" For four
months, at Painb?uf, the ration is but the quarter of a pound of
bread.[128] And the same at Nantes, which has eighty-two thousand
inhabitants and swarms with the wretched; "the distribution never
exceeded four ounces a day," and that only for the past year. The
same at Rouen, which contains sixty thousand inhabitants; and, in
addition, within the past fortnight the distribution has failed three
times. In other reports, those who are well-off suffer more than the
indigent because they take no part in the communal distribution, "all
resources for obtaining food being, so to say, interdicted to them." -
Five ounces of bread per diem for four months is the allowance to the
forty thousand inhabitants of Caen and its district.[129] A great
many in the town, as well as in the country, live on bran and wild
herbs." At the end of Prairial, "there is not a bushel of grain in the
town storehouses, while the requisitions, enforced in the most
rigorous and imposing style, produce nothing or next to nothing."
Misery augments from week to week: "it is impossible to form any idea
of it; the people of Caen live on brown bread and the blood of cattle.
. . .
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