Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/203

JUNE 25, 1791] speech, Bouillé rides; with thoughts that do not brook speech. Northward, towards uncertainty, and the Cimmerian Night: towards West-Indian Isles, for with thin Emigrant delirium the son of the whirlwind cannot act; towards England, towards premature Stoical death; not towards France any more. Honour to the Brave; who, be it in this quarrel or in that, is a substance and articulate-speaking piece of human Valour, not a fanfaronading hollow Spectrum and squeaking and gibbering Shadow! One of the few Royalist Chief-actors this Bouillé, of whom so much can be said.

The brave Bouillé too, then, vanishes from the tissue of our Story. Story and tissue, faint ineffectual Emblem of that grand Miraculous Tissue, and Living Tapestry named French Revolution, which did weave itself then in very fact, 'on the loud-sounding '! The old Brave drop out from it, with their strivings; and new acrid Drouets, of new strivings and colour, come in:—as is the manner of that weaving.

, then, our grand Royalist Plot, of Flight to Metz, has executed itself. Long hovering in the background, as a dread royal ultimatum, it has rushed forward in its terrors: verily to some purpose. How many Royalist Plots and Projects, one after another, cimningly-devised, that were to explode like powder-mines and thunder-claps; not one solitary Plot of which has issued otherwise! Powder-mine of a Séance Royale on the Twenty-third of June 1789, which exploded as we then said, 'through the touchhole'; which next, your wargod Broglie having reloaded it, brought a Bastille about your ears. Then came fervent Opera-Repast, with flourishing of sabres, and O Richard, O my King; which, aided by Hunger, produces Insurrection of Women, and Pallas Athene in the shape