of us, two for each Section of the Forty-eight, they must go forthwith, and tell Paris what the Country needs of her.  Let Eighty more of us be sent, post-haste, over France; to spread the fire-cross, to call forth the might of men.  Let the Eighty also be on the road, before this sitting rise.  Let them go, and think what their errand is.  Speedy Camp of Fifty thousand between Paris and the North Frontier; for Paris will pour forth her volunteers!  Shoulder to shoulder; one strong universal death-defiant rising and rushing; we shall hurl back these Sons of Night yet again; and France, in spite of the world, be free!  (Moniteur in Hist.  Parl. xxv. 6.)—­So sounds the Titan’s voice:  into all Section-houses; into all French hearts.  Sections sit in Permanence, for recruitment, enrolment, that very night.  Convention Commissioners, on swift wheels, are carrying the fire-cross from Town to Town, till all France blaze.

And so there is Flag of Fatherland in Danger waving from the Townhall, Black Flag from the top of Notre-Dame Cathedral; there is Proclamation, hot eloquence; Paris rushing out once again to strike its enemies down.  That, in such circumstances, Paris was in no mild humour can be conjectured.  Agitated streets; still more agitated round the Salle de Manege!  Feuillans-Terrace crowds itself with angry Citizens, angrier Citizenesses; Varlet perambulates with portable-chair:  ejaculations of no measured kind, as to perfidious fine-spoken Hommes d’etat, friends of Dumouriez, secret-friends of Pitt and Cobourg, burst from the hearts and lips of men.  To fight the enemy?  Yes, and even to “freeze him with terror, glacer d’effroi;” but first to have domestic Traitors punished!  Who are they that, carping and quarrelling, in their jesuitic most moderate way, seek to shackle the Patriotic movement?  That divide France against Paris, and poison public opinion in the Departments?  That when we ask for bread, and a Maximum fixed-price, treat us with lectures on Free-trade in grains?  Can the human stomach satisfy itself with lectures on Free-trade; and are we to fight the Austrians in a moderate manner, or in an immoderate?  This Convention must be purged.

“Set up a swift Tribunal for Traitors, a Maximum for Grains:”  thus speak with energy the Patriot Volunteers, as they defile through the Convention Hall, just on the wing to the Frontiers;—­perorating in that heroical Cambyses’ vein of theirs:  beshouted by the Galleries and Mountain; bemurmured by the Right-side and Plain.  Nor are prodigies wanting:  lo, while a Captain of the Section Poissonniere perorates with vehemence about Dumouriez, Maximum, and Crypto-Royalist Traitors, and his troop beat chorus with him, waving their Banner overhead, the eye of a Deputy discerns, in this same Banner, that the cravates or streamers of it have Royal fleurs-de-lys!  The Section-Captain shrieks; his troop shriek, horror-struck, and ‘trample the Banner under foot:’  seemingly the work of some Crypto-Royalist Plotter?  Most probable; (Choix des Rapports, xi. 277.)—­or perhaps at bottom, only the old Banner of the Section, manufactured prior to the Tenth of August, when such streamers were according to rule! (Hist.  Parl. xxv. 72.)