Water was delivered daily to the tall houses, from carts, by a force of twenty thousand men, who carried it as high as the seventh floor for a trifle more than it cost to cross the Pont Neuf under the shade of an umbrella. Drivers sent their water-carts skidding over the slime, for the narrow, cobble-paved streets were black with slippery mud. Coaches and other vehicles swung around corners and dashed along at incredible speed, while pedestrians fled in every direction. There were no sidewalks and no zones of safety. The confusion was so great that dignified travel by sedan-chair had become well-nigh impossible. King Louis XV once said, "If I were chief of police I would forbid coaches"; but, being only King Louis, he had done nothing. Pedestrians were often [Pg 26]run down; then there would be even greater confusion for a few moments, but only the shortest possible halt to traffic. "When on the pavements of Paris it is easy to see that the people do not make the laws," said one who had suffered. These people who suffered in Paris at every turn were now beginning to find a cyclopedia of their own in another invention of comparatively recent date--the cafés, warmed and lighted, where even men who had not sous enough to satisfy their hunger might cheat their stomachs with a thimbleful of sour wine or a morsel of food, and sit for hours listening and pondering the talk of others who came and went. There was much talk, and in one part of Paris or another it touched upon every known subject. Each café had its specialty; politics in one, philosophy in another, science in a third. Men of the same cast of mind gravitated toward the same spot. Cafés had already become schools. Soon they were to become political clubs. It was a wonderful way to spread new ideas. Some of the cafés were very humble, some very expensive, but none were strictly fashionable. To be seen dining in such a place indicated that a man had no invitations to dinner, so the eighteen or twenty thousand fops who, curled and perfumed, went from house to house cared little for cafés. They ate like grasshoppers, through the welcome of one host on Monday and another on Tuesday, and so down the week, "knowing neither the price of meat nor of bread, and consuming not one-quarter of that which was set before them," while thousands went hungry--which [Pg 27]is the reason that after a time the men in the cafés rose and took a terrible revenge. Paris was by no means all France, but whatever Paris did and felt the other towns were doing also; and slowly but surely the passions animating them would make their way to the loneliest peasant hut on the remotest edge of the kingdom.