You find here ordinances reducing by half the number of men-at-arms required of the country, founded upon the proportion of harvests destroyed each year by hail and frost. Several times, during the religious wars, the country became a desert. In 1575, Montluc declares “that it is now so poor that the dwellers hereabouts are forced to quit their houses and take to begging.” In 1592, the people of Comminge having devastated the country, “the peasants of Bigorre abandoned the culture of the land for want of cattle, and the greater part of them took the road into Spain.” It is not a hundred years since that, in all the country, there, were known to exist but three hats and two pairs of shoes. To this very day, the mountaineers are forced to renew with every year their sloping fields, wasted by the rains of winter. “They burn, for light, bits of resinous pine, and scarcely ever taste meat.”
What misery is contained in those few words! Yet how deep must be the wretchedness that can break the tie that binds man to his native soil! A threadbare text from history, a phrase of passionless statistics, contain within their limits years of suffering, myriads of deaths, flight, separations, degradation. Of a truth, there is too much ill in the world. With every century, man removes a bramble and a stone that had helped to obstruct the way over which he advances; but what signifies a bramble or a stone? There remain, and always will remain, more than enough to lacerate and kill him. Besides, new flints are falling into the way, new thorns are springing up. Prosperity increases his sensibility: an equal pain is inflicted by a less evil; the body may be better shielded, but the soul is more disordered.
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The benefits of the Revolution, the progress of industry, the discoveries of science, have given us equality, the comforts of life, liberty of thought, but at the same time a malevolent envy, the rage for success, impatience of the present, necessity of luxury, instability of government, and all the sufferings of doubt and over-refinement.