Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/282

262 incongruous, and staring stupidly in each other's face, the world seldom saw.

King Louis, his door being beaten on, opens it; stands with free bosom; asking, 'What do you want?' The Sansculottic flood recoils awestruck; returns however, the rear pressing on the front, with cries of 'Veto! Patriot Ministers! Remove Veto!'—which things, Louis valiantly answers, this is not the time to do, nor this the way to ask him to do. Honour what virtue is in a man. Louis does not want courage; he has even the higher kind called moral-courage; though only the passive-half of that. His few National Grenadiers shuffle back with him, into the embrasure of a window: there he stands, with unimpeachable passivity, amid the shouldering and the braying; a spectacle to men. They hand him a red Cap of Liberty; he sets it quietly on his head, forgets it there. He complains of thirst; half-drunk Rascality offers him a bottle, he drinks of it. 'Sire, do not fear,' says one of his Grenadiers. 'Fear?' answers Louis: 'feel then,' putting the man's hand on his heart. So stands Majesty in Red woollen Cap; black Sansculottism weltering round him, far and wide, aimless, with inarticulate dissonance, with cries of 'Veto! Patriot Ministers'!

For the space of three hours or more! The National Assembly is adjourned; tricolor Municipals avail almost nothing: Mayor Pétion tarries absent; Authority is none. The Queen with her Children and Sister Elizabeth, in tears and terror not for themselves only, are sitting behind barricaded tables and Grenadiers, in an inner room. The Men in black have all wisely disappeared. Blind lake of Sansculottism welters stagnant through the King's Château, for the space of three hours.

Nevertheless all things do end. Vergniaud arrives with Legislative Deputation, the Evening Session having now opened. Mayor Pétion has arrived; is haranguing, 'lifted on the shoulders of two Grenadiers.' In this uneasy attitude and in others, at various places without and within, Mayor