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Updated: May 7, 2025
To some of these men, and of those who adhered to them, it is due to say that the fanaticism which had emancipated them from the restraints of justice and compassion had emancipated them also from the dominion of vulgar cupidity and of vulgar fear; that, while hardly knowing where to find an assignat of a few francs to pay for a dinner, they expended with strict integrity the immense revenue which they collected by every art of rapine; and that they were ready, in support of their cause, to mount the scaffold with as much indifference as they showed when they signed the death-warrants of aristocrats and priests.
There was, indeed, much excuse for new issues of small notes, for, under the theory that an issue of smaller notes would drive silver out of circulation, the smallest authorized assignat was for fifty livres. To supply silver and copper and hold it in circulation everything was tried. Citizens had been spurred on by law to send their silverware and jewels to the mint.
He refused her, rudely, and when the lady produced an "assignat" and pleaded with him to go and buy some bread, he replied, "Do you take me for one of your former lackeys?" This brutality angered me.
The offer I had made to Crofts to barter the assignat for an English note; my urgent entreaty to have it restored to me; the arguments I had employed to persuade him that no suspicion could attach to my possession of it, were all narrated with so little of exaggeration that I was actually unable to say what assertion I could object to, while I was conscious that the inferences sought to be drawn from them were false and unjust.
He raised the blind and said: "And you'll only be doing me justice. A patriot? Deuce take it! I pride myself upon being one, and of the first calibre, too! And the proof is Drink this to the health of the Republic." And he handed a hundred-franc assignat to the postilion who had recommended him to his comrade.
At Paris, the assignat of one hundred francs is worth in specie, in the month of June, 1791, eighty-five francs, in January, 1792, only sixty-six francs, in March, 1792, only fifty. three francs; rising in value at the end of the Legislative Assembly, owing to fresh confiscations, it falls back to fifty-five francs in January, 1793, to forty-seven francs in April, to forty francs in June, to thirty-three francs in July.
That oeconomy, which was one of the most valuable characteristics of the French, is now comparatively disregarded. The people who receive what they earn in a currency they hold in contempt, are more anxious to spend than to save; and those who formerly hoarded six liards or twelve sols pieces with great care, would think it folly to hoard an assignat, whatever its nominal value.
Our only currency here consists of assignats of 5 livres, 50, 100, 200, and upwards: therefore in making purchases, you must accommodate your wants to the value of your assignat, or you must owe the shopkeeper, or the shopkeeper must owe you; and, in short, as an old woman assured me to-day, "C'est de quoi faire perdre la tete," and, if it lasted long, it would be the death of her.
"A month after the fall of Robespierre," she says, "I considered as to the means of providing for myself, for a mother seventy years of age, my sick husband, my child nine years old, and part of my ruined family. I now possessed nothing in the world but an assignat of five hundred francs. I had become responsible for my husband's debts, to the amount of thirty thousand francs. I chose St.
So he let them drive off; and then told the friend that had brought him the assignat, desiring him to saddle two of the fleetest horses in the post-house, while he stepped over to the town-hall, to give the alarm. While they rode off, the report got abroad through the whole village. Dandoins wanted his dragoons to mount and ride; but they were hungry, and would have some bread and cheese first.
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