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Updated: June 9, 2025
The country's annuitants had for type 'the figure with the helmet of the Owl-Goddess and the trident of the Earth-shaker, seated on a wheel, at the back of penny-pieces; in whom you see neither the beauty of nakedness nor the charm of drapery; not the helmet's dignity or the trident's power; but she has patently that which stops the wheel; and poseing for representative of an imperial nation, she helps to pass a penny. So he passed his epigram, heedless of the understanding or attention of his hearer; who temporarily misjudged him for a man impelled by the vanity of literary point and finish, when indeed it was hot satiric spite, justified of its aim, which crushed a class to extract a drop of scathing acid, in the interests of the country, mankind as well.
Thus the state governments were placed in the easy situation of rich annuitants, who had surrendered the control of some political capital in order to enjoy with less care the opportunities of a plethoric income. The foregoing comment is not intended as any disparagement of a Federal as contrasted with a centralized political system.
These duties were to be kept in the Exchequer separate from all other receipts, and were to form a fund on the credit of which a million was to be raised by life annuities. As the annuitants dropped off, their annuities were to be divided among the survivors, till the number of survivors was reduced to seven. After that time, whatever fell in was to go to the public.
I said that I should be extremely sorry if my purple were stained with the least drop of blood spilt in the civil wars; that I was resolved to clear my hands of everything that savoured of intrigue before I would make or suffer any step which had any tendency that way; that he knew that for the same reason I would neither accept money nor abbeys, and that, consequently, I was engaged by the public declarations I had made upon all those heads to serve the Queen without any interest; that the only end I had in view, and in which I never wavered, was to come off with honour, so that I might resume the spiritual functions belonging to my profession with safety; that I desired nothing from him but the accomplishment of an affair which would be more for the King's service than for my particular interest; that he knew that the day after the arrest of the Prince he sent me with his promise to the annuitants of the Hotel de Ville, and that for want of performance those men were persuaded that I was in concert with the Court to deceive them.
It was usually discussed as a proposal that the State should buy up the land and become the universal landlord; though in fact it only offered to each individual landlord this as an alternative, if he liked better to sell his estate than to retain it on the new conditions; and I fully anticipated that most landlords would continue to prefer the position of landowners to that of Government annuitants, and would retain their existing relation to their tenants, often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on which the compensation to be given them by Government would have been based.
The revenues of the Hotel de Ville, which are, as it were, the patrimony of the bourgeois, and which, if well managed, might be of special service to the King in securing to his interest an infinite number of those people who are always the most formidable in revolutions this sacred fund, I say, suffered much by the licentiousness of the times, the ignorance of Mazarin, and the prevarication of the officers of the Hotel de Ville, who were his dependents, so that the poor annuitants met in great numbers at the Hotel de Ville; but as such assemblies without the Prince's authority are reckoned illegal, the Parliament passed a decree to suppress them.
Meantime Servien and the Abbe Fouquet endeavoured to exasperate the Queen by telling her that I was continually caballing with the annuitants and officers of the militia; and because I refused to go to Parliament, in obedience to the King's orders, when he held his Court of Justice there to register the declaration of high treason against the Prince de Conde, the Queen was made to believe that I was intriguing for the Prince, and therefore resolved to ruin me, cost what it would.
No account was taken of the age of the annuitants, but incomes were sold at a fixed rate of ten per cent, of the capital deposited for one life, nine per cent, for two lives, eight and a half for three, eight for four. The bankers and financiers of the day were shrewd enough to profit by this arrangement. They bought up the obligations, and named healthy children as the annuitants.
The quiet good ladies were multiplied: they were 'the thousands of their sisters, petticoated or long-coated or buck-skinned; comfortable annuitants under clerical shepherding, close upon outnumbering the labourers they paralyze at home and stultify abroad. Colney thumped away.
Several private annuitants, who had made a noise in the assemblies at the Hotel de Ville, were afraid of being called to account, and therefore, after M. le Prince was arrested, they desired me to procure a general amnesty.
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