“This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend,” said the Man of Intelligence, “is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.”
The grandsire is obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, and hastens forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the floor; and as he disappears, a little boy scampers through the door in chase of a butterfly, which has got astray amid the barren sunshine of the city. Had the old gentleman, suggests our ever-suggestive moralist, been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect.
J’ai vécu—I managed to keep alive—was the Abbé Siéyès’ answer to those who, in after days, asked him how he spent his time in the Reign of Terror. And it is in allusion to his position at that season of peril, when no one could reckon on a morrow—nul ne pouvait se promettre un lendemain—that he quotes the vers charmants made in 1708 by Maucroix, then fourscore and upwards:—
“Chaque jour est un bien que du Ciel je reçoi!
Jouissons aujourd’hui de celui qu’il nous donne:
Il n’appartient pas plus aux jeunes gens qu’à moi,
Et celui de demain n’appartient à personne.”
“What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?” said Ducos, as the Girondins were whiling away their last evening here on earth. And each of them replied as the humour took him, or the subject impressed him. The favourite answer seems to have been, We shall sleep after the fatigues of the day. To some the feeling may have been, too literally and very bitterly, what Wordsworth versified as he gazed from Rydal Mount on a slowly-sinking star:
“We struggle with our fate,
While health, power, glory, from their height decline,