an; a true Clerus (or
Inheritance of God on Earth): but now?--They pass silently, with such
_Cahiers_ as they have been able to redact; and none cries, God bless
them.

King Louis with his Court brings up the rear: he cheerful, in this day
of hope, is saluted with plaudits: still more Necker his Minister. Not
so the Queen, on whom hope shines not steadily any more. Ill-fated
Queen! Her hair is already gray with many cares and crosses; her
first-born son is dying in these weeks: black falsehood has
ineffaceably soiled her name--ineffaceably while this generation
lasts. Instead of _Vive la reine_, voices insult her with _Vive
d'Orleans_. Of her queenly beauty little remains except its
stateliness; not now gracious, but haughty, rigid, silently enduring.
With a most mixed feeling, wherein joy has no part, she resigns
herself to a day she hoped never to have seen. Poor Marie Antoinette;
with thy quick, noble instincts, vehement glancings, vision all-too
fitful narrow for the work thou hast to do! O there are tears in store
for thee, bitterest wailings, soft womanly meltings, though thou hast
the heart of an imperial Theresa's Daughter. Thou doomed one, shut thy
eyes on the future!

And so in stately Procession, have passed the Elected of France. Some
toward honor and quick fire-consummation; most toward dishonor; not a
few toward massacre, confusion, emigration, desperation: all toward
Eternity!--So many heterogeneities cast together into the
fermenting-vat; there, with incalculable action, counteraction,
elective affinities, explosive developments, to work out healing for a
sick, Moribund System of Society! Probably the strangest Body of Men,
if we consider well, that ever met together on our Planet on such an
errand. So thousandfold complex a Society, ready to burst up from its
infinite depths; and these men, its rulers and healers, without
life-rule for themselves,--other life-rule than a Gospel according to
Jean Jacques! To the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man
is properly an Accident under the sky. Man is without Duty round him;
except it be "to make the Constitution." He is without Heaven above
him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world.

What further or better belief can be said to exist in these Twelve
Hundred? Belief in high-plumed hats of a feudal cut; in heraldic
scutcheons; in the divine right of Kings, in the divine right of
Game-Destroyers. Belief, or what is still worse, canting