The Red Cockade by Stanley J. Weyman

It will be believed that I looked on the city with no common emotions. I had heard enough at Villeraugues -- and to that enough M. de Geol had added by the way a thousand details -- to satisfy me that here and not in the north, here in the Gard, and the Bouches du Rhone, among the olive groves and white dust of the south, and not among the wheatfields and pastures of the north, the fate of the nation hung in the balance; and that not in Paris -- where men would and yet would not, where Mirabeau and Lafayette, in fear of the mob, took one day a step towards the King, and the next, fearful lest restored he should punish, retraced it -- could the convulsion be arrested, but here! Here, where the warm imagination of the Provencal still saw something holy in things once holy, and faction bound men to faith.

Hitherto the stream of revolution had met with no check. Obstacles apparently the strongest, the King, the nobles, had crumbled and sunk before it, almost without a struggle; it remained to be seen whether the third and last of the governing powers, the Church, would fare better. Clearly, if Froment were right, and faith must be met by faith, and bigotry of one kind be opposed by bigotry of another kind, here in the valley of the Rhone, where the Church still kept its hold, lay the materials nearest to the enthusiast's hand. In that case -- and with this in my mind, I took my first long look at the city, and the wide low plain that lay beyond it, bathed in the sunset light -- in that case, from this spot might fly a torch to kindle France! Hence might start within the next few days a conflagration as wide as the land; that taken up, and roaring ever higher and higher through all La Vendee, and Brittany, and the Cotes du Nord, might swiftly ring round Paris with a circle of flame.