g the
electric news: Our Hereditary Representative is flown. Laugh, black
Royalists: yet be it in your sleeve only; lest Patriotism notice, and
waxing frantic, lower the Lanterne! In Paris alone is a sublime National
Assembly with its calmness; truly, other places must take it as they
can: with open mouth and eyes; with panic cackling, with wrath, with
conjecture. How each one of those dull leathern Diligences, with its
leathern bag and 'The King is fled,' furrows up smooth France as it
goes; through town and hamlet, ruffles the smooth public mind into
quivering agitation of death-terror; then lumbers on, as if nothing
had happened! Along all highways; towards the utmost borders; till all
France is ruffled,--roughened up (metaphorically speaking) into one
enormous, desperate-minded, red-guggling Turkey Cock!

For example, it is under cloud of night that the leathern Monster
reaches Nantes; deep sunk in sleep. The word spoken rouses all Patriot
men: General Dumouriez, enveloped in roquelaures, has to descend from
his bedroom; finds the street covered with 'four or five thousand
citizens in their shirts.' (Dumouriez, Memoires, ii. 109.) Here
and there a faint farthing rushlight, hastily kindled; and so many
swart-featured haggard faces, with nightcaps pushed back; and the more
or less flowing drapery of night-shirt: open-mouthed till the General
say his word! And overhead, as always, the Great Bear is turning so
quiet round Bootes; steady, indifferent as the leathern Diligence
itself. Take comfort, ye men of Nantes: Bootes and the steady Bear are
turning; ancient Atlantic still sends his brine, loud-billowing, up your
Loire-stream; brandy shall be hot in the stomach: this is not the Last
of the Days, but one before the Last.--The fools! If they knew what
was doing, in these very instants, also by candle-light, in the far
North-East!

Perhaps we may say the most terrified man in Paris or France is--who
thinks the Reader?--seagreen Robespierre. Double paleness, with the
shadow of gibbets and halters, overcasts the seagreen features: it is
too clear to him that there is to be 'a Saint-Bartholomew of Patriots,'
that in four-and-twenty hours he will not be in life. These horrid
anticipations of the soul he is heard uttering at Petion's; by a notable
witness. By Madame Roland, namely; her whom we saw, last year, radiant
at the Lyons Federation! These four months, the Rolands have been in
Paris; arranging with Assembly Committ