"The end of the world approaches!" exclaimed the clergy. "Did not St. John the Divine prophesy it in the Apocalypse saying: '_When the thousand years are expired, Satan will be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth; the book of life will be opened; the sea will give up the dead which were in it; death and hell will deliver up the dead which were in them; they will be judged every man according to his works; they will be judged by Him who is seated upon a brilliant throne, and there will be a new heaven and a new earth._'--Tremble, ye peoples!" the clergy repeated everywhere, "the one thousand years, announced by St. John, will run out with the end of this year! Satan, the anti-Christ is to arrive! Tremble! The trumpet of the day of judgment is about to sound; the dead are about to arise from their tombs; in the midst of thunder and lightning, and surrounded by archangels carrying flaming swords, the Eternal is about to pass judgment upon us all! Tremble, ye mighty ones of the earth: in order to conjure away the implacable anger of the All-Mighty, give your goods to the Church! It is still time! It is still time! Give your goods and your treasures to the priests of the Lord! Give all you possess to the Church!" The seigneurs, themselves no less brutified than their serfs by ignorance and by the fear of the devil, and hoping to be able to conjure away the vengeance of the Eternal, assigned to the clergy by means of authentic documents, executed in all the forms of terrestrial law, lands, houses, castles, serfs, their harems, their herds of cattle, their valuable plate, their rich armors, their pictures, their statues, their sumptuous robes. Some of the shrewder ones said: "We have barely a year, a month, a week to live! We are full of youth, of desires, of ardor! Let us put the short period to profit! Let us stave-in our wine casks, let us indulge ourselves freely in wine and women!" "The end of the world is approaching!" exclaimed with delirious joy millions of serfs of the domains of the King, of the lay and of the ecclesiastical seigneurs. "Our poor bodies, broken with toil, will at last take rest in the eternal night that is to emancipate us. A blessing on the end of the world! It is the end of our miseries and our sufferings!" And those poor serfs, having nothing to spend and nothing to assign away, sought to anticipate the expected eternal repose. The larger number dropped their plows, their hoes and their spades so soon as autumn set in. "What is the use," said they, "of cultivating a field that, long before harvest time, will have been swallowed up in chaos?"