But fancy the Royal Family risen from its truckle-beds on the morrow of that mad day:  fancy the Municipal inquiry, “How would your Majesty please to lodge?”—­and then that the King’s rough answer, “Each may lodge as he can, I am well enough,” is congeed and bowed away, in expressive grins, by the Townhall Functionaries, with obsequious upholsterers at their back; and how the Chateau of the Tuileries is repainted, regarnished into a golden Royal Residence; and Lafayette with his blue National Guards lies encompassing it, as blue Neptune (in the language of poets) does an island, wooingly.  Thither may the wrecks of rehabilitated Loyalty gather; if it will become Constitutional; for Constitutionalism thinks no evil; Sansculottism itself rejoices in the King’s countenance.  The rubbish of a Menadic Insurrection, as in this ever-kindly world all rubbish can and must be, is swept aside; and so again, on clear arena, under new conditions, with something even of a new stateliness, we begin a new course of action.

Arthur Young has witnessed the strangest scene:  Majesty walking unattended in the Tuileries Gardens; and miscellaneous tricolor crowds, who cheer it, and reverently make way for it:  the very Queen commands at lowest respectful silence, regretful avoidance. (Arthur Young’s Travels, i. 264-280.) Simple ducks, in those royal waters, quackle for crumbs from young royal fingers:  the little Dauphin has a little railed garden, where he is seen delving, with ruddy cheeks and flaxen curled hair; also a little hutch to put his tools in, and screen himself against showers.  What peaceable simplicity!  Is it peace of a Father restored to his children?  Or of a Taskmaster who has lost his whip?  Lafayette and the Municipality and universal Constitutionalism assert the former, and do what is in them to realise it.  Such Patriotism as snarls dangerously, and shows teeth, Patrollotism shall suppress; or far better, Royalty shall soothe down the angry hair of it, by gentle pattings; and, most effectual of all, by fuller diet.  Yes, not only shall Paris be fed, but the King’s hand be seen in that work.  The household goods of the Poor shall, up to a certain amount, by royal bounty, be disengaged from pawn, and that insatiable Mont de Piete disgorge:  rides in the city with their vive-le-roi need not fail; and so by substance and show, shall Royalty, if man’s art can popularise it, be popularised. (Deux Amis, iii. c. 10.)

Or, alas, is it neither restored Father nor diswhipped Taskmaster that walks there; but an anomalous complex of both these, and of innumerable other heterogeneities; reducible to no rubric, if not to this newly devised one:  King Louis Restorer of French Liberty?  Man indeed, and King Louis like other men, lives in this world to make rule out of the ruleless; by his living energy, he shall force the absurd itself to become less absurd.  But then if there be no living energy; living passivity only?  King Serpent, hurled into his unexpected watery dominion, did at least bite, and assert credibly that he was there:  but as for the poor King Log, tumbled hither and thither as thousandfold chance and other will than his might direct, how happy for him that he was indeed wooden; and, doing nothing, could also see and suffer nothing!  It is a distracted business.