o many strips of paper held fast by two
ill-applied and indistinct stamps. Bear in mind, too, that the guardians
of the spoil are the sans-culottes who have made a conquest of it; that
they are poor; that such a profusion of useful or precious objects makes
them feel the bareness of their homes all the more; that their wives
would like to lay in a stock of furniture; moreover, has it not held
out to them from the beginning of the Revolution, that "forty-thousand
mansions, palaces and chateaux, two-thirds of the property of France,
would be the reward of their valor?"[33124] At this very moment, does
not the representative on mission authorize their greed? Are not Albitte
and Collot d'Herbois at Lyons, Fouche at Nevers, Javogues at Montbrison,
proclaiming that the possessions of anti-revolutionaries and a surplus
of riches form "the patrimony of the sans-culottes?"[33125] Do they not
read in the proclamations of Monestier,[33126] that the peasants "before
leaving home may survey and measure off the immense estates of their
seigneurs, choose, for example, on their return, whatever they want
to add to their farm.. .. tacking on a bit of field or rabbit-warren
belonging to the former count or marquis?" Why not take a portion of
his furniture, any of his beds or clothes-presses--It is not surprising
that, after this, the slip of paper which protects sequestrated
furniture and confiscated merchandise should be ripped off by gross and
greedy hands! When, after Thermidor, the master returns to his own roof
it is generally to an empty house; in this or that habitation in the
Morvan,[33127] the removal of the furniture is so complete that a bin
turned upside down serves for a table and chairs, when the family sit
down to their first meal.

In the towns the embezzlements are often more brazenly carried out than
in the country. At Valenciennes, the Jacobin chiefs of the
municipality are known under the title of "seal-breakers and patriotic
robbers."[33128] At Lyons, the Maratists, who dub themselves "the
friends of Chalier," are, according to the Jacobins' own admission,
"brigands, thieves and rascals."[33129] They compose, to the number
of three or four hundred, the thirty-two revolutionary committees; one
hundred and fifty of leaders, "all of them administrators," form the
popular club; in this town of one hundred and twenty thousand souls they
number, as they themselves state, three thousand, and they firmly rely
on "sharing wit