before witnessed so imposing or
momentous a ceremony. The town itself had not risen into notice till the
memory of the preceding States-general had almost passed away. And now,
after all the deputies had ranged themselves to receive their sovereign,
the representatives of the clergy on the right of the throne, the Nobles
on the left, the Commons in denser masses at the bottom of the hall;[5] as
the king, accompanied by the queen, leading two of her children[6] by the
hand, and attended by all the princes of the royal family and of the
blood, by the dukes and peers of the kingdom, the ministers and great
officers of state, entered and took his seat on the throne, the most
unimpassioned spectator must have felt that he was beholding a scene at
once magnificent and solemn; and one, from long desuetude, as novel as if
it had been wholly unprecedented, such as might well inaugurate a new
policy or a new constitution.

Could those who beheld it as spectators, could those who bore a part in
the solemnity, have looked into futurity; could they have divined that no
other hall would ever again see that virtuous and beneficent king
surrounded with that pomp, or received with that reverential homage which
was now paid to him as as unquestioned right; nay, that the end, of which
this day was the beginning, scarcely one single person of all those now
present, whether men in the flower of their strength, women in the pride
of their beauty, or even children in their infantine innocence and grace,
would live to behold; but that sovereigns and subjects were destined,
almost without exception, to perish with circumstances of unutterable,
unimaginable horror and misery, as the direct consequence of this day's
pageant; we may well believe that the most sanguine of those who now
greeted it with eager hope and exultation would rather have averted his
eyes from the ill-omened spectacle, and would have preferred to bear the
worst evils of which he was anticipating the abolition, to bringing on his
country the calamities which were about to fall upon it.

A large state arm-chair, a little lower than the throne, had been set
beside it for the queen; the princes and princesses were ranged on each
side on a row of chairs without arms; and, when all had taken their
places, the king opened the session with a short speech, leaving the real
business to be unfolded at greater length by his ministers. In order to
feel assured of the proper emphasis and