"living on the herbage,
and on a few goats which devour everything." Often again, these, by
order of Parliament, are killed by the game-keepers. A woman, with two
children in swaddling clothes, having no milk, "and without an inch of
ground," whose two goats, her sole resource, had thus been slain, and
another, with one goat slain in the same way, and who begs along with
her boy, present themselves at the gate of the chateau; one receives
twelve livres, while the other is admitted as a domestic, and
henceforth, '' this village is all bows and smiling faces.''--In short,
they are not accustomed to kindness; the lot of all these poor people
is to endure. "As with rain and hail, they regard as inevitable the
necessity of being oppressed by the strongest, the richest, the most
skillful, the most in repute," and this stamps on them, "if one may be
allowed to say so, an air of painful suffering."

In Auvergne, a feudal country, covered with extensive ecclesiastic and
seigniorial domains, the misery is the same. At Clermont-Ferrand,[5143]
"there are many streets that can for blackness, dirt and scents only be
represented by narrow channels cut in a dunghill." In the inns of the
largest bourgs, "closeness, misery, dirtiness and darkness." That of
Pradelles is "one of the worst in France." That of Aubenas, says Young,
"would be a purgatory for one of my pigs." The senses, in short, are
paralyzed. The primitive man is content so long as he can sleep and get
something to eat. He gets something to eat, but what kind of food?
To put up with the indigestible mess a peasant here requires a still
tougher stomach than in Limousin; in certain villages where, ten years
later, every year twenty or twenty-five hogs are to be slaughtered, they
now slaughter but three[5144].--On contemplating this temperament, rude
and intact since Vercingetorix, and, moreover, rendered more savage
by suffering, one cannot avoid being somewhat alarmed. The Marquis de
Mirabeau describes

"the votive festival of Mont-Dore: savages descending from the mountain
in torrents,[5145] the curate with stole and surplice, the justice
in his wig, the police corps with sabers drawn, all guarding the open
square before letting the bagpipers play; the dance interrupted in a
quarter of an hour by a fight; the hooting and cries of children, of
the feeble and other spectators, urging them on as the rabble urge on so
many fighting dogs; frightful looking men, or rather wild be