furnish the poor with eighteen hundred pounds of bread per week.
During the winter of 1784 there is an increase of alms-giving in all
the religious establishments; their farmers distribute aid among the
poor people of the country, and, to provide for these extra
necessities, many of the communities increase the rigor of their
abstinences." When at the end of 1789, their suppression is in
question, I find a number of protests in their favor, written by
municipal officers, by prominent individuals, by a crowd of
inhabitants, workmen and peasants, and these columns of rustic
signatures are eloquent. Seven hundred families of Cateau-Cambrésis[9]
send in a petition to retain "the worthy abbés and monks of the Abbey
of St. Andrew, their common fathers and benefactors, who fed them
during the tempest." The inhabitants of St. Savin, in the Pyrénées,
"portray with tears of grief their consternation" at the prospect of
suppressing their abbey of Benedictines, the sole charitable
organization in this poor country. At Sierk, Thionville, "the
Chartreuse," say the leading citizens, "is, for us, in every respect,
the Ark of the Lord; it is the main support of from more than twelve
to fifteen hundred persons who come it every day in the week. This
year the monks have distributed amongst them their own store of grain
at sixteen livres less than the current price." The regular canons of
Domiévre, in Lorrraine, feed sixty poor persons twice a week; it is
essential to retain them, says the petition, "out of pity and
compassion for poor beings whose misery cannot be imagined; where
there no regular convents and canons in their dependency, the poor cry
with misery."[10] At Moutiers-Saint-John, near Sémur in Burgundy, the
Benedictines of Saint-Maur support the entire village and supply it
this year with food during the famine. Near Morley in Barrois, the
abbey of Auvey, of the Cistercian order, "was always, for every
village in the neighborhood, a bureau of charity." At Airvault, in