There too, conspicuous among the Thirty, if seldom audible, Philippe d’Orleans may be seen sitting:  in dim fuliginous bewilderment; having, one might say, arrived at Chaos!  Gleams there are, at once of a Lieutenancy and Regency; debates in the Assembly itself, of succession to the Throne ‘in case the present Branch should fail;’ and Philippe, they say, walked anxiously, in silence, through the corridors, till such high argument were done:  but it came all to nothing; Mirabeau, glaring into the man, and through him, had to ejaculate in strong untranslatable language:  Ce j—­f—­ne vaut pas la peine qu’on se donne pour lui.  It came all to nothing; and in the meanwhile Philippe’s money, they say, is gone!  Could he refuse a little cash to the gifted Patriot, in want only of that; he himself in want of all but that?  Not a pamphlet can be printed without cash; or indeed written, without food purchasable by cash.  Without cash your hopefullest Projector cannot stir from the spot:  individual patriotic or other Projects require cash:  how much more do wide-spread Intrigues, which live and exist by cash; lying widespread, with dragon-appetite for cash; fit to swallow Princedoms!  And so Prince Philippe, amid his Sillerys, Lacloses, and confused Sons of Night, has rolled along:  the centre of the strangest cloudy coil; out of which has visibly come, as we often say, an Epic Preternatural Machinery of suspicion; and within which there has dwelt and worked,—­what specialties of treason, stratagem, aimed or aimless endeavour towards mischief, no party living (if it be not the Presiding Genius of it, Prince of the Power of the Air) has now any chance to know.  Camille’s conjecture is the likeliest:  that poor Philippe did mount up, a little way, in treasonable speculation, as he mounted formerly in one of the earliest Balloons; but, frightened at the new position he was getting into, had soon turned the cock again, and come down.  More fool than he rose!  To create Preternatural Suspicion, this was his function in the Revolutionary Epos.  But now if he have lost his cornucopia of ready-money, what else had he to lose?  In thick darkness, inward and outward, he must welter and flounder on, in that piteous death-element, the hapless man.  Once, or even twice, we shall still behold him emerged; struggling out of the thick death-element:  in vain.  For one moment, it is the last moment, he starts aloft, or is flung aloft, even into clearness and a kind of memorability,—­to sink then for evermore!

The Cote Droit persists no less; nay with more animation than ever, though hope has now well nigh fled.  Tough Abbe Maury, when the obscure country Royalist grasps his hand with transport of thanks, answers, rolling his indomitable brazen head:  “Helas, Monsieur, all that I do here is as good as simply nothing.”  Gallant Faussigny, visible this one time in History, advances frantic, into the middle of the Hall, exclaiming:  “There is but one way of dealing with it, and that is to fall sword