Father in God at all; you are--a Chimera, whom I know
not how to name in polite language!"--from that onwards to the shout
which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "_Aux armes_!"
when the people had burst up against _all_ manner of Chimeras,--I find
a natural historical sequence. That shout too, so frightful,
half-infernal, was a great matter. Once more the voice of awakened
nations;--starting confusedly, as out of nightmare, as out of
death-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life was real; that God's-world
was not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal;--yes, since they would
not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or terrestrial!
Hollowness, insincerity _has_ to cease; sincerity of some sort has to
begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors of French Revolution
or what else, we have to return to truth. Here is a Truth, as I said: a
Truth clad in hell-fire, since they would not but have it so--!

A common theory among considerable parties of men in England and
elsewhere used to be, that the French Nation had, in those days, as
it were gone _mad_; that the French Revolution was a general act of
insanity, a temporary conversion of France and large sections of the
world into a kind of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but was a
madness and nonentity,--gone now happily into the region of Dreams and
the Picturesque!--To such comfortable philosophers, the Three Days of
July, 1830, must have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French
Nation risen again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting and
being shot, to make that same mad French Revolution good! The sons and
grandsons of those men, it would seem, persist in the enterprise: they
do not disown it; they will have it made good; will have themselves
shot, if it be not made good. To philosophers who had made up their
life-system, on that "madness" quietus, no phenomenon could be more
alarming. Poor Niebuhr, they say, the Prussian Professor and Historian,
fell broken-hearted in consequence; sickened, if we can believe it, and
died of the Three Days! It was surely not a very heroic death;--little
better than Racine's, dying because Louis Fourteenth looked sternly on
him once. The world had stood some considerable shocks, in its time;
might have been expected to survive the Three Days too, and be found
turning on its axis after even them! The Three Days told all mortals
that the old French Revolution, mad as it might look, was