Also there shall be Prices of Grain well fixed; but then no grain purchasable by them:  bread not to be had except by Ticket from the Mayor, few ounces per mouth daily; after long swaying, with firm grip, on the chain of the Queue.  And Hunger shall stalk direful; and Wrath and Suspicion, whetted to the Preternatural pitch, shall stalk;—­as those other preternatural ‘shapes of Gods in their wrathfulness’ were discerned stalking, ‘in glare and gloom of that fire-ocean,’ when Troy Town fell!—­

Chapter 3.2.III.

Discrowned.

But the question more pressing than all on the Legislator, as yet, is this third:  What shall be done with King Louis?

King Louis, now King and Majesty to his own family alone, in their own Prison Apartment alone, has been Louis Capet and the Traitor Veto with the rest of France.  Shut in his Circuit of the Temple, he has heard and seen the loud whirl of things; yells of September Massacres, Brunswick war-thunders dying off in disaster and discomfiture; he passive, a spectator merely;—­waiting whither it would please to whirl with him.  From the neighbouring windows, the curious, not without pity, might see him walk daily, at a certain hour, in the Temple Garden, with his Queen, Sister and two Children, all that now belongs to him in this Earth.  (Moore, i. 123; ii. 224, &c.) Quietly he walks and waits; for he is not of lively feelings, and is of a devout heart.  The wearied Irresolute has, at least, no need of resolving now.  His daily meals, lessons to his Son, daily walk in the Garden, daily game at ombre or drafts, fill up the day:  the morrow will provide for itself.

The morrow indeed; and yet How?  Louis asks, How?  France, with perhaps still more solicitude, asks, How?  A King dethroned by insurrection is verily not easy to dispose of.  Keep him prisoner, he is a secret centre for the Disaffected, for endless plots, attempts and hopes of theirs.  Banish him, he is an open centre for them; his royal war-standard, with what of divinity it has, unrolls itself, summoning the world.  Put him to death?  A cruel questionable extremity that too:  and yet the likeliest in these extreme circumstances, of insurrectionary men, whose own life and death lies staked:  accordingly it is said, from the last step of the throne to the first of the scaffold there is short distance.

But, on the whole, we will remark here that this business of Louis looks altogether different now, as seen over Seas and at the distance of forty-four years, than it looked then, in France, and struggling, confused all round one!  For indeed it is a most lying thing that same Past Tense always:  so beautiful, sad, almost Elysian-sacred, ’in the moonlight of Memory,’ it seems; and seems only.  For observe:  always, one most important element is surreptitiously (we not noticing it) withdrawn from the Past Time:  the haggard element of Fear!  Not there does Fear