despair, and who are perishing every day with disease caused by famine. While they want bread, you yourself want money, and you will not see the extremity to which you are reduced."
An official account in 1698 had said,—
"In the greater part of Rouen, in Normandy, which was always one of the most industrious and well-to-do provinces, out of seven hundred thousand souls there are not fifty thousand who eat bread at their ease and who sleep on anything better than straw. In the greater part of Caen the population has diminished a half by poverty."
In 1707 Vauban wrote,—
"The tenth part of the people is reduced to beggary, and begs in fact: two million beggars out of twenty million people. Of the other nine tenths there are five who are not in condition to give alms to the one tenth, because they are within a trifle of being reduced to the same wretched condition; and of the four remaining tenths, three are very poorly off."
In 1725 Saint Simon wrote,—
"The poor people of Normandy eat grass, and the kingdom is turned into a vast hospital of the dying and of those driven to despair."
In 1740 Bishop Massillon wrote to Minister Fleury,—
"My lord, the people of our country live in frightful poverty, without bed, without furniture. The greater part even lack, for half the year, oat and barley bread, which makes their sole subsistence, and are obliged to tear it from their own and their children's mouths to pay their taxes."
In 1745 the Duke of Orleans said to Louis XV. on presenting him with some fern bread: "Sire, see on what your subjects feed."[1]
When we consider that the clergy held the third part of the soil of France and exacted a tithe of the produce of the rest, affecting to call this tithe a free-will offering, while they prosecuted forty thousand lawsuits to enforce it, we can see that the crash must come, and can understand why Church and State domination must go down together.
"During the eighteenth century men were speculating on religion, government, and society in a more daring way than they had ever speculated on so great a scale before. . . . This whole period, then, was one of very great importance, but it was mainly
- ↑ Lacombe: Petite Histoire du Peuple Français, p. 202.
