and correspondence, we can reproduce their feeling
and thought, and even enjoy their familiar conversation. The multitude
of memoirs, issuing during the past thirty years from public and private
archives, lead us from one drawing room to another, as if we bore with
us so many letters of introduction. The independent descriptions by
foreign travelers, in their journals and correspondence, correct
and complete the portraits, which this society has traced of itself.
Everything that it could state has been stated, except,

* what was commonplace and well-known to contemporaries,

* whatever seemed technical, tedious and vulgar,

* whatever related to the provinces, to the bourgeoisie, the peasant, to
the laboring man, to the government, and to the household.

It has been my aim to fill this void, and make France known to others
outside the small circle of the literary and the cultivated. Owing
to the kindness of M. Maury[0011] and the precious indications of M.
Boutaric, I have been able to examine a mass of manuscript documents.
These include the correspondence of a large number of intendants, (the
Royal governor of a large district), the directors of customs and tax
offices, legal officers, and private persons of every kind and of every
degree during the thirty last years of the ancient regime. Also included
are the reports and registers of the various departments of the royal
household, the reports and registers of the States General in 176
volumes, the dispatches of military officers in 1789 and 1790, letters,
memoirs and detailed statistics preserved in the one hundred boxes of
the ecclesiastical committee, the correspondence, in 94 bundles, of the
department and municipal authorities with the ministries from 1790 to
1799, the reports of the Councilors of State on mission at the end of
1801, the reports of prefects under the Consulate, the Empire, and
the Restoration down to 1823. There is such a quantity of unknown and
instructive documents besides these that the history of the Revolution
seems, indeed, to be still unwritten. In any event, it is only such
documents, which can make all these people come alive. The lesser
nobles, the curates, the monks, the nuns of the provinces, the aldermen
and bourgeoisie of the towns, the attorneys and syndics of the country
villages, the laborers and artisans, the officers and the soldiers.
These alone enable us to contemplate and appreciate in detail the
various conditions of t