But figure under what thousandfold wrappages, and cloaks of darkness, Royalty, meditating these things, must involve itself.  There are men with ‘Tickets of Entrance;’ there are chivalrous consultings, mysterious plottings.  Consider also whether, involve as it like, plotting Royalty can escape the glance of Patriotism; lynx-eyes, by the ten thousand fixed on it, which see in the dark!  Patriotism knows much:  know the dirks made to order, and can specify the shops; knows Sieur Motier’s legions of mouchards; the Tickets of Entree, and men in black; and how plan of evasion succeeds plan,—­or may be supposed to succeed it.  Then conceive the couplets chanted at the Theatre de Vaudeville; or worse, the whispers, significant nods of traitors in moustaches.  Conceive, on the other hand, the loud cry of alarm that came through the Hundred-and-Thirty Journals; the Dionysius’-Ear of each of the Forty-eight Sections, wakeful night and day.

Patriotism is patient of much; not patient of all.  The Cafe de Procope has sent, visibly along the streets, a Deputation of Patriots, ’to expostulate with bad Editors,’ by trustful word of mouth:  singular to see and hear.  The bad Editors promise to amend, but do not.  Deputations for change of Ministry were many; Mayor Bailly joining even with Cordelier Danton in such:  and they have prevailed.  With what profit?  Of Quacks, willing or constrained to be Quacks, the race is everlasting:  Ministers Duportail and Dutertre will have to manage much as Ministers Latour-du-Pin and Cice did.  So welters the confused world.

But now, beaten on for ever by such inextricable contradictory influences and evidences, what is the indigent French Patriot, in these unhappy days, to believe, and walk by?  Uncertainty all; except that he is wretched, indigent; that a glorious Revolution, the wonder of the Universe, has hitherto brought neither Bread nor Peace; being marred by traitors, difficult to discover.  Traitors that dwell in the dark, invisible there;—­or seen for moments, in pallid dubious twilight, stealthily vanishing thither!  Preternatural Suspicion once more rules the minds of men.

‘Nobody here,’ writes Carra of the Annales Patriotiques, so early as the first of February, ’can entertain a doubt of the constant obstinate project these people have on foot to get the King away; or of the perpetual succession of manoeuvres they employ for that.’  Nobody:  the watchful Mother of Patriotism deputed two Members to her Daughter at Versailles, to examine how the matter looked there.  Well, and there?  Patriotic Carra continues:  ’The Report of these two deputies we all heard with our own ears last Saturday.  They went with others of Versailles, to inspect the King’s Stables, also the stables of the whilom Gardes du Corps; they found there from seven to eight hundred horses standing always saddled and bridled, ready for the road at a moment’s notice.  The same deputies, moreover, saw with their own two eyes several