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92 unimaginable wretchedness. The burden of taxation laid on the people ruined agriculture and commerce, and, when whole provinces had been driven into rebellion by intolerable exactions, they were reduced to obedience by means of wholesale slaughter. Madame de Sévigné, in the charming epistles addressed to her daughter, did not dream of attacking the Government; but what a picture of corruption does not that correspondence reveal! Lower Brittany, from sheer inability to pay more taxes, had taken up arms, but was soon reduced to obedience by the King's troops, and no punishment was severe enough for its inhabitants. The brilliant Marquise, in travelling from Paris to her estates there in 1675, saw "peasants hanging on the trees by the roadside," and in her budget of news speaks of "rebels broken on the wheel by hundreds:" so many hundreds being despatched, indeed, that she says in one letter, "They have done hanging for want of people to hang." These "poor Lower Bretons" took it so meekly, too; asked "but for something to drink, a pinch of snuff, and to be despatched quickly; for, indeed," she remarks, "hanging seems a kind of deliverance here from greater evils."

But let the amiable, witty French Marquise beware of too much sympathy for "the despair and desolation" of her "poor province of Brittany"; for even such letters as hers, from mother to daughter, did not escape the watchful eyes of postal spies, and an ill-considered word of compassion, nay, a witticism, might send her to the Bastile, despite her marquisate. Merely for some such trifle, some satirical lines on Madame de Pompadour, had not a certain Chevalier de Rességuier been shut up for years in an iron cage, to endure the torture of neither being able to