is the rarest case,[3144] the officials do their duty to the end, and perish. In this same town, six months later, Simoneau, the mayor, having refused to cut down the price of wheat, is beaten with iron-pointed sticks, and his corpse is riddled with balls by the murderers.--Municipal bodies must take heed how they undertake to stem the torrent; the slightest opposition will soon be at the expense of their lives. In Touraine,[3145] "as the publication of the tax-rolls takes place, riots break out against the municipal authorities; they are forced to surrender the rolls they have drawn up, and their papers are torn up." And still more, "they kill, they assassinate the municipal authorities." In that large commune men and women "beat and kick them with their fists and sabots. . . . The mayor is laid up after it, and the procureur of the commune died between nine and ten o'clock in the morning. Véteau, a municipal officer, received the last sacrament this morning;" the rest have fled, being constantly threatened with death and incendiarism. They do not, consequently, return, and "no one now will take the office of either mayor or administrator."--The outrages which the municipalities thus commit against their superiors are committed against themselves. The National Guards, the mob, the controlling faction, arrogating to themselves in the commune the same violent sovereignty which the commune pretends to exercise against the State. I should never finish if I undertook to enumerate the outbreaks in which the magistrates are constrained to tolerate or to sanction popular usurpations, to shut up churches, to drive off or imprison priests, to suppress octrois, tax grain, and allow clerks; bakers, corn-dealers, ecclesiastics, nobles, and officers to be hung, beaten to death, or to have their throats cut. Ninety-four thick files of records in the national archives are filled with these acts of violence, and do not contain two-thirds of them. It is worth while to take in detail one case more, a special one, and one that is authentic, which serves as a specimen, and which presents a foreshortened image of France during one tranquil year. At Aix, in the month of December, 1790,[3146] in Opposition to the two Jacobin clubs, a club had been organized, had complied with all the formalities, and, like the "Club des Monarchiens" at Paris, claimed the same right of meeting as the others. But here, as at Paris, the Jacobins recognize no rights but for themselves alone, and refuse to admit their adversaries to the privileges of the law. Moreover, alarming rumors are circulated. A person who has arrived from Nice states that he had "heard that there were twenty thousand men between Turin and Nice, under the pay of the emigrants, and that at Nice a neuvaine[3147] was held in Saint François-de-Paule to pray God to enlighten the French." A counter-revolution is certainly under way. Some of the aristocrats have stated "with an air of triumph, that the