d a bronze chord to his lyre:--

Hail, divine triumph! Enter within our walls!
Bring us these warriors so famed
For Desilles' blood, and for the obsequies
Of many Frenchmen massacred...
One day alone could win so much renown,
And this fair day will shine upon us soon!
When thou shalt lead Jourdan to our army,
And Lafayette to the scaffold!

Jourdan was the slaughterer, the headsman, the torturer of the Glacier
of Avignon, who, coming under the provisions of the amnesty, had
arrived to take part in the triumph of the Swiss of Chateauvieux. The
acclamations were lugubrious. The lanterns and torches shed a funereal
glare. Nothing is more doleful than enthusiasm for ignominy. The
applause accorded to disgrace and crime sounds like sinister derision.
Outraged public conscience extinguishes the fires of apotheoses such as
these. Madame Elisabeth, in a letter of April 18, speaks with a sort
of pity of this odious but ridiculous fete: "The people have been to
see Dame Liberty waggling about on her triumphal car, but they shrugged
their shoulders. Three or four hundred _sans-culottes_ followed,
crying 'Long live the nation! Long live liberty! Long live the
_sans-culottes_! to the devil with Lafayette!' All this was noisy but
sad. The National Guards took no part in it; on the contrary, they
were indignant, and Petion, they say, is ashamed of his conduct. {121}
The next day a pike surmounted by a red bonnet was carried noiselessly
through the garden, and did not remain there long." The Princess de
Lamballe, who was living at the Tuileries in the Pavilion of Flora,
could see the pike thus carried by a passer. It may, perhaps, have
been that belonging to one of the Septembrists,--that on which her own
head was to be placed.

The _Moniteur_, however, grew ecstatic over the fete. "There are
plenty of others," it said, "who will describe the march of the
triumphal cortege, the groups composing it, the car of Liberty,
conducted by Fame, drawn by twenty superb horses, preceded by ravishing
music which was sometimes listened to in religious silence and
sometimes interrupted by wild, irregular dances whose very disorder was
rendered more piquant by the fraternal union reigning in all hearts....
The people were there in all their might, and did not abuse it. There
was not a weapon to repress excesses, and not an excess to be
repressed." It concluded thus: "We say to the administration: Give