Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/133

AUG. 1790] way, in treasonable speculation, as he mounted formerly in one of the earliest Balloons; but, frightened at the new position he was getting into, had soon turned the cock again, and come down. More fool than he rose! To create Preternatural Suspicion, this was his function in the Revolutionary Epos. But now if he have lost his cornucopia of ready-money, what else had he to lose? In thick darkness, inward and outward, he must welter and flounder on, in that piteous death-element, the hapless man. Once, or even twice, we shall still behold him emerged; struggling out of the thick death-element: in vain. For one moment, it is the last moment, he starts aloft, or is flung aloft, even into clearness and a kind of memorability,—to sink then for evermore!

The Côté Droit persists no less; nay with more animation than ever, though hope has now well-nigh fled. Tough Abbé Maury, when the obscure country Royalist grasps his hand with transport of thanks, answers, rolling his indomitable brazen head: 'Hélas, Monsieur, all that I do here is as good as simply nothing.' Gallant Faussigny, visible this one time in History, advances frantic into the middle of the Hall, exclaiming: 'There is but one way of dealing with it, and that is to fall sword in hand on those gentry there, sabre à la main sur ces gaillards là,' franticly indicating our chosen Thirty on the extreme tip of the Left! Whereupon is clangour and clamour, debate, repentance,—evaporation. Things riper towards downright incompatibility, and what is called 'scission': that fierce theoretic onslaught of Faussigny's was in August 1790; next August will not have come, till a famed Two Hundred and Ninety-two, the chosen of Royalism, make solemn final 'scission' from an Assembly given up to faction; and depart, shaking the dust off their feet.

Connected with this matter of sword in hand, there is yet another thing to be noted. Of duels we have sometimes spoken: how, in all parts of France, innumerable duels were fought;