Purveyors prowl the country far and wide, with the appetite of lions; detect hidden grain, purchase open grain; by gentle means or forcible, must and will find grain. A most thankless task; and so difficult, so dangerous,—even if a man did gain some trifle by it! On the 19th August, there is food for one day.[224] Complaints there are that the food is spoiled, and produces an effect on the intestines: not corn but plaster-of-Paris! Which effect on the intestines, as well as that “smarting in the throat and palate,” a Townhall Proclamation warns you to disregard, or even to consider as drastic-beneficial. The Mayor of Saint-Denis, so black was his bread, has, by a dyspeptic populace, been hanged on the Lanterne there. National Guards protect the Paris Corn-Market: first ten suffice; then six hundred.[225] Busy are ye, Bailly, Brissot de Warville, Condorcet, and ye others! For, as just hinted, there is a Municipal Constitution to be made too. The old Bastille Electors, after some ten days of psalmodying over their glorious victory, began to hear it asked, in a splenetic tone, Who put you there? They accordingly had to give place, not without moanings, and audible growlings on both sides, to a new larger Body, specially elected for that post. Which new Body, augmented, altered, then fixed finally at the number of Three Hundred, with the title of Town Representatives (_Représentans de la Commune_), now sits there; rightly portioned into Committees; assiduous making a Constitution; at all moments when not seeking flour. And such a Constitution; little short of miraculous: one that shall “consolidate the Revolution”! The Revolution is finished, then? Mayor Bailly and all respectable friends of Freedom would fain think so. Your Revolution, like jelly sufficiently _boiled_, needs only to be poured into _shapes_, of Constitution, and “consolidated” therein? Could it, indeed, contrive to _cool;_ which last, however, is precisely the doubtful thing, or even the not doubtful! Unhappy friends of Freedom; consolidating a Revolution! They must sit at work there, their pavilion spread on very Chaos; between two hostile worlds, the Upper Court-world, the Nether Sansculottic one; and, beaten on by both, toil painfully, perilously,—doing, in sad literal earnest, “the impossible.” Chapter 1.6.V. The Fourth Estate.