ed livres a year."

Frequently the latter proposes to abandon the entire crop to them
on condition that they demand nothing of him during the year; "these
miserable creatures" have refused; left to themselves, they would not
be sure of keeping themselves alive.--In Limousin and in Angoumois their
poverty is so great[5136] "that, deducting the taxes to which they are
subject, they have no more than from twenty-five to thirty livres each
person per annum to spend; and not in money, it must be stated, but
counting whatever they consume in kind out of the crops they produce.
Frequently they have less, and when they cannot possibly make a living
the master is obliged to support them. . . . The metayer is always
reduced to just what is absolutely necessary to keep him from starving."
As to the small proprietor, the villager who plows his land himself,
his condition is but little better. "Agriculture,[5137] as our
peasants practice it, is a veritable drudgery; they die by thousands in
childhood, and in maturity they seek places everywhere but where they
should be."

In 1783, throughout the plain of the Toulousain they eat only maize,
a mixture of flour, common seeds and very little wheat; those on the
mountains feed, a part of the year, on chestnuts; the potato is hardly
known, and, according to Arthur Young, ninety-nine out of a hundred
peasants would refuse to eat it. According to the reports of intendants,
the basis of food, in Normandy, is oats; in the election-district
of Troyes, buck-wheat; in the Marche and in Limousin, buckwheat with
chestnuts and radishes; in Auvergne, buckwheat, chestnuts, milk-curds
and a little salted goat's meat; in Beauce, a mixture of barley and rye;
in Berry, a mixture of barley and oats. There is no wheat bread; the
peasant consumes inferior flour only because he is unable to pay two
sous a pound for his bread. There is no butcher's meat; at best he
kills one pig a year. His dwelling is built of clay (pise), roofed with
thatch, without windows, and the floor is the beaten ground. Even when
the soil furnishes good building materials, stone, slate and tile, the
windows have no sashes. In a parish in Normandy,[5138] in 1789, "most
of the dwellings consist of four posts." They are often mere stables
or barns "to which a chimney has been added made of four poles and some
mud." Their clothes are rags, and often in winter these are muslin rags.
In Quercy and elsewhere, they have no stockings, or woo