hotels and every means of transport.  This proves that in France “there is no circulation.”  It is only in very large towns that there is any civilization and comfort.  At Nantes there is a superb theater “twice as large as Drury-Lane and five times as magnificent.  Mon Dieu!  I cried to myself, do all these wastes, moors, and deserts, that I have passed for 300 miles lead to this spectacle? . . .  In a single leap you pass from misery to extravagance, ...the country deserted, or if a gentleman in it, you find him in some wretched hole to save that money which is lavished with profusion in the luxuries of a capital.”  “A coach,” says M. de Montlosier, “set out weekly from the principal towns in the provinces for Paris and was not always full, which tells us about the activity in business.  There was a single journal called the Gazette de France, appearing twice a week, which represents the activity of minds."[34] Some magistrates of Paris in exile at Bourges in 1753 and 1754 give the following picture of that place: 

“A town in which no one can be found with whom you can talk at your ease on any topic whatever, reasonably or sensibly.  The nobles, three-fourths of them dying of hunger, rotting with pride of birth, keeping apart from men of the robe and of finance, and finding it strange that the daughter of a tax-collector, married to a counselor of the parliament of Paris, should presume to be intelligent and entertain company.  The citizens are of the grossest ignorance, the sole support of this species of lethargy in which the minds of most of the inhabitants are plunged.  Women, bigoted and pretentious, and much given to play and to gallantry."[35]

In this impoverished and benumbed society, among these Messieurs Thibaudeau, the counselor, and Harpin, the tax-collector, among these vicomtes de Sotenville and Countesses d’Escarbagnas, lives the Archbishop, Cardinal de Larochefoucauld, grand almoner to the king, provided with four great abbeys, possessing five hundred thousand livres income, a man of the world, generally an absentee, and when at home, finding amusement in the embellishing of his gardens and palace, in short, the golden pheasant of an aviary in a poultry yard of geese.[36] Naturally there is an entire absence of political thought.  “You cannot imagine,” says the manuscript, “a person more indifferent to all public matters.”  At a later period, in the very midst of events of the gravest character, and which most nearly concern them, there is the same apathy.  At Chateau-Thierry on the 4th of July, 1789,[37] there is not a café in which a new paper can be found; there is but one at Dijon; at Moulins, the 7th of August, “in the best café in the town, where I found near twenty tables set for company, but as for a newspaper I might as well have demanded an elephant.”  Between Strasbourg and Besançon there is not a gazette.  At Besançon there is “nothing but the Gazette de France, for which, this period, a man of common sense would not give