Poitou, the municipal officers, the colonel of the national guard, and
numbers of "peasants and inhabitants" demand the conservation of the
regular canons of St. Augustin. "Their existence," says the petition,
"is absolutely essential, as well for our town as for the country, and
we should suffer an irreparable loss in their suppression." The
municipality and permanent council of Soissons writes that the
establishment of Saint-Jean des Vignes "has always earnestly claimed
its share of the public charges. This is the institution which, in
times of calamity, welcomes homeless citizens and provides them with
subsistence. It alone bears the expenses of the assembly of the
bailiwick at the time of the election of deputies to the National
Assembly. A company of the regiment of Armagnac is actually lodged
under its roof. This institution is always found wherever sacrifices
are to be made." In scores of places declarations are made that the
monks are "the fathers of the poor." In the diocese of Auxerre, during
the summer of 1789, the Bernardines of Rigny "stripped themselves of
all they possessed in favor of the inhabitants of neighboring
villages: bread, grain, money and other supplies, have all been
lavished on about twelve hundred persons who, for more than six weeks,
never failed to present themselves at their door daily. . . Loans,
advances made on farms, credit with the purveyors of the house, all
has contributed to facilitating their means for relieving the people."
I omit many other traits equally forcible; we see that the
ecclesiastical and lay seigniors are not simple egoists when they live
at home. Man is compassionate of ills of which he is a witness;
absence is necessary to deaden their vivid impression; they move the
heart when the eye contemplates them. Familiarity, moreover, engenders
sympathy; one cannot remain insensible to the trials of a poor man to
whom, for over twenty years, one says good-morning every day on
passing him, with whose life one is acquainted, who is not an abstract