One other incident and specialty we note; with how
different an interest! It is of the Parlement
of Paris; which starts forward, like the others (only
with less audacity, seeing better how it lay), to
nose-ring that Behemoth of a States-General. Worthy
Doctor Guillotin, respectable practitioner in Paris,
has drawn up his little ’Plan of a Cahier of
doleances;’—as had he not, having
the wish and gift, the clearest liberty to do?
He is getting the people to sign it; whereupon the
surly Parlement summons him to give an account of himself.
He goes; but with all Paris at his heels; which floods
the outer courts, and copiously signs the Cahier even
there, while the Doctor is giving account of himself
within! The Parlement cannot too soon dismiss
Guillotin, with compliments; to be borne home shoulder-high.
(Deux Amis de la Liberte, i.
141.) This respectable
Guillotin we hope to behold once more, and perhaps
only once; the Parlement not even once, but let it
be engulphed unseen by us.
Meanwhile such things, cheering as they are, tend
little to cheer the national creditor, or indeed the
creditor of any kind. In the midst of universal
portentous doubt, what certainty can seem so certain
as money in the purse, and the wisdom of keeping it
there? Trading Speculation, Commerce of all kinds,
has as far as possible come to a dead pause; and the
hand of the industrious lies idle in his bosom.
Frightful enough, when now the rigour of seasons has
also done its part, and to scarcity of work is added
scarcity of food! In the opening spring, there
come rumours of forestalment, there come King’s
Edicts, Petitions of bakers against millers; and at
length, in the month of April—troops of
ragged Lackalls, and fierce cries of starvation!
These are the thrice-famed Brigands: an actual
existing quotity of persons: who, long reflected
and reverberated through so many millions of heads,
as in concave multiplying mirrors, become a whole
Brigand World; and, like a kind of Supernatural Machinery
wondrously move the Epos of the Revolution. The
Brigands are here: the Brigands are there; the
Brigands are coming! Not otherwise sounded the
clang of Phoebus Apollos’s silver bow, scattering
pestilence and pale terror; for this clang too was
of the imagination; preternatural; and it too walked
in formless immeasurability, having made itself like
to the Night (Greek.)!
But remark at least, for the first time, the singular
empire of Suspicion, in those lands, in those days.
If poor famishing men shall, prior to death, gather
in groups and crowds, as the poor fieldfares and plovers
do in bitter weather, were it but that they may chirp
mournfully together, and misery look in the eyes of
misery; if famishing men (what famishing fieldfares
cannot do) should discover, once congregated, that
they need not die while food is in the land, since
they are many, and with empty wallets have right hands:
in all this, what need were there of Preternatural
Machinery? To most people none; but not to French
