Bear in mind, too, that the guardians of the spoil are the sans-culottes who have made a conquest of it; that they are poor; that such a profusion of useful or precious objects makes them feel the bareness of their homes all the more; that their wives would like to lay in a stock of furniture; moreover, has it not held out to them from the beginning of the Revolution, that "forty-thousand mansions, palaces and chateaux, two-thirds of the property of France, would be the reward of their valor ?"[33124] At this very moment, does not the representative on mission authorize their greed?
Are not Albitte and Collot d'Herbois at Lyons, Fouche at Nevers, Javogues at Montbrison, proclaiming that the possessions of anti-revolutionaries and a surplus of riches form "the patrimony of the sans-culottes ?"[33125] Do they not read in the proclamations of Monestier,[33126] that the peasants "before leaving home may survey and measure off the immense estates of their seigneurs, choose, for example, on their return, whatever they want to add to their farm..

..

tacking on a bit of field or rabbit-warren belonging to the former count or marquis ?" Why not take a portion of his furniture, any of his beds or clothes-presses--It is not surprising that, after this, the slip of paper which protects sequestrated furniture and confiscated merchandise should be ripped off by gross and greedy hands! When, after Thermidor, the master returns to his own roof it is generally to an empty house; in this or that habitation in the Morvan,[33127] the removal of the furniture is so complete that a bin turned upside down serves for a table and chairs, when the family sit down to their first meal.
In the towns the embezzlements are often more brazenly carried out than in the country.

At Valenciennes, the Jacobin chiefs of the municipality are known under the title of "seal-breakers and patriotic robbers."[33128] At Lyons, the Maratists, who dub themselves "the friends of Chalier," are, according to the Jacobins' own admission, "brigands, thieves and rascals."[33129] They compose, to the number of three or four hundred, the thirty-two revolutionary committees; one hundred and fifty of leaders, "all of them administrators," form the popular club; in this town of one hundred and twenty thousand souls they number, as they themselves state, three thousand, and they firmly rely on "sharing with each other the wealth of Lyons.

This huge cake belongs to them; they do not allow that strangers, Parisians, should have a slice,[33130] and they intend to eat the whole of it, at discretion, without control, even to the last crumb.