Unfortunately, before the tax-gatherer can collect the first two levies these have to be assessed, and as there are complicated writings and formalities, claims to settle amidst great resistance and local ignorance, the operation is indefinitely prolonged. The personal and land-tax schedule of 1791 is not transmitted to the departments by the Assembly until June, 1791. The departments do not distribute it among the districts until the months of July, August, and September, 1791. It is not distributed by the districts among the communes before October, November, and December, 1791. Thus in the last month of 1791 it is not yet distributed to the tax-payers by the communes; from which it follows that on the budget of 1791 and throughout that year, the tax-payer has paid nothing.--At last, in 1792, everybody begins to receive this assessment. It would require a volume to set forth the partiality and dissimulation of these assessments. In the first place the office of assessor is one of danger; the municipal authorities, whose duty it is to assign the quotas, are not comfortable in their town quarters. Already, in 1790,[3251] the municipal officers of Monbazon have been threatened with death if they dared to tax industrial pursuits on the tax-roll, and they escaped to Tours in the middle of the night. Even at Tours, three or four hundred insurgents of the vicinity, dragging along with them the municipal officers of three market-towns, come and declare to the town authorities "that for all taxes they will not pay more than forty-five sous per household." I have already narrated how, in 1792, in the same department, "they kill, they assassinate the municipal officers" who presume to publish the tax-rolls of personal property. In Creuse, at Clugnac, the moment the clerk begins to read the document, the women spring upon him, seize the tax-roll, and "tear it up with countless imprecations;" the municipal council is assailed, and two hundred persons stone its members, one of whom is thrown down, has his head shaved, and is promenaded through the village in derision.--When the small tax-payer defends himself in this manner, it is a warning that he must be humored. The assessment, accordingly, in the village councils is made amongst a knot of cronies. Each relieves himself of the burden by shoving it off on somebody else. "They tax the large proprietors, whom they want to make pay the whole tax." The noble, the old seigneur, is the most taxed, and to such an extent that in many places his income does not suffice to pay his quota.--In the next place they make themselves out poor, and falsify or elude the prescriptions of the law. "In most of the municipalities, houses, tenements, and factories[3252] are estimated according to the value of the area they cover, and considered as land of the first class, which reduces the quota to almost nothing." And this fraud is not practiced in the villages alone.