ovinces for the instruction of his grandson,
the Duc de Bourgogne: "The wars, the mortality, the lodging and the
continual passage of armed forces, the military regulations, the heavy
taxes, the withdrawal of the Huguenots, have ruined this country.... The
bridges and the roads are in a deplorable state, and commerce is
abolished. The frontier provinces are the most completely crushed by the
requisitions, the pillaging of the soldiers, who, receiving neither pay
nor provisions, pay themselves with their own hands. In the district of
Rouen, out of seven hundred thousand inhabitants, six hundred and fifty
thousand have for bed a bundle of straw. The peasant in certain
provinces is returning to a state of savagery,--living, for the most
part, on herbs and roots, like the beasts; and, wild as they are,
fleeing when any one approaches." "There is no nation as savage as these
people," says the intendant of Bourges of those under his
administration; "there may be found sometimes troops of them seated in a
circle in the middle of a field and always far from the roads; if they
are approached, this band immediately disappears."

At this great king's death, he left France, says M. Duruy himself, "in a
prodigious state of exhaustion. The State was ruined, and seemed to have
no other resource than bankruptcy. Before the War of Succession, Vauban
had already written: 'Nearly the tenth part of the people are reduced to
beggary; of the nine other portions, five cannot give any alms to the
mendicants, from whom they differ but slightly; three are very much
distressed; the tenth part do not include more than one hundred thousand
families, of which not ten thousand are comfortably situated.' This
poverty became especially terrible in 1715, after that war in which it
was necessary to borrow money at four hundred per cent., to create new
imposts, to consume in advance the revenues of two years, and to raise
the public debt to the sum of two milliards four hundred millions, which
would make in our day nearly eight milliards!"

[Illustration: AFTER THE CAPTURE OF THE BASTILLE, JULY 14, 1789. From a
painting by Francois Flameng.

NOTE.--The key was sent by Lafayette to Washington, at Mount Vernon.]

"Behold the cost of his glory," says M. Duruy elsewhere, "a public debt
of more than two milliards four hundred millions, with a sum in the
treasury of eight hundred thousand livres; an excessive scarcity of
specie; commerce paralyzed; the nobil