Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/129

1791] but to the New important, indispensable. That man can coöperate and hold communion with man, herein lies his miraculous strength. In hut or hamlet, Patriotism mourns not now like voice in the desert: it can walk to the nearest Town; and there, in the Daughter Society, make its ejaculation into an articulate oration, into an action, guided forward by the Mother of Patriotism herself. All Clubs of Constitutionalists, and suchlike, fail, one after another, as shallow fountains: Jacobinism alone has gone down to the deep subterranean lake of waters; and may, unless filled in, flow there, copious, continual, like an Artesian well. Till the Great Deep have drained itself up; and all be flooded and submerged, and Noah's Deluge out-deluged!

On the other hand, Claude Fauchet, preparing mankind for a Golden Age now apparently just at hand, has opened his Cercle Social, with clerks, corresponding boards, and so forth; in the precincts of the Palais Royal. It is Te-Deum Fauchet; the same who preached on Franklin's Death, in that huge Medicean rotimda of the Halle-aux-bleds. He here, this winter, by Printing-press and melodious Colloquy, spreads bruit of himself to the utmost City-barriers. 'Ten thousand persons of respectability' attend there; and listen to this 'Procureur-Général de la Vérité, Attorney-General of Truth,' so has he dubbed himself; to his sage Condorcet, or other eloquent coadjutor. Eloquent Attorney-General! He blows out from him, better or worse, what crude or ripe thing he holds: not without result to himself; for it leads to a Bishopric, though only a Constitutional one. Fauchet approves himself a glib-tongued, strong-lunged, whole-hearted human individual: much flowing matter there is, and really of the better sort, about Right, Nature, Benevolence, Progress; which flowing matter, whether 'it is pan-theistic,' or is pot-theistic, only the greener mind, in these days, need examine. Busy Brissot was long ago of purpose to establish precisely some such regenerative Social Circle: nay he had tried it in 'Newman-street Oxford-street,' of the Fog Babylon; and failed,—as some say,