action towards all that had any height! "You know
not the Queen," said Mirabeau once in confidence; "her force of mind is
prodigious; she is a man for courage." (Dumont, p. 211.)--And so,
under the void Night, on the crown of that knoll, she has spoken with
a Mirabeau: he has kissed loyally the queenly hand, and said with
enthusiasm: "Madame, the Monarchy is saved!"--Possible? The Foreign
Powers, mysteriously sounded, gave favourable guarded response;
(Correspondence Secrete (in Hist. Parl. viii. 169-73).) Bouille is at
Metz, and could find forty-thousand sure Germans. With a Mirabeau for
head, and a Bouille for hand, something verily is possible,--if Fate
intervene not.

But figure under what thousandfold wrappages, and cloaks of darkness,
Royalty, meditating these things, must involve itself. There are men
with 'Tickets of Entrance;' there are chivalrous consultings, mysterious
plottings. Consider also whether, involve as it like, plotting Royalty
can escape the glance of Patriotism; lynx-eyes, by the ten thousand
fixed on it, which see in the dark! Patriotism knows much: know the
dirks made to order, and can specify the shops; knows Sieur Motier's
legions of mouchards; the Tickets of Entree, and men in black; and how
plan of evasion succeeds plan,--or may be supposed to succeed it. Then
conceive the couplets chanted at the Theatre de Vaudeville; or worse,
the whispers, significant nods of traitors in moustaches. Conceive,
on the other hand, the loud cry of alarm that came through the
Hundred-and-Thirty Journals; the Dionysius'-Ear of each of the
Forty-eight Sections, wakeful night and day.

Patriotism is patient of much; not patient of all. The Cafe de Procope
has sent, visibly along the streets, a Deputation of Patriots, 'to
expostulate with bad Editors,' by trustful word of mouth: singular to
see and hear. The bad Editors promise to amend, but do not. Deputations
for change of Ministry were many; Mayor Bailly joining even with
Cordelier Danton in such: and they have prevailed. With what profit? Of
Quacks, willing or constrained to be Quacks, the race is everlasting:
Ministers Duportail and Dutertre will have to manage much as Ministers
Latour-du-Pin and Cice did. So welters the confused world.

But now, beaten on for ever by such inextricable contradictory
influences and evidences, what is the indigent French Patriot, in these
unhappy days, to believe, and walk by? Uncertainty all; except that he
is wretched, in