It was no longer the people of liberty, but the people of anarchy; the day of the 15th of April combined all its emblems.  Revolt armed against the laws, for instance, mutinous soldiers as conquerors; a colossal galley, an instrument of punishment and shame, crowned with flowers as an emblem; abandoned women and girls, collected from the lowest haunts of infamy, carrying and kissing the broken fetters of these galley-slaves; forty trophies, bearing the forty names of these Swiss; civic crowns on the names of these murderers of citizens; busts of Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, Sidney, the greatest philosophers and most virtuous patriots, mingled with the ignoble busts of these malefactors, and sullied by the contact; these soldiers themselves, astonished if not ashamed of their glory, advancing in the midst of a group of rebellious French-guard, in all the glorification of the forsaking of flags and want of discipline; the march closed by a car imitating in its form the prow of a galley, in this car the statue of Liberty armed in anticipation with the bludgeon of September, and wearing the bonnet rouge, an emblem borrowed from Phrygia by some, from the galleys by others; the book of the constitution carried processionally in this fete, as if to be present at the homage decreed to those who were armed against the laws; bands of male and female citizens, the pikes of the faubourg, the absence of the civic bayonets, fierce threats, theatrical music, demagogic hymns, derisive halts at the Bastille, the Hotel-de-Ville, the Champ-de-Mars; at the altar of the country the vast and tumultuous rounds danced several times by chains of men and women round the triumphal galley, amidst the foul chorus of the air of the Carmagnole; embraces, more obscene than patriotic, between these women and the soldiers, who threw themselves into each others’ arms; and in order to put the cope-stone on this debasement of the laws, Petion the Maire of Paris, the magistrates of the people assisting personally at this fete, and sanctioning this insolent triumph over the laws by their weakness or their complicity.  Such was this fete:  an humiliating copy of the 14th of July, an infamous parody of an insurrection, which parodied a revolution!

France blushed; good citizens were alarmed; the national guard began to be afraid of pikes; the city to fear the faubourgs, and the army herein received the signal of the most entire disorganisation.

The indignation of the constitutional party burst forth in ironical strophes in a hymn of Andre Chenier, in which that young poet avenged the laws, and marked himself out for the scaffold.

  “Salut divin triomphe!  Entre dans nos murailles! 
     Rends nous ces soldats, illustres
   Par le sang de Desilles et par les funerailles
     De nos citoyens massacres!"[16]

BOOK XI.

I.