Not just yet, perhaps; and in the meantime the king empties his private purse to buy wood for the freezing people. This will warm them into loyalty while it lasts; and they crawl out of their icy burrows, or gather up their broken limbs on the snow beds—whereinto they have been ground by the sleds and chariots of the wealthy that rush without warning down the muffled streets—to build monuments of snow to the glory of their rulers. Then by-and-by these great obelisks melt, and add their quota to the thaw that is overwhelming what the frost has spared.
The red socks! Now, on this wild Sunday of September, when the monuments that bore the names of the good king and queen are collapsed and run away some eight years, the tocsin is pealing with a clamour of triumph from the steeples; for at last the solution of the riddle has been vouchsafed to the “Third State,” and it knows that to acquire the right point of view it must wear socks, not of its own blood but of that of the aristocrats, to whom the emblems of Noël were made to appeal.
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All day I felt the pulse of the people, quickening, quickening—an added five beats to every hour—with wonder, rage, and, at last, terror maniacal. Paris was threatened; hard-wrung freedom was tottering to its fall.
This Paris was a vessel of wrath on treacherous waters—manned by revolted slaves; the crew under hatches; encompassed by enemies on every side. What remained but to clear the decks for action,—every hero to his post at the vast bulwarks; every son-of-a-sea-cook to remain and poniard the prisoners lest they club their manacles and take their captors in the rear!
At two o’clock the tocsin pealed—the signal to prepare for the fray. From its first blaring stroke I ceased, it seemed, to be myself. I waived my individuality, and became as much a conscript of the rising tide of passion as a high-perched stone that the wave at last reaches and drags down with the shingle becomes a condition of the general uproar. I made, indeed, no subscription to this fanatical heat of emotion; I was simply involved in it—to go with it, and perish of it, perhaps, but never to succumb to its disordered sophistries or yield my free soul to its influence. Possibly I had a wild idea, in the midst of sinister forebodings, that a few such as I, scattered here and there, might leaven the ugly mass. But I do not know. Hemmed in by wrath and terror, thought casts its buoys and sinks into very fathomless depths.
From the Place de Grève, along Pelletier Quay; across the Ponts au Change and St Michel; westwards by the Rue St André des Arcs, where a little diversion was caused by a street-singer at whom the crowd took offence, in that he, being an insignificant buffoon, did pelt it with its classic pretentiousness, wagging his coat-tails in contempt thereof (“À bas, Pitou!” they shrieked; “we will dock thee of thy sting and put thee to buzz in a stone bottle!”—and they had him unfrocked in a twinkling and hoisted for punishment); round, with a curve to the south, into the Rue de Bussi; thence, again westwards, along the street of St Marguerite; finally, weathering the sinister cape of the Abbaye St Germain, northwards into the Rue St Benoit and up to the yard entrance of the very prison itself,—such was the long course by which I was borne, in the midst of clamour, hate, and revilings, some dreadful early scenes in the panorama of the Revolution unfolded before my eyes—scenes crudely limned by crude street artists, splashed and boltered with crimson, horrible for the ghastly applause they evoked.
I saw and I was helpless—the block about the carriages of the nonjurants—the desperate stroke at the sans-culotte that cut the knot of indecision—the crashing panels, the flying and flung priests. One damnable with a sabre split a bald head, that came wavering in my direction, like a melon, and the brains flew like its seeds. I shut my eyes and thought, Mercy is in right ratio with the hardness of the blow. Strike deep, poor guttersnipes, if you must strike at all!
Then began the “severe justice of the people.”
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