Hathor had once said that whenever Napoleon got into a carriage, he would become especially affectionate.
That had indeed been true before, but lately, when they were alone in the carriage, things were no longer as they had been.
He would hold her close, sometimes reading documents, sometimes talking—art, philosophy, mythology, war, and so on. On the way to The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, they talked about roads.
Corvée labor was a burden imposed upon the people, especially farmers. While the wealthy marveled at society's progress and the splendor of civilization, the farmers lived in despair.
By the end of Louis XIV's reign, the main roads had fallen into disrepair, or were maintained by their owners. Comptroller Orry came up with a "brilliant" idea: these main roads—or Royal Roads, as people called them then—would be built by the poorest farmers, those least likely to travel. After the Seven Years' War, the tax farmers tried to turn corvée labor into a local tax. The farmers still had to pay, though they clearly had no money left to travel.
The navy was slightly better. Transporting timber to coastal naval shipyards came with a certain wage, though it was handed out arbitrarily and in very small amounts. Even so, it was better than road-building corvée labor. The king did not spend a single coin, while the farmers worked for him entirely for free.
What a bargain. It saved an enormous expense, so the nobles expanded the practice. Barracks and all public works came to rely on corvée labor. There had not been many regular troops before, so labor for building barracks had been relatively light. Later, as armies rotated and expanded, every force traveled with heavy baggage trains. Corvée labor for moving armies became unbearably burdensome.
The nobles raced their luxurious carriages along roads