Moulins 185 



liands of starving metayers, instead ol" fat farmers, I know not 

 how to pity the seigneurs, great as their present sufferings are. 

 I met one of them, to whom I opened my mind : — he pretended 

 to talk of agriculture, finding I attended to it; and assured me 

 that he had Abbe Roziere's corps complete, and he believed, from 

 his accounts, that this country would not do for anything but 

 rye. I asked him whether he or Abbe Roziere knew the right 

 end of a plough. He assured me that he was un homme de 

 ^rand merite, beaiicoup d'agriculteiir. Cross the Loire by a ferry; 

 it is here the same nasty scene of shingle as in Touraine. Enter 

 the Bourbonnois; the same enclosed country, and a beautiful 

 gravel road. At Chavanne le Rot, Monsieur Jol> , the aubergiste, 

 informed me of three domains (farms) to be sold, adjoining 

 almost to his house^ which is new and well built. I was for 

 appropriating his inn at once in my imagination for a farm- 

 house, and had got hard at work on turnips and clover, when 

 he told me that if I would walk behind his stable I might see, 

 at a small distance, two of the houses ; he said the price would be 

 about 50,000 or 60.000 livres (/^2625), and would altogether make 

 a noble farm. If I were twenty years younger I should think 

 seriously of such a speculation ; but there again is the folly and 

 deficiency of life; twenty years ago such a thing would, for 

 want of experience, have been my ruin; and now I have the 

 experience I am too old for the undertaking. — 27 miles. 



7//?. Moulins appears to be but a poor ill-built town. I went 

 to the Belle Image, but found it so bad that I left it, and went 

 to the Lyon d'Or, which is worse. This capital of tlie Bour- 

 bonnois, and on the great post road to Italy, has not an inn 

 equal to the little village of Chavanne. To read the papers I 

 went to the cofTee-house of Madame Bourgeau, the best in the 

 town, where I found near twenty tables set for company, but, 

 as to a newspaper, I might as well have demanded an elephant. 

 Here is a feature of national backwardness, ignorance, stupidity, 

 and poverty: in the capital of a great province, the seat of an 

 intendant, at a moment like the present, with a National 

 Assembly voting a revolution, and not a newspaper to inform 

 the people whether Fayette, Mirabeau, or Louis XVI. is on the 

 throne. Companies at a coffee-house, numerous enough to fill 

 twenty tables, and curiosity not active enough to command one 

 paper. What impudence and folly ! — Folly in the customers of 

 such a house not to insist on half a dozen papers, and all the 

 journals of the assembly; and impudence of the woman not to 

 provide them ! Could such a people as this ever have made a 



