The only explanation that can be offered why so many of the snug fortunes of those best and worst of
[Illustration: “There were the sincere Radicals.”]
times miraculously disappeared is to be found in the hypothesis that the majority of the people were utterly incompetent both by education and experience to manage the vast amounts of money that had, as magic, rolled up while they slept.
But there were two kinds of Jacobin houses, there were the sincere Radicals (see Plate LVIII), and the Scaramouches (see Plate LIX). In other words it was another struggle between the Girondists and the Mountain--the moderately-minded folks and the ultra-revolutionists. Examples of the Scaramouches are becoming difficult to obtain, they give the present generation such indescribable pains in the head to be continually seeing them that every year their owners cause them to be altered or to disappear altogether one after another. A perfect nightmare of a house upon which I relied for my _pièce de résistance_ in this chapter was recently remodeled before I could make a picture of it in all its pristine extravagance; and the next reviewer of Jacobin architecture will find the Scaramouches still rarer acquisitions. But I truly regret when I see a Jacobin house of the better sort (see the one illustrated in Plate LVIII), losing its character to make conform to a later fashion in architecture because of certain didactic purposes which it would serve as originally designed.
This Jacobin house exhibits a very creditable composition after the manner of the Reign of Terror; and if we accept the standard by which we judge the newly invented architecture of our own day which I had the honor to illustrate in the second chapter of this review (see Plate VIII), the Jacobin house has but one fault--a fault, by the way, that admits of argument, too--it is out of fashion. The two designs are equally original, equally dauntless and equally successful from the standpoint of harmony, good lines, balance, proportion and all the more obscure terms artists invoke to impress the neophyte while often groping in the dark, themselves for the touchstone whereby they may discern what is good and what is bad in architecture.