but
declining: Paine the rebellious Needleman, by the Pas de Calais, who
accepts.

Few Nobles come, and yet not none. Paul Francois Barras, 'noble as
the Barrases, old as the rocks of Provence;' he is one. The reckless,
shipwrecked man: flung ashore on the coast of the Maldives long ago,
while sailing and soldiering as Indian Fighter; flung ashore since then,
as hungry Parisian Pleasure-hunter and Half-pay, on many a Circe Island,
with temporary enchantment, temporary conversion into beasthood and
hoghood;--the remote Var Department has now sent him hither. A man of
heat and haste; defective in utterance; defective indeed in any thing
to utter; yet not without a certain rapidity of glance, a certain swift
transient courage; who, in these times, Fortune favouring, may go far.
He is tall, handsome to the eye, 'only the complexion a little yellow;'
but 'with a robe of purple with a scarlet cloak and plume of tricolor,
on occasions of solemnity,' the man will look well. (Dictionnaire
des Hommes Marquans, para Barras.) Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau,
Old-Constituent, is a kind of noble, and of enormous wealth; he too
has come hither:--to have the Pain of Death abolished? Hapless
Ex-Parlementeer! Nay, among our Sixty Old-Constituents, see Philippe
d'Orleans a Prince of the Blood! Not now d'Orleans: for, Feudalism being
swept from the world, he demands of his worthy friends the Electors of
Paris, to have a new name of their choosing; whereupon Procureur
Manuel, like an antithetic literary man, recommends Equality, Egalite. A
Philippe Egalite therefore will sit; seen of the Earth and Heaven.

Such a Convention is gathering itself together. Mere angry poultry in
moulting season; whom Brunswick's grenadiers and cannoneers will
give short account of. Would the weather only mend a little!
(Bertrand-Moleville, Memoires, ii. 225.)

In vain, O Bertrand! The weather will not mend a whit:--nay even if it
did? Dumouriez Polymetis, though Bertrand knows it not, started from
brief slumber at Sedan, on that morning of the 29th of August; with
stealthiness, with promptitude, audacity. Some three mornings after
that, Brunswick, opening wide eyes, perceives the Passes of the Argonne
all seized; blocked with felled trees, fortified with camps; and that it
is a most shifty swift Dumouriez this, who has outwitted him!

The manoeuvre may cost Brunswick 'a loss of three weeks,' very fatal in
these circumstances. A Mountain-wall of forty miles lying