(Rapport de Chabroud (Moniteur, du 31 December, 1789).) What then has caused these two unparalleled October Days?  For surely such dramatic exhibition never yet enacted itself without Dramatist and Machinist.  Wooden Punch emerges not, with his domestic sorrows, into the light of day, unless the wire be pulled:  how can human mobs?  Was it not d’Orleans then, and Laclos, Marquis Sillery, Mirabeau and the sons of confusion, hoping to drive the King to Metz, and gather the spoil?  Nay was it not, quite contrariwise, the Oeil-de-Boeuf, Bodyguard Colonel de Guiche, Minister Saint-Priest and highflying Loyalists; hoping also to drive him to Metz; and try it by the sword of civil war?  Good Marquis Toulongeon, the Historian and Deputy, feels constrained to admit that it was both. (Toulongeon, i. 150.)

Alas, my Friends, credulous incredulity is a strange matter.  But when a whole Nation is smitten with Suspicion, and sees a dramatic miracle in the very operation of the gastric juices, what help is there?  Such Nation is already a mere hypochondriac bundle of diseases; as good as changed into glass; atrabiliar, decadent; and will suffer crises.  Is not Suspicion itself the one thing to be suspected, as Montaigne feared only fear?

Now, however, the short hour has struck.  His Majesty is in his carriage, with his Queen, sister Elizabeth, and two royal children.  Not for another hour can the infinite Procession get marshalled, and under way.  The weather is dim drizzling; the mind confused; and noise great.

Processional marches not a few our world has seen; Roman triumphs and ovations, Cabiric cymbal-beatings, Royal progresses, Irish funerals:  but this of the French Monarchy marching to its bed remained to be seen.  Miles long, and of breadth losing itself in vagueness, for all the neighbouring country crowds to see.  Slow; stagnating along, like shoreless Lake, yet with a noise like Niagara, like Babel and Bedlam.  A splashing and a tramping; a hurrahing, uproaring, musket-volleying;—­the truest segment of Chaos seen in these latter Ages!  Till slowly it disembogue itself, in the thickening dusk, into expectant Paris, through a double row of faces all the way from Passy to the Hotel-de-Ville.

Consider this:  Vanguard of National troops; with trains of artillery; of pikemen and pikewomen, mounted on cannons, on carts, hackney-coaches, or on foot;—­tripudiating, in tricolor ribbons from head to heel; loaves stuck on the points of bayonets, green boughs stuck in gun barrels.  (Mercier, Nouveau Paris, iii. 21.) Next, as main-march, ’fifty cartloads of corn,’ which have been lent, for peace, from the stores of Versailles.  Behind which follow stragglers of the Garde-du-Corps; all humiliated, in Grenadier bonnets.  Close on these comes the Royal Carriage; come Royal Carriages:  for there are an Hundred National Deputies too, among whom sits Mirabeau,—­his remarks not given.  Then finally, pellmell, as rearguard, Flandre, Swiss, Hundred Swiss, other Bodyguards,