Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 04.djvu/64

 of the Sarthe, are not wanting. Nor Artists: gross David, with the swoln cheek, has long painted, with genius in a state of convulsion; and will now legislate. The swoln cheek, choking his words in the birth, totally disqualifies him as an orator; but his pencil, his head, his gross hot heart, with genius in a state of convulsion, will be there. A man bodily and mentally swoln-cheeked, disproportionate; flabby-large, instead of great; weak withal as in a state of convulsion, not strong in a state of composure: so let him play his part. Nor are naturalised Benefactors of the Species forgotten: Priestley, elected by the Orne Department, but declining; Paine the rebellious Needleman, by the Pas de Calais, who accepts.

Few Nobles come, and yet not none. Paul-François Barras, 'noble as the Barrases, old as the rocks of Provence'; he is one. The reckless, shipwrecked man: flung ashore on the coast of the Maldives long ago, while sailing and soldiering as Indian Fighter: flung ashore since then, as hungry Parisian pleasure-hunter and half-pay, on many a Circe Island, with temporary enchantment, temporary conversion into beasthood and hoghood;—the remote Var Department has now sent him hither. A man of heat and haste; defective in utterance; defective indeed in anything to utter; yet not without a certain rapidity of glance, a certain swift transient courage; who in these times, Fortune favouring, may go far. He is tall, handsome to the eye, 'only the complexion a little yellow'; but 'with a robe of purple, with a scarlet cloak and plume of tricolor, on occasions of solemnity,' the man will look well. Lepelletier Saint-Fargeau [sic], Old-Constituent, is a kind of noble, and of enormous wealth; he too has come hither:—to have the Pain of Death abolished? Hapless Ex-Parlementeer! Nay among our Sixty Old-Constituents, see Philippe d'Orléans, a Prince of the Blood! Not now D'Orléans: for, Feudalism being swept from the world, he demands of his worthy friends the Electors of Paris, to have a