and talk to themselves aloud." "How
many times," writes a Swiss traveller,[42147] who lived in Paris during
the latter half of 1795, "how often have I chanced to encounter men
sinking through starvation, scarcely able to stand up against a post,
or else down on the ground and unable to get up for want of strength!"
A journalist states that he saw "within ten minutes, along the street,
seven poor creatures fall on account of hunger, a child die on its
mother's breast which was dry of milk, and a woman struggling with a dog
near a sewer to get a bone away from him."[42148] Meissner never leaves
his hotel without filling his pockets with pieces of the national bread.
"This bread," he says, "which the poor would formerly have despised,
I found accepted with the liveliest gratitude, and by well educated
persons;" the lady who contended with the dog for the bone was a former
nun, without either parents or friends and everywhere repulsed." "I
still hear with a shudder," says Meissner, "the weak, melancholy voice
of a well-dressed woman who stopped me in the rue du Bac, to tell me in
accents indicative both of shame and despair: 'Ah, Sir, do help me! I am
not an outcast. I have some talent--you may have seen some of my works
in the salon. I have had nothing to eat for two days and I am crazy for
want of food.'" Again, in June, 1796, the inspectors state that despair
and despondency have reached the highest point, only one cry being
heard-misery!.... Our reports all teem with groans and complaints.. ..
Pallor and suffering are stamped on all faces.... Each day presents a
sadder and more melancholy aspect." And repeatedly,[42149] they sum up
their scattered observations in a general statement:

* "A mournful silence, the deepest distress on every countenance;

* the most intense hatred of the government in general developed in all
conversations;

* contempt for all existing authority;

* an insolent luxuriousness, insulting to the wretchedness of the poor
rentiers who expire with hunger in their garrets, no longer possessing
the courage to crawl to the Treasury and get the wherewithal to prolong
their misery for a few days;

* the worthy father of a family daily deciding what article of furniture
he will sell to make up for what is lacking in his wages that he may buy
a half-pound of bread;

* every sort of provision increasing in price sixty times an hour;

* the smallest business dependent on the fall of assignats;

*