The thing becomes customary and the parish suffers in vain, for it would suffer yet more were it to do otherwise. " Near Aurillac,” says the Marquis de Mirabeau,[22] “there is industry, application and economy without which there would be only misery and want.  This produces a people equally divided into being , on the one hand, insolvent and poor and on the other hand shameful and rich, the latter who, for fear of being fined, create the impoverished.  The taille once assessed, everybody groans and complains and nobody pays it.  The term having expired, at the hour and minute, constraint begins, the collectors, although able, taking no trouble to arrest this by making a settlement, notwithstanding the installation of the bailiff’s men is costly.  But this kind of expense is habitual and people expect it instead of fearing it, for, if it were less rigorous, they would be sure to be additionally burdened the following year.”  The receiver, indeed, who pays the bailiff’s officers a franc a day, makes them pay two francs and appropriates the difference.  Hence “if certain parishes venture to pay promptly, without awaiting constraint, the receiver, who sees himself deprived of the best portion of his gains, becomes ill-humored, and, at the next department (meeting), an arrangement is made between himself, messieurs the elected, the sub-delegate and other shavers of this species, for the parish to bear a double load, to teach it how to behave itself.”

A population of administrative blood-suckers thus lives on the peasant.  “Lately,” says an intendant, “in the district of Romorantin,[23] the collectors received nothing from a sale of furniture amounting to six hundred livres, because the proceeds were absorbed by the expenses.  In the district of Chateaudun the same thing occurred at a sale amounting to nine hundred livres and there are other transactions of the same kind of which we have no information, however flagrant.”  Besides this, the fisc itself is pitiless.  The same intendant writes, in 1784, a year of famine:[24] “People have seen, with horror, the collector, in the country, disputing with heads of families over the costs of a sale of furniture which had been appropriated to stopping their children’s cry of want.”  Were the collectors not to make seizures they would themselves be seized.  Urged on by the receiver we see them, in the documents, soliciting, prosecuting and persecuting the tax-payers.  Every Sunday and every fête-day they are posted at the church door to warn delinquents; and then, during the week they go from door to door to obtain their dues.  “Commonly they cannot write, and take a scribe with them.”  Out of six hundred and six traversing the district of Saint-Flour not ten of them are able to read the official summons and sign a receipt; hence innumerable mistakes and frauds.  Besides a scribe they take along the bailiff’s subordinates, persons of the lowest class, laborers without work, conscious of being hated