e would have none of my money and pushed it aside,
exceedingly troubled, nor could I imagine what he was afraid of. At
last he uttered with a shudder the terrible words, _commis, rats de
cave_" ("assessors, cellar rats"). He made me understand that he hid
the wine because of the _aides_,[159] and the bread because of the
_tailles_,[160] and that he would be a ruined man if it were supposed
that he was not dying of hunger. That man, although fairly well-off,
dared not eat the bread earned by the sweat of his brow, and could
only escape ruin by pretending to be as miserable as those he saw
around him. I issued forth from that house indignant as well as
affected, deploring the lot of that fair land where nature had
lavished all her gifts only to become the spoil of barbarous
tax-farmers (_publicans_)." And Voltaire, that implacable avenger of
injustice, in verse that rends the heart, has in _les Finances_,
(1775), pictured a peaceful home ruined; its inmates evicted to
misery, to the galleys and to death, by the cruel exactions of the
royal director of the _aides_ and _gabelles_, with his _sergents de la
finance habilles en guerriers_. The elder Mirabeau too has told how he
saw a bailiff cut off the hand of a peasant woman who had clung to her
kitchen utensils when distraint was made on her poor possessions for
dues exacted by the tax-farmers. In 1776 two poor starving wretches
were hanged on the gallows of the Place de Greve at Paris for having
stolen some bread from a baker's shop.

[Footnote 157: Taine estimates the revenues of thirty-three abbots in
terms of modern values at from 140,000 to 480,000 francs (L5,600 to
L19,200). Twenty-seven abbesses enjoyed revenues nearly as large.]

[Footnote 158: The score of Rousseau's opera is still preserved in the
Bibliotheque Nationale.]

[Footnote 159: The Excise duty.]

[Footnote 160: Personal and land-taxes paid by the humbler classes
alone.]

"But though the gods see clearly, they are slow
In marking when a man, despising them,
Turns from their worship to the scorn of fools."

Half a century had elapsed since that meal in the peasant's house when
the Nemesis that holds sleepless vigil over the affairs of men stirred
her pinions and, like a strong angel with glittering sword, prepared
to avenge the wrongs of a people whose rulers had outraged every law,
human and divine, by which human society is held together. King,
nobles, and prelates had a supreme and an a