s, for every village in
the neighborhood, a bureau of charity." At Airvault, in Poitou, the
municipal officers, the colonel of the national guard, and numbers of
"peasants and inhabitants" demand the conservation of the regular canons
of St. Augustin. "Their existence," says the petition, "is absolutely
essential, as well for our town as for the country, and we should
suffer an irreparable loss in their suppression." The municipality
and permanent council of Soissons writes that the establishment of
Saint-Jean des Vignes "has always earnestly claimed its share of the
public charges. This is the institution which, in times of calamity,
welcomes homeless citizens and provides them with subsistence. It alone
bears the expenses of the assembly of the bailiwick at the time of the
election of deputies to the National Assembly. A company of the regiment
of Armagnac is actually lodged under its roof. This institution is
always found wherever sacrifices are to be made." In scores of places
declarations are made that the monks are "the fathers of the poor." In
the diocese of Auxerre, during the summer of 1789, the Bernardines
of Rigny "stripped themselves of all they possessed in favor of the
inhabitants of neighboring villages: bread, grain, money and other
supplies, have all been lavished on about twelve hundred persons who,
for more than six weeks, never failed to present themselves at their
door daily. . . Loans, advances made on farms, credit with the purveyors
of the house, all has contributed to facilitating their means for
relieving the people." I omit many other traits equally forcible; we see
that the ecclesiastical and lay seigniors are not simple egoists
when they live at home. Man is compassionate of ills of which he is a
witness; absence is necessary to deaden their vivid impression; they
move the heart when the eye contemplates them. Familiarity, moreover,
engenders sympathy; one cannot remain insensible to the trials of a poor
man to whom, for over twenty years, one says good-morning every day on
passing him, with whose life one is acquainted, who is not an abstract
unit in the imagination, a statistical cipher, but a sorrowing soul and
a suffering body.--And so much the more because, since the writings
of Rousseau and the economists, a spirit of humanity, daily growing
stronger, more penetrating and more universal, has arisen to soften the
heart. Henceforth the poor are thought of, and it is esteemed an
honor to t