which breeds inhabitants who resemble it.  They understand French but slightly, and reason not much better.  The Parliament is at the back of all this.”  Riots were frequent, and were put down with great severity.  “The poor Low-Bretons collect by forty or fifty in the fields,” writes Madame de Sevigne on the 24th of September, 1675:  “as soon as they see soldiers, they throw themselves on their knees, saying, Mea culpa! all the French they know.. . .”

“The severities are abating,” she adds on the 3d of November:  “after the hangings there will be no more hanging.”  All these fresh imposts, which had cost so much suffering and severity, brought in but two millions five hundred thousand livres at Colbert’s death.  The indirect taxes, which were at that time called fermes generales (farmings-general), amounted to thirty-seven millions during the first two years of Colbert’s administration, and rose to sixty-four millions at the time of his death.  “I should be apprehensive of going too far, and that the prodigious augmentations of the fermes (farmings) would be very burdensome to the people,” wrote Louis XIV. in 1680.  The expenses of recovering the taxes, which had but lately led to great abuses, were diminished by half.  “The bailiffs generally, and especially those who are set over the recovery of talliages, are such terrible brutes that, by way of exterminating a good number of these, you could not do anything more worthy of you than suppress those,” wrote Colbert to the criminal magistrate of Orleans.  “I am at this moment promoting two suits against the collectors of talliages, in which I expect at present to get ten thousand crowns’ damages, without counting another against an assessor’s officer, who wounded one Grimault, the which had one of his daughters killed before his eyes, his wife, another of his daughters, and his female servant wounded with swords and sticks, the writ of distrainment being executed whilst the poor creature was being buried.”  The bailiffs were suppressed, and the king’s justice was let loose not only against the fiscal officers who abused their power, but also against tyrannical nobles.  Masters of requests and members of the Parliament of Paris went to Auvergne and Velay and held temporary courts of justice, which were called grands jours.  Several lords were found guilty; Sieur de la Mothe actually died upon the scaffold for having unjustly despoiled and maltreated the people on his estates.  “He was not one of the worst,” says Flechier, in his Journal des Grands Jours d’Auvergne.  The Duke of Bouillon, governor of the province, had too long favored the guilty.  “I resolved,” says the king in his Memoires, “to prevent the people from being subjected to thousands and thousands of tyrants, instead of one lawful king, whose indulgence alone it is that causes all this disorder.”  The puissance of the provincial governors, already curtailed by Richelieu, suffered from fresh attacks