The red socks! Now, on this wild Sunday of September, when the monuments that bore the names of the good king and queen are collapsed and run away some eight years, the tocsin is pealing with a clamour of triumph from the steeples; for at last the solution of the riddle has been vouchsafed to the “Third State,” and it knows that to acquire the right point of view it must wear socks, not of its own blood but of that of the aristocrats, to whom the emblems of Noël were made to appeal. * * * * * * * All day I felt the pulse of the people, quickening, quickening--an added five beats to every hour--with wonder, rage, and, at last, terror maniacal. Paris was threatened; hard-wrung freedom was tottering to its fall. This Paris was a vessel of wrath on treacherous waters--manned by revolted slaves; the crew under hatches; encompassed by enemies on every side. What remained but to clear the decks for action,--every hero to his post at the vast bulwarks; every son-of-a-sea-cook to remain and poniard the prisoners lest they club their manacles and take their captors in the rear! At two o’clock the tocsin pealed--the signal to prepare for the fray. From its first blaring stroke I ceased, it seemed, to be myself. I waived my individuality, and became as much a conscript of the rising tide of passion as a high-perched stone that the wave at last reaches and drags down with the shingle becomes a condition of the general uproar. I made, indeed, no subscription to this fanatical heat of emotion; I was simply involved in it--to go with it, and perish of it, perhaps, but never to succumb to its disordered sophistries or yield my free soul to its influence. Possibly I had a wild idea, in the midst of sinister forebodings, that a few such as I, scattered here and there, might leaven the ugly mass. But I do not know. Hemmed in by wrath and terror, thought casts its buoys and sinks into very fathomless depths.