rangers with a beating. On the 15th of June the damage is already
estimated at 60,000 livres. -- It makes little difference whether
the proprietor has been benevolent, like M. de Talaru,[3] who had
supported the poor on his estate at Issy the preceding winter. The
peasants destroy the dike which conducts water to his communal mill;
condemned by the parliament to restore it, they declare that not
only will they not obey. Should M. de Talaru try to rebuild it they
will return with three hundred armed men, and tear it away the
second time.

For those who are most compromised Paris is the nearest refuge. For
the poorest and most exasperated, the door of nomadic life stands
wide open. Bands rise up around the capital, just as in countries
where human society has not yet been formed, or has ceased to exist.
During the first two weeks of May[4] near Villejuif a band of five
or six hundred vagabonds strive to force Bicêtre and approach Saint-
Cloud. They arrive from thirty, forty, and sixty leagues off, from
Champagne, from Lorraine, from the whole circuit of country
devastated by the hailstorm. All hover around Paris and are there
engulfed as in a sewer, the unfortunate along with criminals, some
to find work, others to beg and to rove about under the injurious
prompting of hunger and the rumors of the public thoroughfares.
During the last days of April,[5] the clerks at the tollhouses note
the entrance of "a frightful number of poorly clad men of sinister
aspect." During the first days of May a change in the appearance of
the crowd is remarked. There mingle in it "a number of foreigners,
from all countries, most of them in rags, armed with big sticks, and
whose very aspect announces what is to be feared from them."
Already, before this final influx, the public sink is full to
overflowing. Think of the extraordinary and rapid increase of