The seized cannon are yoked with seized cart-horses:  brown-locked Demoiselle Theroigne, with pike and helmet, sits there as gunneress, ‘with haughty eye and serene fair countenance;’ comparable, some think, to the Maid of Orleans, or even recalling ‘the idea of Pallas Athene.’  (Deux Amis, iii. 157.) Maillard (for his drum still rolls) is, by heaven-rending acclamation, admitted General.  Maillard hastens the languid march.  Maillard, beating rhythmic, with sharp ran-tan, all along the Quais, leads forward, with difficulty his Menadic host.  Such a host—­marched not in silence!  The bargeman pauses on the River; all wagoners and coachdrivers fly; men peer from windows,—­not women, lest they be pressed.  Sight of sights:  Bacchantes, in these ultimate Formalized Ages!  Bronze Henri looks on, from his Pont-Neuf; the Monarchic Louvre, Medicean Tuileries see a day not theretofore seen.

And now Maillard has his Menads in the Champs Elysees (Fields Tartarean rather); and the Hotel-de-Ville has suffered comparatively nothing.  Broken doors; an Abbe Lefevre, who shall never more distribute powder; three sacks of money, most part of which (for Sansculottism, though famishing, is not without honour) shall be returned:  (Hist.  Parl. iii. 310.) this is all the damage.  Great Maillard!  A small nucleus of Order is round his drum; but his outskirts fluctuate like the mad Ocean:  for Rascality male and female is flowing in on him, from the four winds; guidance there is none but in his single head and two drumsticks.

O Maillard, when, since War first was, had General of Force such a task before him, as thou this day?  Walter the Penniless still touches the feeling heart:  but then Walter had sanction; had space to turn in; and also his Crusaders were of the male sex.  Thou, this day, disowned of Heaven and Earth, art General of Menads.  Their inarticulate frenzy thou must on the spur of the instant, render into articulate words, into actions that are not frantic.  Fail in it, this way or that!  Pragmatical Officiality, with its penalties and law-books, waits before thee; Menads storm behind.  If such hewed off the melodious head of Orpheus, and hurled it into the Peneus waters, what may they not make of thee,—­thee rhythmic merely, with no music but a sheepskin drum!—­Maillard did not fail.  Remarkable Maillard, if fame were not an accident, and History a distillation of Rumour, how remarkable wert thou!

On the Elysian Fields, there is pause and fluctuation; but, for Maillard, no return.  He persuades his Menads, clamorous for arms and the Arsenal, that no arms are in the Arsenal; that an unarmed attitude, and petition to a National Assembly, will be the best:  he hastily nominates or sanctions generalesses, captains of tens and fifties;—­and so, in loosest-flowing order, to the rhythm of some ‘eight drums’ (having laid aside his own), with the Bastille Volunteers bringing up his rear, once more takes the road.