th a light, one fancies, as of the noon sun; with a roar second only
to the Last Trumpet! All living sleepers far and wide it has awakened.
What a sight was that, which the eye of History saw, in the sudden
nocturnal sunblaze! The roofs of hapless Lyons, and all its domes
and steeples made momentarily clear; Rhone and Saone streams flashing
suddenly visible; and height and hollow, hamlet and smooth
stubblefield, and all the region round;--heights, alas, all scarped and
counterscarped, into trenches, curtains, redouts; blue Artillery-men,
little Powder-devilkins, plying their hell-trade there, through the not
ambrosial night! Let the darkness cover it again; for it pains the
eye. Of a truth, Chalier's death is costing this City dear. Convention
Commissioners, Lyons Congresses have come and gone; and action there
was and reaction; bad ever growing worse; till it has come to this:
Commissioner Dubois-Crance, 'with seventy thousand men, and all the
Artillery of several Provinces,' bombarding Lyons day and night.

Worse things still are in store. Famine is in Lyons, and ruin, and fire.
Desperate are the sallies of the besieged; brave Precy, their National
Colonel and Commandant, doing what is in man: desperate but ineffectual.
Provisions cut off; nothing entering our city but shot and shells! The
Arsenal has roared aloft; the very Hospital will be battered down, and
the sick buried alive. A Black Flag hung on this latter noble Edifice,
appealing to the pity of the beseigers; for though maddened, were they
not still our brethren? In their blind wrath, they took it for a flag
of defiance, and aimed thitherward the more. Bad is growing ever worse
here: and how will the worse stop, till it have grown worst of all?
Commissioner Dubois will listen to no pleading, to no speech, save
this only, 'We surrender at discretion.' Lyons contains in it subdued
Jacobins; dominant Girondins; secret Royalists. And now, mere deaf
madness and cannon-shot enveloping them, will not the desperate
Municipality fly, at last, into the arms of Royalism itself? Majesty of
Sardinia was to bring help, but it failed. Emigrant Autichamp, in name
of the Two Pretender Royal Highnesses, is coming through Switzerland
with help; coming, not yet come: Precy hoists the Fleur-de-lys!

At sight of which, all true Girondins sorrowfully fling down their
arms:--Let our Tricolor brethren storm us, then, and slay us in their
wrath: with you we conquer not. The famishing