On the other hand, Claude Fauchet, preparing mankind for a Golden Age now apparently just at hand, has opened his Cercle Social, with clerks, corresponding boards, and so forth; in the precincts of the Palais Royal.  It is Te-Deum Fauchet; the same who preached on Franklin’s Death, in that huge Medicean rotunda of the Halle aux bleds.  He here, this winter, by Printing-press and melodious Colloquy, spreads bruit of himself to the utmost City-barriers.  ‘Ten thousand persons’ of respectability attend there; and listen to this ’Procureur-General de la Verite, Attorney-General of Truth,’ so has he dubbed himself; to his sage Condorcet, or other eloquent coadjutor.  Eloquent Attorney-General!  He blows out from him, better or worse, what crude or ripe thing he holds:  not without result to himself; for it leads to a Bishoprick, though only a Constitutional one.  Fauchet approves himself a glib-tongued, strong-lunged, whole-hearted human individual:  much flowing matter there is, and really of the better sort, about Right, Nature, Benevolence, Progress; which flowing matter, whether ’it is pantheistic,’ or is pot-theistic, only the greener mind, in these days, need read.  Busy Brissot was long ago of purpose to establish precisely some such regenerative Social Circle:  nay he had tried it, in ‘Newman-street Oxford-street,’ of the Fog Babylon; and failed,—­as some say, surreptitiously pocketing the cash.  Fauchet, not Brissot, was fated to be the happy man; whereat, however, generous Brissot will with sincere heart sing a timber-toned Nunc Domine. (See Brissot, Patriote-Francais Newspaper; Fauchet, Bouche-de-Fer, &c. (excerpted in Hist.  Parl. viii., ix., et seqq.).) But ’ten thousand persons of respectability:’  what a bulk have many things in proportion to their magnitude!  This Cercle Social, for which Brissot chants in sincere timber-tones such Nunc Domine, what is it?  Unfortunately wind and shadow.  The main reality one finds in it now, is perhaps this:  that an ‘Attorney-General of Truth’ did once take shape of a body, as Son of Adam, on our Earth, though but for months or moments; and ten thousand persons of respectability attended, ere yet Chaos and Nox had reabsorbed him.

Hundred and thirty-three Paris Journals; regenerative Social Circle; oratory, in Mother and Daughter Societies, from the balconies of Inns, by chimney-nook, at dinner-table,—­polemical, ending many times in duel!  Add ever, like a constant growling accompaniment of bass Discord:  scarcity of work, scarcity of food.  The winter is hard and cold; ragged Bakers’-queues, like a black tattered flag-of-distress, wave out ever and anon.  It is the third of our Hunger-years this new year of a glorious Revolution.  The rich man when invited to dinner, in such distress-seasons, feels bound in politeness to carry his own bread in his pocket:  how the poor dine?  And your glorious Revolution has done it, cries one.  And our glorious Revolution is subtilety, by black traitors worthy of the Lamp-iron,