France -- History -- Louis XVI, 1774-1793; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799
Arthur Young has witnessed the strangest scene: Majesty walking
unattended in the Tuileries Gardens; and miscellaneous tricolor
crowds, who cheer it, and reverently make way for it: the very
Queen commands at lowest respectful silence, regretful
avoidance.[260] Simple ducks, in those royal waters, quackle for
crumbs from young royal fingers: the little Dauphin has a little
railed garden, where he is seen delving, with ruddy cheeks and
flaxen curled hair; also a little hutch to put his tools in, and
screen himself against showers. What peaceable simplicity! Is it
peace of a Father restored to his children? Or of a Taskmaster
who has lost his whip? Lafayette and the Municipality and
universal Constitutionalism assert the former, and do what is in
them to realise it. Such Patriotism as snarls dangerously, and
shows teeth, Patrollotism shall suppress; or far better, Royalty
shall soothe down the angry hair of it, by gentle pattings; and,
most effectual of all, by fuller diet. Yes, not only shall Paris
be fed, but the King’s hand be seen in that work. The household
goods of the Poor shall, up to a certain amount, by royal bounty,
be disengaged from pawn, and that insatiable _Mont de Piété_
disgorge: rides in the city with their _Vive-le-Roi_ need not
fail; and so by substance and show, shall Royalty, if man’s art
can popularise it, be popularised.[261]
Or, alas, is it neither restored Father nor diswhipped Taskmaster
that walks there; but an anomalous complex of both these, and of
innumerable other heterogeneities; reducible to no rubric, if not
to this newly devised one: _King Louis Restorer of French
Liberty?_ Man indeed, and King Louis like other men, lives in
this world to make rule out of the ruleless; by his living
energy, he shall force the absurd itself to become less absurd.
But then if there _be_ no living energy; living passivity only?
King Serpent, hurled into his unexpected watery dominion, did at
least bite, and assert credibly that he was there: but as for the
poor King Log, tumbled hither and thither as thousandfold chance
and other will than his might direct, how happy for him that he
was indeed wooden; and, doing nothing, could also see and suffer
nothing! It is a distracted business.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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