They moved slowly, for they had been savagely beaten. But the interior sphere knew bliss. “Where shall we go—what shall we do—we who never met before to-day and have met thousands of times before to-day?”
“Myriads of times. So blessedly true it is that we are one!”
“So blessedly true!”
“Near Greenfield, in the country, live a family of the people called Friends. Let us go there first.”
They moved across the plain. The stars were all lighted. Theirs were the worlds beneath, around, above and within.
CHAPTER XIX
JEAN AND ESPÉRANCE
Much of the city must have slept at night. But so much of it waked, so much of it roamed the streets, pressed with business, or watching and hearkening to others pressed with business, so much of it, all night through, burned candles in rooms great and small, so much of it talked, harangued and chanted that a visitor, suddenly in presence from afar, might have asked, “Have you conquered sleep?” Presumably children and the very old slept. Most others seemed in the streets or in the lighted rooms, or upon the floors or in the galleries of the red-capped, and tri-coloured, the haranguing, the fierce and red-hot, the immensely Patriot, the double-distilled revolutionary clubs. The city was fevered, fevered! Voices never stopped, footfalls never stopped, small surging, rushing sound of many patriot feet together never stopped. Lights never went out. At the deadest hour, when the night side of earth has almost forgotten the sun, yet rose in the streets voices of proclamation, yet some speaker found a group to address, yet somewhere beat a drum, yet somewhere, gusts of wind in leaves, Paris whirled in Ronde patriotique, later to be called Carmagnole.
Jacobins’ Club. They sat, they stood, they harangued, they applauded, they dissented, they stayed late in the Club of the Jacobins. At times they stayed all night, gods denouncing the old Titans. The gods, an unnamed Titan in their own element, had all the nave of the Jacobins’ church. Up from pavement to hollow roof, tier on tier, climbed the benches, narrow stairs and galleries giving access. Thus was made circle above circle for patriot Paris, for patriot provinces come up to Paris, for forward-looking, revolutionary-minded units drawn to Paris from the elsewhere world, come to observe France and Paris and the cradle turnings of a mighty Change. Circle above circle sat full, even crowded. The topmost circle, putting up its hand, might touch the groined roof. The lowermost circle, shuffling feet on pavement, must look up a little to the platform and the seated officers of the Society.
The platform was built against a pyramidal, tall shape of black marble, a sepulchral monument left in the Church of the Jacobins. Back of officers were ranged, each in white plaster, each on his pedestal, busts of Patriots whom men must honour. Here were Mirabeau, American Franklin, and others. The lower throng of the amphitheatre faced these and the platform. But midway from floor to roof the circles drew level with the tribune. The tribune was built high, built very high, and midmost of the nave. A light stair climbed to it. Up here, as from a Simeon’s Pillar, as from a fount, hill-top high, came the voices addressing the Jacobins’ Society, Paris, France, Europe, and America, Mankind, Reason, and Unreason.
The autumn it was of 1791. In the Tuileries, guarded by red Swiss, still waked or slept as the case might be, a King and his family. The old Constituent Assembly had passed away; a new Assembly was beginning what work it might do. In the prisons waked or slept Suspects, but the prisons were not filled as they would come to be filled. Hope of a world that must change, changing temperately—it was still possible to indulge that hope! Even in nightly meetings of the Society of the Jacobins it might be indulged. The gods had not yet loosed the mad god. They were going to war to the end with the Titans, but there seemed room for hope that these might be vanquished without calling in the ghastly allies, the monsters of the gods’ own deeps. There was room for pure natures to believe that. Why should victory be a Pyrrhic victory?