“THERE IS NO LAW––”
The wild and drunken madness of the triumphant people expended itself in many strange forms, of which none was stranger, more awesome, more ludicrous and yet more tragic than the Carmagnole.
This was a dance that seized whole multitudes in its rhythmic, swaying clutch. The tune was “Ca Ira!” that mad measure of the sansculottes, meaning roughly––
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“Here it goes–– “And there it goes!” |
––and go forever it did till all the world of Paris seemed a heaving, throbbing vortex of werewolves and witches, things lower than animals in their topsyturvydom, drunken frenzy and frequent obscenity.
The throng through which Henriette now directed her steps was verging on this madness, though not yet at the pitch of it.
Henriette managed to find her way to two sansculotte troopers stationed in the centre of the Place, to whom she told her story. Reasonable fellows they seemed, offering to conduct her presently to the new 115 authorities and get a search warrant for the Frochard clan. But the madder swirl of the Carmagnole came along, and presto! swallowed them up. It happened on this wise:
As the locust swarms of the dancers enveloped them in shortening circles, two young and attractive maenads broke from the throng and literally entwined themselves with the troopers. Military dignity, assaulted in burlesque, tried to keep its post. But the bold nymphs were clinging, not to be “shaken”; as the mad whirl of the dancers touched the centre, the troopers and their female captors were borne away in the ricocheting, plunging motions, disappearing thenceforward from our story. Little Henriette dived to a place of safety, the side wall of the nearest building. Straightening herself after the unexpected knocks and bruises, she looked aghast at the scene before her.
Whole streets of them, plazas of them, these endlessly gyrating male and female loons; swirls of gayety, twisting, upsetting passers-by like a cyclone;––arms, bodies and legs frantically waving, as at the very brink of Dante’s Inferno!