the Bakers' shops are besieged; that, in the
Provinces, people are living on 'meal-husks and boiled grass.' But on
all highways there hover dust-clouds, with the march of regiments,
with the trailing of cannon: foreign Pandours, of fierce aspect;
Salis-Samade, Esterhazy, Royal-Allemand; so many of them foreign, to
the number of thirty thousand,--which fear can magnify to fifty:
all wending towards Paris and Versailles! Already, on the heights of
Montmartre, is a digging and delving; too like a scarping and trenching.
The effluence of Paris is arrested Versailles-ward by a barrier of
cannon at Sevres Bridge. From the Queen's Mews, cannon stand pointed on
the National Assembly Hall itself. The National Assembly has its
very slumbers broken by the tramp of soldiery, swarming and defiling,
endless, or seemingly endless, all round those spaces, at dead of night,
'without drum-music, without audible word of command.' (A. Lameth,
Assemblee Constituante, i. 41.) What means it?

Shall eight, or even shall twelve Deputies, our Mirabeaus, Barnaves at
the head of them, be whirled suddenly to the Castle of Ham; the rest
ignominiously dispersed to the winds? No National Assembly can make
the Constitution with cannon levelled on it from the Queen's Mews!
What means this reticence of the Oeil-de-Boeuf, broken only by nods and
shrugs? In the mystery of that cloudy Ida, what is it that they forge
and shape?--Such questions must distracted Patriotism keep asking, and
receive no answer but an echo.

Enough of themselves! But now, above all, while the hungry food-year,
which runs from August to August, is getting older; becoming more and
more a famine-year? With 'meal-husks and boiled grass,' Brigands may
actually collect; and, in crowds, at farm and mansion, howl angrily,
Food! Food! It is in vain to send soldiers against them: at sight of
soldiers they disperse, they vanish as under ground; then directly
reassemble elsewhere for new tumult and plunder. Frightful enough
to look upon; but what to hear of, reverberated through Twenty-five
Millions of suspicious minds! Brigands and Broglie, open Conflagration,
preternatural Rumour are driving mad most hearts in France. What will
the issue of these things be?

At Marseilles, many weeks ago, the Townsmen have taken arms; for
'suppressing of Brigands,' and other purposes: the military commandant
may make of it what he will. Elsewhere, everywhere, could not the like
be done? Dubious, on the d