“Well, and if it be among these high hopes and this brave people that the phantom is to vanish, and the cure to come!” muttered Glyndon; and he thought he felt again the elixir sparkling through his veins.
“Thou shalt be one of the Convention with Paine and Clootz,—I will manage it all for thee!” cried Nicot, slapping him on the shoulder: “and Paris—”
“Ah, if I could but see Paris!” cried Fillide, in her joyous voice. Joyous! the whole time, the town, the air—save where, unheard, rose the cry of agony and the yell of murder—were joy! Sleep unhaunting in thy grave, cold Adela. Joy, joy! In the Jubilee of Humanity all private griefs should cease! Behold, wild mariner, the vast whirlpool draws thee to its stormy bosom! There the individual is not. All things are of the whole! Open thy gates, fair Paris, for the stranger-citizen! Receive in your ranks, O meek Republicans, the new champion of liberty, of reason, of mankind! “Mejnour is right; it was in virtue, in valour, in glorious struggle for the human race, that the spectre was to shrink to her kindred darkness.”
And Nicot’s shrill voice praised him; and lean Robespierre—“Flambeau, colonne, pierre angulaire de l’edifice de la Republique!” (“The light, column, and keystone of the Republic.”—“Lettre du Citoyen P—; Papiers inedits trouves chez Robespierre,” tom 11, page 127.)—smiled ominously on him from his bloodshot eyes; and Fillide clasped him with passionate arms to her tender breast. And at his up-rising and down-sitting, at board and in bed, though he saw it not, the Nameless One guided him with the demon eyes to the sea whose waves were gore.
BOOK VI. — SUPERSTITION DESERTING FAITH.
Why do I yield to that suggestion, Whose horrid image doth unfix
my hair.—Shakespeare
CHAPTER 6.I.
Therefore the Genii were painted with a platter full of garlands
and flowers in one hand, and a whip in the other.—Alexander
Ross, “Mystag. Poet.”