The French Government having thus assumed the place of Providence, it was natural that every one should invoke its aid in his individual necessities. Accordingly we find an immense number of petitions which, while affecting to relate to the public interest, really concern only small individual interests.[33] The boxes containing them are perhaps the only place in which all the classes composing that society of France, which has long ceased to exist, are still mingled. It is a melancholy task to read them: we find peasants praying to be indemnified for the loss of their cattle or their horses; wealthy landowners asking for assistance in rendering their estates more productive; manufacturers soliciting from the Intendant privileges by which they may be protected from a troublesome competition, and very frequently confiding the embarrassed state of their affairs to him, and begging him to obtain for them relief or a loan from the Comptroller-General. It appears that some fund was set apart for this purpose. Even the nobles were often very importunate solicitants; the only mark of their condition is the lofty tone in which they begged. The tax of twentieths was to many of them the principal link in the chain of their dependence.[2] Their quota of this tax was fixed every year by the Council upon the report of the Intendant, and to him they addressed themselves in order to obtain delays and remissions. I have read a host of petitions of this nature made by nobles, nearly all men of title, and often of very high rank, in consideration, as they stated, of the insufficiency of their revenues, or the disordered state of their affairs. The nobles usually addressed the Intendant as ‘Monsieur;’ but I have observed that, under these circumstances, they invariably called him ‘Monseigneur,’ as was usually done by men of the middle class. Sometimes pride and poverty were drolly mixed in these petitions. One of the nobles wrote to the Intendant: ‘Your feeling heart will never consent to see the father of a family of my rank strictly taxed by twentieths like a father of the lower classes.’ At the periods of scarcity, which were so frequent during the eighteenth century, the whole population of each district looked to the Intendant, and appeared to expect to be fed by him alone. It is true that every man already blamed the Government for all his sufferings. The most inevitable privations were ascribed to it, and even the inclemency of the seasons was made a subject of reproach to it. We need not be astonished at the marvellous facility with which centralisation was re-established in France at the beginning of this century.[34] The men of 1789 had overthrown the edifice, but its foundations remained deep in the very minds of the destroyers, and on these foundations it was easy to build it up anew, and to make it more stable than it had ever been before. FOOTNOTES: [32] See Note XXVI., Additional Patrols. [33] See Note XXVII., Bureaux de Tabac.