People walk about and chat in the streets as usual."[26121]--On the 19th of August, Moore, the Englishman,[26122] sees, with astonishment, the heedless crowd filling the Champs Elysees, the various diversions, the air of a fete, the countless small shops in which refreshments are sold accompanied with songs and music, and the quantities of pantomimes and marionettes.

"Are these people as happy as they seem to be ?" he asks of a Frenchman along with him.--"They are as jolly as gods!"-- "Do you think the Duke of Brunswick is ever in their heads ?"--"Monsieur, you may be sure of this, that the Duke of Brunswick is the last man they think of." Such is the unconcern or light-heartedness of the gross, egoistic mass, otherwise busy, and always passive under any government whatever it may be, a veritable flock of sheep, allowing government to do as it pleases, provided it does not hinder it from browsing and capering as it chooses .-- As to the men of sensibility who love their country, they are still less troublesome, for they are gone or going (to the army), often at the rate of a thousand and even two thousand a day, ten thousand in the last week of July,[26123] fifteen thousand in the first two weeks of September,[26124] in all perhaps 40,000 volunteers furnished by the capital alone and who, with their fellows proportionate in number supplied by the departments, are to be the salvation of France .-- Through this departure of the worthy, and this passivity of the flock, Paris belongs to the fanatics among the population.

"These are the sans-culottes," wrote the patriotic Palloy, "the scum and riffraff of Paris, and I glory in belonging to that class which has put down the so-called honest folks."[26125]--"Three thousand workmen," says the Girondist Soulavie, later, "made the Revolution of the 10th of August, against the kingdom of the Feuillants, the majority of the capital and against the Legislative Assembly."[26126] Workmen, day laborers, and petty shop-keepers, not counting women, common vagabonds and regular bandits, form, indeed, one-twentieth of the adult male population of the city, about 9,000 spread over all sections of Paris, the only ones to vote and act in the midst of universal stupor and indifference .-- We find in the Rue de Seine, for example, seven of them, Lacaille, keeper of a roasting-shop; Philippe, "a cattle-breeder, who leads around she-asses for consumptives," now president of the section, and soon to become one of the Abbaye butchers; Guerard, "a Rouen river-man who has abandoned the navigation of the Seine on a large scale and keeps a skiff, in which he ferries people over the river from the Pont du Louvre to the Quai Mazarin," and four characters of the same stamp.

Their energy, however, replaces their lack of education and numerical inferiority.

One day, Guerard, on passing M.Hua, the deputy, tells him in the way of a warning, "You big rascal, you were lucky to have other people with you.