and custom are invincible in the country regions, where
the peasants are left very much to themselves, the town of Issoudun
itself has reached a state of complete social stagnation. Obliged to
meet the decadence of fortunes by the practice of sordid economy, each
family lives to itself. Moreover, society is permanently deprived
of that distinction of classes which gives character to manners and
customs. There is no opposition of social forces, such as that to which
the cities of the Italian States in the Middle Ages owed their vitality.
There are no longer any nobles in Issoudun. The Cottereaux, the
Routiers, the Jacquerie, the religious wars and the Revolution did
away with the nobility. The town is proud of that triumph. Issoudun has
repeatedly refused to receive a garrison, always on the plea of cheap
provisions. She has thus lost a means of intercourse with the age,
and she has also lost the profits arising from the presence of troops.
Before 1756, Issoudun was one of the most delightful of all the garrison
towns. A judicial drama, which occupied for a time the attention of
France, the feud of a lieutenant-general of the department with
the Marquis de Chapt, whose son, an officer of dragoons, was put
to death,--justly perhaps, yet traitorously, for some affair of
gallantry,--deprived the town from that time forth of a garrison. The
sojourn of the forty-fourth demi-brigade, imposed upon it during the
civil war, was not of a nature to reconcile the inhabitants to the race
of warriors.

Bourges, whose population is yearly decreasing, is a victim of the same
social malady. Vitality is leaving these communities. Undoubtedly, the
government is to blame. The duty of an administration is to discover the
wounds upon the body-politic, and remedy them by sending men of energy
to the diseased regions, with power to change the state of things. Alas,
so far from that, it approves and encourages this ominous and fatal
tranquillity. Besides, it may be asked, how could the government send
new administrators and able magistrates? Who, of such men, is willing
to bury himself in the arrondissements, where the good to be done is
without glory? If, by chance, some ambitious stranger settles there,
he soon falls into the inertia of the region, and tunes himself to the
dreadful key of provincial life. Issoudun would have benumbed Napoleon.

As a result of this particular characteristic, the arrondissement of
Issoudun was governed, in 182