land used to exact. The protestant cantons are, in proportion, twice as rich as the catholic, because the state, in the first, possesses the lands of the monks. Those who were formerly subjects to the Archdukes of Austria, to the Duke of Zeringue, and to the monks, are now the subjects of their own country. They pay to that country the same tithes, the same fines of alienation, that they paid to their former masters; and as the subjects, in general, have very little trade, their merchandise is liable to no charges, except some small staple duties. The men make a trade of their courage, in their dealings with foreign powers, and sell themselves for a certain term of years, which brings some money into their country at our expense: and this example is as singular a one in the civilized world, as is the sole tax now laid on by our new legislators.
THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS.--So, sir, the Swiss are not plundered, _jure divino_, of one-half of their goods; and he that has four cows in Switzerland is not obliged to give two of them to the state?
THE GEOMETRICIAN.--Undoubtedly, not. In one canton, upon thirteen tons of wine, they pay one, and drink the other twelve. In another canton, they pay the twelfth, and drink the remaining eleven.
THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS.--Why am not I a Swiss? That cursed tax, that single and singularly iniquitous tax, that has reduced me to beggary!
But then again, three or four hundred taxes, of which it is impossible for me to retain or pronounce the bare names, are they more just and more tolerable? Was there ever a legislator, who, in founding a state, wished to create counselors to the king, inspectors of coal-meters, gaugers of wine, measurers of wood, searchers of hog-tongues, comptrollers of salt butter? or to maintain an army of rascals, twice as numerous as that of Alexander, commanded by sixty generals, who lay the country under contribution, who gain, every day, signal victories, who take prisoners, and who sometimes sacrifice them in the air, or on a boarded stage, as the ancient Scythians did, according to what my vicar told me?
Now, was such a legislation, against which so many outcries were raised, and which caused the shedding of so many tears, much better than the newly imposed one, which at one stroke, cleanly and quietly takes away half of my subsistence? I am afraid, that on a fair liquidation, it will be found that under the ancient system of the revenue, they used to take, at times and in detail, three-quarters of it.
THE GEOMETRICIAN.--_Iliacos intra muros peccatur et extra. Est modus in retus. Caveas fine quidnimie._ THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS.--I have learned a little of history, and something of geometry; but I do not understand a word of Latin.
THE GEOMETRICIAN.--The sense is, pretty nearly, as follows. _There is wrong on both sides. Keep to a medium in every thing. Nothing too much._ THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS.--I say, nothing too much; that is really my situation; but the worst of it is, I have not enough.
THE GEOMETRICIAN.--I allow that you must perish of want, and I too, and the state too, if the new administration should continue only two years longer; but it is to be hoped heaven will have mercy on us.
THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS.--We pass our lives in hope, and die hoping to the last. Adieu, sir, you have enlightened me, but my heart is grieved.
THE GEOMETRICIAN.--This is, indeed, often the fruit of knowledge.
IV.
AN ADVENTURE WITH A CARMELITE.
When I had thanked the academician of the Academy of Sciences, for having set me right, I went away quite out of heart, praising providence, but muttering between my teeth these doleful words: "_What!
to have no more than forty crowns a year to live on, nor more than twenty-two years to live!_ Alas! may our life be yet shorter, since it is to be so miserable!"
As I was saying this, I found myself just opposite a very superb house.
Already was I feeling myself pressed by hunger. I had not so much as the hundred and twentieth part of the sum that by right belongs to each individual. But as soon as I was told that this was the palace of my reverend fathers, the bare-footed Carmelites, I conceived great hopes, and said to myself, since these saints are humble enough to go bare-footed, they will be charitable enough to give me a dinner.
I rang. A Carmelite came to the door.
"What would you please to have, my son?"
"A morsel of bread, my reverend father. The new edicts have stripped me of every thing."
"Son, know that we ourselves beg charity; we do not bestow it."[1] "What! while your holy institute forbids you to wear shoes, you have the house of a prince, and can you refuse to me a meal?"
"My son, it is true, we go without stockings and shoes; that is an expense the less; we feel no more cold in our feet than in our hands.
As to our fine house, we built it very easily, as we have a hundred thousand livres a year of income from houses in the same street."
"So, then! you suffer me to die of hunger, while you have an income of a hundred thousand livres! I suppose you pay fifty thousand of these to the new government?"
"Heaven preserve us from paying a single farthing! It is only the produce of the land cultivated by laborious hands, callous with work, and moistened with tears, that owes taxes to the legislative and executive power. The alms which have been bestowed upon us, have enabled us to build those houses, by the rent of which we get a hundred thousand livres a year. But these alms, coming from the fruits of the earth, and having, consequently, already paid the tax, ought not to pay twice. They have sanctified the faithful believers, who have impoverished themselves to enrich us, and we continue to beg charity, and to lay under contribution the Fauxbourg of St. Germain, in order to sanctify a still greater number of the faithful believers."[2] Having thus spoken, the Carmelite politely shut the door in my face.
I then passed along and stopped before the _Hôtel_ of the _Mousquetaires gris_, and related to those gentlemen what had just happened to me. They gave me a good dinner and half a crown, (_un ecu_). One of them proposed to go directly and set fire to the convent; but a musqueteer, more discreet than he, remonstrated with him, insisting that the time for action had not yet arrived, and implored him to wait patiently a little longer.[3] [1] Victor Hugo in his poem, _Christ at the Vatican_, (translated by G.B. Burleigh,) rebukes this inhuman spirit of monkish greed and avarice, which always receives but neves gives in return. In the poem, Christ is represented as saying: "----I have said, 'I will have mercy and not sacrifice;'-- Have said, 'Give freely what, without a price, Was given to you.' To my redeemed, instead, You sell baptism upon their natal bed; Sell to the sinner void indulgences; To lovers sell the natural right to wed; Sell to the dying the privilege of decease, And sell your funeral masses to the dead!
Your prayers and masses and communions sell; Beads, benedictions, crosses; in your eyes Nothing is sacred,--all is merchandise."--E.
[2] In a recent number of _The Nineteenth Century_, Mr. Alex. A. Knox, in an able criticism on the writings of Voltaire, says very truly: "It should not be forgotten that in his day a very large portion of the soil of France was in the hands of the clergy, free from all burdens, save in so far as the clergy chose to execute them by the way of 'gratuitous gifts.' The condition of the French peasant was frightful.
Arthur Young, Dr. Moore, and others have described it at a somewhat later date, but it was even so in Voltaire's time. Of course the 'clerical immunities' were far from being the only cause of all this misery; but they were a frightful addition to it."
[3] The degradation of labor, and the corruption and injustice of the papal priesthood, were the inciting causes of the great revolution in France, which at length overturned the monarchy, and convulsed, for so long a period, every nation in Europe. In reading this romance of the hardships of the laborer, we may learn to comprehend the true principles of Voltaire, and recognize his great benevolence and sympathy with suffering and distress. We may also listen to the first faint mutterings of the terrible storm of blood and retribution, that was so soon to burst over unhappy France, and overwhelm in its lurid course all ranks and conditions of mankind--the innocent and the guilty, the oppressed and the oppressor, the peasant and the priest.--E.
V.
AUDIENCE OF THE COMPTROLLER GENERAL.
I went, with my half-crown, to present a petition to the comptroller general, who was that day giving audience.
His anti-chamber was filled with people of all kinds. There were there especially some with more bluff faces, more prominent bellies, and more arrogant looks than my man of eight millions. I durst not draw near to them; I saw them, but they did not observe me.
A monk, a great man for tithes, had begun a suit at law against certain subjects of the state, whom he called his tenants. He had already a larger income than the half of his parishioners put together, and was moreover lord of the manor. His claim was, that whereas his vassals had, with infinite pains, converted their heaths into vineyards, they owed him a tithe of the wine, which, taking into the account the price of labor, of the vine-props, of the casks and cellarage, would carry off above a quarter of the produce.
"But," said he, "as the tithes are due, _jure divino_, I demand the quarter of the substance of my tenants, in the name of God."
The minister of the revenue said to him, "I see how charitable you are."
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 over-consumption 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 cockney, who having, inadvertently, lived a year and a day in a house subject to this servitude, and inclosed within the hands of this priest, had died at the year's end. The monk was claiming all the estate of this cockney, 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 justified himself for his having reduced twenty families to beggary. They had inherited from their uncles, their aunts, their brothers, or cousins; and were liable to pay the duties. The officers of the domain had generously proved to them, that they had not set the full value on their inheritances,--that they were much richer than they believed, and, consequently, having condemned them to a triple fine, ruined them in charges, and threw the heads of the families into jail, he had bought their best possessions without untying his purse-strings.
The comptroller general said to him, in a tone indeed rather bitter: _"Euge, controlleur bone et fidelis, quia supra pauca fuisti fidelis, But to a master of the requests, who was standing at his side, he said in a low voice: "We must make these blood-suckers, sacred and profane, disgorge. It is time to give some relief to the people, who, without our care, and our equity, would have nothing to live upon in this world at least, however they might fare in the other."
Some, of profound genius, presented projects to him. One of them had imagined a scheme to lay a tax on wit. "All the world," said he, "will be eager to pay, as no one cares to pass for a fool."
The minister declared to him, "I exempt you from the tax."
Another proposed to lay the _only_ tax upon songs and laughing, in consideration that we were the merriest nation under the sun, and that a song was a relief and comfort for every thing. But the minister observed, that of late there were hardly any songs of pleasantry made; and he was afraid that, to escape the tax, we would become too serious.
The next that presented himself, was a trusty and loyal subject, who offered to raise for the king three times as much, by making the nation pay three times less. The minister advised him to learn arithmetic.
A fourth proved to the king in the way of _friendship_, that he could not raise above seventy-five millions, but that he was going to procure him two hundred and twenty-five. "You will oblige me in this," said the minister, "as soon as we shall have paid the public debts."
At length, who should appear but a deputy of the new author, who makes the legislative power co-proprietor of all our lands, _jure divino_, and who was giving the king twelve hundred millions of revenue. I knew the man again who had flung me into prison for not having paid my twenty crowns, and throwing myself at the feet of the comptroller general, I implored his justice; upon which, he burst out a laughing, and telling me, it was a trick that had been played me, he ordered the doers of this mischief in jest to pay me a hundred crowns damages, and exempted me from the land-tax for the rest of my life. I said to him, "God bless your honor!"
VI.
THE MAN OF FORTY CROWNS MARRIES, BECOMES A FATHER, AND DESCANTS UPON THE MONKS.
The Man of Forty Crowns having improved his understanding, and having accumulated a moderate fortune, married a very pretty girl, who had an 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 us." "Well, then, I will pray to God for them, in return."
QUESTION.--How many of these useful gentry, men and women, may the convents in this kingdom contain?
ANSWER.--By the lists of the superintendents, taken toward the end of the last century, there were about ninety thousand.
QUESTION.--According to our ancient account, they ought not, at forty crowns a head, to possess above ten millions eight hundred thousand livres. Pray, how much have they actually?
ANSWER.--They have to the amount of fifty millions, including the masses, and alms to the mendicant monks, who really lay a considerable tax on the people. A begging friar of a convent in Paris, publicly bragged that his wallet was worth fourscore thousand livres a year.
QUESTION.--Let us now consider how much the repartition of fifty millions among ninety thousand shaven crowns gives to each? Let us see, is it not five hundred and fifty-five livres?
ANSWER.--Yes, and a considerable sum it is in a numerous society, where the expenses even diminish by the quantity of consumers; for ten persons may live together much cheaper than if each had his separate lodging and table.
QUESTION.--So that the ex-Jesuits, to whom there is now assigned a pension of four hundred livres, are then really losers by the bargain.
ANSWER.--I do not think so; for they are almost all of them retired among their friends, who assist them. Several of them say masses for money, which they did not do before; others get to be preceptors; some are maintained by female bigots; each has made a shift for himself: and, perhaps, at this time, there are few of them, who have tasted of the world, and of liberty, that would resume their former chains. The monkish life, whatever they may say, is not at all to be envied. It is a maxim well known, that the monks are a kind of people who assemble without knowing, live without loving, and die without regretting each other.
QUESTION.--You think, then, that it would be doing them a great service, to strip them of all their monks' habits?
ANSWER.--They would undoubtedly gain much by it, and the state still more. It would restore to the country a number of subjects, men and women, who have rashly sacrificed their liberty, at an age to which the laws do not allow a capacity of disposing of tenpence a year income. It would be taking these corpses out of their tombs, and afford a true resurrection. Their houses might become hospitals, or be turned into places for manufactures. Population would be increased. All the arts would be better cultivated. One might at least diminish the number of these voluntary victims by fixing the number of novices. The country would have subjects more useful, and less unhappy. Such is the opinion of all the magistrates, such the unanimous wish of the public, since its understanding is enlightened. The example of England, and other states, is an evident proof of the necessity of this reformation. What would England do at this time, if, instead of forty thousand seamen, it had forty thousand monks? The more they are multiplied, the greater need there is of a number of industrious subjects. There are undoubtedly buried in the cloisters many talents, which are lost to the state. To make a kingdom nourish, there should be the fewest priests and the most artisans possible. So far ought the ignorance and barbarism of our forefathers to be from being any rule for us, that they ought rather to be an admonition to us, to do what they would do, if they were in our place, with our improvements in knowledge.
QUESTION.--It is not then out of hatred to monks that you wish to abolish them, but out of love to your country? I think as you do. I would not have my son a monk. And if I thought I was to rear children for nothing better than a cloister, I would not wish to become a father.
ANSWER.--Where in fact, is that good father of a family that would not groan to see his son and daughter lost to society? This is seeking the safety of the soul. It may be so, but a soldier that seeks the safety of his body, when his duty is to fight, is punished. We are all soldiers of the state; we are in the pay of society; we become deserters when we quit it.
Why, then, has monkishness prevailed? Because, since the days of Constantine, the government has been everywhere absurd and detestable; because the Roman empire came to have more monks than soldiers; because there were a hundred thousand of them in Egypt alone; because they were exempt from labor and taxes; because the chiefs of those barbarous nations which destroyed the empire, having turned Christians, in order to govern Christians, exercised the most horrid tyranny; because, to avoid the fury of these tyrants, people threw themselves in crowds into cloisters, and so, to escape one servitude, put themselves into another; because the popes, by instituting so many different orders of sacred drones, contrived to have so many subjects to themselves in other states; because a peasant likes better to be called reverend father, and to give his benedictions, than to follow a plough's tail; because he does not know that the plough is nobler than a monk's habit; because he had rather live at the expense of fools than by a laborious occupation; in short, because he does not know that, in making a monk of himself, he is preparing for himself unhappy days, of which the sad groundwork will be nothing but a _tedium vitæ_ and repentance.
QUESTION.--I am satisfied. Let us have no monks, for the sake of their own happiness, as well as ours. But I am sorry to hear it said by the landlord of our village, who is father to four boys and three girls, that he does not know how to dispose of his daughters, unless he makes nuns of them.
ANSWER.--This too often repeated plea is at once inhuman, detrimental to the country, and destructive to society. Every time that it can be said of any condition of life whatever, that if all the world were to embrace it mankind would perish, it is proved that that condition is a worthless one, and that whoever embraces it does all the mischief to mankind that in him lies.
Now, it being a clear consequence that if all the youth of both sexes were to shut themselves up in cloisters the world would perish, monkery is, if it were but in that light alone, the enemy to human nature, independently of the horrid evils it has formerly caused.
QUESTION.--Might not as much be said of soldiers?
ANSWER. Certainly not; for if every subject carried arms in his turn, as formerly was the practice in all republics, and especially in that of Rome, the soldier is but the better farmer for it. The soldier, as a good subject ought to do, marries, and fights for his wife and children.
Would it were the will of heaven that every laborer was a soldier and a married man! They would make excellent subjects. But a monk, merely in his quality of a monk, is good for nothing but to devour the substance of his countryman. There is no truth more generally acknowledged.
QUESTION.--But, sir, the daughters of poor gentlemen, who cannot portion them off in marriage, what are they to do?
ANSWER.---Do! They should do, as has a thousand times been said, like the daughters in England, in Scotland, Ireland, Switzerland, Holland, half Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Tartary, Turkey, Africa, and in almost all the rest of the globe. They will prove much better wives, much better mothers, when it shall have been the custom, as in Germany, to marry women without fortune. A woman, industrious and a good economist, will do more good in a house, than a daughter of a farmer of the revenue, who spends more in superfluities than she will have brought of income to her husband.
There is a necessity for houses of retreat for old age, for infirmity, for deformity. But by the most detestable of all abuses, these foundations are for well-made persons. Let a hump-backed old woman present herself to enter into a cloister, and she will be rejected with contempt, unless she will give an immense portion to the house. But what do I say? Every nun must bring her dower with her; she is else the refuse of the convent. Never was there a more intolerable abuse.
QUESTION.--Thank you, sir. I swear to you that no daughter of mine shall be a nun. They shall learn to spin, to sew, to make lace, to embroider, to render themselves useful. I look on the vows of convents to be crimes against one's country and one's self. Now, sir, I beg you will explain to me, how comes it that a certain writer, in contradiction to human kind, pretends that monks are useful to the population of a state, because their buildings are kept in better repair than those of the nobility, and their lands better cultivated?
ANSWER.---He has a mind to divert himself; he knows but too well, that ten families who have each five thousand livres a year in land, are a hundred, nay, a thousand times more useful than a convent that enjoys fifty thousand livres a year, and which has always a secret hoard. He cries up the fine houses built by the monks, and it is precisely those fine houses that provoke the rest of the subjects; it is the very cause of complaint to all Europe. The vow of poverty condemns those palaces, as the vow of humility protests against pride, and as the vow of extinguishing one's race is in opposition to nature.
QUESTION.--Bless me! Who can this be that advances so strange a proposition?
ANSWER. It is the _friend of mankind_, [Monsieur le M. de Mirabeau, in his book entitled _L'Ami des Hommes_. It is against this marquis that the jest on the _only tax_ is leveled; a tax proposed by him], or rather the friend of the monks.
QUESTION.--I begin to think it advisable to be very distrustful of books.
ANSWER.--The best way is to make use, with regard to them, of the same caution, as with men. Choose the most reasonable, examine them, and never yield unless to evidence.
VII.
ON TAXES PAID TO A FOREIGN POWER.
About a month ago, the Man of Forty Crowns came to me, holding both his sides, which seemed ready to burst with laughing. In short, he laughed so heartily that I could not help laughing also, without knowing at what. So true it is, that man is born an imitative animal, that instinct rules us, and that the great emotions of the soul are catching. _Ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adflent, Humani vultus._ When he had had his laugh out, he told me that he had just come from meeting with a man who called himself the prothonotary of the Holy See, and that this personage was sending away a great sum of money to an Italian, three hundred leagues off, in the name and behalf of a Frenchman, on whom the king had bestowed a small fief or fee; because the said Frenchman could never enjoy this benefit of the king's conferring, if he did not give to this Italian the first year's income.
"The thing," said I, "is very true; but it is not quite such a laughing matter either. It costs France about four hundred thousand livres a year, in petty duties of this kind; and in the course of two centuries and a half, that this custom has lasted, we have already sent to Italy fourscore millions."
"Heavenly Father!" he exclaimed, "how many forty crowns would that make?
Some Italian, then, subdued us, I suppose, two centuries and a half ago, and laid that tribute upon us!"
"In good faith," answered I, "he used to impose on us in former times, in a much more burthensome way. That is but a trifle in comparison to what, for a long time, he levied on our poor nations of Europe."
Then I related to him how those holy usurpations had taken place, and came to be established. He knows a little of history, and does not want for sense. He easily conceived that we had been slaves, and that we were still dragging a little bit of our chain that we could not get rid of.
He spoke much and with energy, against this abuse; but with what respect for religion in general. With what reverence did he express himself for the bishops! How heartily did he wish them many forty crowns a year, that they might spend them in their dioceses in good works.
He also wished that all the country vicars might have a number of forty crowns, that they might live with decency.
"It is a sad thing," said he, "that a vicar should be obliged to dispute with his flock for two or three sheaves of corn, and that he should not be amply paid by the country. These eternal contests for imaginary rights, for the tithes, destroy the respect that is owing to them. The unhappy cultivator who shall have already paid to the collectors his tenth penny, and the twopence a livre, and the tax, and the capitation, and the purchase of his exemption from lodging soldiers,--after he shall have lodged soldiers,--for this unfortunate man, I say, to see the vicar take away in addition the tithe of his produce, he can no longer look on him as his pastor, but as one that flays him alive,--that tears from him the little skin that is left him. He feels but too sensible, that while they are, _jure divino_, robbing him of his tenth sheaf, they have the diabolical cruelty not to give him credit for all that it will have cost him to make that sheaf grow. What then remains to him for himself and family? Tears, want, discouragement, despair, and thus he dies of fatigue and misery. If the vicar were paid by the country, he would be a comfort to his parishioners, instead of being looked on by them as their enemy."
The worthy man melted as he uttered these words; he loved his country, and the public good was his idol. He would sometimes emphatically say, "What a nation would the French be if it pleased!" We went to see his son, whom the mother, a very neat and clean woman, was nursing. "Alas!"
said the father, "here thou art, poor child, and hast nothing to pretend to but twenty-three years of life, and forty crowns a year."
VIII.
ON PROPORTIONS.
The produce of the extremes is equal to the produce of the means: but two sacks of corn stolen, are not, to those who stole them, as the loss of their lives is to the interest of the person from whom they were stolen.
The prior of ----, from whom two of his domestic servants in the country had stolen two measures of corn, has just had the two delinquents hanged. This execution has cost him more than all his harvest has been worth to him; and since that time he has not been able to get a servant.
If the laws had ordained that such as stole their master's corn should work in his grounds, during their lives in fetters, and with a bell at their neck fixed to a collar, the prior would have been a considerable gainer by it.
"Terror should be preventively employed against crimes;" very true: but work, on compulsion, and lasting shame, strike more terror than the gallows.
There was, some months ago at London, a malefactor who had been condemned to be transported to America to work there at the sugar works with the negroes. In England, any criminal, as in many other countries, may get a petition presented to the king, either to obtain a free pardon, or a mitigation of the sentence. This one presented a petition to be hanged, alleging that he mortally hated work, and that he had rather suffer strangling for a minute, than to make sugar all his lifetime.
Others may think otherwise, every one to his taste. But it has been already said, and cannot be too often repeated, that a man hanged is good for nothing, and that punishments ought to be useful.
Some years ago, in Turkey, two young men were condemned to be impaled, for having, (without taking off their caps,) stood to see the procession of the Lama pass by. The Emperor of China, who is a man of very good sense, said, that for his part, he should have condemned them to walk bareheaded, in every public procession, for three months afterwards.
"Proportion punishments to crimes," says the Marquis Beccaria; but those who made the laws were not geometricians.
* * * * * I hate the laws of Draco, which punish equally crimes and faults, wickedness and folly. Let us,--especially in all litigations,--in all dissensions, in all quarrels,--distinguish the aggressor from the party offended, the oppressor from the oppressed. An offensive war is the procedure of a tyrant; he who defends himself is in the character of a just man.
As I was absorbed in these reflections, the Man of Forty Crowns came to me all in tears. I asked, with emotion, if his son, who was by right to live twenty-three years, was dead?
"No," said he, "the little one is very well, and so is my wife; but I was summoned to give evidence against a miller, who has been put to the torture, ordinary and extraordinary, and who has been found innocent. I saw him faint away under redoubled tortures. I heard the crash of his bones. His outcries and screams of agony are not yet out of my ears; they haunt me. I shed tears for pity, and shudder with horror."
His tears drew mine. I trembled, too, like him; for I have naturally an extreme sensibility.
My memory then represented to me the dreadful fate of the Calas family!
A virtuous mother in irons,--her children in tears, and forced to fly, her house given up to pillage,--a respectable father of a family broken with torture, agonizing on a wheel, and expiring in the flames; a son loaded with chains, and dragged before the judges, one of whom said to him: _"We have just now broken your father on the wheel; we will break you alive too."_ I remembered the family of Sirven, who one of my friends met with among the mountains covered with ice, as they were flying from the persecution of a judge as ignorant as he was unjust. This judge (he told me) had condemned an innocent family to death on a supposition, without the least shadow of proof, that the father and mother, assisted by two of their daughters, had cut the throat of the third, and drowned her besides, for going to mass. I saw in judgments of this kind, at once an excess of stupidity, of injustice, and of barbarity.
The Man of Forty Crowns joined with me in pitying human nature. I had in my pocket the discourse of an attorney-general of Dauphiny, which turned upon very important matters. I read to him the following passages: "Certainly those must have been truly great men, who, at first, dared to take upon themselves the office of governing their fellow creatures, and to set their shoulders to the burthen of the public welfare; who, for the sake of the good they meant to do to men, exposed themselves to their ingratitude, and for the public repose renounced their own; who made themselves, as one may say, middle-men between their fellow-creatures and Providence, to compose for them, by artifice, a happiness which Providence seems otherwise to have refused to them by any other means.
"What magistrate, was ever so careless of his responsibilities and duties to humanity as to entertain such ideas? Could he, in the solitude of his closet, without shuddering with horror and pity, cast his eyes on those papers, the unfortunate monuments of gilt or of innocence? Should he not think he hears a plaintive voice and groans issue from those fatal writings, and press him to decide the destiny of a subject, of a husband, of a father, or of a whole family? What judge can be so unmerciful (if he is charged with but one single process) as to pass in cold blood before the door of a prison? Is it I (must he say to himself) who detain in that execrable place my fellow-creature, perhaps my countryman, one of humankind, in short? Is it I that confine him every day,--that shut those execrable doors upon him? Perhaps despair will have seized him. He sends up to heaven my name loaded with his curses; and doubtless calls to witness against me that great Judge of the world, who observes us, and will judge us both."
"Here a dreadful sight presents itself on a sudden to my eyes: The judge, tired with interrogating bywords, has recourse to interrogation by tortures. Impatient in his inquiries and researches, and perhaps irritated at their inutility, he has brought to him torches, chains, levers, and all those instruments invented for producing pain. An executioner comes to interpose in the functions of the magistracy, and terminates by violence a judicial interrogation.
"Gentle philosophy! Thou who never seekest truth but with attention and patience, couldst thou expect, in an age that takes thy name, that such instruments would be employed to discover that truth?
"Can it be really true, that our laws approve this inconceivable method, and that custom consecrates it?