"Heaven preserve us from paying a single farthing! It is only the produce of the land cultivated by laborious hands, callous with work, and moistened with tears, that owes taxes to the legislative and executive power. The alms which have been bestowed upon us, have enabled us to build those houses, by the rent of which we get a hundred thousand livres a year. But these alms, coming from the fruits of the earth, and having, consequently, already paid the tax, ought not to pay twice. They have sanctified the faithful believers, who have impoverished themselves to enrich us, and we continue to beg charity, and to lay under contribution the Fauxbourg of St. Germain, in order to sanctify a still greater number of the faithful believers."[2] Having thus spoken, the Carmelite politely shut the door in my face. I then passed along and stopped before the _Hôtel_ of the _Mousquetaires gris_, and related to those gentlemen what had just happened to me. They gave me a good dinner and half a crown, (_un ecu_). One of them proposed to go directly and set fire to the convent; but a musqueteer, more discreet than he, remonstrated with him, insisting that the time for action had not yet arrived, and implored him to wait patiently a little longer.[3] [1] Victor Hugo in his poem, _Christ at the Vatican_, (translated by G.B. Burleigh,) rebukes this inhuman spirit of monkish greed and avarice, which always receives but neves gives in return. In the poem, Christ is represented as saying: "----I have said, 'I will have mercy and not sacrifice;'-- Have said, 'Give freely what, without a price, Was given to you.' To my redeemed, instead, You sell baptism upon their natal bed; Sell to the sinner void indulgences; To lovers sell the natural right to wed; Sell to the dying the privilege of decease, And sell your funeral masses to the dead! Your prayers and masses and communions sell; Beads, benedictions, crosses; in your eyes Nothing is sacred,--all is merchandise."--E. [2] In a recent number of _The Nineteenth Century_, Mr. Alex. A. Knox, in an able criticism on the writings of Voltaire, says very truly: "It should not be forgotten that in his day a very large portion of the soil of France was in the hands of the clergy, free from all burdens, save in so far as the clergy chose to execute them by the way of 'gratuitous gifts.' The condition of the French peasant was frightful. Arthur Young, Dr. Moore, and others have described it at a somewhat later date, but it was even so in Voltaire's time. Of course the 'clerical immunities' were far from being the only cause of all this misery; but they were a frightful addition to it."