the bread, straw and all, but it was not very satisfying to one exhausted by fatigue. The man scrutinised me and judged by my appetite the truth of the story I had told. Suddenly, after saying that he perceived I was a good, honest youth and not there to spy upon him, he opened a trap door, descended and returned speedily with some good wheaten bread, a ham appetising but rather high, and a bottle of wine which rejoiced my heart more than all the rest. He added a good thick omelette and I enjoyed a dinner such as those alone who travel on foot can know. When it came to paying, his anxiety and fears again seized him; he would have none of my money and pushed it aside, exceedingly troubled, nor could I imagine what he was afraid of. At last he uttered with a shudder the terrible words, _commis, rats de cave_" ("assessors, cellar rats"). He made me understand that he hid the wine because of the _aides_,[159] and the bread because of the _tailles_,[160] and that he would be a ruined man if it were supposed that he was not dying of hunger. That man, although fairly well-off, dared not eat the bread earned by the sweat of his brow, and could only escape ruin by pretending to be as miserable as those he saw around him. I issued forth from that house indignant as well as affected, deploring the lot of that fair land where nature had lavished all her gifts only to become the spoil of barbarous tax-farmers (_publicans_)." And Voltaire, that implacable avenger of injustice, in verse that rends the heart, has in _les Finances_, (1775), pictured a peaceful home ruined; its inmates evicted to misery, to the galleys and to death, by the cruel exactions of the royal director of the _aides_ and _gabelles_, with his _sergents de la finance habilles en guerriers_. The elder Mirabeau too has told how he saw a bailiff cut off the hand of a peasant woman who had clung to her kitchen utensils when distraint was made on her poor possessions for dues exacted by the tax-farmers. In 1776 two poor starving wretches were hanged on the gallows of the Place de Greve at Paris for having stolen some bread from a baker's shop. [Footnote 157: Taine estimates the revenues of thirty-three abbots in terms of modern values at from 140,000 to 480,000 francs (L5,600 to L19,200). Twenty-seven abbesses enjoyed revenues nearly as large.] [Footnote 158: The score of Rousseau's opera is still preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale.] [Footnote 159: The Excise duty.] [Footnote 160: Personal and land-taxes paid by the humbler classes alone.] "But though the gods see clearly, they are slow In marking when a man, despising them, Turns from their worship to the scorn of fools."