And such a Constitution; little short of miraculous:  one that shall ‘consolidate the Revolution’!  The Revolution is finished, then?  Mayor Bailly and all respectable friends of Freedom would fain think so.  Your Revolution, like jelly sufficiently boiled, needs only to be poured into shapes, of Constitution, and ‘consolidated’ therein?  Could it, indeed, contrive to cool; which last, however, is precisely the doubtful thing, or even the not doubtful!

Unhappy friends of Freedom; consolidating a Revolution!  They must sit at work there, their pavilion spread on very Chaos; between two hostile worlds, the Upper Court-world, the Nether Sansculottic one; and, beaten on by both, toil painfully, perilously,—­doing, in sad literal earnest, ‘the impossible.’

Chapter 1.6.V.

The Fourth Estate.

Pamphleteering opens its abysmal throat wider and wider:  never to close more.  Our Philosophes, indeed, rather withdraw; after the manner of Marmontel, ‘retiring in disgust the first day.’  Abbe Raynal, grown gray and quiet in his Marseilles domicile, is little content with this work; the last literary act of the man will again be an act of rebellion:  an indignant Letter to the Constituent Assembly; answered by ’the order of the day.’  Thus also Philosophe Morellet puckers discontented brows; being indeed threatened in his benefices by that Fourth of August:  it is clearly going too far.  How astonishing that those ’haggard figures in woollen jupes’ would not rest as satisfied with Speculation, and victorious Analysis, as we!

Alas, yes:  Speculation, Philosophism, once the ornament and wealth of the saloon, will now coin itself into mere Practical Propositions, and circulate on street and highway, universally; with results!  A Fourth Estate, of Able Editors, springs up; increases and multiplies; irrepressible, incalculable.  New Printers, new Journals, and ever new (so prurient is the world), let our Three Hundred curb and consolidate as they can!  Loustalot, under the wing of Prudhomme dull-blustering Printer, edits weekly his Revolutions de Paris; in an acrid, emphatic manner.  Acrid, corrosive, as the spirit of sloes and copperas, is Marat, Friend of the People; struck already with the fact that the National Assembly, so full of Aristocrats, ‘can do nothing,’ except dissolve itself, and make way for a better; that the Townhall Representatives are little other than babblers and imbeciles, if not even knaves.  Poor is this man; squalid, and dwells in garrets; a man unlovely to the sense, outward and inward; a man forbid;—­and is becoming fanatical, possessed with fixed-idea.  Cruel lusus of Nature!  Did Nature, O poor Marat, as in cruel sport, knead thee out of her leavings, and miscellaneous waste clay; and fling thee forth stepdamelike, a Distraction into this distracted Eighteenth Century?  Work is appointed thee there; which thou shalt do.  The Three Hundred have summoned and will again summon Marat:  but always he croaks forth answer sufficient; always he will defy them, or elude them; and endure no gag.