eless financial embarrassment, without
the aid and advice of this body, which had not been summoned for one
hundred and fifty years.

It became, of course, an object of ambition to Count Mirabeau to have a
seat in this illustrious assembly. To secure this, he renounced his
rank, became a plebeian, solicited the votes of the people, and was
elected a deputy both from Marseilles and Aix. He chose Aix, and his
great career began with the meeting of the States-General at Versailles,
the 5th of May, 1789. It was composed of three hundred nobles, three
hundred priests, and six hundred deputies of the third estate,--twelve
hundred in all. It is generally conceded that these representatives of
the three orders were on the whole a very respectable body of men,
patriotic and incorruptible, but utterly deficient in political
experience and in powers of debate. The deputies were largely composed
of country lawyers, honest, but as conceited as they were inexperienced.
The vanity of Frenchmen is so inordinate that nearly every man in the
assembly felt quite competent to govern the nation or frame a
constitution. Enthusiasm and hope animated the whole assembly, and
everybody saw in this States-General the inauguration of a
glorious future.

One of the most brilliant and impressive chapters in Carlyle's "French
Revolution"--that great prose poem--is devoted to the procession of the
three orders from the church of St. Louis to the church of Notre Dame,
to celebrate the Mass, parts of which I quote.

"Shouts rend the air; one shout, at which Grecian birds might drop
dead. It is indeed a stately, solemn sight. The Elected of France and
then the Court of France; they are marshalled, and march there, all in
prescribed place and costume. Our Commons in plain black mantle and
white cravat; Noblesse in gold-worked, bright-dyed cloaks of velvet,
resplendent, rustling with laces, waving with plumes; the Clergy in
rochet, alb, and other clerical insignia; lastly the King himself and
household, in their brightest blaze of pomp,--their brightest and final
one. Which of the six hundred individuals in plain white cravats that
have come up to regenerate France might one guess would become their
king? For a king or a leader they, as all bodies of men, must have. He
with the thick locks, will it be? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and
rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness,
small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,--and burnin