f provisions,
especially in the summer of 1795, as the harvesting draws near, when
the granaries, filled by the crop of 1794, are getting empty. And these
hungering cries go up by millions: for a good many of the departments in
France do not produce sufficient grain for home consumption, this
being the case in fertile wheat departments, and likewise in certain
districts; cries also go up from the large and small towns, while in
each village numbers of peasants fast because they have no land
to provide them with food, or because they lack strength, health,
employment and wages. "For a fortnight past," writes a municipal body in
Seine-et-Marne,[42104] "at least two hundred citizens in our commune are
without bread, grain and flour; they have had no other food than bran
and vegetables. We see with sorrow children deprived of nourishment,
their nurses without milk, unable to suckle them; old men falling down
through inanition, and young men in the fields too weak to stand up to
their work." And other communes in the district "are about in the same
condition." The same spectacle is visible throughout the Ile-de-France,
Normandy, and in Picardy. Around Dieppe, in the country,[42105]
entire communes support themselves on herbs and bran. "Citizen
representatives," write the administrators, "we can no longer maintain
ourselves. Our fellow citizens reproach us with having despoiled them of
their grain in favor of the large communes."--"All means of subsistence
are exhausted," writes the district of Louviers;[42106] "we are reduced
here for a month past to eating bran bread and boiled herbs, and even
this rude food is getting scarce. Bear in mind that we have seventy-one
thousand people to govern, at this very time subject to all the horrors
of famine, a large number of them having already perished, some with
hunger and others with diseases engendered by the poor food they live
on. "--In the Caen district,[42107] "the unripe peas, horse peas, beans,
and green barley and rye are attacked;" mothers and children go after
these in the fields in default of other food; "other vegetables in the
gardens are already consumed; furniture, the comforts of the well to do
class, have become the prey of the farming egoist; having nothing more
to sell they consequently have nothing with which to obtain a morsel of
bread."

"It is impossible," writes the representative on mission, "to wait for
the crop without further aid. As long as bran lasted t