"It is a sad thing," said he, "that a vicar should be obliged to dispute with his flock for two or three sheaves of corn, and that he should not be amply paid by the country. These eternal contests for imaginary rights, for the tithes, destroy the respect that is owing to them. The unhappy cultivator who shall have already paid to the collectors his tenth penny, and the twopence a livre, and the tax, and the capitation, and the purchase of his exemption from lodging soldiers,--after he shall have lodged soldiers,--for this unfortunate man, I say, to see the vicar take away in addition the tithe of his produce, he can no longer look on him as his pastor, but as one that flays him alive,--that tears from him the little skin that is left him. He feels but too sensible, that while they are, _jure divino_, robbing him of his tenth sheaf, they have the diabolical cruelty not to give him credit for all that it will have cost him to make that sheaf grow. What then remains to him for himself and family? Tears, want, discouragement, despair, and thus he dies of fatigue and misery. If the vicar were paid by the country, he would be a comfort to his parishioners, instead of being looked on by them as their enemy." The worthy man melted as he uttered these words; he loved his country, and the public good was his idol. He would sometimes emphatically say, "What a nation would the French be if it pleased!" We went to see his son, whom the mother, a very neat and clean woman, was nursing. "Alas!" said the father, "here thou art, poor child, and hast nothing to pretend to but twenty-three years of life, and forty crowns a year." VIII. ON PROPORTIONS. The produce of the extremes is equal to the produce of the means: but two sacks of corn stolen, are not, to those who stole them, as the loss of their lives is to the interest of the person from whom they were stolen. The prior of ----, from whom two of his domestic servants in the country had stolen two measures of corn, has just had the two delinquents hanged. This execution has cost him more than all his harvest has been worth to him; and since that time he has not been able to get a servant. If the laws had ordained that such as stole their master's corn should work in his grounds, during their lives in fetters, and with a bell at their neck fixed to a collar, the prior would have been a considerable gainer by it. "Terror should be preventively employed against crimes;" very true: but work, on compulsion, and lasting shame, strike more terror than the gallows. [Illustration: The rack.--"I was summoned to give evidence against a miller, who has been put to the torture, ordinary and extraordinary, and who has been found innocent. I saw him faint away under redoubled tortures. I heard the crash of his bones. His outcries and screams of agony are not yet out of my ears; they haunt me. I shed tears for pity, and shudder with horror."]