subdues all hearts; his rude-seamed face, desolate fire-scathed,
becomes fire-lit, and radiates: once again men feel, in these beggarly
ages, what is the potency and omnipotency of man's word on the souls of
men. "I will triumph or be torn in fragments," he was once heard to
say. "Silence," he cries now, in strong word of command, in imperial
consciousness of strength, "Silence, the thirty voices, Silence
aux trente voix!"--and Robespierre and the Thirty Voices die into
mutterings; and the Law is once more as Mirabeau would have it.

How different, at the same instant, is General Lafayette's street
eloquence; wrangling with sonorous Brewers, with an ungrammatical
Saint-Antoine! Most different, again, from both is the Cafe-de-Valois
eloquence, and suppressed fanfaronade, of this multitude of men with
Tickets of Entry; who are now inundating the Corridors of the Tuileries.
Such things can go on simultaneously in one City. How much more in
one Country; in one Planet with its discrepancies, every Day a mere
crackling infinitude of discrepancies--which nevertheless do yield some
coherent net-product, though an infinitesimally small one!

Be this as it may. Lafayette has saved Vincennes; and is marching
homewards with some dozen of arrested demolitionists. Royalty is not
yet saved;--nor indeed specially endangered. But to the King's
Constitutional Guard, to these old Gardes Francaises, or Centre
Grenadiers, as it chanced to be, this affluence of men with Tickets of
Entry is becoming more and more unintelligible. Is his Majesty verily
for Metz, then; to be carried off by these men, on the spur of the
instant? That revolt of Saint-Antoine got up by traitor Royalists for a
stalking-horse? Keep a sharp outlook, ye Centre Grenadiers on duty
here: good never came from the 'men in black.' Nay they have cloaks,
redingotes; some of them leather-breeches, boots,--as if for instant
riding! Or what is this that sticks visible from the lapelle of
Chevalier de Court? (Weber, ii. 286.) Too like the handle of some
cutting or stabbing instrument! He glides and goes; and still the
dudgeon sticks from his left lapelle. "Hold, Monsieur!"--a Centre
Grenadier clutches him; clutches the protrusive dudgeon, whisks it out
in the face of the world: by Heaven, a very dagger; hunting-knife, or
whatsoever you call it; fit to drink the life of Patriotism!

So fared it with Chevalier de Court, early in the day; not without
noise; not without commentaries