Stourm, i. 361.] yet the use of the article had become so general that this population bought fifteen million pounds yearly, or between five eighths and three quarters of a pound per head. Of this amount about one twelfth was used for smoking in pipes, and the remainder was consumed in the pleasant form of snuff. Three livres fifteen sous a pound was the price set by the government and collected by the Farmers, and the tobacco was often mouldy.[Footnote: Necker, _De l'Administration_, ii. 100. Babeau, _La vie rurale_, 78.] The excise on wine and cider (_aides_) was levied not only on the producer, but also on the consumer, in a most vexatious manner, so that the revenue officers were continually forcing their way into private houses, and so that the poor peasant who quietly diluted his measure of cider with two measures of water was lucky if he got off with a triple tax, and did not undergo fine and forfeiture for having untaxed cider in his house. It was moreover a principle with the officers of the excise that wine was never given away; and as a tax was due on every sale the poor vine-dresser could not give a part of the produce of his vineyard to his married children, or even bestow a few bottles in alms on a poor, sick woman without getting into trouble, and all this notwithstanding the fact that in France in the eighteenth century, when tea and coffee were unknown to the rural classes, and when drinking water was often taken from polluted wells, wine or cider was generally considered necessary to health and to life.