s dress
with the uniform."]

[Footnote 2386: Mallet du Pan, "Memoires," II 429 (note of July,
1792).--Mercure de France, March 10, 1792, article by Mallet du Pan.]

CHAPTER IV. THE DEPARTMENTS.

I.--Provence in 1792.--Early supremacy of the Jacobins in Marseilles.

Composition of the party.--The club and the municipality.
--Expulsion of the "Earnest" regiment.

Should you like to see the revolutionary tree when, for the first time,
it came fully into leaf, it is in the department of the Bouches-du-Rhone
you have to look. Nowhere else had it been so precocious, nowhere were
local circumstances and native temperament so well adapted to enhance
its growth.--"A blistering sky, an excessive climate, an arid soil,
rocks,... savage rivers, torrential or dry or overburdened," blinding
dust, nerves upset by steady northern blasts or by the intermittent
gusts of the sirocco. A sensual race choleric and impetuous, with no
intellectual or moral ballast, in which the mixture of Celt and Latin
has destroyed the humane suavity of the Celt and the serious earnestness
of the Roman; "complete, tough, powerful, and restless men,"[2401] and
yet gay, spontaneous, eloquent, dupes of their own bombast, suddenly
carried away by a flow of words and superficial enthusiasm. Their
principal city numbering 120,000 souls, in which commercial and maritime
risks foster innovating and adventurous spirits; in which the sight of
suddenly-acquired fortunes expended on sensual enjoyments constantly
undermines all stability of Character; in which politics, like
speculation, is a lottery offering its prizes to audacity; besides all
this, a free port and a rendezvous for lawless nomads, disreputable
people, without steady trade,[2402] scoundrels, and blackguards, who,
like uprooted, decaying seaweed, drift from coast to coast around the
entire circle of the Mediterranean sea; a veritable sink filled with the
dregs of twenty corrupt and semi-barbarous civilizations, where the scum
of crime cast forth from the prisons of Genoa, Piedmont, Sicily, indeed,
of all Italy, of Spain, of the Archipelago, and of Barbary,3 accumulates
and ferments.2 No wonder that, in such a time the reign of the mob
should be established there sooner than elsewhere.[2403]--After many an
explosion, this reign is inaugurated August 17, 1790, by the removal of
M. Lieutaud, a sort of bourgeois, moderate Lafayette, who commands the
National Guard. Around him rally