reorganization or of dissolution, are not trustworthy, or are too weak.
There are no more than thirty of the cavalry in Creuse, and as many in
Corrèze. The National Guards of the towns are knocked up by expeditions
into the country, and there is no money with which to provide for their
change of quarters. And finally, as the elections are in the hands of
the people, this brings into power men disposed to tolerate popular
excesses. At Tulle, the electors of the second class, almost all chosen
from among the cultivators, and, moreover, catechized by the club,
nominate for deputies and public prosecutor only the candidates who are
pledged against rentals and against water privileges.--Accordingly, the
general demolition of the dikes begins as the month of May approaches.
This operation continues unopposed on a vast pond, a league and a half
from the town, and lasts for a whole week; elsewhere, on the arrival of
the guards or of the gendarmerie, they are fired upon. Towards the end
of September, all the embankments in the department are broken down:
nothing is left in the place of the ponds but fetid marshes; the
mill-wheels no longer turn, and the fields are no longer watered. But
those who demolish them carry away baskets full of fish, and the soil of
the ponds again becomes communal.--Hatred is not the motive which impels
them, but the instinct of acquisition: all these violent outstretched
hands, which rigidly resist the law, are directed against property, but
not against the proprietor; they are more greedy than hostile. One of
the noblemen of Corrèze,[3278] M. de Saint-Victour, has been absent for
five years. From the beginning of the Revolution, although his feudal
dues constitute one-half of the income of his estate, he has given
orders that no rigorous measures shall be employed in their collection,
and the result is that, since 1789, none of them were collected.
Moreover, having a reserve stock of wheat on hand, he lent grain, to the
amount of four thousand francs, to those of his tenants who had none.
In short, he is liberal, and, in the neighboring town, at Ussel, he even
passes for a Jacobin. In spite of all this, he is treated just like the
rest. It is because the parishes in his domain are "clubbist," governed
by associations of moral and practical levelers; in one of them "the
brigands have organized themselves into a municipal body," and have
chosen their leader as procureur-syndic. Consequently, on the 22nd of
August, eighty armed peasants opened the dam of his large pond, at the
risk of submerging a village in the neighborhood, the inhabitants of
which came and closed it up. Five other ponds belonging to him are
demolished in the course of the two following weeks; fish to the value
of from four to five thousand francs are stolen, and the rest perish in
the weeds. In order to make this expropriation sure, an effort is made
to burn his title-deeds; his chateau, twice attacked in the night, is
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