal;
      and lines of them are set up, to the North Frontiers and
      elsewhither. On an Autumn evening of the Year Two, Far-writer
      having just written that Condé Town has surrendered to us, we
      send from Tuileries Convention Hall this response in the shape of
      Decree: “The name of Condé is changed to _Nord-Libre_,
      North-Free. The Army of the North ceases not to merit well of the
      country.”—To the admiration of men! For lo, in some half hour,
      while the Convention yet debates, there arrives this new answer:
      “I inform thee, _je t’annonce_, Citizen President, that the
      decree of Convention, ordering change of the name Condé into
      _North-Free;_ and the other declaring that the Army of the North
      ceases not to merit well of the country, are transmitted and
      acknowledged by Telegraph. I have instructed my Officer at Lille
      to forward them to North-Free by express. _Signed_, CHAPPE.”[729]

      Or see, over Fleurus in the Netherlands, where General Jourdan,
      having now swept the soil of Liberty, and advanced thus far, is
      just about to fight, and sweep or be swept, things there not in
      the Heaven’s Vault, some Prodigy, seen by Austrian eyes and
      spyglasses: in the similitude of an enormous Windbag, with
      netting and enormous Saucer depending from it? A Jove’s Balance,
      O ye Austrian spyglasses? One saucer-hole of a Jove’s Balance;
      _your_ poor Austrian scale having kicked itself quite aloft, out
      of sight? By Heaven, answer the spyglasses, it is a Montgolfier,
      a Balloon, and they are making signals! Austrian cannon-battery
      barks at this Montgolfier; harmless as dog at the Moon: the
      Montgolfier makes its signals; detects what Austrian ambuscade
      there may be, and descends at its ease.[730] What will not these
      devils incarnate contrive?

      On the whole, is it not, O Reader, one of the strangest
      Flame-Pictures that ever painted itself; flaming off there, on
      its ground of Guillotine-black? And the nightly Theatres are
      Twenty-three; and the _Salons de danse_ are sixty: full of mere
      _Egalité, Fraternite_ and _Carmagnole_. And Section
      Committee-rooms are Forty-eight; redolent of tobacco and brandy:
      vigorous with twenty-pence a-day, coercing the suspect. And the
      Houses of Arrest are Twelve for Paris alone; crowded and even
      crammed. And at all turns, you need your “Certificate of Civism;”
      be it for going out, or for coming in; nay without it you cannot,
      for money, get your daily ounces of bread. Dusky red-capped
      Baker’s-queues; wagging themselves; not in silence! For we still
      live by Maximum, in all things; waited on by these two, Scarcity
      and Confusion. The faces of men are darkened with suspicion; with
      suspecting, or being suspect. The streets lie unswept; the ways
      unmended. Law has shut her Books; speaks little, save impromptu,
      through the throat of Tinville. Crimes go unpunished: not crimes
      against the Revolution.[731] “The number of foundling children,”
      as some compute, “is doubled.”

      How silent now sits Royalism; sits all Aristocratism;
      Respectability that kept its Gig! The honour now, and the safety,
      is to Poverty, not to Wealth. Your Citizen, who would be
      fashionable, walks abroad, with his Wife on his arm, in red wool
      nightcap, black shag spencer, and carmagnole complete.
      Aristocratism crouches low, in what shelter is still left;
      submitting to all requisitions, vexations; too happy to escape
      with life. Ghastly châteaus stare on you by the wayside;
      disroofed, diswindowed; which the National House-broker is
      peeling for the lead and ashlar. The old tenants hover
      disconsolate, over the Rhine with Condé; a spectacle to men.
      _Ci-devant_ Seigneur, exquisite in palate, will become an
      exquisite Restaurateur Cook in Hamburg; Ci-devant Madame,
      exquisite in dress, a successful _Marchande des Modes_ in London.
      In Newgate-Street, you meet M. le Marquis, with a rough deal on
      his shoulder, adze and jack-plane under arm; he has taken to the
      joiner trade; it being necessary to live (_faut
      vivre_).[732]—Higher than all Frenchmen the domestic Stock-jobber
      flourishes,—in a day of Paper-money. The Farmer also flourishes:
      “Farmers’ houses,” says Mercier, “have become like Pawn-brokers’
      shops;” all manner of furniture, apparel, vessels of gold and
      silver accumulate themselves there: bread is precious. The
      Farmer’s rent is Paper-money, and he alone of men has bread:
      Farmer is better than Landlord, and will himself become Landlord.

      And daily, we say, like a black Spectre, silently through that
      Life-tumult, passes the Revolution Cart; writing on the walls its
      MENE, MENE, _Thou art weighed, and found wanting!_ A Spectre with
      which one has grown familiar. Men have adjusted themselves:
      complaint issues not from that Death-tumbril. Weak women and
      _ci-devants_, their plumage and finery all tarnished, sit there;
      with a silent gaze, as if looking into the Infinite Black. The
      once light lip wears a curl of irony, uttering no word; and the
      Tumbril fares along. They may be guilty before Heaven, or not;
      they are guilty, we suppose, before the Revolution. Then, does
      not the Republic “coin money” of them, with its great axe? Red
      Nightcaps howl dire approval: the rest of Paris looks on; if with
      a sigh, that is much; Fellow-creatures whom sighing cannot help;
      whom black Necessity and Tinville have clutched.

      One other thing, or rather two other things, we will still
      mention; and no more: The Blond Perukes; the Tannery at Meudon.
      Great talk is of these _Perruques blondes:_ O Reader, they are
      made from the Heads of Guillotined women! The locks of a Duchess,
      in this way, may come to cover the scalp of a Cordwainer: her
      blond German Frankism his black Gaelic poll, if it be bald. Or
      they may be worn affectionately, as relics; rendering one
      suspect?[733] Citizens use them, not without mockery; of a rather
      cannibal sort.

      Still deeper into one’s heart goes that Tannery at Meudon; not
      mentioned among the other miracles of tanning! “At Meudon,” says
      Montgaillard with considerable calmness, “there was a Tannery of
      Human Skins; such of the Guillotined as seemed worth flaying: of
      which perfectly good wash-leather was made:” for breeches, and
      other uses. The skin of the men, he remarks, was superior in
      toughness (_consistance_) and quality to shamoy; that of women
      was good for almost nothing, being so soft in
      texture![734]—History looking back over Cannibalism, through
      _Purchas’s Pilgrims_ and all early and late Records, will perhaps
      find no terrestrial Cannibalism of a sort on the whole so
      detestable. It is a manufactured, soft-feeling, quietly elegant
      sort; a sort _perfide!_ Alas then, is man’s civilisation only a
      wrappage, through which the savage nature of him can still burst,
      infernal as ever? Nature still makes him; and has an Infernal in
      her as well as a Celestial.

      BOOK 3.VI.
      THERMIDOR

      Chapter 3.6.I.
      The Gods are athirst.

      What then is this Thing, called _La Révolution_, which, like an
      Angel of Death, hangs over France, noyading, fusillading,
      fighting, gun-boring, tanning human skins? _La Révolution_ is but
      so many Alphabetic Letters; a thing nowhere to be laid hands on,
      to be clapt under lock and key: where is it? what is it? It is
      the Madness that dwells in the hearts of men. In this man it is,
      and in that man; as a rage or as a terror, it is in all men.
      Invisible, impalpable; and yet no black Azrael, with wings spread
      over half a continent, with sword sweeping from sea to sea, could
      be a truer Reality.

      To explain, what is called explaining, the march of this