There are moments on which the destiny of a nation, perhaps of an age, turns.  I had reached Paris at one of those moments.  As my caleche wound its slow way round the base of Montmartre, I perceived, through the deepening twilight, a long train of flame, spreading from the horizon to the gates of the city.  Shouts were heard, with now and then the heavy sounds of cannon.  This produced a dead stop in my progress.  My postilion stoutly protested against venturing his caleche, his horses, and, what he probably regarded much more than either, himself, into the very heart of what he pronounced a counter-revolution.  My courier, freighted with despatches, which might have been high treason to the majesty of the mob, and who saw nothing less than suspension from the first lamp-post in their discovery, protested, with about the same number of sacres; and my diplomatic beams seemed in a fair way to be shorn.

But this was the actual thing which I had come to see:  Paris in its new existence; the capital of the populace; the headquarters of the grand army of insurgency; the living centre of all those flashes of fantasy, fury, and fire, which were already darting out towards every throne of Europe.  I determined to have a voice on the occasion, and I exerted it with such vigour, that I roused the inmates of a blockhouse, a party of the National Guard, who, early as it was, had been as fast asleep as if they had been a posse of city watchmen.  They clustered round us, applauded my resolve, to see what was to be seen, as perfectly national, vraiment Francais; kicked my postilion till he mounted his horse, beat my sulky courier with the flats of their little swords, and would have bastinadoed, or probably hanged him, if I had not interposed; and, finally, hoisting me into the caleche, which they loaded with half a dozen of their number before and behind, commenced our march into Paris.  This was evidently not the age of discipline.

It may have been owing to this curious escort that I got in at all; for at the gate I found a strong guard of the regular troops, who drove back a long succession of carriages which had preceded me.  But my cortege were so thoroughly in the new fashion, they danced the “carmagnole” so boisterously, and sang patriotic rhymes with such strength of lungs, that it was impossible to refuse admission to patriots of such sonorousness.  The popular conjectures, too, which fell to my share, vastly increased my importance.  In the course of the five minutes spent in wading through the crowd of the rejected, I bore fifty different characters—­I was a state prisoner—­a deputy from Marseilles, a part of the kingdom then in peculiar favour; an ex-general; a captain of banditti, and an ambassador from England or America; in either case, an especially honoured missionary, for England was then pronounced by all the Parisian authorities to be on the verge of a revolution.  Though, I believe, Jonathan had the preference, for the double reason, that the love of Jean Francais for John Bull is of a rather precarious order, and that the American Revolution was an egg hatched by the warmth of the Gallic bird itself; a secondary sort of parentage.