cola, Saint-Jean-d'Acre,
Eylau, Friedland, Champaubert--Ah! Frenchmen! look upon this hog
covered with slime strutting about in that lion's skin!

BOOK V

PARLIAMENTARISM

I

1789

One day, more than sixty-three years ago, the French people, who had
been the property of one family for upwards of eight hundred years, who
had been oppressed by the barons down to Louis XI, and since Louis XI
by the parliaments, that is to say, to employ the frank remark of a
great nobleman of the eighteenth century, "who had been half eaten up
by wolves and finished by vermin;" who had been parcelled into
provinces, into chatellanies, into bailiwicks, and into seneschalries;
who had been exploited, squeezed, taxed, fleeced, peeled, shaven,
shorn, clipped and abused without mercy, fined incessantly at the good
pleasure of their masters; governed, led, misled, overdriven, tortured;
beaten with sticks, and branded with red-hot irons for an oath; sent to
the galleys for killing a rabbit upon the king's grounds; hung for a
matter of five sous; contributing their millions to Versailles and
their skeletons to Montfaucon; laden with prohibitions, with
ordinances, with patents, with royal letters, with edicts pecuniary and
rural, with laws, with codes, with customs; ground to the earth with
imposts, with fines, with quit-rents, with mortmains, import and export
duties, rents, tithes, tolls, statute-labour, and bankruptcies;
cudgelled with a cudgel called a sceptre; gasping, sweating, groaning,
always marching, crowned, but on their knees, rather a beast of burthen
than a nation,--the French people suddenly stood upright, determined to
be men, and resolved to demand an account of Providence, and to
liquidate those eight centuries of misery. It was a noble effort!

II

MIRABEAU

A large hall was chosen which was surrounded with benches, then they
took boards, and with these boards constructed, in the middle of the
hall, a kind of platform. When this platform was finished, what in
those days was called the nation, that is to say, the clergy, in their
red and violet robes, the nobility in spotless white, with their swords
at their sides, and the bourgeoisie dressed in black, took their seats
upon the benches. Scarcely were they seated when there was seen to
ascend the platform and there take its stand an extraordinary figure.
"Who is this monster?" said some; "Who is this giant?" said others. It
was a singular being, u