stand upright nor of lying down? Who, remembering, these punishments, those infamous Lettres de Cachet, given in blank by Louis XV. to his minions and mistresses, to be filled in by them with the name of whomsoever they chose—who, I say, remembering this, can help giving the people absolution if in return its retribution was terrible?
The unlimited power of the Sovereign, having sapped the pride of the French nobles, had gradually converted them from a body of responsible landholders into cringing courtiers, who, absenting themselves from their estates—left in the hands of rapacious stewards and land-agents,—came to spend their revenues in Versailles, and to intrigue for place and power by paying court to the King's reigning mistress. It was while performing her toilet that Madame de Pompadour received the lords, generals, prelates, and princes of the blood; nor were any of them suffered to sit down in her presence. But, while behaving like curs at court, these same nobles turned into wolves in their dealings with the peasantry, whom they fleeced as if they were so many flocks of sheep.
In describing the relations of the nobles to the French peasantry, it is difficult to speak with more than approximate correctness; for, as each province had its separate laws and customs and fiscal regulations, their conditions were often widely dissimilar, and the discrepancy between Provence and Brittany, for example, was so great, that they were more like two separate countries than provinces of the same empire. Thus, although the peasants were everywhere wretchedly treated, they were worse off in some parts of France than in others; emancipated in this district, while in that they were in the truly purgatorial condition of
