The Man of Forty Crowns

Chapter 4

When I had thanked the academician of the Academy of Sciences, for having set me right, I went away quite out of heart, praising providence, but muttering between my teeth these doleful words: "What! to have no more than forty crowns a year to live on, nor more than twenty-two years to live! Alas! may our life be yet shorter, since it is to be so miserable!"

As I was saying this, I found myself just opposite a very superb house. Already was I feeling myself pressed by hunger. I had not so much as the hundred and twentieth part of the sum that by right belongs to each individual. But as soon as I was told that this was the palace of my reverend fathers, the bare-footed Carmelites, I conceived great hopes, and said to myself, since these saints are humble enough to go bare-footed, they will be charitable enough to give me a dinner.

I rang. A Carmelite came to the door.

"What would you please to have, my son?"

"A morsel of bread, my reverend father. The new edicts have stripped me of every thing."

Son, know that we ourselves beg charity; we do not bestow it."[1]

"What! while your holy institute forbids you to wear shoes, you have the house of a prince, and can you refuse to me a meal?"

"My son, it is true, we go without stockings and shoes; that is an expense the less; we feel no more cold in our feet than in our hands. As to our fine house, we built it very easily, as we have a hundred thousand livres a year of income from houses in the same street."

"So, then! you suffer me to die of hunger, while you have an income of a hundred thousand livres! I suppose you pay fifty thousand of these to the new government?"

"Heaven preserve us from paying a single farthing! It is only the produce of the land cultivated by laborious hands, callous with work, and moistened with tears, that owes taxes to the legislative and executive power. The alms which have been bestowed upon us, have enabled us to build those houses, by the rent of which we get a hundred thousand livres a year. But these alms, coming from the fruits of the earth, and having, consequently, already paid the tax, ought not to pay twice. They have sanctified the faithful believers, who have impoverished themselves to enrich us, and we continue to beg charity, and to lay under contribution the Fauxbourg of St. Germain, in order to sanctify a still greater number of the faithful believers."[2]

Having thus spoken, the Carmelite politely shut the door in my face.

I then passed along and stopped before the H*** of the Mousquetaires gris, and related to those gentlemen what had just happened to me. They gave me a good dinner and half a crown, (un ecu). One of them proposed to go directly and set fire to the convent; but a musqueteer, more discreet than he, remonstrated with him, insisting that the time for action had not yet arrived, and implored him to wait patiently a little longer.[3]

[1] Victor Hugo in his poem, Christ at the Vatican, (translated by G.B. Burleigh,) rebukes this inhuman spirit of monkish greed and avarice, which always receives but neves gives in return. In the poem, Christ is represented as saying:

"--I have said,

'I will have mercy and not sacrifice;'-

Have said, 'Give freely what, without a price,

Was given to you.' To my redeemed, instead,

You sell baptism upon their natal bed;

Sell to the sinner void indulgences;

To lovers sell the natural right to wed;

Sell to the dying the privilege of decease,

And sell your funeral masses to the dead!

Your prayers and masses and communions sell;

Beads, benedictions, crosses; in your eyes

Nothing is sacred,-all is merchandise."-E.

[2] In a recent number of The Nineteenth Century, Mr. Alex. A. Knox, in an able criticism on the writings of Voltaire, says very truly:

"It should not be forgotten that in his day a very large portion of the soil of France was in the hands of the clergy, free from all burdens, save in so far as the clergy chose to execute them by the way of 'gratuitous gifts.' The condition of the French peasant was frightful. Arthur Young, Dr. Moore, and others have described it at a somewhat later date, but it was even so in Voltaire's time. Of course the 'clerical immunities' were far from being the only cause of all this misery; but they were a frightful addition to it."

[3] The degradation of labor, and the corruption and injustice of the papal priesthood, were the inciting causes of the great revolution in France, which at length overturned the monarchy, and convulsed, for so long a period, every nation in Europe. In reading this romance of the hardships of the laborer, we may learn to comprehend the true principles of Voltaire, and recognize his great benevolence and sympathy with suffering and distress. We may also listen to the first faint mutterings of the terrible storm of blood and retribution, that was so soon to burst over unhappy France, and overwhelm in its lurid course all ranks and conditions of mankind-the innocent and the guilty, the oppressed and the oppressor, the peasant and the priest.-E.