So it was at Paris on the inaugural day of the Constitution for the
present year. The foreign ministers were ordered to attend at this
investiture of the Directory;--for so they call the managers of their
burlesque government. The diplomacy, who were a sort of strangers, were
quite awe-struck with the "pride, pomp, and circumstance" of this
majestic senate; whilst the _sans-culotte_ gallery instantly recognized
their old insurrectionary acquaintance, burst out into a horse-laugh at
their absurd finery, and held them in infinitely greater contempt than
whilst they prowled about the streets in the pantaloons of the last
year's Constitution, when their legislators appeared honestly, with
their daggers in their belts, and their pistols peeping out of their
side-pocket-holes, like a bold, brave banditti, as they are. The
Parisians (and I am much of their mind) think that a thief with a crape
on his visage is much worse than a barefaced knave, and that such
robbers richly deserve all the penalties of all the black acts. In this
their thin disguise, their comrades of the late abdicated sovereign
_canaille_ hooted and hissed them, and from that day have no other name
for them than what is not quite so easy to render into English,
impossible to make it very civil English: it belongs, indeed, to the
language of the _halles_: but, without being instructed in that dialect,
it was the opinion of the polite Lord Chesterfield that no man could be
a complete master of French.
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