Yes, friends, ye may sit and look:  boldly or in thought, all France, and all Europe, may sit and look; for it is a day like few others.  Oh, one might weep like Xerxes:—­So many serried rows sit perched there; like winged creatures, alighted out of Heaven:  all these, and so many more that follow them, shall have wholly fled aloft again, vanishing into the blue Deep; and the memory of this day still be fresh.  It is the baptism-day of Democracy; sick Time has given it birth, the numbered months being run.  The extreme-unction day of Feudalism!  A superannuated System of Society, decrepit with toils (for has it not done much; produced you, and what ye have and know!)—­and with thefts and brawls, named glorious-victories; and with profligacies, sensualities, and on the whole with dotage and senility,—­is now to die:  and so, with death-throes and birth-throes, a new one is to be born.  What a work, O Earth and Heavens, what a work!  Battles and bloodshed, September Massacres, Bridges of Lodi, retreats of Moscow, Waterloos, Peterloos, Tenpound Franchises, Tarbarrels and Guillotines;—­and from this present date, if one might prophesy, some two centuries of it still to fight!  Two centuries; hardly less; before Democracy go through its due, most baleful, stages of Quackocracy; and a pestilential World be burnt up, and have begun to grow green and young again.

Rejoice nevertheless, ye Versailles multitudes; to you, from whom all this is hid, and glorious end of it is visible.  This day, sentence of death is pronounced on Shams; judgment of resuscitation, were it but far off, is pronounced on Realities.  This day it is declared aloud, as with a Doom-trumpet, that a Lie is unbelievable.  Believe that, stand by that, if more there be not; and let what thing or things soever will follow it follow.  ‘Ye can no other; God be your help!’ So spake a greater than any of you; opening his Chapter of World-History.

Behold, however!  The doors of St. Louis Church flung wide; and the Procession of Processions advancing towards Notre-Dame!  Shouts rend the air; one shout, at which Grecian birds might drop dead.  It is indeed a stately, solemn sight.  The Elected of France, and then the Court of France; they are marshalled and march there, all in prescribed place and costume.  Our Commons ‘in plain black mantle and white cravat;’ Noblesse, in gold-worked, bright-dyed cloaks of velvet, resplendent, rustling with laces, waving with plumes; the Clergy in rochet, alb, or other best pontificalibus:  lastly comes the King himself, and King’s Household, also in their brightest blaze of pomp,—­their brightest and final one.  Some Fourteen Hundred Men blown together from all winds, on the deepest errand.