The Third Estate triumphs; Versailles Town shouting round it; ten thousand whirling all day in the Palais Royal; and all France standing a-tiptoe, not unlike whirling!  Let the Oeil-de-Boeuf look to it.  As for King Louis, he will swallow his injuries; will temporise, keep silence; will at all costs have present peace.  It was Tuesday the 23d of June, when he spoke that peremptory royal mandate; and the week is not done till he has written to the remaining obstinate Noblesse, that they also must oblige him, and give in.  D’Espremenil rages his last; Barrel Mirabeau ‘breaks his sword,’ making a vow,—­which he might as well have kept.  The ‘Triple Family’ is now therefore complete; the third erring brother, the Noblesse, having joined it;—­erring but pardonable; soothed, so far as possible, by sweet eloquence from President Bailly.

So triumphs the Third Estate; and States-General are become National Assembly; and all France may sing Te Deum.  By wise inertia, and wise cessation of inertia, great victory has been gained.  It is the last night of June:  all night you meet nothing on the streets of Versailles but ‘men running with torches’ with shouts of jubilation.  From the 2nd of May when they kissed the hand of Majesty, to this 30th of June when men run with torches, we count seven weeks complete.  For seven weeks the National Carroccio has stood far-seen, ringing many a signal; and, so much having now gathered round it, may hope to stand.

Chapter 1.5.III.

Broglie the War-God.

The Court feels indignant that it is conquered; but what then?  Another time it will do better.  Mercury descended in vain; now has the time come for Mars.—­The gods of the Oeil-de-Boeuf have withdrawn into the darkness of their cloudy Ida; and sit there, shaping and forging what may be needful, be it ‘billets of a new National Bank,’ munitions of war, or things forever inscrutable to men.

Accordingly, what means this ‘apparatus of troops’?  The National Assembly can get no furtherance for its Committee of Subsistences; can hear only that, at Paris, 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?