[154] Some conception of the insanitary condition of the court may be formed by the fact that fifty persons were struck down there by this loathsome disease during the king's illness.
[155] "I have seen the Louvre and its huge enclosure, a vast palace which for two hundred years is always being finished and always begun. Two workmen, lazy hodmen, speed very slowly those rich buildings, and are paid when they are thought of."
[156] The aspect of the west front with Soufflot's "improvements" is well seen in Les Principaux Monuments Gothiques de l'Europe, published in Brussels, 1843.
[157] Taine estimates the revenues of thirty-three abbots in terms of modern values at from 140,000 to 480,000 francs (£5,600 to £19,200). Twenty-seven abbesses enjoyed revenues nearly as large.
[158] The score of Rousseau's opera is still preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
[159] The Excise duty.
[160] Personal and land-taxes paid by the humbler classes alone.
[161] It is difficult, however, to read the sober and irrefutable picture of their miserable condition, given in the famous Books II. and V. of Taine's Ancien Régime, without deep emotion.
[162] See also Bodley's France, where the author favours the view that Robespierre was not a democrat with a thirst for blood, but rather a man of government, destroyed as a reactionary by surviving Revolutionists who saw their end coming.
[163] After the Thermidorian reaction in 1795, ninety-seven Jacobins were massacred by the royalists at Lyons on 5th May; thirty at Aix on 11th May. Similar horrors were enacted at Avignon, Arles, and Marseilles, and at other places in the south.