So far, ye august Senators, with your Tennis-Court Oaths, your inertia and impetus, your sagacity and pertinacity, have ye brought us. ‘And yet think, Messieurs,’ as the Petitioner justly urged, ‘you who were our saviours, did yourselves need saviours,’—the brave Bastillers, namely; workmen of Paris; many of them in straightened pecuniary circumstances! [198] Subscriptions are opened; Lists are formed, more accurate than Elie’s; harangues are delivered. A Body of _Bastille Heroes_, tolerably complete, did get together;—comparable to the Argonauts; hoping to endure like them. But in little more than a year, the whirlpool of things threw them asunder again, and they sank. So many highest superlatives achieved by man are followed by new higher; and dwindle into comparatives and positives! The Siege of the Bastille, weighed with which, in the Historical balance, most other sieges, including that of Troy Town, are gossamer, cost, as we find, in killed and mortally wounded, on the part of the Besiegers, some Eighty-three persons: on the part of the Besieged, after all that straw-burning, fire-pumping, and deluge of musketry, One poor solitary invalid, shot stone-dead (_roide-mort_) on the battlements;[199] The Bastille Fortress, like the City of Jericho, was overturned by miraculous _sound._ BOOK VI. CONSOLIDATION Chapter 1.6.I. Make the Constitution. Here perhaps is the place to fix, a little more precisely, what these two words, _French Revolution_, shall mean; for, strictly considered, they may have as many meanings as there are speakers of them. All things are in revolution; in change from moment to moment, which becomes sensible from epoch to epoch: in this Time-World of ours there is properly nothing else but revolution and mutation, and even nothing else conceivable. Revolution, you answer, means _speedier_ change. Whereupon one has still to ask: How speedy? At what degree of speed; in what particular points of this variable course, which varies in velocity, but can never stop till Time itself stops, does revolution begin and end; cease to be ordinary mutation, and again become such? It is a thing that will depend on definition more or less arbitrary.