There had been a time when
this manufacture supported sixty mills; at the death of Lewis XIV. their
number had fallen from sixty to sixteen. An excise duty at the mill, a
duty on exportation at the provincial frontier, a duty on the
importation of rags over the provincial frontier,--all these vexations
had succeeded in reducing the trade with Holland, one of France's best
customers, to one-fourth of its previous dimensions. Nor were paper and
cattle the only branches of trade that had been blighted by fiscal
perversity. The same burden arrested the transport of saffron across the
borders of the province, on its way to Hungary and Prussia and the other
cold lands where saffron was a favourite condiment. Salt which came up
the Charente from the marshes by the coast, was stripped of all its
profit, first by the duty paid on crossing from the Limousin to Perigord
and Auvergne, and next by the right possessed by certain of the great
lords on the banks of the Charente to help themselves at one point and
another to portions of the cargo. Iron was subject to a harassing excise
in all those parts of the country that were beyond the jurisdiction of
the parlement of Bordeaux. The effect of such positive hindrances as
these to the transit of goods was further aided, to the destruction of
trade, by the absence of roads. There were four roads in the province,
but all of them so bad that the traveller knew not whether to curse more
lustily the rocks or the swamps that interrupted his journey
alternately. There were two rivers, the Vienne and the Vezere, and these
might seem to an enthusiast for the famous argument from Design, as if
Nature had intended them for the transport of timber from the immense
forests that crowned the Limousin hills. Unluckily, their beds were so
thickly bestrewn with rock that neither of them was navigable for any
considerable part of its long course through the ill-starred province.

The inhabitants were as cheerless as the land on which they lived. They
had none of the fiery energy, the eloquence, the mobility of the people
of the south. Still less were they endowed with the apt intelligence,
the ease, the social amiability, the openness, of their neighbours on
the north. 'The dwellers in Upper Limousin,' said one who knew them,
'are coarse and heavy, jealous, distrustful, avaricious.' The dwellers
in Lower Limousin had a less repulsive address, but they were at least
as narrowly self-interested at heart, a