Whole parishes, on the strength of this, betake themselves at night to the woods, abandoning their houses, and carrying away their furniture; "the fugitives trod down and destroyed their own crops; pregnant women were injured in the forests, and others lost their wits." Fear lends them wings.

Two years after this, Madame Campan was shown a rocky peak on which a woman had taken refuge, and from which she was obliged to be let down with ropes .-- The people at last return to their homes, and resume their usual routines.

But such large masses are not unsettled with impunity; a tumult like this is, in itself, a lively source of alarm.

As the country did rise, it must have been on account of threatened danger and if the peril was not due to brigands, it must have come from some other quarter.

Arthur Young, at Dijon and in Alsace,[1312] hears at the public dinner tables that the Queen had formed a plot to undermine the National Assembly and to massacre all Paris.