sers, who locked up their
stores in the hope of making enormous gains. Commissioners were
appointed to inspect the granaries, and were empowered to send to
market all the corn that was not necessary for the consumption of the
proprietors. Such interference of course increased the suffering which
it was meant to relieve. But in the midst of the general distress there
was an artificial plenty in one favoured spot. The most arbitrary
prince must always stand in some awe of an immense mass of human beings
collected in the neighbourhood of his own palace. Apprehensions similar
to those which had induced the Caesars to extort from Africa and Egypt
the means of pampering the rabble of Rome induced Lewis to aggravate the
misery of twenty provinces for the purpose of keeping one huge city in
good humour. He ordered bread to be distributed in all the parishes of
the capital at less than half the market price. The English Jacobites
were stupid enough to extol the wisdom and humanity of this arrangement.
The harvest, they said, had been good in England and bad in France; and
yet the loaf was cheaper at Paris than in London; and the explanation
was simple. The French had a sovereign whose heart was French, and
who watched over his people with the solicitude of a father, while the
English were cursed with a Dutch tyrant, who sent their corn to Holland.
The truth was that a week of such fatherly government as that of Lewis
would have raised all England in arms from Northumberland to Cornwall.
That there might be abundance at Paris, the people of Normandy and Anjou
were stuffing themselves with nettles. That there might be tranquillity
at Paris, the peasantry were fighting with the bargemen and the troops
all along the Loire and the Seine. Multitudes fled from those rural
districts where bread cost five sous a pound to the happy place where
bread was to be had for two sous a pound. It was necessary to drive the
famished crowds back by force from the barriers, and to denounce the
most terrible punishments against all who should not go home and starve
quietly. [468]

Lewis was sensible that the strength of France had been overstrained by
the exertions of the last campaign. Even if her harvest and her vintage
had been abundant, she would not have been able to do in 1694 what she
had done in 1693; and it was utterly impossible that, in a season of
extreme distress, she should again send into the field armies superior
in number on every poi