The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 | Page 2

one battle let his country's fate be decided. The battle is fought and lost; his army is routed and cut to pieces; he has asked for liberty with his whole strength, with his whole soul, and the answer is 'No!' written with bayonets in blood, and voiced by the enemy's cannon. Would WASHINGTON have been true to his greatness in placing himself before the last cannon? No! emphatically, no! With Napoleon he might have cried, 'It is finished,' but then with the same calm brow yet bursting heart, he would have resigned his sword to his conquerors; and if the scaffold were his fate, met it with quiet dignity; or if the dungeon, there calmly await the Almighty's time when he might again raise his right arm for his country; still as great in the prison or on the scaffold, as when he was at the head of conquering armies. Napoleon's intellectual character was perceptive rather than deep; and there is an intense concentrativeness about him, a power of throwing the whole effort of his soul into the environment of the moment, which is remarkable; and not less so the facility with which he changes that concentration from place to place, from subject to subject. Probably no man ever had his whole mind so much under the control of his will, at his fingers' ends, as it were; 'the eye to see and the will to do.' But revert we to CARLYLE.
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Some call for Barras to be made commandant; he conquered in Thermidor. Some, what is more to the purpose, bethink them of the Citizen BONAPARTE, unemployed artillery officer who took Toulon. A man of head, a man of action: Barras is named Commandant's Cloak; this young artillery officer is named Commandant. He was in the gallery at the moment, and heard it; he withdrew some half hour to consider with himself: after a half-hour of grim compressed considering, to be or not to be, he answers yea. And now, a man of head being at the head of it, the whole matter gets vital. Swift to camp of Sablon, to secure the artillery; there are not twenty men guarding it! A swift adjutant, Murat is the name of him, gallops, gets thither some minutes within time, for Lepelletier was also on march that way: the cannon are ours. And now beset this post and beset that; rapid and firm; at Wicket of the Louvre, in Cul-de-sac Dauphin, in Rue St. Honoré, from Pont Neuf all along the North Quays, southward to the Pont ci-devant Royal, rank round the sanctuary of the Tuilleries, a ring of steel discipline; let every gunner have his match burning, and all men stand to their arms. Lepelletier has seized the Church of Saint Roche; has seized the Pont Neuf, our piquet there retreating thence without fire. Stray shots fall from Lepelletier, rattle down on the very Tuilleries' stair-case. On the other hand, women advance dishevelled, shrieking peace; Lepelletier behind them waving his hat in sign that we shall fraternize. Steady! The artillery officer is steady as bronze; can, if need were, be quick as lightning. Lepelletier making nothing by messengers by fraternity or hat-waving, bursts out, along the southern Quai Voltaire, along streets and passages, treble-quick in huge veritable onslaught! Whereupon thou bronze artillery officer--? 'Fire'! say the bronze lips. And roar and thunder, roar and again roar, continual, volcano-like, goes his great gun, in the Cul-de-sac Dauphin against the Church of Saint Roch; go his great guns on the Pont Royal; go all his great guns--blow to air some two hundred men, mainly about the Church of Saint Roch! Lepelletier cannot stand such harsh play; no sectioner can stand it; the forty thousand yield on all sides scour toward covert. The ship is over the bar; free she bounds shoreward--amid shouting and vivats! Citizen Bonaparte is 'named General of the Interior by acclamation;' quelled sections have to disarm in such humor as they may; sacred right of insurrection is gone forever! 'It is false,' says Napoleon, 'that we fired first with blank charge; it had been a waste of life to do that.' Most false; the firing was with sharp and sharpest shot: to all men it was plain that here was no sport; the rabbits and plinths of Saint Roch Church show splintered by it to this hour. Singular: in old Broglie's time, six years ago, this whiff of grape shot was promised; but it could not be given then; could not have profited then. Now, however, the time has come for it and the man; and behold you have it; and the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it and become a thing that was!
The French revolution did disclose original men: among