Meeting of the Estates-General, 1789. 129 
requirements, according to the characterization by Maleissye. 
To illustrate his methods, the latter states that several times 
the colonel had a certain quantity of wine distributed among 
the companies to win their favor, but this action was soon turned 
against him. For several months, the king had granted each 
man an additional sum of a sou and a half per day, but the men 
had not been informed of this by the colonel, who held the 
money back. At last rumors of this state of affairs got out and 
the troops demanded, in the most seditious manner, that an 
accounting be made. The colonel complied with the demand, 
but, to the disgust of the men, he took care to count out the 
cost of the wine which he had distributed.* 
Naturally, the discipline of the regiment suffered under a 
commander of this type. Besides the unpopularity of the Duc 
de Chatelet, the harshness of the military régime and the eco- 
nomic circumstances of the time created intense dissatisfaction 
among the troops. Maleissye shows that the poor pay of the 
rank and file, the lack of effort on the part of their superiors’ to 
provide comforts for the soldiers after fatiguing marches, con- 
fusion in orders which tended to irritate the men, and. finally 
_the indifference of the majority of the upper officers to the 
service—all of these things served to alienate the troops and 
open the way for corruption. He says that he himself never 
saw either M. de Besenval or the Duc de Chatelet except in 
civilian attire.“* The upper officers in general were rarely seen 
by their men, to say nothing of becoming acquainted with them. 
All the real work was left to the under officers,** who had little 
in common with the aristocratic commissioned officers. 
While the latter spent much of their time in the gay society 
of Paris and Versailles, the lower officers and the men were 
overworked and underpaid. Nine sous per day were wholly 
insufficient to support a man in view of the high prices of food 
in the spring of 1789. Maleissye explains that it was necessary 
‘to send a certain number of men from each company into the 
city to work, that their wages and their absence from the barracks 
33 Maleissye, 33-34. 
84 Maleissye, 35. 
35 Tbid., 35; Besenval, II, 352. 
243 
