The same paper adds that France has three hundred and forty-eight separate taxes, by far the most in the whole league. Nor is that the end. The French Parliament is now examining the budget for 2027, which, according to the High Council of Public Finances, seeks eighteen billion more through new fiscal and social measures. What those measures are and on whom they fall, the paper does not say. Yet that is the first question.

Lest anyone think I hate taxes, I confess what everyone knows. My grandfather was a tax-farmer; and when I found the treasury empty after the civil wars, I said myself that forty thousand million were needed for the state to stand. I even put a tax on urine, and when my son held a coin under his nose I told him: "And yet it comes from urine." I am no philosopher preaching poverty to the treasury. Without money soldiers go unpaid, and unpaid soldiers make emperors. I learned that in the year of four emperors.

But taking much is one thing; taking many ways is another. Three hundred and forty-eight taxes mean as many ledgers, as many collectors, as many lawsuits. A tax-farmer's grandson knows that the smallest tolls often cost more to collect than they bring into the treasury. Meanwhile the citizen wastes his days counting what he owes instead of making what he sells. The farmer, bent under so many little bundles, at last leaves his field, and then the treasury has neither the tax nor the grain. Tiberius, no soft man, used to warn his governors that a good shepherd shears his sheep and does not skin them. A shorn sheep gives wool again; a skinned one, only once.

There remains what the paper leaves out. I took money, but the people could see where it went: an amphitheatre on Nero's lake, public pleasure where private luxury had been; the Capitol restored; the Temple of Peace. If the French pay forty-six parts in a hundred and see hospitals, schools, roads and a secure old age, the price is not too high. If they see forms and debt, it is a swindle. Valeurs actuelles says nothing about spending; those who take the other side would say these taxes feed the care of citizens. Then let the magistrates show it. For the streets are full: on 31 October, Le Figaro reported, three hundred and twenty thousand people across France protested over the price of food and the cost of living. Whoever asks eighteen billion more of people already shouting about the price of bread should first point to the building, then hold out his hand.

The remedy is ready to hand, and not new. Count the taxes, as my grandmother counted coins on the estate at Cosa. Of the three hundred and forty-eight keep a few, broad and certain, which everyone pays and no one escapes; abolish those that cost more than they bring. Engrave in bronze in the forum what each tax builds. Before you demand eighteen billion more, sell one palace. I do not hold up Ireland as a model for France; different soil, different customs. But Ireland teaches that money left in the hand of the man who makes things often bears fruit.

Dying, I said: "Alas, I think I am becoming a god." It was a joke. But a treasury that thinks itself a god, toward which everything must flow, is not joking, and that I fear. I said an emperor ought to die standing, and I stood up. The state too must stand; but a citizen loaded with three hundred and forty-eight packs cannot. Shear the sheep, France: don't skin it.