By mighty effort and combination this latter course, of reestablish it, is the course fixed on; and it shall by the strong arm, if not by the clearest logic, be made good.  With the sacrifice of all their hard-earned popularity, this notable Triumvirate, says Toulongeon, ’set the Throne up again, which they had so toiled to overturn:  as one might set up an overturned pyramid, on its vertex; to stand so long as it is held.’

Unhappy France; unhappy in King, Queen, and Constitution; one knows not in which unhappiest!  Was the meaning of our so glorious French Revolution this, and no other, That when Shams and Delusions, long soul-killing, had become body-killing, and got the length of Bankruptcy and Inanition, a great People rose and, with one voice, said, in the Name of the Highest:  Shams shall be no more?  So many sorrows and bloody horrors, endured, and to be yet endured through dismal coming centuries, were they not the heavy price paid and payable for this same:  Total Destruction of Shams from among men?  And now, O Barnave Triumvirate! is it in such double-distilled Delusion, and Sham even of a Sham, that an Effort of this kind will rest acquiescent?  Messieurs of the popular Triumvirate:  Never!  But, after all, what can poor popular Triumvirates and fallible august Senators do?  They can, when the Truth is all too-horrible, stick their heads ostrich-like into what sheltering Fallacy is nearest:  and wait there, a posteriori!

Readers who saw the Clermontais and Three-Bishopricks gallop, in the Night of Spurs; Diligences ruffling up all France into one terrific terrified Cock of India; and the Town of Nantes in its shirt,—­may fancy what an affair to settle this was.  Robespierre, on the extreme Left, with perhaps Petion and lean old Goupil, for the very Triumvirate has defalcated, are shrieking hoarse; drowned in Constitutional clamour.  But the debate and arguing of a whole Nation; the bellowings through all Journals, for and against; the reverberant voice of Danton; the Hyperion-shafts of Camille; the porcupine-quills of implacable Marat:—­conceive all this.

Constitutionalists in a body, as we often predicted, do now recede from the Mother Society, and become Feuillans; threatening her with inanition, the rank and respectability being mostly gone.  Petition after Petition, forwarded by Post, or borne in Deputation, comes praying for Judgment and Decheance, which is our name for Deposition; praying, at lowest, for Reference to the Eighty-three Departments of France.  Hot Marseillese Deputation comes declaring, among other things:  “Our Phocean Ancestors flung a Bar of Iron into the Bay at their first landing; this Bar will float again on the Mediterranean brine before we consent to be slaves.”  All this for four weeks or more, while the matter still hangs doubtful; Emigration streaming with double violence over the frontiers; (Bouille, ii. 101.) France seething in fierce agitation of this question and prize-question:  What is to be done with the fugitive Hereditary Representative?