half-belief;
or worst of all, mere Machiavellic pretense-of-belief,--in consecrated
dough-wafers, and the godhood of a poor old Italian Man! Nevertheless,
in that immeasurable Confusion and Corruption, which struggles there
so blindly to become less confused and corrupt, there is, as we said,
this one salient point of a New Life discernible--the deep fixed
Determination to have done with Shams. A determination which,
consciously or unconsciously, is _fixed_; which waxes ever more fixed,
into very madness and fixed-idea; which, in such embodiment as lies
provided there, shall now unfold itself rapidly: monstrous,
stupendous, unspeakable; new for long thousands of years!--How has the
heaven's _light_, oftentimes in this Earth, to clothe itself in
thunder and electric murkiness, and descend as molten _lightning_,
blasting, if purifying! Nay, is it not rather the very murkiness, and
atmospheric suffocation, that _brings_ the lightning and the light?
The new Evangel, as the old had been, was it to be born in the
Destruction of a World?

THE SIEGE OF THE BASTILLE

From 'The French Revolution'

But, to the living and the struggling, a new, Fourteenth morning
dawns. Under all roofs of this distracted City is the nodus of a
Drama, not untragical, crowding toward solution. The bustlings and
preparings, the tremors and menaces; the tears that fell from old
eyes! This day, my sons, ye shall quit you like men. By the memory of
your fathers' wrongs; by the hope of your children's rights! Tyranny
impends in red wrath: help for you is none, if not in your own right
hands. This day ye must do or die.

From earliest light, a sleepless Permanent Committee has heard the old
cry, now waxing almost frantic, mutinous: Arms! Arms! Provost
Flesselles, or what traitors there are among you, may think of those
Charleville Boxes. A hundred-and-fifty thousand of us, and but the
third man furnished with so much as a pike! Arms are the one thing
needful: with arms we are an unconquerable man-defying National Guard;
without arms, a rabble to be whiffed with grape-shot.

Happily the word has arisen, for no secret can be kept,--that there
lie muskets at the Hotel des Invalides. Thither will we: King's
Procureur M. Ethys de Corny, and whatsoever of authority a Permanent
Committee can lend, shall go with us. Besenval's Camp is there;
perhaps he will not fire on us; if he kill us, we shall but die.

Alas! poor Besenval, with his troops melting