The 50,000 customs officers or clerks of the ferme, the 23,000 soldiers without a uniform who, posted in the interior along a line of 1200 leagues, guarded the heavily taxed salt districts against the provinces which were less taxed, redeemed or free, the innumerable employees at the barriers, forming a confused and complicated band around each province, town, district or canton, levying on twenty or thirty different sorts of merchandise forty-five principal duties, general, provincial, or municipal, and nearly sixteen hundred tolls, in short, the entire body of officials of the old system of indirect taxation has almost wholly disappeared.

Save at the entrance of towns, and for the octroi the eye no longer encounters an official clerk.

The carters who, from Roussillon or Languedoc, transport a cask of wine to Paris, are no longer subject to his levies, humiliations and moods in twenty different places, nor to ascribe to him the dozen or fifteen days' useless extension of their trip due to his predecessor, and during which they had to wait in his office until he wrote a receipt or a permit.

There is scarcely any one now but the inn-keeper who sees his green uniform on his premises.

After the abolition of the house-inventory, nearly two millions of proprietors and wine metayers are forever free of his visits;[3249] from now on, for consumers, especially for the people, he seems absent and non existent.
In effect, he has been transferred one or two hundred leagues off, to the salt-establishments in the interior and on the coasts, and on the frontier.