stipulations, and on actual consent. They possess the authentic act and the dated official report of it.[3104] There is still something more--the time and the occasion betoken a union of all hearts. The barriers which have hitherto separated men from each other are all removed and without effort. Provincial antagonisms are now to cease: the confederates of Brittany and Anjou write that they no longer desire to be Angevins and Bretons, but simply Frenchmen. All religious discords are to come to an end: at Saint-Jean-du-Gard, near Alais, the Catholic curé and the Protestant pastor embrace each other at the altar; the pastor occupies the best seat in the church, and at the Protestant meeting-house the curé has the place of honor, and listens to the sermon of the pastor.[3105] Distinctions of rank and condition will no longer exist; at Saint-Andéol "the honor of taking the oath in the name of the people is conferred on two old men, one ninety-three and the other ninety-four years of age, one a noble and a colonel of the National Guard, and the other a simple peasant." At Paris, two hundred thousand persons of all conditions, ages, and sexes, officers and soldiers, monks and actors, school-boys and masters, dandies and ragamuffins, elegant ladies and fishwives, workmen of every class and the peasants from the vicinity, all flocked to the Champ de Mars to dig the earth which was not ready, and in a week, trundling wheelbarrows and handling the pick-ax as equals and comrades, all voluntarily yoked in the same service, converted a flat surface into a valley between two hills.--At Strasbourg, General Luckner, commander-in-chief, worked a whole afternoon in his shirt-sleeves just like the commonest laborer. The confederates are fed, housed, and have their expenses paid everywhere on all the roads. At Paris the publicans and keepers of furnished houses lower their prices of their own accord, and do not think of robbing their new guests. "The districts," moreover, "feast the provincials to their heart's content.[3106] There are meals every day for from twelve to fifteen hundred people." Provincials and Parisians, soldiers and bourgeois, seated and mingled together, drink each other's health and embrace. The soldiers, especially, and the inferior officers are surrounded, welcomed, and entertained to such an extent that they lose their heads, their health, and more besides. One "old trooper, who had been over fifty years in the service, died on the way home, used up with cordials and excess of pleasure." In short, the joy is excessive, as it should be on the great day when the wish of an entire century is accomplished.--Behold ideal felicity, as displayed in the books and illustrations of the time! The natural man buried underneath an artificial civilization is disinterred, and again appears as in early days, as in Tahiti, as in philosophic and literary pastorals, as in bucolic and mythological operas, confiding, affectionate, and happy.