Indeed, as to the general outlook of things, Bouille himself augurs not well of it.  The French Army, ever since those old Bastille days, and earlier, has been universally in the questionablest state, and growing daily worse.  Discipline, which is at all times a kind of miracle, and works by faith, broke down then; one sees not with that near prospect of recovering itself.  The Gardes Francaises played a deadly game; but how they won it, and wear the prizes of it, all men know.  In that general overturn, we saw the Hired Fighters refuse to fight.  The very Swiss of Chateau-Vieux, which indeed is a kind of French Swiss, from Geneva and the Pays de Vaud, are understood to have declined.  Deserters glided over; Royal-Allemand itself looked disconsolate, though stanch of purpose.  In a word, we there saw Military Rule, in the shape of poor Besenval with that convulsive unmanageable Camp of his, pass two martyr days on the Champ-de-Mars; and then, veiling itself, so to speak, ’under the cloud of night,’ depart ‘down the left bank of the Seine,’ to seek refuge elsewhere; this ground having clearly become too hot for it.

But what new ground to seek, what remedy to try?  Quarters that were ‘uninfected:’  this doubtless, with judicious strictness of drilling, were the plan.  Alas, in all quarters and places, from Paris onward to the remotest hamlet, is infection, is seditious contagion:  inhaled, propagated by contact and converse, till the dullest soldier catch it!  There is speech of men in uniform with men not in uniform; men in uniform read journals, and even write in them. (See Newspapers of July, 1789 (in Hist.  Parl. ii. 35), &c.) There are public petitions or remonstrances, private emissaries and associations; there is discontent, jealousy, uncertainty, sullen suspicious humour.  The whole French Army, fermenting in dark heat, glooms ominous, boding good to no one.

So that, in the general social dissolution and revolt, we are to have this deepest and dismallest kind of it, a revolting soldiery?  Barren, desolate to look upon is this same business of revolt under all its aspects; but how infinitely more so, when it takes the aspect of military mutiny!  The very implement of rule and restraint, whereby all the rest was managed and held in order, has become precisely the frightfullest immeasurable implement of misrule; like the element of Fire, our indispensable all-ministering servant, when it gets the mastery, and becomes conflagration.  Discipline we called a kind of miracle:  in fact, is it not miraculous how one man moves hundreds of thousands; each unit of whom it may be loves him not, and singly fears him not, yet has to obey him, to go hither or go thither, to march and halt, to give death, and even to receive it, as if a Fate had spoken; and the word-of-command becomes, almost in the literal sense, a magic-word?