and one in which greed takes poverty for its accomplice. At the
next harvest the temptation will be similar: "they have threatened
to come and do our harvesting for us, and also to take our cattle
and sell the meat in the villages at the rate of two sous the
pound." -- In every important insurrection there are similar evil-
does and vagabonds, enemies to the law, savage, prowling
desperadoes, who, like wolves, roam about wherever they scent a
prey. It is they who serve as the directors and executioners of
public or private malice. Near Uzès twenty-five masked men, with
guns and clubs, enter the house of a notary, fire a pistol at him,
beat him, wreck the premises, and burn his registers along with the
title-deeds and papers which be has in keeping for the Count de
Rouvres. Seven of them are arrested, but the people are on their
side, and fall on the constabulary and free them.[24] -- They are
known by their acts, by their love of destruction for the sake of
destruction, by their foreign accent, by their savage faces and
their rags. Some of them come from Paris to Rouen, and, for four
days, the town is at their mercy.[25] The stores are forced open,
train wagons are discharged, wheat is wasted, and convents and
seminaries are put to ransom. They invade the dwelling of the
attorney-general, who has begun proceedings against them, and want
to tear him to pieces. They break his mirrors and his furniture,
leave the premises laden with booty, and go into the town and its
outskirts to pillage the manufactories and break up or burn all the
machinery. -- Henceforth these constitute the new leaders: for in
every mob it is the boldest and least scrupulous who march ahead and
set the example in destruction. The example is contagious: the
beginning was the craving for bread, the end is murder and arson;
the savagery which is unchained adding its unlimited violence to the
limited revolt of necessity.