of the Carmagnole.  Nay a certain, Tambour or National Drummer, having just been presented with a little daughter, determines to have the new Frenchwoman christened on Fatherland’s Altar then and there.  Repast once over, he accordingly has her christened; Fauchet the Te-Deum Bishop acting in chief, Thuriot and honourable persons standing gossips:  by the name, Petion-National-Pique! (Patriote-Francais (Brissot’s Newspaper), in Hist.  Parl. xiii. 451.) Does this remarkable Citizeness, now past the meridian of life, still walk the Earth?  Or did she die perhaps of teething?  Universal History is not indifferent.

Chapter 2.5.XI.

The Hereditary Representative.

And yet it is not by carmagnole-dances and singing of ca-ira, that the work can be done.  Duke Brunswick is not dancing carmagnoles, but has his drill serjeants busy.

On the Frontiers, our Armies, be it treason or not, behave in the worst way.  Troops badly commanded, shall we say?  Or troops intrinsically bad?  Unappointed, undisciplined, mutinous; that, in a thirty-years peace, have never seen fire?  In any case, Lafayette’s and Rochambeau’s little clutch, which they made at Austrian Flanders, has prospered as badly as clutch need do:  soldiers starting at their own shadow; suddenly shrieking, “On nous trahit,” and flying off in wild panic, at or before the first shot;—­managing only to hang some two or three Prisoners they had picked up, and massacre their own Commander, poor Theobald Dillon, driven into a granary by them in the Town of Lille.

And poor Gouvion:  he who sat shiftless in that Insurrection of Women!  Gouvion quitted the Legislative Hall and Parliamentary duties, in disgust and despair, when those Galley-slaves of Chateau-Vieux were admitted there.  He said, “Between the Austrians and the Jacobins there is nothing but a soldier’s death for it;” (Toulongeon, ii. 149.) and so, ‘in the dark stormy night,’ he has flung himself into the throat of the Austrian cannon, and perished in the skirmish at Maubeuge on the ninth of June.  Whom Legislative Patriotism shall mourn, with black mortcloths and melody in the Champ-de-Mars:  many a Patriot shiftier, truer none.  Lafayette himself is looking altogether dubious; in place of beating the Austrians, is about writing to denounce the Jacobins.  Rochambeau, all disconsolate, quits the service:  there remains only Luckner, the babbling old Prussian Grenadier.

Without Armies, without Generals!  And the Cimmerian Night, has gathered itself; Brunswick preparing his Proclamation; just about to march!  Let a Patriot Ministry and Legislative say, what in these circumstances it will do?  Suppress Internal Enemies, for one thing, answers the Patriot Legislative; and proposes, on the 24th of May, its Decree for the Banishment of Priests.  Collect also some nucleus of determined internal friends, adds War-minister Servan; and proposes, on the 7th of June, his Camp of Twenty-thousand.  Twenty-thousand National Volunteers; Five out of each Canton; picked Patriots, for Roland has charge of the Interior:  they shall assemble here in Paris; and be for a defence, cunningly devised, against foreign Austrians and domestic Austrian Committee alike.  So much can a Patriot Ministry and Legislative do.