In the towns, they have particular stations, which may be looked upon as shops where they expose their miseries, as they would any other kind of merchandise. There was one, I remember, at Bordeaux, who had scarcely any vestige of form left. He used to come to his station on horseback, (for he was a man of some consideration), and setting himself on the ground, he displayed his legs, which were dreadfully deformed; as a tradesman sets out his goods in his shop window.
All the cottages that border the high road are filled with little mendicants, who rush forth at the first sound of a carriage, and torment the unhappy traveller, sometimes for miles. One of their most common methods of begging is to throw a bunch of flowers into the window, and then never quit the vehicle till they are paid for them. Such a mode of soliciting charity may seem very poetical; but never in my life did I see such a race of dirty, ragged, pertinacious little vagabonds.
It is the same all over France. In every thing else the various provinces differ essentially, but in beggars they are all equally well supplied. I have visited the north, the south, the east, and the west of France, and have found no visible difference. From the Place de la Comédie, at Bordeaux, passing along the allées and the Cours de Tourny to the Place Dauphine, a distance of about half a mile, I once met three-and-twenty beggars; and on the bridge at Pau I have counted nineteen. Although many of those who are now common mendicants, played parts, more or less conspicuous, in the French revolution, I do not believe that it added greatly, if at all, to the number of beggars in France. The wars of the League and those of the Fronde certainly did add to the number; but in those wars there was no purifying principle, no ennobling motive on the part of the insurgents: all was selfishness, vice, or caprice. In speaking of the wars of the Fronde, Voltaire says:
Les Anglais avaient mis dans leurs troubles civiles un acharnement mélancolique et une fureur raisonée. Ils donnaient de sanglantes batalles et le fer décidait tout.
Les Français, au contraire, se précipitaient dans les séditions par caprice et en riant. Les femmes étaient à la tête des factions, l'amour faisait et rompait les cabales.--Voltaire--Siecle de Louis XIV.
Amongst the beggars in the streets of Bordeaux there is an old man, said to have been bourreau, or executioner, in that city, during the revolution. Perhaps an executioner is one of the most extraordinary beings in nature. Cut off from all human feeling, to embrace by choice the occupation of deliberately slaying his fellow-creatures, seems a paradox in the history of man. There is certainly a strange principle of destructiveness mingled with all nature, in a way and for reasons that we cannot divine. But here seems an innate cruelty getting the better of all that man learns from his infancy. An executioner must be a being apart from all nature, who, without passion or prejudice to stimulate him, throws off all feeling of humanity, breaks from all social charity, and exposes himself to the abhorrence of mankind, for the sole delight of embruing his hands in human blood.
Before the revolution the office of bourreau was confined to particular families. It was a curse that descended from generation to generation; all fled from, all detested the unfortunate man fated to be the instrument of his fellows' death, and he himself, cut off from society with kindred beings, often grew morose and cruel, destroying without regret that race which refused him all community.
But when this odious inheritance was abolished, and it became a voluntary act, thousands stepped forward eager for the office of blood-spiller, and in all the horrors which succeeded, no one was ever wanting to do the work of death.
As the office of executioner is the most extraordinary that man can choose, so perhaps the French revolution is the most extraordinary event in the history of mankind.
It seems as if all nations were more or less like a man subject to occasional fits of insanity, and that they cannot proceed beyond a certain period without an unconquerable desire to destroy everything, which at other times they are most careful to preserve. From some of these maladies they recover, and have afterwards a more perfect health than if they had never occurred, but often the effects of the disease remain long after it has itself ceased.