" They go from one market-
town to another, to Saint-Calais, Montdoubleau, Blois, Vend?me,
reducing the cost of provisions, their troop increasing like a
snowball - for they threaten "to burn the effects and set fire to
the houses of all who are not as courageous as themselves."
In this state of social disintegration, insurrection is a gangrene
in which the healthy are infected by the morbid parts. Mobs are
everywhere produced and re-produced, incessantly, large and small,
like abscesses which break out side by side, and painfully irritate
each other and finally combine. There are the towns against the
rural districts and rural districts against the towns. On the one
hand "every farmer who transports anything to the market passes (at
home) for an aristocrat,[32] and becomes the horror of his fellow-
citizens in the village." On the other hand the National Guards of
the towns spread themselves through the rural districts and make
raids to save themselves from death by hunger.
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