Consider that they are Twelve Hundred; that they not only speak, but read their speeches; and even borrow and steal speeches to read!  With Twelve Hundred fluent speakers, and their Noah’s Deluge of vociferous commonplace, unattainable silence may well seem the one blessing of Life.  But figure Twelve Hundred pamphleteers; droning forth perpetual pamphlets:  and no man to gag them!  Neither, as in the American Congress, do the arrangements seem perfect.  A Senator has not his own Desk and Newspaper here; of Tobacco (much less of Pipes) there is not the slightest provision.  Conversation itself must be transacted in a low tone, with continual interruption:  only ‘pencil Notes’ circulate freely; ‘in incredible numbers to the foot of the very tribune.’ (See Dumont (pp. 159-67); Arthur Young, &c.)—­Such work is it, regenerating a Nation; perfecting one’s Theory of Irregular Verbs!

Chapter 1.6.III.

The General Overturn.

Of the King’s Court, for the present, there is almost nothing whatever to be said.  Silent, deserted are these halls; Royalty languishes forsaken of its war-god and all its hopes, till once the Oeil-de-Boeuf rally again.  The sceptre is departed from King Louis; is gone over to the Salles des Menus, to the Paris Townhall, or one knows not whither.  In the July days, while all ears were yet deafened by the crash of the Bastille, and Ministers and Princes were scattered to the four winds, it seemed as if the very Valets had grown heavy of hearing.  Besenval, also in flight towards Infinite Space, but hovering a little at Versailles, was addressing his Majesty personally for an Order about post-horses; when, lo, ’the Valet in waiting places himself familiarly between his Majesty and me,’ stretching out his rascal neck to learn what it was!  His Majesty, in sudden choler, whirled round; made a clutch at the tongs:  ’I gently prevented him; he grasped my hand in thankfulness; and I noticed tears in his eyes.’ (Besenval, iii. 419.)

Poor King; for French Kings also are men!  Louis Fourteenth himself once clutched the tongs, and even smote with them; but then it was at Louvois, and Dame Maintenon ran up.—­The Queen sits weeping in her inner apartments, surrounded by weak women:  she is ’at the height of unpopularity;’ universally regarded as the evil genius of France.  Her friends and familiar counsellors have all fled; and fled, surely, on the foolishest errand.  The Chateau Polignac still frowns aloft, on its ’bold and enormous’ cubical rock, amid the blooming champaigns, amid the blue girdling mountains of Auvergne:  (Arthur Young, i. 165.) but no Duke and Duchess Polignac look forth from it; they have fled, they have ‘met Necker at Bale;’ they shall not return.  That France should see her Nobles resist the Irresistible, Inevitable, with the face of angry men, was unhappy, not unexpected:  but with the face and sense of pettish children?  This was her peculiarity.  They understood nothing; would understand nothing.  Does not, at this hour, a new Polignac, first-born of these Two, sit reflective in the Castle of Ham; (A.D. 1835.) in an astonishment he will never recover from; the most confused of existing mortals?