_On the Antiquity of Feasts, Which, It has been Asserted, were Always
Mournful._
Men of ingenuity, profound searchers into antiquity, who would know how
the earth was made a hundred thousand years ago, if genius could
discover it, have asserted that mankind, reduced to a very small number
in both continents, and still terrified at the innumerable revolutions
which this sad globe had undergone, perpetuated the remembrance of their
calamities by dismal and mournful commemorations.
"Every feast," say they, "was a day of horror, instituted to remind men
that their fathers had been destroyed by the fires of the volcanoes, by
rocks falling from the mountains, by eruptions of the sea, by the teeth
and claws of wild beasts, by war, pestilence and famine."
Then we are not made as men were then. There was never so much rejoicing
in London as after the plague and the burning of the whole city in the
reign of Charles II. We made songs while the massacres of Bartholomew
were still going on. Some pasquinades have been preserved which were
made the day after the assassination of Coligni; there was printed in
Paris, _Passio Domini nostri Gaspardi Colignii secundum Bartholomæum_.
It has a thousand times happened that the sultan who reigns in
Constantinople has made his eunuchs and odalisks dance in apartments
stained with the blood of his brothers and his viziers. What do the
people of Paris do on the very day that they are apprised of the loss of
a battle and the death of a hundred brave officers? They run to the play
and the opera.
What did they when the wife of Marshal d'Ancre was given up in the Grève
to the barbarity of her persecutors? When Marshal de Marillac was
dragged to execution in a wagon, by virtue of a paper signed by robed
lackeys in Cardinal de Richelieu's ante-chamber? When a
lieutenant-general of the army, a foreigner, who had shed his blood for
the state, condemned by the cries of his infuriated enemies, was led to
the scaffold in a dung-cart, with a gag in his mouth? When a young man
of nineteen, full of candor, courage and modesty, but very imprudent,
was carried to the most dreadful of punishments? They sang vaudevilles.
Such is man, at least man on the banks of the Seine. Such has he been
at all times, for the same reason that rabbits have always had hair, and
larks feathers.