the wayfarers whom he has stopped on the road.
Generally they kneel down, tender their purses, and the shot is not
fired. But the gun is cocked, nevertheless, and, to be certain of this,
we have only to look at the shriveled hand grasping the trigger. We are
reminded of those swarms of banditti which infested the country under
the ancient regime;[3229] the double-girdle of smugglers and receivers
embraced within twelve hundred leagues of internal excise-duties, the
poachers abounding on the four hundred leagues of guarded captaincies,
the deserters so numerous that in eight years they amounted to sixty
thousand, the beggars with which the prisons overflowed, the thousands
of thieves and vagabonds thronging the highways, quarry of the police
which the Revolution let loose and armed, and which, in its turn,
from being prey, became the hunters of game. For three years these
strong-armed prowlers have served as the hard-core of local jacqueries;
at the present time they form the staff of the universal jacquerie. At
Nimes,[3230] the head of the Executive Power is a "dancing-master." The
two leading demagogues of Toulouse are a shoemaker, and an actor who
plays valets.[3231] At Toulon,[3232] the club, more absolute than
any Asiatic despot, is recruited from among the destitute, sailors,
harbor-hands, soldiers, "stray peddlers," while its president,
Sylvestre, sent down from Paris, is a criminal of the lowest degree. At
Rheims,[3233] the principal leader is an unfrocked priest, married to
a nun, aided by a baker, who, an old soldier, came near being hung.
Elsewhere,[3234] it is some deserter tried for robbery; here, a cook
or innkeeper, and there, a former lackey The oracle of Lyons is an
ex-commercial traveler, an emulator of Marat, named Chalier, whose
murderous delirium is complicated with morbid mysticism. The acolytes of
Chalier are a barber, a hair-dresser, an old-clothes dealer, a mustard
and vinegar manufacturer, a cloth-dresser, a silk-worker, a gauze-maker,
while the time is near when authority is to fall into still meaner
hands, those of "the dregs of the female population," who, aided by "a
few bullies," elect "female commissaries," tax food, and for three days
pillage the warehouses.[3235] Avignon has for its masters the Glaciere
bandits. Arles is under the yoke of its porters and bargemen. Marseilles
belongs to "a band of wretches spawned out of houses of debauchery,
who recognize neither laws nor magistrates, and