There was no complaint on their part because of their poverty, but there was dissatisfaction with the system which did not reward properly a man who had given his life to the interests of his country, and had produced numbers of valuable works, while it took up insignificant individuals, and, through favoritism or for a round bribe, gave them easy and amply paid positions, and allowed them to keep them whatever they did or did not do; a system which, in short, justified Beaumarchais’ characterization: “Il fallait un calculateur pour remplir la place, ce fut un danseur qui l’obtint.” (An accountant was wanted in the place, a dancer received it.) After the Rolands left Amiens, they came into personal contact with the feudal rights; for in the Beaujolais the peasant was still often obliged to give personal service to his lord. It was to the lord’s wine-press he was obliged to take his grapes, to his mill that he must take his wheat. They saw the effect of the wretched salt-tax, an indirect tax which forced every inhabitant to buy seven pounds of salt a year, and it cost eight times what it does to-day, considering the value of money. Not only was he forced to buy, he was forced to use it in certain ways,—not a grain of that seven pounds could be employed anywhere except in his table food. If he wanted to salt pork, he must buy another kind. They probably saw, in their rides to and from Lyons, the peasants bent at their _corvée_, or road tax; for the peasants still made the royal roads in the Lyonnais. On an average, they gave twelve days a year, and the use of their own implements, to the highways which they rarely had the advantage of using. The terrible tolls were another unjust imposition from which they suffered personally. They were innumerable. Let a boat of wine attempt to go from Dauphiné, by the Rhone, Loire, and the canal of Briare, and it paid thirty-five to forty kinds of duties, not counting the entrée to Paris. From Pontarlier to Lyons there were twenty-five or thirty tolls. If Madame Roland had bought ten cents worth of wine in Burgundy, it would have cost her fifteen to eighteen sous before she got it to Lyons. Another experience which intensified their disgust with the _ancien régime_ was the study of the affairs of Lyons. In a report made, in 1791, on the condition of the city, Roland showed how Lyons, after having been for a long time one of the most flourishing cities of the world, because of her active and peculiar industries, and having earned a world-wide credit, attracted the attention of the government, at that time completely corrupt. The State forced the city to compromise her industries and credit in order to lend money. She borrowed again and again, and gave in return the saddest, most ruinous compensation,—the permission to tax herself. This had gone on until Lyons was bankrupt, her industries ruined, her streets full of beggars.