Or seest thou with any distinctness, low down probably, not in places of honour, a Stanislas Maillard, riding-tipstaff (huissier a cheval) of the Chatelet; one of the shiftiest of men?  A Captain Hulin of Geneva, Captain Elie of the Queen’s Regiment; both with an air of half-pay?  Jourdan, with tile-coloured whiskers, not yet with tile-beard; an unjust dealer in mules?  He shall be, in a few months, Jourdan the Headsman, and have other work.

Surely also, in some place not of honour, stands or sprawls up querulous, that he too, though short, may see,—­one squalidest bleared mortal, redolent of soot and horse-drugs:  Jean Paul Marat of Neuchatel!  O Marat, Renovator of Human Science, Lecturer on Optics; O thou remarkablest Horseleech, once in D’Artois’ Stables,—­as thy bleared soul looks forth, through thy bleared, dull-acrid, wo-stricken face, what sees it in all this?  Any faintest light of hope; like dayspring after Nova-Zembla night?  Or is it but blue sulphur-light, and spectres; woe, suspicion, revenge without end?

Of Draper Lecointre, how he shut his cloth-shop hard by, and stepped forth, one need hardly speak.  Nor of Santerre, the sonorous Brewer from the Faubourg St. Antoine.  Two other Figures, and only two, we signalise there.  The huge, brawny, Figure; through whose black brows, and rude flattened face (figure ecrasee), there looks a waste energy as of Hercules not yet furibund,—­he is an esurient, unprovided Advocate; Danton by name:  him mark.  Then that other, his slight-built comrade and craft-brother; he with the long curling locks; with the face of dingy blackguardism, wondrously irradiated with genius, as if a naphtha-lamp burnt within it:  that Figure is Camille Desmoulins.  A fellow of infinite shrewdness, wit, nay humour; one of the sprightliest clearest souls in all these millions.  Thou poor Camille, say of thee what they may, it were but falsehood to pretend one did not almost love thee, thou headlong lightly-sparkling man!  But the brawny, not yet furibund Figure, we say, is Jacques Danton; a name that shall be ’tolerably known in the Revolution.’  He is President of the electoral Cordeliers District at Paris, or about to be it; and shall open his lungs of brass.

We dwell no longer on the mixed shouting Multitude:  for now, behold, the Commons Deputies are at hand!

Which of these Six Hundred individuals, in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their king?  For a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have:  be their work what it may, there is one man there who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it; that man, as future not yet elected king, walks there among the rest.  He with the thick black locks, will it be?  With the hure, as himself calls it, or black boar’s-head, fit to be ‘shaken’ as a senatorial portent?  Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,—­and burning fire of genius; like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions?  It is Gabriel Honore Riquetti de Mirabeau, the world-compeller; man-ruling Deputy of Aix!  According to the Baroness de Stael, he steps proudly along, though looked at askance here, and shakes his black chevelure, or lion’s-mane; as if prophetic of great deeds.