dry it in the oven, because they are too hungry to wait.  The intendant of Poitiers writes that “as soon as the workhouses open, a prodigious number of the poor rush to them, in spite of the reduction of wages and of the restrictions imposed on them in behalf of the most needy.”  The intendant of Bourges notices that a great many tenant farmers have sold off their furniture, and that “entire families pass two days without eating,” and that in many parishes the famished stay in bed most of the day because they suffer less.  The intendant of Orleans reports that “in Sologne, poor widows have burned up their wooden bedsteads and others have consumed their fruit trees,” to preserve themselves from the cold, and he adds, “nothing is exaggerated in this statement; the cries of want cannot be expressed; the misery of the rural districts must be seen with one’s own eyes to obtain an idea of it.”  From Rioni, from La Rochelle, from Limoges, from Lyons, from Montauban, from Caen, from Alençon, from Flanders, from Moulins come similar statements by other intendants.  One might call it the interruptions and repetitions of a funeral knell; even in years not disastrous it is heard on all sides.  In Burgundy, near Chatillon-sur-Seine,

“taxes, seigniorial dues, the tithes, and the expenses of cultivation, split up the productions of the soil into thirds, leaving nothing for the unfortunate cultivators, who would have abandoned their fields, had not two Swiss manufacturers of calicoes settled there and distributed about the country 40,000 francs a year in cash."[18]

In Auvergne, the country is depopulated daily; many of the villages have lost, since the beginning of the century, more than one-third of their inhabitants[19].

“Had not steps been promptly taken to lighten the burden of a down-trodden people,” says the provincial assembly in 1787, “Auvergne would have forever lost its population and its cultivation.”

In Comminges, at the outbreak of the Revolution, certain communities threaten to abandon their possessions, should they obtain no relief[20].

“It is a well-known fact,” says the assembly of Haute-Guyenne, in 1784,” that the lot of the most severely taxed communities is so rigorous as to have led their proprietors frequently to abandon their property[21].  Who is not aware of the inhabitants of Saint-Servin having abandoned their property ten times, and of their threats to resort again to this painful proceeding in their recourse to the administration?  Only a few years ago an abandonment of the community of Boisse took place through the combined action of the inhabitants, the seignior and the décimateur of that community;” and the desertion would be still greater if the law did not forbid persons liable to the taille abandoning over-taxed property, except by renouncing whatever they possessed in the community.  In the Soissonais, according to the report of the provincial assembly,[22] “misery is excessive.”  In Gascony the spectacle is “heartrending.”  In the environs of Toul, the cultivator, after paying his taxes, tithes and other dues, remains empty-handed.