THE WOMEN AND MAIDENS EVINCE THEIR ENTHUSIASM. 395

them pronounces a few noble charming sentences, which will create heroes to-morrow. Elsewhere (in the civic procession of Romans in Dauphiné), a beautiful girl marched along, bearing in her hand a palm with this superscription: To the best citizen!.. Many returned from that procession lost in thought.

Dauphiné, the serious and valiant province which opened the Revolution, made numerous confederations of the whole province, and of the towns and villages. The rural communes of the frontier nearest to Savoy, close to the emigrants, and tilling the ground in the neighbourhood of their guns, did but have still finer festivals. They had a battalion of children, another of women, and another of maidens, all armed. At Maubec they filed along in good order, headed by a banner, bearing and handling their naked swords with that graceful skill peculiar to the women of France.

I have related elsewhere the heroic example of the women and maidens of Angers. They wanted to depart and follow the young army of Anjou and Brittany marching for Rennes, to take their share in that first crusade of liberty, to feed the combatants, and take care of the wounded. They swore they would never marry any but loyal citizens, love only the valiant, and associate for life only with those who devoted theirs to France.

They thus inspired the enthusiasm of 1788. And now in the confederations of June and July, 1790, after the removal of so many obstacles, none were more affected in these festivals of victory; for, during the winter, in the complete absence of all public protection, what dangers had not the family incurred! They embraced the hope of safety, and found comfort in those immense assemblies. Their poor hearts were however still very full of the past, and of what the future might bring forth? But they wished for no other future than the salvation of their country! They evinced, as we may perceive in every written document, more enthusiasm and fervour than even the men, and a greater impatience to take the civic oath. Women kept back from public life; and people are too to for at they really have more right to it than any.

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396 THE WOMAN'S STAKE GREATER THAN THE MAN'S.

The stake they venture is very different from ours; man plays only his life; but woman stakes her child. She is far more interested in acquiring information and foresight. In the solitary sedentary life which most women lead, they follow, in their anxious musings, the critical events of their country, and the movements of the armies. The mind of this woman, whom you believe to be entirely occupied with her household duties, is wandering in Algeria, sharing all the privations and marches of our young soldiers in Africa, and suffering and fighting with them. But, whether called or not, they took the most active part in the fêtes of the confederations. In some village or other, the men had assembled alone in a large building, to make a common address to the National Assembly. The women draw near, listen, enter, and, with tears in their eyes, entreat to be allowed to join them. Then, the address is read to them, and they agree to it heartily. This affecting union of the family and the country filled every heart with an unknown sentiment. The fête, though quite accidental, was but the more touching on that account. It was short, like all human happiness, and lasted but one day. The account of the proceedings ends with a natural expression of melancholy and musing: "Thus passed away the happiest moment of our lives." The reason was, they had to work on the morrow and rise early; for it was harvest time. The confederates of Etoile, near Valence, express themselves in words to this effect, after having mentioned their fire-works and farandoles: "We who, on the 29th of November, 1789, gave France the example of the first confederation, have been able to devote to this festivity only one day; and we withdrew in the evening to rest ourselves in order to resume our labours on the morrow; for the labours of the field are urgent, and we are sorry for it." . . . Good husbandmen! They write all that to the National Assembly, convinced that it is thinking of them, and that, like God, it beholds and performs everything!

These memorials of rural communes are so many wild flowers that seem to have sprung up in the midst of the harvest. In reading them we seem to inhale the strong and vivifying perfume of the country at that glowing season of fecundity. It is like walking among the ripe corn.

And in fact it was in the open country that all this took

THE CHILD ON THE ALTAR OF ITS NATIVE LAND. 397

place. No temple would have sufficed. The whole population went forth, every man, woman, and child; and with them they transported the old in their chairs, and infants in their cradles; whilst villages and whole towns were left in the custody of public faith. A few patrols, who cross through a town, depose that they saw nothing on their way but dogs. Any one who, on the 14th of July, 1790, had passed through those deserted villages, at noon, without seeing the country, would have taken them for Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Nobody was able to absent himself from the festival, for no one was a mere spectator; all were actors, from the centenarian to the new-born infant; and the latter more so than any.

He was carried like a living flower among the flowers of the harvest, offered by his mother, and laid upon the altar. But it was not the passive part of an offering alone that he had to perform; he was active also; he was accounted a person; took his civic oath by the lips of his mother; claimed his dignity as a man and a Frenchman; was put at once in possession of his native land, and received his share of hope.

Yes, the child, the future generation, was the principal actor. At a festival in Dauphiné, the commune itself is crowned, in the person of its principal magistrate, by a young child. Such a hand brings good fortune. These youths, whom I now behold under the anxious eye of their mother, will, in two years' time, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, depart in arms, full of military enthusiasm; the year '92 will have summoned them, and they will follow their elders to Jemmapes. These again, still younger, whose arms appear so feeble, are the future soldiers of Austerlitz. Their hand has brought good fortune; they have accomplished the good omen, and crowned their native land; and even to-day, though feeble and pale, France still wears that eternal crown, and overawes nations.

How great and happy the generation born amidst such things, and whose first gaze was gladdened by that sublime spectacle! Children brought and blessed at the altar of their native land, devoted by their weeping, but resigned and heroic mothers, and bestowed by them on France. Oh! those who are thus born can never die. You received on that day the cup of immortality. Even those among you whom history has not mentioned, nevertheless fill the world with your nameless

398

EVERY DISSENSION FORGOTTEN.

living spirit, with that great unanimous idea which, sword in hand, they extended throughout the world.

I do not believe that the heart of man was at any period more teeming with a vast and comprehensive affection, or that the distinctions of classes, fortunes, and parties, were ever so much forgotten. In the villages, especially, there are no longer either rich or poor, nobles or plebeians; there is but one general table, and provisions are in common; social dissensions and quarrels have disappeared; enemies become reconciled; and opposite sects, believers and philosophers, Protestants and Catholics, fraternise together.

At Saint-Jean-du-Gard, near Alais, the Catholic curate and the Protestant minister embraced at the altar. The Catholics led the Protestants to church, and the minister was made to sit in the first place in the choir. Similar honours were done by the Protestants to the curate, who, seated among them in the most honourable place, listened to the minister's sermon. The religions fraternise on their old battle-field, at the entrance to the Cévennes, upon the tombs of their ancestors who killed one another, and on the still warm ashes of the faggots. God, so long accused, was at length justified. All hearts overflowed with love; prose was not sufficient; a burst of poetry could alone express so profound a sentiment. The curate composed and chanted a hymn to liberty; the mayor replied in stanzas, and his wife, a respectable mother of a family, at the moment when she presented her children at the altar, poured forth the feelings of her heart in a few pathetic verses.

The open air, the fields, and the immense valleys, where these festivals were generally held, seemed to contribute to this effusion of the heart. Man had not only reconquered his rights, but he had re-entered upon his possession of nature. Several of these writings testify the emotion which those poor people felt on beholding their country for the first time. Strange to relate! those rivers, mountains, and noble landscapes, where they were constantly passing, were discovered by them on that day they had never seen them before.

An instinct of nature, the natural inspiration of the genius of the country, often caused them to choose for the scene of these festivals the very places which had been preferred by our ancient Gauls, the Druids. The islands held sacred by the

MAN AGAIN FINDS NATURE.

399

ancestors, became sacred also for their posterity. In the departments of Gard, Charente, and elsewhere, the altar was erected on an island. That of Angoulême received the representatives of sixty thousand men ; and there were, perhaps, as many upon the admirable amphitheatre on which this town is situated, above the river. In the evening, there was a banquet in the illuminated island, with a whole people for guests and spectators, from the top to the bottom of that gigantic coliseum.

At Maubec (in the department of Isère), where many rural communes assembled, the altar was erected in the middle of an immense plain, opposite to an ancient monastery, with a magnificent view, an unbounded horizon, and the reminiscence of Rousseau, who had lived there some time! In a speech glowing with enthusiasm, a priest extolled the glorious memory of the philosopher, who, in that very place, had mused and prepared that great day. In conclusion, he pointed to heaven, and called to witness the sun, then bursting from the clouds, as though to enjoy also that sublime and affecting spectacle.

We, worshippers of the future, who put our faith in hope, and look towards the east; we, whom the disfigured and perverted past, daily becoming more impossible, has banished from every temple; we who, by its monopoly, are deprived of temple and altar, and often feel sad in the isolated communion of our thoughts; we had a temple on that day,—such a temple as had never existed before! No artificial church, but the universal church; from the Vosges to the Cévennes, and from the Alps to the Pyrenees.

No conventional symbol! All nature, all mind, all truth! Man who, in our old churches, never saw his fellows face to face, saw them here,-saw himself for the first time, and from the eyes of a whole people received a spark of God.

He perceived nature, seized it again, and found it still sacred: for in it he perceived his God.

And he called that people and that country by the name he had found,-Native Land. And however large this Patria may be, he enlarges his heart so as to embrace it all. He beholds it with the eyes of the mind, and clasps it with the longings of desire.

Ye mountains of our native land, which bound our sight, but not our thoughts, be witness that if we do not clasp in one