ourt-Etiquette can
moderate. Wholly the lightest-hearted frivolous foam of Existence; yet
an artfully refined foam; pleasant were it not so costly, like that
which mantles on the wine of Champagne!

Monsieur, the King's elder Brother, has set up for a kind of wit; and
leans towards the Philosophe side. Monseigneur d'Artois pulls the mask
from a fair impertinent; fights a duel in consequence,--almost drawing
blood. (Besenval, ii. 282-330.) He has breeches of a kind new in this
world;--a fabulous kind; 'four tall lackeys,' says Mercier, as if he
had seen it, 'hold him up in the air, that he may fall into the garment
without vestige of wrinkle; from which rigorous encasement the same
four, in the same way, and with more effort, must deliver him at night.'
(Mercier, Nouveau Paris, iii. 147.) This last is he who now, as a gray
time-worn man, sits desolate at Gratz; (A.D. 1834.) having winded up
his destiny with the Three Days. In such sort are poor mortals swept and
shovelled to and fro.

Chapter 1.2.II.

Petition in Hieroglyphs.

With the working people, again it is not so well. Unlucky! For there are
twenty to twenty-five millions of them. Whom, however, we lump together
into a kind of dim compendious unity, monstrous but dim, far off, as the
canaille; or, more humanely, as 'the masses.' Masses, indeed: and yet,
singular to say, if, with an effort of imagination, thou follow them,
over broad France, into their clay hovels, into their garrets and
hutches, the masses consist all of units. Every unit of whom has his own
heart and sorrows; stands covered there with his own skin, and if you
prick him he will bleed. O purple Sovereignty, Holiness, Reverence;
thou, for example, Cardinal Grand-Almoner, with thy plush covering of
honour, who hast thy hands strengthened with dignities and moneys, and
art set on thy world watch-tower solemnly, in sight of God, for such
ends,--what a thought: that every unit of these masses is a miraculous
Man, even as thyself art; struggling, with vision, or with blindness,
for his infinite Kingdom (this life which he has got, once only, in the
middle of Eternities); with a spark of the Divinity, what thou callest
an immortal soul, in him!

Dreary, languid do these struggle in their obscure remoteness; their
hearth cheerless, their diet thin. For them, in this world, rises no Era
of Hope; hardly now in the other,--if it be not hope in the gloomy rest
of Death, for their faith too is failing