Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/315

 did not yield! But Mandat returns not; Pétion is gone: much hangs wavering in the invisible Balance. About five o'clock, there rises from the Garden a kind of sound; as of a shout which had become a howl, and instead of Vive le Roi were ending in Vive la Nation. Mon Dieu! ejaculates a spectral Minister, 'what is he doing down there?' For it is his Majesty, gone down with old Marshal Maillé to review the troops; and the nearest companies of them answer so. Her Majesty bursts into a stream of tears. Yet on stepping from the cabinet, her eyes are dry and calm, her look is even cheerful. 'The Austrian lip, and the aquiline nose, fuller than usual, gave to her countenance,' says Peltier, 'something of majesty, which they that did not see her in these moments cannot well have an idea of.' O thou Theresa's Daughter!

King Louis enters, much blown with the fatigue; but for the rest with his old air of indifference. Of all hopes now, surely the joyfulest were, that the tocsin did not yield.

Friends, the tocsin does yield, has yielded! Lo ye, how with the first sunrays its Ocean-tide, of pikes and fusils, flows glittering from the far East;—immeasurable; born of the Night! They march there, the grim host; Saint-Antoine on this side the River; Saint-Marceau on that, the blackbrowed Marseillese in the van. With hum, and grim murmur, far-heard; like the Ocean-tide, as we say: drawn up, as if by Luna and Influences, from the great Deep of Waters, they roll gleaming on; no King, Canute or Louis, can bid them roll back. Wide-eddying side-currents, of onlookers, roll hither and thither, unarmed, not voiceless; they, the steel host, roll on. New-Commandant Santerre, indeed,