figured and blasted with drudgery, they appeared not so much women as creatures of amorphous shape, and that this extreme poverty of the husbandman, following his plough "without wooden shoes or feet to his stockings," in turn became the insidious worm, gnawing at the root of the tree of national prosperity.
In the Confessions, Rousseau incidentally refers to the French peasant's dread of the tax-gatherer's spies, and the premium that was put upon poverty. He narrates how, journeying on foot from Paris to Lyons, he lost his way on one occasion, and, footsore and famishing, besought hospitality of a peasant for payment. The rustic brought him some skimmed milk and rye-bread, saying it was all he possessed. Jean Jacques' hunger being in no wise appeased, and the peasant, drawing his own conclusions from this very genuine appetite, cautiously lifted a trap-door near the kitchen, descended, and reappeared with a ham, a bottle of wine, add a loaf of wheaten bread—a meal to make the traveller's mouth water. But the peasant's anxiety returned on Rousseau's offering to pay him, and it was only after much pressing that he, with a shudder, brought out the terrible words of tax-gatherer and cellar-rat. He explained how be hid his wine, because of the aides, how he hid his bread, because of the taille, and that he would be lost if it were known that he was not dying of hunger. The impression produced by the lot of this peasant who dared not so much as eat the bread he had earned in the sweat of his brow, became the germ of that life-long inextinguishable hatred which Rousseau felt for the oppression of the poor—became the germ of his Contrat Social, the little book which kindled so mighty a conflagration.
