Chap. V

In apostrophizing the spirit of his father; in looking back with painful recollection on the past, and with uneasy conjectures towards the future, D’Alonville continued his way, avoiding, as far as was possible, towns, and even villages; and as night came on, seeking shelter in the lone cottages of the peasantry, many of which he found deserted by all their male inhabitants; while the women and children who remained, were suffering the severest extremes of poverty. ‘And these,’ cried he, frequently as he witnessed scenes of want and woe, as he saw the human figure deformed by famine, and the human character rendered ferocious by despair, ‘these are the boasted blessings of that liberty for which they have been four years contending – infatuated, misled people! The taille, the gabelle, the corvés,²¹ even the feudal services, however heavily imposed, what were they when compared to the oppressions under which you now labour! If ye had burthens under the government of an arbitrary monarch, ye danced gaily under them; but the yoke ye have put on yourselves weighs ye down to the earth – its iron points are stained with blood, and dipped in poison!’ Such were the reflections to which the desolate state of his country gave rise in the breast of D’Alonville; and such reflections were natural to a native of France. An Englishman would perhaps have beheld the same scenes with different sensations – an Englishman might have thought the experiment right; and that the attempt to shake off such burthens as the taille, the gabelle, the corvés, and vassalage, was a glorious attempt, and failed only because the headlong vehemence of the French national character, and the impossibility of finding (in a very corrupt nation, and among men never educated in notions of real patriotism^*) a sufficient weight of 314abilities and integrity to guide the vessel in the revolutionary tempest, has occasioned it to fall into the hands of pirates, and utterly to destroy it. A coarser Briton, a plain John Bull, would say – ‘Those French fellows have not sense enough to be as free as we are;’ and both would unquestionably agree in deprecating, in regard to his own country, any attempt at change, if the most complete reform was to be purchased by one week, or even one day, of such scenes as have been exhibited in France. They would, most undoubtedly, unite in declaring that even if the constitution of England had not proved itself to be the most calculated for general happiness, as it undoubtedly has^*, if its delapidations from time were greater, and its defects more visible, yet, that since there must be faults and errors in every human institution, it is far wiser ‘To bear the ills we have‘Than trust to others that we know not of.’²³ Without any accident worth recording, for he was fortunately unsuspected the whole way, D’Alonville at length arrived at Merol, where it was probable he might undergo a stricter examination. In these small towns the lowest of the people had emerged into municipal officers; and in every country it is equally true that no set of men are so offensively insolent as those who have acquired unexpected fortune, or unexpected authority.