barefoot, eating nothing but coarse black bread, but cherishing the little treasure in his breast on which he builds so many hopes, he watches for the opportunity which never fails to come.  “In spite of privileges,” writes a gentleman in 1755,[46] “the nobles are daily being ruined and reduced, the Third-Estate making all the fortunes.”  A number of domains, through forced or voluntary sales, thus pass into the hands of financiers, of men of the quill, of merchants, and of the well-to-do bourgeois.  Before undergoing this total dispossession, however, the seignior, involved in debt, is evidently resigned to partial alienation of his property.  The peasant who has bribed the steward is at hand with his hoard.  “It is poor property, my lord, and it costs you more than you get from it.”  This may refer to an isolated patch, one end of a field or meadow, sometimes a farm whose farmer pays nothing, and generally worked by a métayer whose wants and indolence make him an annual expense to his master.  The latter may say to himself that the alienated parcel is not lost, since, some day or other, through his right of repurchase, he may take it back, while, in the meantime, he enjoys a cens, drawbacks, and the lord’s dues.  Moreover, there is on his domain and around him, extensive open spaces which the decline of cultivation and depopulation have left a desert.  To restore the value of this he must surrender its proprietorship.  There is no other way by which to attach man permanently to the soil.  And the government helps him along in this matter.  Obtaining no revenue from the abandoned soil, it assents to a provisional withdrawal of its too weighty hand.  By the edict of 1766, a piece of cleared waste land remains free of the taille for fifteen years, and, thereupon, in twenty-eight provinces 400,000 arpents are cleared in three years[47].

This is the mode by which the seigniorial domain gradually crumbles away and decreases.  Towards the last, in many places, with the exception of the chateau and the small adjoining farm which brings in 2 or 3000 francs a year, nothing is left to the seignior but his feudal dues;[48] the rest of the soil belongs to the peasantry.  Forbonnais already remarks, towards 1750, that many of the nobles and of the ennobled “reduced to extreme poverty but with titles to immense possessions,” have sold off portions to small cultivators at low prices, and often for the amount of the taille.  Towards 1760, one-quarter of the soil is said to have already passed into the hands of farmers.  In 1772, in relation to the vingtième, which is levied on the net revenue of real property, the intendant of Caen, having completed the statement of his quota, estimates that out of 150,000 “there are perhaps 50,000 whose liabilities did not exceed five sous, and perhaps still as many more not exceeding twenty sous."[49] Contemporary observers authenticate this passion of the peasant for land.  “The savings of the lower classes,