The friendship of Mad. de ____ will be little
available to me. Her extensive fortune, before frittered to mere
competency by the extortions of the revolution, now scarcely supplies her
own wants; and her tenants humanely take the opportunity of her present
distress to avoid paying their rent.*
* In some instances servants or tenants have been known to seize on
portions of land for their own use--in others the country
municipalities exacted as the price of a certificate of civism,
(without which no release from prison could be obtained,) such
leases, lands, or privileges, as they thought the embarrassments of
their landlords would induce them to grant. Almost every where the
houses of persons arrested were pilfered either by their own
servants or the agents of the republic. I have known an elegant
house put in requisition to erect blacksmiths' forges in for the use
of the army, and another filled with tailors employed in making
soldiers' clothes.--Houses were likewise not unfrequently abandoned
by the servants through fear of sharing the fate of their masters,
and sometimes exposed equally by the arrest of those who had been
left in charge, in order to extort discoveries of plate, money, &c.
the concealment of which they might be supposed privy to.
--So that I have no resource, either for myself or Mrs.
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