ds over all
the benches; prudence gives way, all foresight disappears and every
objection is stifled. During the night of the 4th of August,[2109]
"nobody is master of himself. The Assembly presents the spectacle of an
inebriated crowd in a shop of valuable furniture, breaking and smashing
at will whatever they can lay their hands on."

"That which would have required a year of care and reflection," says
a competent foreigner, "was proposed, deliberated over, and passed by
general acclamation. The abolition of feudal rights, of titles, of the
privileges of the provinces, three articles which alone embraced a whole
system of jurisprudence and statesmanship, were decided with ten or
twelve other measures in less time than is required in the English
Parliament for the first reading of an important bill."

"Such are our Frenchmen," says Mirabeau again, "they spend a month in
disputes about syllables, and overthrow, in a single night, the whole
established system of the Monarchy!"[2110]

The truth is, they display the nervousness of women, and, from one end
of the Revolution to the other, this excitability keeps on increasing.

Not only are they excited, but the pitch of excitement must be
maintained, and, like the drunkard who, once stimulated, has recourse
again to strong waters, one would say that they carefully try to expel
the last remnants of calmness and common sense from their brains. They
delight in pompous phrases, in high-sounding rhetoric, in declamatory
sentimental strokes of eloquence: this is the style of nearly all their
speeches, and so strong is their taste, they are not satisfied with
the orations made amongst themselves. Lally and Necker, having made
"affecting and sublime" speeches at the Hotel-de-Ville, the Assembly
wish them to be repeated before them:[2111] this being the heart of
France, it is proper for it to answer to the noble emotions of all
Frenchmen. Let this heart throb on, and as strongly as possible, for
that is its office, and day by day it receives fresh impulses. Almost
all sittings begin with the reading of flattering addresses or of
threatening denunciations. The petitioners frequently appear in person,
and read their enthusiastic effusions, their imperious advice, their
doctrines of dissolution. To-day it is Danton, in the name of Paris,
with his bull visage and his voice that seems a tocsin of insurrection;
to-morrow, the vanquishers of the Bastille, or some other troop, with a
ba