Brunswick is ever in their heads?"--"Monsieur, you may be sure of this,
that the Duke of Brunswick is the last man they think of."
Such is the unconcern or light-heartedness of the gross, egoistic mass,
otherwise busy, and always passive under any government whatever it may
be, a veritable flock of sheep, allowing government to do as it
pleases, provided it does not hinder it from browsing and capering as it
chooses.--As to the men of sensibility who love their country, they are
still less troublesome, for they are gone or going (to the army), often
at the rate of a thousand and even two thousand a day, ten thousand in
the last week of July,[26123] fifteen thousand in the first two weeks
of September,[26124] in all perhaps 40,000 volunteers furnished by
the capital alone and who, with their fellows proportionate in number
supplied by the departments, are to be the salvation of France.--Through
this departure of the worthy, and this passivity of the flock,
Paris belongs to the fanatics among the population. "These are the
sans-culottes," wrote the patriotic Palloy, "the scum and riffraff of
Paris, and I glory in belonging to that class which has put down the
so-called honest folks."[26125]--"Three thousand workmen," says the
Girondist Soulavie, later, "made the Revolution of the 10th of August,
against the kingdom of the Feuillants, the majority of the capital and
against the Legislative Assembly."[26126] Workmen, day laborers, and
petty shop-keepers, not counting women, common vagabonds and regular
bandits, form, indeed, one-twentieth of the adult male population of the
city, about 9,000 spread over all sections of Paris, the only ones to
vote and act in the midst of universal stupor and indifference.--We find
in the Rue de Seine, for example, seven of them, Lacaille, keeper of a
roasting-shop; Philippe, "a cattle-breeder, who leads around she-asses
for consumptives," now president of the section, and soon to become one
of the Abbaye butchers; Guérard, "a Rouen river-man who has abandoned
the navigation of the Seine on a large scale and keeps a skiff, in which
he ferries people over the river from the Pont du Louvre to the Quai
Mazarin," and four characters of the same stamp. Their energy, however,
replaces their lack of education and numerical inferiority. One day,
Guérard, on passing M. Hua, the deputy, tells him in the way of a
warning, "You big rascal, you were lucky to have other people with
you. If you had been alone, I would have capsized my boat, and had the
pleasure of drowning a blasted aristocrat!" These are the "matadors
of the quarter".[26127]--Their ignorance does not trouble them; on
the contrary, they take pride in coarseness and vulgarity. One of the
ordinary speechmakers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Gouchon, a designer
for calicos, comes to the bar of the Assembly, "in the name of the men
of July 14 and Augusts 10," to glorify the political reign of brutal
incapacity; according to him, it is more enlightened than that of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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