Verily so:  ye dulled-bright Seigneurs, make of it what ye may.  Ah, and France does not rise round us in mass; and the Peasants do not join us, but assassinate us:  neither hanging nor any persuasion will induce them!  They have lost their old distinguishing love of King, and King’s-cloak,—­I fear, altogether; and will even fight to be rid of it:  that seems now their humour.  Nor does Austria prosper, nor the siege of Thionville.  The Thionvillers, carrying their insolence to the epigrammatic pitch, have put a Wooden Horse on their walls, with a bundle of hay hung from him, and this Inscription:  ’When I finish my hay, you will take Thionville.’ (Hist.  Parl. xix. 177.) To such height has the frenzy of mankind risen.

The trenches of Thionville may shut:  and what though those of Lille open?  The Earth smiles not on us, nor the Heaven; but weeps and blears itself, in sour rain, and worse.  Our very friends insult us; we are wounded in the house of our friends:  “His Majesty of Prussia had a greatcoat, when the rain came; and (contrary to all known laws) he put it on, though our two French Princes, the hope of their country, had none!” To which indeed, as Goethe admits, what answer could be made?  (Goethe, xxx. 49.)—­Cold and Hunger and Affront, Colic and Dysentery and Death; and we here, cowering redouted, most unredoubtable, amid the ‘tattered corn-shocks and deformed stubble,’ on the splashy Height of La Lune, round the mean Tavern de La Lune!—­

This is the Cannonade of Valmy; wherein the World-Poet experimented on the cannon-fever; wherein the French Sansculottes did not fly like poultry.  Precious to France!  Every soldier did his duty, and Alsatian Kellermann (how preferable to old Luckner the dismissed!) began to become greater; and Egalite Fils, Equality Junior, a light gallant Field-Officer, distinguished himself by intrepidity:—­it is the same intrepid individual who now, as Louis-Philippe, without the Equality, struggles, under sad circumstances, to be called King of the French for a season.

Chapter 3.1.VIII.

Exeunt.

But this Twentieth of September is otherwise a great day.  For, observe, while Kellermann’s horse was flying blown from under him at the Mill of Valmy, our new National Deputies, that shall be a national convention, are hovering and gathering about the Hall of the Hundred Swiss; with intent to constitute themselves!

On the morrow, about noontide, Camus the Archivist is busy ’verifying their powers;’ several hundreds of them already here.  Whereupon the Old Legislative comes solemnly over, to merge its old ashes Phoenix-like in the body of the new;—­and so forthwith, returning all solemnly back to the Salle de Manege, there sits a National Convention, Seven Hundred and Forty-nine complete, or complete enough; presided by Petion;—­which proceeds directly to do business.  Read that reported afternoon’s-debate,