Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 04.djvu/77

 beside us, one sense-confusing tumult: the mass rolled this way and that; and, all struggling forward, each hindered the other. Unexpectedly our carriage drew up before a stately house in the marketplace; master and mistress of the mansion saluted us in reverent distance.' Dexterous Lisieux, though we knew it not, had said we were the King of Prussia's Brother!

'But now, from the ground-floor windows, looking over the whole marketplace, we had the endless tumult lying, as it were, palpable. All sorts of walkers, soldiers in uniform, marauders, stout but sorrowing citizens and peasants, women and children, crushed and jostled each other, amid vehicles of all forms: ammunition-wagons, baggage-wagons; carriages, single, double and multiplex; such hundredfold miscellany of teams, requisitioned or lawfully owned, making way, hitting together, hindering each other, rolled here to right and to left. Horned-cattle too were struggling on; probably herds that had been put in requisition. Riders you saw few; but the elegant carriages of the Emigrants, many-coloured, lackered, gilt and silvered, evidently by the best builders, caught your eye.

'The crisis of the strait, however, arose farther on a little; where the crowded marketplace had to introduce itself into a street,—straight indeed and good, but proportionably far too narrow. I have, in my life, seen nothing like it: the aspect of it might perhaps be compared to that of a swoln river which has been raging over meadows and fields, and is now again obliged to press itself through a narrow bridge, and flow on in its bounded channel. Down the long street, all visible from our windows, there swelled continually the strangest tide: a high double-seated travelling coach towered visible over the flood of things. We thought of the fair Frenchwomen we had seen in the morning. It was not they, however; it was Count Haugwitz; him you could look at, with a kind of sardonic malice, rocking onwards, step by step, there.'