led October Days? For surely such
dramatic exhibition never yet enacted itself without Dramatist and
Machinist. Wooden Punch emerges not, with his domestic sorrows, into the
light of day, unless the wire be pulled: how can human mobs? Was it not
d'Orleans then, and Laclos, Marquis Sillery, Mirabeau and the sons of
confusion, hoping to drive the King to Metz, and gather the spoil? Nay
was it not, quite contrariwise, the Oeil-de-Boeuf, Bodyguard Colonel de
Guiche, Minister Saint-Priest and highflying Loyalists; hoping also to
drive him to Metz; and try it by the sword of civil war? Good Marquis
Toulongeon, the Historian and Deputy, feels constrained to admit that it
was both. (Toulongeon, i. 150.)

Alas, my Friends, credulous incredulity is a strange matter. But when a
whole Nation is smitten with Suspicion, and sees a dramatic miracle
in the very operation of the gastric juices, what help is there? Such
Nation is already a mere hypochondriac bundle of diseases; as good as
changed into glass; atrabiliar, decadent; and will suffer crises. Is not
Suspicion itself the one thing to be suspected, as Montaigne feared only
fear?

Now, however, the short hour has struck. His Majesty is in his carriage,
with his Queen, sister Elizabeth, and two royal children. Not for
another hour can the infinite Procession get marshalled, and under way.
The weather is dim drizzling; the mind confused; and noise great.

Processional marches not a few our world has seen; Roman triumphs and
ovations, Cabiric cymbal-beatings, Royal progresses, Irish funerals:
but this of the French Monarchy marching to its bed remained to be
seen. Miles long, and of breadth losing itself in vagueness, for all
the neighbouring country crowds to see. Slow; stagnating along, like
shoreless Lake, yet with a noise like Niagara, like Babel and Bedlam. A
splashing and a tramping; a hurrahing, uproaring, musket-volleying;--the
truest segment of Chaos seen in these latter Ages! Till slowly it
disembogue itself, in the thickening dusk, into expectant Paris, through
a double row of faces all the way from Passy to the Hotel-de-Ville.

Consider this: Vanguard of National troops; with trains of artillery; of
pikemen and pikewomen, mounted on cannons, on carts, hackney-coaches,
or on foot;--tripudiating, in tricolor ribbons from head to heel; loaves
stuck on the points of bayonets, green boughs stuck in gun barrels.
(Mercier, Nouveau Paris, iii. 21.) Next, as main-march, 'fifty