Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/118

100 of the whole mischief, lies ignominiously suppressed; the Prisons can hold no more; bereaved down-beaten Patriotism murmurs, not loud but deep. Here and in the neighbouring Towns, 'flattened balls' picked from the streets of Nanci are worn at buttonholes: balls flattened in carrying death to Patriotism; men wear them there, in perpetual memento of revenge. Mutineer deserters roam the woods; have to demand charity at the musket's end. All is dissolution, mutual rancour, gloom and despair:—till National Assembly Commissioners arrive, with a steady gentle flame of Constitutionalism in their hearts; who gently lift up the downtrodden, gently pull down the too uplifted; reinstate the Daughter Society, recall the mutineer deserter; gradually levelling, strive in all wise ways to smoothe and soothe. With such gradual mild levelling on the one side; as with solemn funeral-service, cassolettes, Courts-Martial, National thanks, on the other,—all that Officiality can do is done. The buttonhole will drop its flat ball; the black ashes, so far as may be, get green again.

This is the 'Affair of Nanci'; by some called the 'Massacre of Nanci';—properly speaking, the unsightly wrong-side of that thrice-glorious Feast of Pikes, the right-side of which formed a spectacle for the very gods. Right-side and wrong lie always so near: the one was in July, in August the other! Theatres, the theatres over in London, are bright with their pasteboard simulacrum of that 'Federation of the French people,' brought out as Drama: this of Nanci, we may say, though not played in any pasteboard Theatre, did for many months enact itself, and even walk spectrally, in all French heads. For the news of it fly pealing through all France: awakening, in town and village, in clubroom, messroom, to the utmost borders, some mimic reflex or imaginative repetition of the business; always with the angry questionable assertion: It was right; It was wrong. Whereby come controversies, duels; embitterment, vain jargon; the hastening