Page:Works of Voltaire Volume 02.djvu/307

Rh

The Man of Forty Crowns having improved his understanding, and having accumulated a moderate fortune, married a very pretty girl, who had a hundred crowns a year of her own. As soon as his son was born, he felt himself a man of some consequence in the state. He was famous for making the best baskets in the world, and his wife was an excellent seamstress. She was born in the neighborhood of a rich abbey of a hundred thousand livres a year. Her husband asked me one day why those gentlemen, who were so few in number, had swallowed so many of the forty-crown lots? "Are they more useful to their country than I am?" "No, dear neighbor." "Do they, like me, contribute at least to the population of it?" "No." "Do they cultivate the land? Do they defend the state when it is attacked?" "No, they pray to God for us." "Well, then, I will pray to God for them in return."

.—How many of these useful gentry, men and women, may the convents in this kingdom contain?

.—By the lists of the superintendents, taken toward the end of the last century, there were about ninety thousand.

.—According to our ancient account,