Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 02.djvu/304

272 A farmer-general, extremely well-skilled in assessments, interposed, saying:

"Sir, that village can afford nothing to this monk, as I have, but the last year, made the parishioners pay thirty-two taxes on their wine, besides their overconsumption of the allowance for their own drinking. They are entirely ruined. I have seized and sold their cattle and movables, and yet they are still my debtors. I protest, then, against the claim of the reverend father."

"You are in the right," answered the minister of the revenue, "to be his rival; you both equally love your neighbor, and you both edify me."

A third, a monk and lord of the manor, whose tenants were in mortmain, was waiting for a decree of the council that should put him in possession of all the estate of a Paris simpleton who, having inadvertently lived a year and a day in a house subject to this servitude and enclosed within the property of this priest, had died at the year's end. The monk was claiming all the estate of this person, and claiming it jure divino.

The minister found by this that the heart of this monk was as just and as tender as those of the others.

A fourth, who was comptroller of the royal domains, presented a specious memorial, in which he sought to justify his having reduced twenty families to beggary. They had inherited property from their uncles, their aunts, their brothers, or cousins, and