continues. Six months later, Fructidor
7, Amiens has but sixty nine quintals of flour in its market storehouse,
"an insufficient quantity for distribution this very day; to morrow, it
will be impossible to make any distribution at all, and the day after
to morrow the needy population of this commune will be brought down
to absolute famine."--"Complete desperation! There are already "many
suicides."[42123] At other times, rage predominates and there are riots.
At Evreux,[42124] Germinal 21, a riot breaks out, owing to the delivery
of only two pounds of flour per head and per week, and because three
days before, only a pound and a half was delivered. There is a riot at
Dieppe,[42125] Prairial 14 and 15, because "the people are reduced here
to three or four ounces of bread." There is another at Vervins, Prairial
9, because the municipality which obtains bread at a cost of seven and
eight francs a pound, raises the price from twenty-five to fifty
sous. At Lille, an insurrection breaks out Messidor 4, because the
municipality, paying nine francs for bread, can give it to the poor only
for about twenty and thirty sous.--Lyons, during the month of Nivose,
remains without bread "for five full days."[42126] At Chartres,
Thermidor 15,[42127] the distribution of bread for a month is only eight
ounces a day, and there is not enough to keep this up until the 20th of
Thermidor. On the fifteenth of Fructidor, La Rochelle writes that "its
public distributions, reduced to seven or eight ounces of bread, are on
the point of failing entirely." For four months, at Painboeuf, the ration
is but the quarter of a pound of bread.[42128] And the same at Nantes,
which has eighty-two thousand inhabitants and swarms with the wretched;
"the distribution never exceeded four ounces a day," and that only
for the past year. The same at Rouen, which contains sixty thousand
inhabitants; and, in addition, within the past fortnight the
distribution has failed three times. In other reports, those who are
well-off suffer more than the indigent because they take no part in the
communal distribution, "all resources for obtaining food being, so
to say, interdicted to them."--Five ounces of bread per diem for four
months is the allowance to the forty thousand inhabitants of Caen
and its district.[42129] A great many in the town, as well as in the
country, live on bran and wild herbs." At the end of Prairial, "there is
not a bushel of grain in the town storehouses,