as of a different species of being. . . .  The proprietor gets all he can out of him; in any event, looking upon him and his oxen as domestic animals, he puts them into harness and employs them in all weathers for every kind of journey, and for every species of carting and transport.  On the other hand, this métayer thinks of living with as little labor as possible, converting as much ground as he can into pasturage, for the reason that the product arising from the increase of stock costs him no labor.  The little plowing he does is for the purpose of raising low-priced provisions suitable for his own nourishment, such as buckwheat, radishes, etc.  His enjoyment consists only of his own idleness and sluggishness, hoping for a good chestnut year and doing nothing voluntarily but procreate;” unable to hire farming hands he begets children. —

The rest, ordinary laborers, have a few savings, “living on the herbage, and on a few goats which devour everything.”  Often again, these, by order of Parliament, are killed by the game-keepers.  A woman, with two children in swaddling clothes, having no milk, “and without an inch of ground,” whose two goats, her sole resource, had thus been slain, and another, with one goat slain in the same way, and who begs along with her boy, present themselves at the gate of the chateau; one receives twelve livres, while the other is admitted as a domestic, and henceforth, ‘’ this village is all bows and smiling faces.’’ — In short, they are not accustomed to kindness; the lot of all these poor people is to endure.  “As with rain and hail, they regard as inevitable the necessity of being oppressed by the strongest, the richest, the most skillful, the most in repute,” and this stamps on them, “if one may be allowed to say so, an air of painful suffering.”

In Auvergne, a feudal country, covered with extensive ecclesiastic and seigniorial domains, the misery is the same.  At Clermont-Ferrand,[43] “there are many streets that can for blackness, dirt and scents only be represented by narrow channels cut in a dunghill.”  In the inns of the largest bourgs, “closeness, misery, dirtiness and darkness.”  That of Pradelles is “one of the worst in France.”  That of Aubenas, says Young, “would be a purgatory for one of my pigs.”  The senses, in short, are paralyzed.  The primitive man is content so long as he can sleep and get something to eat.  He gets something to eat, but what kind of food?  To put up with the indigestible mess a peasant here requires a still tougher stomach than in Limousin; in certain villages where, ten years later, every year twenty or twenty-five hogs are to be slaughtered, they now slaughter but three[44]. — On contemplating this temperament, rude and intact since Vercingetorix, and, moreover, rendered more savage by suffering, one cannot avoid being somewhat alarmed.  The Marquis de Mirabeau describes