At Montlhery stones and clubs disperse seven brigades of the police.

An immense throng of eight thousand persons, women and men, provided with bags, fall upon the grain exposed for sale.

They force the delivery to them of wheat worth 40 francs at 24 francs, pillaging the half of it and conveying it off without payment.

"The constabulary is disheartened," writes the sub-delegate; "the determination of the people is wonderful; I am frightened at what I have seen and heard."-- After the 13th of July, 1788, the day of the hail-storm, despair seized the peasantry; well disposed as the proprietors may have been, it was impossible to assist them.

"Not a workshop is open;[1202] the noblemen and the bourgeois, obliged to grant delays in the payment of their incomes, can give no work." Accordingly, "the famished people are on the point of risking life for life," and, publicly and boldly, they seek food wherever it can be found.