stones and clubs disperse seven brigades of the police. An immense
throng of eight thousand persons, women and men, provided with bags,
fall upon the grain exposed for sale. They force the delivery to
them of wheat worth 40 francs at 24 francs, pillaging the half of it
and conveying it off without payment. "The constabulary is
disheartened," writes the sub-delegate; "the determination of the
people is wonderful; I am frightened at what I have seen and heard."
-- After the 13th of July, 1788, the day of the hail-storm, despair
seized the peasantry; well disposed as the proprietors may have
been, it was impossible to assist them. "Not a workshop is
open;[2] the noblemen and the bourgeois, obliged to grant delays in
the payment of their incomes, can give no work." Accordingly, "the
famished people are on the point of risking life for life," and,
publicly and boldly, they seek food wherever it can be found. At
Conflans-Saint-Honorine, Eragny, Neuville, Chenevières, at Cergy,
Pontoise, Ile-Adam, Presle, and Beaumont, men, women, and children,
the hole parish, range the country, set snares, and destroy the
burrows. "The rumor is current that the Government, informed of the
damage done by the game to cultivators, allows its destruction . .
. and really the hares ravaged about a fifth of the crop. At first
an arrest is made of nine of these poachers; but they are released,
"taking circumstances into account." Consequently, for two months,
there is a slaughter on the property of the Prince de Conti and of
the Ambassador Mercy d'Argenteau; in default of bread they eat
rabbits. -- Along with the abuse of property they are led, by a
natural impulse, to attack property itself. Near Saint-Denis the
woods belonging to the abbey are devastated. "The farmers of the
neighborhood carry away loads of wood, drawn by four and five
horses;" the inhabitants of the villages of Ville-Parisis, Tremblay,
Vert-Galant, Villepinte, sell it publicly, and threaten the wood-