men assemble together to demolish his dwelling.  Their religious belief is on the same level.[6] “Their priests drink with them and sell them absolution.  On Sundays, at the sermon, they put up lieutenancies and sub-lieutenancies (among the saints) for sale:  so much for a lieutenant’s place under St. Peter! — If the peasant hesitates in his bid, an eulogy of St. Peter at once begins, and then our peasants run it up fast enough.” — To intellects in a primitive state, barren of ideas and crowded with images, idols on earth are as essential as idols in heaven.  “No doubt whatever existed in my mind,” says Rétit de la Bretonne,[7] “of the power of the king to compel any man to bestow his wife or daughter on me, and my village (Sacy, in Burgundy) thought as I did."[8] There is no room in minds of this description for abstract conceptions, for any idea of social order; they are submissive to it and that is all.  “The mass of the people,” writes Governor in 1789, “have no religion but that of their priests, no law but that of those above them, no morality but that of self-interest; these are the beings who, led on by drunken curates, are now on the high road to liberty, and the first use they make of it is to rebel on all sides because there is dearth."[9]

How could things be otherwise?  Every idea, previous to taking root in their brain, must possess a legendary form, as absurd as it is simple, adapted to their experiences, their faculties, their fears and their aspirations.  Once planted in this uncultivated and fertile soil it vegetates and becomes transformed, developing into gross excrescences, somber foliage and poisonous fruit.  The more monstrous the greater its vigor, clinging to the slightest of probabilities and tenacious against the most certain of demonstrations.  Under Louis XV, in an arrest of vagabonds, a few children having been carried off willfully or by mistake, the rumor spreads that the king takes baths in blood to restore his exhausted functions, and, so true does this seem to be, the women, horrified through their maternal instincts, join in the riot; a policeman is seized and knocked down, and, on his demanding a confessor, a woman in the crowd, picking up a stone, cries out that he must not have time to go to heaven, and smashes his head with it, believing that she is performing an act of justice[10].  Under Louis XVI evidence is presented to the people that there is no scarcity:  in 1789, [11] an officer, listening to the conversation of his soldiers, hears them state “with full belief that the princes and courtiers, with a view to starve Paris out, are throwing flour into the Seine.”  Turning to a quarter-master he asks him how he can possibly believe such an absurd story.  “Lieutenant,” he replies, “’tis time — the bags were tied with blue strings (cordons bleus).”  To them this is a sufficient reason, and no argument could convince them to the contrary.  Thus, among the dregs of society, foul and horrible romances are forged,