King Louis with his Court brings up the rear:  he cheerful, in this day of hope, is saluted with plaudits; still more Necker his Minister.  Not so the Queen; on whom hope shines not steadily any more.  Ill-fated Queen!  Her hair is already gray with many cares and crosses; her first-born son is dying in these weeks:  black falsehood has ineffaceably soiled her name; ineffaceably while this generation lasts.  Instead of Vive la Reine, voices insult her with Vive d’Orleans.  Of her queenly beauty little remains except its stateliness; not now gracious, but haughty, rigid, silently enduring.  With a most mixed feeling, wherein joy has no part, she resigns herself to a day she hoped never to have seen.  Poor Marie Antoinette; with thy quick noble instincts; vehement glancings, vision all-too fitful narrow for the work thou hast to do!  O there are tears in store for thee; bitterest wailings, soft womanly meltings, though thou hast the heart of an imperial Theresa’s Daughter.  Thou doomed one, shut thy eyes on the future!—­

And so, in stately Procession, have passed the Elected of France.  Some towards honour and quick fire-consummation; most towards dishonour; not a few towards massacre, confusion, emigration, desperation:  all towards Eternity!—­So many heterogeneities cast together into the fermenting-vat; there, with incalculable action, counteraction, elective affinities, explosive developments, to work out healing for a sick moribund System of Society!  Probably the strangest Body of Men, if we consider well, that ever met together on our Planet on such an errand.  So thousandfold complex a Society, ready to burst-up from its infinite depths; and these men, its rulers and healers, without life-rule for themselves,—­other life-rule than a Gospel according to Jean Jacques!  To the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man is properly an Accident under the sky.  Man is without Duty round him; except it be ’to make the Constitution.’  He is without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world.

What further or better belief can be said to exist in these Twelve Hundred?  Belief in high-plumed hats of a feudal cut; in heraldic scutcheons; in the divine right of Kings, in the divine right of Game-destroyers.  Belief, or what is still worse, canting half-belief; or worst of all, mere Macchiavellic pretence-of-belief,—­in consecrated dough-wafers, and the godhood of a poor old Italian Man!  Nevertheless in that immeasurable Confusion and Corruption, which struggles there so blindly to become less confused and corrupt, there is, as we said, this one salient point of a New Life discernible:  the deep fixed Determination to have done with Shams.  A determination, which, consciously or unconsciously, is fixed; which waxes ever more fixed, into very madness and fixed-idea; which in such embodiment as lies provided there, shall now unfold itself rapidly:  monstrous, stupendous, unspeakable; new for long thousands of years!—­How has the Heaven’s light, oftentimes in this Earth, to clothe itself in thunder and electric murkiness; and descend as molten lightning, blasting, if purifying!  Nay is it not rather the very murkiness, and atmospheric suffocation, that brings the lightning and the light?  The new Evangel, as the old had been, was it to be born in the Destruction of a World?