nd of music which continues playing even into the hall. The meeting is
not a conference for business, but a patriotic opera, where the eclogue,
the melodrama, and sometimes the masquerade, mingle with the cheers and
the clapping of hands.[2112]--A serf of the Jura is brought to the
bar of the Assembly aged one hundred and twenty years, and one of the
members of the cortege, "M. Bourbon de la Crosniere, director of a
patriotic school, asks permission to take charge of an honorable old
man, that he may be waited on by the young people of all ranks, and
especially by the children of those whose fathers were killed in the
attack on the Bastille." [2113] Great is the hubbub and excitement. The
scene seems to be in imitation of Berquin,[2114] with the additional
complication of a mercenary consideration.

But small matters are not closely looked into, and the Assembly, under
the pressure of the galleries, stoops to shows, such as are held
at fairs. Sixty vagabonds who are paid twelve francs a head, in the
costumes of Spaniards, Dutchmen, Turks, Arabs, Tripolitans, Persians,
Hindus, Mongols, and Chinese, conducted by the Prussian Anacharsis
Clootz, enter, under the title of Ambassadors of the Human Race, to
declaim against tyrants, and they are admitted to the honors of the
sitting. On this occasion the masquerade is a stroke devised to hasten
and extort the abolition of nobility.[2115] At other times, there is
little or no object in it; its ridiculousness is inexpressible, for the
farce is played out as seriously and earnestly as in a village award
of prizes. For three days, the children who have taken their first
communion before the constitutional bishop have been promenaded through
the streets of Paris; at the Jacobin club they recite the nonsense they
have committed to memory; and, on the fourth day, admitted to the bar
of the Assembly, their spokesman, a poor little thing of twelve years,
repeats the parrot-like tirade. He winds up with the accustomed oath,
upon which all the others cry out in their piping, shrill voices, "We
swear!" As a climax, the President, Trejlhard, a sober lawyer, replies
to the little gamins with perfect gravity in a similar strain, employing
metaphors, personifications, and everything else belonging to the
stock-in-trade of a pedant on his platform:

"You merit a share in the glory of the founders of liberty, prepared as
you are to shed your blood in her behalf."

Immense applause from the "le