Familiarity, moreover, engenders sympathy; one cannot remain insensible to the trials of a poor man to whom, for over twenty years, one says good-morning every day on passing him, with whose life one is acquainted, who is not an abstract unit in the imagination, a statistical cipher, but a sorrowing soul and a suffering body .-- And so much the more because, since the writings of Rousseau and the economists, a spirit of humanity, daily growing stronger, more penetrating and more universal, has arisen to soften the heart.

Henceforth the poor are thought of, and it is esteemed an honor to think of them.

We have only to read the registers of the States-General[1311] to see that spirit of philanthropy spreads from Paris even to the chateaux and abbeys of the provinces.

I am satisfied that, except for a few country squires, either huntsmen or drinkers, carried away by the need of physical exercise, and confined through their rusticity to an animal life, most of the resident seigniors resembled, in fact or in intention, the gentry whom Marmontel, in his moral tales, then brought on the stage.

Fashion took this direction, and people in France always follow the fashion.