.]

[Footnote 5275: Grievances of the community of Culmon (Election de
Langres.)]

[Footnote 5276: Boivin-Champeaux, 34, 36, 41, 48.--Perin ("Doleances
des paroisses rurales de l'Artuis," 301, 308).--Archives nationales,
proces-verbaux and cahiers of the States-Generaux, vol. XVII. P. 12
(Letter of the inhabitants of Dracy-le Viteux).]

[Footnote 5277: Motte: a mound indicative of Seigniorial dominion;
quevaise; the right of forcing a resident to remain on his property
under penalty of forfeiture; domaine congeable; property held subject to
capricious ejection. (TR)]

[Footnote 5278: Prud'homme, "Resume des cahiers," III. passim, and
especially from 317 to 340.]

CHAPTER III. INTELLECTUAL STATE OF THE PEOPLE.

I.

Intellectual incapacity.--How ideas are transformed into
marvelous stories.

To comprehend their actions we ought now to look into the condition of
their minds, to know the current train of their ideas, their mode of
thinking. But is it really essential to draw this portrait, and are not
the details of their mental condition we have just presented sufficient?
We shall obtain a knowledge of them later, and through their actions,
when, in Touraine, they knock a mayor and his assistant, chosen by
themselves, senseless with kicks from their wooden shoes, because, in
obeying the national Assembly, these two unfortunate men prepared a
table of taxes; or when at Troyes, they drag through the streets and
tear to pieces the venerable magistrate who was nourishing them at
that very moment, and who had just dictated his testament in their
favor.-Take the still rude brain of a contemporary peasant and deprive
it of the ideas which, for eighty years past, have entered it by so many
channels, through the primary school of each village, through the return
home of the conscript after seven years' service, through the prodigious
multiplication of books, newspapers, roads, railroads, foreign travel
and every other species of communication.[5301] Try to imagine the
peasant of the eighteenth century, penned and shut up from father to
son in his hamlet, without parish highways, deprived of news, with no
instruction but the Sunday sermon, continuously worrying about his daily
bread and the taxes, "with his wretched, dried-up aspect,"[5302] not
daring to repair his house, always persecuted, distrustful, his mind
contracted and stinted, so to say, by misery. His condition is almost
that of his ox or h