is. There
the smallest things made great noise, literature was the vehicle of
French influence; there intellectual monarchy had its books, its
theatre, its writings even before it had its heroes.

Conquering by its intelligence, its printing-presses were its army.

IX.

The parties who divided the country after the death of Mirabeau were
thus distributed; out of the Assembly, the Court, and the Jacobins; in
the Assembly the right side and the left side, and between these two
extreme parties--the one fanatic by its innovations, the other fanatic
from its resistance,--there was an intermediate party, consisting of the
men of substance and peace belonging to both these parties. Their views
moderate, and wavering between revolution and conservatism, desired that
the one should conquer without violence, and the other concede without
vindictiveness. These were the philosophers of the Revolution,--but it
was not the hour for philosophy, it was the hour of victory; the two
ideas required champions, not judges; they crushed men in their
encounter. Let us enumerate the principal chiefs of the contending
parties, and make them known before we bring them into action.

King Louis XVI. was then only thirty-seven years of age; his features
resembled those of his race, rendered somewhat heavy by the German blood
of his mother, a princess of the house of Saxony. Fine blue eyes, very
wide open, and clear rather than dazzling, a round and retreating
forehead, a Roman nose, the nostrils flaccid and large, and somewhat
destroying the energy of the aquiline profile, a mouth smiling and
gracious in expression, lips thick, but well shaped, a fine skin, fresh
and high-coloured in tint, though rather loose; of short stature, stout
frame, timid carriage, irregular walk, and, when not moving, a
restlessness of body in shifting first one foot and then the other
without advancing--a habit contracted either from that impatience common
to princes compelled to undergo long audiences, or else the outward
token of the constant wavering of an undecided mind. In his person there
was an expression of _bonhommie_ more vulgar than royal, which at the
first glance inspired as much derision as veneration, and on which his
enemies seized with contemptuous perversity, in order to show to the
people in the features of their ruler the visible and personal sign of
those vices they sought to destroy in royalty; in the _tout ensemble_
some resemblance to the imp