Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/108

92 all round, alarmed with watch-fires, illuminated towns, and marching and rout, has been sleepless these several nights. Nanci, with its uncertain National Guards, with its distributed fusils, mutinous soldiers, black panic and redhot ire, is not a City but a Bedlam.

with help, thou brave Bouillé: if swift help come not, all is now verily 'burning'; and may burn,—to what lengths and breadths! Much, in these hours, depends on Bouillé; as it shall now fare with him, the whole Future may be this way or be that. If, for example, he were to loiter dubitating, and not come; if he were to come, and fail: the whole Soldiery of France to blaze into mutiny. National Guards going some this way, some that; and Royalism to draw its rapier, and Sansculottism to snatch its pike; and the Spirit of Jacobinism, as yet young, girt with sun-rays, to grow instantaneously mature, girt with hell-fire,—as mortals, in one night of deadly crisis, have had their heads turned grey!

Brave Bouillé is advancing fast, with the old inflexibility; gathering himself, unhappily 'in small affluences,' from East, from West and North; and now on Tuesday morning, the last day of the month, he stands all concentred, unhappily still in small force, at the village of FrouardeFrouard [sic], within some few miles. Son of Adam with a more dubious task before him is not in the world this Tuesday morning. A weltering inflammable sea of doubt and peril, and Bouillé sure of simply one thing, his own determination. Which one thing, indeed, may be worth many. He puts a most firm face on the matter: 'Submission, or unsparing battle and destruction; twenty-four hours to make your choice': this was the tenor of his Proclamation; thirty copies of which he sent yesterday