Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/104

94 what was called metayers, being neither bond nor free, so as to be equally deprived of the rights of liberty and the privileges of serfdom; in years of scarcity they were frequently turned adrift by the landowners, whose dues they were unable to pay, thus swelling the appalling host of beggars and vagrants which was one of the scourges of old France. In order to protect society from these famishing hordes infesting the highways and byeways, the most stringent edicts were continually published against them. They were branded like criminals and stuffed pell mell into prisons, dignified by the name of hospitals; where, in conformity to orders, they were forced to lie down on straw in order to take up less room. The indignant Saint Simon wrote as follows to Cardinal Fleury, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century:—"In Normandy they live on the grass of the fields. I speak in secret and in confidence to a Frenchman, a bishop, a minister, and to the only man who seems to enjoy the friendship and the confidence of the King, and is able to speak in private to him. The King, moreover, can be called such only while he possesses subject and a kingdom; he is of an age one day to feel the consequences of our state; and in spite of being the first King in Europe, he cannot be a great King if he only rules over wretches of all sorts and conditions, with his kingdom turned into one vast infirmary for the desperate and dying."

What a picture is this of the state to which the country had been reduced! And it puzzles one not a little to understand why so rich and fertile a country as France—a country which, after its disasters in 1670, recovered with astonishing rapidity from the ravages of an invading army—should only a century