CASTING BREAD UPON THE WATERS 181 



Exposure would throw them back into the mud where they be- 

 long. 



I admit that there were also many noble men and women, 

 whose nobility appeared not only in their coats of arms but in 

 their character and conduct, and who were able to enjoy all the 

 elegances of the age and at the same time to exemplify its finest 

 virtues. But even at best, that society was extremely limited, and 

 the famous "douceur de vivre" of the eighteenth century of which 

 some of our literary men and artists are dreaming as if it were 

 the supreme reward of a golden age, cannot have been more com- 

 mon then than it is now. In fact, life was so far from sweet for the 

 masses that they were finally goaded into the despair of revolt. 

 Revolutions, it should be noted, do not happen without cause or 

 reason; they are generally the result of a long preparation — not of 

 years but of centuries; and those who prepare them are not the 

 revolutionaries, the so-called leaders, but rather the privileged 

 people who abuse their privileges and increase the burdens of the 

 people beyond endurance. 



We have abundant proofs of the cruelty, barbarism, and in- 

 humanity of those times in the £ncyclopedie (if one can read be- 

 tween the lines) and in the writings of the "philosophers." La 

 Bruyere's description of the peasants had appeared in the preced- 

 ing century (1688), but it was still as cruelly true in the eight- 

 eenth, for their condition hardly improved before the Revolution. 

 Listen to this old English version of it. 



We meet with certain wild Animals, Male and Female, spread 

 over the Country, black and tann'd with the Sun, linkM down to 

 the Earth, which they are always digging and turning up and down 

 with an unwearyM Resolution; they have something like an articu- 

 late Voice, and when they stand erect discover a human Face, and 

 indeed are Men; at Night they retire into their Burrows, where 

 they live on brown Bread, Water, Roots and Herbs: They save 

 other Men the trouble of sowing, labouring, and reaping for their 

 Maintenance, and deserve, one would think, not to want the Bread 

 they sow themselves. 



