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037 - Book 6 Chapter 3 The General Overturn · The French Revolution Volume 1 - The Bastille

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  Speaker 1: The French Revolution. A history by Thomas Carlyle, Volume one,
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  Speaker 1: Book six, Consolidation, Chapter three, The General Overturn. This LibriVox
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  Speaker 1: recording is in the public domain. Read by Peter Dan
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  Speaker 1: Book six, Chapter three, The General Overturn of the King's Court.
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  Speaker 1: For the present, there is almost nothing whatever to be said. Silent,
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  Speaker 1: deserted are these halls, royalty languishers, forsaken of its war
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  Speaker 1: god and all its hopes, till once the Oui de
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  Speaker 1: Boeuf rally again, the scepter is departed from King Louis,
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  Speaker 1: is gone over to the salle D's menu, to the
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  Speaker 1: Paris town Hall, or one knows not whither. In the
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  Speaker 1: July days, while all ears were yet deafened by the
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  Speaker 1: crash of the bastilla, and ministers and princes were scattered
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  Speaker 1: to the four winds, it seemed as if the very
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  Speaker 1: valets had grown heavy of hearing. Besson Ba, also in
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  Speaker 1: flight towards infinite space, but hovering a little at Versailles,
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  Speaker 1: was addressing his Majesty personally for an order about post horses.
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  Speaker 1: When lo the Valet in waiting, places himself familiarly between
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  Speaker 1: his Majesty and me, stretching out his rascal neck to
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  Speaker 1: learn what it was. His majesty, in sudden collar whirled round,
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  Speaker 1: made a clutch at the tongs. I gently prevented him.
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  Speaker 1: He grasped my hand in thankfulness, and I noticed tears
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  Speaker 1: in his eyes, poor king, For French kings also are men.
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  Speaker 1: Louis fourteenth himself once clutched the tongs and even smote
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  Speaker 1: with them. But then it was at Louvois, and Dame
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  Speaker 1: Mantenon ran up. The Queen sits weeping in her inner apartments,
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  Speaker 1: surrounded by weak women. She is at the height of unpopularity,
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  Speaker 1: universally regarded as the evil genius of France. Her friends
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  Speaker 1: and familiar counselors have all fled, and fled surely on
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  Speaker 1: the foolishest errand the Chateau Polygnac still frowns aloft on
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  Speaker 1: its bold and enormous cubical rock amid the blue girdling
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  Speaker 1: mountains of Auverne. But no Duke and Duchess Polignac look
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  Speaker 1: forth from it. They have fled, They have met necar
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  Speaker 1: at Baal. They shall not return. That France should see
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  Speaker 1: her nobles resist the irresistible, inevitable with the face of
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  Speaker 1: angry men was unhappy, not unexpected, but with the face
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  Speaker 1: and sense of pettish children. This was her peculiarity. They understood,
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  Speaker 1: nothing would understand nothing does not. At this hour a
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  Speaker 1: new polygnac, first born of these two, sit reflective in
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  Speaker 1: the castle of ham in an astonishment. He will never
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  Speaker 1: recover from the most confused of existing mortals. King Louis
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  Speaker 1: has his new ministry, mere popularities, old President Pompignon Necca
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  Speaker 1: come back in triumph and others such. But what will
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  Speaker 1: it avail him? As was said the scepter, all but
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  Speaker 1: the wooden guilt scepter had departed elsewhere. Volician determination is
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  Speaker 1: not in this man, only innocence, indolence, dependence on all
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  Speaker 1: persons but himself, on all circumstances, but the circumstances he
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  Speaker 1: were lord of. So troublous. Internally is our Versailles and
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  Speaker 1: its work beautiful if seen from afar resplendent, like a
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  Speaker 1: sun seen near at hand, a mere sun's atmosphere hiding darkness, confused,
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  Speaker 1: ferment of ruin. But over France there goes on the
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  Speaker 1: indisputablest destruction of formulas, transaction of realities that follow therefrom
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  Speaker 1: so many millions of persons, all jived and nighe strangled
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  Speaker 1: with formulas, whose life, nevertheless, at least the digestion and
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  Speaker 1: hunger of it was real enough. Heaven has at length
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  Speaker 1: sent an abundant harvest. But what profits at the poor man?
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  Speaker 1: When Earth, with her formulas interposes industry in these times
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  Speaker 1: of insurrection, must needs lie dormant capital as usual, not
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  Speaker 1: circulating but stagnating timorously in nooks. The poor man is
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  Speaker 1: short of work, is therefore short of money. Nay, even
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  Speaker 1: had he money, bread is not to be bought for
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  Speaker 1: it were it plotting of aristocrats, plotting of daw Leon,
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  Speaker 1: were at Brigand's preternatural terror, and the clang of Phoebus
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  Speaker 1: Apollo silver bow. Enough, the markets are scarce of grain,
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  Speaker 1: plentiful only in tumult farmers seem lazy to thresh, being
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  Speaker 1: either bribed or needing no bribe, with prices ever rising,
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  Speaker 1: with perhaps rent itself no longer so pressing. Neither what
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  Speaker 1: is singular? Do municipal enactments that, along with so many
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  Speaker 1: measures of which you shall sell so many of rye
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  Speaker 1: and other the like, much mend the matter. Dragoons with
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  Speaker 1: drawn sword stand among the corn sacks, often more dragoons
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  Speaker 1: than sacks. Meal mobs abound, growing into mobs of still
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  Speaker 1: darker quality. Starvation has been known among the French commonalty
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  Speaker 1: before this, known and familiar. Did we not see them
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  Speaker 1: in the year seventeen seventy five, presenting in sallow faces,
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  Speaker 1: in wretchedness and raggedness, their petition of grievances and for
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  Speaker 1: ansa getting a brand new gallows forty feet high, hunger
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  Speaker 1: and darkness through long years for look back on that
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  Speaker 1: earlier Paris riot, when a great personage, worn out by debauchery,
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  Speaker 1: was believed to be in want of blood baths and mothers,
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  Speaker 1: in worn raiment, yet with living hearts under it filled
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  Speaker 1: the public places with their wild rachel cries, stilled also
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  Speaker 1: by the gallows. Twenty years ago, the Friend of Men
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  Speaker 1: preaching to the deaf described the limos and peasants as
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  Speaker 1: wearing a pain stricken suffra dolo er look a look
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  Speaker 1: past complaint, as if the oppression of the grate were
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  Speaker 1: like the hail and the thunder, a thing irremediable the
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  Speaker 1: ordinance of nature. And now, if in some great hour
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  Speaker 1: the shock of a falling bustilla should awaken you and
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  Speaker 1: it were found to be the ordinance of art, merely
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  Speaker 1: and remediable, reversible, Or has the reader forgotten that flood
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  Speaker 1: of savages which, in sight of the same friend of men,
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  Speaker 1: descended from the mountain at Mont d'Or lank haired, haggard faces, shapes,
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  Speaker 1: raw boned in high sabots, in woolen dupes, with leather
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  Speaker 1: girdles studded with copper nails. They rocked from foot to foot,
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  Speaker 1: and beat time with their elbows too. As the quarrel
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  Speaker 1: and battle, which was not long in beginning, went on
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  Speaker 1: shouting fiercely, the lank faces distorted into the similitude of
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  Speaker 1: a cruel laugh, for they were darkened and hardened long
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  Speaker 1: had they been the prey of excise men and tax
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  Speaker 1: men of clucks with the cold spurt of their pen.
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  Speaker 1: It was the fixed prophecy of our old marquis, which
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  Speaker 1: no man would listen to, that such government, by blind
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  Speaker 1: man's buff stumbling along too far, would end by the
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  Speaker 1: general overturn the Gulbut general no man would listen. Each
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  Speaker 1: went his thoughtless way, and time and destiny also traveled
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  Speaker 1: on the government by blind man's buff stumbling along has
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  Speaker 1: reached the precipice inevitable for it. Dull drudgery driven on
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  Speaker 1: by clerks with the cold, dusted spurt of their pen,
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  Speaker 1: has been driven into a communion of drudges. For now
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  Speaker 1: moreover they have come the strangest confused tidings by Paris
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  Speaker 1: journals with their paper wings, or still more portentous where
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  Speaker 1: no journals are, by rumor and conjecture. Oppression not inevitable,
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  Speaker 1: a bustee of prostrate, and the constitution fast getting ready.
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  Speaker 1: Which constitution, if it be something and not nothing, what
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  Speaker 1: can it be but bread to eat? The traveler walking
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  Speaker 1: up hill, bridle in hand, overtakes a poor woman, The image,
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  Speaker 1: as such commonly are of drudgery and scarcity, looking sixty
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  Speaker 1: years of age, though she is not yet twenty eight.
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  Speaker 1: They have seven children, her poor drudge, and she a
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  Speaker 1: farm with one car which helps to make the children soup,
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  Speaker 1: also one little horse or garron. They have rents and
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  Speaker 1: quit rents hens to pay to this senor oat sacks,
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  Speaker 1: to that king's taxes, statute, labor, church taxes, taxes. Enough,
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  Speaker 1: and think the times inexpressible. She has heard that somewhere,
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  Speaker 1: in some manner, something is to be done for the poor. God,
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  Speaker 1: send it soon, for the dews and taxes crush us down.
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  Speaker 1: Nuza Croissan. Fair prophecies are spoken, but they are not fulfilled.
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  Speaker 1: There have been notables, assemblages, turnings out, and comings in
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  Speaker 1: intriguing and maneuvering parliamentary eloquence at arguing Greek meeting Greek
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  Speaker 1: in high places has long gone on. Yet still bread
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  Speaker 1: comes not. The harvest is reaped and garnered, Yet still
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  Speaker 1: we have no bread. Urg'd by despair and by hope.
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  Speaker 1: What can drudgery do but rise as predicted and produce
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  Speaker 1: the general overturn fancy. Then some five full grown millions
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  Speaker 1: of such gaunt figures, with their haggard faces, figure the
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  Speaker 1: havelve in woolen dupes, with copper studded leather girths, and
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  Speaker 1: high sabbots starting up to ask, As in forest roarings,
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  Speaker 1: there washed upper classes, after long unreviewed centuries, virtually this question,
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  Speaker 1: how have ye treated us? How have ye taught us?
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  Speaker 1: Fed us and led us while we toiled for you?
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  Speaker 1: The answer can be read in flames over the nightly
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  Speaker 1: summer sky. This is the feeding and lee we have
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  Speaker 1: had of you, emptiness of pocket, of stomach, of head,
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  Speaker 1: and of heart. Behold, there is nothing in us, nothing
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  Speaker 1: but what nature gives her wild children of the desert,
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  Speaker 1: ferocity and appetite, strength grounded on hunger. Did she mark
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  Speaker 1: among your rights of men that man was not to
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  Speaker 1: die of starvation while there was bread reaped by him?
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  Speaker 1: It is among the mites of man. Seventy two chateaus
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  Speaker 1: have flamed aloft in the Maconae, and beaujelais alone. This
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  Speaker 1: seems the center of the conflagration, but it has spread
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  Speaker 1: over Dauphine Alsace, the Lionnae. The whole southeast is in
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  Speaker 1: a blaze. All over the north, from Ruan to Metz.
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  Speaker 1: Disorder is abroad. Smugglers of salt go openly in armed bands.
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  Speaker 1: The barriers of towns are burnt, toll gatherers, tax gatherers,
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  Speaker 1: official persons put to flight. It was thoughts as young
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  Speaker 1: the people from hunger would revolt, and we see they
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  Speaker 1: have done it. Desperate lackles, long prowling, aimless, now finding
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  Speaker 1: hope in desperation itself everywhere form a nucleus. They ring
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  Speaker 1: the church bell by way of tocsin, and the parish
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  Speaker 1: turns out to the work. Ferocity, atrocity, hunger and revenge.
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  Speaker 1: Such work as we can imagine, ill stands it now
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  Speaker 1: with the seigneur, who, for example, has walled up the
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  Speaker 1: only fountain of the township, who has ridden high on
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  Speaker 1: his charter and parchments, who has preserved game not wisely
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  Speaker 1: but too well. Churches also and cannonies are sacked without mercy,
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  Speaker 1: which have shorn the flock too close forgetting to feed it.
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  Speaker 1: Woe to the land over which sans Colottism, in its
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  Speaker 1: day of vengeance, tramps roughshod shod in sabots. High bred
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  Speaker 1: seigneurs with their delicate women and little ones, ad to
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  Speaker 1: fly half naked under cloud of night, glad to escape
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  Speaker 1: the flames. And even worse, you meet them at the
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  Speaker 1: tabla dart of ends, making wise reflections or foolish that
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  Speaker 1: rank is destroyed, uncertain whether they shall now wend the
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  Speaker 1: matea will find it convenient to be slack in paying rent.
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  Speaker 1: As for the tax gatherer, he long hunting as a
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  Speaker 1: biped of prey, may now get hunted as one. His
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  Speaker 1: majesty's exchequer will not fill up the deficit this season.
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  Speaker 1: It is the notion of many that a patriot majesty
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  Speaker 1: being the restorer of French liberty has abolished most taxes,
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  Speaker 1: though for their private ends some men make a secret
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  Speaker 1: of it. Where this will end in the abyss, one
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  Speaker 1: may prophesire whither all delusions are at all moments traveling
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  Speaker 1: where this delusion has now arrived. For if there be
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  Speaker 1: a faith from of old, it is this, As we
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  Speaker 1: often repeat, that no lie can live forever. The very
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  Speaker 1: truth has to change its vesture from time to time
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  Speaker 1: and be borne again. But all lies have sentence of
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  Speaker 1: death written down against them, and Heaven's chancery itself, and
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  Speaker 1: slowly or fast advance incessantly towards their hour. The sign
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  Speaker 1: of a grand seigneur of being landlord, says the vehement
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  Speaker 1: plain spoken Arthur Young, are wastes, lands, deserts ling. Go
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  Speaker 1: to his residence. You will find it in the middle
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  Speaker 1: of a forest, peopled with deer, wild boars and wolves.
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  Speaker 1: The fields are scenes of pitiable management, as the houses
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  Speaker 1: are of misery. To see so many millions of hands
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  Speaker 1: that would be industrious, all idle and starving. Oh, if
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  Speaker 1: I were a legislator of France, for one day, I
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  Speaker 1: would make these great lords skip again. Oh, Arthur, thou
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  Speaker 1: now actually beholdest them, skip wilt thou grow to grumble
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  Speaker 1: at that too? For long years and generations it lasted,
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  Speaker 1: But the time came feather brain, whom no reasoning and
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  Speaker 1: no pleading could touch, the glare of the firebrand had
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  Speaker 1: to illuminate. There remained, but that method consider it. Look
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  Speaker 1: at it. The widow is gathering nettles for her children's dinner,
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  Speaker 1: a perfumed seigneur delicately lounging in the eil de boeuf
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  Speaker 1: as an alchemy, whereby he will extract from her the
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  Speaker 1: third nettle and name it rent and law. Such an
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  Speaker 1: arrangement must end aught it, But almost fearful is such
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  Speaker 1: an ending. Let those to whom God, in his great
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  Speaker 1: mercy has granted time and space, prepare another and milder
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  Speaker 1: one to sum it as a matter of wonder that
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  Speaker 1: the seigneurs did not do something to help themselves, say,
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  Speaker 1: combine and arm. For there were one hundred and fifty
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  Speaker 1: thousand of them, all violent enough. Unhappily, one hundred and
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  Speaker 1: fifty thousand, scattered over wide provinces divided by mutual ill
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  Speaker 1: will cannot combine. The highest segneurs as we have seen,
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  Speaker 1: had already emigrated with a view of putting France to
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  Speaker 1: the blush. Neither our arms now the peculiar property of seigneurs,
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  Speaker 1: but of every mortal who has ten shillings wherewith to
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  Speaker 1: buy a second hand firelock. Besides, those starving peasants, after all,
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  Speaker 1: have not four feet and claws that you could keep
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  Speaker 1: them down permanently in that manner, they are not even
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  Speaker 1: a black color. They are mere unwashed seigneurs. And a
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  Speaker 1: signor too has human bowels. The seigneurs did what they could,
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  Speaker 1: enrolled in national guards, fled with shrieks, complaining to Heaven
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  Speaker 1: and earth. One signor, famed Memmee of Kinsey, near Vessul,
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  Speaker 1: invited all the rustics of his neighborhood to a banquet,
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  Speaker 1: blew up his chateau and them with gunpowder, and instantaneously vanished.
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  Speaker 1: No man yet knows whither, Some half dozen years after
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  Speaker 1: he came back and demonstrated that it was by accident.
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  Speaker 1: Nor are the authorities idle, though unluckily all authorities, municipalities
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  Speaker 1: and such like, are in the uncertain transitory state getting
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  Speaker 1: reachel generated from old monarchic to new democratic. No official
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  Speaker 1: yet knows clearly what he is nevertheless mayors old or
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  Speaker 1: new do gather Mara Shaus's National Guards, troops of the line,
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  Speaker 1: justice of the most summary sort, is not wanting the
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  Speaker 1: electoral committee of Mason, though, but a committee goes the
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  Speaker 1: length of hanging for its own behoof as many as twenty.
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  Speaker 1: The pravo of d'orphinay traverses the country with a movable
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  Speaker 1: column with tipstaves, gallows, ropes for gallows. Any tree will
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  Speaker 1: serve and suspend its culprit or thirteen culprits. Unhappy country.
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  Speaker 1: How is the fair gold and green of the ripe
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  Speaker 1: bright year defaced with horrid blackness, black ashes of chateaus,
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  Speaker 1: black bodies of gibbeted men. Industry has ceased in it?
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  Speaker 1: Not sounds of the hammer and sare, but of the
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  Speaker 1: tocsin an alarm drum. The scepter has departed, whither one knows,
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  Speaker 1: not breaking itself in pieces impotent there tyrannus. National guards
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  Speaker 1: are unskillful and of doubtful purpose. Soldiers are inclined to mutiny.
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  Speaker 1: There is danger that they too may quarrel, danger that
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  Speaker 1: they may agree. Strasbourg has seen riots, a town hall
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  Speaker 1: torn to shreds, its archives scattered white on the winds,
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  Speaker 1: drunk soldiers embracing drunk citizens for three days, and Mayor
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  Speaker 1: Dietrich and Marshal Roschambeau reduced night and desperation through the
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  Speaker 1: middle of all, which phenomena is seen on his triumphant transit,
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  Speaker 1: escorted through before, for instance, by fifty National horsemen, and
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  Speaker 1: all the military music of the place. Monsieur Necker returning
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  Speaker 1: from Baos, glorious as the Meridian, though poor Neckar himself
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  Speaker 1: partly guesses whither it is leading one highest culminating day
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  Speaker 1: at the Paris town Hall with immortal vivats, with wife
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  Speaker 1: and daughter kneeling publicly to kiss his hand, with Bessonval's
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  Speaker 1: pardon granted but indeed revoked before sunset one highest day,
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  Speaker 1: but then lower days, and even lower down, even to lowest.
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  Speaker 1: Such magic is in a name, and in the want
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  Speaker 1: of a name, like some enchanted Mombrino's helmet. Essential to
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  Speaker 1: victory comes this Savior of France be shouted, bessembled by
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  Speaker 1: the world, alas so soon to be disenchanted, to be
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  Speaker 1: pitched shamefully over the lists as a barber's basin. Gibbon
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  Speaker 1: could wish to show him in this ejected Barber's basin
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  Speaker 1: state to any man of solidity who were minded to
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  Speaker 1: have the soul burned out of him and become a
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: couplet mortuum by ambition, unsuccessful or successful, another small face,
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  Speaker 1: as we add, and no more. How in the autumn months,
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: our sharp tempered Arthur has been pested for some days
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  Speaker 1: past by shot, lead drops and slugs rattling five or
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  Speaker 1: six times into my chaise and about my ears. All
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  Speaker 1: the mob of the country gone out to kill game.
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  Speaker 1: It is even so on the cliffs of Dover, over
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  Speaker 1: all the marches of France, there appear this autumn two
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  Speaker 1: signs of the earth, emigrant flights of French seigneurs, emigrant
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  Speaker 1: winged flights of French. Game finished, one may say, or
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  Speaker 1: as good as finished. Is the preservation of game on
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  Speaker 1: this earth completed? For endless time? What part it had
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  Speaker 1: to play in the history of civilization is played plaudite exiat.
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  Speaker 1: In this manner does sans colotism blaze up, illustrating many things,
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  Speaker 1: producing among the rest. As we saw on the fourth
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  Speaker 1: of August, that semi miraculous night of Pentecost in the
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  Speaker 1: National Assembly, semi miraculous, which had its causes and its effects.
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  Speaker 1: Feudalism is struck dead, not on parchment only and by ink,
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  Speaker 1: but in very fact by fire, say by self combustion.
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  Speaker 1: This conflagration the southeast will abate, will be got scattered
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  Speaker 1: to the west or elsewhere. Extinguish it will not till
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  Speaker 1: the fuel be all done. In a book six, Chapter three,