"
" All our reports," say the district administrators, "resound with
shrieks of despair." People are infatuated; "it seems to us that a
crazy spirit prevails universally, we often encounter people in the
street who, although alone, gesticulate and talk to themselves aloud."
"How many times," writes a Swiss traveller,[147] who lived in Paris
during the latter half of 1795, "how often have I chanced to encounter
men sinking through starvation, scarcely able to stand up against a
post, or else down on the ground and unable to get up for want of
strength !" A journalist states that he saw "within ten minutes, along
the street, seven poor creatures fall on account of hunger, a child
die on its mother's breast which was dry of milk, and a woman
struggling with a dog near a sewer to get a bone away from him."[148]
Meissner never leaves his hotel without filling his pockets with
pieces of the national bread. "This bread," he says, "which the poor
would formerly have despised, I found accepted with the liveliest
gratitude, and by well educated persons;" the lady who contended with
the dog for the bone was a former nun, without either parents or
friends and everywhere repulsed.
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