e famine, and, having retired to
his chateau of Nouay, had told the peasants that the announcement of
the coming of brigands was a false alarm; he thought that it was not
necessary to sound the alarm bell, and all that was necessary was that
they should remain quiet. Accordingly he is set down as being in league
with the brigands, and besides this he is a monopolist, and a buyer of
standing crops. The peasants lead him off; along with his son-in-law, M.
de Montesson, to the neighboring village, where there are judges. On the
way "they dragged their victims on the ground, pummeled them, trampled
on them, spit in their faces, and besmeared them with filth." M. de
Montesson is shot, while M. Cureau is killed by degrees; a carpenter
cuts off the two heads with a double-edged ax, and children bear them
along to the sound of drums and violins. Meanwhile, the judges of the
place, brought by force, draw up an official report stating the finding
of thirty louis and several bills of the Banque d'Escompte in the
pockets of M. de Cureau, on the discovery of which a shout of triumph is
set up: this evidence proves that they were going to buy up the standing
wheat!--Such is the course of popular justice. Now that the Third-Estate
has become the nation, every mob thinks that it has the right to
pronounce sentences, which it carries out, on lives and on possessions.

These explosions are isolated in the western, central and southern
provinces; the conflagration, however, is universal in the east. On a
strip of ground from thirty to fifty leagues broad, extending from
the extreme north down to Provence. Alsace, Franche-Comte, Burgundy,
Maconnais, Beaujolais, Auvergne, Viennois, Dauphiny, the whole of this
territory resembles a continuous mine which explodes at the same time.
The first column of flame which shoots up is on the frontiers of Alsace
and Franche-Comte, in the vicinity of Belfort and Vesoul, a feudal
district, in which the peasant, over-burdened with taxes, bears the
heavier yoke with greater impatience. An instinctive argument is going
on in his mind without his knowing it. "The good Assembly and the good
King want us to be happy, suppose we help them! They say that the King
has already relieved us of the taxes, suppose we relieve ourselves
of paying rents! Down with the nobles! They are no better than the
tax-collectors!"--On the 16th of July, the chateau of Sancy, belonging
to the Princesses de Beaufremont, is sacked, and o