Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/74

58 of Able Editors. Beautiful to see! The snowy linen and delicate pantaloon alternates with the soiled check-shirt and bushel-breeches; for both have cast their coats, and under both are four limbs and a set of Patriot muscles. There do they pick and shovel; or bend forward, yoked in long strings to box-barrow or overloaded tumbril; joyous, with one mind. Abbé Sieyes is seen pulling, wiry, vehement, if too light for draught; by the side of Beauharnais, who shall get Kings though he be none. Abbé Maury did not pull; but the Charcoalmen brought a mummer guised like him, and he had to pull in effigy. Let no august Senator disdain the work: Mayor Bailly, Generalissimo Lafayette are there;—and, alas, shall be there again another day! The King himself comes to see: sky-rending Vive-le-roi! 'and suddenly with shouldered spades they form a guard of honour round him.' Whoso ever can come comes; to work, or to look, and bless the work.

Whole families have come. One whole family we see clearly of three generations: the father picking, the mother shovelling, the young ones wheeling assiduous; old grandfather, hoary with ninety-three years, holds in his arms the youngest of all: frisky, not helpful this one; who nevertheless may tell it to his grandchildren; and how the Future and the Past alike looked on, and with failing or with half-formed voice, faltered their ça-ira. A vintner has wheeled in, on Patriot truck, beverage of wine: 'Drink not, my brothers, if ye are not thirsty; that your cask may last the longer:' neither did any drink but men 'evidently exhausted.' A dapper Abbé looks on, sneering: 'To the barrow!' cry several; whom he, lest a worse thing befall him, obeys: nevertheless one wiser Patriot barrowman, arriving now, interposes his arrêtez; setting down his own barrow, he snatches the Abbé's; trundles it fast, like an infected thing, forth of the Champ-de-Mars circuit, and discharges it there. Thus too a certain person (of some quality, or private capital, to appearance),