"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour thy beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out on the silent main; on balls at the Orangerie of Versailles, where high rouged Dames of the palace are even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-officers:--and also on this roaring Hell-porch of a Hôtel de Ville." And a few sentences further on a heart of stone must be moved by what the archives of that grim prison-house revealed:-- "Old secrets come to view; and long-buried despair finds voice. Read this portion of an old letter. "'If for my consolation Monseigneur would grant me, for the sake of God and the Most Blessed Trinity, that I could have news of my dear wife; were it only her name on a card, to show that she is alive! It were the greatest consolation I could receive; and I should for ever bless the greatness of Monseigneur.' "Poor prisoner, who namest thyself Queret-Demery, and hast no other history,--she is dead, that dear wife of thine, and thou art dead! Tis fifty years since thy breaking heart put this question; to be heard now first, and long heard, in the hearts of men." In the reign of Louis XV. alone, there were no less than fifteen thousand _lettres de cachet_ issued, by which anyone could be suddenly arrested, and, without trial, and, heedless of protest, imprisoned perhaps for life in the Bastille. In the excesses of the Reign of Terror three or four thousand persons perished. Their deaths were spectacular, and have covered with execrations their dreadful executioners. But it is right that we should remember, Antony, the life-long agony and the unutterable despair of the victims of that remorselessly cruel system which the Revolution overthrew. The chapter on the "Everlasting Yea," in _Sartor Resartus_, seems to me to come nearer to the above excerpts than anything else in Carlyle, though at a perceptible distance:-- "O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see!