lier picture than the
cheerful beauty of prosperous Normandy, or the olive-groves and
orange-gardens of Provence. Arthur Young thought the Limousin the most
beautiful part of France. Unhappily for the cultivator, these gracious
conformations belonged to a harsh and churlish soil. For him the roll of
the chalk and the massing of the granite would have been well exchanged
for the fat loams of level Picardy. The soil of the Limousin was
declared by its inhabitants to be the most ungrateful in the whole
kingdom, returning no more than four net for one of seed sown, while
there was land in the vale of the Garonne that returned thirty-fold. The
two conditions for raising tolerable crops were abundance of labour and
abundance of manure. But misery drove the men away, and the stock were
sold to pay the taxes. So the land lacked both the arms of the tiller,
and the dressing whose generous chemistry would have transmuted the dull
earth into fruitfulness and plenty. The extent of the district was
estimated at a million and a half of hectares, equivalent to nearly four
millions of English acres: yet the population of this vast tract was
only five hundred thousand souls. Even to-day it is not more than eight
hundred thousand.

The common food of the people was the chestnut, and to the great
majority of them even the coarsest rye-bread was a luxury that they had
never tasted. Maise and buckwheat were their chief cereals, and these,
together with a coarse radish, took up hundreds of acres that might
under a happier system have produced fine wheat and nourished
fruit-trees. There had once been a certain export of cattle, but that
had now come to an end, partly because the general decline of the
district had impaired the quality of the beasts, and partly because the
Parisian butchers, who were by much the greatest customers, had found
the markets of Normandy more convenient. The more the trade went down,
the heavier was the burden of the cattle-tax on the stock that remained.
The stock-dealer was thus ruined from both sides at once. In the same
way, the Limousin horses, whose breed had been famous all over France,
had ceased to be an object of commerce, and the progressive increase of
taxation had gradually extinguished the trade. Angoumois, which formed
part of the Generality of Limoges, had previously boasted of producing
the best and finest paper in the world, and it had found a market not
only throughout France, but all over Europe.