The French Revolution A History Chapter 1.4.IV. - The Procession.
by Thomas Carlyle
On the first Saturday of May, it is gala at Versailles; and Monday, fourth
of the month, is to be a still greater day. The Deputies have mostly got
thither, and sought out lodgings; and are now successively, in long well-
ushered files, kissing the hand of Majesty in the Chateau. Supreme Usher
de Breze does not give the highest satisfaction: we cannot but observe
that in ushering Noblesse or Clergy into the anointed Presence, he
liberally opens both his folding-doors; and on the other hand, for members
of the Third Estate opens only one! However, there is room to enter;
Majesty has smiles for all.
The good Louis welcomes his Honourable Members, with smiles of hope. He
has prepared for them the Hall of Menus, the largest near him; and often
surveyed the workmen as they went on. A spacious Hall: with raised
platform for Throne, Court and Blood-royal; space for six hundred Commons
Deputies in front; for half as many Clergy on this hand, and half as many
Noblesse on that. It has lofty galleries; wherefrom dames of honour,
splendent in gaze d'or; foreign Diplomacies, and other gilt-edged white-
frilled individuals to the number of two thousand,--may sit and look.
Broad passages flow through it; and, outside the inner wall, all round it.
There are committee-rooms, guard-rooms, robing-rooms: really a noble Hall;
where upholstery, aided by the subject fine-arts, has done its best; and
crimson tasseled cloths, and emblematic fleurs-de-lys are not wanting.
The Hall is ready: the very costume, as we said, has been settled; and the
Commons are not to wear that hated slouch-hat (chapeau clabaud), but one
not quite so slouched (chapeau rabattu). As for their manner of working,
when all dressed: for their 'voting by head or by order' and the rest,--
this, which it were perhaps still time to settle, and in few hours will be
no longer time, remains unsettled; hangs dubious in the breast of Twelve
Hundred men.
But now finally the Sun, on Monday the 4th of May, has risen;--unconcerned,
as if it were no special day. And yet, as his first rays could strike
music from the Memnon's Statue on the Nile, what tones were these, so
thrilling, tremulous of preparation and foreboding, which he awoke in every
bosom at Versailles! Huge Paris, in all conceivable and inconceivable
vehicles, is pouring itself forth; from each Town and Village come
subsidiary rills; Versailles is a very sea of men. But above all, from the
Church of St. Louis to the Church of Notre-Dame: one vast suspended-billow
of Life,--with spray scattered even to the chimney-pots! For on chimney-
tops too, as over the roofs, and up thitherwards on every lamp-iron, sign-
post, breakneck coign of vantage, sits patriotic Courage; and every window
bursts with patriotic Beauty: for the Deputies are gathering at St. Louis
Church; to march in procession to Notre-Dame, and hear sermon.
Yes, friends, ye may sit and look: boldly or in thought, all France, and
all Europe, may sit and look; for it is a day like few others. Oh, one
might weep like Xerxes:--So many serried rows sit perched there; like
winged creatures, alighted out of Heaven: all these, and so many more that
follow them, shall have wholly fled aloft again, vanishing into the blue
Deep; and the memory of this day still be fresh. It is the baptism-day of
Democracy; sick Time has given it birth, the numbered months being run.
The extreme-unction day of Feudalism! A superannuated System of Society,
decrepit with toils (for has it not done much; produced you, and what ye
have and know!)--and with thefts and brawls, named glorious-victories; and
with profligacies, sensualities, and on the whole with dotage and
senility,--is now to die: and so, with death-throes and birth-throes, a
new one is to be born. What a work, O Earth and Heavens, what a work!
Battles and bloodshed, September Massacres, Bridges of Lodi, retreats of
Moscow, Waterloos, Peterloos, Tenpound Franchises, Tarbarrels and
Guillotines;--and from this present date, if one might prophesy, some two
centuries of it still to fight! Two centuries; hardly less; before
Democracy go through its due, most baleful, stages of Quackocracy; and a
pestilential World be burnt up, and have begun to grow green and young
again.
Rejoice nevertheless, ye Versailles multitudes; to you, from whom all this
is hid, and glorious end of it is visible. This day, sentence of death is
pronounced on Shams; judgment of resuscitation, were it but far off, is
pronounced on Realities. This day it is declared aloud, as with a Doom-
trumpet, that a Lie is unbelievable. Believe that, stand by that, if more
there be not; and let what thing or things soever will follow it follow.
'Ye can no other; God be your help!' So spake a greater than any of you;
opening his Chapter of World-History.
Behold, however! The doors of St. Louis Church flung wide; and the
Procession of Processions advancing towards Notre-Dame! Shouts rend the
air; one shout, at which Grecian birds might drop dead. It is indeed a
stately, solemn sight. The Elected of France, and then the Court of
France; they are marshalled and march there, all in prescribed place and
costume. Our Commons 'in plain black mantle and white cravat;' Noblesse,
in gold-worked, bright-dyed cloaks of velvet, resplendent, rustling with
laces, waving with plumes; the Clergy in rochet, alb, or other best
pontificalibus: lastly comes the King himself, and King's Household, also
in their brightest blaze of pomp,--their brightest and final one. Some
Fourteen Hundred Men blown together from all winds, on the deepest errand.
Yes, in that silent marching mass there lies Futurity enough. No symbolic
Ark, like the old Hebrews, do these men bear: yet with them too is a
Covenant; they too preside at a new Era in the History of Men. The whole
Future is there, and Destiny dim-brooding over it; in the hearts and
unshaped thoughts of these men, it lies illegible, inevitable. Singular to
think: they have it in them; yet not they, not mortal, only the Eye above
can read it,--as it shall unfold itself, in fire and thunder, of siege, and
field-artillery; in the rustling of battle-banners, the tramp of hosts, in
the glow of burning cities, the shriek of strangled nations! Such things
lie hidden, safe-wrapt in this Fourth day of May;--say rather, had lain in
some other unknown day, of which this latter is the public fruit and
outcome. As indeed what wonders lie in every Day,--had we the sight, as
happily we have not, to decipher it: for is not every meanest Day 'the
conflux of two Eternities!'
Meanwhile, suppose we too, good Reader, should, as now without miracle Muse
Clio enables us--take our station also on some coign of vantage; and glance
momentarily over this Procession, and this Life-sea; with far other eyes
than the rest do, namely with prophetic? We can mount, and stand there,
without fear of falling.
As for the Life-sea, or onlooking unnumbered Multitude, it is unfortunately
all-too dim. Yet as we gaze fixedly, do not nameless Figures not a few,
which shall not always be nameless, disclose themselves; visible or
presumable there! Young Baroness de Stael--she evidently looks from a
window; among older honourable women. (Madame de Stael, Considerations sur
la Revolution Francaise (London, 1818), i. 114-191.) Her father is
Minister, and one of the gala personages; to his own eyes the chief one.
Young spiritual Amazon, thy rest is not there; nor thy loved Father's: 'as
Malebranche saw all things in God, so M. Necker sees all things in
Necker,'--a theorem that will not hold.
But where is the brown-locked, light-behaved, fire-hearted Demoiselle
Theroigne? Brown eloquent Beauty; who, with thy winged words and glances,
shalt thrill rough bosoms, whole steel battalions, and persuade an Austrian
Kaiser,--pike and helm lie provided for thee in due season; and, alas, also
strait-waistcoat and long lodging in the Salpetriere! Better hadst thou
staid in native Luxemburg, and been the mother of some brave man's
children: but it was not thy task, it was not thy lot.
Of the rougher sex how, without tongue, or hundred tongues, of iron,
enumerate the notabilities! Has not Marquis Valadi hastily quitted his
quaker broadbrim; his Pythagorean Greek in Wapping, and the city of
Glasgow? (Founders of the French Republic (London, 1798), para Valadi.)
De Morande from his Courrier de l'Europe; Linguet from his Annales, they
looked eager through the London fog, and became Ex-Editors,--that they
might feed the guillotine, and have their due. Does Louvet (of Faublas)
stand a-tiptoe? And Brissot, hight De Warville, friend of the Blacks? He,
with Marquis Condorcet, and Claviere the Genevese 'have created the
Moniteur Newspaper,' or are about creating it. Able Editors must give
account of such a day.
Or seest thou with any distinctness, low down probably, not in places of
honour, a Stanislas Maillard, riding-tipstaff (huissier a cheval) of the
Chatelet; one of the shiftiest of men? A Captain Hulin of Geneva, Captain
Elie of the Queen's Regiment; both with an air of half-pay? Jourdan, with
tile-coloured whiskers, not yet with tile-beard; an unjust dealer in mules?
He shall be, in a few months, Jourdan the Headsman, and have other work.
Surely also, in some place not of honour, stands or sprawls up querulous,
that he too, though short, may see,--one squalidest bleared mortal,
redolent of soot and horse-drugs: Jean Paul Marat of Neuchatel! O Marat,
Renovator of Human Science, Lecturer on Optics; O thou remarkablest
Horseleech, once in D'Artois' Stables,--as thy bleared soul looks forth,
through thy bleared, dull-acrid, wo-stricken face, what sees it in all
this? Any faintest light of hope; like dayspring after Nova-Zembla night?
Or is it but blue sulphur-light, and spectres; woe, suspicion, revenge
without end?
Of Draper Lecointre, how he shut his cloth-shop hard by, and stepped forth,
one need hardly speak. Nor of Santerre, the sonorous Brewer from the
Faubourg St. Antoine. Two other Figures, and only two, we signalise there.
The huge, brawny, Figure; through whose black brows, and rude flattened
face (figure ecrasee), there looks a waste energy as of Hercules not yet
furibund,--he is an esurient, unprovided Advocate; Danton by name: him
mark. Then that other, his slight-built comrade and craft-brother; he with
the long curling locks; with the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously
irradiated with genius, as if a naphtha-lamp burnt within it: that Figure
is Camille Desmoulins. A fellow of infinite shrewdness, wit, nay humour;
one of the sprightliest clearest souls in all these millions. Thou poor
Camille, say of thee what they may, it were but falsehood to pretend one
did not almost love thee, thou headlong lightly-sparkling man! But the
brawny, not yet furibund Figure, we say, is Jacques Danton; a name that
shall be 'tolerably known in the Revolution.' He is President of the
electoral Cordeliers District at Paris, or about to be it; and shall open
his lungs of brass.
We dwell no longer on the mixed shouting Multitude: for now, behold, the
Commons Deputies are at hand!
Which of these Six Hundred individuals, in plain white cravat, that have
come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their king? For
a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have: be their work what
it may, there is one man there who, by character, faculty, position, is
fittest of all to do it; that man, as future not yet elected king, walks
there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be? With the
hure, as himself calls it, or black boar's-head, fit to be 'shaken' as a
senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn,
seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox,
incontinence, bankruptcy,--and burning fire of genius; like comet-fire
glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions? It is Gabriel Honore
Riquetti de Mirabeau, the world-compeller; man-ruling Deputy of Aix!
According to the Baroness de Stael, he steps proudly along, though looked
at askance here, and shakes his black chevelure, or lion's-mane; as if
prophetic of great deeds.
Yes, Reader, that is the Type-Frenchman of this epoch; as Voltaire was of
the last. He is French in his aspirations, acquisitions, in his virtues,
in his vices; perhaps more French than any other man;--and intrinsically
such a mass of manhood too. Mark him well. The National Assembly were all
different without that one; nay, he might say with the old Despot: "The
National Assembly? I am that."
Of a southern climate, of wild southern blood: for the Riquettis, or
Arighettis, had to fly from Florence and the Guelfs, long centuries ago,
and settled in Provence; where from generation to generation they have ever
approved themselves a peculiar kindred: irascible, indomitable, sharp-
cutting, true, like the steel they wore; of an intensity and activity that
sometimes verged towards madness, yet did not reach it. One ancient
Riquetti, in mad fulfilment of a mad vow, chains two Mountains together;
and the chain, with its 'iron star of five rays,' is still to be seen. May
not a modern Riquetti unchain so much, and set it drifting,--which also
shall be seen?
Destiny has work for that swart burly-headed Mirabeau; Destiny has watched
over him, prepared him from afar. Did not his Grandfather, stout Col.
d'Argent (Silver-Stock, so they named him), shattered and slashed by seven-
and-twenty wounds in one fell day lie sunk together on the Bridge at
Casano; while Prince Eugene's cavalry galloped and regalloped over him,--
only the flying sergeant had thrown a camp-kettle over that loved head; and
Vendome, dropping his spyglass, moaned out, 'Mirabeau is dead, then!'
Nevertheless he was not dead: he awoke to breathe, and miraculous
surgery;--for Gabriel was yet to be. With his silver stock he kept his
scarred head erect, through long years; and wedded; and produced tough
Marquis Victor, the Friend of Men. Whereby at last in the appointed year
1749, this long-expected rough-hewn Gabriel Honore did likewise see the
light: roughest lion's-whelp ever littered of that rough breed. How the
old lion (for our old Marquis too was lion-like, most unconquerable,
kingly-genial, most perverse) gazed wonderingly on his offspring; and
determined to train him as no lion had yet been! It is in vain, O Marquis!
This cub, though thou slay him and flay him, will not learn to draw in
dogcart of Political Economy, and be a Friend of Men; he will not be Thou,
must and will be Himself, another than Thou. Divorce lawsuits, 'whole
family save one in prison, and three-score Lettres-de-Cachet' for thy own
sole use, do but astonish the world.
Our Luckless Gabriel, sinned against and sinning, has been in the Isle of
Rhe, and heard the Atlantic from his tower; in the Castle of If, and heard
the Mediterranean at Marseilles. He has been in the Fortress of Joux; and
forty-two months, with hardly clothing to his back, in the Dungeon of
Vincennes;--all by Lettre-de-Cachet, from his lion father. He has been in
Pontarlier Jails (self-constituted prisoner); was noticed fording estuaries
of the sea (at low water), in flight from the face of men. He has pleaded
before Aix Parlements (to get back his wife); the public gathering on
roofs, to see since they could not hear: "the clatter-teeth (claque-
dents)!" snarles singular old Mirabeau; discerning in such admired forensic
eloquence nothing but two clattering jaw-bones, and a head vacant,
sonorous, of the drum species.
But as for Gabriel Honore, in these strange wayfarings, what has he not
seen and tried! From drill-sergeants, to prime-ministers, to foreign and
domestic booksellers, all manner of men he has seen. All manner of men he
has gained; for at bottom it is a social, loving heart, that wild
unconquerable one:--more especially all manner of women. From the Archer's
Daughter at Saintes to that fair young Sophie Madame Monnier, whom he could
not but 'steal,' and be beheaded for--in effigy! For indeed hardly since
the Arabian Prophet lay dead to Ali's admiration, was there seen such a
Love-hero, with the strength of thirty men. In War, again, he has helped
to conquer Corsica; fought duels, irregular brawls; horsewhipped calumnious
barons. In Literature, he has written on Despotism, on Lettres-de-Cachet;
Erotics Sapphic-Werterean, Obscenities, Profanities; Books on the Prussian
Monarchy, on Cagliostro, on Calonne, on the Water Companies of Paris:--each
book comparable, we will say, to a bituminous alarum-fire; huge, smoky,
sudden! The firepan, the kindling, the bitumen were his own; but the
lumber, of rags, old wood and nameless combustible rubbish (for all is fuel
to him), was gathered from huckster, and ass-panniers, of every description
under heaven. Whereby, indeed, hucksters enough have been heard to
exclaim: Out upon it, the fire is mine!
Nay, consider it more generally, seldom had man such a talent for
borrowing. The idea, the faculty of another man he can make his; the man
himself he can make his. "All reflex and echo (tout de reflet et de
reverbere)!" snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but will not. Crabbed old
Friend of Men! it is his sociality, his aggregative nature; and will now be
the quality of all for him. In that forty-years 'struggle against
despotism,' he has gained the glorious faculty of self-help, and yet not
lost the glorious natural gift of fellowship, of being helped. Rare union!
This man can live self-sufficing--yet lives also in the life of other men;
can make men love him, work with him: a born king of men!
But consider further how, as the old Marquis still snarls, he has "made
away with (hume, swallowed) all Formulas;"--a fact which, if we meditate
it, will in these days mean much. This is no man of system, then; he is
only a man of instincts and insights. A man nevertheless who will glare
fiercely on any object; and see through it, and conquer it: for he has
intellect, he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with logic-
spectacles; but with an eye! Unhappily without Decalogue, moral Code or
Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without a strong living Soul in him, and
Sincerity there: a Reality, not an Artificiality, not a Sham! And so he,
having struggled 'forty years against despotism,' and 'made away with all
formulas,' shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the same.
For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off despotism;
to make away with her old formulas,--having found them naught, worn out,
far from the reality? She will make away with such formulas;--and even go
bare, if need be, till she have found new ones.
Towards such work, in such manner, marches he, this singular Riquetti
Mirabeau. In fiery rough figure, with black Samson-locks under the slouch-
hat, he steps along there. A fiery fuliginous mass, which could not be
choked and smothered, but would fill all France with smoke. And now it has
got air; it will burn its whole substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere too,
and fill all France with flame. Strange lot! Forty years of that
smouldering, with foul fire-damp and vapour enough, then victory over
that;--and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high; and, for twenty-
three resplendent months, pours out, in flame and molten fire-torrents, all
that is in him, the Pharos and Wonder-sign of an amazed Europe;--and then
lies hollow, cold forever! Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honore, the
greatest of them all: in the whole National Deputies, in the whole Nation,
there is none like and none second to thee.
But now if Mirabeau is the greatest, who of these Six Hundred may be the
meanest? Shall we say, that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man,
under thirty, in spectacles; his eyes (were the glasses off) troubled,
careful; with upturned face, snuffing dimly the uncertain future-time;
complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may
be the pale sea-green. (See De Stael, Considerations (ii. 142); Barbaroux,
Memoires, &c.) That greenish-coloured (verdatre) individual is an Advocate
of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre. The son of an Advocate; his
father founded mason-lodges under Charles Edward, the English Prince or
Pretender. Maximilien the first-born was thriftily educated; he had brisk
Camille Desmoulins for schoolmate in the College of Louis le Grand, at
Paris. But he begged our famed Necklace-Cardinal, Rohan, the patron, to
let him depart thence, and resign in favour of a younger brother. The
strict-minded Max departed; home to paternal Arras; and even had a Law-case
there and pleaded, not unsuccessfully, 'in favour of the first Franklin
thunder-rod.' With a strict painful mind, an understanding small but clear
and ready, he grew in favour with official persons, who could foresee in
him an excellent man of business, happily quite free from genius. The
Bishop, therefore, taking counsel, appoints him Judge of his diocese; and
he faithfully does justice to the people: till behold, one day, a culprit
comes whose crime merits hanging; and the strict-minded Max must abdicate,
for his conscience will not permit the dooming of any son of Adam to die.
A strict-minded, strait-laced man! A man unfit for Revolutions? Whose
small soul, transparent wholesome-looking as small ale, could by no chance
ferment into virulent alegar,--the mother of ever new alegar; till all
France were grown acetous virulent? We shall see.
Between which two extremes of grandest and meanest, so many grand and mean
roll on, towards their several destinies, in that Procession! There is
Cazales, the learned young soldier; who shall become the eloquent orator of
Royalism, and earn the shadow of a name. Experienced Mounier, experienced
Malouet; whose Presidential Parlementary experience the stream of things
shall soon leave stranded. A Petion has left his gown and briefs at
Chartres for a stormier sort of pleading; has not forgotten his violin,
being fond of music. His hair is grizzled, though he is still young:
convictions, beliefs, placid-unalterable are in that man; not hindmost of
them, belief in himself. A Protestant-clerical Rabaut-St.-Etienne, a
slender young eloquent and vehement Barnave, will help to regenerate
France. There are so many of them young. Till thirty the Spartans did not
suffer a man to marry: but how many men here under thirty; coming to
produce not one sufficient citizen, but a nation and a world of such! The
old to heal up rents; the young to remove rubbish:--which latter, is it
not, indeed, the task here?
Dim, formless from this distance, yet authentically there, thou noticest
the Deputies from Nantes? To us mere clothes-screens, with slouch-hat and
cloak, but bearing in their pocket a Cahier of doleances with this singular
clause, and more such in it: 'That the master wigmakers of Nantes be not
troubled with new gild-brethren, the actually existing number of ninety-two
being more than sufficient!' (Histoire Parlementaire, i. 335.) The Rennes
people have elected Farmer Gerard, 'a man of natural sense and rectitude,
without any learning.' He walks there, with solid step; unique, 'in his
rustic farmer-clothes;' which he will wear always; careless of short-cloaks
and costumes. The name Gerard, or 'Pere Gerard, Father Gerard,' as they
please to call him, will fly far; borne about in endless banter; in
Royalist satires, in Republican didactic Almanacks. (Actes des Apotres (by
Peltier and others); Almanach du Pere Gerard (by Collot d'Herbois) &c. &c.)
As for the man Gerard, being asked once, what he did, after trial of it,
candidly think of this Parlementary work,--"I think," answered he, "that
there are a good many scoundrels among us." so walks Father Gerard; solid
in his thick shoes, whithersoever bound.
And worthy Doctor Guillotin, whom we hoped to behold one other time? If
not here, the Doctor should be here, and we see him with the eye of
prophecy: for indeed the Parisian Deputies are all a little late.
Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner: doomed by a satiric destiny
to the strangest immortal glory that ever kept obscure mortal from his
resting-place, the bosom of oblivion! Guillotin can improve the
ventilation of the Hall; in all cases of medical police and hygiene be a
present aid: but, greater far, he can produce his 'Report on the Penal
Code;' and reveal therein a cunningly devised Beheading Machine, which
shall become famous and world-famous. This is the product of Guillotin's
endeavours, gained not without meditation and reading; which product
popular gratitude or levity christens by a feminine derivative name, as if
it were his daughter: La Guillotine! "With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk
off your head (vous fais sauter la tete) in a twinkling, and you have no
pain;"--whereat they all laugh. (Moniteur Newspaper, of December 1st, 1789
(in Histoire Parlementaire).) Unfortunate Doctor! For two-and-twenty
years he, unguillotined, shall near nothing but guillotine, see nothing but
guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a
disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to
outlive Caesar's.
See Bailly, likewise of Paris, time-honoured Historian of Astronomy Ancient
and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beautiful Philosophising, with
its soft moonshiny clearness and thinness, ends in foul thick confusion--of
Presidency, Mayorship, diplomatic Officiality, rabid Triviality, and the
throat of everlasting Darkness! Far was it to descend from the heavenly
Galaxy to the Drapeau Rouge: beside that fatal dung-heap, on that last
hell-day, thou must 'tremble,' though only with cold, 'de froid.'
Speculation is not practice: to be weak is not so miserable; but to be
weaker than our task. Wo the day when they mounted thee, a peaceable
pedestrian, on that wild Hippogriff of a Democracy; which, spurning the
firm earth, nay lashing at the very stars, no yet known Astolpho could have
ridden!
In the Commons Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of Letters; three
hundred and seventy-four Lawyers; (Bouille, Memoires sur la Revolution
Francaise (London, 1797), i. 68.) and at least one Clergyman: the Abbe
Sieyes. Him also Paris sends, among its twenty. Behold him, the light
thin man; cold, but elastic, wiry; instinct with the pride of Logic;
passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-conceit. If indeed that
can be called a passion, which, in its independent concentrated greatness,
seems to have soared into transcendentalism; and to sit there with a kind
of godlike indifference, and look down on passion! He is the man, and
wisdom shall die with him. This is the Sieyes who shall be System-builder,
Constitution-builder General; and build Constitutions (as many as wanted)
skyhigh,--which shall all unfortunately fall before he get the scaffolding
away. "La Politique," said he to Dumont, "Polity is a science I think I
have completed (achevee)." (Dumont, Souvenirs sur Mirabeau, p. 64.) What
things, O Sieyes, with thy clear assiduous eyes, art thou to see! But were
it not curious to know how Sieyes, now in these days (for he is said to be
still alive) (A.D. 1834.) looks out on all that Constitution masonry,
through the rheumy soberness of extreme age? Might we hope, still with the
old irrefragable transcendentalism? The victorious cause pleased the gods,
the vanquished one pleased Sieyes (victa Catoni).
Thus, however, amid skyrending vivats, and blessings from every heart, has
the Procession of the Commons Deputies rolled by.
Next follow the Noblesse, and next the Clergy; concerning both of whom it
might be asked, What they specially have come for? Specially, little as
they dream of it, to answer this question, put in a voice of thunder: What
are you doing in God's fair Earth and Task-garden; where whosoever is not
working is begging or stealing? Wo, wo to themselves and to all, if they
can only answer: Collecting tithes, Preserving game!--Remark, meanwhile,
how D'Orleans affects to step before his own Order, and mingle with the
Commons. For him are vivats: few for the rest, though all wave in plumed
'hats of a feudal cut,' and have sword on thigh; though among them is
D'Antraigues, the young Languedocian gentleman,--and indeed many a Peer
more or less noteworthy.
There are Liancourt, and La Rochefoucault; the liberal Anglomaniac Dukes.
There is a filially pious Lally; a couple of liberal Lameths. Above all,
there is a Lafayette; whose name shall be Cromwell-Grandison, and fill the
world. Many a 'formula' has this Lafayette too made away with; yet not all
formulas. He sticks by the Washington-formula; and by that he will stick;-
-and hang by it, as by sure bower-anchor hangs and swings the tight war-
ship, which, after all changes of wildest weather and water, is found still
hanging. Happy for him; be it glorious or not! Alone of all Frenchmen he
has a theory of the world, and right mind to conform thereto; he can become
a hero and perfect character, were it but the hero of one idea. Note
further our old Parlementary friend, Crispin-Catiline d'Espremenil. He is
returned from the Mediterranean Islands, a redhot royalist, repentant to
the finger-ends;--unsettled-looking; whose light, dusky-glowing at best,
now flickers foul in the socket; whom the National Assembly will by and by,
to save time, 'regard as in a state of distraction.' Note lastly that
globular Younger Mirabeau; indignant that his elder Brother is among the
Commons: it is Viscomte Mirabeau; named oftener Mirabeau Tonneau (Barrel
Mirabeau), on account of his rotundity, and the quantities of strong liquor
he contains.
There then walks our French Noblesse. All in the old pomp of chivalry:
and yet, alas, how changed from the old position; drifted far down from
their native latitude, like Arctic icebergs got into the Equatorial sea,
and fast thawing there! Once these Chivalry Duces (Dukes, as they are
still named) did actually lead the world,--were it only towards battle-
spoil, where lay the world's best wages then: moreover, being the ablest
Leaders going, they had their lion's share, those Duces; which none could
grudge them. But now, when so many Looms, improved Ploughshares, Steam-
Engines and Bills of Exchange have been invented; and, for battle-brawling
itself, men hire Drill-Sergeants at eighteen-pence a-day,--what mean these
goldmantled Chivalry Figures, walking there 'in black-velvet cloaks,' in
high-plumed 'hats of a feudal cut'? Reeds shaken in the wind!
The Clergy have got up; with Cahiers for abolishing pluralities, enforcing
residence of bishops, better payment of tithes. (Hist. Parl. i. 322-27.)
The Dignitaries, we can observe, walk stately, apart from the numerous
Undignified,--who indeed are properly little other than Commons disguised
in Curate-frocks. Here, however, though by strange ways, shall the Precept
be fulfilled, and they that are greatest (much to their astonishment)
become least. For one example, out of many, mark that plausible Gregoire:
one day Cure Gregoire shall be a Bishop, when the now stately are wandering
distracted, as Bishops in partibus. With other thought, mark also the Abbe
Maury: his broad bold face; mouth accurately primmed; full eyes, that ray
out intelligence, falsehood,--the sort of sophistry which is astonished you
should find it sophistical. Skilfulest vamper-up of old rotten leather, to
make it look like new; always a rising man; he used to tell Mercier, "You
will see; I shall be in the Academy before you." (Mercier, Nouveau Paris.)
Likely indeed, thou skilfullest Maury; nay thou shalt have a Cardinal's
Hat, and plush and glory; but alas, also, in the longrun--mere oblivion,
like the rest of us; and six feet of earth! What boots it, vamping rotten
leather on these terms? Glorious in comparison is the livelihood thy good
old Father earns, by making shoes,--one may hope, in a sufficient manner.
Maury does not want for audacity. He shall wear pistols, by and by; and at
death-cries of "The Lamp-iron;" answer coolly, "Friends, will you see
better there?"
But yonder, halting lamely along, thou noticest next Bishop Talleyrand-
Perigord, his Reverence of Autun. A sardonic grimness lies in that
irreverent Reverence of Autun. He will do and suffer strange things; and
will become surely one of the strangest things ever seen, or like to be
seen. A man living in falsehood, and on falsehood; yet not what you can
call a false man: there is the specialty! It will be an enigma for future
ages, one may hope: hitherto such a product of Nature and Art was possible
only for this age of ours,--Age of Paper, and of the Burning of Paper.
Consider Bishop Talleyrand and Marquis Lafayette as the topmost of their
two kinds; and say once more, looking at what they did and what they were,
O Tempus ferax rerum!
On the whole, however, has not this unfortunate Clergy also drifted in the
Time-stream, far from its native latitude? An anomalous mass of men; of
whom the whole world has already a dim understanding that it can understand
nothing. They were once a Priesthood, interpreters of Wisdom, revealers of
the Holy that is in Man: a true Clerus (or Inheritance of God on Earth):
but now?--They pass silently, with such Cahiers as they have been able to
redact; and none cries, God bless them.
King Louis with his Court brings up the rear: he cheerful, in this day of
hope, is saluted with plaudits; still more Necker his Minister. Not so the
Queen; on whom hope shines not steadily any more. Ill-fated Queen! Her
hair is already gray with many cares and crosses; her first-born son is
dying in these weeks: black falsehood has ineffaceably soiled her name;
ineffaceably while this generation lasts. Instead of Vive la Reine, voices
insult her with Vive d'Orleans. Of her queenly beauty little remains
except its stateliness; not now gracious, but haughty, rigid, silently
enduring. With a most mixed feeling, wherein joy has no part, she resigns
herself to a day she hoped never to have seen. Poor Marie Antoinette; with
thy quick noble instincts; vehement glancings, vision all-too fitful narrow
for the work thou hast to do! O there are tears in store for thee;
bitterest wailings, soft womanly meltings, though thou hast the heart of an
imperial Theresa's Daughter. Thou doomed one, shut thy eyes on the
future!--
And so, in stately Procession, have passed the Elected of France. Some
towards honour and quick fire-consummation; most towards dishonour; not a
few towards massacre, confusion, emigration, desperation: all towards
Eternity!--So many heterogeneities cast together into the fermenting-vat;
there, with incalculable action, counteraction, elective affinities,
explosive developments, to work out healing for a sick moribund System of
Society! Probably the strangest Body of Men, if we consider well, that
ever met together on our Planet on such an errand. So thousandfold complex
a Society, ready to burst-up from its infinite depths; and these men, its
rulers and healers, without life-rule for themselves,--other life-rule than
a Gospel according to Jean Jacques! To the wisest of them, what we must
call the wisest, man is properly an Accident under the sky. Man is without
Duty round him; except it be 'to make the Constitution.' He is without
Heaven above him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world.
What further or better belief can be said to exist in these Twelve Hundred?
Belief in high-plumed hats of a feudal cut; in heraldic scutcheons; in the
divine right of Kings, in the divine right of Game-destroyers. Belief, or
what is still worse, canting half-belief; or worst of all, mere
Macchiavellic pretence-of-belief,--in consecrated dough-wafers, and the
godhood of a poor old Italian Man! Nevertheless in that immeasurable
Confusion and Corruption, which struggles there so blindly to become less
confused and corrupt, there is, as we said, this one salient point of a New
Life discernible: the deep fixed Determination to have done with Shams. A
determination, which, consciously or unconsciously, is fixed; which waxes
ever more fixed, into very madness and fixed-idea; which in such embodiment
as lies provided there, shall now unfold itself rapidly: monstrous,
stupendous, unspeakable; new for long thousands of years!--How has the
Heaven's light, oftentimes in this Earth, to clothe itself in thunder and
electric murkiness; and descend as molten lightning, blasting, if
purifying! Nay is it not rather the very murkiness, and atmospheric
suffocation, that brings the lightning and the light? The new Evangel, as
the old had been, was it to be born in the Destruction of a World?
But how the Deputies assisted at High Mass, and heard sermon, and applauded
the preacher, church as it was, when he preached politics; how, next day,
with sustained pomp, they are, for the first time, installed in their
Salles des Menus (Hall no longer of Amusements), and become a States-
General,--readers can fancy for themselves. The King from his estrade,
gorgeous as Solomon in all his glory, runs his eye over that majestic Hall;
many-plumed, many-glancing; bright-tinted as rainbow, in the galleries and
near side spaces, where Beauty sits raining bright influence.
Satisfaction, as of one that after long voyaging had got to port, plays
over his broad simple face: the innocent King! He rises and speaks, with
sonorous tone, a conceivable speech. With which, still more with the
succeeding one-hour and two-hour speeches of Garde-des-Sceaux and M.
Necker, full of nothing but patriotism, hope, faith, and deficiency of the
revenue,--no reader of these pages shall be tried.
We remark only that, as his Majesty, on finishing the speech, put on his
plumed hat, and the Noblesse according to custom imitated him, our Tiers-
Etat Deputies did mostly, not without a shade of fierceness, in like manner
clap-on, and even crush on their slouched hats; and stand there awaiting
the issue. (Histoire Parlementaire (i. 356). Mercier, Nouveau Paris, &c.)
Thick buzz among them, between majority and minority of Couvrezvous,
Decrouvrez-vous (Hats off, Hats on)! To which his Majesty puts end, by
taking off his own royal hat again.
The session terminates without further accident or omen than this; with
which, significantly enough, France has opened her States-General.
