Much had grieved me in the six months I had spent in the country, in
the state of the peasantry. I believe that in the Bocage they are
better off than in many parts of France, but even there they seemed
to me much oppressed and weighed down. Their huts were wretched--
they had no chimneys, no glass in the windows, no garden, not even
anything comfortable for the old to sit in; and when I wanted to give
a poor rheumatic old man a warm cushion, I found it was carefully
hidden away lest M. l'Intendant should suppose the family too well
off.
Those seigniorial rights then seemed to me terrible. The poor people
stood in continual fear either of the intendant of the king or of the
Marquis, or of the collector of the dues of the Church. At harvest
time, a bough was seen sticking in half the sheaves. In every ten,
one sheaf is marked for the tithe, tow for the seigneur, two for the
king; and the officer of each takes the best, so that only the worst
are left for the peasant.
Nay, the only wonder seemed to me that there were any to be had at
all, for our intendant thought it his duty to call off the men from
their own fields for the days due from them whenever he wanted
anything to be done to our land (or his own, or his son's-in-law),
without the slightest regard to the damage their crops suffered from
neglect.
I was sure these things ought not to be. I thought infinitely more
good might be done by helping the peasants to make the most of what
they had, and by preventing them from being robbed in my son's name,
than by dealing out gallons of soup and piles of bread at the castle
gates to relieve the misery we had brought on them, or by dressing
the horrible sores that were caused by dirt and bad food.
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