Few Nobles come, and yet not none.  Paul Francois Barras, ’noble as the Barrases, old as the rocks of Provence;’ he is one.  The reckless, shipwrecked man:  flung ashore on the coast of the Maldives long ago, while sailing and soldiering as Indian Fighter; flung ashore since then, as hungry Parisian Pleasure-hunter and Half-pay, on many a Circe Island, with temporary enchantment, temporary conversion into beasthood and hoghood;—­the remote Var Department has now sent him hither.  A man of heat and haste; defective in utterance; defective indeed in any thing to utter; yet not without a certain rapidity of glance, a certain swift transient courage; who, in these times, Fortune favouring, may go far.  He is tall, handsome to the eye, ‘only the complexion a little yellow;’ but ’with a robe of purple with a scarlet cloak and plume of tricolor, on occasions of solemnity,’ the man will look well. (Dictionnaire des Hommes Marquans, para Barras.) Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau, Old-Constituent, is a kind of noble, and of enormous wealth; he too has come hither:—­to have the Pain of Death abolished?  Hapless Ex-Parlementeer!  Nay, among our Sixty Old-Constituents, see Philippe d’Orleans a Prince of the Blood!  Not now d’Orleans:  for, Feudalism being swept from the world, he demands of his worthy friends the Electors of Paris, to have a new name of their choosing; whereupon Procureur Manuel, like an antithetic literary man, recommends Equality, Egalite.  A Philippe Egalite therefore will sit; seen of the Earth and Heaven.

Such a Convention is gathering itself together.  Mere angry poultry in moulting season; whom Brunswick’s grenadiers and cannoneers will give short account of.  Would the weather only mend a little!  (Bertrand-Moleville, Memoires, ii. 225.)

In vain, O Bertrand!  The weather will not mend a whit:—­nay even if it did?  Dumouriez Polymetis, though Bertrand knows it not, started from brief slumber at Sedan, on that morning of the 29th of August; with stealthiness, with promptitude, audacity.  Some three mornings after that, Brunswick, opening wide eyes, perceives the Passes of the Argonne all seized; blocked with felled trees, fortified with camps; and that it is a most shifty swift Dumouriez this, who has outwitted him!

The manoeuvre may cost Brunswick ‘a loss of three weeks,’ very fatal in these circumstances.  A Mountain-wall of forty miles lying between him and Paris:  which he should have preoccupied;—­which how now to get possession of?  Also the rain it raineth every day; and we are in a hungry Champagne Pouilleuse, a land flowing only with ditch-water.  How to cross this Mountain-wall of the Argonne; or what in the world to do with it?—­there are marchings and wet splashings by steep paths, with sackerments and guttural interjections; forcings of Argonne Passes,—­which unhappily will not force.  Through the woods, volleying War reverberates, like huge gong-music, or Moloch’s kettledrum, borne by the echoes; swoln torrents boil angrily round