[139] People who are
well off live on potatoes, but only for them, for, in the middle of
Germinal, these cost fifteen francs the bushel and, towards the end,
twenty francs; towards the end of Messidor, forty-five francs; in the
first month of the Directory, one hundred and eighty francs, and then
two hundred and eighty-four francs, whilst other produce goes up at
the same rates. - After the abolition of the "maximum " the evil
springs not from a lack of provisions, but from their dearness: the
shops are well supplied. Whoever comes with a full purse gets what he
wants[140]: The former rich, the property owners and large
capitalists, may eat on the condition that they hand their bundles of
assignats over, that they withdrawing their last louis from its
hiding-place, that they sell their jewelry, clocks, furniture and
clothes. And the nouveaux rich, the speculators, the suppliers, the
happy and extravagant robbers, spend four hundred, one thousand, three
thousand, then five thousand francs for their dinner, and revel in the
great eating establishments on fine wines and exquisite cheer: the
burden of the scarcity is transferred to other shoulders. - At
present, the class which suffers, and which suffers beyond all bounds
of patience is, together with employees and people with small
incomes,[141] the crowd of workmen, the City plebeians, the low
Parisian populace
* which lives from day to day,
* which is Jacobin at heart,
* which made the Revolution in order to better itself,
* which finds itself worse off,
* which gets up one insurrection more on the 1st of Prairial,
* which forcibly enters the Tuileries yelling "Bread and the
Constitution of '93,"
* which installs itself as sovereign in the Convention,
* which murders the Representative F?raud,
* which decrees a return to Terror,
but which, put down by the National Guard, disarmed and forced back
into lasting obedience, has only to submit to the consequences of its
own outrages, the socialism it has itself instituted and the
economical system it itself has organized.
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