he people ate
that; none can now be found and despair is at its height. I have not
seen the sun since I came. The harvest will be a month behind. What
shall we do? What will become of us?"--"In Picardy," writes the Beauvais
district, "the great majority of people in the rural communes search the
woods" to find mushrooms, berries and wild fruits.[42108] "They think
themselves lucky," says the Bapaume district, "if they can get a share
of the food of animals." "In many communes," the district of Vervier
reports, "the inhabitants are reduced to living on herbage." "Many
families, entire communes," reports the Laon commissary, "have been
without bread two or three months and live on bran or herbs.... Mothers
of families, children, old men, pregnant women, come to the (members of
the) Directory for bread and often faint in their arms.

And yet, great as the famine is in the country it is worse in the towns;
and the proof of it is that the starving people flock into the country
to find whatever they can to live on, no matter how, and, generally
speaking, in vain.--"Three quarters of our fellow citizens," writes
the Rozoy municipality,[42109] "are forced to quit work and overrun the
country here and there, among the farmers, to obtain bread for specie,
and with more entreaty than the poorest wretches; for the most part,
they return with tears in their eyes at not being able to find, not
merely a bushel of wheat, but a pound of bread." "Yesterday," writes
the Montreuil-sur-Mer municipality,[42110] "more than two hundred of
our citizens set out to beg in the country," and, when they get nothing,
they steal. "Bands of brigands[42111] spread through the country and
pillage all dwellings anywise remote. ... Grain, flour, bread, cattle,
poultry, stuffs, etc., all come in play. Our terrified shepherds are
no longer willing to sleep in their sheep pens and are leaving us." The
most timid dig Carrots at night or, during the day, gather dandelions;
but their town stomachs cannot digest this food. "Lately," writes the
procureur--syndic of Saint-Germain,[42112] "the corpse of a father of a
family, found in the fields with his mouth still filled with the grass
he had striven to chew, exasperates and arouses the spirit of the poor
creatures awaiting a similar fate."

What then, do people in the towns do in order to survive?--In small
towns or scattered villages, each municipality, using what gendarmes it
has, makes legal requisitions in it