The Paris fops, who accompanied messieurs the King's company to the States, related that we country squires had our pockets lined with tin so that we might take home M. le Commandant's fricassees of chicken to our wives. These jests were dearly paid for. A Comte de Sabran had erewhile lost his life in return for his idle talk. This descendant of the troubadours and of the Provencal kings, as big as a Swiss[282], allowed himself to be killed by a little hare-hunter of Morbihan, no taller than a Laplander[283]. This "Ker[284]" was not a whit second to his adversary in pedigree: if St. Elzear of Sabran was a near kinsman of St. Louis, St. Corentin[285], collateral ancestor of the most noble Ker, was Bishop of Quimper under King Gallon II., three centuries before Christ. * The King's revenue, in Brittany, consisted of the benevolences, which varied according to needs; the income from the Crown domains, which might amount to three or four hundred thousand francs; the stamp-duty, &c. Brittany had her own revenues, which served to meet her expenditure: the "great due" and the "petty due," which were laid on liquor and the liquor traffic, produced two millions a year; and then there were the sums raised by hearth-money. One little suspects the important part played by hearth-money in our history; yet it was to the French Revolution what the stamp-duties were to the Revolution in America. Hearth-money or _fouage_ (_census pro singulis focis exactus_) was a quit-rent, or a sort of villain tax, charged upon the goods of the commonalty for each hearth. This hearth-money, which was gradually increased, went to pay the debts of the province. In time of war, the expenditure amounted to more than seven millions from one session to the next, a sum which exceeded the receipts. A plan had been proposed to create a capital out of the funds provided by hearth-money and to turn it into stock for the benefit of the payers of hearth-money: in this way the tax became only a loan. The injustice (although it was an injustice made legal by the wording of the customary law) lay in making it bear upon the property of the commonalty alone. The commons never ceased protesting; the nobles, who set less store by their money than by their privileges, would not hear of a duty which would have made them liable to a villain-tax. This was the question when the States of Brittany, that were to prove so bloody, came together in December 1788. Men's minds were at that time excited by various causes: the assembly of the Notables, the territorial impost, the traffic in corn, the approaching sittings of the States-General and the affair of the Necklace, the Plenary Court and the _Mariage de Figaro_, the grand bailiwicks and Cagliostro[286] and Mesmer[287], a thousand other serious and trivial matters formed subjects of controversy in every family. [Sidenote: The Breton nobles.]