The French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle [an ebook reader TXT] 📗

copious, continual, like an Artesian well. Till the Great Deep have drained itself up: and all be flooded and submerged, and Noah’s Deluge out-deluged!

On the other hand, Claude Fauchet, preparing mankind for a Golden Age now apparently just at hand, has opened his Cercle Social, with clerks, corresponding boards, and so forth; in the precincts of the Palais Royal.

It is Te-Deum Fauchet; the same who preached on Franklin’s Death, in that huge Medicean rotunda of the Halle aux bleds. He here, this winter, by Printing-press and melodious Colloquy, spreads bruit of himself to the utmost City-barriers. ‘Ten thousand persons’ of respectability attend there; and listen to this ‘Procureur-General de la Verite, Attorney-General of Truth,’ so has he dubbed himself; to his sage Condorcet, or other eloquent coadjutor. Eloquent Attorney-General! He blows out from him, better or worse, what crude or ripe thing he holds: not without result to himself; for it leads to a Bishoprick, though only a Constitutional one.

Fauchet approves himself a glib-tongued, strong-lunged, whole-hearted human individual: much flowing matter there is, and really of the better sort, about Right, Nature, Benevolence, Progress; which flowing matter, whether ‘it is pantheistic,’ or is pot-theistic, only the greener mind, in these days, need read. Busy Brissot was long ago of purpose to establish precisely some such regenerative Social Circle: nay he had tried it, in ‘Newman-street Oxford-street,’ of the Fog Babylon; and failed,—as some say, surreptitiously pocketing the cash. Fauchet, not Brissot, was fated to be the happy man; whereat, however, generous Brissot will with sincere heart sing a timber-toned Nunc Domine. (See Brissot, Patriote-Francais Newspaper; Fauchet, Bouche-de-Fer, &c. (excerpted in Hist. Parl. viii., ix., et seqq.).) But ‘ten thousand persons of respectability:’ what a bulk have many things in proportion to their magnitude! This Cercle Social, for which Brissot chants in sincere timber-tones such Nunc Domine, what is it? Unfortunately wind and shadow. The main reality one finds in it now, is perhaps this: that an ‘Attorney-General of Truth’ did once take shape of a body, as Son of Adam, on our Earth, though but for months or moments; and ten thousand persons of respectability attended, ere yet Chaos and Nox had reabsorbed him.

Hundred and thirty-three Paris Journals; regenerative Social Circle; oratory, in Mother and Daughter Societies, from the balconies of Inns, by chimney-nook, at dinner-table,—polemical, ending many times in duel! Add ever, like a constant growling accompaniment of bass Discord: scarcity of work, scarcity of food. The winter is hard and cold; ragged Bakers’-

queues, like a black tattered flag-of-distress, wave out ever and anon. It is the third of our Hunger-years this new year of a glorious Revolution.

The rich man when invited to dinner, in such distress-seasons, feels bound in politeness to carry his own bread in his pocket: how the poor dine?

And your glorious Revolution has done it, cries one. And our glorious Revolution is subtilety, by black traitors worthy of the Lamp-iron, perverted to do it, cries another! Who will paint the huge whirlpool wherein France, all shivered into wild incoherence, whirls? The jarring that went on under every French roof, in every French heart; the diseased things that were spoken, done, the sum-total whereof is the French Revolution, tongue of man cannot tell. Nor the laws of action that work unseen in the depths of that huge blind Incoherence! With amazement, not with measurement, men look on the Immeasurable; not knowing its laws; seeing, with all different degrees of knowledge, what new phases, and results of event, its laws bring forth. France is as a monstrous Galvanic Mass, wherein all sorts of far stranger than chemical galvanic or electric forces and substances are at work; electrifying one another, positive and negative; filling with electricity your Leyden-jars,—Twenty-five millions in number! As the jars get full, there will, from time to time, be, on slight hint, an explosion.

Chapter 2.3.III.

Sword in Hand.

On such wonderful basis, however, has Law, Royalty, Authority, and whatever yet exists of visible Order, to maintain itself, while it can. Here, as in that Commixture of the Four Elements did the Anarch Old, has an august Assembly spread its pavilion; curtained by the dark infinite of discords; founded on the wavering bottomless of the Abyss; and keeps continual hubbub. Time is around it, and Eternity, and the Inane; and it does what it can, what is given it to do.

Glancing reluctantly in, once more, we discern little that is edifying: a Constitutional Theory of Defective Verbs struggling forward, with perseverance, amid endless interruptions: Mirabeau, from his tribune, with the weight of his name and genius, awing down much Jacobin violence; which in return vents itself the louder over in its Jacobins Hall, and even reads him sharp lectures there. (Camille’s Journal (in Hist. Parl. ix. 366-85).) This man’s path is mysterious, questionable; difficult, and he walks without companion in it. Pure Patriotism does not now count him among her chosen; pure Royalism abhors him: yet his weight with the world is overwhelming. Let him travel on, companionless, unwavering, whither he is bound,—while it is yet day with him, and the night has not come.

But the chosen band of pure Patriot brothers is small; counting only some Thirty, seated now on the extreme tip of the Left, separate from the world.

A virtuous Petion; an incorruptible Robespierre, most consistent, incorruptible of thin acrid men; Triumvirs Barnave, Duport, Lameth, great in speech, thought, action, each according to his kind; a lean old Goupil de Prefeln: on these and what will follow them has pure Patriotism to depend.

There too, conspicuous among the Thirty, if seldom audible, Philippe d’Orleans may be seen sitting: in dim fuliginous bewilderment; having, one might say, arrived at Chaos! Gleams there are, at once of a Lieutenancy and Regency; debates in the Assembly itself, of succession to the Throne ‘in case the present Branch should fail;’ and Philippe, they say, walked anxiously, in silence, through the corridors, till such high argument were done: but it came all to nothing; Mirabeau, glaring into the man, and through him, had to ejaculate in strong untranslatable language: Ce j—f--

ne vaut pas la peine qu’on se donne pour lui. It came all to nothing; and in the meanwhile Philippe’s money, they say, is gone! Could he refuse a little cash to the gifted Patriot, in want only of that; he himself in want of all but that? Not a pamphlet can be printed without cash; or indeed written, without food purchasable by cash. Without cash your hopefullest Projector cannot stir from the spot: individual patriotic or other Projects require cash: how much more do wide-spread Intrigues, which live and exist by cash; lying widespread, with dragon-appetite for cash; fit to swallow Princedoms! And so Prince Philippe, amid his Sillerys, Lacloses, and confused Sons of Night, has rolled along: the centre of the strangest cloudy coil; out of which has visibly come, as we often say, an Epic Preternatural Machinery of SUSPICION; and within which there has dwelt and worked,—what specialties of treason, stratagem, aimed or aimless endeavour towards mischief, no party living (if it be not the Presiding Genius of it, Prince of the Power of the Air) has now any chance to know. Camille’s conjecture is the likeliest: that poor Philippe did mount up, a little way, in treasonable speculation, as he mounted formerly in one of the earliest Balloons; but, frightened at the new position he was getting into, had soon turned the cock again, and come down. More fool than he rose! To create Preternatural Suspicion, this was his function in the Revolutionary Epos. But now if he have lost his cornucopia of ready-money, what else had he to lose? In thick darkness, inward and outward, he must welter and flounder on, in that piteous death-element, the hapless man. Once, or even twice, we shall still behold him emerged; struggling out of the thick death-element: in vain. For one moment, it is the last moment, he starts aloft, or is flung aloft, even into clearness and a kind of memorability,—

to sink then for evermore!

The Cote Droit persists no less; nay with more animation than ever, though hope has now well nigh fled. Tough Abbe Maury, when the obscure country Royalist grasps his hand with transport of thanks, answers, rolling his indomitable brazen head: “Helas, Monsieur, all that I do here is as good as simply nothing.” Gallant Faussigny, visible this one time in History, advances frantic, into the middle of the Hall, exclaiming: “There is but one way of dealing with it, and that is to fall sword in hand on those gentry there, sabre a la main sur ces gaillards la,” (Moniteur, Seance du 21 Aout, 1790.) franticly indicating our chosen Thirty on the extreme tip of the Left! Whereupon is clangour and clamour, debate, repentance,—

evaporation. Things ripen towards downright incompatibility, and what is called ‘scission:’ that fierce theoretic onslaught of Faussigny’s was in August, 1790; next August will not have come, till a famed Two Hundred and Ninety-two, the chosen of Royalism, make solemn final ‘scission’ from an Assembly given up to faction; and depart, shaking the dust off their feet.

Connected with this matter of sword in hand, there is yet another thing to be noted. Of duels we have sometimes spoken: how, in all parts of France, innumerable duels were fought; and argumentative men and messmates, flinging down the wine-cup and weapons of reason and repartee, met in the measured field; to part bleeding; or perhaps not to part, but to fall mutually skewered through with iron, their wrath and life alike ending,—

and die as fools die. Long has this lasted, and still lasts. But now it would seem as if in an august Assembly itself, traitorous Royalism, in its despair, had taken to a new course: that of cutting off Patriotism by systematic duel! Bully-swordsmen, ‘Spadassins’ of that party, go swaggering; or indeed they can be had for a trifle of money. ‘Twelve Spadassins’ were seen, by the yellow eye of Journalism, ‘arriving recently out of Switzerland;’ also ‘a considerable number of Assassins, nombre considerable d’assassins, exercising in fencing-schools and at pistol-

targets.’ Any Patriot Deputy of mark can be called out; let him escape one time, or ten times, a time there necessarily is when he must fall, and France mourn. How many cartels has Mirabeau had; especially while he was the People’s champion! Cartels by the hundred: which he, since the Constitution must be made first, and his time is precious, answers now always with a kind of stereotype formula: “Monsieur, you are put upon my List; but I warn you that it is long, and I grant no preferences.”

Then, in Autumn, had we not the Duel of Cazales and Barnave; the two chief masters of tongue-shot meeting now to exchange pistol-shot? For Cazales, chief of the Royalists, whom we call ‘Blacks or Noirs,’ said, in a moment of passion, “the Patriots were sheer Brigands,” nay in so speaking, he darted or seemed to dart, a fire-glance specially at Barnave; who thereupon could not but reply by fire-glances,—by adjournment to the Bois-de-

Boulogne. Barnave’s second shot took effect: on Cazales’s hat. The ‘front nook’ of a triangular Felt, such as mortals then wore, deadened the ball; and saved that fine brow from more than temporary injury. But how easily might the lot have fallen the other way, and Barnave’s hat not been