#live from ushant

[intriguingpeoplebyangelafloyd]

MARY ANNE TALBOT

MARY ANNE TALBOT

1778-1808

Woman who disguised herself as a male so should serve as a soldier

Mary Anne Talbot, an English woman who disguised herself as a male and named herself John Taylor to serve as a soldier.

Talbot, aged 14, became a mistress of Captain Essex Bowen in 1792, who enlisted her as his footboy under the name “John Taylor” to go on a voyage to Santo Domingo. The regiment was to do service in Flanders against the French where she served as a drummer boy in the army during the battle for Valenciennes, where Bowen was killed. She was wounded in the battle and treated the wound herself.

Due to lack of funds, she decided to work as a cabin boy for a French ship. When the British Royal Navy captured the ship she was transferred to the Brunswick where she served as a powder monkey (a boy who carried powder to the guns).

Talbot was wounded for the second time in 1794 during the battle against the French fleet off Ushant when a small iron ball (grapeshot) almost severed her leg. She never fully recovered the use of her leg but did re-join the crew. She was captured by the French and spent the next 18 months in prison.

She returned to London in 1796 and signed to work as a clerk aboard an American merchantman as a passage to the US and then returned to England to avoid the attention she was receiving from the skipper’s niece who wanted to marry her, ignorant of Talbot’s true gender.

In 1797 she was forced to reveal her gender. She went to the Navy to get her earnings for her service and due to her injuries and the magistrate was sympathetic to her cause. She continued wearing male clothing as her leg injury worsened.

Talbot continued working in a variety of different jobs including on stage at Drury Lane and later as a household servant for publisher Robert S. Kirby until her health deteriorated.

She then went to live with friends and died a few weeks later aged in her 30s in 1808. It was alleged she died of a heart attack.

Robert S. Kirby published her tale in his book The Life and Surprising Adventures of Mary Anne Talbot (1809).

There has been doubt about her story, as there is no record of any seaman working on boards the ships she claimed to have worked on under the name John Taylor. Talbot had claimed she had been on the Vesuvius when it was captured by the French on the English Channel, however, at the time of the alleged capture, the ship was in the West Indies.

#maryannetalbot

#mary anne talbot #maryannetalbot

[musicblogwales]

ARA DEG FESTIVAL LINE-UP ANNOUNCED

Yann Tiersen, Gruff Rhys, Deerhoof, Cerys Hafana and more announced for ARA DEG 2023.

Yann Tiersen, Gruff Rhys, Deerhoof, Cerys Hafana and Rozi Plain are among the local and international artists performing at the fifth edition of Ara Deg Mae Dal Iâr (AD23), an accessible, all-ages festival in Bethesda, north-west Wales on Thursday 24th, Friday 25th and Saturday 26th August 2023.

Ian F Svenonius and Escape-ism, Quinquis, Cathead and Permanent Draft are also set for this year's Ara Deg, which aims to stage experimental and eclectic offerings that will open minds in the Gwynedd quarry town on the edge of Eryri National Park.

Performances will be held at community arts hub Neuadd Ogwen, Bethesda's original cinema and village hall, with the Fic pub next door hosting a record fair on Saturday August 26th and broadcasting Radio Ara Deg throughout the festival. Further pop-up events and associated goings-on will be announced in the coming weeks.

A mix of acts with international careers spanning decades such as Tiersen, Svenonius and Deerhoof with newer names such as Hafana, Quinquis and Cathead, the artists on the line-up, selected by the AD23 decentralised planning committee, are united by a sense of experimentation and curiosity - not just in terms of their own creativity but also in relation to the wider world of 2023.

Opening the festival will be the mesmerising electronic soundscapes and Breton songwriting of Quinquis aka Émilie Tiersen, who sails to Ara Deg with world-renowned artist-composer Yann Tiersen on their boat Ninnog, named after Saint Ninnoc, a mediaeval abbess reputedly born in Wales who travelled to Brittany to become a protector of women, agriculture and woodland. Having already voyaged from their island home in Ushant to perform in Ireland, the Faroe Islands and Shetland, the Breton artists view their Ninnog tour as a political statement challenging the ecological impact of established large-scale touring and as a means to establish connections with new communities.

In 2022's ‘Seim’, her debut album for Mute as Quinquis, Émilie's haunting, evocative electronica explores nature and the stories and culture of Breton, the only Celtic language remaining in use in mainland Europe. Quinquis will be followed by Permanent Draft, the queer record label, micropress and live project founded by writer/poet Fanny Chiarello and musician Valentina Magaletti a London-based drummer, percussionist and composer whose work is informed by folklore, collaboration and endless experimentation with new materials, sounds and stories.

Thursday's concert will end with the emotive harmonies and switched-on, stream-of-conscious songs of Rozi Plain, who returns to Ara Deg following her 2022 visit playing bass with her band This Is The Kit. With ‘Prize’, her recent fifth solo record, Plain explores the calm reflection of the present moment as a way to begin to navigate the uncertain future.

Opening Friday's performance will be Cathead aka Gwen Siôn, an experimental composer and multidisciplinary artist from the nearby village of Rachub. Currently being mentored by Brian Eno, Siôn works with sound, film, sculpture and installation to create works inspired by ecology, mythology, ritual and transformation, often using non-traditional composition methods, field recordings and hand-built instruments and electronic sound devices using physical fragments of the landscape.

Also performing on Thursday is young Machynlleth artist Cerys Hafana, a master of the triple harp. Though commonly known as the Welsh harp, the three-rowed instrument originated in Italy before being adopted by Welsh musicians in 17th century London. In 2022's ‘Edyf’ ("thread"), a Guardian Folk Album of the Month, Hafana investigates the contemporary resonances of songs unsung for 200 years she found in the archives of the National Library of Wales with lithe, textural vocals, glistening melodies and a raw, percussive edginess that's sharply contemporary. Writing in 2022's ‘Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales’, Hafana explains how Welsh folk music can be told "as a story of change, of new influences and ideas being brought in by people from other places, and a story of new struggles and challenges that will inevitably enact changes over the centuries."

Hafana is followed by a set from Yann Tiersen, himself a lover of Celtic languages, including his native Breton. Though best known across the world for film soundtracks (eg Amélie, Good Bye, Lenin!), Tiersen has been involved in music for most of his life, forever pushing boundaries of genre and instrumentation as a recording artist, live performer and collaborator with a galaxy of artists from Dominique A and Françoiz Breut to The Divine Comedy, Elizabeth Fraser, Sage Francis and the late Jane Birkin. His set coincides with the release of ‘Kerber Complete’, a CD box set charting the evolution of his Kerber project from stripped-back piano work to its electronic resolution ‘11 5 18 2 5 18’.

Like Tiersen, the ever-evolving careers of Saturday's performers stretch back to the 1990s, with Ian F Svenonius making his album debut in 1991's post-hardcore teen rebellion manual ‘13-Point Program To Destroy America’ as part of breakneck Washington DC noisemakers The Nation of Ulysses. Svenonius has headed several similarly irrepressible outfits over the years, such as The Make-Up, Weird War, Chain and The Gang, and current project Escape-ism. Svenonius, also a published author and online talk show host, will open the day with a lecture relating to his latest “book to end all books” ‘Against The Written Word’ and a screening of ‘The Lost Record’, his first feature length film made in conjunction with Alexandra Cabral, shot on 16mm about a girl torn between revealing a lost masterpiece album to the world or keeping it all for herself.

Svenonius will subsequently perform as Escape-ism, their abrasive, high energy rock 'n' roll offering contrast to the sweeter, though similarly omnivorous vibes of Gruff Rhys whose recent work includes 2021's ‘Seeking New Gods’, a visionary psychedelic pop album inspired by Mount Paektu, a desolate stratovolcano on the North Korea-China border, and ‘The Almond and The Seahorse’, a teaming, evocative soundtrack to Celyn Jones and Tom Stern's 2022 film about rebuilding life after brain injury starring Rebel Wilson and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

Ara Deg's final live performance of 2023 will come with Deerhoof, the influential San Francisco experimentalists whose recent nineteenth album ‘Miracle-Level’ was described by Under The Radar as "a celebration of the human spirit, one that offers optimism and wonder in the face of pessimism and hopelessness."

Radio Ara Deg will be broadcasting throughout the festival live from the Fic pub via Soho Radio including interviews and live sessions with AD23 artists.

Other events and pop-up performances will be announced in the coming weeks taking place in and around Bethesda, a creative quarry town located close by the splendour of Eryri's multiple mountain ranges, tranquil valleys and ancient woodland.

Camping can be found at Eagle Camping at nearby Bethesda Rugby Club.

Since 2019 Bethesda has welcomed acclaimed artists such as Aldous Harding, BCUC, Jane Weaver, mùm, N'famady Kouyaté, Sage Todz, Snapped Ankles and Troupe Djéliguinet for Ara Deg, which is planned and run by a collective centring on community arts space Neuadd Ogwen.

As well as a £50 weekend pass offering access to all three days' performances, tickets are available for each day, with concessions for unemployed people, pensioners and students and discounted prices for those aged 6 to 15. Under 5s go free.

Gruff Rhys, part of the AD23 decentralised planning committee, says: “The idea with Ara Deg is to put on good music, but not to the point of fatigue or to have too many acts to digest meaningfully.

We invite musicians to play longer than a usual festival set if they want to, and nobody is going to clash with another act. We hope to expose local ears to diverse sounds and ideas from across Wales and the world and expose our guests to the cultural, scenic and linguistic wonders of Eryri. It’s a small 400 capacity festival so hopefully it doesn’t overwhelm the area either.”

For tickets visits https://neuaddogwen.com/en/ara-deg-2023/

[ondasyletras]

Yann Tiersen - Palestine (Live from Ushant)

#Yann Tiersen #synthesizer #music #ushant #youtube

[olympedupuget]

Gif Request Meme - A Musical of my Choice + a Villain:  Artois and Orléans

↳ Requested by @fallenidol-453

Philippe Égalité: The only legitimate son of the Duc d’Orléans, a prince du sang from birth, Philippe was a very unlikely revolutionary. And yet Philippe showed a strong level of compassion for the lives of the lower class, going down a coal shaft to see the conditions faced by miners, pulling a groom of his from a river with his own hands, and providing shelter for the poor during the bitter winter of 1788-89. 

He was noted for his extravagant lifestyle; a noted lover of racehorses, gambling, architecture, his various and assorted mistresses, and all things English. Despite being the richest man in France, with a truly astronomical income, he nonetheless found himself frequently in debt. That was the impetus for him to totally redesign the Palais Royal over the course of two and a half years, opening it up to shopkeepers and establishing it as a major area for counter revolutionary activity, with the police being banned from intervening. As such, an overwhelming feeling of liberty prevailed there, with people from all social classes gathering to observe the spectacles and walk along the gardens there. 

There was a certain amount of hostility to be expected between the two branches of the Bourbon family, going as far back as the first Duc’s tempestuous relationship with his brother, Louis XIV. Still, the relationship between Louis XVI and Philippe gradually deteriorated over time, despite several attempts to patch things up. Orléans blamed Louis for the loss of his naval career, with the controversial Battle of Ushant in 1778 being a major breaking point in their relationship. In 1788, he spoke up at a “Royal Sitting” where Louis tried to press the Parliament into obeying his will, saying “Sire, this appears to be illegal.” Louis responded, “It is legal, because I wish it to be so.” Orléans spent the next five months in a comfortable exile at his estate, and he returned more popular than ever. 

When the Estates General was called, Orléans sided with the Third Estate, taking his place with the other delegates rather than sitting with the Royal Family as his rank entitled him to. His name was consistently brought up alongside revolutionary activity, with his bust being paraded alongside Necker’s on July 12, 1789, when the rash charge of the Prince de Lambesc into the Tuilleries heightened the people’s fears over an armed crackdown of Paris. It would be in the Palais Royal where Camille Desmoulins would jump on a table and call the people to arms, and even though the exact impact of that statement’s been disputed, the fact that Palais Royal was a huge locus point for revolutionary activity never has been. 

Among the royalists, it was popularly thought that Orléans was behind the entire Revolution, masterminding the Storming of the Bastille, the Women’s March to Versailles, a famine, and various and assorted other disturbances, in lieu of believing that the common people themselves were discontent. However, the sources nearest and dearest to Philippe suggest that he had no intention of seizing power, and Philippe’s own action of going and staying in England at Lafayette’s suggestion between October 1789 and July 1790, when he had a strong chance of fighting back against the charges and seizing power for himself by riding off the highest point of his popularity, strongly indicates that he had no intention of seizing the throne for himself. Overall, while he was a man of undeniable courage, the popular consensus is that he was, by nature, too passive to do it on his own, generally being very diffident to those near him such as his former mistress and longtime friend, Madame de Genlis, as well as her rival for his attention, Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, and generally disinterested in long-form plans, preferring to throw himself into whims. It is far more likely that, if a plan existed to make Philippe king, it came from one of those brains, as opposed to anything Philippe himself considered in any detail. 

He did, however, become embittered over the increasingly chilly reception he received at Versailles, including one occasion where a courtier shouted “Do not let him touch the wine!” when he entered, with him then being spat on as he made his leave. 

In the latter half of 1792, Philippe faced a bevy of problems, both personal and political, as his long-suffering wife had filed for a separation, his daughter was put on a list of émigrés and was forced to leave the country very shortly after arriving (after Madame de Genlis, who he had instructed to take her back before her name could be added, lingered for too long, causing a final breakdown in their long relationship), his popularity was rapidly fading, and he had been called, as a Deputy of the National Convention, to sit at the trial of his cousin. According to one anecdote, found in William Cooke Taylor’s Memoirs of the House of Orléans, it was in that particular maelstrom that he changed his name, as a last ditch effort to save his daughter and prove his loyalty to the Revolution, to Philippe Égalité. Many options were considered for him to not sit the trial, and there is no reason to believe, despite the long-lasting enmity that the two of them had, that Philippe, when he went to sleep the night before the trial of Louis began on December 26, that he had any idea that when it came time to give the verdict on January 14-15, he would vote “yea,” a decision that shocked the entire room, not the least Louis himself. Perhaps it was a last ditch effort to save himself, perhaps he felt pressured to do it by everyone else in the room, perhaps in that moment he truly believed that Louis’ actions merited the death penalty. It’s impossible to truly know, but in the end that one decision, more than anything else, has defined his legacy. 

However, the Royalists would soon be able to find some comfort, as, on the 4th of April 1793, his son, Louis-Philippe, Duc de Chartres, defected along with General Dumouriez, and Philippe’s enemies had the ammunition they needed.

On 7 April, 1793, he was arrested and sent to Fort Saint-Jean in Marseilles, along with two of his sons. Throughout his imprisonment, Philippe kept up an optimistic front, constantly reassuring his sons, the Duc de Montpensier and the Comte de Beaujolais, on the rare occasions he was allowed to speak to them after they were separated, that everything would turn out well, even expressing optimism about his trial in Paris. Whether this was real or simply an attempt at keeping up morale will never be known, but on November 2, 1793, he was sent back to Paris, to be imprisoned in the Conciergerie. He was tried on the 6th and, at his own request not to prolong things any longer than necessary, he was executed on that same day. By all accounts, he met his death courageously, his composure only threatening to break when the cart he was in stopped in front of the Palais Royal, so that he could very clearly see the sign on it that said it was now national property. His last words were to stop the assistants at the guillotine from taking off his boots, saying “You are losing time, you can take them off at a greater leisure when I am dead.” 

Unlike his royal cousins, his body was never found, and to this day, he is generally considered as one of the great villains of the Revolution in media associated with it, though none of the serious charges against him (the October Days being prime) were ever proven.

Charles X- For most of his younger years, like his older cousin, Charles’ defining quality was his wild life, which was punctuated by multiple love affairs, copious gambling and alcohol, and even more copious debts, with his brother, Louis XVI, somewhat reluctantly paying the bills. He also had a close friendship with his brother’s wife, who he shared a love of high living with, the two of them often being seen together at the theatre and balls. This close friendship was much remarked upon, with Artois being a frequent subject of the pornographic pamphlets that circulated about the queen, along with Marie Antoinette’s favorite, Madame de Polignac. In the years preceding and following the Revolution, however, the two of them gradually cooled, with their later relationship being marked by political disagreements. Charles consistently pressured his brother into more conservative stances during the meeting of the Estates General, arguing against doubling the Third Estates’ representation and conspiring to get rid of Louis’ liberal finance minister, Jacques Necker. The dismissal of the Necker would end up being one of the leading causes for the Storming of the Bastille, with Charles’ temporary personal victory being quickly eclipsed by the blaze that the little spark of Revolution had turned into. In the days immediately following the Storming of the Bastille, Artois was ordered to emigrate by his brother, along with the rest of his family.

He wouldn’t see France again for decades, going from court to court in Europe asking for help and trailed by a small army of creditors (who would become some of his most frequent companions, the avid huntsman only being able to go out riding at his estate at Holyrood on Sundays, when his creditors would be unable to pursue him), but with very little materializing, even less of which was successful, with the Battle of Quiberon being particularly disastrous to any hope of a royalist win by military might. Instead, he set up his main residence in London, with his mistress, Louise de Polastron, sister-in-law of Madame de Polignac, upon whose death he swore a vow of celibacy, the former playboy becoming sober and religious in his later years. The family briefly returned to France in May 1814, with the exile of Napoleon to Elba, however his later escape and mustering of the troops led to them leaving the city in February 1815, only able to fully establish themselves back in the country shortly after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Upon his brother, the Comte de Provence’s ascension to the throne as Louis XVIII (the space between XVI and XVIII being taken up by Charles’ young nephew, Louis-Charles, who died in prison and therefore never ruled), Charles became known as a leading member of the Ultra Royalist faction, who were, as the name suggests, “More Royalist than the king.” His brother dying without a male heir, Charles took the throne in 1824, though his highly conservative policies following his more tolerant brother’s reign made him highly unpopular with the public. 

In 1830, he was forced to abdicate. His intent had been for the throne to go to his young grandson, however, it would go to Louis-Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, the son of Philippe Égalite (who would himself end up being deposed.) He spent the remainder of his life similarly to how he spent his exile, traveling from place to place, hounded by debtors.

 Eventually, he would die in Austria, on 6 November 1836, 43 years to the day of his revolutionary cousin’s execution. 

Sources: 

The Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Virtuoso of the Sword and the Bow: Gabriel Banat

A French King at Holyrood: Alexander John Mackenzie Stuart

The Journalists and the July Revolution in France: The Role of the Political Press in the Overthrow of the Bourbon Restoration 1827–1830: Daniel Rader

Memoirs of the House of Orléans: William Cooke Taylor

The Perilous Crown: France Between Revolutions, 1814-1848: Munro Price

Prince of the blood : being an account of the illustrious birth, the strange life and the horrible death of Louis-Philippe Joseph, fifth duke of Orleans, better remembered as Philippe Egalite: Evart Seelye Scudder

Revolutions in the Western World 1775–1825: Jeremy Black, ed.

#perioddramaedit #asiantheatrenet #musicaltheatreedit #historyedit #1789 les amants de la bastille #marie antoinette das musical #keigo yoshino #mitsuo yoshihara #long post #ch: artois #Production: Toho #other musicals: MA #historical #on this day in history we mourn the death of two thots #one more than the other #(apologies if I smudged any facts given that it is rather late)

[ltwilliammowett]

Captain Lord Robert Manners

He was born on 6 February 1758, the second son of Lieutenant-General John Manners, the Marquis of Granby, and grandson of John, 3rd Duke of Rutland. His mother was Lady Frances Seymour. He was the first cousin of Captain Hon William Clement Finch and Hon. Seymour Finch. An illegitimate cousin was Captain Evelyn Sutton.

Captain Lord Robert Manners by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723  - 1792)

Manners was educated at Eton from 1763-71 before joining the navy in April 1772 aboard the Panther 60, Captain Cornthwaite Ommanney, flying the broad pennant of Commodore Molyneux Shuldham and going out to Newfoundland in the following month where that officer served as the commander-in-chief. Returning home in November after a brief secondment to the Aldborough 24, Captain James Hawker, he then returned to Newfoundland with the Panther in the following two years, as was the custom.

In July 1775 he joined the frigate Enterprise 28, Captain Sir Thomas Rich, going out to the Mediterranean from Spithead during July, and remaining on that station for the next couple of years, during which period he was appointed an acting lieutenant. He left this vessel in the autumn of 1777 to return home to seek a lieutenant’s commission.

On 13 May 1778, as a beneficiary of the King’s fleet review, he was commissioned lieutenant of the Ocean 90, Captain John Laforey, in which ship he was present at the Battle of Ushant on 27 July. He transferred to Admiral Hon. Augustus Keppel’s flagship Victory 100 on 17 September, but in the following spring resigned his commission and went on half-pay in order to personally apply to the first lord of the Admiralty, Earl Sandwich, for a more active posting.Accordingly in July 1779 Manners joined the newly launched Alcide 74, Captain John Brisbane, but which ship, somewhat frustratingly, was not able to leave the Thames until November from where she went around to Spithead. She was subsequently present with Admiral Sir George Rodney’s fleet at the Moonlight Battle off Cape St. Vincent on 16 January 1780 and thereafter at the relief of Gibraltar.

The first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, had already written to Rodney requesting that the highly-connected Manners be promoted as a personal favour to satisfy the young man’s political allies, indeed his family had constantly badgered Sandwich for the young officer’s promotion, claiming that to deny it was a slight to such a prominent family, and that Manners would resign if not given his chance. Accordingly, with seniority from 17 January 1780, Manners was posted captain of the Resolution 74 bearing the broad pennant of her previous captain, Commodore Sir Chaloner Ogle.Upon returning to England under the orders of Rear-Admiral Hon. Robert Digby, the Resolution led the ships which first engaged the Protée 64, which had been escorting fifteen supply ships bound for the Indian Ocean, leading to its capture on 24 February, the first such rated vessel to be taken in the war. Shortly afterwards, on 8 April as the Resolution was about to sail for North America with Rear-Admiral Thomas Graves’ squadron he first lieutenant, William Nowell, quelled a mutiny by punching the ringleader to the deck during a dispute about outstanding payments, one that also afflicted the other ships of the squadron.

Continuing to fly the broad pennant of Commodore Ogle, the Resolution eventually sailed with Graves’ squadron for North America from Plymouth in the middle of May before departing for the Leeward Islands with Admiral Sir George Rodney’s fleet in November. Upon Ogle being advanced to flag rank, Manners assumed full command of the Resolution at the beginning of 1781, and he was present at the capture of St. Eustatius on 3 February where he was rebuked for opening fire on the Dutch frigate Mars after his first lieutenant, William Nowell, had allowed her to fire her cannon as a gesture of defiance after surrendering During the same year he fought at the Battle of Fort Royal on 29 April and at the Battle of Chesapeake Bay on 5 September, where he afforded excellent support to the rear, although he had a lucky escape when the peak of his hat was shot off.. Once Hood returned to the Leeward Islands the Resolution was present at the Battle of St. Kitts on 25/26 January 1782 where she was heavily engaged at the rear of the line and incurred casualties of five men killed and eleven wounded.

At the Battle of the Saintes on 12 April the Resolution found herself in the thick of the action from her position of third in line of battle behind the flagship. Within a half-hour of his ship opening fire Manners was struck by a ball that inflicted such serious wounds to his legs that one had to be amputated, at the same time being struck by a splinter that gouged through his chest and right arm. He was invalided to the Andromache 32 bound for England and commanded by his friend, Captain George Anson Byron, but despite being initially in good spirits he died a week later on 23 April when tetanus set in. It was mooted that his body be carried home for burial, but that proving largely impractical a conference between Captain Byron, Captain Lord Cranstoun, who was returning home with Rodney’s despatches, and the Resolution’s surgeon, Robert Blair, resolved that he should be buried at sea, and the relevant service was held on the early evening of 24 April.

Death of Lord Robert Manners by William Turner Davey, after Thomas Stothard (circa 1800-1825) (c)National Portrait Gallery

Manners was unmarried. He had been elected MP for Cambridge in 1780 in a hard fought, often scurrilous and expensive contest held in his absence, but he never took up his seat.

Three Captains memorial to William Bayne, William Blair and Lord Robert Manners © 2019 Dean and Chapter of Westminster                                        

A monument to his memory is in Westminster Abbey with those of his fellow captains William Blair and Alfred Bayne, who also lost their lives at the Battle of the Saintes. Manners was resolute, well respected, bright, skilled and gallant, and famed for his sense of fashion. A fair-minded disciplinarian, he quickly turned the Resolution into an excellent and esteemed ship, and he was deemed more than worthy of the early opportunities granted him by his birthright. Upon being informed of Manners’ death the King informed the Duke of Portland that ‘he would rather have lost three of the best ships in his service’.

#naval art #persons of the Navy #lord robert manners #18th Century #age of sail

[ivovynckier]

Been listening to “Kerber” (2021), Yann Tiersen’s brand new album.

If you know him at all, it’s certainly because the French (film) composer wrote the soundtrack of the cult movie “Amelie”. (And because of the movie, Tiersen’s sound has become the music of Paris and its bohemian quarter Montmartre.)

With “Kerber”, he continues on the road he’s followed the last years: he showcases his piano virtuosity and blends the piano with electronic sounds (created in the recording studio annexed to his house!) and ambient sounds (recorded on the Breton island Ushant (“Ouessant” in French) where he lives with his wife, the singer Emilie Quinquis).

Every track is named after a location on his home island - Ar Maner Kozh, Ker al Loch, Poull Bojer etc. (As I said, Brittany has its own culture and language, very different from the French “standard”.)

At times, the music made me think of the album “async” of (film) composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.

“All” (2019) is Tiersen’s most important record of the last 10 years… and the gentleman kindly signed it for me.

#yanntiersen #tiersen #kerber #brittany #bretagne #breton #ushant #ouessant #amelie #ameliepoulain #emiliequinquis #piano #composer #cd #cds #cdcollection #cdcollector #cdcover #music #filmcomposer #musician #musicians #electronicmusic #france #french #france🇫🇷 @yanntiersen (at Ouessant)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUQAYLrKe3U/?utm_medium=tumblr

#yanntiersen #tiersen #kerber #brittany #bretagne #breton #ushant #ouessant #amelie #ameliepoulain #emiliequinquis #piano #composer #cd #cds #cdcollection #cdcollector #cdcover #music #filmcomposer #musician #musicians #electronicmusic #france #french #france🇫🇷

[the-tailor-retailored]

The French Revolution: A History Volume 1 Excepts

it is a summing-up of Life; a final settling, and giving-in the “account of the deeds done in the body:” they are done now; and lie there unalterable, and do bear their fruits, long as Eternity shall last

that praying Duke of Orleans, Egalité’s grandfather, who honesty believed that there was no Death! He, if the Court Newsmen can be believed, started up once on a time, glowing with sulphurous contempt and indignation on his poor Secretary, who had stumbled on the words, feu roi d’Espagne (the late King of Spain): ‘Feu roi, Monsieur?' (the *late* king?) —‘Monseigneur,’ (My Lord) hastily answered the trembling but adroit man of business, ‘c’est une titre qu’ils prennent (’tis a title they take)

Man, “Symbol of Eternity imprisoned into Time!” it is not thy works, which are all mortal, infinitely little, and the greatest no greater than the least, but only the Spirit thou workest in, that can have worth or continuance.

These things befell not, they were slowly done; not in an hour, but through the flight of days: what was to be said of it? This hour seemed altogether as the last was, as the next would be.

As victory is silent, so is defeat. Of the opposing forces the weaker has resigned itself; the stronger marches on, noiseless now, but rapid, inevitable: the fall and overturn will not be noiseless.

If when the oak stands proudliest flourishing to the eye, you know that its heart is sound, it is not so with the man; how much less with the Society, with the Nation of men! Of such it may be affirmed even that the superficial aspect, that the inward feeling of full health, is generally ominous. For indeed it is of apoplexy, so to speak, and a plethoric lazy habit of body, that Churches, Kingships, Social Institutions, oftenest die. Sad, when such Institution plethorically says to itself, Take thy ease, thou hast goods laid up;—like the fool of the Gospel, to whom it was answered, Fool, this night thy life shall be required of thee!

Intelligence so abounds; irradiated by wit and the art of conversation. Philosophism sits joyful in her glittering saloons, the dinner-guest of Opulence grown ingenuous, the very nobles proud to sit by her; and preaches, lifted up over all Bastilles, a coming millennium.

let the Absurd fly utterly forsaking this lower Earth for ever. It is Truth and Astræa Redux that (in the shape of Philosophism) henceforth reign. For what imaginable purpose was man made, if not to be “happy”? By victorious Analysis, and Progress of the Species, happiness enough now awaits him.

With the working people, again it is not so well. Unlucky! For there are twenty to twenty-five millions of them.

the masses consist all of units. Every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows; stands covered there with his own skin, and if you prick him he will bleed.

what a thought: that every unit of these masses is a miraculous Man, even as thyself art; struggling, with vision, or with blindness, for his infinite Kingdom

For them, in this world, rises no Era of Hope; hardly now in the other,—if it be not hope in the gloomy rest of Death, for their faith too is failing. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed! A dumb generation; their voice only an inarticulate cry: spokesman, in the King’s Council, in the world’s forum, they have none that finds credence.

At rare intervals they will fling down their hoes and hammers; and, to the astonishment of thinking mankind, flock hither and thither, dangerous, aimless; get the length even of Versailles.

The Château gates have to be shut; but the King will appear on the balcony, and speak to them. They have seen the King’s face; their Petition of Grievances has been, if not read, looked at. For answer, two of them are hanged, on a “new gallows forty feet high;” and the rest driven back to their dens,—for a time.

Clearly a difficult “point” for Government, that of dealing with these masses;—if indeed it be not rather the sole point and problem of Government

the masses count to so many millions of units; made, to all appearance, by God,—whose Earth this is declared to be. Besides, the people are not without ferocity; they have sinews and indignation.

governing; what by the spurt of your pen, in its cold dastard indifference, you will fancy you can starve always with impunity; always till the catastrophe come!—Ah Madame, such Government by Blindman’s-buff, stumbling along too far, will end in the General Overturn

trouble us not with thy prophecies, O croaking Friend of Men: ’tis long that we have heard such; and still the old world keeps wagging, in its old way.

For all is wrong, and gone out of joint; the inward spiritual, and the outward economical; head or heart, there is no soundness in it. As indeed, evils of all sorts are more or less of kin, and do usually go together: especially it is an old truth, that wherever huge physical evil is, there, as the parent and origin of it, has moral evil to a proportionate extent been.

—what unspeakable, nigh infinite Dishonesty ... must there not, through long ages, have gone on accumulating! It will accumulate: moreover, it will reach a head; for the first of all Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.

Their King has become a King Popinjay; with his Maurepas Government, gyrating as the weather-cock does, blown about by every wind. Above them they see no God; or they even do not look above, except with astronomical glasses. The Church indeed still is; but in the most submissive state; quite tamed by Philosophism; in a singularly short time; for the hour was come.

Peace? O Philosophe-Sentimentalism, what hast thou to do with peace, when thy mother’s name is Jezebel? Foul Product of still fouler Corruption, thou with the corruption art doomed!

it is singular how long the rotten will hold together, provided you do not handle it roughly.

On the other hand, be this conceded: Where thou findest a Lie that is oppressing thee, extinguish it. Lies exist there only to be extinguished; they wait and cry earnestly for extinction. Think well, meanwhile, in what spirit thou wilt do it: not with hatred, with headlong selfish violence; but in clearness of heart, with holy zeal, gently, almost with pity. Thou wouldst not replace such extinct Lie by a new Lie, which a new Injustice of thy own were; the parent of still other Lies? Whereby the latter end of that business were worse than the beginning.

It has been well said: “Man is based on Hope; he has properly no other possession but Hope; this habitation of his is named the Place of Hope.”

Off Ushant some naval thunder is heard. In the course of which did our young Prince, Duke de Chartres, “hide in the hold;” or did he materially, by active heroism, contribute to the victory? Alas, by a second edition, we learn that there was no victory; or that English Keppel had it.

Brave Suffren must return from Hyder Ally and the Indian Waters; with small result; yet with great glory for “six” non-defeats;—which indeed, with such seconding as he had, one may reckon heroic.

Dance on, ye foolish ones; ye sought not wisdom, neither have ye found it. Ye and your fathers have sown the wind, ye shall reap the whirlwind. Was it not, from of old, written: The wages of sin is death?

The name jokei (jockey) comes from the English; as the thing also fancies that it does. Our Anglomania, in fact , is grown considerable; prophetic of much. If France is to be free, why shall she not, now when mad war is hushed, love neighbouring Freedom? Cultivated men, your Dukes de Liancourt, de la Rochefoucault admire the English Constitution, the English National Character; would import what of it they can.

Of what is lighter, especially if it be light as wind, how much easier the freightage! Non-Admiral Duke de Chartres (not yet d’Orléans or Egalité) flies to and fro across the Strait; importing English Fashions; this he, as hand-and-glove with an English Prince of Wales, is surely qualified to do. Carriages and saddles; top-boots and rédingotes, as we call riding-coats. Nay the very mode of riding: for now no man on a level with his age but will trot à l’Anglaise, rising in the stirrups; scornful of the old sitfast method, in which, according to Shakspeare, “butter and eggs” go to market.

Elf jokeis, we have seen; but see now real Yorkshire jockeys, and what they ride on, and train: English racers for French Races.

A problematic Chevalier d’Eon, now in petticoats, now in breeches, is no less problematic in London than in Paris; and causes bets and lawsuits. Beautiful days of international communion! Swindlery and Blackguardism have stretched hands across the Channel, and saluted mutually: on the racecourse of Vincennes or Sablons, behold in English curricle-and-four, wafted glorious among the principalities and rascalities, an English Dr. Dodd,[43]—for whom also the too early gallows gapes.

Duke de Chartres was a young Prince of great promise, as young Princes often are; which promise unfortunately has belied itself. With the huge Orléans Property, with Duke de Penthievre for Father-in-law (and now the young Brother-in-law Lamballe killed by excesses),—he will one day be the richest man in France. Meanwhile, “his hair is all falling out, his blood is quite spoiled,”—by early transcendentalism of debauchery. Carbuncles stud his face; dark studs on a ground of burnished copper. A most signal failure, this young Prince! The stuff prematurely burnt out of him: little left but foul smoke and ashes of expiring sensualities: what might have been Thought, Insight, and even Conduct, gone now, or fast going,—to confused darkness, broken by bewildering dazzlements; to obstreperous crotchets; to activities which you may call semi-delirious, or even semi-galvanic!

the circles of Beauty and Fashion, each circle a living circular Passion-Flower: expecting the magnetic afflatus, and new-manufactured Heaven-on-Earth. O women, O men, great is your infidel-faith!

under the strangest new vesture, the old great truth (since no vesture can hide it) begins again to be revealed: That man is what we call a miraculous creature, with miraculous power over men; and, on the whole, with such a Life in him, and such a World round him, as victorious Analysis, with her Physiologies, Nervous-systems, Physic and Metaphysic, will never completely name, to say nothing of explaining. Wherein also the Quack shall, in all ages, come in for his share.

Through all time, if we read aright, sin was, is, will be, the parent of misery. This land calls itself most Christian, and has crosses and cathedrals; but its High-priest is some Roche-Aymon, some Necklace-Cardinal Louis de Rohan. The voice of the poor, through long years, ascends inarticulate, in Jacqueries, meal-mobs; low-whimpering of infinite moan: unheeded of the Earth; not unheeded of Heaven. Always moreover where the Millions are wretched, there are the Thousands straitened, unhappy; only the Units can flourish; or say rather, be ruined the last. Industry, all noosed and haltered, as if it too were some beast of chase for the mighty hunters of this world to bait, and cut slices from,—cries passionately to these its well-paid guides and watchers, not, Guide me; but, Laissez faire, Leave me alone of your guidance! What market has Industry in this France? For two things there may be market and demand: for the coarser kind of field-fruits, since the Millions will live: for the fine kinds of luxury and spicery,—of multiform taste, from opera-melodies down to racers and courtesans; since the Units will be amused. It is at bottom but a mad state of things.

and now has not Jean Jacques promulgated his new Evangel of a Contrat Social; explaining the whole mystery of Government, and how it is contracted and bargained for,—to universal satisfaction? Theories of Government! Such have been, and will be; in ages of decadence. Acknowledge them in their degree; as processes of Nature, who does nothing in vain; as steps in her great process. Meanwhile, what theory is so certain as this, That all theories, were they never so earnest, painfully elaborated, are, and, by the very conditions of them, must be incomplete, questionable, and even false? Thou shalt know that this Universe is, what it professes to be, an infinite one. Attempt not to swallow it, for thy logical digestion; be thankful, if skilfully planting down this and the other fixed pillar in the chaos, thou prevent its swallowing thee.

Blessed also is Hope; and always from the beginning there was some Millennium prophesied; Millennium of Holiness; but (what is notable) never till this new Era, any Millennium of mere Ease and plentiful Supply.

Man is not what one calls a happy animal; his appetite for sweet victual is so enormous. How, in this wild Universe, which storms in on him, infinite, vague-menacing, shall poor man find, say not happiness, but existence, and footing to stand on, if it be not by girding himself together for continual endeavour and endurance? Woe, if in his heart there dwelt no devout Faith; if the word Duty had lost its meaning for him!

For life is no cunningly-devised deception or self-deception: it is a great truth that thou art alive, that thou hast desires, necessities; neither can these subsist and satisfy themselves on delusions, but on fact. To fact, depend on it, we shall come back: to such fact, blessed or cursed, as we have wisdom for.

let the theory of Perfectibility say what it will, discontents cannot be wanting: your promised Reformation is so indispensable; yet it comes not; who will begin it—with himself?

How, beneath this rose-coloured veil of Universal Benevolence and Astræa Redux, is the sanctuary of Home so often a dreary void, or a dark contentious Hell-on-Earth! The old Friend of Men has his own divorce case too; and at times, “his whole family but one” under lock and key: he writes much about reforming and enfranchising the world; and for his own private behoof he has needed sixty Lettres-de-Cachet. A man of insight too, with resolution, even with manful principle: but in such an element, inward and outward; which he could not rule, but only madden. Edacity, rapacity;—quite contrary to the finer sensibilities of the heart! Fools, that expect your verdant Millennium, and nothing but Love and Abundance, brooks running wine, winds whispering music,—with the whole ground and basis of your existence champed into a mud of Sensuality; which, daily growing deeper, will soon have no bottom but the Abyss!

It is a doomed world: gone all “obedience that made men free;” fast going the obedience that made men slaves,—at least to one another. Slaves only of their own lusts they now are, and will be. Slaves of sin; inevitably also of sorrow.

Shall we say, then: Wo to Philosophism, that it destroyed Religion, what it called “extinguishing the abomination (écraser l’infâme)”? Wo rather to those that made the Holy an abomination, and extinguishable; wo at all men that live in such a time of world-abomination and world-destruction! Nay, answer the Courtiers, it was Turgot, it was Necker, with their mad innovating; it was the Queen’s want of etiquette; it was he, it was she, it was that. Friends! it was every scoundrel that had lived, and quack-like pretended to be doing, and been only eating and misdoing, in all provinces of life, as Shoeblack or as Sovereign Lord, each in his degree, from the time of Charlemagne and earlier. All this (for be sure no falsehood perishes, but is as seed sown out to grow) has been storing itself for thousands of years; and now the account-day has come.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. And yet, as we said, Hope is but deferred; not abolished, not abolishable. It is very notable, and touching, how this same Hope does still light onwards the French Nation through all its wild destinies. For we shall still find Hope shining, be it for fond invitation, be it for anger and menace; as a mild heavenly light it shone; as a red conflagration it shines: burning sulphurous blue, through darkest regions of Terror, it still shines; and goes sent out at all, since Desperation itself is a kind of Hope. Thus is our Era still to be named of Hope, though in the saddest sense,—when there is nothing left but Hope.

If the soliloquising Barber ask: ‘What has your Lordship done to earn all this?’ and can only answer: ‘You took the trouble to be born (Vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître),’ all men must laugh: and a gay horse-racing Anglomaniac Noblesse loudest of all.

Men, though never so thickly clad in dignities, sit not inaccessible to the influences of their time; especially men whose life is business;

There are Duports of deep scheme; Fréteaus, Sabatiers, of incontinent tongue: all nursed more or less on the milk of the Contrat Social.

and now nothing but a solid phlegmatic M. de Vergennes sits there, in dull matter of fact, like some dull punctual Clerk (which he originally was); admits what cannot be denied, let the remedy come whence it will. In him is no remedy; only clerklike “despatch of business” according to routine. The poor King, grown older yet hardly more experienced, must himself, with such no-faculty as he has, begin governing; wherein also his Queen will give help. Bright Queen, with her quick clear glances and impulses; clear, and even noble; but all too superficial, vehement-shallow, for that work!

Less chivalrous was Duke de Coigny, and yet not luckier: ‘We got into a real quarrel, Coigny and I,’ said King Louis; ‘but if he had even struck me, I could not have blamed him.’

Baron Besenval, with that frankness of speech which stamps the independent man, plainly assures her Majesty that it is frightful (affreux); ‘you go to bed, and are not sure but you shall rise impoverished on the morrow: one might as well be in Turkey.’ It is indeed a dog’s life.

How singular this perpetual distress of the royal treasury! And yet it is a thing not more incredible than undeniable. A thing mournfully true: the stumbling-block on which all Ministers successively stumble, and fall. Be it “want of fiscal genius,” or some far other want, there is the palpablest discrepancy between Revenue and Expenditure; a Deficit of the Revenue: you must “choke (combler) the Deficit,” or else it will swallow you!

Controller Joly de Fleury, who succeeded Necker, could do nothing with it; nothing but propose loans, which were tardily filled up; impose new taxes, unproductive of money, productive of clamour and discontent.

Vain seems human ingenuity.

Great is Bankruptcy: the great bottomless gulf into which all Falsehoods, public and private, do sink, disappearing; whither, from the first origin of them, they were all doomed. For Nature is true and not a lie. No lie you can speak or act but it will come, after longer or shorter circulation, like a Bill drawn on Nature’s Reality, and be presented there for payment,—with the answer, No effects. Pity only that it often had so long a circulation: that the original forger were so seldom he who bore the final smart of it! Lies, and the burden of evil they bring, are passed on; shifted from back to back, and from rank to rank; and so land ultimately on the dumb lowest rank, who with spade and mattock, with sore heart and empty wallet, daily come in contact with reality, and can pass the cheat no further.

Observe nevertheless how, by a just compensating law, if the lie with its burden (in this confused whirlpool of Society) sinks and is shifted ever downwards, then in return the distress of it rises ever upwards and upwards. Whereby, after the long pining and demi-starvation of those Twenty Millions, a Duke de Coigny and his Majesty come also to have their “real quarrel.” Such is the law of just Nature; bringing, though at long intervals, and were it only by Bankruptcy, matters round again to the mark.

Honour to Bankruptcy; ever righteous on the great scale, though in detail it is so cruel! Under all Falsehoods it works, unweariedly mining. No Falsehood, did it rise heaven-high and cover the world, but Bankruptcy, one day, will sweep it down, and make us free of it.

anon, invites some dedicating Poet or Poetaster to sing “this Assembly of the Notables and the Revolution that is preparing.”[53] Preparing indeed; and a matter to be sung,—only not till we have seen it, and what the issue of it is.

with spoiled blood and prospects; half-weary of a world which is more than half-weary of him, Monseigneur’s future is most questionable. Not in illumination and insight, not even in conflagration; but, as was said, “in dull smoke and ashes of outburnt sensualities,” does he live and digest.

These Privileged Classes have been used to tax; levying toll, tribute and custom, at all hands, while a penny was left: but to be themselves taxed? Of such Privileged persons, meanwhile, do these Notables, all but the merest fraction, consist. Headlong Calonne had given no heed to the “composition,” or judicious packing of them; but chosen such Notables as were really notable; trusting for the issue to off-hand ingenuity, good fortune, and eloquence that never yet failed. Headlong Controller-General! Eloquence can do much, but not all. Orpheus, with eloquence grown rhythmic, musical (what we call Poetry), drew iron tears from the cheek of Pluto: but by what witchery of rhyme or prose wilt thou from the pocket of Plutus draw gold?

The force of private intrigue, and then also the force of public opinion, grows so dangerous, confused!

a Rustic is represented convoking the poultry of his barnyard, with this opening address: ‘Dear animals, I have assembled you to advise me what sauce I shall dress you with;’ to which a Cock responding, ‘We don’t want to be eaten,’ is checked by ‘You wander from the point (Vous vous écartez de la question).’

worse men there have been, and better; but to thee also was allotted a task,—of raising the wind, and the winds; and thou hast done it.

Unhappy only that it took such talent and industry to gain the place; that to qualify for it hardly any talent or industry was left disposable! Looking now into his inner man, what qualification he may have, Loménie beholds, not without astonishment, next to nothing but vacuity and possibility. Principles or methods, acquirement outward or inward (for his very body is wasted, by hard tear and wear) he finds none; not so much as a plan, even an unwise one. Lucky, in these circumstances, that Calonne has had a plan! Calonne’s plan was gathered from Turgot’s and Necker’s by compilation; shall become Loménie’s by adoption. Not in vain has Loménie studied the working of the British Constitution; for he professes to have some Anglomania, of a sort.

There are things, as we said, which should not be dwelt on with minute close scrutiny: over hot coals you cannot glide too fast.

‘Tithe, that free-will offering of the piety of Christians’—‘Tithe,’ interrupted Duke la Rochefoucault, with the cold business-manner he has learned from the English, ‘that free-will offering of the piety of Christians; on which there are now forty-thousand lawsuits in this realm.’

The unquietest humour possesses all men; ferments, seeks issue, in pamphleteering, caricaturing, projecting, declaiming; vain jangling of thought, word and deed. It is Spiritual Bankruptcy, long tolerated; verging now towards Economical Bankruptcy, and become intolerable. For from the lowest dumb rank, the inevitable misery, as was predicted, has spread upwards. In every man is some obscure feeling that his position, oppressive or else oppressed, is a false one: all men, in one or the other acrid dialect, as assaulters or as defenders, must give vent to the unrest that is in them. Of such stuff national well-being, and the glory of rulers, is not made.

Loménie’s first Edicts are mere soothing ones: creation of Provincial Assemblies, “for apportioning the imposts,” when we get any; suppression of Corvées or statute-labour; alleviation of Gabelle. Soothing measures, recommended by the Notables; long clamoured for by all liberal men. Oil cast on the waters has been known to produce a good effect.

The lower classes, in this duel of Authority with Authority, Greek throttling Greek, have ceased to respect the City-Watch: Police-satellites are marked on the back with chalk (the M signifies mouchard, spy); they are hustled, hunted like feræ naturæ. Subordinate rural Tribunals send messengers of congratulation, of adherence. Their Fountain of Justice is becoming a Fountain of Revolt.

What will not people bless; in their extreme need?

The evil is considerable; but can he not remove it, can he not attack it? At lowest, he can attack the symptom of it: these rebellious Parlements he can attack, and perhaps remove. Much is dim to Loménie, but two things are clear: that such Parlementary duel with Royalty is growing perilous, nay internecine; above all, that money must be had.

But apart from exile, or other violent methods, is there not one method, whereby all things are tamed, even lions? The method of hunger! What if the Parlement’s supplies were cut off; namely its Lawsuits!

In a victorious Parlement, Counsellor Goeslard de Monsabert even denounces that “levying of the Second Twentieth on strict valuation;” and gets decree that the valuation shall not be strict,—not on the privileged classes.

To a shower of gold most things are penetrable.

For the rest, in such circumstances, the Successive Loan, very naturally, remains unfilled; neither, indeed, can that impost of the Second Twentieth, at least not on “strict valuation,” be levied to good purpose: “Lenders,” says Weber, in his hysterical vehement manner, “are afraid of ruin; tax-gatherers of hanging.” The very Clergy turn away their face: convoked in Extraordinary Assembly, they afford no gratuitous gift (don gratuit),—if it be not that of advice; here too instead of cash is clamour for States-General.

During all that hatching of the Plenary Court, while Lamoignon looked so mysterious, Besenval had kept asking him one question: Whether they had cash? To which as Lamoignon always answered (on the faith of Loménie) that the cash was safe, judicious Besenval rejoined that then all was safe. Nevertheless, the melancholy fact is, that the royal coffers are almost getting literally void of coin. Indeed, apart from all other things this “invitation to thinkers,” and the great change now at hand are enough to “arrest the circulation of capital,” and forward only that of pamphlets. A few thousand gold louis are now all of money or money’s worth that remains in the King’s Treasury.

an Edict concerning Payments (such was the soft title Rivarol had contrived for it): all payments at the Royal Treasury shall be made henceforth, three-fifths in Cash, and the remaining two-fifths—in Paper bearing interest!

But the effect on Paris, on the world generally? From the dens of Stock-brokerage, from the heights of Political Economy, of Neckerism and Philosophism; from all articulate and inarticulate throats, rise hootings and howlings, such as ear had not yet heard. Sedition itself may be imminent!

Flimsier mortal was seldom fated to do as weighty a mischief; to have a life as despicable-envied, an exit as frightful. Fired, as the phrase is, with ambition: blown, like a kindled rag, the sport of winds, not this way, not that way, but of all ways, straight towards such a powder-mine,—which he kindled! Let us pity the hapless Loménie; and forgive him; and, as soon as possible, forget him.

The City-watch can do nothing; hardly save its own skin: for the last twelve-month, as we have sometimes seen, it has been a kind of pastime to hunt the Watch. Besenval indeed is at hand with soldiers; but they have orders to avoid firing, and are not prompt to stir.

On Monday morning the explosion of petards began: and now it is near midnight of Wednesday; and the “wicker Mannequin” is to be buried,—apparently in the Antique fashion.

and there are soldiers come. Gloomy Lamoignon is not to die by conflagration, or this night; not yet for a year, and then by gunshot (suicidal or accidental is unknown).[105] Foiled Rascality burns its “Mannikin of osier,” under his windows; “tears up the sentry-box,” and rolls off: to try Brienne; to try Dubois Captain of the Watch. Now, however, all is bestirring itself; Gardes Françaises, Invalides, Horse-patrol: the Torch Procession is met with sharp shot, with the thrusting of bayonets, the slashing of sabres. Even Dubois makes a charge, with that Cavalry of his, and the cruelest charge of all: “there are a great many killed and wounded.” Not without clangour, complaint; subsequent criminal trials, and official persons dying of heartbreak![106] So, however, with steel-besom, Rascality is brushed back into its dim depths, and the streets are swept clear. Not for a century and half had Rascality ventured to step forth in this fashion; not for so long, showed its huge rude lineaments in the light of day. A Wonder and new Thing: as yet gamboling merely, in awkward Brobdingnag sport, not without quaintness; hardly in anger: yet in its huge half-vacant laugh lurks a shade of grimness,—which could unfold itself! However, the thinkers invited by Loménie are now far on with their pamphlets: States-General, on one plan or another, will infallibly meet; if not in January, as was once hoped, yet at latest in May. Old Duke de Richelieu, moribund in these autumn days, opens his eyes once more, murmuring, ‘What would Louis Fourteenth’ (whom he remembers) ‘have said!’—then closes them again, forever, before the evil time.

As good Archbishop Loménie was wont to say: ‘There are so many accidents; and it needs but one to save us.’—How many to destroy us?

What! To us also has hope reached; down even to us? Hunger and hardship are not to be eternal? The bread we extorted from the rugged glebe, and, with the toil of our sinews, reaped and ground, and kneaded into loaves, was not wholly for another, then; but we also shall eat of it, and be filled? Glorious news (answer the prudent elders), but all-too unlikely!

To which political phenomena add this economical one, that Trade is stagnant, and also Bread getting dear; for before the rigorous winter there was, as we said, a rigorous summer, with drought, and on the 13th of July with destructive hail. What a fearful day! all cried while that tempest fell. Alas, the next anniversary of it will be a worse.[118] Under such aspects is France electing National Representatives.

The incidents and specialties of these Elections belong not to Universal, but to Local or Parish History: for which reason let not the new troubles of Grenoble or Besancon; the bloodshed on the streets of Rennes, and consequent march thither of the Breton “Young Men” with Manifesto by their “Mothers, Sisters and Sweethearts;”[119] nor suchlike, detain us here. It is the same sad history everywhere; with superficial variations.

for the new popular force can use not only arguments but brickbats!

The plebeian heart too has red life in it, which changes not to paleness at glance even of you; and “the six hundred Breton gentlemen assembled in arms, for seventy-two hours, in the Cordeliers’ Cloister, at Rennes,”—have to come out again, wiser than they entered.

the Noblesse, with equal goodwill, finds it better to stick to Protests, to well-redacted “Cahiers of grievances,” and satirical writings and speeches.

“In all countries, in all times,” exclaims he departing, “the Aristocrats have implacably pursued every friend of the People; and with tenfold implacability, if such a one were himself born of the Aristocracy. It was thus that the last of the Gracchi perished, by the hands of the Patricians. But he, being struck with the mortal stab, flung dust towards heaven, and called on the Avenging Deities; and from this dust there was born Marius,—Marius not so illustrious for exterminating the Cimbri, as for overturning in Rome the tyranny of the Nobles.”[121] Casting up which new curious handful of dust (through the Printing-press), to breed what it can and may, Mirabeau stalks forth into the Third Estate.

But indeed, if Achilles, in the heroic ages, killed mutton, why should not Mirabeau, in the unheroic ones, measure broadcloth?

More authentic are his triumph-progresses through that disturbed district, with mob jubilee, flaming torches, “windows hired for two louis,” and voluntary guard of a hundred men... He has opened his far-sounding voice, the depths of his far-sounding soul; he can quell (such virtue is in a spoken word) the pride-tumults of the rich, the hunger-tumults of the poor; and wild multitudes move under him, as under the moon do billows of the sea: he has become a world compeller, and ruler over men.

Meanwhile such things, cheering as they are, tend little to cheer the national creditor, or indeed the creditor of any kind. In the midst of universal portentous doubt, what certainty can seem so certain as money in the purse, and the wisdom of keeping it there? Trading Speculation, Commerce of all kinds, has as far as possible come to a dead pause; and the hand of the industrious lies idle in his bosom. Frightful enough, when now the rigour of seasons has also done its part, and to scarcity of work is added scarcity of food!

actual existing quotity of persons: who, long reflected and reverberated through so many millions of heads, as in concave multiplying mirrors, become a whole Brigand World; and, like a kind of Supernatural Machinery wondrously move the Epos of the Revolution. The Brigands are here: the Brigands are there; the Brigands are coming! Not otherwise sounded the clang of Phoebus Apollo’s silver bow, scattering pestilence and pale terror; for this clang too was of the imagination; preternatural; and it too walked in formless immeasurability, having made itself like to the Night (νυκτὶ ἐοικώς.)!

These Brigands (as Turgot’s also were, fourteen years ago) have all been set on; enlisted, though without tuck of drum,—by Aristocrats, by Democrats, by D’Orléans, D’Artois, and enemies of the public weal.

the Brigands are clearly got to Paris, in considerable multitudes:[126] with sallow faces, lank hair (the true enthusiast complexion), with sooty rags; and also with large clubs, which they smite angrily against the pavement! These mingle in the Election tumult; would fain sign Guillotin’s Cahier, or any Cahier or Petition whatsoever, could they but write. Their enthusiast complexion, the smiting of their sticks bodes little good to any one; least of all to rich master-manufacturers of the Suburb Saint-Antoine, with whose workmen they consort.

Or was he only thought, and believed, to be heard saying it? By this long chafing and friction it would appear the National temper has got electric.

grim individuals, soon waxing to grim multitudes, and other multitudes crowding to see, beset that Paper-Warehouse; demonstrate, in loud ungrammatical language (addressed to the passions too), the insufficiency of sevenpence halfpenny a-day. The City-watch cannot dissipate them; broils arise and bellowings; Réveillon, at his wits’ end, entreats the Populace, entreats the authorities. Besenval, now in active command, Commandant of Paris, does, towards evening, to Réveillon’s earnest prayer, send some thirty Gardes Françaises. These clear the street, happily without firing; and take post there for the night in hope that it may be all over.[127]

Not so: on the morrow it is far worse.

two cartloads of paving-stones, that happened to pass that way” have been seized as a visible godsend. Another detachment of Gardes Françaises must be sent; Besenval and the Colonel taking earnest counsel. Then still another; they hardly, with bayonets and menace of bullets, penetrate to the spot. What a sight! A street choked up, with lumber, tumult and the endless press of men. A Paper-Warehouse eviscerated by axe and fire: mad din of Revolt; musket-volleys responded to by yells, by miscellaneous missiles; by tiles raining from roof and window,—tiles, execrations and slain men!

The Gardes Françaises like it not, but have to persevere. All day it continues, slackening and rallying; the sun is sinking, and Saint-Antoine has not yielded. The City flies hither and thither: alas, the sound of that musket-volleying booms into the far dining-rooms of the Chaussée d’Antin; alters the tone of the dinner-gossip there. Captain Dampmartin leaves his wine; goes out with a friend or two, to see the fighting. Unwashed men growl on him, with murmurs of ‘À bas les Aristocrates (Down with the Aristocrats);’ and insult the cross of St. Louis? They elbow him, and hustle him; but do not pick his pocket;—as indeed at Réveillon’s too there was not the slightest stealing.[128]

At fall of night, as the thing will not end, Besenval takes his resolution: orders out the Gardes Suisses with two pieces of artillery. The Swiss Guards shall proceed thither; summon that rabble to depart, in the King’s name. If disobeyed, they shall load their artillery with grape-shot, visibly to the general eye; shall again summon; if again disobeyed, fire,—and keep firing “till the last man” be in this manner blasted off, and the street clear. With which spirited resolution, as might have been hoped, the business is got ended. At sight of the lit matches, of the foreign red-coated Switzers, Saint-Antoine dissipates; hastily, in the shades of dusk. There is an encumbered street; there are “from four to five hundred” dead men. Unfortunate Réveillon has found shelter in the Bastille; does therefrom, safe behind stone bulwarks, issue, plaint, protestation, explanation, for the next month. Bold Besenval has thanks from all the respectable Parisian classes; but finds no special notice taken of him at Versailles,—a thing the man of true worth is used to.[

Poor Lackalls, all betoiled, besoiled, encrusted into dim defacement; into whom nevertheless the breath of the Almighty has breathed a living soul! To them it is clear only that eleutheromaniac Philosophism has yet baked no bread; that Patrioti Committee-men will level down to their own level, and no lower. Brigands, or whatever they might be, it was bitter earnest with them. They bury their dead with the title of Défenseurs de la Patrie, Martyrs of the good Cause.

Oh, one might weep like Xerxes:—So many serried rows sit perched there; like winged creatures, alighted out of Heaven: all these, and so many more that follow them, shall have wholly fled aloft again, vanishing into the blue Deep; and the memory of this day still be fresh.

and from this present date, if one might prophesy, some two centuries of it still to fight! Two centuries; hardly less; before Democracy go through its due, most baleful, stages of Quackocracy; and a pestilential World be burnt up, and have begun to grow green and young again.

This day, sentence of death is pronounced on Shams; judgment of resuscitation, were it but far off, is pronounced on Realities. This day it is declared aloud, as with a Doom-trumpet, that a Lie is unbelievable. Believe that, stand by that, if more there be not; and let what thing or things soever will follow it follow. “Ye can no other; God be your help!” So spake a greater than any of you; opening his Chapter of World-History.

No symbolic Ark, like the old Hebrews, do these men bear: yet with them too is a Covenant; they too preside at a new Era in the History of Men. The whole Future is there, and Destiny dim-brooding over it; in the hearts and unshaped thoughts of these men, it lies illegible, inevitable. Singular to think: they have it in them; yet not they, not mortal, only the Eye above can read it,—as it shall unfold itself, in fire and thunder, of siege, and field-artillery; in the rustling of battle-banners, the tramp of hosts, in the glow of burning cities, the shriek of strangled nations!

for is not every meanest Day “the conflux of two Eternities!”

A fellow of infinite shrewdness, wit, nay humour; one of the sprightliest clearest souls in all these millions. Thou poor Camille, say of thee what they may, it were but falsehood to pretend one did not almost love thee, thou headlong lightly-sparkling man!

Which of these Six Hundred individuals, in plain white cravat, that have come up to regenerate France, might one guess would become their king? For a king or leader they, as all bodies of men, must have: be their work what it may, there is one man there who, by character, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it; that man, as future not yet elected king, walks there among the rest.

One ancient Riquetti, in mad fulfilment of a mad vow, chains two Mountains together; and the chain, with its “iron star of five rays,” is still to be seen. May not a modern Riquetti unchain so much, and set it drifting,—which also shall be seen?

The idea, the faculty of another man he can make his; the man himself he can make his. ‘All reflex and echo (tout de reflet et de réverbère)!’ snarls old Mirabeau, who can see, but will not. Crabbed old Friend of Men! it is his sociality, his aggregative nature; and will now be the quality of all for him. In that forty-years “struggle against despotism,” he has gained the glorious faculty of self-help, and yet not lost the glorious natural gift of fellowship, of being helped. Rare union! This man can live self-sufficing—yet lives also in the life of other men; can make men love him, work with him: a born king of men!

This is no man of system, then; he is only a man of instincts and insights. A man nevertheless who will glare fiercely on any object; and see through it, and conquer it: for he has intellect, he has will, force beyond other men. A man not with logic-spectacles; but with an eye! Unhappily without Decalogue, moral Code or Theorem of any fixed sort; yet not without a strong living Soul in him, and Sincerity there: a Reality, not an Artificiality, not a Sham! And so he, having struggled “forty years against despotism,” and “made away with all formulas,” shall now become the spokesman of a Nation bent to do the same. For is it not precisely the struggle of France also to cast off despotism; to make away with her old formulas,—having found them naught, worn out, far from the reality? She will make away with such formulas;—and even go bare, if need be, till she have found new ones.

Forty years of that smouldering, with foul fire-damp and vapour enough, then victory over that;—and like a burning mountain he blazes heaven-high; and, for twenty-three resplendent months, pours out, in flame and molten fire-torrents, all that is in him, the Pharos and Wonder-sign of an amazed Europe;—and then lies hollow, cold forever! Pass on, thou questionable Gabriel Honoré, the greatest of them all: in the whole National Deputies, in the whole Nation, there is none like and none second to thee.

Shall we say, that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man, under thirty, in spectacles; his eyes (were the glasses off) troubled, careful; with upturned face, snuffing dimly the uncertain future-time; complexion of a multiplex atrabiliar colour, the final shade of which may be the pale sea-green.[132] That greenish-coloured (verdâtre) individual is an Advocate of Arras; his name is Maximilien Robespierre.

But he begged our famed Necklace-Cardinal, Rohan, the patron, to let him depart thence, and resign in favour of a younger brother.

With a strict painful mind, an understanding small but clear and ready, he grew in favour with official persons, who could foresee in him an excellent man of business, happily quite free from genius.

of business, happily quite free from genius. The Bishop, therefore, taking counsel, appoints him Judge of his diocese; and he faithfully does justice to the people: till behold, one day, a culprit comes whose crime merits hanging; and the strict-minded Max must abdicate, for his conscience will not permit the dooming of any son of Adam to die. A strict-minded, strait-laced man! A man unfit for Revolutions?

His hair is grizzled, though he is still young: convictions, beliefs, placid-unalterable are in that man; not hindmost of them, belief in himself.

There are so many of them young. Till thirty the Spartans did not suffer a man to marry: but how many men here under thirty; coming to produce not one sufficient citizen, but a nation and a world of such! The old to heal up rents; the young to remove rubbish:—which latter, is it not, indeed, the task here?

Singular Guillotin, respectable practitioner: doomed by a satiric destiny to the strangest immortal glory that ever kept obscure mortal from his resting-place, the bosom of oblivion!

This is the product of Guillotin’s endeavours, gained not without meditation and reading; which product popular gratitude or levity christens by a feminine derivative name, as if it were his daughter: La Guillotine! ‘With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais sauter la tête) in a twinkling, and you have no pain;’—whereat they all laugh.[135] Unfortunate Doctor! For two-and-twenty years he, unguillotined, shall hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive Cæsar’s.

Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beautiful Philosophising, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thinness, ends in foul thick confusion—of Presidency, Mayorship, diplomatic Officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlasting Darkness! Far was it to descend from the heavenly Galaxy to the Drapeau Rouge: beside that fatal dung-heap, on that last hell-day, thou must “tremble,” though only with cold, “de froid.”

Speculation is not practice: to be weak is not so miserable; but to be weaker than our task.

Wo the day when they mounted thee, a peaceable pedestrian, on that wild Hippogriff of a Democracy; which, spurning the firm earth, nay lashing at the very stars, no yet known Astolpho could have ridden!

In the Commons Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of Letters; three hundred and seventy-four Lawyers;[136] and at least one Clergyman:

passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-conceit. If indeed that can be called a passion, which, in its independent concentrated greatness, seems to have soared into transcendentalism; and to sit there with a kind of godlike indifference, and look down on passion! He is the man, and wisdom shall die with him.

The victorious cause pleased the gods, the vanquished one pleased Sieyes

this question, put in a voice of thunder: What are you doing in God’s fair Earth and Task-garden; where whosoever is not working is begging or stealing? Wo, wo to themselves and to all, if they can only answer: Collecting tithes, Preserving game!

There are Liancourt, and La Rochefoucault; the liberal Anglomaniac Dukes. There is a filially pious Lally; a couple of liberal Lameths. Above all, there is a Lafayette; whose name shall be Cromwell-Grandison, and fill the world. Many a “formula” has this Lafayette too made away with; yet not all formulas. He sticks by the Washington-formula; and by that he will stick;—and hang by it, as by sure bower-anchor hangs and swings the tight war-ship, which, after all changes of wildest weather and water, is found still hanging. Happy for him; be it glorious or not! Alone of all Frenchmen he has a theory of the world, and right mind to conform thereto; he can become a hero and perfect character, were it but the hero of one idea.

it is Viscomte Mirabeau; named oftener Mirabeau Tonneau (Barrel Mirabeau), on account of his rotundity, and the quantities of strong liquor he contains.

There then walks our French Noblesse. All in the old pomp of chivalry: and yet, alas, how changed from the old position; drifted far down from their native latitude, like Arctic icebergs got into the Equatorial sea, and fast thawing there! Once these Chivalry Duces (Dukes, as they are still named) did actually lead the world,—were it only towards battle-spoil, where lay the world’s best wages then: moreover, being the ablest Leaders going, they had their lion’s share, those Duces; which none could grudge them. But now, when so many Looms, improved Ploughshares, Steam-Engines and Bills of Exchange have been invented; and, for battle-brawling itself, men hire Drill-Sergeants at eighteen-pence a-day,—what mean these goldmantled Chivalry Figures, walking there “in black-velvet cloaks,” in high-plumed “hats of a feudal cut”? Reeds shaken in the wind!

nay thou shalt have a Cardinal’s Hat, and plush and glory; but alas, also, in the longrun—mere oblivion, like the rest of us; and six feet of earth!

He will do and suffer strange things; and will become surely one of the strangest things ever seen, or like to be seen. A man living in falsehood, and on falsehood; yet not what you can call a false man: there is the specialty! It will be an enigma for future ages, one may hope: hitherto such a product of Nature and Art was possible only for this age of ours,—Age of Paper, and of the Burning of Paper.

has not this unfortunate Clergy also drifted in the Time-stream, far from its native latitude? An anomalous mass of men; of whom the whole world has already a dim understanding that it can understand nothing. They were once a Priesthood, interpreters of Wisdom, revealers of the Holy that is in Man: a true Clerus (or Inheritance of God on Earth): but now?—They pass silently, with such Cahiers as they have been able to redact; and none cries, God bless them.

Instead of Vive la Reine, voices insult her with Vive d’Orléans. Of her queenly beauty little remains except its stateliness; not now gracious, but haughty, rigid, silently enduring. With a most mixed feeling, wherein joy has no part, she resigns herself to a day she hoped never to have seen. Poor Marie Antoinette; with thy quick noble instincts; vehement glancings, vision all-too fitful narrow for the work thou hast to do! O there are tears in store for thee; bitterest wailings, soft womanly meltings, though thou hast the heart of an imperial Theresa’s Daughter. Thou doomed one, shut thy eyes on the future!—

And so, in stately Procession, have passed the Elected of France. Some towards honour and quick fire-consummation; most towards dishonour; not a few towards massacre, confusion, emigration, desperation: all towards Eternity!

Probably the strangest Body of Men, if we consider well, that ever met together on our Planet on such an errand.

To the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man is properly an Accident under the sky.

Man is without Duty round him; except it be “to make the Constitution.” He is without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world.

What further or better belief can be said to exist in these Twelve Hundred? Belief in high-plumed hats of a feudal cut; in heraldic scutcheons; in the divine right of Kings, in the divine right of Game-destroyers. Belief, or what is still worse, canting half-belief; or worst of all, mere Macchiavellic pretence-of-belief,—in consecrated dough-wafers, and the godhood of a poor old Italian Man! Nevertheless in that immeasurable Confusion and Corruption, which struggles there so blindly to become less confused and corrupt, there is, as we said, this one salient point of a New Life discernible: the deep fixed Determination to have done with Shams.

How has the Heaven’s light, oftentimes in this Earth, to clothe itself in thunder and electric murkiness; and descend as molten lightning, blasting, if purifying! Nay is it not rather the very murkiness, and atmospheric suffocation, that brings the lightning and the light? The new Evangel, as the old had been, was it to be born in the Destruction of a World?

We remark only that, as his Majesty, on finishing the speech, put on his plumed hat, and the Noblesse according to custom imitated him, our Tiers-Etat Deputies did mostly, not without a shade of fierceness, in like manner clap-on, and even crush on their slouched hats; and stand there awaiting the issue.[141] Thick buzz among them, between majority and minority of Couvrezvous, Décrouvrez-vous (Hats off, Hats on)! To which his Majesty puts end, by taking off his own royal hat again.

“France, in this same National Assembly of hers, has got something, nay something great, momentous, indispensable, cannot be doubted; yet still the question were: Specially what?

The States-General, created and conflated by the passionate effort of the whole nation, is there as a thing high and lifted up. Hope, jubilating, cries aloud that it will prove a miraculous Brazen Serpent in the Wilderness; whereon whosoever looks, with faith and obedience, shall be healed of all woes and serpent-bites.

We may answer, it will at least prove a symbolic Banner; round which the exasperating complaining Twenty-Five Millions, otherwise isolated and without power, may rally, and work—what it is in them to work. If battle must be the work, as one cannot help expecting, then shall it be a battle-banner (say, an Italian Gonfalon, in its old Republican Carroccio); and shall tower up, car-borne, shining in the wind: and with iron tongue peal forth many a signal.

For what is Majesty but the Delegate of the Nation; delegated, and bargained with (even rather tightly),—in some very singular posture of affairs, which Jean Jacques has not fixed the date of?

But the Noblesse and Clergy, it would seem, have retired to their two separate Apartments, or Halls; and are there “verifying their powers,” not in a conjoint but in a separate capacity.

Double representation, and all else hitherto gained, were otherwise futile, null. Doubtless, the “powers must be verified;”—doubtless, the Commission, the electoral Documents of your Deputy must be inspected by his brother Deputies, and found valid: it is the preliminary of all.

It must be resisted; wise was that maxim, Resist the beginnings! Nay were resistance unadvisable, even dangerous, yet surely pause is very natural: pause, with Twenty-five Millions behind you, may become resistance enough.—

The inorganic mass of Commons Deputies will restrict itself to a “system of inertia,” and for the present remain inorganic.

For six weeks their history is of the kind named barren; which indeed, as Philosophy knows, is often the fruitfulest of all.

These were their still creation-days; wherein they sat incubating! In fact, what they did was to do nothing, in a judicious manner. Daily the inorganic body reassembles; regrets that they cannot get organisation, “verification of powers in common, and begin regenerating France. Headlong motions may be made, but let such be repressed; inertia alone is at once unpunishable and unconquerable.

Six Hundred inorganic individuals, essential for its regeneration and salvation, sit there, on their elliptic benches, longing passionately towards life; in painful durance; like souls waiting to be born.

At times shall come an inspiration from royal Mirabeau: he is nowise yet recognised as royal; nay he was “groaned at,” when his name was first mentioned: but he is struggling towards recognition

the Commons having called their Eldest to the chair, and furnished him with young stronger-lunged assistants,—can speak articulately; and, in audible lamentable words, declare, as we said, that they are an inorganic body, longing to become organic. Letters arrive; but an inorganic body cannot open letters; they lie on the table unopened.

the poor man looks desolately towards a nameless lot. And this States-General, that could make us an age of gold, is forced to stand motionless; cannot get its powers verified! All industry necessarily languishes, if it be not that of making motions.

In the Palais Royal there has been erected, apparently by subscription, a kind of Wooden Tent (en planches de bois);[144]—most convenient; where select Patriotism can now redact resolutions, deliver harangues, with comfort, let the weather but as it will.

Lively is that Satan-at-Home! On his table, on his chair, in every café, stands a patriotic orator; a crowd round him within; a crowd listening from without, open-mouthed, through open door and window; with “thunders of applause for every sentiment of more than common hardiness.”

Finally, on the 27th day of May, Mirabeau, judging the time now nearly come, proposes that “the inertia cease;” that, leaving the Noblesse to their own stiff ways, the Clergy be summoned, “in the name of the God of Peace,” to join the Commons, and begin.

This Third Estate will get in motion, with the force of all France in it; Clergy-machinery with Noblesse-machinery, which were to serve as beautiful counter-balances and drags, will be shamefully dragged after it,—and take fire along with it.

we meanwhile getting forward Swiss Regiments, and a “hundred pieces of field-artillery.” This is what the Œil-de-Bœuf, for its part, resolves on.

they have now, on this 17th day of June, determined that their name is not Third Estate, but—National Assembly!They, then, are the Nation? Triumvirate of Princes, Queen, refractory Noblesse and Clergy, what, then, are you? A most deep question;—scarcely answerable in living political dialects.

Now surely were the time for a “god from the machine;” there is a nodus worthy of one. The only question is, Which god? Shall it be Mars de Broglie, with his hundred pieces of cannon?—Not yet, answers prudence; so soft, irresolute is King Louis. Let it be Messenger Mercury, our Supreme Usher de Brézé.

Your Third Estate, self-styled “National Assembly,” shall suddenly see itself extruded from its Hall, by carpenters, in this dexterous way; and reduced to do nothing, not even to meet, or articulately lament,—till Majesty, with Séance Royale and new miracles, be ready! In this manner shall De Brézé, as Mercury ex machinâ, intervene;

Before supper, this night, he writes to President Bailly, a new Letter, to be delivered shortly after dawn tomorrow, in the King’s name. Which Letter, however, Bailly in the pride of office, will merely crush together into his pocket, like a bill he does not mean to pay.

It is shut, this Salle; occupied by Gardes Françaises. ‘Where is your Captain?’ The Captain shows his royal order: workmen, he is grieved to say, are all busy setting up the platform for his Majesty’s Séance; most unfortunately, no admission; admission, at furthest, for President and Secretaries to bring away papers, which the joiners might destroy!—President Bailly enters with Secretaries; and returns bearing papers: alas, within doors, instead of patriotic eloquence, there is now no noise but hammering, sawing, and operative screeching and rumbling! A profanation without parallel.

Six hundred right-hands rise with President Bailly’s, to take God above to witness that they will not separate for man below, but will meet in all places, under all circumstances, wheresoever two or three can get together, till they have made the Constitution. Made the Constitution, Friends! That is a long task.

Barndoor poultry fly cackling: but National Deputies turn round, lion-faced; and, with uplifted right-hand, swear an Oath that makes the four corners of France tremble.

President Bailly has covered himself with honour; which shall become rewards. The National Assembly is now doubly and trebly the Nation’s Assembly; not militant, martyred only, but triumphant; insulted, and which could not be insulted. Paris disembogues itself once more, to witness, “with grim looks,” the Séance Royale:[150] which, by a new felicity, is postponed till Tuesday. The Hundred and Forty-nine, and even with Bishops among them, all in processional mass, have had free leisure to march off, and solemnly join the Commons sitting waiting in their Church. The Commons welcomed them with shouts, with embracings, nay with tears;[151] for it is growing a life-and-death matter now.

Which Five-and-Thirty Articles, adds his Majesty again rising, if the Three Orders most unfortunately cannot agree together to effect them, I myself will effect: ‘seul je ferai le bien de mes peuples,’—which being interpreted may signify, You, contentious Deputies of the States-General, have probably not long to be here!

This is the determination of the royal breast: pithy and clear. And herewith King, retinue, Noblesse, majority of Clergy file out, as if the whole matter were satisfactorily completed.

These file out; through grim-silent seas of people. Only the Commons Deputies file not out; but stand there in gloomy silence, uncertain what they shall do. One man of them is certain; one man of them discerns and dares! It is now that King Mirabeau starts to the Tribune, and lifts up his lion-voice. Verily a word in season; for, in such scenes, the moment is the mother of ages! Had not Gabriel Honoré been there,—one can well fancy, how the Commons Deputies, affrighted at the perils which now yawned dim all round them, and waxing ever paler in each other’s paleness, might very naturally, one after one, have glided off; and the whole course of European History have been different!

But he is there. List to the brool of that royal forest-voice; sorrowful, low; fast swelling to a roar! Eyes kindle at the glance of his eye:—National Deputies were missioned by a Nation; they have sworn an Oath; they—but lo! while the lion’s voice roars loudest, what Apparition is this?

Apparition of Mercurius de Brézé, muttering somewhat!—‘Speak out,’ cry several.—‘Messieurs,’ shrills De Brézé, repeating himself, ‘You have heard the King’s orders!’—Mirabeau glares on him with fire-flashing face; shakes the black lion’s mane: ‘Yes, Monsieur, we have heard what the King was advised to say: and you who cannot be the interpreter of his orders to the States-General; you, who have neither place nor right of speech here; you are not the man to remind us of it. Go, Monsieur, tell these who sent you that we are here by the will of the People, and that nothing shall send us hence but the force of bayonets!’

But what does the Œil-de-Bœuf, now when De Brézé shivers back thither? Despatch that same force of bayonets? Not so: the seas of people still hang multitudinous, intent on what is passing; nay rush and roll, loud-billowing, into the Courts of the Château itself; for a report has risen that Necker is to be dismissed. Worst of all, the Gardes Françaises seem indisposed to act: “two Companies of them do not fire when ordered!”[

Instead of soldiers, the Œil-de-Bœuf sends—carpenters, to take down the platform. Ineffectual shift! In few instants, the very carpenters cease wrenching and knocking at their platform; stand on it, hammer in hand, and listen open-mouthed.[157] The Third Estate is decreeing that it is, was, and will be, nothing but a National Assembly; and now, moreover, an inviolable one, all members of it inviolable: “infamous, traitorous, towards the Nation, and guilty of capital crime, is any person, body-corporate, tribunal, court or commission that now or henceforth, during the present session or after it, shall dare to pursue, interrogate, arrest, or cause to be arrested, detain or cause to be detained, any,” &c. &c. “on whose part soever the same be commanded.”[158] Which done, one can wind up with this comfortable reflection from Abbé Sieyes: ‘Messieurs, you are today what you were yesterday.’

Folly is that wisdom which is wise only behindhand.

Few months ago these Thirty-five Concessions had filled France with a rejoicing, which might have lasted for several years. Now it is unavailing, the very mention of it slighted; Majesty’s express orders set at nought.

All France is in a roar; a sea of persons, estimated at “ten thousand,” whirls “all this day in the Palais Royal.”[159] The remaining Clergy, and likewise some Forty-eight Noblesse, D’Orléans among them, have now forthwith gone over to the victorious Commons; by whom, as is natural, they are received “with acclamation.”

The Third Estate triumphs; Versailles Town shouting round it; ten thousand whirling all day in the Palais Royal; and all France standing a-tiptoe, not unlike whirling! Let the Œil-de-Bœuf look to it. As for King Louis, he will swallow his injuries; will temporise, keep silence; will at all costs have present peace. It was Tuesday the 23d of June, when he spoke that peremptory royal mandate; and the week is not done till he has written to the remaining obstinate Noblesse, that they also must oblige him, and give in. D’Espréménil rages his last; Barrel Mirabeau “breaks his sword,” making a vow,—which he might as well have kept. The “Triple Family” is now therefore complete; the third erring brother, the Noblesse, having joined it;—erring but pardonable; soothed, so far as possible, by sweet eloquence from President Bailly.

So triumphs the Third Estate; and States-General are become National Assembly; and all France may sing Te Deum.

By wise inertia, and wise cessation of inertia, great victory has been gained.

It is the last night of June: all night you meet nothing on the streets of Versailles but “men running with torches” with shouts of jubilation. From the 2nd of May when they kissed the hand of Majesty, to this 30th of June when men run with torches, we count seven weeks complete. For seven weeks the National Carroccio has stood far-seen, ringing many a signal; and, so much having now gathered round it, may hope to stand.

Mercury descended in vain; now has the time come for Mars.

But now, above all, while the hungry food-year, which runs from August to August, is getting older; becoming more and more a famine-year?

Frightful enough to look upon; but what to hear of, reverberated through Twenty-five Millions of suspicious minds!

At Marseilles, many weeks ago, the Townsmen have taken arms; for “suppressing of Brigands,” and other purposes: the military commandant may make of it what he will. Elsewhere, everywhere, could not the like be done?

Your National Assembly, stopped short in its Constitutional labours, may fatigue the royal ear with addresses and remonstrances: those cannon of ours stand duly levelled; those troops are here.

The Parisians resist? scornfully cry Messeigneurs. As a meal-mob may! They have sat quiet, these five generations, submitting to all. Their Mercier declared, in these very years, that a Parisian revolt was henceforth “impossible.”[162] Stand by the royal Declaration, of the Twenty-third of June. The Nobles of France, valorous, chivalrous as of old, will rally round us with one heart;—and as for this which you call Third Estate, and which we call canaille of unwashed Sansculottes, of Patelins, Scribblers, factious Spouters,—brave Broglie, “with a whiff of grapeshot (salve de canons),” if need be, will give quick account of it. Thus reason they: on their cloudy Ida; hidden from men,—men also hidden from them.

Good is grapeshot, Messeigneurs, on one condition: that the shooter also were made of metal! But unfortunately he is made of flesh;

your hired shooter has instincts, feelings, even a kind of thought. It is his kindred, bone of his bone, this same canaille that shall be whiffed; he has brothers in it, a father and mother,—

The soldier, who has seen his pay stolen by rapacious Foulons, his blood wasted by Soubises, Pompadours, and the gates of promotion shut inexorably on him if he were not born noble,—is himself not without griefs against you. Your cause is not the soldier’s cause; but, as would seem, your own only, and no other god’s nor man’s.

Neither have the Gardes Françaises, the best regiment of the line, shown any promptitude for street-firing lately. They returned grumbling from Réveillon’s; and have not burnt a single cartridge since; nay, as we saw, not even when bid.

Consigned to their barracks, the Gardes Françaises do but form a “Secret Association,” an Engagement not to act against the National Assembly. Debauched by Valadi the Pythagorean; debauched by money and women! cry Besenval and innumerable others. Debauched by what you will, or in need of no debauching, behold them, long files of them, their consignment broken, arrive, headed by their Sergeants, on the 26th day of June, at the Palais Royal! Welcomed with vivats, with presents, and a pledge of patriot liquor; embracing and embraced; declaring in words that the cause of France is their cause! Next day and the following days the like. What is singular too, except this patriot humour, and breaking of their consignment, they behave otherwise with “the most rigorous accuracy.”

Why new military force was not called out? New military force was called out. New military force did arrive, full gallop, with drawn sabre: but the people gently “laid hold of their bridles;” the dragoons sheathed their swords; lifted their caps by way of salute, and sat like mere statues of dragoons,—except indeed that a drop of liquor being brought them, they “drank to the King and Nation with the greatest cordiality.”

And now, ask in return, why Messeigneurs and Broglie the great god of war, on seeing these things, did not pause, and take some other course, any other course?

Pride, which goes before a fall; wrath, if not reasonable, yet pardonable, most natural, had hardened their hearts and heated their heads; so, with imbecility and violence (ill-matched pair), they rush to seek their hour.

The twelfth July morning is Sunday; the streets are all placarded with an enormous-sized De par le Roi, “inviting peaceable citizens to remain within doors,” to feel no alarm, to gather in no crowd.

Besenval is with them. Swiss Guards of his are already in the Champs Elysées, with four pieces of artillery.

Have the destroyers descended on us, then? From the Bridge of Sèvres to utmost Vincennes, from Saint-Denis to the Champ-de-Mars, we are begirt! Alarm, of the vague unknown, is in every heart. The Palais Royal has become a place of awestruck interjections, silent shakings of the head:

Are these troops verily come out “against Brigands”? Where are the Brigands? What mystery is in the wind?—Hark! a human voice reporting articulately the Job’s-news: Necker, People’s Minister, Saviour of France, is dismissed. Impossible; incredible! Treasonous to the public peace! Such a voice ought to be choked in the water-works;[171]—had not the news-bringer quickly fled

We have a new Ministry: Broglie the War-god; Aristocrat Bréteuil; Foulon who said the people might eat grass!

Rumour, therefore, shall arise; in the Palais Royal, and in broad France. Paleness sits on every face; confused tremor and fremescence; waxing into thunder-peals, of Fury stirred on by Fear.

But see Camille Desmoulins, from the Café de Foy, rushing out, sibylline in face; his hair streaming, in each hand a pistol! He springs to a table: the Police satellites are eyeing him; alive they shall not take him, not they alive him alive. This time he speaks without stammering:—Friends, shall we die like hunted hares? Like sheep hounded into their pinfold; bleating for mercy, where is no mercy, but only a whetted knife? The hour is come; the supreme hour of Frenchman and Man; when Oppressors are to try conclusions with Oppressed; and the word is, swift Death, or Deliverance forever. Let such hour be well-come! Us, meseems, one cry only befits: To Arms! Let universal Paris, universal France, as with the throat of the whirlwind, sound only: To arms!—‘To arms!’ yell responsive the innumerable voices: like one great voice, as of a Demon yelling from the air: for all faces wax fire-eyed, all hearts burn up into madness. In such, or fitter words,[172] does Camille evoke the Elemental Powers, in this great moment.—Friends, continues Camille, some rallying sign! Cockades; green ones;—the colour of hope!—As with the flight of locusts, these green tree leaves; green ribands from the neighbouring shops; all green things are snatched, and made cockades of. Camille descends from his table, “stifled with embraces, wetted with tears;” has a bit of green riband handed him; sticks it in his hat.

France, so long shaken and wind-parched, is probably at the right inflammable point.—

In this manner march they, a mixed, continually increasing multitude; armed with axes, staves and miscellanea; grim, many-sounding, through the streets. Be all Theatres shut; let all dancing, on planked floor, or on the natural greensward, cease! Instead of a Christian Sabbath, and feast of guinguette tabernacles, it shall be a Sorcerer’s Sabbath; and Paris, gone rabid, dance,—with the Fiend for piper!

Victorious Lambesc, in this his second or Tuileries charge, succeeds but in overturning (call it not slashing, for he struck with the flat of his sword) one man, a poor old schoolmaster, most pacifically tottering there; and is driven out, by barricade of chairs, by flights of “bottles and glasses,” by execrations in bass voice and treble. Most delicate is the mob-queller’s vocation; wherein Too-much may be as bad as Not-enough.

Counsel dwells not under the plumed hat.

The Six-and-twenty Town-Councillors, with their long gowns, have ducked under (into the raging chaos);—shall never emerge more. Besenval is painfully wriggling himself out, to the Champ-de-Mars; he must sit there “in the cruelest uncertainty:” courier after courier may dash off for Versailles; but will bring back no answer, can hardly bring himself back. For the roads are all blocked with batteries and pickets, with floods of carriages arrested for examination: such was Broglie’s one sole order; the Œil-de-Bœuf, hearing in the distance such mad din, which sounded almost like invasion, will before all things keep its own head whole. A new Ministry, with, as it were, but one foot in the stirrup, cannot take leaps. Mad Paris is abandoned altogether to itself.

Use and wont will now no longer direct any man; each man, with what of originality he has, must begin thinking; or following those that think. Seven hundred thousand individuals, on the sudden, find all their old paths, old ways of acting and deciding, vanish from under their feet. And so there go they, with clangour and terror, they know not as yet whether running, swimming or flying,—headlong into the New Era.

The working man has become a fighting man; has one want only: that of arms. The industry of all crafts has paused;—except it be the smith’s, fiercely hammering pikes;

“on les pendit, they hanged them.”[175] Brief is the word; not without significance, be it true or untrue!

Our Parisian Militia,—which some think it were better to name National Guard,—is prospering as heart could wish. It promised to be forty-eight thousand; but will in few hours double and quadruple that number: invincible, if we had only arms!

O poor mortals, how ye make this Earth bitter for each other; this fearful and wonderful Life fearful and horrible; and Satan has his place in all hearts! Such agonies and ragings and wailings ye have, and have had, in all times:—to be buried all, in so deep silence; and the salt sea is not swoln with your tears.

Great meanwhile is the moment, when tidings of Freedom reach us; when the long-enthralled soul, from amid its chains and squalid stagnancy, arises, were it still only in blindness and bewilderment, and swears by Him that made it, that it will be free! Free? Understand that well, it is the deep commandment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be free. Freedom is the one purport, wisely aimed at, or unwisely, of all man’s struggles, toilings and sufferings, in this Earth. Yes, supreme is such a moment (if thou have known it): first vision as of a flame-girt Sinai, in this our waste Pilgrimage,—which thenceforth wants not its pillar of cloud by day, and pillar of fire by night! Something it is even,—nay, something considerable, when the chains have grown corrosive, poisonous, to be free “from oppression by our fellow-man.” Forward, ye maddened sons of France; be it towards this destiny or towards that! Around you is but starvation, falsehood, corruption and the clam of death. Where ye are is no abiding.

Commandant Besenval, in the Champ-de-Mars, has worn out these sorrowful hours Insurrection all round; his men melting away! From Versailles, to the most pressing messages, comes no answer; or once only some vague word of answer which is worse than none. A Council of Officers can decide merely that there is no decision: Colonels inform him, “weeping,” that they do not think their men will fight.

war-god Broglie sits yonder, inaccessible in his Olympus; does not descend terror-clad, does not produce his whiff of grapeshot; sends no orders.

Truly, in the Château of Versailles all seems mystery: in the Town of Versailles, were we there, all is rumour, alarm and indignation.

It has sent solemn Deputation over to the Château, with entreaty to have these troops withdrawn. In vain: his Majesty, with a singular composure, invites us to be busy rather with our own duty, making the Constitution!

with an eye too probably to the Salle des Menus,—were it not for the “grim-looking countenances” that crowd all avenues there.[177] Be firm, ye National Senators; the cynosure of a firm, grim-looking people!

He is the Brother of that Pompignan who meditated lamentably on the Book of Lamentations:

Saves-voux pourquoi Jérémie

Se lamentait toute sa vie?

C’est qu’il prévoyait

Que Pompignan le traduirait!

If ordered to fire, they would, he imagines, turn their cannon against himself.

Unfortunate old military gentlemen, it is your hour, not of glory! Old Marquis de Launay too, of the Bastille, has pulled up his drawbridges long since, “and retired into his interior;” with sentries walking on his battlements, under the midnight sky, aloft over the glare of illuminated Paris;—whom a National Patrol, passing that way, takes the liberty of firing at; “seven shots towards twelve at night,” which do not take effect.[178] This was the 13th day of July, 1789; a worse day, many said, than the last 13th was, when only hail fell out of Heaven, not madness rose out of Tophet, ruining worse than crops!

hot old Marquis Mirabeau lies stricken down, at Argenteuil,—not within sound of these alarm-guns; for heproperly is not there, and only the body of him now lies, deaf and cold forever.

Upwards from the Esplanade, horizontally from all neighbouring roofs and windows, flashes one irregular deluge of musketry,—without effect. The Invalides lie flat, firing comparatively at their ease from behind stone; hardly through portholes, shew the tip of a nose. We fall, shot; and make no impression!

Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guard-rooms are burnt, Invalides mess-rooms. A distracted “Peruke-maker with two fiery torches” is for burning “the saltpetres of the Arsenal;”—had not a woman run screaming; had not a Patriot, with some tincture of Natural Philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him (butt of musket on pit of stomach), overturned barrels, and stayed the devouring element. A young beautiful lady, seized escaping in these Outer Courts, and thought falsely to be de Launay’s daughter, shall be burnt in de Launay’s sight; she lies swooned on a paillasse: but again a Patriot, it is brave Aubin Bonnemere the old soldier, dashes in, and rescues her. Straw is burnt; three cartloads of it, hauled thither, go up in white smoke: almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so that Elie had, with singed brows, to drag back one cart; and Reole the “gigantic haberdasher” another. Smoke as of Tophet; confusion as of Babel; noise as of the Crack of Doom!

Blood flows, the aliment of new madness.

The Firemen are here, squirting with their fire-pumps on the Invalides’ cannon, to wet the touchholes; they unfortunately cannot squirt so high; but produce only clouds of spray. Individuals of classical knowledge propose catapults. Santerre, the sonorous Brewer of the Suburb Saint-Antoine, advises rather that the place be fired, by a “mixture of phosphorous and oil-of-turpentine spouted up through forcing pumps:” O Spinola-Santerre, hast thou the mixture ready? Every man his own engineer!

Hast thou considered how each man’s heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? How their shriek of indignation palsies the strong soul; their howl of contumely withers with unfelt pangs? The Ritter Gluck confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage, in one of his noblest Operas, was the voice of the Populace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser: Bread! Bread! Great is the combined voice of men; the utterance of their instincts, which are truer than their thoughts: it is the greatest a man encounters, among the sounds and shadows, which make up this World of Time. He who can resist that, has his footing some where beyond Time. De Launay could not do it.

As we said, it was a living deluge, plunging headlong; had not the Gardes Françaises, in their cool military way, “wheeled round with arms levelled,” it would have plunged suicidally, by the hundred or the thousand, into the Bastille-ditch.

Alas, already one poor Invalide has his right hand slashed off him; his maimed body dragged to the Place de Grève, and hanged there. This same right hand, it is said, turned back de Launay from the Powder-Magazine, and saved Paris.

And so it goes plunging through court and corridor; billowing uncontrollable, firing from windows—on itself: in hot frenzy of triumph, of grief and vengeance for its slain.

Through roarings and cursings; through hustlings, clutchings, and at last through strokes! Your escort is hustled aside, felled down; Hulin sinks exhausted on a heap of stones. Miserable de Launay! He shall never enter the Hotel de Ville: only his “bloody hair-queue, held up in a bloody hand;” that shall enter, for a sign. The bleeding trunk lies on the steps there; the head is off through the streets; ghastly, aloft on a pike.

Rigorous de Launay has died; crying out, ‘O friends, kill me fast!’

Your Place de Grève is become a Throat of the Tiger; full of mere fierce bellowings, and thirst of blood. One other officer is massacred; one other Invalide is hanged on the Lamp-iron: with difficulty, with generous perseverance, the Gardes Françaises will save the rest. Provost Flesselles stricken long since with the paleness of death, must descend from his seat, “to be judged at the Palais Royal:”—alas, to be shot dead, by an unknown hand, at the turning of the first street!—

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 in the silent main;

It was the Titans warring with Olympus; and they scarcely crediting it, have conquered: prodigy of prodigies; delirious,—as it could not but be. Denunciation, vengeance; blaze of triumph on a dark ground of terror: all outward, all inward things fallen into one general wreck of madness!

Electoral Committee? Had it a thousand throats of brass, it would not suffice.

Last night, a Patriot, in liquor, insisted on sitting to smoke on the edge of one of the Powder-barrels; there smoked he, independent of the world,—till the Abbé “purchased his pipe for three francs,” and pitched it far.

Elie, in the grand Hall, Electoral Committee looking on, sits “with drawn sword bent in three places;” with battered helm, for he was of the Queen’s Regiment, Cavalry; with torn regimentals, face singed and soiled; comparable, some think, to “an antique warrior;”—judging the people; forming a list of Bastille Heroes. O Friends, stain not with blood the greenest laurels ever gained in this world: such is the burden of Elie’s song; could it but be listened to. Courage, Elie! Courage, ye Municipal Electors! A declining sun; the need of victuals, and of telling news, will bring assuagement, dispersion: all earthly things must end.

Along the streets of Paris circulate Seven Bastille Prisoners, borne shoulder-high: seven Heads on pikes;

See also the Garde Françaises, in their steadfast military way, marching home to their barracks, with the Invalides and Swiss kindly enclosed in hollow square.

and now they have participated; and will participate. Not Gardes Françaises henceforth, but Centre Grenadiers of the National Guard: men of iron discipline and humour,—not without a kind of thought in them!

His Majesty, kept in happy ignorance, perhaps dreams of double-barrels and the Woods of Meudon. Late at night, the Duke de Liancourt, having official right of entrance, gains access to the Royal Apartments; unfolds, with earnest clearness, in his constitutional way, the Job’s-news. ‘Mais,’ said poor Louis, ‘c’est une révolte, Why, that is a revolt!’—‘Sire,’ answered Liancourt, ‘It is not a revolt, it is a revolution.’

when lo, his Majesty himself attended only by his two Brothers, step in; quite in the paternal manner; announces that the troops, and all causes of offence, are gone, and henceforth there shall be nothing but trust, reconcilement, good-will; whereof he “permits and even requests,” a National Assembly to assure Paris in his name! Acclamation, as of men suddenly delivered from death, gives answer. The whole Assembly spontaneously rises to escort his Majesty back; “interlacing their arms to keep off the excessive pressure from him;” for all Versailles is crowding and shouting.

As for old Foulon, one learns that he is dead; at least a “sumptuous funeral” is going on; the undertakers honouring him, if no other will.

that in Henri Quatre’s case, the King had to make conquest of his People, but in this happier case, the People makes conquest of its King (a conquis son Roi). The King, so happily conquered, drives forward, slowly, through a steel people, all silent, or shouting only Vive la Nation;

[Louis] knows not what to think of it, or say of it; learns that he is “Restorer of French Liberty,”—as a Statue of him, to be raised on the site of the Bastille, shall testify to all men.

It was Sunday when the red-hot balls hung over us, in mid air: it is now but Friday, and “the Revolution is sanctioned.” An August National Assembly shall make the Constitution;

Already in most Towns, Electoral Committees were met; to regret Necker, in harangue and resolution. In many a Town, as Rennes, Caen, Lyons, an ebullient people was already regretting him in brickbats and musketry. But now, at every Town’s-end in France, there do arrive, in these days of terror,—“men,” as men will arrive; nay, “men on horseback,” since Rumour oftenest travels riding. These men declare, with alarmed countenance, The BRIGANDS to be coming, to be just at hand; and do then—ride on, about their further business, be what it might! Whereupon the whole population of such Town, defensively flies to arms. Petition is soon thereafter forwarded to National Assembly; in such peril and terror of peril, leave to organise yourself cannot be withheld: the armed population becomes everywhere an enrolled National Guard. Thus rides Rumour, careering along all radii, from Paris outwards, to such purpose: in few days, some say in not many hours, all France to the utmost borders bristles with bayonets. Singular, but undeniable,—miraculous or not!—But thus may any chemical liquid; though cooled to the freezing-point, or far lower, still continue liquid; and then, on the slightest stroke or shake, it at once rushes wholly into ice. Thus has France, for long months and even years, been chemically dealt with; brought below zero; and now, shaken by the Fall of a Bastille, it instantaneously congeals: into one crystallised mass, of sharp-cutting steel! Guai a chi la tocca; ’Ware who touches it!

Some living domestic or dependant, for none loves Foulon, has betrayed him to the Village. Merciless boors of Vitry unearth him; pounce on him, like hell-hounds: Westward, old Infamy; to Paris, to be judged at the Hôtel-de-Ville! His old head, which seventy-four years have bleached, is bare; they have tied an emblematic bundle of grass on his back; a garland of nettles and thistles is round his neck: in this manner; led with ropes; goaded on with curses and menaces, must he, with his old limbs, sprawl forward; the pitiablest, most unpitied of all old men.

Foulon must not only be judged righteously; but judged there where he stands, without any delay. Appoint seven judges, ye Municipals, or seventy-and-seven; name them yourselves, or we will name them: but judge him![193] Electoral rhetoric, eloquence of Mayor Bailly, is wasted explaining the beauty of the Law’s delay. Delay, and still delay! Behold, O Mayor of the People, the morning has worn itself into noon; and he is still unjudged!—Lafayette, pressingly sent for, arrives; gives voice: This Foulon, a known man, is guilty almost beyond doubt; but may he not have accomplices? Ought not the truth to be cunningly pumped out of him,—in the Abbaye Prison? It is a new light! Sansculottism claps hands;—at which hand-clapping, Foulon (in his fainness, as his Destiny would have it) also claps. ‘See! they understand one another!’ cries dark Sansculottism, blazing into fury of suspicion.—‘Friends,’ said “a person in good clothes,” stepping forward, ‘what is the use of judging this man? Has he not been judged these thirty years?’ With wild yells, Sansculottism clutches him, in its hundred hands: he is whirled across the Place de Grève, to the “Lanterne,” Lamp-iron which there is at the corner of the Rue de la Vannerie; pleading bitterly for life,—to the deaf winds. Only with the third rope (for two ropes broke, and the quavering voice still pleaded), can he be so much as got hanged! His Body is dragged through the streets; his Head goes aloft on a pike, the mouth filled with grass: amid sounds as of Tophet, from a grass-eating people.

Surely if Revenge is a “kind of Justice,” it is a “wild” kind!

Nevertheless, be the man’s conscience what it may, his nerves are of iron. At the Hôtel-de-Ville, he will answer nothing. He says, he obeyed superior order; they have his papers; they may judge and determine: as for himself, not having closed an eye these two nights, he demands, before all things, to have sleep. Leaden sleep, thou miserable Berthier! Guards rise with him, in motion towards the Abbaye. At the very door of the Hôtel-de-Ville, they are clutched; flung asunder, as by a vortex of mad arms; Berthier whirls towards the Lanterne. He snatches a musket; fells and strikes, defending himself like a mad lion; is borne down, trampled, hanged, mangled: his Head too, and even his Heart, flies over the City on a pike.

Horrible, in Lands that had known equal justice! Not so unnatural in Lands that had never known it.

The halcyon weather returns, though of a grayer complexion; of a character more and more evidently notsupernatural.

Thus, in any case, with what rubs soever, shall the Bastille be abolished from our Earth; and with it, Feudalism, Despotism; and, one hopes, Scoundrelism generally, and all hard usage of man by his brother man. Alas, the Scoundrelism and hard usage are not so easy of abolition!

Vanished is the Bastille, what we call vanished: the body, or sandstones, of it hanging, in benign metamorphosis, for centuries to come, over the Seine waters, as Pont Louis Seize;[197] the soul of it living, perhaps still longer, in the memories of men.

‘And yet think, Messieurs,’ as the Petitioner justly urged, ‘you who were our saviours, did yourselves need saviours,’—the brave Bastillers, namely; workmen of Paris; many of them in straightened pecuniary circumstances! [198] Subscriptions are opened; Lists are formed, more accurate than Elie’s; harangues are delivered. A Body of Bastille Heroes, tolerably complete, did get together;—comparable to the Argonauts; hoping to endure like them. But in little more than a year, the whirlpool of things threw them asunder again, and they sank.

So many highest superlatives achieved by man are followed by new higher; and dwindle into comparatives and positives!

The Siege of the Bastille, weighed with which, in the Historical balance, most other sieges, including that of Troy Town, are gossamer, cost, as we find, in killed and mortally wounded, on the part of the Besiegers, some Eighty-three persons: on the part of the Besieged, after all that straw-burning, fire-pumping, and deluge of musketry, One poor solitary invalid, shot stone-dead (roide-mort) on the battlements;[199]

The Bastille Fortress, like the City of Jericho, was overturned by miraculous sound.

All things are in revolution; in change from moment to moment, which becomes sensible from epoch to epoch: in this Time-World of ours there is properly nothing else but revolution and mutation, and even nothing else conceivable. Revolution, you answer, means speedier change. Whereupon one has still to ask: How speedy? At what degree of speed; in what particular points of this variable course, which varies in velocity, but can never stop till Time itself stops, does revolution begin and end; cease to be ordinary mutation, and again become such? It is a thing that will depend on definition more or less arbitrary.

Seeing which course of things, Messeigneurs of the Court Triumvirate, Messieurs of the dead-born Broglie-Ministry, and others such, consider that their part also is clear: to mount and ride. Off, ye too-loyal Broglies, Polignacs, and Princes of the Blood; off while it is yet time! Did not the Palais-Royal in its late nocturnal “violent motions,” set a specific price (place of payment not mentioned) on each of your heads?

This is what they call the First Emigration; determined on, as appears, in full Court-conclave; his Majesty assisting; prompt he, for his share of it, to follow any counsel whatsoever. “Three Sons of France, and four Princes of the blood of Saint Louis,” says Weber, “could not more effectually humble the Burghers of Paris than by appearing to withdraw in fear of their life.” Alas, the Burghers of Paris bear it with unexpected Stoicism!

The Emigration is not gone many miles, Prince Condé hardly across the Oise, when his Majesty, according to arrangement, for the Emigration also thought it might do good,—undertakes a rather daring enterprise: that of visiting Paris in person.

The King, so happily conquered, drives forward, slowly, through a steel people, all silent, or shouting only Vive la Nation; is harangued at the Townhall, by Moreau of the three-thousand orders, by King’s Procureur M. Ethys de Corny, by Lally Tollendal, and others; knows not what to think of it, or say of it; learns that he is “Restorer of French Liberty,”—as a Statue of him, to be raised on the site of the Bastille, shall testify to all men. Finally, he is shewn at the Balcony, with a Tricolor cockade in his hat; is greeted now, with vehement acclamation, from Square and Street, from all windows and roofs:—and so drives home again amid glad mingled and, as it were, intermarried shouts, of Vive le Roi and Vive la Nation; wearied but safe.

Surely a great Phenomenon: nay it is a transcendental one, overstepping all rules and experience; the crowning Phenomenon of our Modern Time. For here again, most unexpectedly, comes antique Fanaticism in new and newest vesture; miraculous, as all Fanaticism is. Call it the Fanaticism of “making away with formulas, de humer les formules.” The world of formulas, the formed regulated world, which all habitable world is,—must needs hate such Fanaticism like death; and be at deadly variance with it. The world of formulas must conquer it; or failing that, must die execrating it, anathematising it;—can nevertheless in nowise prevent its being and its having been. The Anathemas are there, and the miraculous Thing is there.

When the age of Miracles lay faded into the distance as an incredible tradition, and even the age of Conventionalities was now old; and Man’s Existence had for long generations rested on mere formulas which were grown hollow by course of time; and it seemed as if no Reality any longer existed but only Phantasms of realities, and God’s Universe were the work of the Tailor and Upholsterer mainly, and men were buckram masks that went about becking and grimacing there,—on a sudden, the Earth yawns asunder, and amid Tartarean smoke, and glare of fierce brightness, rises SANSCULOTTISM, many-headed, fire-breathing, and asks: What think ye of me?

The age of Miracles has come back! “Behold the World-Phoenix, in fire-consummation and fire-creation; wide are her fanning wings; loud is her death-melody, of battle-thunders and falling towns; skyward lashes the funeral flame, enveloping all things: it is the Death-Birth of a World!”

Whereby, however, as we often say, shall one unspeakable blessing seem attainable. This, namely: that Man and his Life rest no more on hollowness and a Lie, but on solidity and some kind of Truth. Welcome, the beggarliest truth, so it be one, in exchange for the royallest sham! Truth of any kind breeds ever new and better truth; thus hard granite rock will crumble down into soil, under the blessed skyey influences; and cover itself with verdure, with fruitage and umbrage. But as for Falsehood, which in like contrary manner, grows ever falser,—what can it, or what should it do but decease, being ripe; decompose itself, gently or even violently, and return to the Father of it,—too probably in flames of fire?

Sansculottism will burn much; but what is incombustible it will not burn. Fear not Sansculottism; recognise it for what it is, the portentous, inevitable end of much, the miraculous beginning of much.

and the wrath of men is made to praise Him.—But to gauge and measure this immeasurable Thing, and what is called account for it, and reduce it to a dead logic-formula, attempt not!

How the Twenty-five Millions of such, in their perplexed combination, acting and counter-acting may give birth to events; which event successively is the cardinal one; and from what point of vision it may best be surveyed

A Constitution can be built, Constitutions enough à la Sieyes: but the frightful difficulty is that of getting men to come and live in them!

Nay, strictly considered, is it not still true that without some such celestial sanction, given visibly in thunder or invisibly otherwise, no Constitution can in the long run be worth much more than the waste-paper it is written on? The Constitution, the set of Laws, or prescribed Habits of Acting, that men will live under, is the one which images their Convictions,—their Faith as to this wondrous Universe, and what rights, duties, capabilities they have there; which stands sanctioned therefore, by Necessity itself, if not by a seen Deity, then by an unseen one. Other laws, whereof there are always enough ready-made, are usurpations; which men do not obey, but rebel against, and abolish, by their earliest convenience.

Who is it that especially for rebellers and abolishers, can make a Constitution? He that can image forth the general Belief when there is one; that can impart one when, as here, there is none. A most rare man; ever as of old a god-missioned man!

Or is it the nature of National Assemblies generally to do, with endless labour and clangour, Nothing? Are Representative Governments mostly at bottom Tyrannies too! Shall we say, the Tyrants, the ambitious contentious Persons, from all corners of the country do, in this manner, get gathered into one place; and there, with motion and counter-motion, with jargon and hubbub, cancel one another, like the fabulous Kilkenny Cats; and produce, for net-result, zero;—the country meanwhile governing or guiding itself, by such wisdom, recognised or for most part unrecognised, as may exist in individual heads here and there?—Nay, even that were a great improvement: for, of old, with their Guelf Factions and Ghibelline Factions, with their Red Roses and White Roses, they were wont to cancel the whole country as well.

One thing an elected Assembly of Twelve Hundred is fit for: Destroying. Which indeed is but a more decided exercise of its natural talent for Doing Nothing. Do nothing, only keep agitating, debating; and things will destroy themselves.

It is the cynosure of revolutionary France, this National Assembly. All work of Government has fallen into its hands, or under its control; all men look to it for guidance. In the middle of that huge Revolt of Twenty-five millions, it hovers always aloft as Carroccio or Battle-Standard, impelling and impelled, in the most confused way; if it cannot give much guidance, it will still seem to give some.

With endless debating, we get the Rights of Man written down and promulgated: true paper basis of all paper Constitutions. Neglecting, cry the opponents, to declare the Duties of Man! Forgetting, answer we, to ascertain the Mights of Man;—one of the fatalest omissions!—Nay, sometimes, as on the Fourth of August, our National Assembly, fired suddenly by an almost preternatural enthusiasm, will get through whole masses of work in one night.

Such night, unforeseen but for ever memorable, was this of the Fourth of August 1789. Miraculous, or semi-miraculous, some seem to think it. A new Night of Pentecost, shall we say, shaped according to the new Time, and new Church of Jean Jacques Rousseau? It had its causes; also its effects.

For the present, if we glance into that Assembly Hall of theirs, it will be found, as is natural, “most irregular.” As many as “a hundred members are on their feet at once;” no rule in making motions, or only commencements of a rule; Spectators’ Gallery allowed to applaud, and even to hiss;[200] President, appointed once a fortnight, raising many times no serene head above the waves.

There likewise sits seagreen Robespierre; throwing in his light weight, with decision, not yet with effect. A thin lean Puritan and Precisian; he would make away with formulas; yet lives, moves, and has his being, wholly in formulas, of another sort. “Peuple,” such according to Robespierre ought to be the Royal method of promulgating laws, “Peuple, this is the Law I have framed for thee; dost thou accept it?”—answered from Right Side, from Centre and Left, by inextinguishable laughter.[203] Yet men of insight discern that the Seagreen may by chance go far: ‘this man,’ observes Mirabeau, ‘will do somewhat; he believes every word he says.’

As we often say, he has an eye, he is a reality; while others are formulas and eye-glasses. In the Transient he will detect the Perennial, find some firm footing even among Paper-vortexes. His fame is gone forth to all lands; it gladdened the heart of the crabbed old Friend of Men himself before he died. The very Postilions of inns have heard of Mirabeau

Twelve Hundred brother men are there, in the centre of Twenty-five Millions; fighting so fiercely with Fate and with one another; struggling their lives out, as most sons of Adam do, for that which profiteth not.

But figure Twelve Hundred pamphleteers; droning forth perpetual pamphlets: and no man to gag them! Neither, as in the American Congress, do the arrangements seem perfect. A Senator has not his own Desk and Newspaper here; of Tobacco (much less of Pipes) there is not the slightest provision. Conversation itself must be transacted in a low tone, with continual interruption: only “pencil Notes” circulate freely; “in incredible numbers to the foot of the very tribune.”[206]—Such work is it, regenerating a Nation; perfecting one’s Theory of Irregular Verbs!

Of the King’s Court, for the present, there is almost nothing whatever to be said. Silent, deserted are these halls; Royalty languishes forsaken of its war-god and all its hopes, till once the Œil-de-Bœuf rally again. The sceptre is departed from King Louis; is gone over to the Salles des Menus, to the Paris Townhall, or one knows not whither.

Poor King; for French Kings also are men!

The Queen sits weeping in her inner apartments, surrounded by weak women: she is “at the height of unpopularity;” universally regarded as the evil genius of France. Her friends and familiar counsellors have all fled; and fled, surely, on the foolishest errand.

That France should see her Nobles resist the Irresistible, Inevitable, with the face of angry men, was unhappy, not unexpected: but with the face and sense of pettish children? This was her peculiarity. They understood nothing; would understand nothing.

Volition, determination is not in this man: only innocence, indolence; dependence on all persons but himself, on all circumstances but the circumstances he were lord of. So troublous internally is our Versailles and its work.

So many millions of persons, all gyved, and nigh strangled, with formulas; whose Life nevertheless, at least the digestion and hunger of it, was real enough! Heaven has at length sent an abundant harvest; but what profits it the poor man, when Earth with her formulas interposes? Industry, in these times of Insurrection, must needs lie dormant; capital, as usual, not circulating, but stagnating timorously in nooks. The poor man is short of work, is therefore short of money; nay even had he money, bread is not to be bought for it. Were it plotting of Aristocrats, plotting of d’Orléans; were it Brigands, preternatural terror, and the clang of Phoebus Apollo’s silver bow,—enough, the markets are scarce of grain, plentiful only in tumult. Farmers seem lazy to thresh;—being either “bribed;” or needing no bribe, with prices ever rising, with perhaps rent itself no longer so pressing. Neither, what is singular, do municipal enactments, “That along with so many measures of wheat you shall sell so many of rye,” and other the like, much mend the matter. Dragoons with drawn swords stand ranked among the corn-sacks, often more dragoons than sacks.[211] Meal-mobs abound; growing into mobs of a still darker quality.

Starvation has been known among the French Commonalty before this; known and familiar. Did we not see them, in the year 1775, presenting, in sallow faces, in wretchedness and raggedness, their Petition of Grievances; and, for answer, getting a brand-new Gallows forty feet high? Hunger and Darkness, through long years! For look back on that earlier Paris Riot, when a Great Personage, worn out by debauchery, was believed to be in want of Blood-baths; and Mothers, in worn raiment, yet with living hearts under it, “filled the public places” with their wild Rachel-cries,—stilled also by the Gallows. Twenty years ago, the Friend of Men (preaching to the deaf) described the Limousin Peasants as wearing a pain-stricken (souffre-douleur) look, a look past complaint, “as if the oppression of the great were like the hail and the thunder, a thing irremediable, the ordinance of Nature.”[212] And now, if in some great hour, the shock of a falling Bastille should awaken you; and it were found to be the ordinance of Art merely; and remediable, reversible!

Or has the Reader forgotten that “flood of savages,” which, in sight of the same Friend of Men, descended from the mountains at Mont d’Or? Lank-haired haggard faces; shapes rawboned, in high sabots; in woollen jupes, with leather girdles studded with copper-nails! They rocked from foot to foot, and beat time with their elbows too, as the quarrel and battle which was not long in beginning went on; shouting fiercely; the lank faces distorted into the similitude of a cruel laugh. For they were darkened and hardened: long had they been the prey of excise-men and tax-men; of “clerks with the cold spurt of their pen.” It was the fixed prophecy of our old Marquis, which no man would listen to, that “such Government by Blind-man’s-buff, stumbling along too far, would end by the General Overturn, the Culbute Générale!”

No man would listen, each went his thoughtless way;—and Time and Destiny also travelled on. The Government by Blind-man’s-buff, stumbling along, has reached the precipice inevitable for it. Dull Drudgery, driven on, by clerks with the cold dastard spurt of their pen, has been driven—into a Communion of Drudges! For now, moreover, there have come the strangest confused tidings; by Paris Journals with their paper wings; or still more portentous, where no Journals are,[213] by rumour and conjecture: Oppression not inevitable; a Bastille prostrate, and the Constitution fast getting ready! Which Constitution, if it be something and not nothing, what can it be but bread to eat?

The harvest is reaped and garnered; yet still we have no bread. Urged by despair and by hope, what can Drudgery do, but rise, as predicted, and produce the General Overturn?

Fancy, then, some Five full-grown Millions of such gaunt figures, with their haggard faces (figures hâves); in woollen jupes, with copper-studded leather girths, and high sabots,—starting up to ask, as in forest-roarings, their washed Upper-Classes, after long unreviewed centuries, virtually this question: How have ye treated us; how have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we toiled for you? The answer can be read in flames, over the nightly summer sky. This is the feeding and leading we have had of you: EMPTINESS,—of pocket, of stomach, of head, and of heart. Behold there is nothing in us; nothing but what Nature gives her wild children of the desert: Ferocity and Appetite; Strength grounded on Hunger. Did ye mark among your Rights of Man, that man was not to die of starvation, while there was bread reaped by him? It is among the Mights of Man.

Where this will end? In the Abyss, one may prophecy; whither all Delusions are, at all moments, travelling; where this Delusion has now arrived. For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live for ever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, and Heaven’s Chancery itself; and, slowly or fast, advance incessantly towards their hour.

To some it is a matter of wonder that the Seigneurs did not do something to help themselves; say, combine, and arm: for there were a “hundred and fifty thousand of them,” all violent enough. Unhappily, a hundred and fifty thousand, scattered over wide Provinces, divided by mutual ill-will, cannot combine. The highest Seigneurs, as we have seen, had already emigrated,—with a view of putting France to the blush. Neither are arms now the peculiar property of Seigneurs; but of every mortal who has ten shillings, wherewith to buy a secondhand firelock.

The Seigneurs did what they could; enrolled in National Guards; fled, with shrieks, complaining to Heaven and Earth. One Seigneur, famed Memmay of Quincey, near Vesoul, invited all the rustics of his neighbourhood to a banquet; blew up his Château and them with gunpowder; and instantaneously vanished, no man yet knows whither.[218] Some half dozen years after, he came back; and demonstrated that it was by accident.

Unhappy country! How is the fair gold-and-green of the ripe bright Year defaced with horrid blackness: black ashes of Châteaus, black bodies of gibetted Men! Industry has ceased in it; not sounds of the hammer and saw, but of the tocsin and alarm-drum. The sceptre has departed, whither one knows not;—breaking itself in pieces: here impotent, there tyrannous. National Guards are unskilful, and of doubtful purpose; Soldiers are inclined to mutiny: there is danger that they two may quarrel, danger that they may agree. Strasburg has seen riots: a Townhall torn to shreds, its archives scattered white on the winds; drunk soldiers embracing drunk citizens for three days, and Mayor Dietrich and Marshal Rochambeau reduced nigh to desperation.

But consider, while work itself is so scarce, how a man must not only realise money; but stand waiting (if his wife is too weak to wait and struggle) for half days in the Tail, till he get it changed for dear bad bread!

The Mayor of Saint-Denis, so black was his bread, has, by a dyspeptic populace, been hanged on the Lanterne there. National Guards protect the Paris Corn-Market: first ten suffice; then six hundred.[225] Busy are ye, Bailly, Brissot de Warville, Condorcet, and ye others!

The old Bastille Electors, after some ten days of psalmodying over their glorious victory, began to hear it asked, in a splenetic tone, Who put you there?

Unhappy friends of Freedom; consolidating a Revolution! They must sit at work there, their pavilion spread on very Chaos; between two hostile worlds, the Upper Court-world, the Nether Sansculottic one; and, beaten on by both, toil painfully, perilously,—doing, in sad literal earnest, “the impossible.”

Pamphleteering opens its abysmal throat wider and wider: never to close more. Our Philosophes, indeed, rather withdraw; after the manner of Marmontel, “retiring in disgust the first day.”

Camille Desmoulins has appointed himself Procureur-Général de la Lanterne, Attorney-General of the Lamp-iron; and pleads, not with atrocity, under an atrocious title; editing weekly his brilliant Revolutions of Paris and Brabant. Brilliant, we say: for if, in that thick murk of Journalism, with its dull blustering, with its fixed or loose fury, any ray of genius greet thee, be sure it is Camille’s. The thing that Camille teaches he, with his light finger, adorns: brightness plays, gentle, unexpected, amid horrible confusions; often is the word of Camille worth reading, when no other’s is. Questionable Camille, how thou glitterest with a fallen, rebellious, yet still semi-celestial light; as is the star-light on the brow of Lucifer! Son of the Morning, into what times and what lands, art thou fallen!

Unhappy mortals: such tugging and lugging, and throttling of one another, to divide, in some not intolerable way, the joint Felicity of man in this Earth; when the whole lot to be divided is such a “feast of shells!”—Diligent are the Three Hundred; none equals Scipio Americanus in dealing with mobs. But surely all these things bode ill for the consolidating of a Revolution.

No, Friends, this Revolution is not of the consolidating kind. Do not fires, fevers, sown seeds, chemical mixtures, men, events; all embodiments of Force that work in this miraculous Complex of Forces, named Universe,—go on growing, through their natural phases and developments, each according to its kind; reach their height, reach their visible decline; finally sink under, vanishing, and what we call die? They all grow; there is nothing but what grows, and shoots forth into its special expansion,—once give it leave to spring.

Observe too that each grows with a rapidity proportioned, in general, to the madness and unhealthiness there is in it: slow regular growth, though this also ends in death, is what we name health and sanity.

Seventy-two Châteaus have flamed aloft in the Maconnais and Beaujolais alone: this seems the centre of the conflagration; but it has spread over Dauphiné, Alsace, the Lyonnais; the whole South-East is in a blaze. All over the North, from Rouen to Metz, disorder is abroad: smugglers of salt go openly in armed bands: the barriers of towns are burnt; toll-gatherers, tax-gatherers, official persons put to flight. “It was thought,” says Young, “the people, from hunger, would revolt;” and we see they have done it.

Many things too, especially all diseased things, grow by shoots and fits.

Barriers and Customhouses burnt; the Tax-gatherer hunted, not hunting; his Majesty’s Exchequer all but empty. The remedy is a Loan of thirty millions; then, on still more enticing terms, a Loan of eighty millions: neither of which Loans, unhappily, will the Stockjobbers venture to lend. The Stockjobber has no country, except his own black pool of Agio.

And yet, in those days, for men that have a country, what a glow of patriotism burns in many a heart; penetrating inwards to the very purse! So early as the 7th of August, a Don Patriotique, “a Patriotic Gift of jewels to a considerable extent,” has been solemnly made by certain Parisian women; and solemnly accepted, with honourable mention. Whom forthwith all the world takes to imitating and emulating. Patriotic Gifts, always with some heroic eloquence, which the President must answer and the Assembly listen to, flow in from far and near: in such number that the honourable mention can only be performed in “lists published at stated epochs.” Each gives what he can: the very cordwainers have behaved munificently; one landed proprietor gives a forest; fashionable society gives its shoebuckles, takes cheerfully to shoe-ties. Unfortunate females give what they “have amassed in loving.”[227] The smell of all cash, as Vespasian thought, is good.

Beautiful, and yet inadequate!

They flung themselves before him; conjuring him with tears in their eyes not to suffer the Veto Absolu. They were in a frenzy: ‘Monsieur le Comte, you are the people’s father; you must save us; you must defend us against those villains who are bringing back Despotism. If the King get this Veto, what is the use of National Assembly? We are slaves, all is done.’”[228] Friends, if the sky fall, there will be catching of larks! Mirabeau, adds Dumont, was eminent on such occasions: he answered vaguely, with a Patrician imperturbability, and bound himself to nothing.

To the Parisian common man, meanwhile, one thing remains inconceivable: that now when the Bastille is down, and French Liberty restored, grain should continue so dear. Our Rights of Man are voted, Feudalism and all Tyranny abolished; yet behold we stand in queue! Is it Aristocrat forestallers; a Court still bent on intrigues? Something is rotten, somewhere.

O much-suffering People, our glorious Revolution is evaporating in tricolor ceremonies, and complimentary harangues! Of which latter, as Loustalot acridly calculates, “upwards of two thousand have been delivered within the last month, at the Townhall alone.”[229] And our mouths, unfilled with bread, are to be shut, under penalties?

Hunger whets everything, especially Suspicion and Indignation. Realities themselves, in this Paris, have grown unreal: preternatural. Phantasms once more stalk through the brain of hungry France. O ye laggards and dastards, cry shrill voices from the Queues, if ye had the hearts of men, ye would take your pikes and secondhand firelocks, and look into it; not leave your wives and daughters to be starved, murdered, and worse!—Peace, women! The heart of man is bitter and heavy; Patriotism, driven out by Patrollotism, knows not what to resolve on.

Dinners are defined as “the ultimate act of communion;” men that can have communion in nothing else, can sympathetically eat together, can still rise into some glow of brotherhood over food and wine.

Suppose the customary loyal toasts drunk; the King’s health, the Queen’s with deafening vivats;—that of the Nation “omitted,” or even “rejected.” Suppose champagne flowing; with pot-valorous speech, with instrumental music; empty feathered heads growing ever the noisier, in their own emptiness, in each other’s noise! Her Majesty, who looks unusually sad tonight (his Majesty sitting dulled with the day’s hunting), is told that the sight of it would cheer her. Behold! She enters there, issuing from her State-rooms, like the Moon from the clouds, this fairest unhappy Queen of Hearts; royal Husband by her side, young Dauphin in her arms! She descends from the Boxes, amid splendour and acclaim; walks queen-like, round the Tables; gracefully escorted, gracefully nodding; her looks full of sorrow, yet of gratitude and daring, with the hope of France on her mother-bosom! And now, the band striking up, O Richard, O mon Roi, l’univers t’abandonne (O Richard, O my King, and world is all forsaking thee)—could man do other than rise to height of pity, of loyal valour?

A natural Repast, in ordinary times, a harmless one: now fatal, as that of Thyestes; as that of Job’s Sons, when a strong wind smote the four corners of their banquet-house! Poor ill-advised Marie-Antoinette; with a woman’s vehemence, not with a sovereign’s foresight! It was so natural, yet so unwise.

Captains of horse and foot go swashing with “enormous white cockades;” nay one Versailles National Captain had mounted the like, so witching were the words and glances; and laid aside his tricolor! Well may Major Lecointre shake his head with a look of severity; and speak audible resentful words. But now a swashbuckler, with enormous white cockade, overhearing the Major, invites him insolently, once and then again elsewhere, to recant; and failing that, to duel. Which latter feat Major Lecointre declares that he will not perform, not at least by any known laws of fence; that he nevertheless will, according to mere law of Nature, by dirk and blade, “exterminate” any “vile gladiator,” who may insult him or the Nation;—whereupon (for the Major is actually drawing his implement) “they are parted,” and no weasands slit.[231]

But fancy what effect this Thyestes Repast and trampling on the National Cockade, must have had in the Salle des Menus; in the famishing Bakers’-queues at Paris! Nay such Thyestes Repasts, it would seem, continue. Flandre has given its Counter-Dinner to the Swiss and Hundred Swiss; then on Saturday there has been another.

Yes, here with us is famine; but yonder at Versailles is food; enough and to spare! Patriotism stands in queue, shivering hungerstruck, insulted by Patrollotism; while bloodyminded Aristocrats, heated with excess of high living, trample on the National Cockade. Can the atrocity be true? Nay, look: green uniforms faced with red; black cockades,—the colour of Night! Are we to have military onfall; and death also by starvation? For behold the Corbeil Cornboat, which used to come twice a-day, with its Plaster-of-Paris meal, now comes only once.

Truly, it is time for the black cockades at least, to vanish. Them Patrollotism itself will not protect. Nay, sharp-tempered “M. Tassin,” at the Tuileries parade on Sunday morning, forgets all National military rule; starts from the ranks, wrenches down one black cockade which is swashing ominous there; and tramples it fiercely into the soil of France. Patrollotism itself is not without suppressed fury.

Sullen is the male heart, repressed by Patrollotism; vehement is the female, irrepressible. The public-speaking woman at the Palais Royal was not the only speaking one:—Men know not what the pantry is, when it grows empty, only house-mothers know. O women, wives of men that will only calculate and not act! Patrollotism is strong; but Death, by starvation and military onfall, is stronger. Patrollotism represses male Patriotism: but female Patriotism? Will Guards named National thrust their bayonets into the bosoms of women? Such thought, or rather such dim unshaped raw-material of a thought, ferments universally under the female night-cap; and, by earliest daybreak, on slight hint, will explode.

If Voltaire once, in splenetic humour, asked his countrymen: ‘But you, Gualches, what have you invented?’ they can now answer: The Art of Insurrection. It was an art needed in these last singular times: an art, for which the French nature, so full of vehemence, so free from depth, was perhaps of all others the fittest.

Let the Reader confess too that, taking one thing with another, perhaps few terrestrial Appearances are better worth considering than mobs. Your mob is a genuine outburst of Nature; issuing from, or communicating with, the deepest deep of Nature. When so much goes grinning and grimacing as a lifeless Formality, and under the stiff buckram no heart can be felt beating, here once more, if nowhere else, is a Sincerity and Reality. Shudder at it; or even shriek over it, if thou must; nevertheless consider it. Such a Complex of human Forces and Individualities hurled forth, in their transcendental mood, to act and react, on circumstances and on one another; to work out what it is in them to work. The thing they will do is known to no man; least of all to themselves. It is the inflammablest immeasurable Fire-work, generating, consuming itself. With what phases, to what extent, with what results it will burn off, Philosophy and Perspicacity conjecture in vain.

“Man,” as has been written, “is for ever interesting to man; nay properly there is nothing else interesting.” In which light also, may we not discern why most Battles have become so wearisome? Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the slightest possible developement of human individuality or spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner. Battles ever since Homer’s time, when they were Fighting Mobs, have mostly ceased to be worth looking at, worth reading of, or remembering. How many wearisome bloody Battles does History strive to represent; or even, in a husky way, to sing:—and she would omit or carelessly slur-over this one Insurrection of Women?

In squalid garret, on Monday morning, Maternity awakes, to hear children weeping for bread. Maternity must forth to the streets, to the herb-markets and Bakers’—queues; meets there with hunger-stricken Maternity, sympathetic, exasperative. O we unhappy women! But, instead of Bakers’-queues, why not to Aristocrats’ palaces, the root of the matter? Allons! Let us assemble. To the Hôtel-de-Ville; to Versailles; to the Lanterne!

All women gather and go; crowds storm all stairs, force out all women: the female Insurrectionary Force, according to Camille, resembles the English Naval one; there is a universal “Press of women.”

Fly back, thou shifty Maillard; seek the Bastille Company; and O return fast with it; above all, with thy own shifty head! For, behold, the Judiths can find no Mayor or Municipal; scarcely, in the topmost belfry, can they find poor Abbé Lefevre the Powder-distributor. Him, for want of a better, they suspend there; in the pale morning light; over the top of all Paris, which swims in one’s failing eyes:—a horrible end? Nay, the rope broke, as French ropes often did; or else an Amazon cut it.

And now doors fly under hatchets; the Judiths have broken the Armoury; have seized guns and cannons, three money-bags, paper-heaps; torches flare: in few minutes, our brave Hôtel-de-Ville which dates from the Fourth Henry, will, with all that it holds, be in flames!

#The French Revolution #Carlyle

[baptonbooks]

Mr Pyle writes in:

I am pleased to be able to present you with, as a sample, the first two scenes of the first chapter of Mr Wemyss’ Ordinary Time, to whet your appetites:

Professor Millicent, The Baroness Lacy (of Merryhill and Mansell Lacy in the County of Herefordshire, for her life), looked out of the window at the frosty day – and smiled. It was an excellent day for muffins and lashings of tea, and very much not the sort of day one wished to see in the digging season, which this most assuredly was not. She was eminently comfortable where she was, in the Coursing Lodge hard by Somerford Tout Saints, there upon the Downlands in Wildest Wilts.

The old Coursing Lodge had been one of the hiding places of the Second Charles – whose many-times-great-nephew, Charles duke of Taunton, Lady Lacy was soon to marry – after Worcester; the new and present lodge, by James Gibbs, housed her, for now, and housed also the various offices of His Grace’ agent; His Grace’ steward; and her own Great Archaeological Dig there in the Downlands and the Vale. The Coursing Lodge of the present was very characteristically a classic sample of that secret recusant’s – and secret Jacobite’s – Gibbs’ work: and Lady Lacy was accordingly quite at home there, Gibbs having (after all) been the architect for the Rad Cam (and for All Souls’ Codrington Library) at Oxford and for the Senate House at Cambridge, and Professor The Baroness Lacy having taken degrees at both Universities and being a Quondam Fellow of All Souls.

Millicent Lacy was one of the greater lights in ‘Hist.-&-Arch.’. Her ducal husband-to-be was equally a notable and celebrated historian.

It was, all the same, largely by a sort of osmosis, rather than by research quâ research, and by some odd, unspoken, hedgerow-telegraph communication from no one in particular, out of the oldest memories and forgotten tales, that she came, had come, to acquire, all unconsciously, a deep knowledge of her new countryside.

It had been, after all, very much the same in Mansell Lacy. One simply knew, when quite young, that an old field, just there, had been the holding of a villein under Ulfkil, and, here, long since reverted to the plough, the cottage long ago of a cottar whose lord had been Godric; and that both had, afterward, been in the hands – quite likely the same hands, or those of a son or grandson – of someone owing suit and feudal service to Gruffydd Puer, who had cynically snapped up, Welshly, a Marcher trifle through a shrewd accommodation with the new Norman overlords of England.

That the curious declivity in Farmer Eckley’s fields, over towards Foxley and Yarsop, beyond Nash Wood, was the last trace of a German bomber which had careened away, fatally damaged, from the bombing of Dudley in November of 1940, and had made it remarkably far from the place of its doom, directionless and blind, was simply understood; and one could hardly say when – or, indeed, if, or how – one had been specifically told so.

That there’d been Pembers and Isbells, Triggs and Likes and Stalkers and Baynhams, who’d survived – or not – the Mutiny, who’d fallen at Ladysmith, and at Gallipoli, and at the Somme, and at Caen and at Arnhem, and in Korea, one knew without being told; just as Baynhams and Stalkers and Likes, Triggs, Isbells, and Pembers, had seen Bangalore, and Vimeiro, and Flushing and Salamanca, and Dunkirk and the Western Desert … and Culloden and Falkirk and Lauffeld and Belle Île and battles innumerable and forgotten, over many ages. Some had come safe home; others slept in foreign fields. And the blood of every family in the parish, one knew without wanting to be told, antedating the modern surnames which now bore it forwards, had been present – and shed – at Pencoed in 720, in Hereford’s battles against the Welsh in 760 and in 1056, in fronting the Danes, in the bloody border wars of Mercia; as afterward, at Ludford Bridge and Mortimer’s Cross and … well: one knew that the shopkeepers and the farmers and the village as a whole were the sons and daughters in many generations of the men who’d put up the hillforts and garrisoned the little keeps and castles – no few of them Lacy castles –, and had sent archers to the battles of the wars of Stephen and Maud, and to Cressy and Agincourt, and who had held Hereford town for the Stuarts against the Scots or worn the russet of the Parliamentarians under Waller or Birch or Morgan; who had served in the Low Countries in the Protestant cause against Spain, or hidden Jesuits in priest’s holes and, perhaps, served Parma against Elizabeth 1st; who’d sailed with the Royal Navy, or been transported for poaching or Chartism, or had died, one or twelve of them, in Irish bogs for religion in Tudor times, or in the dust of Spain in the Thirties for ideology’s sake.

They’d gone, too, the wilder ones or the more dutiful, to Australia and Canada, New Zealand and India and South Africa, to America and the Argentine, or to crowd the factory towns of the West Midlands in the first hectic flush of industry, or to seek what fortune proffered in London; or turned pirate, or took service with John Company, or sweated their lives away in Malaya or HK. And some had been hanged, and some had been murdered, and some had simply vanished from all knowing. Peasants, priests, ploughmen, and privateers; severe Puritans, Singapore and Straits Settlements police, squire-parsons, and sergeant pilots shot down over the Ruhr; victims of Vikings; rectors and reprobates; families carried off wholesale by the Sweating Sickness or the Black Death; dissidents, divines, and Dissenters; hauliers and highwaymen; lords and labourers and Luddites, agitators and aristocrats and artisans: the men and women of one small parish, and every parish in England being able to say the same. Their distant kin they’d left behind them knew them not; yet these remained without recall or legend, in the little fields and woods they once had known and which knew their ghosts yet. Their stories were lost, their names and histories forgotten, save by God; yet they lived on, impalpably, and the bones’ marrows of those who came after sensed them beyond sense.

So it had been in Mansell Lacy when Millicent had been small; and so it was in the Woolfonts in her maturity. As it ever is, and ever was, in a land in which the old hillforts and rings and henges yet recall folk long vanished, and every burning of what the billhook brings down calls up anew the firing of cottages by the Great Heathen Army, and the beacons which alerted all England that the Armada had been sighted off Ushant, and the incendiaries of the Luftwaffe.

*****

In those parts of the District, the old Malet Honour after 1066, which were not devoted to sheep (as most were), or dairying (as parts of the Vale were, and parts, also, of the Cheese Country northwards of The Woolfonts and the Here Way and Grimsbarrow, towards Wanscombe and Pebdown and beyond), or arable (largely in the Vale), the forthcoming ducal nuptials were marked, noted, and mostly forgotten: for after sheep and milk and a little bit of arable farming, the District were next mostly concerned with pigs and poultry.

And January is a season of birthing and new life: farrowing time for sows (and thus a laborious season for pigkeepers and vets.): just as late February, after the duke and his new duchess should doubtless be back at Wolfdown, was always, year upon year, weaning time. The land has its rhythms, and they reck little of all human affairs save – in the case of pigs – such considerations as birth-registering new piglets, and, in the District, come April and the Feast of S George, Wadhay Pig Fair (and all which that entailed in AMLS2s and movement books and standstills after). Governments and scholars, peers and poets, come and go: but saints endure, and parishes; and pigs go on forever.

*****

#preview #Ordinary Time #village tales

[kidsviral-blog]

Here Are The 24 Tiniest Animals In The World. Number 13 Is So Adorable I Could Scream.

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/here-are-the-24-tiniest-animals-in-the-world-number-13-is-so-adorable-i-could-scream/

Here Are The 24 Tiniest Animals In The World. Number 13 Is So Adorable I Could Scream.

Creatures great and small live all around us, but I bet you don’t know just how small some of those animals are. If you think of a random animal like a tortoise or an octopus, you probably don’t imagine something pint sized and absolutely adorable. However, teeny tiny versions of those animals do exist. And I’m about to blow your mind with their adorable existence.

1. Royal Antelope: this little guy is a tiny species of antelope. They can grow up to 10 to 12 inches tall and weigh about 10lbs.

2. Brookesia Micra Chameleon: the micra chameleon is the smallest in the world. It’s average length is 30mm long, so standing on someone’s fingertip is MORE than enough room for this lizard.

3. Bumblebee Bat: this tiny bat resembles a fuzzy bumble bee, but we hope you don’t swat at it. It’s also known as Kitti’s hog-nosed bat and you can find them in Thailand.

4. Satomi’s Pygmy Seahorse: this little seahorse is the smallest in the world, reaching only a length of 0.54in and a height of 0.45in.

5. Pink Fairy Armadillo: also known as the Pichiciego, this tiny armadillo is from Argentina and it is the smallest species (out of 20).

6. Virgin Islands Dwarf Gecko: dwarf geckos are typically the size of a coin, about 18mm in length. hey are found in three British Virgin Islands, namely, Virgin Gorda, Tortola and Mosquito Island.

7. Speckled Padloper Tortoise: the smallest tortoise in the world is found in South Africa. The itty bitty tortoises grow up to 8-10cm in length.

8. Dwarf Sloth: also known as the pygmy three-toed sloth or monk sloth, is found off of the coast of Panama. It’s 40% smaller than it’s mainland cousins.

9. Baluchistan Pygmy Jerboa: the jerboa is one of the smallest mammals in the world and is the smallest rodent. Adult females only weigh up to 3.75g.

10. Vechur Cow: the smallest breed of cattle in the world only grows to be 124cm in length and 87cm in height.

11. Paedophryne Amauensis Frog: this smallest vertebrate in the world is found in Papua New Guinea. A normal-sized coin dwarfs this tiny frog.

12. Smallest Octopus Wolfi: you can find this tiny octopus in the Indo-Pacific Ocean. There are about 300 species of octopus and this Wolfi is one of the smallest.

13. Pygmy Goat: pygmy goats originate in West Africa and can grow up to 23in tall.

14. Etruscan Shrew: this little guy is also known as the Savi’s pygmy shrew, Pygmy white-toothed shrew, Etruscan pygmy shrew and White-toothed pygmy shrew. They are the smallest land mammal in the world.

15. Fennec Fox: if you want to find one of these cuties, you have to look in the Sahara of North Africa. They are most well-known for their oversized, sensitive ears.

16. Borneo Pygmy Elephant: if you think of an elephant, you may think about a GIANT mammal. But, there are some smaller elephants. The Borneo elephant is 30% smaller than Asian elephants. Adult males are just 5 to 8 ft tall, whereas the females are 4 to 7 ft in height.

17. Irukandji Jellyfish: the tiny jellyfish is only 1 cubic cm in size, smaller than a human fingernail, but it is one of the most venomous in the world for its size.

18. Little Blue Penguin: the Little Penguin, Fairy Penguin or Blue Penguin is the smallest species of penguin, found in New Zealand and Australia.

19. Tamaulipas Pygmy Owl: this owl hails from Mexico and only grows to be about 13.5cm long.

20. Sabah Rhinoceros: the Sabah rhinoceros is the world’s smallest rhinoceros species, with a height of only just over a meter. The tiny rhino is almost extinct, though, with only 30 to 50 individuals alive in the world.

21. Pygmy Anteater: the smallest anteater in the world is found in Central and South America. They can grow up to 18in long and they are pretty much always adorable.

22. Roborovski Hamster: the Robo hamster is a kind of dwarf hamster, native to Russia, Kazakhstan and northern China. They are sold as pets and the smallest as less than an inch in length.

23. Mediterranean Miniature Donkey: this mini donkey originates from the Mediterranean islands of Sicily and Sardinia. They can live to be 35 years-old and there are 15,000 of these donkeys in the United States.

24. Ouessant Sheep: the smallest sheep in the world is also known as the Anglicized Ushant, Ushant or Breton Dwarf sheep. They stand less than 50cm high and are as adorable as they sound.

If only I could buy every single one of these tiny animals and carry them around in my pockets. I guess I’ll have to settle for adopting a Fennec fox and whispering secrets into its big, fuzzy ears. More @ TheTopTenz Spread the cuteness by sharing this article with others.

Read more: http://viralnova.com/smallest-animals-in-the-world/

#animals #small animal breeds #smallest #smallest animals #tiny #tiny animals #world's smallest animals

[christinaepilzauthor-blog]

The 'Mystery Boats' of Tresco Island

By Mike Williams Five inhabited islands of outstanding beauty, together with over one hundred islets and large rocks rising out of the Atlantic make up the Isles of Scilly. Lying some 28 miles west of Lands End, they provide an ideal anchorage for flotillas of small boats engaged in covert operations. During the English Civil War Royalist privateers operating out of Scilly became the scourge of both Parliamentarian and foreign merchant ships - especially the Dutch. It eventually took an uneasy alliance between Cromwell's General-at-Sea Monk and the Dutch admiral van Tromp to bring the piratical Royalists to heel. Almost 300 years later, Churchill's rallying cry to "Set Europe ablaze!" did much to galvanise both SOE (the Special Operations Executive) and the SIS (the Secret Intelligence Service) into action, following the fall of France in 1940. One immediate result was the emergence of many so-called small "Special Forces" units. While SOE quickly began to regard itself as a striking force, attacking the enemy wherever it could, SIS was intended to be responsible for the infiltration and exfiltration of Allied agents and vital intelligence, between Great Britain and Nazi-occupied Europe. Working under Commander Slocum RN, who had been tasked with re-establishing direct communications with Resistance groups in Nazi-occupied Europe, RNVR Officers- Stephen Mackenzie, Daniel Lomenech - a Breton - and others began exploring the use of converted fishing boats to convey both agents and intelligence to and from Brittany. The idea quickly turned into workable reality as two such "spy-boats" were quickly developed with the professional help of British marine architects and small boat manufacturers. The traditional style of fishing boat was chosen because they were accepted by the Germans who allowed them to remain at sea for up to three nights at a time. This relaxation of rules played right into the hands of British intelligence. A major issue was the need for far greater speed than the usual plodding pace of a genuine fishing boat. In order to enter the coastal waters of occupied France and mingle with the large fleets of Breton fishing boats, without raising suspicion, the British boats would need to race from Scilly across approximately 100 miles of sea, under cover of darkness, to arrive off the Breton coast by early dawn. Coded radio messages and mast-head pennants of pre-arranged colours would identify which of the local Breton boats would be the contact vessel for the inshore transfer of agents, crucial intelligence, or weapons and explosives, off the Breton coast. Lomenech who was familiar with the Breton fishing industry personally oversaw much of the conversion work to ensure as much authenticity as possible in the transformations He knew that the real test was not to convince the Germans, but to avoid raising questions in the minds of the patrol boat crews of the French Harbour Gendarmerie. In consultation with Lomenech and other RNVR Officers, British boat designers cleverly re-configured the boats' underwater hulls and fitted new far more powerful engines, giving the boats a top speed in excess of 30 knots. Because of its remoteness, privacy from prying eyes and sheltered waters, Tresco Island's New Grimsby Sound was chosen as the base for the new secret flotilla. The former World War One flying boat base also conveniently situated at Tresco provided storage facilities, workshops and also some accommodation. . . . One of the secret flotilla's first tasks was to deliver two key French agents to the Resistance movement, close to Concarneau, during April 1941.The French Resistance had talked about using a submarine for the job, but were over-ruled by the British Admiralty who viewed such craft as pure gold. Instead it was agreed to deliver the agent by Angele Rouge one of the two "doctored" fishing boats newly arrived in Tresco's New Grimsby harbour anchorage, under the shelter of Braiden Rock. The boats were delivered to Tresco painted British "Pusser's grey" so that they blended in with other RN boats at anchor, giving the impression to curious observers that they were some sort of minor naval auxiliary vessel. It was at the eleventh hour, before a cross-Channel operation into enemy waters that, under Daniel Lomenech's expert direction, the boats were painted in the garish colours typical of Breton fishing vessels. One trick devised by the crews painting the boats was to mix iron filings in with the paint. On contact with the sea the fresh paint quickly took on a convincing weathered appearance. Locals quickly dubbed them "The mystery boats".

Aerial View of the Scilly Isles (Public Domain Image)

Lobsters, crabs and other fish freshly caught in Scillonian waters were packed in barrels, in ice, to add a touch of authenticity and crew members filled the strategically placed "operations boxes" with their personal weapons also covered with fish. These ensured that should they be stopped and fail to convince the Authorities that they were Breton fishermen, they could call upon significant firepower in a fire-fight. Adding to the illusion of Breton fishermen, RNVR personnel wore similar working rig to their French counterparts. All boats carried at least one Breton who could speak his native tongue, as well as French.

A model of a Breton fishing boat, built & photographed by the author

At midnight Angele Rouge, slipped her moorings at Braiden Rock, the secret flotilla's anchorage below Cromwell's Castle, on Tresco's western shore, heading south. The incoming tide saw her cautiously navigate the shallow waters of Tresco Flats, before she opened up her two 500 hp Hall Scott engines and began punching her way, at over 20 knots, through the rolling whitecaps of St Mary's Road. Once through St Mary's Sound and with St Agnes astern to starboard, her youthful skipper ordered his coxswain to maintain maximum revolutions, to arrive off the Breton coast in time to mingle with the French fishing fleets around dawn. Below decks, each with their private thoughts and fears, the two agents sat huddled in silence, sipping steaming mugs of "kye", the Royal Navy's own glutinous chocolate nectar. Both were SOE French Section recruits. One was a former French army lieutenant, code-named "Antoine", who had escaped from France in the evacuation from Dunkirk. The other, "Marie-Claude", a young woman of Anglo-French parents, had been selected for espionage operations by SOE's formidable Vera Atkins.

Vera Atkins (Public Domain Image)

SOE's creative technologists - the real-live versions of James Bond's "Q" - developed the weaponry and kit essential in covert operations - some of them so bizarre as to beggar belief. One such example was that of ingeniously crafted dummy lobsters, to be used for carrying secret intelligence. Unfortunately the design team had only ever seen cooked lobsters, which turn pink as a result of boiling. It was a fisherman who told them in no uncertain terms that lobsters, as caught in the sea, are dark blue! Many an SOE face turned bright red when the error was spotted. On this trip, Angele Rouge carried no fanciful confections from the "Gadgets" Section - only radios packed in tobacco and sealed in French petrol drums, for the Resistance. With the first signs of dawn beginning to lighten the sky, Angel Rouge was some 12 miles north of Ushant. To preserve the anonymity essential to her cover, her skipper ordered "Reduce speed to six knots, we'll shortly be joining the locals." Poring over their charts, with Ushant astern, the skipper and coxswain navigated Angele Rouge through the scattered islands and rock outcrops west of the Brittany coast, maintaining a course due south. The entrance to the sheltered waters of Brest on her port bow, Angele Rouge flying her yellow mutual recognition pennant, slowly turned heading for Camaret, the RV with the local crabber, Monique, which would take the agents ashore. Almost right on the ETA of 07.30 hours, the crabber appeared, flying a similar yellow pennant. Three miles offshore, under the guns of the German coastal batteries, the two boats drew alongside feigning a noisy chance meeting, of old fishing colleagues. Under the pretence of energetically hauling in nets, the crew slipped the agents from one vessel to the other. The confidential intelligence and radios in the fuel drums were also transferred and after more boisterous exchanges the two boats appeared to resume their fishing. Later, under cover of darkness, mission accomplished, Angele Rouge returned to her anchorage at Braiden Rock - and a fresh coat of Admiralty grey paint, minus iron-filings, securing around 23.00.

Map showing Brest and Camaret (See Commons attribution here)

Shortly after the transfer of the two agents, the Tresco flotilla was called upon to bring to England a leading Resistance Leader - Colonel Gilbert Rénault a.k.a. Colonel "Remy" - who had been betrayed and was in immediate danger of capture, inevitable torture and execution, by the Gestapo. The operation to rescue Colonel "Remy" and his family took the fishing boat Le Dinan to the remote Îles de Glénan, lying some twenty miles west of L'Orient. 65 feet in length, Le Dinan was longer than Angele Rouge and offered slightly more civilised accommodation for the Colonel, his wife and their children - including a 6-month-old baby. Because the waters around Brittany are among the most dangerous in the world - especially at night - the date of the pick-up was influenced by the weather, as well as the risks to Remy. Up-to-date weather forecasts were relayed to the crew on Tresco via a "scrambler" telephone, hidden in the heather at New Grimsby - as were top secret calls from SOE in London, and Government Communications at Bletchley Park. Inevitably it was the Gestapo's imminent arrest of Remy which ultimately decided the date and RV of the rescue at sea. Until three hours before nightfall, Le Dinan was given air cover by Beaufighters which, with a farewell waggle of wings, peeled off just north of Ushant, to return to Cornwall. This time, there would be no masthead recognition pennant, to look out for, but simply a white sail above a green hull. By 10 am the following morning, with the sea unusually calm, Le Dinan was plodding slowly through the Concarneau crabbing fleets. Skirting the towering Penmarc'h lighthouse she set course east and headed for the Îles de Glénan, her RV with the small fishing vessel bringing Remy and with him, vital up-to-date intelligence about the latest German coastal defences along the Normandy coast. Some 30 minutes ahead of schedule, Le Dinan's crew sailed in among the islands to wait.

Map showing Ushant (See here for Commons attribution)

After an hour-and-a-half, lurking between the scattered islands, while awaiting the now well overdue lone white sail of the Colonel's small boat to appear, the crew of Le Dinan were horrified to see a flotilla of five German corvettes belching black smoke and heading straight for them. Had the Colonel been picked up by the Kriegsmarine? Had the mission been compromised? Under the guise of hauling in their nets, the British held their nerve as the Germans steamed past them, at less than a cable's distance, binoculars trained on them. Shortly after the corvettes passed them in line astern, the awaited green hull and white sail appeared from behind one of the islands. Minutes later the Colonel - complete with German top secret intelligence of "Festung Europa", his wife and children - including the tiny baby was safely onboard Le Dinan. After transferring supplies of tobacco, food and much needed oil and petrol, to the fishermen who brought Colonel "Remy", she set course for Tresco. Some 36 hours later and with their passengers now enjoying the fresh air, on deck, after the cramped conditions below, Le Dinan sailed into New Grimsby Sound and hove-to off Braiden Rock. Colonel Remy and his family were safe and British Intelligence had top secret German plans of the Normandy beach defences, so vital for planning the forthcoming D-Day invasion. Many more such hazardous operations were to take place before peace in Europe arrived in May 1945. At a moving ceremony in July 2000 a commemorative plaque, honouring these gallant men was unveiled at Braiden Rock anchorage. Today, over 70 years later, the "mystery boats" and their crews are still remembered by Tresco's older inhabitants. ~~~~~~~~~~

Mike Williams MSc. is the published author of a trilogy of novels, based on a clandestine naval unit which operated out of the Isles of Scilly, during World War 2. Its role was to take secret agents and intelligence to and from Brittany, under the noses of the Nazis. Published by Thorogood Publishing, London, titles are - The Secret Channel The Channel of Invasion The Channel to Freedom In September 2011 he presented his trilogy at the Marlborough LitFest. Available on Amazon.                                                   His Cold War sequel -The Judas Trap -   is a story of counter-intelligence in response to a the insertion of Soviet spies in the Uk . Available from the author: [email protected] Currently he is undertaking research for a novel about espionage in the English Civil War (In Treachery's Shadow) set in the western counties, Mike is a member of the Historical Writers' Association.

Hat Tip To: English Historical Fiction Authors

[tamta24]

Sold Out η συναυλία του Yann Tiersen στο Ωδείο Ηρώδου Αττικού στις 13 Ιουλίου!

Αυτό αποτελεί και τη μεγαλύτερη απόδειξη ότι ο καταξιωμένος Γάλλος συνθέτης και πολυοργανίστας έχει ριζώσει για τα καλά στις καρδιές του Ελληνικού κοινού.

Ανυπομονούμε να τον απολαύσουμε στο Ηρώδειο την Πέμπτη 13 Ιουλίου.

Στις 13 Ιουλίου, ο Yann Tiersen θα πραγματοποιήσει μια μοναδική παράσταση στο Ωδείο Ηρώδου Αττικού.

«Δεν είμαι κλασικός συνθέτης, δεν έχω κλασική μουσική παιδεία, χώρος μου είναι τα στούντιο και η σκηνή». Πράγματι, ο Yann Tiersen δεν έχει τίποτα το κλασικό. Οι μελωδίες του, μινιμαλιστικές, νοσταλγικές, αρκετές φορές μυσταγωγικές, επαναπροσδιορίζουν την έννοια του κλασικού και επάξια τοποθετούν τον ίδιο στον πυρήνα της νεώτερης γαλλικής μουσικής σκηνής. Τα συναισθήματα κατακλύζουν τις νότες, που τοποθετούνται άναρχα στο πεντάγραμμο και με συνέπεια αποδίδουν τον ψυχικό και πνευματικό κόσμο του μαέστρου τους.

«Πολλοί θεωρούν ότι γράφω soundtrack. Όχι, απλά τα τραγούδια μου μπορεί να ταιριάζουν σε κάποια ταινία ή σε κάποιο σκηνοθέτη», λέει ο ίδιος και το επιβεβαιώνει ακόμη και το πιο απαίδευτο μουσικά αυτί, εντοπίζοντας την καλλιτεχνική του σφραγίδα στις μελωδίες που έντυσαν το Amélie – ταινία σταθμό του σύγχρονου γαλλικού κινηματογράφου- και το GoodBye Lenin!, αντίστοιχα σημαντικό δημιούργημα του γερμανικού κινηματογράφου. Το νοητό νήμα που ενώνει αυτές τις δύο ταινίες είναι οι ηλεκτρισμένοι ήχοι, ερωτικοί κι ευαίσθητοι, εύθραυστοι κι αποφασιστικοί, φινετσάτοι και πανκ, τόσο συνεπείς στο δημιουργό τους, που απορρίπτουν κάθε κανόνα στη μουσική δημιουργία.

Και το κοινό ερωτεύτηκε τα soundtracks του Yann Tiersen: μέσα από μια χούφτα νότες, μέσα από τα ακατάπαυστα επαναλαμβανόμενα μουσικά μοτίβα, που εκπέμπουν νοσταλγία και σπινθηροβολούν λαχτάρα και επιθυμίες, ο συνθέτης καταφέρνει να χτυπά κατάκαρδα και να ξυπνά τα πιο βαθιά συναισθήματα.

Γιατί αυτός είναι ο Yann Tiersen, ένας αιώνιος μουσικός, που εξακολουθεί να πειραματίζεται και να εκπλήσσει το αφοσιωμένο του κοινό. Το κοινό που κάθε φορά τον ευχαριστεί που γέμισε με μελωδίες ακόμη και τις πιο ανεξερεύνητες πτυχές της ψυχής του και μαζί του ταξίδεψε, ταυτίστηκε με τα πλήκτρα του πιάνου και ένιωσε τον συνθέτη, σα μαέστρο, του δικού του ψυχικού μωσαϊκού.

Με ξεγυμνωμένη την ιδιόρρυθμη μουσική του ύπαρξη, ο Tiersen ταξιδεύει στην αγαπημένη του Αθήνα.

Το ελληνικό κοινό θα έχει την ευκαιρία να τον δει να καταθέτει την ψυχή του, πότε με ένα πιάνο, πότε με ένα δαιμονικό βιολί, στο Ωδείο Ηρώδου του Αττικού.

Την Πέμπτη 13 Ιουλίου, ο πολύ- οργανίστας συνθέτης μας προσκαλεί σε μια απέριττα, μυσταγωγική βραδιά, τόσο οικεία όσο και «μυστική», όπως μία παράσταση μέσα σε ένα «παλιό μουσικό κουτί».

Το τελευταίο του project, Εusa, είναι μια εξερεύνηση των ήχων και της ατμόσφαιρας του μικρού νησιού στο οποίο ζει, της Ushant, απέναντι από τις ακτές της Βρετάνης, γραμμένων στο τόσο χαρακτηριστικό του πιάνο.

Την Πέμπτη 13 Ιουλίου οι μουσικές του, θα είναι όλες εδώ, σε ένα μαγευτικό live show και τα κομμάτια του, νέα και παλιά, θα φωλιάσουν στην ψυχή μας.

The post Sold Out η συναυλία του Yann Tiersen στο Ωδείο Ηρώδου Αττικού στις 13 Ιουλίου! appeared first on tralala.gr.

from tralala.gr via περισσότερα στο tralala.gr

[janetgannon]

Dick Durham Podcast May 2017

Biscay or bust, 44 years after a disastrously ill-fated attempt, Dick Durham finally makes the fabled crossing

It may be a small one, but it’s still an ocean passage, where the sea is deep and blue and the sky reaches from horizon to horizon

Dick Durham: The last time I tried to cross Biscay I ended up fighting for my life, although I was too young to realise it then. It was the worst storm I’ve ever experienced. But for now, let me tell you about my second Biscay baptism. It was last July and this time there were no preparations for shipwreck, no Maydays, no lifeboat rescue. And yet, still, there were plenty of challenges. We were four strong: my second cousin David Smith, his co-owner Adrian Lower, former rear-commodore of RORC and the crew – John ‘Glum’ Green and myself. The boat was Snatch, a German Frers Swan 48 built in 1998. We took our departure from Lymington in a fresh south-westerly and, later, a forecast of poor visibility and a Force 7 from the same quarter saw us duck into Salcombe after one night at sea to await a veer and have a night in our bunks. However, the run ashore involved unexpected greetings from friends of our skippers, which took a greater toll on our well-being than would a further night of watch-keeping. Worse, the wind was still south-west Force 6 when we left Salcombe the next day. But with no choice but to carry on, we found ourselves east of Ushant by morning with a parted genoa furler and 30 knots on the nose. We all admired David, not just because he sat astride the bow for an hour winding on a jury furling line as spray broke over him, but also because he had only recently rejected a surfeit of rum and coke. The night’s thrash across the Channel had also seen the flailing genoa sheets tear the collapsed inflatable, stowed on the foredeck, from its lashings and hurl it overboard. Other losses included the chain locker dorade and the port light on the pulpit. But we eventually weathered Ushant, which glowed under a brief ray of sunshine, its patchwork of fields pinned down with giant lighthouses, as the next job – a shredded generator fan belt – presented itself. Glum and Adrian spent hours dismantling the watermaker and refrigerator compressor to get at the aforementioned belt. As the engineers slowly reassembled their efforts, bare to the waist and covered in grease, the wind at last veered west and we flew south-west. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was short-lived as the spare belt also quickly shredded. To conserve power the decision was made to hand-steer, use no lights below and even turn the nav lights on only when we could see other traffic, until we could make port to sort things out. That night the wind went north-west and we made good progress, the tricolour only needing activation as we sailed in among flickering white and red lights, rather like a Christmas tree sales room, which turned out not to be craft but lobster pots. Morning brought another problem; the fridge was no longer being fed with power from the engine. Under a warm sun and with a Force 4 westerly I thrilled to some wonderful helming as the others dismantled and reassembled the generators. They succeded and we were back with nav instruments, cabin lights, and cockpit music, which, personally, I can live without. The following day Spain came over the horizon, along with more problems. We’d eased the halyards, to prevent chafe, so when Adrian goose-winged the genoa the loose halyard jammed in the top of the luff spar and now we could not roll up more than two thirds of its area. With no-one willing to go aloft at sea we sailed into Camariñas in Galicia that evening and anchored within a biscuit toss of the rocks under a pine forest to get some lee. Aloft, David discovered the top of the foil had spread and its jagged fingers had hooked up the genoa halyard and cut it to the core. He changed it for the spinnaker halyard and taped up the foil. But with dense draughts of Rioja, sardines and cod stew we celebrated our landfall. Forty-four years on, I had at last crossed the Bay of Biscay.

Along the Clipper way

Headwinds in Biscay

Biscay Triangle Rally

Biscay Triangle Rally with Yachting Monthly

French ports closed to visiting yachts

Beware Biscay destinations

HMS Pickle beaten up in Biscay

Twin-masted Tall Ship battered by gales

The post Dick Durham Podcast May 2017 appeared first on Yachting Monthly.

Read Full Content Here

The post Dick Durham Podcast May 2017 appeared first on YachtAweigh.

from http://yachtaweigh.com/dick-durham-podcast-may-2017/ from https://yachtaweigh.tumblr.com/post/159564237251

[yachtaweigh]

Dick Durham Podcast May 2017

Biscay or bust, 44 years after a disastrously ill-fated attempt, Dick Durham finally makes the fabled crossing

It may be a small one, but it’s still an ocean passage, where the sea is deep and blue and the sky reaches from horizon to horizon

Dick Durham: The last time I tried to cross Biscay I ended up fighting for my life, although I was too young to realise it then. It was the worst storm I’ve ever experienced. But for now, let me tell you about my second Biscay baptism. It was last July and this time there were no preparations for shipwreck, no Maydays, no lifeboat rescue. And yet, still, there were plenty of challenges. We were four strong: my second cousin David Smith, his co-owner Adrian Lower, former rear-commodore of RORC and the crew – John ‘Glum’ Green and myself. The boat was Snatch, a German Frers Swan 48 built in 1998. We took our departure from Lymington in a fresh south-westerly and, later, a forecast of poor visibility and a Force 7 from the same quarter saw us duck into Salcombe after one night at sea to await a veer and have a night in our bunks. However, the run ashore involved unexpected greetings from friends of our skippers, which took a greater toll on our well-being than would a further night of watch-keeping. Worse, the wind was still south-west Force 6 when we left Salcombe the next day. But with no choice but to carry on, we found ourselves east of Ushant by morning with a parted genoa furler and 30 knots on the nose. We all admired David, not just because he sat astride the bow for an hour winding on a jury furling line as spray broke over him, but also because he had only recently rejected a surfeit of rum and coke. The night’s thrash across the Channel had also seen the flailing genoa sheets tear the collapsed inflatable, stowed on the foredeck, from its lashings and hurl it overboard. Other losses included the chain locker dorade and the port light on the pulpit. But we eventually weathered Ushant, which glowed under a brief ray of sunshine, its patchwork of fields pinned down with giant lighthouses, as the next job – a shredded generator fan belt – presented itself. Glum and Adrian spent hours dismantling the watermaker and refrigerator compressor to get at the aforementioned belt. As the engineers slowly reassembled their efforts, bare to the waist and covered in grease, the wind at last veered west and we flew south-west. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was short-lived as the spare belt also quickly shredded. To conserve power the decision was made to hand-steer, use no lights below and even turn the nav lights on only when we could see other traffic, until we could make port to sort things out. That night the wind went north-west and we made good progress, the tricolour only needing activation as we sailed in among flickering white and red lights, rather like a Christmas tree sales room, which turned out not to be craft but lobster pots. Morning brought another problem; the fridge was no longer being fed with power from the engine. Under a warm sun and with a Force 4 westerly I thrilled to some wonderful helming as the others dismantled and reassembled the generators. They succeded and we were back with nav instruments, cabin lights, and cockpit music, which, personally, I can live without. The following day Spain came over the horizon, along with more problems. We’d eased the halyards, to prevent chafe, so when Adrian goose-winged the genoa the loose halyard jammed in the top of the luff spar and now we could not roll up more than two thirds of its area. With no-one willing to go aloft at sea we sailed into Camariñas in Galicia that evening and anchored within a biscuit toss of the rocks under a pine forest to get some lee. Aloft, David discovered the top of the foil had spread and its jagged fingers had hooked up the genoa halyard and cut it to the core. He changed it for the spinnaker halyard and taped up the foil. But with dense draughts of Rioja, sardines and cod stew we celebrated our landfall. Forty-four years on, I had at last crossed the Bay of Biscay.

Along the Clipper way

Headwinds in Biscay

Biscay Triangle Rally

Biscay Triangle Rally with Yachting Monthly

French ports closed to visiting yachts

Beware Biscay destinations

HMS Pickle beaten up in Biscay

Twin-masted Tall Ship battered by gales

The post Dick Durham Podcast May 2017 appeared first on Yachting Monthly.

Read Full Content Here

The post Dick Durham Podcast May 2017 appeared first on YachtAweigh.

from http://yachtaweigh.com/dick-durham-podcast-may-2017/

[ltwilliammowett]

Rear-Admiral Richard Kempenfelt, 1718-82 by Tilly Kettle, 1782

Known for his reputation as a naval innovator, he is best remembered for his victory against the French at the Second Battle of Ushant in 1781, during the Anglo-French War, and for his death when the HMS Royal George accidentally sank at Portsmouth the following year. His father was a Swedish citizen who is said to have been in the service of British King James II, and subsequently to have entered the British Army. After joining the British Navy, he was commissioned a lieutenant in January 1741. He saw service in the West Indies, taking part in the capture of Portobelo during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. In 1746 he returned to Britain, and from then to 1780, when he was made rear-admiral, he saw active service in the East Indies with Admiral Sir George Pocock. In 1779 he became Chief of Staff or Captain of the Fleet under Admiral Sir Charles Hardy on the HMS Victory which was to lead a hastily assembled fleet to oppose an invasion of England set to begin with the destruction of the Portsmouth naval base by the French and Spanish Armada of 1779. In 1782 he was given command HMS Royal George, which formed part of the fleet under Admiral of the Fleet Lord Richard Howe. In August of that year, his fleet was ordered to proceed to the relief of Gibraltar, and underwent a refit at top speed at Portsmouth, England. On 29 August 1782, the Royal George was being heeled off Portsmouth to allow repairs to be made to the water intake for the deck wash pump, which was three feet below water level. The larboard guns had been run out and the starboard guns moved into the center of the deck to heel over the ship until her lowest gun ports were close to the surface of the water. A supply vessel, the Lark approached the Royal George on her low side to transfer a cargo of rum. According to an Admiralty report – not made public until early the next century – the larboard cannons’ weight on the ship’s central frame caused excessively decayed timbers to break. This caused the ship to heel to such a degree that the sea washed in at her gunports, and she soon began to ship water in her hold. A sudden breeze on the raised side of the ship forced her further over and the water rushed in. The crew were ordered to right the ship but the fallen cannon could not be moved. Within a couple of minutes she rolled on to her side and sank before any distress signal could be given. Nine hundred people were estimated to have lost their lives, for besides the crew there were a large number of tradesmen and women and children on board. About 230 people were saved, some by running up the rigging, while others were picked up by boats from other vessels. Kempenfelt was writing in his cabin when the ship sank; the cabin doors had jammed due to the ship heeling, and he perished with the rest at the age of about 64. A bachelor, Kempenfelt was noted for the care of his men, for the divisional system to enhance officer responsibility, and for the introduction of French tactics and ideas. He was known as the ‘brains of the navy’ and Admirals Howe, Nelson, Jervis and Duncan later adapted his principles and tactics in later battles to earn themselves famous victories. Together with Howe he drafted the ‘Steadfast Fighting Laws’, and he improved Howe’s innovative signalling system, basing it on nine flags which allowed up to ninety-nine different signals to be generated. Even so, many officers could not understand the codes, a fact which greatly upset him, as did the fact that they did not take to his melee tactics. He worked hard on managing Admirals Hardy and Geary in his position of captain of the fleet, but felt constrained to criticise both officers.

#naval art #persons of the navy #richard kempenfelt #rear admiral #18th century #age of sail #biography

[janetgannon]

Dick Durham Podcast May 2017

Biscay or bust, 44 years after a disastrously ill-fated attempt, Dick Durham finally makes the fabled crossing

It may be a small one, but it’s still an ocean passage, where the sea is deep and blue and the sky reaches from horizon to horizon

Dick Durham: The last time I tried to cross Biscay I ended up fighting for my life, although I was too young to realise it then. It was the worst storm I’ve ever experienced. But for now, let me tell you about my second Biscay baptism. It was last July and this time there were no preparations for shipwreck, no Maydays, no lifeboat rescue. And yet, still, there were plenty of challenges. We were four strong: my second cousin David Smith, his co-owner Adrian Lower, former rear-commodore of RORC and the crew – John ‘Glum’ Green and myself. The boat was Snatch, a German Frers Swan 48 built in 1998. We took our departure from Lymington in a fresh south-westerly and, later, a forecast of poor visibility and a Force 7 from the same quarter saw us duck into Salcombe after one night at sea to await a veer and have a night in our bunks. However, the run ashore involved unexpected greetings from friends of our skippers, which took a greater toll on our well-being than would a further night of watch-keeping. Worse, the wind was still south-west Force 6 when we left Salcombe the next day. But with no choice but to carry on, we found ourselves east of Ushant by morning with a parted genoa furler and 30 knots on the nose. We all admired David, not just because he sat astride the bow for an hour winding on a jury furling line as spray broke over him, but also because he had only recently rejected a surfeit of rum and coke. The night’s thrash across the Channel had also seen the flailing genoa sheets tear the collapsed inflatable, stowed on the foredeck, from its lashings and hurl it overboard. Other losses included the chain locker dorade and the port light on the pulpit. But we eventually weathered Ushant, which glowed under a brief ray of sunshine, its patchwork of fields pinned down with giant lighthouses, as the next job – a shredded generator fan belt – presented itself. Glum and Adrian spent hours dismantling the watermaker and refrigerator compressor to get at the aforementioned belt. As the engineers slowly reassembled their efforts, bare to the waist and covered in grease, the wind at last veered west and we flew south-west. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was short-lived as the spare belt also quickly shredded. To conserve power the decision was made to hand-steer, use no lights below and even turn the nav lights on only when we could see other traffic, until we could make port to sort things out. That night the wind went north-west and we made good progress, the tricolour only needing activation as we sailed in among flickering white and red lights, rather like a Christmas tree sales room, which turned out not to be craft but lobster pots. Morning brought another problem; the fridge was no longer being fed with power from the engine. Under a warm sun and with a Force 4 westerly I thrilled to some wonderful helming as the others dismantled and reassembled the generators. They succeded and we were back with nav instruments, cabin lights, and cockpit music, which, personally, I can live without. The following day Spain came over the horizon, along with more problems. We’d eased the halyards, to prevent chafe, so when Adrian goose-winged the genoa the loose halyard jammed in the top of the luff spar and now we could not roll up more than two thirds of its area. With no-one willing to go aloft at sea we sailed into Camariñas in Galicia that evening and anchored within a biscuit toss of the rocks under a pine forest to get some lee. Aloft, David discovered the top of the foil had spread and its jagged fingers had hooked up the genoa halyard and cut it to the core. He changed it for the spinnaker halyard and taped up the foil. But with dense draughts of Rioja, sardines and cod stew we celebrated our landfall. Forty-four years on, I had at last crossed the Bay of Biscay.

Along the Clipper way

Headwinds in Biscay

Biscay Triangle Rally

Biscay Triangle Rally with Yachting Monthly

French ports closed to visiting yachts

Beware Biscay destinations

HMS Pickle beaten up in Biscay

Twin-masted Tall Ship battered by gales

The post Dick Durham Podcast May 2017 appeared first on Yachting Monthly.

Read Full Content Here

The post Dick Durham Podcast May 2017 appeared first on YachtAweigh.

from http://yachtaweigh.com/dick-durham-podcast-may-2017/ from https://yachtaweigh.tumblr.com/post/159492086141

[yachtaweigh]

Dick Durham Podcast May 2017

Biscay or bust, 44 years after a disastrously ill-fated attempt, Dick Durham finally makes the fabled crossing

It may be a small one, but it’s still an ocean passage, where the sea is deep and blue and the sky reaches from horizon to horizon

Dick Durham: The last time I tried to cross Biscay I ended up fighting for my life, although I was too young to realise it then. It was the worst storm I’ve ever experienced. But for now, let me tell you about my second Biscay baptism. It was last July and this time there were no preparations for shipwreck, no Maydays, no lifeboat rescue. And yet, still, there were plenty of challenges. We were four strong: my second cousin David Smith, his co-owner Adrian Lower, former rear-commodore of RORC and the crew – John ‘Glum’ Green and myself. The boat was Snatch, a German Frers Swan 48 built in 1998. We took our departure from Lymington in a fresh south-westerly and, later, a forecast of poor visibility and a Force 7 from the same quarter saw us duck into Salcombe after one night at sea to await a veer and have a night in our bunks. However, the run ashore involved unexpected greetings from friends of our skippers, which took a greater toll on our well-being than would a further night of watch-keeping. Worse, the wind was still south-west Force 6 when we left Salcombe the next day. But with no choice but to carry on, we found ourselves east of Ushant by morning with a parted genoa furler and 30 knots on the nose. We all admired David, not just because he sat astride the bow for an hour winding on a jury furling line as spray broke over him, but also because he had only recently rejected a surfeit of rum and coke. The night’s thrash across the Channel had also seen the flailing genoa sheets tear the collapsed inflatable, stowed on the foredeck, from its lashings and hurl it overboard. Other losses included the chain locker dorade and the port light on the pulpit. But we eventually weathered Ushant, which glowed under a brief ray of sunshine, its patchwork of fields pinned down with giant lighthouses, as the next job – a shredded generator fan belt – presented itself. Glum and Adrian spent hours dismantling the watermaker and refrigerator compressor to get at the aforementioned belt. As the engineers slowly reassembled their efforts, bare to the waist and covered in grease, the wind at last veered west and we flew south-west. Unfortunately the ‘fix’ was short-lived as the spare belt also quickly shredded. To conserve power the decision was made to hand-steer, use no lights below and even turn the nav lights on only when we could see other traffic, until we could make port to sort things out. That night the wind went north-west and we made good progress, the tricolour only needing activation as we sailed in among flickering white and red lights, rather like a Christmas tree sales room, which turned out not to be craft but lobster pots. Morning brought another problem; the fridge was no longer being fed with power from the engine. Under a warm sun and with a Force 4 westerly I thrilled to some wonderful helming as the others dismantled and reassembled the generators. They succeded and we were back with nav instruments, cabin lights, and cockpit music, which, personally, I can live without. The following day Spain came over the horizon, along with more problems. We’d eased the halyards, to prevent chafe, so when Adrian goose-winged the genoa the loose halyard jammed in the top of the luff spar and now we could not roll up more than two thirds of its area. With no-one willing to go aloft at sea we sailed into Camariñas in Galicia that evening and anchored within a biscuit toss of the rocks under a pine forest to get some lee. Aloft, David discovered the top of the foil had spread and its jagged fingers had hooked up the genoa halyard and cut it to the core. He changed it for the spinnaker halyard and taped up the foil. But with dense draughts of Rioja, sardines and cod stew we celebrated our landfall. Forty-four years on, I had at last crossed the Bay of Biscay.

Along the Clipper way

Headwinds in Biscay

Biscay Triangle Rally

Biscay Triangle Rally with Yachting Monthly

French ports closed to visiting yachts

Beware Biscay destinations

HMS Pickle beaten up in Biscay

Twin-masted Tall Ship battered by gales

The post Dick Durham Podcast May 2017 appeared first on Yachting Monthly.

Read Full Content Here

The post Dick Durham Podcast May 2017 appeared first on YachtAweigh.

from http://yachtaweigh.com/dick-durham-podcast-may-2017/