agance,...the country deserted, or if a
gentleman in it, you find him in some wretched hole to save that money
which is lavished with profusion in the luxuries of a capital." "A
coach," says M. de Montlosier, "set out weekly from the principal towns
in the provinces for Paris and was not always full, which tells us about
the activity in business. There was a single journal called the Gazette
de France, appearing twice a week, which represents the activity of
minds."[1334] Some magistrates of Paris in exile at Bourges in 1753 and
1754 give the following picture of that place:

"A town in which no one can be found with whom you can talk at
your ease on any topic whatever, reasonably or sensibly. The nobles,
three-fourths of them dying of hunger, rotting with pride of birth,
keeping apart from men of the robe and of finance, and finding it
strange that the daughter of a tax-collector, married to a counselor of
the parliament of Paris, should presume to be intelligent and entertain
company. The citizens are of the grossest ignorance, the sole support of
this species of lethargy in which the minds of most of the inhabitants
are plunged. Women, bigoted and pretentious, and much given to play and
to gallantry."[1335]

In this impoverished and benumbed society, among these Messieurs
Thibaudeau, the counselor, and Harpin, the tax-collector, among
these vicomtes de Sotenville and Countesses d'Escarbagnas, lives the
Archbishop, Cardinal de Larochefoucauld, grand almoner to the king,
provided with four great abbeys, possessing five hundred thousand livres
income, a man of the world, generally an absentee, and when at home,
finding amusement in the embellishing of his gardens and palace,
in short, the golden pheasant of an aviary in a poultry yard of
geese.[1336] Naturally there is an entire absence of political thought.
"You cannot imagine," says the manuscript, "a person more indifferent to
all public matters." At a later period, in the very midst of events of
the gravest character, and which most nearly concern them, there is the
same apathy. At Chateau-Thierry on the 4th of July, 1789,[1337] there is
not a cafe in which a new paper can be found; there is but one at Dijon;
at Moulins, the 7th of August, "in the best cafe in the town, where I
found near twenty tables set for company, but as for a newspaper I might
as well have demanded an elephant." Between Strasbourg and Besancon
there is not a gazette. At Besancon there is "no