Around Dieppe, in the country,[105] entire communes support themselves on herbs and bran. "Citizen representatives," write the administrators, "we can no longer maintain ourselves. Our fellow citizens reproach us with having despoiled them of their grain in favor of the large communes." - "All means of subsistence are exhausted," writes the district of Louviers;[106] "we are reduced here for a month past to eating bran bread and boiled herbs, and even this rude food is getting scarce. Bear in mind that we have seventy-one thousand people to govern, at this very time subject to all the horrors of famine, a large number of them having already perished, some with hunger and others with diseases engendered by the poor food they live on. " - In the Caen district,[107] "the unripe peas, horse peas, beans, and green barley and rye are attacked;" mothers and children go after these in the fields in default of other food; "other vegetables in the gardens are already consumed; furniture, the comforts of the well to do class, have become the prey of the farming egoist; having nothing more to sell they consequently have nothing with which to obtain a morsel of bread."" It is impossible," writes the representative on mission, "to wait for the crop without further aid. As long as bran lasted the people ate that; none can now be found and despair is at its height. I have not seen the sun since I came. The harvest will be a month behind.
What shall we do? What will become of us?" - "In Picardy," writes the Beauvais district, "the great majority of people in the rural communes search the woods" to find mushrooms, berries and wild fruits.[108]
"They think themselves lucky," says the Bapaume district, "if they can get a share of the food of animals." "In many communes," the district of Vervier reports, "the inhabitants are reduced to living on herbage." "Many families, entire communes," reports the Laon commissary, "have been without bread two or three months and live on bran or herbs. . . . Mothers of families, children, old men, pregnant women, come to the (members of the) Directory for bread and often faint in their arms.
And yet, great as the famine is in the country it is worse in the towns; and the proof of it is that the starving people flock into the country to find whatever they can to live on, no matter how, and, generally speaking, in vain. - "Three quarters of our fellow citizens," writes the Rozoy municipality,[109] "are forced to quit work and overrun the country here and there, among the farmers, to obtain bread for specie, and with more entreaty than the poorest wretches; for the most part, they return with tears in their eyes at not being able to find, not merely a bushel of wheat, but a pound of bread." "Yesterday," writes the Montreuil-sur-Mer municipality,[110]
"more than two hundred of our citizens set out to beg in the country,"and, when they get nothing, they steal. "Bands of brigands[111]
spread through the country and pillage all dwellings anywise remote.
. . . Grain, flour, bread, cattle, poultry, stuffs, etc., all come in play. Our terrified shepherds are no longer willing to sleep in their sheep pens and are leaving us." The most timid dig Carrots at night or, during the day, gather dandelions; but their town stomachs cannot digest this food. "Lately," writes the procureur- syndic of Saint-Germain,[112] "the corpse of a father of a family, found in the fields with his mouth still filled with the grass he had striven to chew, exasperates and arouses the spirit of the poor creatures awaiting a similar fate."What then, do people in the towns do in order to survive? - In small towns or scattered villages, each municipality, using what gendarmes it has, makes legal requisitions in its vicinity, and sometimes the commune obtains from the government a charitable gift of wheat, oats, rice or assignats. But the quantity of grain it receives is so small, one asks how it is that, after two months, six months or a year of such a system, that half of the inhabitants are not in the grave yard.