Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/290

, into frightful conscious and unconscious Magnetic-sleep; which frightful Magnetic-sleep must now issue soon in one of two things: Death or Madness! The Fédérés carry mostly in their pocket some earnest cry and Petition, to have the 'National Executive put in action'; or as a step towards that, to have the King's Déchéance, King's Forfeiture, or at least his Suspension, pronounced. They shall be welcome to the Legislative, to the Mother of Patriotism; and Paris will provide for their lodging.

Déchéance, indeed: and what next? A France spell-free, a Revolution saved; and anything, and all things next! so answer grimly Danton and the unlimited Patriots, down deep in their subterranean region of Plot, whither they have now dived. Déchéance, answers Brissot with the limited: and if next the little Prince Royal were crowned, and some Regency of Girondins and recalled Patriot Ministry set over him? Alas, poor Brissot; looking, as indeed poor man does always, on the nearest morrow as his peaceable promised land; deciding what must reach to the world's end, yet with an insight that reaches not beyond his own nose! Wiser are the unlimited subterranean Patriots, who with light for the hour itself, leave the rest to the gods.

Or were it not, as we now stand, the probablest issue of all, that Brunswick, in Coblentz, just gathering his huge limbs towards him to rise, might arrive first; and stop both Déchéance, and theorising on it? Brunswick is on the eve of marching; with Eighty-thousand, they say; fell Prussians, Hessians, feller Emigrants: a General of the Great Frederick, with such an Army. And our Armies? And our Generals? As for Lafayette, on whose late visit a Committee is sitting and all France is jarring and censuring, he seems readier to fight us than fight Brunswick. Lückner and Lafayette pretend to be interchanging corps, and are making movements, which Patriotism cannot understand. This only is very clear, that their corps go marching and shuttling, in the interior of the country; much nearer Paris than formerly! Lückner has