[Footnote 2378: The reader will meet the French expression sans-culottes again and again in Taine's or any other book about the French revolution. The nobles wore a kind of breeches terminating under the knee while tight long stockings, fastened to the trousers, exposed their calves. The male leg was as important an adornment for the nobles as it was to be for the women in the 20th Century. The poor, on the other hand, wore crude long trousers, mostly without a crease, often without socks or shoes, barefoot in the summer and wooden shoed in the winter. (SR).] [Footnote 2379: The song of "Veillons au salut de l'empire" belongs to the end of 1791. The "Marseillaise" was composed in April, 1792.] [Footnote 2380: Mercure de France, Nov. 23, 1791.] [Footnote 2381: Philippe de Ségur, "Mémoires," I. (at Fresnes, a village situated about seven leagues from Paris, a few days after Sep. 2, 1792). "A band of these demagogues pursued a large farmer of this place, suspected of royalism and denounced as a monopoliser because he was rich. These madmen had seized him, and, without any other form of trial, were about to put an end to him, when my father ran up to them. He addressed them, and so successfully as to change their rage into a no less exaggerated enthusiasm for humanity. Animated by their new transports, they obliged the poor farmer, still pale and trembling, and whom they were just going to hang on its branches, to drink and dance along with them around the tree of liberty."] [Footnote 2382: Lacretelle, "Dix ans d'Epreuves," 78. "The Girondists wanted to fashion a Roman people out of the dregs of Romulus, and, what is worse, out of the brigands of the 5th of October."] [Footnote 2383: These pages must have made a strong impression upon Lenin when he read them in the National Library in Paris around 1907. (SR).] [Footnote 2384: Lafayette, I. 442. "The Girondists sought in the war an opportunity for attacking with advantage, the constitutionalists of 1791 and their institutions."--Brissot (Address to my constituents). "We sought in the war an opportunity to set traps for the king, to expose his bad faith and his relationship with the emigrant princes."--Moniteur, (session of April 3, 1793). Speech by Brissot: "'I had told the Jacobins what my opinion was, and had proved to them that war was the sole means of unveiling the perfidy of Louis XVI. The event has justified my opinion."--Buchez et Roux, VIII. 60, 216, 217. The decree of the Legislative Assembly is dated Jan. 25, the first money voted by a club for the making of pikes is on Jan. 31, and the first article by Brissot, on the red cap, is on Feb. 6.]