Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/292

 'Marchons,' are marching. Long journey, doubtful errand; Enfans de la Patrie, may a good genius guide you! Their own wild heart and what faith it has will guide them: and is not that the monition of some genius, better or worse? Five-hundred and Seventeen able men, with Captains of fifties and tens; well armed all, musket on shoulder, sabre on thigh: nay they drive three pieces of cannon; for who knows what obstacles may occur? Municipalities there are, paralysed by War-minister; Commandants with orders to stop even Federation Volunteers: good, when sound arguments will not open a Towngate, if you have a petard to shiver it! They have left their sunny Phocean City and Seahaven, with its bustle and its bloom: the thronging Course, with high-frondent Avenues, pitchy dockyards, almond and olive groves, orange-trees on house-tops, and white glittering bastides that crown the hills, are all behind them. They wend on their wild way, from the extremity of French land, through unknown cities, toward an unknown destiny; with a purpose that they know.

Much wondering at this phenomenon, and how, in a peaceable trading City, so many householders or hearthholders do severally fling down their crafts and industrial tools; gird themselves with weapons of war, and set out on a journey of six hundred miles, to 'strike down the tyrant,'—you search in all Historical Books, Pamphlets and Newspapers, for some light on it: unhappily without effect. Rumour and Terror precede this march; which still echo on you; the march itself an unknown thing. Weber, in the back-stairs of the Tuileries, has understood that they were Forçats, Galley-slaves and mere scoundrels, these Marseillese; that, as they marched through Lyons, the people shut their shops;—also that the number of them was some Four Thousand. Equally vague is Blanc Gilli, who likewise murmurs about Forçats and danger of plunder. Forçats they were not; neither was there plunder or danger of it. Men of regular life, or of the best-filled