is ass, while his ideas are those of his condition.
He has been a long time stolid; "he lacks even instinct,"[5303]
mechanically and fixedly regarding the ground on which he drags along
his hereditary plow. In 1751, d'Argenson wrote in his journal:

"nothing in the news from the court affects them; the reign is
indifferent to them. . . . . the distance between the capital and the
province daily widens. . . . Here they are ignorant of the striking
occurrences that most impressed us at Paris. . . .The inhabitants of the
country side are merely poverty-stricken slaves, draft cattle under a
yoke, moving on as they are goaded, caring for nothing and embarrassed
by nothing, provided they can eat and sleep at regular hours."

They make no complaints, "they do not even dream of complaining;"[5304]
their wretchedness seems to them natural like winter or hail. Their
minds, like their agriculture, still belong to the middle ages.-In the
environment of Toulouse,[5305] to ascertain who committed a robbery, to
cure a man or a sick animal, they resort to a sorcerer, who divines this
by means of a sieve. The countryman fully believes in ghosts and, on
All Saints' eve, he lays the cloth for the dead.--In Auvergne, at the
outbreak the Revolution, on a contagious fever making its appearance,
M. de Montlosier, declared to be a sorcerer, is the cause of it, and two
hundred men assemble together to demolish his dwelling. Their religious
belief is on the same level.[5306] "Their priests drink with them
and sell them absolution. On Sundays, at the sermon, they put up
lieutenancies and sub-lieutenancies (among the saints) for sale: so much
for a lieutenant's place under St. Peter!--If the peasant hesitates in
his bid, an eulogy of St. Peter at once begins, and then our peasants
run it up fast enough."--To intellects in a primitive state, barren of
ideas and crowded with images, idols on earth are as essential as idols
in heaven. "No doubt whatever existed in my mind," says Retit de la
Bretonne,[5307] "of the power of the king to compel any man to bestow
his wife or daughter on me, and my village (Sacy, in Burgundy) thought
as I did."[5308] There is no room in minds of this description for
abstract conceptions, for any idea of social order; they are submissive
to it and that is all. "The mass of the people," writes Governor in
1789, "have no religion but that of their priests, no law but that of
those above them, no morality but that of self-int