k of drowning at every moment.

II. The Peasants.

The condition of the peasant during the last thirty years of
the Ancient Regime.--His precarious subsistence.--State of
agriculture.--Uncultivated farms.--Poor cultivation.--
Inadequate wages.--Lack of comforts.

Between 1750 and 1760,[5125] the idlers who eat suppers begin to regard
with compassion and alarm the laborers who go without dinners. Why are
the latter so impoverished; and by what misfortune, on a soil as rich
as that of France, do those lack bread who grow the grain? In the first
place many farms remain uncultivated, and, what is worse, many are
deserted. According to the best observers "one-quarter of the soil is
absolutely lying waste. . . . Hundreds and hundreds of arpents of heath
and moor form extensive deserts."[5126] Let a person traverse Anjou,
Maine, Brittany, Poitou, Limousin, la Marche, Berry, Nivernais,
Bourbonnais and Auvergne, and he finds one-half of these provinces in
heaths, forming immense plains, all of which might be cultivated." In
Touraine, in Poitou and in Berry they form solitary expanses of 30,000
arpents. In one canton alone, near Preuilly, 40,000 arpents of good
soil consist of heath. The agricultural society of Rennes declares
that two-thirds of Brittany is lying waste. This is not sterility but
decadence. The regime invented by Louis XIV has produced its effect; the
soil for a century past has been reverting to a wild state.

"We see only abandoned and ruinous chateaux; the principal towns of the
fiefs, in which the nobility formerly lived at their ease, are all now
occupied by poor tenant herdsmen whose scanty labor hardly suffices for
their subsistence, and a remnant of tax ready to disappear through the
ruin of the proprietors and the desertion of the settlers."

In the election district of Confolens a piece of property rented for
2,956 livres in 1665, brings in only 900 livres in 1747. On the confines
of la Marche and of Berry a domain which, in 1660, honorably supported
two seigniorial families is now simply a small unproductive tenant-farm;
"the traces of the furrows once made by the plow-iron being still
visible on the surrounding heaths." Sologne, once flourishing,[5127]
becomes a marsh and a forest; a hundred years earlier it produced three
times the quantity of grain; two-thirds of its mills are gone; not a
vestige of its vineyards remains; "grapes have given way to the heath."
Thus aband