Hotel de Ville, &c. receive assignats at par, and the wages of the
labouring poor are still comparatively low. What was five years ago a
handsome fortune, now barely supplies a decent maintenance; and smaller
incomes, which were competencies at that period, are now almost
insufficient for existence. A workman, who formerly earned twenty-five
sols a day, has at present three livres; and you give a sempstress thirty
sols, instead of ten: yet meat, which was only five or six sols when
wages was twenty-five, is now from fifty sols to three livres the pound,
and every other article in the same or a higher proportion. Thus, a
man's daily wages, instead of purchasing four or five pounds of meat, as
they would have done before the revolution, now only purchase one.

It grieves me to see people whom I have known at their ease, obliged to
relinquish, in the decline of life, comforts to which they were
accustomed at a time when youth rendered indulgence less necessary; yet
every day points to the necessity of additional oeconomy, and some little
convenience or enjoyment is retrenched--and to those who are not above
acknowledging how much we are the creatures of habit, a dish of coffee,
or a glass of liqueur, &c. will not seem such trifling privations. It is
true, these are, strictly speaking, luxuries; so too are most things by
comparison--

"O reason not the need: our basest beggars
"Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
"Allow not nature more than nature needs,
"Man's life is cheap as beast's."

If the wants of one class were relieved by these deductions from the
enjoyments of another, it might form a sufficient consolation; but the
same causes which have banished the splendor of wealth and the comforts