第201章

So then our grand Royalist Plot, of Flight to Metz, has executed itself.

Long hovering in the background, as a dread royal ultimatum, it has rushed forward in its terrors: verily to some purpose. How many Royalist Plots and Projects, one after another, cunningly-devised, that were to explode like powder-mines and thunderclaps; not one solitary Plot of which has issued otherwise! Powder-mine of a Seance Royale on the Twenty-third of June 1789, which exploded as we then said, 'through the touchhole;' which next, your wargod Broglie having reloaded it, brought a Bastille about your ears. Then came fervent Opera-Repast, with flourishing of sabres, and O Richard, O my King; which, aided by Hunger, produces Insurrection of Women, and Pallas Athene in the shape of Demoiselle Theroigne. Valour profits not; neither has fortune smiled on Fanfaronade. The Bouille Armament ends as the Broglie one had done. Man after man spends himself in this cause, only to work it quicker ruin; it seems a cause doomed, forsaken of Earth and Heaven.

On the Sixth of October gone a year, King Louis, escorted by Demoiselle Theroigne and some two hundred thousand, made a Royal Progress and Entrance into Paris, such as man had never witnessed: we prophesied him Two more such; and accordingly another of them, after this Flight to Metz, is now coming to pass. Theroigne will not escort here, neither does Mirabeau now 'sit in one of the accompanying carriages.' Mirabeau lies dead, in the Pantheon of Great Men. Theroigne lies living, in dark Austrian Prison; having gone to Liege, professionally, and been seized there. Bemurmured now by the hoarse-flowing Danube; the light of her Patriot Supper-Parties gone quite out; so lies Theroigne: she shall speak with the Kaiser face to face, and return. And France lies how! Fleeting Time shears down the great and the little; and in two years alters many things.

But at all events, here, we say, is a second Ignominious Royal Procession, though much altered; to be witnessed also by its hundreds of thousands.

Patience, ye Paris Patriots; the Royal Berline is returning. Not till Saturday: for the Royal Berline travels by slow stages; amid such loud-voiced confluent sea of National Guards, sixty thousand as they count; amid such tumult of all people. Three National-Assembly Commissioners, famed Barnave, famed Petion, generally-respectable Latour-Maubourg, have gone to meet it; of whom the two former ride in the Berline itself beside Majesty, day after day. Latour, as a mere respectability, and man of whom all men speak well, can ride in the rear, with Dame Tourzel and the Soubrettes.