Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/184

166 By such sublime calmness, the terror of the People is calmed. These gleaming Pike-forests, which bristled fateful in the early sun, disappear again; the far-sounding Street-orators cease, or spout milder. We are to have a civil war; let us have it then. The King is gone; but National Assembly, but France and we remain. The People also takes a great attitude; the People also is calm; motionless as a couchant lion. With but a few broolings, some waggings of the tail; to show what it will do! Cazalès, for instance, was beset by street-groups, and cries of Lanterne; but National Patrols easily delivered him. Likewise all King's effigies and statues, at least stucco ones, get abolished. Even King's names; the word Roi fades suddenly out of all shop-signs; the Royal Bengal Tiger itself, on the Boulevards, becomes the National Bengal one, Tigre National.

How great is a calm couchant People! On the morrow, men will say to one another: 'We have no King, yet we slept sound enough.' On the morrow, fervent Achille de Châtelet, and Thomas Paine the rebellious Needleman, shall have the walls of Paris profusely plastered with their Placard; announcing that there must be a Republic. —Need we add, that Lafayette too, though at first menaced by Pikes, has taken a great attitude, or indeed the greatest of all? Scouts and Aides-de-camp fly forth, vague, in quest and pursuit; young Romœuf towards Valenciennes, though with small hope.

Thus Paris; sublimely calmed, in its bereavement. But from the Messageries Royales, in all Mail-bags, radiates forth far-darting the electric news: Our Hereditary Representative is flown. Laugh, black Royalists: yet be it in your sleeve only; lest Patriotism notice, and waxing frantic, lower the Lanterne! In Paris alone is a sublime National Assembly with its calmness; truly, other places must take it as they can: with open mouth and eyes; with panic cackling, with wrath, with conjecture. How each one of those dull leathern Diligences, with its leathern bag and 'The King is fled,' furrows up smooth