Is it only an oppressive nightmare with which we have been loaded? Is
it then all a frightful dream, and are there no regicides in the world?
Have we not heard of that prodigy of a ruffian, who would not suffer his
benignant sovereign, with his hands tied behind him, and stripped for
execution, to say one parting word to his deluded people;--of Santerre,
who commanded the drums and trumpets to strike up to stifle his voice,
and dragged him backward to the machine of murder? This nefarious
villain (for a few days I may call him so) stands high in France, as in
a republic of robbers and murderers he ought. What hinders this monster
from being sent as ambassador to convey to his majesty the first
compliments of his brethren, the regicide Directory? They have none that
can represent them more properly. I anticipate the day of his arrival.
He will make his public entry into London on one of the pale horses of
his brewery. As he knows that we are pleased with the Paris taste
for the orders of knighthood, he will fling a bloody sash across his
shoulders with the order of the Holy Guillotine, surmounting the Crown,
appendant to the riband. Thus adorned, he will proceed from Whitechapel
to the further end of Pall Mall, all the music of London playing the
Marseillais hymn before him, and escorted by a chosen detachment of
the Legion de l'Echaffaud. It were only to be wished, that no ill-fated
loyalist for the imprudence of his zeal may stand in the pillory at
Charing Cross, under the statue of King Charles the First, at the
time of this grand procession, lest some of the rotten eggs, which the
constitutional society shall let fly at his indiscreet head, may hit the
virtuous murderer of his king. They might soil the state dress, which
the ministers of so many crowned heads have admired, and in which Sir
Clement Cotterel is to introduce him at St. James's.
If Santerre cannot be spared from the constitutional butcheries at home,
Tallien may supply his place, and, in point of figure, with advantage.
He has been habituated to commissions; and he is as well qualified as
Santerre for this. Nero wished the Roman people had but one neck. The
wish of the more exalted Tallien, when he sat in judgment, was, that his
sovereign had eighty-three heads, that he might send one to every one of
the departments. Tallien will make an excellent figure at Guildhall at
the next sheriff's feast. He may open the ball with my Lady Mayoress.
But this will be after he has retired from the public table, and gone
into the private room for the enjoyment of more social and unreserved
conversation with the ministers of state and the judges of the bench.
There these ministers and magistrates will hear him entertain the worthy
aldermen with an instructing and pleasing narrative of the manner in
which he made the rich citizens of Bordeaux squeak, and gently led
them by the public credit of the guillotine to disgorge their
anti-revolutionary pelf.
All this will be the display, and the town-talk, when our regicide is on
a visit of ceremony. At home nothing will equal the pomp and splendour
of the Hotel de la Republique. There another scene of gaudy grandeur
will be opened. When his citizen excellency keeps the festival, which
every citizen is ordered to observe, for the glorious execution of Louis
the Sixteenth, and renews his oath of detestation of kings, a
grand ball, of course, will be given on the occasion. Then what a
hurly-burly;--what a crowding;--what a glare of a thousand flambeaux in
the square;--what a clamour of footmen contending at the door;--what a
rattling of a thousand coaches of duchesses, countesses, and Lady Marys,
choking the way, and overturning each other, in a struggle who should be
first to pay her court to the Citoyenne, the spouse of the twenty-first
husband, he the husband of the thirty-first wife, and to hail her in the
rank of honourable matrons, before the four days' duration of marriage
is expired!--Morals, as they were:--decorum, the great outguard of
the sex, and the proud sentiment of honour, which makes virtue more
respectable where it is, and conceals human frailty where virtue may not
be, will be banished from this land of propriety, modesty, and reserve.