r stock of bread-stuff had for some time
threatened famine, and had raised that article to an enormous price. So
great, indeed, was the scarcity of bread, that, from the highest to the
lowest citizen, the bakers were permitted to deal but a scanty allowance
per head, even to those who paid for it; and, in cards of invitation
to dine in the richest houses, the guest was notified to bring his own
bread. To eke out the existence of the people, every person who had
the means, was called on for a weekly subscription, which the Cures
collected, and employed in providing messes for the nourishment of the
poor, and vied with each other in devising such economical compositions
of food, as would subsist the greatest number with the smallest means.
This want of bread had been foreseen for some time past, and M. de
Montmorin had desired me to notify it in America, and that, in addition
to the market price, a premium should be given on what should be brought
from the United States. Notice was accordingly given, and produced
considerable supplies. Subsequent information made the importations from
America, during the months of March, April, and May, into the Atlantic
ports of France, amount to about twenty-one thousand barrels of flour,
besides what went to other ports, and in other months; while our
supplies to their West Indian islands relieved them also from that
drain. This distress for bread continued till July.

Hitherto no acts of popular violence had been produced by the struggle
for political reformation. Little riots, on ordinary incidents, had
taken place at other times, in different parts of the kingdom, in which
some lives, perhaps a dozen or twenty, had been lost; but in the month
of April, a more serious one occurred in Paris, unconnected, indeed,
with the Revolutionary principle, but making part of the history of
the day. The Fauxbourg St. Antoine, is a quarter of the city inhabited
entirely by the class of day-laborers and journeymen in every line. A
rumor was spread among them, that a great paper-manufacturer, of the
name of Reveillon, had proposed, on some occasion, that their wages
should be lowered to fifteen sous a day. Inflamed at once into rage,
and without inquiring into its truth, they flew to his house in
vast numbers, destroyed every thing in it, and in his magazines and
work-shops, without secreting, however, a pin's worth to themselves, and
were continuing this work of devastation, when the regular troops