Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/253

1792] a little? And yet again, are our resources growing towards maturity; or growing the other way? Dubious: the ablest Patriots are divided; Brissot and his Brissotins, or Girondins, in the Legislative, cry aloud for the former defiant plan; Bobespierre, in the Jacobins, pleads as loud for the latter dilatory one: with responses, even with mutual reprimands; distracting the Mother of Patriotism. Consider also what agitated Breakfasts there may be at Madame d'Udon's in the Place Vendôme! The alarm of all men is great. Help, ye Patriots; and O at least agree; for the hour presses. Frost was not yet gone, when in that 'tolerably handsome apartment of the Castle of Niort,' there arrived a Letter: General Dumouriez must to Paris. It is War-Minister Narbonne that writes; the General shall give counsel about many things. In the month of February 1792, Brissotin friends welcome their Dumouriez Polymetis,—comparable really to an antique Ulysses in modem costume; quick, elastic, shifty, insuppressible, a 'many-counselled man.'

Let the Reader fancy this fair France with a whole Cimmerian Europe girdling her, rolling in on her, black, to burst in red thunder of War; fair France herself hand-shackled and foot-shackled in the weltering complexities of this Social Clothing, or Constitution, which they have made for her; a France that, in such Constitution, cannot march! And Hunger too; and plotting Aristocrats, and excommunicating Dissident Priests: 'the man Lebrun by name' urging his black wiski, visible to the eye; and, still more terrible in his invisibility, Engineer Goguelat, with Queen's cipher, riding and running!

The excommunicatory Priests give new trouble in the Maine and Loire; La Vendée, nor Cathelineau the wool-dealer, has not ceased grumbling and rumbling. Nay behold Jalès itself once more: how often does that real-imaginary Camp of the Fiend require to be extinguished! For near two years now,