a hideous cave were it not open to all the winds and the frosts.  Below there are two rooms with stone floors, without doors or windows, and five feet high; a third room six feet high, paved with stone, serves as parlor, hall, kitchen, wash-house, bakery, and sink for the water of the court and garden.  Above are three similar rooms, the whole cracking and tumbling in ruins, absolutely threatening to fail, without either doors and windows that hold.”  And, in 1790, the repairs are not yet made.  See, by way of contrast, the luxury of the prelates possessing half a million income, the pomp of their palaces, the hunting equipment of M. de Dillon, bishop of Evreux, the confessionals lined with satin of M. de Barral, bishop of Troyes, and the innumerable culinary utensils in massive silver of M. de Rohan, bishop of Strasbourg. — Such is the lot of curates at the established rates, and there are “a great many” who do not get the established rates, withheld from them through the ill-will of the higher clergy; who, with their perquisites, get only from 400 to 500 livres, and who vainly ask for the meager pittance to which they are entitled by the late edict.  “Should not such a request,” says a curate, “be willingly granted by Messieurs of the upper clergy who suffer monks to enjoy from 5 to 6,000 livres income each person, whilst they see curates, who are at least as necessary, reduced to the lighter portion, as little for themselves as for their parish? " — And they yet gnaw on this slight pittance to pay the free gift.  In this, as in the rest, the poor are charged to discharge the rich.  In the diocese of Clermont, “the curates, even with the simple fixed rates, are subject to a tax of 60, 80, 100, 120 livres and even more; the vicars, who live only by the sweat of their brows, are taxed 22 livres.”  The prelates, on the contrary, pay but little, and “it is still a custom to present bishops on New-Year’s day with a receipt for their taxes."[30] — There is no escape for the curates.  Save two or three small bishoprics of “lackeys,” all the dignities of the church are reserved to the nobles; “to be a bishop nowadays,” says one of them, “a man must be a gentleman.”  I regard them as sergeants who, like their fellows in the army, have lost all hope of becoming officers. — Hence there are some whose anger bursts its bounds:  “We, unfortunate curates at fixed rates; we, commonly assigned to the largest parishes, like my own which, for two leagues in the woods, includes hamlets that would form another; we, whose lot makes even the stones and beams of our miserable dwellings cry aloud,” we have to endure prelates “who would still, through their forest-keepers, prosecute a poor curate for cutting a stick in their forests, his sole support on his long journeys over the road.”  On their passing, the poor man “is obliged to jump close against a slope to protect himself from the feet and the spattering of the horses, as likewise from the wheels and, perhaps, the whip of an insolent