Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/62

46 Platrière's Wife! Strict elderly Roland, King's Inspector of Manufactures here; and now likewise, by popular choice, the strictest of our new Lyons Municipals: a man who has gained much, if worth and faculty be gain; but, above all things, has gained to wife Phlipon the Paris Engraver's daughter. Reader, mark that queenlike burgher-woman: beautiful, Amazonian-graceful to the eye; more so to the mind. Unconscious of her worth (as all worth is), of her greatness, of her crystal clearness; genuine, the creature of Sincerity and Nature, in an age of Artificiality, Pollution and Cant; there, in her still completeness, in her still invincibility, she, if thou knew it, is the noblest of all living Frenchwomen,—and will be seen, one day. O, blessed rather while unseen, even of herself! For the present she gazes, nothing doubting, into this grand theatricality; and thinks her young dreams are to be fulfilled.

From dawn to dusk, as we said, it lasts; and truly a sight like few. Flourishes of drums and trumpets are something: but think of an 'artificial Rock fifty feet high,' all cut into crag-steps, not without the similitude of 'shrubs'! The interior cavity,—for in sooth it is made of deal,—stands solemn, a 'Temple of Concord': on the outer summit rises 'a Statue of Liberty,' colossal, seen for miles, with her Pike and Phrygian Cap, and civic column; at her feet a Country's Altar, Autel de la Patrie:—on all which neither deal-timber nor lath-and-plaster, with paint of various colours, have been spared. But fancy then the banners all placed on the steps of the Rock; high-mass chanted; and the civic oath of fifty thousand: with what volcanic outburst of sound from iron and other throats, enough to frighten back the very SoaneSaône [sic] and Rhone; and how the brightest fireworks, and balls, and even repasts closed in that night of the gods! And so the Lyons Federation vanishes too, swallowed of darkness;—and yet not wholly, for our brave fair Roland was there; also she, though