Nevertheless deepen your cajolery, harp quick and quicker, ye Royalist Seigneurs; with a dead-lift effort you may bring it to that.  In the month of June next, this Camp of Jales will step forth as a theatricality suddenly become real; Two thousand strong, and with the boast that it is Seventy thousand:  most strange to see; with flags flying, bayonets fixed; with Proclamation, and d’Artois Commission of civil war!  Let some Rebecqui, or other the like hot-clear Patriot; let some ‘Lieutenant-Colonel Aubry,’ if Rebecqui is busy elsewhere, raise instantaneous National Guards, and disperse and dissolve it; and blow the Old Castle asunder, (Moniteur, Seance du 15 Juillet 1792.) that so, if possible, we hear of it no more!

In the Months of February and March, it is recorded, the terror, especially of rural France, had risen even to the transcendental pitch:  not far from madness.  In Town and Hamlet is rumour; of war, massacre:  that Austrians, Aristocrats, above all, that The Brigands are close by.  Men quit their houses and huts; rush fugitive, shrieking, with wife and child, they know not whither.  Such a terror, the eye-witnesses say, never fell on a Nation; nor shall again fall, even in Reigns of Terror expressly so-called.  The Countries of the Loire, all the Central and South-East regions, start up distracted, ’simultaneously as by an electric shock;’—­for indeed grain too gets scarcer and scarcer.  ’The people barricade the entrances of Towns, pile stones in the upper stories, the women prepare boiling water; from moment to moment, expecting the attack.  In the Country, the alarm-bell rings incessant:  troops of peasants, gathered by it, scour the highways, seeking an imaginary enemy.  They are armed mostly with scythes stuck in wood; and, arriving in wild troops at the barricaded Towns, are themselves sometimes taken for Brigands.’ (Newspapers, &c. in Hist.  Parl. xiii. 325.)

So rushes old France:  old France is rushing down.  What the end will be is known to no mortal; that the end is near all mortals may know.

Chapter 2.5.VII.

Constitution will not march.

To all which our poor Legislative, tied up by an unmarching Constitution, can oppose nothing, by way of remedy, but mere bursts of parliamentary eloquence!  They go on, debating, denouncing, objurgating:  loud weltering Chaos, which devours itself.

But their two thousand and odd Decrees?  Reader, these happily concern not thee, nor me.  Mere Occasional Decrees, foolish and not foolish; sufficient for that day was its own evil!  Of the whole two thousand there are not, now half a score, and these mostly blighted in the bud by royal Veto, that will profit or disprofit us.  On the 17th of January, the Legislative, for one thing, got its High Court, its Haute Cour, set up at Orleans.  The theory had been given by the Constituent, in May last, but this is the reality:  a Court for the trial of Political Offences; a Court which cannot want work.  To this it was decreed that there needed no royal Acceptance, therefore that there could be no Veto.  Also Priests can now be married; ever since last October.  A patriotic adventurous Priest had made bold to marry himself then; and not thinking this enough, came to the bar with his new spouse; that the whole world might hold honey-moon with him, and a Law be obtained.