See Bailly, likewise of Paris, time-honored Historian of Astronomy Ancient and Modern. Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beautiful Philosophizing, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thinness, ends in foul thick confusion--of Presidency, Mayorship, diplomatic officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlasting Darkness! Far was it to descend from the heavenly Galaxy to the _Drapeau Rouge_: beside that fatal dung-heap, on that last hell-day, thou must "tremble", though only with cold--"_de froid_." Speculation is not practice: to be weak is not so miserable, but to be weaker than our task. Woe the day when they mounted thee, a peaceable pedestrian, on that wild Hippogriff of a Democracy, which, spurning the firm earth, nay, lashing at the very _stars_, no yet known Astolpho could have ridden!
In the Commons Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of Letters; 374 Lawyers, and at least one Clergyman, the Abbé Sieyès. Him also Paris sends, among its twenty. Behold him, the light, thin man; cold, but elastic, wiry; instinct with the pride of Logic; passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-conceit. If indeed that can be called a passion, which in its independent concentrated greatness, seems to have soared into transcendentalism; and to sit there with a kind of godlike indifference, and look down on passion! He is the man, and wisdom shall die with him. This is the Sieyès who shall be System-builder, Constitution-builder General, and build Constitutions (as many as wanted) sky-high,--which shall all unfortunately fall before he get the scaffolding away. "_La Politique_", said he to Dumont, "polity is a science I think I have completed (_achevée_)." What things, O Sieyès, with thy clear assiduous eyes, art thou to see! But were it not curious to know how Sieyès, now in these days (for he is said to be still alive) looks out on all that Constitution masonry, through the rheumy soberness of extreme age? Might we hope, still with the old irrefragable transcendentalism? The victorious cause pleased the gods, the vanquished one pleased Sieyès (_victa Catoni_).
Thus, however, amid sky-rending _vivats_, and blessings from every heart, has the Procession of the Commons Deputies rolled by.