[The Origins of Contemporary France<br>Volume 2 (of 6) by Hippolyte A. Taine]@TWC D-Link book
The Origins of Contemporary France
Volume 2 (of 6)

CHAPTER I
11/54

Almost all sittings begin with the reading of flattering addresses or of threatening denunciations.

The petitioners frequently appear in person, and read their enthusiastic effusions, their imperious advice, their doctrines of dissolution.

To-day it is Danton, in the name of Paris, with his bull visage and his voice that seems a tocsin of insurrection; to-morrow, the vanquishers of the Bastille, or some other troop, with a band of music which continues playing even into the hall.

The meeting is not a conference for business, but a patriotic opera, where the eclogue, the melodrama, and sometimes the masquerade, mingle with the cheers and the clapping of hands.[2112]--A serf of the Jura is brought to the bar of the Assembly aged one hundred and twenty years, and one of the members of the cortege, "M.

Bourbon de la Crosniere, director of a patriotic school, asks permission to take charge of an honorable old man, that he may be waited on by the young people of all ranks, and especially by the children of those whose fathers were killed in the attack on the Bastille." [2113] Great is the hubbub and excitement.


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