Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/69

JUNE 1790] being dead these ten months, why should her empty trappings and scutcheons survive? the very Coats-of-arms will require to be obliterated;—and yet Cassandra-Marat on this and the other coach-panel notices that they 'are but painted over,' and threaten to peer through again.

So that henceforth De Lafayette is but the Sieur Motier, and Saint-Fargeau is plain Michel Lepelletier; and Mirabeau soon after has to say huffingly, 'With your Riquetti you have set Europe at cross-purposes for three days.' For his Counthood is not indifferent to this man; which indeed the admiring People treat him with to the last. But let extreme Patriotism rejoice, and chiefly Anacharsis and Mankind; for now it seems to be taken for granted that one Adam is Father of us all!—

Such was, in historical accuracy, the famed feat of Anacharsis. Thus did the most extensive of Public Bodies find a sort of spokesman. Whereby at least we may judge of one thing; what a humour the once sniffing mocking City of Paris and Baron Clootz had got into; when such exhibition could appear a propriety, next door to a sublimity. It is true. Envy did, in after-times, pervert this success of Anacharsis; making him, from incidental 'Speaker of the Foreign-Nations Committee,' claim to be official permanent 'Speaker, Orateur, of the Human Species,' which he only deserved to be; and alleging, calumniously, that his astrological Chaldeans, and the rest, were a mere French tagrag-and-bobtail disguised for the nonce; and, in short, sneering and fleering at him in her cold barren way: all which however, he, the man he was, could receive on thick enough panoply, or even rebound therefrom, and also go his way.

Most extensive of Public Bodies, we may call it; and also the most unexpected: for who could have thought to see All Nations in the Tuileries Riding-Hall? But so it is; and truly as strange things may happen when a whole People goes mumming and miming. Hast not thou thyself perchance seen diademed Cleopatra, daughter of the Ptolemies, pleading,