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picture of these famished wretches, cadaverous with hunger, beating a devil's tattoo on the shutters, jostling and pressing each other in their need, and with greedy eyes watching the loaves, as they stumble over each other in their hot haste to catch them! This disturbance was at last allayed by a reduction of the price of bread to a loaf of two sous, and Manon dilates on the singular appearance of the crowd, now appeased, if only for the present. "Some of the people," she writes, "caper about with loaves hugged in their arms, carrying them in triumph, and manifesting the pleasure of satisfied hunger by the most energetic gestures. In many quarters," she continues, "the disturbance would hardly have been perceived had it not been for the pusillanimity of the shop-keepers, who all closed their shutters." She herself was a witness of one of these panics. On entering a church to hear mass, three or four children came running in to seek shelter from a mob that was making for a neighbouring baker. Great alarm on the part of the beadles and the female chair-hirers, who, violently shutting the doors, would naturally have led the otherwise unsuspecting congregation to think that enraged ravishers were coming to violate the most sacred of shrines. "The poor people only wanted bread, and thought not of altars," she says, adding significantly, "the sight of these things gives one quite a new kind of feeling and awakens a host of thoughts."

 

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