The tenant who furnishes his own rooms is an aristocrat,
for many lodge in boarding-houses and others sleep in the open air.
Whoever possesses capital is an aristocrat, even the smallest amount
in money or in kind, a field, a roof over his head, half-a-dozen
silver spoons given to him by his parents on his wedding-day, an old
woollen stocking into which twenty or thirty crowns have been dropped
one by one, all one's savings, whatever has been laid by or
economized, a petty assortment of eatables or merchandise, one's crop
for the year and stock of groceries, especially if, disliking to give
them up and letting his dissatisfaction be seen, he, through
revolutionary taxation and requisitions, through the maximum and the
confiscation of the precious metals, is constrained to surrender his
small savings gratis, or at half their value. - Fundamentally, it is
only those who have nothing of their own that are held to be patriots,
those who live from day to day,[93] "the wretched," the poor,
vagabonds, and the famished; the humblest laborer, the least
instructed, the most ill at his ease, is treated as criminal, as an
enemy, as soon as he is suspected of having some resources; in vain
does he show his scarified or callous hands; he escapes neither
spoliation, the prison, nor the guillotine.
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