While ignorance and custom are invincible in the country regions, where the peasants are left very much to themselves, the town of Issoudun itself has reached a state of complete social stagnation.  Obliged to meet the decadence of fortunes by the practice of sordid economy, each family lives to itself.  Moreover, society is permanently deprived of that distinction of classes which gives character to manners and customs.  There is no opposition of social forces, such as that to which the cities of the Italian States in the Middle Ages owed their vitality.  There are no longer any nobles in Issoudun.  The Cottereaux, the Routiers, the Jacquerie, the religious wars and the Revolution did away with the nobility.  The town is proud of that triumph.  Issoudun has repeatedly refused to receive a garrison, always on the plea of cheap provisions.  She has thus lost a means of intercourse with the age, and she has also lost the profits arising from the presence of troops.  Before 1756, Issoudun was one of the most delightful of all the garrison towns.  A judicial drama, which occupied for a time the attention of France, the feud of a lieutenant-general of the department with the Marquis de Chapt, whose son, an officer of dragoons, was put to death,—­justly perhaps, yet traitorously, for some affair of gallantry,—­deprived the town from that time forth of a garrison.  The sojourn of the forty-fourth demi-brigade, imposed upon it during the civil war, was not of a nature to reconcile the inhabitants to the race of warriors.

Bourges, whose population is yearly decreasing, is a victim of the same social malady.  Vitality is leaving these communities.  Undoubtedly, the government is to blame.  The duty of an administration is to discover the wounds upon the body-politic, and remedy them by sending men of energy to the diseased regions, with power to change the state of things.  Alas, so far from that, it approves and encourages this ominous and fatal tranquillity.  Besides, it may be asked, how could the government send new administrators and able magistrates?  Who, of such men, is willing to bury himself in the arrondissements, where the good to be done is without glory?  If, by chance, some ambitious stranger settles there, he soon falls into the inertia of the region, and tunes himself to the dreadful key of provincial life.  Issoudun would have benumbed Napoleon.

As a result of this particular characteristic, the arrondissement of Issoudun was governed, in 1822, by men who all belonged to Berry.  The administration of power became either a nullity or a farce,—­except in certain cases, naturally very rare, which by their manifest importance compelled the authorities to act.  The procureur du roi, Monsieur Mouilleron, was cousin to the entire community, and his substitute belonged to one of the families of the town.  The judge of the court, before attaining that dignity, was made famous by one of those provincial sayings which put