ey
have been able to redact; and none cries, God bless them.

King Louis with his Court brings up the rear: he cheerful, in this day
of hope, is saluted with plaudits; still more Necker his Minister.
Not so the Queen; on whom hope shines not steadily any more. Ill-fated
Queen! Her hair is already gray with many cares and crosses; her
first-born son is dying in these weeks: black falsehood has ineffaceably
soiled her name; ineffaceably while this generation lasts. Instead of
Vive la Reine, voices insult her with Vive d'Orleans. Of her queenly
beauty little remains except its stateliness; not now gracious, but
haughty, rigid, silently enduring. With a most mixed feeling, wherein
joy has no part, she resigns herself to a day she hoped never to have
seen. Poor Marie Antoinette; with thy quick noble instincts; vehement
glancings, vision all-too fitful narrow for the work thou hast to do!
O there are tears in store for thee; bitterest wailings, soft womanly
meltings, though thou hast the heart of an imperial Theresa's Daughter.
Thou doomed one, shut thy eyes on the future!--

And so, in stately Procession, have passed the Elected of France. Some
towards honour and quick fire-consummation; most towards dishonour; not
a few towards massacre, confusion, emigration, desperation: all
towards Eternity!--So many heterogeneities cast together into the
fermenting-vat; there, with incalculable action, counteraction, elective
affinities, explosive developments, to work out healing for a sick
moribund System of Society! Probably the strangest Body of Men, if we
consider well, that ever met together on our Planet on such an errand.
So thousandfold complex a Society, ready to burst-up from its infinite
depths; and these men, its rulers and healers, without life-rule for
themselves,--other life-rule than a Gospel according to Jean Jacques!
To the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man is properly an
Accident under the sky. Man is without Duty round him; except it be 'to
make the Constitution.' He is without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath
him; he has no God in the world.

What further or better belief can be said to exist in these Twelve
Hundred? Belief in high-plumed hats of a feudal cut; in heraldic
scutcheons; in the divine right of Kings, in the divine right of
Game-destroyers. Belief, or what is still worse, canting half-belief;
or worst of all, mere Macchiavellic pretence-of-belief,--in consecrated
dough-wafers, and th