[149] Some conception of the insanitary condition of the court may be formed by the fact that fifty persons were struck down there by this loathsome disease during the king's illness. [150] "I have seen the Louvre and its huge enclosure, a vast palace which for two hundred years is always being finished and always begun. Two workmen, lazy hodmen, speed very slowly those rich buildings, and are paid when they are thought of." [151] The aspect of the west front with Soufflot's "improvements" is well seen in _Les Principaux Monuments Gothiques de l'Europe_, published in Brussels, 1843. [152] Taine estimates the revenues of thirty-three abbots in terms of modern values at from 140,000 to 480,000 francs (£5600 to £19,200). Twenty-seven abbesses enjoyed revenues nearly as large. [153] The score of Rousseau's opera is still preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale. [154] The Excise duty. [155] Personal and land-taxes paid by the humbler classes alone. [156] It is difficult, however, to read the sober and irrefutable picture of their miserable condition, given in the famous Books II. and V. of Taine's _Ancien Régime_, without deep emotion. [157] After the Thermidorian reaction in 1795, ninety-seven Jacobins were massacred by the royalists at Lyons on 5th May; thirty at Aix on 11th May. Similar horrors were enacted at Avignon, Arles, and Marseilles, and at other places in the south. [158] When de Brézé reported this to the king, he seemed vexed, and answered petulantly, "Well, if they won't go they must be left there." [159] A whole library has been written concerning the identity of this famous prisoner. There is little doubt that the mask was of velvet and not of iron, and that the mysterious captive who died on 19th November 1703 in the Bastille was Count Mattioli of Bologna, who was secretly arrested for having betrayed the confidence of Louis XIV. [160] Only five francs were allowed for a bourgeois, a man of letters was granted ten; a Marshal of France obtained the maximum. [161] It was composed by one of the _émigrés_, M. de Limon, approved by the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, and signed, against his better judgment, by the Duke of Brunswick. [162] The numbers have been variously estimated from 100 to 5000 killed on the popular side. [163] "Sew we, spin we, sew we well, behold the coats we have made for the winter that is coming. Soldiers of the Fatherland, ye shall want for nothing." [164] _Inferno._ XV. 76-78.--"In whom lives again the seed of those Romans who remained there when the nest (Florence) of so much wickedness was made." [165] Mdlle. Curchod, for whom Gibbon "sighed as a lover." [166] "We could rouse no enthusiasm," said the head of a State Department to the writer at the time of the Fashoda incident, "even for a war for the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine, much less against England." [167] _See_ p. 41.