Bastile, and the system which kept it up.

For these very ministers of luxury--then miscalled art--from the periwig-
maker to the play-actor--who like them had seen the frivolity, the
baseness, the profligacy, of the rulers to whose vices they pandered,
whom they despised while they adored! Figaro himself may have looked up
to his master the Marquis as a superior being as long as the law enabled
the Marquis to send him to the Bastile by a lettre de cachet; yet Figaro
may have known and seen enough to excuse him, when lettres de cachet were
abolished, for handing the Marquis over to a Comite de Salut Public.
Disappointed play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed poets, like
Fabre d'Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious. Why not?
Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by men
and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they had, it
may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their patrons than
had our own Pitt and Burke. They had played the valet: and no man was a
hero to them. They had seen the nobleman expose himself before his own
helots: they would try if the helot was not as good as the nobleman. The
nobleman had played the mountebank: why should not the mountebank, for
once, play the nobleman? The nobleman's God had been his five senses,
with (to use Mr. Carlyle's phrase) the sixth sense of vanity: why should
not the mountebank worship the same God, like Carriere at Nantes, and see
what grace and gifts he too might obtain at that altar?

But why so cruel? Because, with many of these men, I more than suspect,
there were wrongs to be avenged deeper than any wrongs done to the sixth
sense of vanity. Wrongs common to them, and to a great portion of the
respectable middle class, and much of the lower class: but wrongs to
which they and their families, being most in contact with the noblesse,
would be especially exposed; namely, wrongs to women.