The Menads.
If Voltaire once, in splenetic humour, asked his countrymen: ‘But
you, _Gualches_, what have you invented?’ they can now answer:
The Art of Insurrection. It was an art needed in these last
singular times: an art, for which the French nature, so full of
vehemence, so free from depth, was perhaps of all others the
fittest.
Accordingly, to what a height, one may well say of perfection,
has this branch of human industry been carried by France, within
the last half-century! Insurrection, which, Lafayette thought,
might be “the most sacred of duties,” ranks now, for the French
people, among the duties which they can perform. Other mobs are
dull masses; which roll onwards with a dull fierce tenacity, a
dull fierce heat, but emit no light-flashes of genius as they go.
The French mob, again, is among the liveliest phenomena of our
world. So rapid, audacious; so clear-sighted, inventive, prompt
to seize the moment; instinct with life to its finger-ends! That
talent, were there no other, of spontaneously standing in queue,
distinguishes, as we said, the French People from all Peoples,
ancient and modern.
Let the Reader confess too that, taking one thing with another,
perhaps few terrestrial Appearances are better worth considering
than mobs. Your mob is a genuine outburst of Nature; issuing
from, or communicating with, the deepest deep of Nature. When so
much goes grinning and grimacing as a lifeless Formality, and
under the stiff buckram no heart can be felt beating, here once
more, if nowhere else, is a Sincerity and Reality. Shudder at it;
or even shriek over it, if thou must; nevertheless consider it.
Such a Complex of human Forces and Individualities hurled forth,
in their transcendental mood, to act and react, on circumstances
and on one another; to work out what it is in them to work. The
thing they will do is known to no man; least of all to
themselves. It is the inflammablest immeasurable Fire-work,
generating, consuming itself. With what phases, to what extent,
with what results it will burn off, Philosophy and Perspicacity
conjecture in vain.
“Man,” as has been written, “is for ever interesting to man; nay
properly there is nothing else interesting.” In which light also,
may we not discern why most Battles have become so wearisome?
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the
slightest possible developement of human individuality or
spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an
artificial manner. Battles ever since Homer’s time, when they
were Fighting Mobs, have mostly ceased to be worth looking at,
worth reading of, or remembering. How many wearisome bloody
Battles does History strive to represent; or even, in a husky
way, to sing:—and she would omit or carelessly slur-over this one
Insurrection of Women?
A thought, or dim raw-material of a thought, was fermenting all
night, universally in the female head, and might explode. In
squalid garret, on Monday morning, Maternity awakes, to hear
children weeping for bread. Maternity must forth to the streets,
to the herb-markets and Bakers’—queues; meets there with
hunger-stricken Maternity, sympathetic, exasperative. O we
unhappy women! But, instead of Bakers’-queues, why not to
Aristocrats’ palaces, the root of the matter? _Allons!_ Let us
assemble. To the Hôtel-de-Ville; to Versailles; to the Lanterne!
In one of the Guardhouses of the Quartier Saint-Eustache, “a
young woman” seizes a drum,—for how shall National Guards give
fire on women, on a young woman? The young woman seizes the drum;
sets forth, beating it, “uttering cries relative to the dearth of
grains.” Descend, O mothers; descend, ye Judiths, to food and
revenge!—All women gather and go; crowds storm all stairs, force
out all women: the female Insurrectionary Force, according to
Camille, resembles the English Naval one; there is a universal
“Press of women.” Robust Dames of the Halle, slim Mantua-makers,
assiduous, risen with the dawn; ancient Virginity tripping to
matins; the Housemaid, with early broom; all must go. Rouse ye, O
women; the laggard men will not act; they say, we ourselves may
act!
And so, like snowbreak from the mountains, for every staircase is
a melted brook, it storms; tumultuous, wild-shrilling, towards
the Hôtel-de-Ville. Tumultuous, with or without drum-music: for
the Faubourg Saint-Antoine also has tucked up its gown; and, with
besom-staves, fire-irons, and even rusty pistols (void of
ammunition), is flowing on. Sound of it flies, with a velocity of
sound, to the outmost Barriers. By seven o’clock, on this raw
October morning, fifth of the month, the Townhall will see
wonders. Nay, as chance would have it, a male party are already
there; clustering tumultuously round some National Patrol, and a
Baker who has been seized with short weights. They are there; and
have even lowered the rope of the Lanterne. So that the official
persons have to smuggle forth the short-weighing Baker by back
doors, and even send “to all the Districts” for more force.
Grand it was, says Camille, to see so many Judiths, from eight to
ten thousand of them in all, rushing out to search into the root
of the matter! Not unfrightful it must have been;
ludicro-terrific, and most unmanageable. At such hour the
overwatched Three Hundred are not yet stirring: none but some
Clerks, a company of National Guards; and M. de Gouvion, the
Major-general. Gouvion has fought in America for the cause of
civil Liberty; a man of no inconsiderable heart, but deficient in
head. He is, for the moment, in his back apartment; assuaging
Usher Maillard, the Bastille-serjeant, who has come, as too many
do, with “representations.” The assuagement is still incomplete
when our Judiths arrive.
The National Guards form on the outer stairs, with levelled
bayonets; the ten thousand Judiths press up, resistless; with
obtestations, with outspread hands,—merely to speak to the Mayor.
The rear forces them; nay, from male hands in the rear, stones
already fly: the National Guards must do one of two things; sweep
the Place de Grève with cannon, or else open to right and left.
They open; the living deluge rushes in. Through all rooms and
cabinets, upwards to the topmost belfry: ravenous; seeking arms,
seeking Mayors, seeking justice;—while, again, the better-cressed
(dressed?) speak kindly to the Clerks; point out the misery of
these poor women; also their ailments, some even of an
interesting sort.[233]
Poor M. de Gouvion is shiftless in this extremity;—a man
shiftless, perturbed; who will one day commit suicide. How happy
for him that Usher Maillard, the shifty, was there, at the
moment, though making representations! Fly back, thou shifty
Maillard; seek the Bastille Company; and O return fast with it;
above all, with thy own shifty head! For, behold, the Judiths can
find no Mayor or Municipal; scarcely, in the topmost belfry, can
they find poor Abbé Lefevre the Powder-distributor. Him, for want
of a better, they suspend there; in the pale morning light; over
the top of all Paris, which swims in one’s failing eyes:—a
horrible end? Nay, the rope broke, as French ropes often did; or
else an Amazon cut it. Abbé Lefevre falls, some twenty feet,
rattling among the leads; and lives long years after, though
always with “a _tremblement_ in the limbs.”[234]
And now doors fly under hatchets; the Judiths have broken the
Armoury; have seized guns and cannons, three money-bags,
paper-heaps; torches flare: in few minutes, our brave
Hôtel-de-Ville which dates from the Fourth Henry, will, with all
that it holds, be in flames!