ys on the
road."

The thing becomes customary and the parish suffers in vain, for it
would suffer yet more were it to do otherwise. "Near Aurillac," says the
Marquis de Mirabeau,[5222] "there is industry, application and economy
without which there would be only misery and want. This produces a
people equally divided into being, on the one hand, insolvent and poor
and on the other hand shameful and rich, the latter who, for fear
of being fined, create the impoverished. The taille once assessed,
everybody groans and complains and nobody pays it. The term having
expired, at the hour and minute, constraint begins, the collectors,
although able, taking no trouble to arrest this by making a settlement,
notwithstanding the installation of the bailiff's men is costly. But
this kind of expense is habitual and people expect it instead of fearing
it, for, if it were less rigorous, they would be sure to be additionally
burdened the following year." The receiver, indeed, who pays the
bailiff's officers a franc a day, makes them pay two francs and
appropriates the difference. Hence "if certain parishes venture to pay
promptly, without awaiting constraint, the receiver, who sees himself
deprived of the best portion of his gains, becomes ill-humored, and, at
the next department (meeting), an arrangement is made between himself,
messieurs the elected, the sub-delegate and other shavers of this
species, for the parish to bear a double load, to teach it how to behave
itself."

A population of administrative blood-suckers thus lives on the peasant.
"Lately," says an intendant, "in the district of Romorantin,[5223] the
collectors received nothing from a sale of furniture amounting to six
hundred livres, because the proceeds were absorbed by the expenses. In
the district of Chateaudun the same thing occurred at a sale amounting
to nine hundred livres and there are other transactions of the same kind
of which we have no information, however flagrant." Besides this, the
fisc itself is pitiless. The same intendant writes, in 1784, a year
of famine:[5224] "People have seen, with horror, the collector, in the
country, disputing with heads of families over the costs of a sale of
furniture which had been appropriated to stopping their children's cry
of want." Were the collectors not to make seizures they would themselves
be seized. Urged on by the receiver we see them, in the documents,
soliciting, prosecuting and persecuting the tax-payers. Eve