vine-yards,[5116] "the wine-growers each year are reduced, for the
most part, to begging their bread during the dull season." Elsewhere,
several of the day-laborers and mechanics, obliged to sell their effects
and household goods, die of the cold; insufficient and unhealthy food
generates sickness, while, in two districts, 35,000 persons are stated
to be living on alms[5117]. In a remote canton the peasants cut the
grain still green and dry it in the oven, because they are too hungry to
wait. The intendant of Poitiers writes that "as soon as the workhouses
open, a prodigious number of the poor rush to them, in spite of the
reduction of wages and of the restrictions imposed on them in behalf
of the most needy." The intendant of Bourges notices that a great many
tenant farmers have sold off their furniture, and that "entire families
pass two days without eating," and that in many parishes the famished
stay in bed most of the day because they suffer less. The intendant
of Orleans reports that "in Sologne, poor widows have burned up their
wooden bedsteads and others have consumed their fruit trees," to
preserve themselves from the cold, and he adds, "nothing is exaggerated
in this statement; the cries of want cannot be expressed; the misery of
the rural districts must be seen with one's own eyes to obtain an idea
of it." From Rioni, from La Rochelle, from Limoges, from Lyons, from
Montauban, from Caen, from Alencon, from Flanders, from Moulins
come similar statements by other intendants. One might call it the
interruptions and repetitions of a funeral knell; even in years
not disastrous it is heard on all sides. In Burgundy, near
Chatillon-sur-Seine,

"taxes, seigniorial dues, the tithes, and the expenses of cultivation,
split up the productions of the soil into thirds, leaving nothing for
the unfortunate cultivators, who would have abandoned their fields, had
not two Swiss manufacturers of calicoes settled there and distributed
about the country 40,000 francs a year in cash."[5118]

In Auvergne, the country is depopulated daily; many of the villages have
lost, since the beginning of the century, more than one-third of their
inhabitants[5119].

"Had not steps been promptly taken to lighten the burden of a
down-trodden people," says the provincial assembly in 1787, "Auvergne
would have forever lost its population and its cultivation."

In Comminges, at the outbreak of the Revolution, certain communities
threaten to aband