Now such misery ought to suffice; but no:—the plunderers will come, who will seek everything…. Everything will be taken and snapped up; and we need not ask who pays.”
Statesmen, too, make themselves the spokesmen of the miserable people, and utter their complaints. Jean Jouvenel laid them before the States of Blois in 1433, and those of Orléans in 1439. In a petition presented to the king at the meeting of the States of Tours in 1484, these complaints take the direct form of a political “remonstrance.”
The chroniclers could not help reverting to the subject again and again: it was bound up with their subject-matter.
The poets in their turn took hold of the motif. Alain Chartier treats it in his Quadriloge Invectif, and Robert Gaguin in his Debat du Laboureur, du Prestre et du Gendarme, inspired by Chartier. A hundred years after La Complainte du povre Commun et des povres Laboureurs de France of about 1400, Jean Molinet was to compose a Resource du petit Peuple. Jean Meschinot never tires of reminding the ruling classes of the fact that the common people are being neglected.
“O Dieu, voyez du commun l’indigence,
Pourvoyez-y à toute diligence:
Las! par faim, froid, paour et misere tremble.
S’il a peché ou commis negligence
Encontre vous, il demande indulgence.
N’est-ce pitié des biens que l’on lui emble?
Il n’a plus bled pour porter au molin,
On lui oste draps de laine et de lin,
L’eaue, sans plus, lui demeure pour boire.”[1]
This pity, however, remains sterile. It does not result in acts, not even in programmes, of reform. The felt need of serious reform is wanting to it and will be wanting for a long time. In La Bruyère, in Fénelon, perhaps in the elder Mirabeau, the theme is still the same; even they have not yet got beyond theoretical and stereotyped commiseration.
It is natural that the belated chivalrous spirits of the fifteenth
- ↑ O God, see the indigence of the common people, Provide for it with all speed: Alas! with hunger, cold, fear and misery they tremble, If they have sinned or are guilty of negligence Toward Thee, they beg indulgence. Is it not a pity that they are bereft of their goods? They have no more corn to take to the mill, Woollen and linen goods are taken from them, Only water is left to them to drink.
