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A forty-pound note would not purchase a pair of boots, and the peasant, very naturally, was not anxious to barter a year's toil for a piece of paper with which he could not even buy a shirt. As long as worthless paper-money whether called assignats or labour notes is offered to the peasant-producer it will always be the same.
Danton and La Revelliere preach in vain; each is too egoistic and too worn-out; they let the rein slacken on Cambaceres. As to him, he would rather keep quiet and drag the cart no longer; but there are two things necessary which he must provide for on pain of death. "It will not do," says he in plaintive tones, "to keep on printing the assignats at night which we want for the next day.
The winter was a much milder one than the preceding, food was less scarce, money more plentiful owing to the issue of assignats, public confidence greatly increased. But the tension between the King and the assembly did not relax; there was no serious attempt on either side to take advantage of the improved situation for effecting a reconciliation.
He made sport of the legislature ruled by the commune, and made up not of men of experience, but of adventurers, stock-jobbers, directors of assignats, trustees for the sale of church-lands, who "took a constitution in hand as savages would a looking-glass," a body made up of those courtiers who wished to cut off the head of their king, of those priests who voted religion a nuisance, of those lawyers who called the laws a dead letter, of those philosophers who admitted no argument but the guillotine, of those sentimentalists who chanted the necessity of more blood, of butchers and bakers and brewers who would exterminate the very people who bought from them.
Perhaps the most whimsical thing in the whole situation was the fact that the government, pressed as it was by demands of all sorts, continued to issue the old assignats at the same time that it was discrediting them by issuing the new mandats.
Distrust of the assignats, and scarcity of bread, have occasioned a law to oblige the farmers, in every part of the republic, to sell their corn at a certain price, infinitely lower than what they have exacted for some months past.
One thing only vexes him, and that is the pamphlet of M. Bergasse against the assignats; therefore it is after a long series of arguments and protestations, in order to give a final proof of his confidence in the paper money and his entire skepticism as to the evils predicted by Bergasse and others, M. Sarot solemnly lays his house, garden and furniture upon the altar of his country and offers to sell them for paper money alone.
Then from February 4 to February 14, 1797, came decrees and orders that the engraving apparatus for the mandats should be destroyed as that for the assignats had been, that neither assignats nor mandats should longer be a legal tender and that old debts to the state might be paid for a time with government paper at the rate of one per cent of their face value.
January 22, 1875. The French mind, according to Gioberti, apprehends only the outward form of truth, and exaggerates it by isolating it, so that it acts as a solvent upon the realities with which it works. It takes the shadow for the substance, the word for the thing, appearance for reality, and abstract formula for truth. It lives in a world of intellectual assignats.
Leigh had sold the saddles with the horses; having, on the journey to Paris, removed the bundles of assignats concealed in them. The accommodation on board was very fair.
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