deserve a worse name), is so much the more incomprehensible, as the
poverty of the higher and middle classes is as great as the misery of the
people, and, except those employed under Bonaparte, and some few upstart
contractors or army commissaries, the greatest privations must be
submitted to in order to pay the enormous taxes and make a decent
appearance. I know families of five, six, and seven persons, who
formerly were wealthy, and now have for a scanty subsistence an income of
twelve or eighteen hundred livres--per year, with which they are obliged
to live as they can, being deprived of all the resource that elsewhere
labour offers to the industrious, and all the succours compassion bestows
on the necessitous. You know that here all trade and all commerce are at
a stand or destroyed, and the hearts of our modern rich are as unfeeling
as their manners are vulgar and brutal.

A family of ci-devant nobles of my acquaintance, once possessing a
revenue of one hundred and fifty thousand livres--subsist now on fifteen
hundred livres--per year; and this sum must support six individuals--the
father and mother, with four children! It does so, indeed, by an
arrangement of only one poor meal in the day; a dinner four times, and a
supper three times, in the week. They endure their distress with
tolerable cheerfulness, though in the same street, where they occupy the
garrets of a house, resides, in an elegant hotel, a man who was once
their groom, but who is now a tribune, and has within these last twelve
years, as a conventional deputy, amassed, in his mission to Brabant and
Flanders, twelve millions of livres. He has kindly let my friend
understand that his youngest daughter might be received as a chambermaid
to his wife, being informed that she has a good education. All the four
daughters are good musicians, good drawers, and very able with their
needles. By their talents they supported their parents and themselves
during their emigration in Germany; but here these are of but little use