men, women, and children, the hole parish, range the country,
set snares, and destroy the burrows. "The rumor is current that the
Government, informed of the damage done by the game to cultivators,
allows its destruction. . . and really the hares ravaged about a fifth
of the crop. At first an arrest is made of nine of these poachers; but
they are released, "taking circumstances into account." Consequently,
for two months, there is a slaughter on the property of the Prince de
Conti and of the Ambassador Mercy d'Argenteau; in default of bread
they eat rabbits.--Along with the abuse of property they are led, by a
natural impulse, to attack property itself. Near Saint-Denis the woods
belonging to the abbey are devastated. "The farmers of the neighborhood
carry away loads of wood, drawn by four and five horses;" the
inhabitants of the villages of Ville-Parisis, Tremblay, Vert-Galant,
Villepinte, sell it publicly, and threaten the wood-rangers with a
beating. On the 15th of June the damage is already estimated at 60,000
livres.--It makes little difference whether the proprietor has been
benevolent, like M. de Talaru,[1203] who had supported the poor on his
estate at Issy the preceding winter. The peasants destroy the dike which
conducts water to his communal mill; condemned by the parliament to
restore it, they declare that not only will they not obey. Should M. de
Talaru try to rebuild it they will return with three hundred armed men,
and tear it away the second time.

For those who are most compromised Paris is the nearest refuge. For the
poorest and most exasperated, the door of nomadic life stands wide
open. Bands rise up around the capital, just as in countries where human
society has not yet been formed, or has ceased to exist. During the
first two weeks of May[1204] near Villejuif a band of five or six
hundred vagabonds strive to force Bicetre and approach Saint-Cloud. They
arrive from thirty, forty, and sixty leagues off, from Champagne, from
Lorraine, from the whole circuit of country devastated by the hailstorm.
All hover around Paris and are there engulfed as in a sewer, the
unfortunate along with criminals, some to find work, others to beg and
to rove about under the injurious prompting of hunger and the rumors
of the public thoroughfares. During the last days of April,[1205] the
clerks at the tollhouses note the entrance of "a frightful number of
poorly clad men of sinister aspect." During the first days of May a