But soon it rises to fourteen sous. “A brisk business is doing on the bridges, in the open places, where men passing with a loaf of bread under their arms re-sell it to the workmen for twenty sous.” “We want powder for our wigs,” Jean Jacques Rousseau had said; “that is the reason of the poor wanting bread.” “And the reproach touches the hearts of actresses and fashionable ladies; they discard powder, or use as little as possible: the starch-makers are ordered to employ barley instead of wheat; the pupils of the college Louis le Grand resolve to eat rice, and to offer twenty-eight sacks of wheat. The king forbids the playing of the fountains at the fêtes, in order to turn the water to the Versailles mills; but it is of no use: the associates of the grain monopoly, the makers of the vile Famine Pact, cause a fictitious scarcity by having the markets pillaged, the mills burned, the corn thrown into the river by a band of ruffians. Poor Louis is astonished, and begins to doubt whether he is really king of France.” But there were other causes back of the famine which led to the volcanic outburst of the French Revolution. For long years the terrible mine had been preparing beneath the French monarchy, and at length exploded with awful destruction and blood-curdling horrors. The dazzling glory of the gorgeous Louis XVI., with all its power and grandeur, was reared over a sleeping volcano, destined to shock the continent of Europe, when at length its slow fires should unite their direful forces for the last mighty eruption. The glorious success of the American Revolution inspired suffering people in all lands with a clearer hope of future freedom. Regarding its effect upon France a writer says:— “It is difficult to suppose that so many thousand officers and soldiers had visited America, and fought in behalf of her rights, without being imbued with something of a kindred spirit. There they beheld a new and happy nation, among whom the pride of birth and the distinctions of rank were alike unknown; there they for the first time saw virtue and talents and courage rewarded; there they viewed with surprise a sovereign people fighting, not for a master, but themselves, and haranguing, deliberating, dispensing justice, and administering the laws, by representatives of their own free choice. On their return the contrast was odious and intolerable; they beheld family preferred to merit, influence to justice, wealth to worth; they began to examine into a constitution in which the monarch, whom they were now accustomed to consider as only the first magistrate, was everything, and the people, the fountain of all power, merely ciphers; and they may well be supposed to have wished, and even languished, for a change.