Until he was eleven they all lived together in the gloomy old château where he was born. This has been described as "great and rather heavy." It had been fortified in the fourteenth century. Two round towers with steep, pointed roofs flanked it on the right and left. Across its front high French windows let in light to the upper floors. From them there was a far-reaching view over plain and river, and steep hills dotted with clumps of trees. But loopholes on each side of an inhospitable narrow doorway told of a time when its situation had been more prized for defense than for mere beauty of scenery. It had a dungeon and other grim conveniences of life in the Middle Ages, which must have stamped themselves deep on the mind of an impressionable child. The castles of Wissac and Saint-Romain, of which the boy was also lord, could be seen higher up among the hills. There were glimpses, too, of peasant homes, but these were neither neat nor prosperous. Bad laws, and abuse of law that had been going on for centuries, had brought France to a point where a few people were growing inordinately rich at the expense of all [Pg 6]the rest. The king suffered from this as well as the peasants. The country was overrun by an army of tax-collectors, one for every one hundred and thirty souls in France, each of them bent on giving up as little as possible of the money he collected. To curry favor with the great nobles, who were more powerful than the king himself, their property was not taxed so heavily as it should have been, while poorer people, especially the peasants, were robbed to make up the difference. "The people of our country live in misery; they have neither furniture nor beds; during part of the year the most of them have no nourishment except bread made of oats and barley, and even this they must snatch from their own mouths and those of their children in order to pay the taxes." That was written about this very region of Auvergne a few years before Lafayette was born. In self-defense the peasants made their homes look even more wretched than they really were. On occasion, when convinced that the stranger knocking at their door was no spy, they could bring a wheaten loaf and a bottle of wine from their secret store and do the honors most hospitably.