peasant, to the laboring man, to the government, and to the household.

It has been my aim to fill this void, and make France known to
others outside the small circle of the literary and the cultivated.
Owing to the kindness of M. Maury[1] and the precious indications of
M. Boutaric, I have been able to examine a mass of manuscript
documents. These include the correspondence of a large number of
intendants, (the Royal governor of a large district), the directors of
customs and tax offices, legal officers, and private persons of every
kind and of every degree during the thirty last years of the ancient
regime. Also included are the reports and registers of the various
departments of the royal household, the reports and registers of the
States General in 176 volumes, the dispatches of military officers in
1789 and 1790, letters, memoirs and detailed statistics preserved in
the one hundred boxes of the ecclesiastical committee, the
correspondence, in 94 bundles, of the department and municipal
authorities with the ministries from 1790 to 1799, the reports of the
Councilors of State on mission at the end of 1801, the reports of
prefects under the Consulate, the Empire, and the Restoration down to
1823. There is such a quantity of unknown and instructive documents
besides these that the history of the Revolution seems, indeed, to be
still unwritten. In any event, it is only such documents, which can
make all these people come alive. The lesser nobles, the curates, the
monks, the nuns of the provinces, the aldermen and bourgeoisie of the
towns, the attorneys and syndics of the country villages, the laborers
and artisans, the officers and the soldiers. These alone enable us to
contemplate and appreciate in detail the various conditions of their
existence, the interior of a parsonage, of a convent, of a town-
council, the wages of a workman, the produce of a farm, the taxes
levied on a peasant, the duties of a tax-collector, the expenditure of