The citizens are of the grossest ignorance, the sole support of this species of lethargy in which the minds of most of the inhabitants are plunged.

Women, bigoted and pretentious, and much given to play and to gallantry."[1335] In this impoverished and benumbed society, among these Messieurs Thibaudeau, the counselor, and Harpin, the tax-collector, among these vicomtes de Sotenville and Countesses d'Escarbagnas, lives the Archbishop, Cardinal de Larochefoucauld, grand almoner to the king, provided with four great abbeys, possessing five hundred thousand livres income, a man of the world, generally an absentee, and when at home, finding amusement in the embellishing of his gardens and palace, in short, the golden pheasant of an aviary in a poultry yard of geese.[1336] Naturally there is an entire absence of political thought.
"You cannot imagine," says the manuscript, "a person more indifferent to all public matters." At a later period, in the very midst of events of the gravest character, and which most nearly concern them, there is the same apathy.

At Chateau-Thierry on the 4th of July, 1789,[1337] there is not a cafe in which a new paper can be found; there is but one at Dijon; at Moulins, the 7th of August, "in the best cafe in the town, where I found near twenty tables set for company, but as for a newspaper I might as well have demanded an elephant." Between Strasbourg and Besancon there is not a gazette.

At Besancon there is "nothing but the Gazette de France, for which, this period, a man of common sense would not give one sol,.

.