One word more to complete the picture.  People seek shelter in the towns and, indeed, compared with the country, the towns are a refuge.  But misery accompanies the poor, for, on the one hand, they are involved in debt, and, on the other, the closed circles administering municipal affairs impose taxation on the poor.  The towns being oppressed by the fisc, they in their turn oppress the people by passing to them the load which the king had imposed.  Seven times in twenty-eight years[64] he withdraws and re-sells the right of appointing their municipal officers, and, to get rid of “this enormous financial burden,” the towns double their octrois.  At present, although liberated, they still make payment; the annual charge has become a perpetual charge; never does the fisc release its hold; once beginning to suck it continues to suck.  “Hence, in Brittany,” says an intendant, “not a town is there whose expenses are not greater than its revenue."[65] They are unable to mend their pavements, and repair their streets, “the approaches to them being almost impracticable.”  What could they do for self-support, obliged, as they are, to pay over again after having already paid?  Their augmented octrois, in 1748, ought to furnish during a period of eleven years a total of 606,000 livres; but, the eleven years having lapsed, the tax authorities, in spite of having been paid, still maintains its exigencies, and to such an extent that, in 1774, they have contributed 2,071,052 livres, the provisional octroi being still maintained. — Now, this exorbitant octroi bears heavily everywhere on the most indispensable necessities, the artisan being more heavily burdened than the bourgeois.  In Paris, as we have seen above, wine pays forty-seven livres a hogshead entrance duty which, at the present standard of value, must be doubled.  “A turbot, taken on the coast at Harfleur and brought by post, pays an entrance duty of eleven times its value, the people of the capital therefore being condemned to dispense with fish from the sea."[66] At the gates of Paris, in the little parish of Aubervilliers, I find “excessive duties on hay, straw, seeds, tallow, candles, eggs, sugar, fish, faggots and firewood."[67] Compiegne pays the whole amount of its taille by means of a tax on beverages and cattle[68].  “In Toul and in Verdun the taxes are so onerous that but few consent to remain in the town, except those kept there by their offices and by old habits."[69] At Coulommiers, “the merchants and the people are so severely taxed they dread undertaking any enterprise.”  Popular hatred everywhere is profound against octroi, barrier and clerk.  The bourgeois oligarchy everywhere first cares for itself before caring for those it governs.  At Nevers and at Moulins,[70] “all rich persons find means to escape their turn to collect taxes by belonging to different commissions or through their influence with the élus, to such an extent that the collectors of Nevers, of the present and preceding