第332章

Declamation foams and rolls along in a steady stream of rhetoric everywhere throughout France.[7] In this state of excitement the difference between magniloquence and sincerity, between the false and the true, between show and substance, is no longer distinguishable. The Federation becomes an opera which is seriously played in the open street - children have parts assigned them in it;it occurs to no one that they are puppets, and that the words taken for an expression of the heart are simply memorized speeches that have been put into their mouths. At Besan?on, on the return of the confederates, hundreds of "youthful citizens" from twelve to fourteen years of age,[8] in the national uniform, "with sword in hand," march up to the standard of Liberty. Three little girls from eleven to thirteen years old and two little boy of nine years each pronounce "a discourse full of fire and breathing nothing but patriotism;" after which, a young lady of fourteen, raising her voice and pointing to the flag, harangues in turn the crowd, the deputies, the National Guard, the mayor, and the commander of the troops, the scene ending with a ball. This is the universal finale - men and women, children and adults, common people and men of the world, chiefs and subordinates, all, everywhere, frisk about as in the last act of a pastoral drama. At Paris, - writes an eye-witness, "I saw chevaliers of Saint-Louis and chaplains dancing in the street with people belonging to their department."[9] At the Champ de Mars, on the day of the Federation, notwithstanding that rain was falling in torrents, "the first arrivals began to dance, and those who came after them, joining in, formed a circle which soon spread over a portion of the Champ de Mars. . . .Three hundred thousand spectators kept time with their hands." On the following days dancing is kept up on the Champ de Mars and in the streets, and there is drinking and carousing; "there was a ball with refreshments at the Corn-Exchange, and on the site of the Bastille."- At Tours, where fifty-two detachments from the neighboring provinces are collected, about four o'clock in the afternoon,[10]

through an irresistible outburst of insane gaiety, "the officers, inferior officers, and soldiers, pell-mell, race through the streets, some with saber in hand and others dancing and shouting 'Vive le Roi!' 'Vive la Nation!' flinging up their hats and compelling every one they met to join in the dance. One of the canons of the cathedral, who happens to be passing quietly along, has a grenadier's cap put on his head," and is dragged into the circle, and after him two monks; "they are often embraced," and then allowed to depart. The carriages of the mayor and the Marquise de Montausier arrive; people mount up behind, get inside, and seat themselves in front, as many as can find room, and force the coachmen to parade through the principal streets in this fashion.

There is no malice in it, nothing but sport and the overflow of spirits. "Nobody was maltreated or insulted, although almost every one was drunk." - Nevertheless, there is one bad symptom: the soldiers of the Anjou regiment leave their barracks the following day and "pass the whole night abroad, no one being able to hinder them." And there is another of still graver aspect; at Orleans, after the companies of the National Militia had danced on the square in the evening, "a large number of volunteers marched in procession through the town with drums, shouting out with all their might that the aristocracy must be destroyed, and that priests and aristocrats should be strung up to the lamp post. They enter a suspected coffee-house, drive out the inmates with insults, lay hands on a gentleman who is supposed not to have cried out as correctly and as lustily as themselves, and come near to hanging him.[11] - Such is the fruit of the philosophy and the attitudes of the eighteenth century. Men believed that, for the organization of a perfect society and the permanent establishment of freedom, justice, and happiness on earth, an inspiration of sentiments and an act of the will would suffice. The inspiration came and the act was fulfilled;they have been carried away, delighted, affected and out of their minds. Now comes the reaction, when they have to fall back upon themselves. The effort has succeeded in accomplishing all that it could accomplish, namely, a deluge of emotional demonstrations and slogans, a verbal and not a real contract ostentatious fraternity skin-deep, a well-meaning masquerade, an outpouring of feeling evaporating through its own pageantry - in short, an agreeable carnival of a day's duration.

The reason is that in the human mind there are two strata. One superficial, of which men are conscious, the other deep down, of which they are unconscious.[12] The former unstable and vacillating like shifting sand, the latter stable and fixed like a solid rock, to which their caprices and agitation never descend. The latter alone determines the general inclination of the soil, the main current of human activity necessarily following the bent thus prepared for it. - Certainly embraces have been interchanged and oaths have been taken; but after, as before the ceremony, men are just what many centuries of administrative thralldom and one century of political literature have made them. Their ignorance and presumption, their prejudices, hatreds, and distrusts, their inveterate intellectual and emotional habits are still preserved.