In these same days, as Chronology will teach us, hot old Marquis Mirabeau lies stricken down, at Argenteuil,—­not within sound of these alarm-guns; for he properly is not there, and only the body of him now lies, deaf and cold forever.  It was on Saturday night that he, drawing his last life-breaths, gave up the ghost there;—­leaving a world, which would never go to his mind, now broken out, seemingly, into deliration and the culbute generale.  What is it to him, departing elsewhither, on his long journey?  The old Chateau Mirabeau stands silent, far off, on its scarped rock, in that ‘gorge of two windy valleys;’ the pale-fading spectre now of a Chateau:  this huge World-riot, and France, and the World itself, fades also, like a shadow on the great still mirror-sea; and all shall be as God wills.

Young Mirabeau, sad of heart, for he loved this crabbed brave old Father, sad of heart, and occupied with sad cares,—­is withdrawn from Public History.  The great crisis transacts itself without him. (Fils Adoptif, Mirabeau, vi. l. 1.)

Chapter 1.5.VI.

Storm and Victory.

But, to the living and the struggling, a new, Fourteenth morning dawns.  Under all roofs of this distracted City, is the nodus of a drama, not untragical, crowding towards solution.  The bustlings and preparings, the tremors and menaces; the tears that fell from old eyes!  This day, my sons, ye shall quit you like men.  By the memory of your fathers’ wrongs, by the hope of your children’s rights!  Tyranny impends in red wrath:  help for you is none if not in your own right hands.  This day ye must do or die.

From earliest light, a sleepless Permanent Committee has heard the old cry, now waxing almost frantic, mutinous:  Arms!  Arms!  Provost Flesselles, or what traitors there are among you, may think of those Charleville Boxes.  A hundred-and-fifty thousand of us; and but the third man furnished with so much as a pike!  Arms are the one thing needful:  with arms we are an unconquerable man-defying National Guard; without arms, a rabble to be whiffed with grapeshot.

Happily the word has arisen, for no secret can be kept,—­that there lie muskets at the Hotel des Invalides.  Thither will we:  King’s Procureur M. Ethys de Corny, and whatsoever of authority a Permanent Committee can lend, shall go with us.  Besenval’s Camp is there; perhaps he will not fire on us; if he kill us we shall but die.

Alas, poor Besenval, with his troops melting away in that manner, has not the smallest humour to fire!  At five o’clock this morning, as he lay dreaming, oblivious in the Ecole Militaire, a ‘figure’ stood suddenly at his bedside:  ’with face rather handsome; eyes inflamed, speech rapid and curt, air audacious:’  such a figure drew Priam’s curtains!  The message and monition of the figure was, that resistance would be hopeless; that if blood flowed, wo to him who shed it.  Thus spoke the