[Year 3
course. Alas, Trade, shackled, topsyturvied in the way we saw, and now suddenly let-go again, can for the present take no course at all; but only reel and stagger. There is, so to speak, no Trade whatever for the time being. Assignats, long sinking, emitted in such quantities, sink now with an alacrity beyond parallel. 'Combien?' said one, to a Hackney-coachman, 'What fare?' 'Six thousand livres,' answered he: some three hundred pounds sterling, in Paper-money.[1] Pressure of Maximum withdrawn, the things it compressed likewise withdraw. 'Two ounces of bread per day' is the modicum allotted: wide-waving, doleful are the Bakers' Queues; Farmers' houses are become pawnbrokers' shops.
One can imagine, in these circumstances, with what humour Sansculottism growled in its throat 'La Cabarus'; beheld Ci-devants return dancing, the Thermidor effulgence of recivilisation, and Balls in flesh-coloured drawers. Greek tunics and sandals; hosts of Muscadins parading, with their clubs loaded with lead;—and we here, cast out, abhorred, 'picking offals from the street';[2] agitating in Baker's Queue for our two ounces of bread! Will the Jacobin lion, which they say is meeting secretly 'at the Archevêché, in bonnet rouge with loaded pistols,' not awaken? Seemingly, not. Our Collot, our Billaud, Barrère, Vadier, in these last days of March 1795, are found worthy of Déportation, of Banishment beyond seas; and shall, for the present, be trundled off to the Castle of Ham. The lion is dead;—or writhing in death-throes!
Behold, accordingly, on the day they call Twelfth of Germinal (which is also called First of April, not a lucky day), how lively are these streets of Paris once more! Floods of hungry women, of squalid hungry men; ejaculating, 'Bread, bread, and the Constitution of Ninety-three!' Paris has risen, once again, like the Ocean-tide; is flowing towards the Tuileries,
