dvance dishevelled, shrieking peace;
Lepelletier behind them waving his hat in sign that we shall fraternize.
Steady! The artillery officer is steady as bronze; can, if need were, be
quick as lightning. Lepelletier making nothing by messengers by fraternity
or hat-waving, bursts out, along the southern Quai Voltaire, along streets
and passages, treble-quick in huge veritable onslaught! Whereupon thou
bronze artillery officer--? 'Fire'! say the bronze lips. And roar and
thunder, roar and again roar, continual, volcano-like, goes his great gun,
in the Cul-de-sac Dauphin against the Church of Saint Roch; go his great
guns on the Pont Royal; go all his great guns--blow to air some two
hundred men, mainly about the Church of Saint Roch! Lepelletier cannot
stand such harsh play; no sectioner can stand it; the forty thousand yield
on all sides scour toward covert. The ship is over the bar; free she
bounds shoreward--amid shouting and vivats! Citizen Bonaparte is 'named
General of the Interior by acclamation;' quelled sections have to disarm
in such humor as they may; sacred right of insurrection is gone forever!
'It is false,' says Napoleon, 'that we fired first with blank charge; it
had been a waste of life to do that.' Most false; the firing was with
sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport;
the rabbits and plinths of Saint Roch Church show splintered by it to this
hour. Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this whiff of grape
shot was promised; but it could not be given then; could not have profited
then. Now, however, the time has come for it and the man; and behold you
have it; and the thing we specifically call _French Revolution_ is blown
into space by it and become a thing that was!

The French revolution did disclose original men: among the twenty-five
millions, at least one or two units. Some reckon in the present stage of
the business, as many as three: Napoleon, Danton, Mirabeau. Whether more
will come to light, or of what sort, when the computation is quite
liquidated, one cannot say. Meanwhile, let the world be thankful for these
three; as indeed, the world is; loving original men, without limit, were
they never so questionable, well knowing how rare they are! To us,
accordingly, it is rather interesting to observe how on these three also,
questionable as they surely are, the old process is repeating itself; how
these also are getting known in their true likeness. A second