obled six families in less than
twenty years." Should this abuse continue, "in a hundred years
every tax-payer the most capable of supporting taxation will be
ennobled."[5260] Observe, moreover, that an infinity of offices and
functions, without conferring nobility, exempt their titularies from
the personal taille and reduce their poll-tax to the fortieth of their
income; at first, all public functionaries, administrative or judicial,
and next all employments in the salt-department, in the customs, in the
post-office, in the royal domains, and in the excise.[5261] "There are
few parishes," writes an intendant, "in which these employees are
not found, while several contain as many as two or three."[5262]
A postmaster is exempt from the taille, in all his possessions and
offices, and even on his farms to the extent of a hundred arpents. The
notaries of Angouleme are exempt from the corvee, from collections, and
the lodging of soldiers, while neither their sons or chief clerks can
be drafted in the militia. On closely examining the great fiscal net
in administrative correspondence, we detect at every step some meshes
through which, with a bit of effort and cunning, all the big and
average-sized fish escape; the small fry alone remain at the bottom of
the scoop. A surgeon not an apothecary, a man of good family forty-five
years old, in commerce, but living with his parent and in a province
with a written code, escapes the collector. The same immunity is
extended to the begging agents of the monks of "la Merci" and "L'Etroite
Observance." Throughout the South and the East individuals in easy
circumstances purchase this commission of beggar for a "louis," or for
ten crowns, and, putting three livres in a cup, go about presenting it
in this or that parish:[5263] ten of the inhabitants of a small mountain
village and five inhabitants in the little village of Treignac obtain
their discharge in this fashion. Consequently, "the collections fall
on the poor, always powerless and often insolvent," the privileged
who effect the ruin of the tax-payer causing the deficiencies of the
treasury.

VII. Municipal Taxation.

The octrois of towns.--The poor the greatest sufferers.

One word more to complete the picture. People seek shelter in the towns
and, indeed, compared with the country, the towns are a refuge. But
misery accompanies the poor, for, on the one hand, they are involved
in debt, and, on the other, the closed cir