Thus a man under the given circumstances would have to pay double taxes for three years as a penalty for changing his dwelling.

We already hear the murmur of the _cahiers_ of five-and-twenty years later in the account of the transports of joy with which the citizens of Lisieux saw the _taille proportionelle_ established (1718), and how numerous other cities sent up prayers that the same blessing might be conferred on them.

"Reasons that it is not for us to divine, caused the rejection of these demands; so hard is it to do a good act, which everybody talks about, much more in order to seem to desire it, than from any intention of really doing it....

To illustrate the advantages of this plan, the impost of 1718 with all arrears for five years was discharged in twelve months without needless cost or dispute.
By an extravagance more proper than any other to degrade humanity, the common happiness made malcontents of all that class whose prosperity depends on the misery of others,"-- that is the privileged class.[161] It is no innate factiousness, as flighty critics of French affairs sometimes imply, that has made civil equality the passion of modern France.

The root of this passion is an undying memory of the curse that was inflicted on its citizens, morally and materially, by the fiscal inequalities of the old _regime_.