THE INFERNAL MACHINE.
discharging foul Iler devilish glut. chained thunder-bolts and hail Of iron globes
Paris, 10th August 18;35.
This letter was written yesterday in French, to chase away the devils; and to-day the writer is condemned to bring them back again by translating it into English. To write or talk the former tongue, is a practice extremely beneficial to our pensive country- men; the sound of it being as sovereign against the spleen as that of a fiddle. They are not, however, recommended to do any- thing in this way, if it must be on condition of afterwards turning it into English ; which is by no means an inspiriting operation, and will infallibly convert their supposed gold and silver into slate and pebbles. Furthermore, as the letter was to sing of wars, horrid wars, thunderbolts launched from garret-windows, and a whole hell of "iron globes" vomited on the highway, the French, as more sonorous and ronflant, seemed better adapted to the subject than a language defective in nasality, unless when it is snorted from nostrils hooked by an habitual scorn of all that is not duke or lord.
You are aware that it is FIESCIII'S new patent machine for executing vengeance, of which it is proposed to treat,—a week or so too late, it must be confessed ; but then, stunned by so dia- bolical an explosion, it is only now that one's ears are ceasing to tingle and one's bead to recover from stupor. In fact, you possibly might be reminded of poor MATHEWS'S " Long-bow," if you were told, that the rimbombo of this infernal outbreak was heard from Vincennes to St. Cloud and from Mont-martre to Mont-rouge. If you are hard of belief, accept it on the credit of a poet who wrote about the matter two thousand years ago :
" Tartaream intendit vocem, qua protenus omne Contremuit nenius, et slim intonuere profundw ; Et trepidae matres pressere ad pectora natos."
Or if you will not take it on the authority of VIRGIL, perhaps it may go down on that of Aelosro, who has prophesied the uproar in express terms :
" Tremip Parigi e torbidossi Senna All' alta voce, a quell' orribil grido;
. . . . . . . Si strinsero he madri i figli al seno."
After all, it is MILTON, that great infernal machinist, who has most pointedly alluded to FIESCHI'S Satanic contrivance :
" The invention all admired, and each how lie
To be the inventor missed ; so easy it seemed
Once known, which yet unknown, most would have thought Impossible: yet haply of thy race,
In after times, if malice should abound,
Some one intent on mischief, and inspired With devilish machination, might invent
Like instrument to plague the sons of men." After all these testimonies and prophetic warnings, you will be amazed at the more than mill-stone deafness of him whose ears were not apprized of it, and at the dulness of eyes that read it not in the face of man, woman, and child, till more than four-and- twenty hours after the explosion, when the news was served up to him along with the everlasting bif-tick at a traiteur's;—so com- pletely may a foreigner cut himself off from all communication with mankind in the heart of a city of little less than a million of souls! He begs to vindicate, however, the integrity of one sense at least, by declaring, on the authority of a sous-officier in the Eleventh Legion, stationed within a ten minutes' walk of No. 50 —alas I not the "dirty half-hundred " that carried the day at Corunna, but the hellish garret of the Corsican devil—that not the faintest echo of the rimbombo was beard either by him or his comrades. The first intimations that reached them were like the floating feathers and whirling straws which portend a thunder- storm. It was a strange movement along the whole line, for which nobody could account, but which fascinated everybody. On r6pittait t cheque instant : "Mais it y a quelquechose de nouveau., Inds oui ; mats Lien certainement, y a quelquechose d arrive. Peu apress cette sensation inexplicable se formula comme de suite : " On a tire eur le .Roi, it y a une personne de Ad, pas davantage." BientOt " On dit que c'est un =reshot." Puis, ".C'est.un aide-de-camp du Roi." Ah I alors re n'est plush) mare- .chal ; le marechal nest done pas tue ; puis, " C'est le colonel de la Ah ! alors, it n'y a ni marechal, ni aide-decamp de tub. Peu apses : On a tire sur le Roi, et de sa suite, it n'y a que lui seta qui est reste debout ! Thus les autres ont ite itendus worts ou mourans sur la place:' Pen apses, paraissa to Roi et sa suite, asses nombreuse pour ne pas laisser remarquer les vides que la machine de Fieschi venait y faire. in fact, LOUIS PHILIP bad presence of mind enough left him to continue the review and play out the play to the end ; a stretch of heroism for which he has been already so copiously helauded in French and English, as to render further commendation superfluous. Alas, crowned heads glean golden opinions with little pains ; which is, perhaps, the reason why they take so little to merit them. How- ever, the man's courage and sang froid in danger have never been questioned. In his youth he hummed the Marseillaise under the fire of the Austrians at Jemappe; it was to be expected that in his age he would not be put out of his way by that of an assas- sin from an upper window. All that the Eleventh Legion could remark, was an unusual paleness under the black toe pet, which the caricatures have made as well known to everybody as a man's own is to himself; and no wonder, all things considered. The spectacle afterwards was bad enough to allow one to believe that the first confusion of the havoc must have been horrid ; for when the crowd had been cleared off the ground and the spot surrounded by the troops, there lay some thirty individuals dead or wounded ; and among them poor old Marechal MORTIER, just the most innocent man about Court, and a passive obeyer of re- gimes of all colours. The Carlist vengeance—for Carlist it has every appearance of being—has made a strange mistake. One of its balls lodged in the inexpressibles of M. Da BROGLIE (which, however, is no reason why he should avenge his breeches, which might so well bear the affront, on the press); and another did, or did not, touch the tip of little THIERS'S dirty little finger. Had it reserved for either, and particularly for the last, what it so brutally and stu- pidly perpetrated on old men, women, and children, Carlism might have consoled itself by reflecting—" C'est vrai, j'ai manque le gros, mais ce petit vaurien, qui a conseille l'arrestation de Nantes, et la prison de Blaye, ne fera plus arris:ter niemprisonner personne. C'est toujours quelquechose, en attendant." The complicity of Carlism, which everything that has transpired contributes to establish, and which will be believed by all Paris till a trial in the face of day has disproved it, may be reasonably inferred from antecedent transactions. The Republic in opposition, whether at Lyons or Paris, goes down into the street; erects a barricade, which it mans, till swept away by an inundation of troops ; re- treats into a house, which it defends as long as an old nail can be found to load with ; then, powder and ball spent, escapes with blackened hands and swart face over the adjoining house-tops, leaving a luckless or less active portion of its body to the bayonets of the infantry. The Republic in power, crowds the prisons with suspects, erects scaffolds, travels with a guillotine; but always affects a form of law, and does not massacre, even in September, without the farce of a trial and a condemnation, after the approved mode of the TuDoas and STUARTS, so much admired by the mo- dern Tories and the Quarterly Review. If it be some isolated in- dividual, in whose vindictive breast the apparition of a Cossack army on the Boulevards and a king following in their bag- gage-waggons has made an ineffaceable impression and left an incurable rancour, he presents himself, like Louver., bodily before his victim, and plunges a dagger in his breast. 'Von les mceurs de la Republique en fait d'assassinats politiques. What, after the most-approved precedents, is the mode in which Carlism proceeds? What other but that of FIESCHI? GEORGES CADOUDAL, the em- ploye of the emigrants and the Count DARTOIS that then was, has a spite against the First Consul, and, to conciliate the interests of his vengeance with those of his own personal security, does not scruple an explosion, which had like to have brought down the neighbourhood in ruins, and which actually demolished a consider- able number of honest bourgeois, their wives and children. The Globe, therefore—who without any evidence, and solely on the grounds of antecedents, exculpates Carlism and incriminates the Republic—only proves that he knows just as much about the one as the other, and is more than sufficiently disposed to be fulsome and adulatory. Fiescnt was just as great a Destructive of others and Conservative of himself, as GEORGES or any other Carlist or Tory. He appears to have stipulated for what would have kept him itt. three mistresses (for the gentle Corsican seems to have been unable to do with fewer) to the end of his days; and he had prepared so well for his escape, that if his own machine—an executor of justice in this respect at least—had not made infraction in his skull, he might have proved the Police as dull in quest as it has shown itself tardy in prevention. Strange oversight! Of the twenty-five canons de fusil of which Satan had composed his devilish engine, some five or six wanted touch-holes ; and, strange temerity ! they were so " thick rammed " with balls, lingots, and other mischievous missiles, that such as were fbund unfired, required to be sawed asunder before they could be unloaded. It is therefore no wonder, that although the majority discharged their " devilish glut " on the Boulevard, some two or three should be found just and prompt enough to pay the contriver the merit of his invention. Would it not seem that there is an assisting daemon at such operations, who bewilders those whom he instigates? But it is not given to the coolest and most intrepid villain on earth, to preserve his sang froid in the concoction of such hell-hot wickedness. And Ftzscui was not without qualms, as he has confessed himself. Can v conceive the state of a inan's heart, about to fire off a charge destined, in all likelihood, to carry off some fifty individuals, men, women, and children, not to mentian a whole family of princes? Imagine a distant view of the splendid cortege advancing, and the cries of " Vivo le Roi " falling faintly on the ear of the assassin peeping from behind the blind of his attic window 1 In fact, he was in such a funk, as they say nowhere but at Cambridge, that he found himself obliged to run down to the marchand de yin below, and drink two or three coups deau de vie to screw up his reso- lution to the firing point. Certainly, to leap with EMPEDOCLES, or CURTIUS, OT the Englishman who threw himself from the column in the Place Venthitne, were a light and trivial step, com- pared with that of putting the lighted match to the train of powder attached to FIESCHI'S machine. His application to the brandy bottle, however, and the precautions taken to save his own bacon at the expense of that of other folks, will not allow his name to go down among those of the grands scelerats of all ages and coun- tries. Enough of impossibility remains, to attest him a true Corsican ; for they of that island, great or small, appear to have this organ in perfection ; and Le Grand NAPOLEON in the heroic way, was as unsparing of human flesh as FIESCHI in his scoun- drel vocation.
Perhaps you would desire to have some data for giving a local habitation to this demoniacal tragedy. The Boulevard du Temple, a portion of the long line of splendid road which girds Paris, as the New Road, City Road, &c. girdle London, is as like the latter, as elms are like to poplars, and tall; handsome buildings of white stone, to dingy, dwarfish brick houses. Draw up under either row of trees a line of infantry reaching both ways beyond ken, and crowd men, women, and children on the pavement, pRe-mole, behind. Now plant yourself with your back to the Jardin Turc- the poor Jardin Ture, written at length in capital letters, was peppered in its whole extent by the musketry of M. FiEscni, its opposite neighbour—and so placed, you have before you, between " Billards " on the one hand and a coffeehouse on the other, a squalid enough house, having but three windows in front, one above the other, and on the ground-floor a gin-shop or tap. Voilis la maison; No. 50 du Boulevard du Temple, done into English. It is hoped that this minute description of the premises, will be of use to the Surry, when, according to the laudable practice of' that theatre, it dramatizes No. 50, Temple Boulevard, as it dramatized Gill's-hill Cottage, and produces the actual machine of FIESCHI, as it produced the actual horse and gig of THURTELL. Let not the Surry forget to write under the window of the third story—an ugly, square, stunted window, out of which nothing good could evidently proceed—" Fieschi's window ;" in short, "Connaissances utiles, 4 sous la livraison;'—and not dear either, considering that the first livraison or delivery was tantamount to the lives of one Marechal, two Generals, two Colonels, besides women, children, and bons bourgeois. It is a striking exemplification of the march of intelligence; and as such it has been understood by MM. GUIZOT and BROGLIE, who are therefore taking measures for stopping the march altogether. Is it not a specimen of lordly ratiocina- tion? A Corsican brigand, first thief, then spy of the Police, "et de surveille qu11 etait auparavant, devenu surveillant," is bought with Carlist money, to fire off an infernal machine on the King's Ma- jesty ; and the King's Government infers from the explosion, that the press is to be gagged and the jury system modified ! A Tory Lord under CASTLEREAGH could not have reasoned more logically. The Police is in yet worse odour than its employer and confede- rate the Government. It is proved to conviction, that the Police is only good for getting tip a row in the streets or a plot in a poke, and can do nothing in the way of prevention, whether it be to arrest Don CARLOS travelling leisurely through France, or to ferret FIESCHI out of his hole, in No. 50; and yet rumours of an in- tention to fire upon the King somewhere in the Boulevards, were afloat on or before the 38th, at the same time that the said No. 50 is the only house in that neighbourhood which enjoys a particularly ill reputation, and is critically situated for the firing off of such a coup d'etat—I mean coup de brigand. This amiable Police, so exact in its perquisitions en domicile, that lets not so much as a pot de chambre escape reconnoitering, could not smell out a fox so rank as FIESCHI, in a hole so obvious to suspicion as his mansarde No. 50.
Along with the Police and Doctrinaire Government, the colt- RUPTION-CLU13 system is brought just now into the universal odium it merits. The Carlists on the Continent make a common purse, like the Tories in Carlton Place ; and. the Carlist Club in- deed is only a sort of branch society affiliated to the richer Carlton Club. It is known to supply Don CARLOS with funds for carrying
on his brigandage in Spain ; and is suspected of having bought Frascni, as the Carlton Club would buy a borough venal enough to be sold. It was no doubt hoped, that by so wide a breach, Carlism might enter and establish its head-quarters in Paris, as
in the good time of M. JULES PoLis.'arse and the Pavillon Marsan. Each acts up to the amount of its ambition, and is vindictive in proportion to the injury it has to revenge. A crown lost, and a military expedition endins, in an accouchement, could be atoned
for only by the removal of intruder and " all his little ones," at one " fell swoop," from throne and life together. The Carlton
Club, in like manner, when defeated in an election, revenges itself by plundering the successful candidate. The principle is the same ; the effects vary only with the exigencies of the case and the manners of the country. It is a wretched history, of which the parts are worthy of one another : FIESCHI, Machine, Doctri- naires, Carlism, and Carlton Club.