hat province and taking refuge in Piedmont, Savoy, and Spain, tormented
and frightened by the measures resorted to in collecting tithes. . . .
The extortioners sell everything and imprison everybody as if prisoners
of war, and even with more avidity and malice, in order to gain
something themselves."--"I met an intendant of one of the finest
provinces in the kingdom, who told me that no more farmers could be
found there; that parents preferred to send their children to the towns;
that living in the surrounding country was daily becoming more horrible
to the inhabitants. . . . A man, well-informed in financial matters,
told me that over two hundred families in Normandy had left this year,
fearing the collections in their villages."--At Paris, "the streets
swarm with beggars. One cannot stop before a door without a dozen
mendicants besetting him with their importunities. They are said to be
people from the country who, unable to endure the persecutions they
have to undergo, take refuge in the cities. . . preferring begging to
labor."--And yet the people of the cities are not much better off. "An
officer of a company in garrison at Mezieres tells me that the poverty
of that place is so great that, after the officers had dined in the
inns, the people rush in and pillage the remnants."--"There are more
than 12,000 begging workmen in Rouen, quite as many in Tours, etc. More
than 20,000 of these workmen are estimated as having left the kingdom
in three months for Spain, Germany, etc. At Lyons 20,000 workers in
silk are watched and kept in sight for fear of their going abroad."
At Rouen,[5110] and in Normandy, "those in easy circumstances find it
difficult to get bread, the bulk of the people being entirely without
it, and, to ward off starvation, providing themselves with food
otherwise repulsive to human beings."--"Even at Paris," writes
d'Argenson,[5111] "I learn that on the day M. le Dauphin and Mme. la
Dauphine went to Notre Dame, on passing the bridge of the Tournelle,
more than 2,000 women assembled in that quarter crying out, 'Give
us bread, or we shall die of hunger.'. . . A vicar of the parish of
Saint-Marguerite affirms that over eight hundred persons died in the
Faubourg St. Antoine between January 20th and February 20th; that the
poor expire with cold and hunger in their garrets, and that the priests,
arriving too late, see them expire without any possible relief."

Were I to enumerate the riots, the sedition of the