Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 04.djvu/29

 marching feet; and ever and anon the dread thunder of the knocker at some door, a Tricolor Commissioner with his blue Guards (black-guards!) arriving. All Streets are vacant, says Peltier; beset by Guards at each end: all Citizens are ordered to be within doors. On the River float sentinel barges, lest we escape by water: the Barriers hermetically closed, Frightful! The Sun shines; serenely westering, in smokeless mackerel-sky; Paris is as if sleeping, as if dead:—Paris is holding its breath, to see what stroke will fall on it. Poor Peltier! Acts of Apostles, and all jocundity of Leading-Articles, are gone out, and it is become bitter earnest instead; polished satire changed now into coarse pike-points (hammered out of railing); all logic reduced to this one primitive thesis, An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth!—Peltier, dolefully aware of it, ducks low; escapes unscathed to England; to urge there the inky war anew;—to have Trial by Jury, in due season, and deliverance by young Whig eloquence, world-celebrated for a day.

Of 'thirty-thousand' naturally great multitudes were left unmolested: but, as we said, some four-hundred, designated as 'persons suspect,' were seized; and an unspeakable terror fell on all. Wo to him who is guilty of plotting, of Anti-civism, Royalism, Feuillantism; who, guilty or not guilty, has an enemy in his Section to call him guilty! Poor old M. de Cazotte is seized; his young loved Daughter with him, refusing to quit him. Why, O Cazotte, wouldst thou quit romancing and Diable Amoureux, for such reality as this? Poor old M. de Sombreuil, he of the Invalides, is seized; a man seen askance by Patriotism ever since the Bastille days; whom also a fond Daughter will not quit. With young tears hardly suppressed, and old wavering weakness rousing itself once more,—O my brothers, O my sisters!

The famed and named go; the nameless, if they have an accuser. Necklace Lamotte's Husband is in these Prisons (she long since squelched on the London Pavements); but gets delivered. Gross de Morande, of the Courrier de l'Europe,