Our Lady of Darkness by Bernard Capes — Read

Looking on a certain afternoon (it was that of the 27th of November) from his high perch, Ned saw the people of the streets to be in a more than usual state of excitement and commotion. Once or twice latterly it had occurred to him that the ferment of national affairs was not subsiding, as he had expected it to do, under the tonic treatment of the national comptrollers -- that the people were bent on levying on their taxmasters a tax more stringent than any they had themselves groaned under. Sometimes turning, as he rarely did, into the Palais Royal, and marking how, in that garden of public sedition, the very veil had been torn from innuendo; how furious agitators, each with his knot of eager listeners, found applause proportionate to the daring of their vituperation; how struggling hordes fought from door to counter of Desein's book-shop, that they might feed their revolutionary hunger with any cag-mag of radicalism, provided it were dressed to look raw and bloody -- he would fall curiously grave over a thought of the impotence of any known principle to precipitate passions held in such intricate solution, curiously speculative as to the drifting of a rudderless bark of state. For himself, he was conscious of having been shouldered from all his little snug standpoints of legislative philosophy; of the treading-under of his protoplasmic theories by innumerable vigorous feet; of his inadmissible claim to be allotted a portfolio in any government whatsoever of man by man. He was become, indeed, quite humble, and yet larger-souled than before, by reason of his content to act the part of insignificant unit in a drama, the goodly developments of which he was nevertheless still confident enough to foretell. And surely at this point he would have cried -- and that, despite the augurs -- as Mirabeau cried ecstatically at a later date: "How honourable will it be for France that this great Revolution has cost humanity neither offences nor crimes. To see it brought about by the mere union of enlightened minds with patriotic intentions: our battles mere discussions; our enemies only prejudices that may well be forgiven; our victories, our triumphs, so far from being cruel, blessed by the very conquered themselves."

"And, indeed," thought Ned, "what reforms were ever compelled without pressure, and what pressure, that was considerate of the pressed, was ever effective?"