Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/149

FEB. 28, 1791] Meanwhile the rest of Paris, with more or less unconcern, may mind the rest of its business: for what is this but an effervescence, of which there are now so many? The National Assembly, in one of its stormiest moods, is debating a Law against Emigration; Mirabeau declaring aloud, 'I swear beforehand that I will not obey it.' Mirabeau is often at the Tribune this day; with endless impediments from without; with the old unabated energy from within. What can murmurs and clamours, from Left or from Right, do to this man; like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved? With clear thought; with strong bass voice, though at first low, uncertain, he claims audience, sways the storm of men: anon the sound of him waxes, softens; he rises into far-sounding melody of strength, triumphant, which subdues all hearts; his rude seamed face, desolate, fire-scathed, becomes fire-lit and radiates: once again men feel, in these beggarly ages, what is the potency and omnipotency of man's word on the souls of men. 'I will triumph, or be torn in fragments.' he was once heard to say. 'Silence,' he cries now, in strong word of command, in imperial consciousness of strength, 'Silence, the thirty voices, Silence aux trente voix!'—and Robespierre and the Thirty Voices die into mutterings; and the Law is once more as Mirabeau would have it.

How different, at the same instant, is General Lafayette's street-eloquence; wrangling with sonorous Brewers, with an ungrammatical Saint-Antoine! Most different, again, from both is the Café-de-Valois eloquence, and suppressed fanfaronade, of this multitude of men with Tickets of Entry; who are now inundating the Corridors of the Tuileries. Such things can go on simultaneously in one City. How much more in one Country; in one Planet with its discrepancies, every Day a mere crackling infinitude of discrepancies,—which nevertheless do yield some coherent net-product, though an infinitesimally small one!

But be this as it may, Lafayette has saved Vincennes; and is marching homewards with some dozen of arrested