Fancy, then, some Five full-grown Millions of such gaunt figures, with their haggard faces (figures haves); in woollen jupes, with copper-studded leather girths, and high sabots,—­starting up to ask, as in forest-roarings, their washed Upper-Classes, after long unreviewed centuries, virtually this question:  How have ye treated us; how have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we toiled for you?  The answer can be read in flames, over the nightly summer sky.  This is the feeding and leading we have had of you:  Emptiness,—­of pocket, of stomach, of head, and of heart.  Behold there is nothing in us; nothing but what Nature gives her wild children of the desert:  Ferocity and Appetite; Strength grounded on Hunger.  Did ye mark among your Rights of Man, that man was not to die of starvation, while there was bread reaped by him?  It is among the Mights of Man.

Seventy-two Chateaus have flamed aloft in the Maconnais and Beaujolais alone:  this seems the centre of the conflagration; but it has spread over Dauphine, Alsace, the Lyonnais; the whole South-East is in a blaze.  All over the North, from Rouen to Metz, disorder is abroad:  smugglers of salt go openly in armed bands:  the barriers of towns are burnt; toll-gatherers, tax-gatherers, official persons put to flight.  ’It was thought,’ says Young, ‘the people, from hunger, would revolt;’ and we see they have done it.  Desperate Lackalls, long prowling aimless, now finding hope in desperation itself, everywhere form a nucleus.  They ring the Church bell by way of tocsin:  and the Parish turns out to the work.  (See Hist.  Parl. ii. 243-6.) Ferocity, atrocity; hunger and revenge:  such work as we can imagine!

Ill stands it now with the Seigneur, who, for example, ’has walled up the only Fountain of the Township;’ who has ridden high on his chartier and parchments; who has preserved Game not wisely but too well.  Churches also, and Canonries, are sacked, without mercy; which have shorn the flock too close, forgetting to feed it.  Wo to the land over which Sansculottism, in its day of vengeance, tramps roughshod,—­shod in sabots!  Highbred Seigneurs, with their delicate women and little ones, had to ‘fly half-naked,’ under cloud of night; glad to escape the flames, and even worse.  You meet them at the tables-d’hote of inns; making wise reflections or foolish that ‘rank is destroyed;’ uncertain whither they shall now wend. (See Young, i. 149, &c.) The metayer will find it convenient to be slack in paying rent.  As for the Tax-gatherer, he, long hunting as a biped of prey, may now get hunted as one; his Majesty’s Exchequer will not ‘fill up the Deficit,’ this season:  it is the notion of many that a Patriot Majesty, being the Restorer of French Liberty, has abolished most taxes, though, for their private ends, some men make a secret of it.