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.



Chapter 1.7.IV.

The Menads.

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.

Accordingly, to what a height, one may well say of perfection, has
this branch of human industry been carried by France, within the last
half-century! Insurrection, which, Lafayette thought, might be 'the most
sacred of duties,' ranks now, for the French people, among the duties
which they can perform. Other mobs are dull masses; which roll
onwards with a dull fierce tenacity, a dull fierce heat, but emit no
light-flashes of genius as they go. The French mob, again, is among the
liveliest phenomena of our world. So rapid, audacious; so clear-sighted,
inventive, prompt to seize the moment; instinct with life to its
finger-ends! That talent, were there no other, of spontaneously standing
in queue, distinguishes, as we said, the French People from all Peoples,