In the Salle de Manége.
To believing Patriots, however, it is now clear, that the
Constitution will march, _marcher_,—had it once legs to stand on.
Quick, then, ye Patriots, bestir yourselves, and make it; shape
legs for it! In the _Archevêché_, or Archbishop’s Palace, his
Grace himself having fled; and afterwards in the Riding-hall,
named Manege, close on the Tuileries: there does a National
Assembly apply itself to the miraculous work. Successfully, had
there been any heaven-scaling Prometheus among them; not
successfully since there was none! There, in noisy debate, for
the sessions are occasionally “scandalous,” and as many as three
speakers have been seen in the Tribune at once,—let us continue
to fancy it wearing the slow months.
Tough, dogmatic, long of wind is Abbé Maury; Ciceronian pathetic
is Cazalès. Keen-trenchant, on the other side, glitters a young
Barnave; abhorrent of sophistry; sheering, like keen Damascus
sabre, all sophistry asunder,—reckless what else he sheer with
it. Simple seemest thou, O solid Dutch-built Pétion; if solid,
surely dull. Nor lifegiving in that tone of thine, livelier
polemical Rabaut. With ineffable serenity sniffs great Sieyes,
aloft, alone; his Constitution ye may babble over, ye may mar,
but can by no possibility mend: is not Polity a science he has
exhausted? Cool, slow, two military Lameths are visible, with
their quality sneer, or demi-sneer; they shall gallantly refund
their Mother’s Pension, when the Red Book is produced; gallantly
be wounded in duels. A Marquis Toulongeon, whose Pen we yet
thank, sits there; in stoical meditative humour, oftenest silent,
accepts what destiny will send. Thouret and Parlementary Duport
produce mountains of Reformed Law; liberal, Anglomaniac,
available and unavailable. Mortals rise and fall. Shall goose
Gobel, for example,—or Go(with an umlaut)bel, for he is of
Strasburg German breed, be a Constitutional Archbishop?
Alone of all men there, Mirabeau may begin to discern clearly
whither all this is tending. Patriotism, accordingly, regrets
that his zeal seems to be getting cool. In that famed
Pentecost-Night of the Fourth of August, when new Faith rose
suddenly into miraculous fire, and old Feudality was burnt up,
men remarked that Mirabeau took no hand in it; that, in fact, he
luckily happened to be absent. But did he not defend the _Veto_,
nay _Veto Absolu;_ and tell vehement Barnave that six hundred
irresponsible senators would make of all tyrannies the
insupportablest? Again, how anxious was he that the King’s
Ministers should have seat and voice in the National
Assembly;—doubtless with an eye to being Minister himself!
Whereupon the National Assembly decides, what is very momentous,
that no Deputy shall be Minister; he, in his haughty stormful
manner, advising us to make it, “no Deputy called Mirabeau.”[263]
A man of perhaps inveterate Feudalisms; of stratagems; too often
visible leanings towards the Royalist side: a man suspect; whom
Patriotism will unmask! Thus, in these June days, when the
question _Who shall have right to declare war?_ comes on, you
hear hoarse Hawkers sound dolefully through the streets, ‘Grand
Treason of Count Mirabeau, price only one sou;’—because he pleads
that it shall be not the Assembly but the King! Pleads; nay
prevails: for in spite of the hoarse Hawkers, and an endless
Populace raised by them to the pitch even of “_Lanterne_,” he
mounts the Tribune next day; grim-resolute; murmuring aside to
his friends that speak of danger: ‘I know it: I must come hence
either in triumph, or else torn in fragments;’ and it was in
triumph that he came.
A man of stout heart; whose popularity is not of the populace,
“_pas populacière;_” whom no clamour of unwashed mobs without
doors, or of washed mobs within, can scarce from his way! Dumont
remembers hearing him deliver a Report on Marseilles; “every word
was interrupted on the part of the _Côté Droit_ by abusive
epithets; calumniator, liar, assassin, scoundrel (_scélérat_):
Mirabeau pauses a moment, and, in a honeyed tone, addressing the
most furious, says: ‘I wait, Messieurs, till these amenities be
exhausted.’”[264] A man enigmatic, difficult to unmask! For
example, whence comes his money? Can the profit of a Newspaper,
sorely eaten into by Dame Le Jay; can this, and the eighteen
francs a-day your National Deputy has, be supposed equal to this
expenditure? House in the Chaussée d’Antin; Country-house at
Argenteuil; splendours, sumptuosities, orgies;—living as if he
had a mint! All saloons barred against Adventurer Mirabeau, are
flung wide open to King Mirabeau, the cynosure of Europe, whom
female France flutters to behold,—though the Man Mirabeau is one
and the same. As for money, one may conjecture that Royalism
furnishes it; which if Royalism do, will not the same be welcome,
as money always is to him?
“Sold,” whatever Patriotism thinks, he cannot readily be: the
spiritual fire which is in that man; which shining through such
confusions is nevertheless Conviction, and makes him strong, and
without which he had no strength,—is not buyable nor saleable; in
such transference of barter, it would vanish and not _be_.
Perhaps “paid and not sold, _payé pas vendu:_” as poor Rivarol,
in the unhappier converse way, calls himself “sold and not paid!”
A man travelling, comet-like, in splendour and nebulosity, his
wild way; whom telescopic Patriotism may long watch, but, without
higher mathematics, will not make out. A questionable most
blameable man; yet to us the far notablest of all. With rich
munificence, as we often say, in a most blinkard, bespectacled,
logic-chopping generation, Nature has gifted this man with an
eye. Welcome is his word, there where he speaks and works; and
growing ever welcomer; for it alone goes to the heart of the
business: logical cobwebbery shrinks itself together; and thou
seest a _thing_, how it is, how is may be worked with.
Unhappily our National Assembly has much to do: a France to
regenerate; and France is short of so many requisites; short even
of cash! These same Finances give trouble enough; no choking of
the Deficit; which gapes ever, _Give, give!_ To appease the
Deficit we venture on a hazardous step, sale of the Clergy’s
Lands and superfluous Edifices; most hazardous. Nay, given the
sale, who is to buy them, ready-money having fled? Wherefore, on
the 19th day of December, a paper-money of “_Assignats_,” of
Bonds secured, or _assigned_, on that Clerico-National Property,
and unquestionable at least in payment of that,—is decreed: the
first of a long series of like financial performances, which
shall astonish mankind. So that now, while old rags last, there
shall be no lack of circulating medium; whether of commodities to
circulate thereon is another question. But, after all, does not
this Assignat business speak volumes for modern science?
Bankruptcy, we may say, was come, as the _end_ of all Delusions
needs must come: yet how gently, in softening diffusion, in mild
succession, was it hereby made to fall;—like no all-destroying
avalanche; like gentle showers of a powdery impalpable snow,
shower after shower, till all was indeed buried, and yet little
was destroyed that could not be replaced, be dispensed with! To
such length has modern machinery reached. Bankruptcy, we said,
was great; but indeed Money itself is a standing miracle.
On the whole, it is a matter of endless difficulty, that of the
Clergy. Clerical property may be made the Nation’s, and the
Clergy hired servants of the State; but if so, is it not an
altered Church? Adjustment enough, of the most confused sort, has
become unavoidable. Old landmarks, in any sense, avail not in a
new France. Nay literally, the very Ground is new divided; your
old party-coloured _Provinces_ become new uniform _Departments_,
Eighty-three in number;—whereby, as in some sudden shifting of
the Earth’s axis, no mortal knows his new latitude at once. The
Twelve old Parlements too, what is to be done with them? The old
Parlements are declared to be all “in permanent vacation,”—till
once the new equal-justice, of Departmental Courts, National
Appeal-Court, of elective Justices, Justices of Peace, and other
Thouret-and-Duport apparatus be got ready. They have to sit
there, these old Parlements, uneasily waiting; as it were, with
the rope round their neck; crying as they can, _Is there none to
deliver us?_ But happily the answer being, _None, none_, they are
a manageable class, these Parlements. They can be bullied, even
into silence; the Paris Parliament, wiser than most, has never
whimpered. They will and must sit there; in such vacation as is
fit; their Chamber of Vacation distributes in the interim what
little justice is going. With the rope round their neck, their
destiny may be succinct! On the 13th of November 1790, Mayor
Bailly shall walk to the Palais de Justice, few even heeding him;
and with municipal seal-stamp and a little hot wax, seal up the
Parlementary Paper-rooms,—and the dread Parlement of Paris pass
away, into Chaos, gently as does a Dream! So shall the Parlements
perish, succinctly; and innumerable eyes be dry.
Not so the Clergy. For granting even that Religion were dead;
that it had died, half-centuries ago, with unutterable Dubois; or
emigrated lately, to Alsace, with Necklace-Cardinal Rohan; or
that it now walked as goblin _revenant_ with Bishop Talleyrand of
Autun; yet does not the Shadow of Religion, the Cant of Religion,
still linger? The Clergy have means and material: means, of
number, organization, social weight; a material, at lowest, of
public ignorance, known to be the mother of devotion. Nay,
withal, is it incredible that there might, in simple hearts,
latent here and there like gold grains in the mud-beach, still
dwell some real Faith in God, of so singular and tenacious a sort
that even a Maury or a Talleyrand, could still be the symbol for
it?—Enough, and Clergy has strength, the Clergy has craft and
indignation. It is a most fatal business this of the Clergy. A
weltering hydra-coil, which the National Assembly has stirred up
about its ears; hissing, stinging; which cannot be appeased,
alive; which cannot be trampled dead! Fatal, from first to last!
Scarcely after fifteen months’ debating, can a _Civil
Constitution of the Clergy_ be so much as got to paper; and then
for getting it into reality? Alas, such Civil Constitution is but
an agreement to disagree. It divides France from end to end, with
a new split, infinitely complicating all the other
splits;—Catholicism, what of it there is left, with the Cant of
Catholicism, raging on the one side, and sceptic Heathenism on
the other; both, by contradiction , waxing fanatic. What endless
jarring, of Refractory hated Priests, and Constitutional despised
ones; of tender consciences, like the King’s, and consciences
hot-seared, like certain of his People’s: the whole to end in
Feasts of Reason and a War of La Vendée! So deep-seated is
Religion in the heart of man, and holds of all infinite passions.
If the dead echo of it still did so much, what could not the
living voice of it once do?
Finance and Constitution, Law and Gospel: this surely were work
enough; yet this is not all. In fact, the Ministry, and Necker
himself whom a brass inscription “fastened by the people over his
door-lintel” testifies to be the “_Ministre adoré_,” are
dwindling into clearer and clearer nullity. Execution or
legislation, arrangement or detail, from their nerveless fingers
all drops undone; all lights at last on the toiled shoulders of
an august Representative Body. Heavy-laden National Assembly! It
has to hear of innumerable fresh revolts, Brigand expeditions; of
Châteaus in the West, especially of Charter-chests, _Chartiers_,
set on fire; for there too the overloaded Ass frightfully
recalcitrates. Of Cities in the South full of heats and
jealousies; which will end in crossed sabres, Marseilles against
Toulon, and Carpentras beleaguered by Avignon;—such Royalist
collision in a career of Freedom; nay Patriot collision, which a
mere difference of _velocity_ will bring about! Of a Jourdan
Coup-tete, who has skulked thitherward, from the claws of the
Chatelet; and will raise whole scoundrel-regiments.
Also it has to hear of Royalist _Camp of Jalès:_ Jalès
mountain-girdled Plain, amid the rocks of the Cevennes; whence
Royalism, as is feared and hoped, may dash down like a mountain
deluge, and submerge France! A singular thing this camp of Jalès;
existing mostly on paper. For the Soldiers at Jalès, being
peasants or National Guards, were in heart sworn Sansculottes;
and all that the Royalist Captains could do was, with false
words, to keep them, or rather keep the report of them, drawn up
there, visible to all imaginations, for a terror and a sign,—if
peradventure France might be reconquered by theatrical machinery,
by the _picture_ of a Royalist Army done to the life![265] Not
till the third summer was this portent, burning out by fits and
then fading, got finally extinguished; was the old Castle of
Jalès, no Camp being visible to the bodily eye, got blown asunder
by some National Guards.
Also it has to hear not only of Brissot and his _Friends of the
Blacks_, but by and by of a whole St. Domingo blazing skyward;
blazing in literal fire, and in far worse metaphorical; beaconing
the nightly main. Also of the shipping interest, and the
landed-interest, and all manner of interests, reduced to
distress. Of Industry every where manacled, bewildered; and only
Rebellion thriving. Of sub-officers, soldiers and sailors in
mutiny by land and water. Of soldiers, at Nanci, as we shall see,
needing to be cannonaded by a brave Bouillé. Of sailors, nay the
very galley-slaves, at Brest, needing also to be cannonaded; but
with no Bouillé to do it. For indeed, to say it in a word, in
those days there was _no King_ in Israel, and every man did that
which was right in his own eyes.[266]
Such things has an august National Assembly to hear of, as it
goes on regenerating France. Sad and stern: but what remedy? Get
the Constitution ready; and all men will swear to it: for do not
“Addresses of adhesion” arrive by the cartload? In this manner,
by Heaven’s blessing, and a Constitution got ready, shall the
bottomless fire-gulf be vaulted in, with rag-paper; and Order
will wed Freedom, and live with her there,—till it grow too hot
for them. _O Côté Gauche_, worthy are ye, as the adhesive
Addresses generally say, to “fix the regards of the Universe;”
the regards of this one poor Planet, at lowest!—
Nay, it must be owned, the _Côté Droit_ makes a still madder
figure. An irrational generation; irrational, imbecile, and with
the vehement obstinacy characteristic of that; a generation which
will not learn. Falling Bastilles, Insurrections of Women,
thousands of smoking Manorhouses, a country bristling with no
crop but that of Sansculottic steel: these were tolerably
didactic lessons; but them they have not taught. There are still
men, of whom it was of old written, Bray them in a mortar! Or, in
milder language, They have _wedded_ their delusions: fire nor
steel, nor any sharpness of Experience, shall sever the bond;
till death do us part! Of such may the Heavens have mercy; for
the Earth, with her rigorous Necessity, will have none.
Admit, at the same time, that it was most natural. Man lives by
Hope: Pandora when her box of gods’-gifts flew all out, and
became gods’-curses, still retained Hope. How shall an irrational
mortal, when his high-place is never so evidently pulled down,
and he, being irrational, is left resourceless,—part with the
belief that it will be rebuilt? It would make all so straight
again; it seems so unspeakably desirable; so reasonable,—would
you but look at it aright! For, must not the thing which was
continue to be; or else the solid World dissolve? Yes, persist, O
infatuated Sansculottes of France! Revolt against constituted
Authorities; hunt out your rightful Seigneurs, who at bottom so
loved you, and readily shed their blood for you,—in country’s
battles as at Rossbach and elsewhere; and, even in preserving
game, were preserving _you_, could ye but have understood it:
hunt them out, as if they were wild wolves; set fire to their
Châteaus and Chartiers as to wolf-dens; and what then? Why, then
turn every man his hand against his fellow! In confusion, famine,
desolation, regret the days that are gone; rueful recall them,
recall us with them. To repentant prayers we will not be deaf.
So, with dimmer or clearer consciousness, must the Right Side
reason and act. An inevitable position perhaps; but a most false
one for them. Evil, be thou our good: this henceforth must
virtually be their prayer. The fiercer the effervescence grows,
the sooner will it pass; for after all it is but some mad
effervescence; the World is solid, and cannot dissolve.
For the rest, if they have any positive industry, it is that of
plots, and backstairs conclaves. Plots which cannot be executed;
which are mostly theoretic on their part;—for which nevertheless
this and the other practical Sieur Augeard, Sieur Maillebois,
Sieur Bonne Savardin, gets into trouble, gets imprisoned, and
escapes with difficulty. Nay there is a poor practical Chevalier
Favras who, not without some passing reflex on Monsieur himself,
gets hanged for them, amid loud uproar of the world. Poor Favras,
he keeps dictating his last will at the “Hôtel-de-Ville, through
the whole remainder of the day,” a weary February day; offers to
reveal secrets, if they will save him; handsomely declines since
they will not; then dies, in the flare of torchlight, with
politest composure; remarking, rather than exclaiming, with
outspread hands: ‘People, I die innocent; pray for me.’[267] Poor
Favras;—type of so much that has prowled indefatigable over
France, in days now ending; and, in freer field, might have
_earned_ instead of prowling,—to thee it is no theory!
In the Senate-house again, the attitude of the Right Side is that
of calm unbelief. Let an august National Assembly make a
Fourth-of-August Abolition of Feudality; declare the Clergy
State-servants who shall have wages; vote Suspensive Vetos, new
Law-Courts; vote or decree what contested thing it will; have it
responded to from the four corners of France, nay get King’s
Sanction, and what other Acceptance were conceivable,—the Right
Side, as we find, persists, with imperturbablest tenacity, in
considering, and ever and anon shews that it still considers, all
these so-called Decrees as mere temporary whims, which indeed
stand on paper, but in practice and fact are not, and cannot be.
Figure the brass head of an Abbé Maury flooding forth Jesuitic
eloquence in this strain; dusky d’Espréménil, Barrel Mirabeau
(probably in liquor), and enough of others, cheering him from the
Right; and, for example, with what visage a seagreen Robespierre
eyes him from the Left. And how Sieyes ineffably sniffs on him,
or does not deign to sniff; and how the Galleries groan in
spirit, or bark rabid on him: so that to escape the Lanterne, on
stepping forth, he needs presence of mind, and a pair of pistols
in his girdle! For he is one of the toughest of men.
Here indeed becomes notable one great difference between our two
kinds of civil war; between the modern _lingual_ or
Parliamentary-logical kind, and the ancient, or _manual_ kind, in
the steel battle-field;—much to the disadvantage of the former.
In the manual kind, where you front your foe with drawn weapon,
one right stroke is final; for, physically speaking, when the
brains are out the man does honestly die, and trouble you no
more. But how different when it is with arguments you fight! Here
no victory yet definable can be considered as final. Beat him
down, with Parliamentary invective, till sense be fled; cut him
in two, hanging one half in this dilemma-horn, the other on that;
blow the brains or thinking-faculty quite out of him for the
time: it skills not; he rallies and revives on the morrow;
tomorrow he repairs his golden fires! The think that _will_
logically extinguish him is perhaps still a desideratum in
Constitutional civilisation. For how, till a man know, in some
measure, at what point he becomes logically defunct, can
Parliamentary Business be carried on, and Talk cease or slake?
Doubtless it was some feeling of this difficulty; and the clear
insight how little such knowledge yet existed in the French
Nation, new in the Constitutional career, and how defunct
Aristocrats would continue to walk for unlimited periods, as
Partridge the Alamanack-maker did,—that had sunk into the deep
mind of People’s-friend Marat, an eminently practical mind; and
had grown there, in that richest putrescent soil, into the most
original plan of action ever submitted to a People. Not yet has
it grown; but it has germinated, it is growing; rooting itself
into Tartarus, branching towards Heaven: the second season hence,
we shall see it risen out of the bottomless Darkness, full-grown,
into disastrous Twilight,—a Hemlock-tree, great as the world; on
or under whose boughs all the People’s-friends of the world may
lodge. “Two hundred and sixty thousand Aristocrat heads:” that is
the precisest calculation, though one would not stand on a few
hundreds; yet we never rise as high as the round three hundred
thousand. Shudder at it, O People; but it is as true as that ye
yourselves, and your People’s-friend, are alive. These prating
Senators of yours hover ineffectual on the barren letter, and
will never save the Revolution. A Cassandra-Marat cannot do it,
with his single shrunk arm; but with a few determined men it were
possible. ‘Give me,’ said the People’s-friend, in his cold way,
when young Barbaroux, once his pupil in a course of what was
called Optics, went to see him, ‘Give me two hundred Naples
Bravoes, armed each with a good dirk, and a muff on his left arm
by way of shield: with them I will traverse France, and
accomplish the Revolution.’[268] Nay, be brave, young Barbaroux;
for thou seest, there is no jesting in those rheumy eyes; in that
soot-bleared figure, most earnest of created things; neither
indeed is there madness, of the strait-waistcoat sort.
Such produce shall the Time ripen in cavernous Marat, the man
forbid; living in Paris cellars, lone as fanatic Anchorite in his
Thebaid; say, as far-seen Simon on his Pillar,—taking peculiar
views therefrom. Patriots may smile; and, using him as bandog now
to be muzzled, now to be let bark, name him, as Desmoulins does,
“Maximum of Patriotism” and “Cassandra-Marat:” but were it not
singular if this dirk-and-muff plan of his (with superficial
modifications) proved to be precisely the plan adopted?
After this manner, in these circumstances, do august Senators
regenerate France. Nay, they are, in very deed, _believed_ to be
regenerating it; on account of which great fact, main fact of
their history, the wearied eye can never be permitted wholly to
ignore them.
But, looking away now from these precincts of the Tuileries,
where Constitutional Royalty, let Lafayette water it as he will,
languishes too like a cut branch; and august Senators are perhaps
at bottom only perfecting their “theory of defective verbs,”—how
does the young Reality, young Sansculottism thrive? The attentive
observer can answer: It thrives bravely; putting forth new buds;
expanding the old buds into leaves, into boughs. Is not French
Existence, as before, most prurient, all _loosened_, most
nutrient for it? Sansculottism has the property of growing by
what other things die of: by agitation, contention,
disarrangement; nay in a word, by what is the symbol and fruit of
all these: Hunger.
In such a France as this, Hunger, as we have remarked, can hardly
fail. The Provinces, the Southern Cities feel it in their turn;
and what it brings: Exasperation, preternatural Suspicion. In
Paris some halcyon days of abundance followed the Menadic
Insurrection, with its Versailles grain-carts, and recovered
Restorer of Liberty; but they could not continue. The month is
still October when famishing Saint-Antoine, in a moment of
passion, seizes a poor Baker, innocent “François the Baker;”[269]
and hangs him, in Constantinople wise;—but even this, singular as
it my seem, does not cheapen bread! Too clear it is, no Royal
bounty, no Municipal dexterity can adequately feed a
Bastille-destroying Paris. Wherefore, on view of the hanged
Baker, Constitutionalism in sorrow and anger demands “_Loi
Martiale_,” a kind of Riot Act;—and indeed gets it, most readily,
almost before the sun goes down.
This is that famed _Martial law_, with its Red Flag, its
“_Drapeau Rouge:_” in virtue of which Mayor Bailly, or any Mayor,
has but henceforth to hang out that new _Oriflamme_ of his; then
to read or mumble something about the King’s peace; and, after
certain pauses, serve any undispersing Assemblage with
musket-shot, or whatever shot will disperse it. A decisive Law;
and most just on one proviso: that all Patrollotism be of God,
and all mob-assembling be of the Devil;—otherwise not so just.
Mayor Bailly be unwilling to use it! Hang not out that new
Oriflamme, _flame_ not _of gold_ but of the want of gold! The
thrice-blessed Revolution is _done_, thou thinkest? If so it will
be well with thee.
But now let no mortal say henceforth that an august National
Assembly wants riot: all it ever wanted was riot enough to
balance Court-plotting; all it now wants, of Heaven or of Earth,
is to get its theory of defective verbs perfected.