mansions, palaces and chateaux, two-thirds of the property of France, would be the reward of their valor?"[33124] At this very moment, does not the representative on mission authorize their greed? Are not Albitte and Collot d'Herbois at Lyons, Fouché at Nevers, Javogues at Montbrison, proclaiming that the possessions of anti-revolutionaries and a surplus of riches form "the patrimony of the sans-culottes?"[33125] Do they not read in the proclamations of Monestier,[33126] that the peasants "before leaving home may survey and measure off the immense estates of their seigneurs, choose, for example, on their return, whatever they want to add to their farm.. .. tacking on a bit of field or rabbit-warren belonging to the former count or marquis?" Why not take a portion of his furniture, any of his beds or clothes-presses--It is not surprising that, after this, the slip of paper which protects sequestrated furniture and confiscated merchandise should be ripped off by gross and greedy hands! When, after Thermidor, the master returns to his own roof it is generally to an empty house; in this or that habitation in the Morvan,[33127] the removal of the furniture is so complete that a bin turned upside down serves for a table and chairs, when the family sit down to their first meal. In the towns the embezzlements are often more brazenly carried out than in the country. At Valenciennes, the Jacobin chiefs of the municipality are known under the title of "seal-breakers and patriotic robbers."[33128] At Lyons, the Maratists, who dub themselves "the friends of Chalier," are, according to the Jacobins' own admission, "brigands, thieves and rascals."[33129] They compose, to the number of three or four hundred, the thirty-two revolutionary committees; one hundred and fifty of leaders, "all of them administrators," form the popular club; in this town of one hundred and twenty thousand souls they number, as they themselves state, three thousand, and they firmly rely on "sharing with each other the wealth of Lyons. This huge cake belongs to them; they do not allow that strangers, Parisians, should have a slice,[33130] and they intend to eat the whole of it, at discretion, without control, even to the last crumb. As to their mode of operations, it consists in "selling justice, in trading on denunciations, in holding under sequestration at least four thousand households," in putting seals everywhere on dwellings and warehouses, in not summoning interested parties who might watch their proceedings, in expelling women, children and servants who might testify to their robberies, in not drawing up inventories, in installing themselves as "guardians at five francs a day," themselves or their boon companions, and in "general squandering, in league with the administrators." It is impossible to stay their hands or repress them, even for the representatives. Take them in the act,[33131] and you must shut your eyes or they will all shout at the