Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/142

124 with her but, in spite of all prepossessions, she was forced to recognise it, to draw nigh to it, with trust. High imperial heart; with the instinctive attraction towards all that had any height! 'You know not the Queen,' said Mirabeau once in confidence; 'her force of mind is prodigious; she is a man for courage.' —And so, under the void Night, on the crown of that knoll, she has spoken with a Mirabeau: he has kissed loyally the queenly hand, and said with enthusiasm: 'Madame, the Monarchy is saved!'—Possible? The Foreign Powers, mysteriously sounded, gave favourable guarded response; Bouillé is at Metz, and could find forty-thousand sure Germans. With a Mirabeau for head, and a Bouillé for hand, something verily is possible,—if Fate intervene not.

But figure under what thousandfold wrappages, and cloaks of darkness. Royalty, meditating these things, must involve itself. There are men with 'Tickets of Entrance'; there are chivalrous consultings, mysterious plottings. Consider also whether, involve as it like, plotting Royalty can escape the glance of Patriotism; lynx-eyes, by the ten thousand, fixed on it, which see in the dark! Patriotism knows much: knows the dirks made to order, and can specify the shops; knows Sieur Motier's legions of mouchards; the Tickets of Entrée, and men in black; and how plan of evasion succeeds plan,—or may be supposed to succeed it. Then conceive the couplets chanted at the Théâtre de Vaudeville; or worse, the whispers, significant nods of traitors in mustachioes. Conceive, on the other hand, the loud cry of alarm that came through the Hundred-and-Thirty Journals; the Dionysius'-Ear of each of the Forty-Eight Sections, wakeful night and day.

Patriotism is patient of much; not patient of all. The Café de Procope has sent, visibly along the streets, a Deputation of Patriots, 'to expostulate with bad Editors,' by trustful word of mouth: singular to see and hear. The bad Editors promise to amend, but do not. Deputations for