es Rigault_, lately published, make one shudder. It is a
repulsive picture of profligacy at once savage and uncontrolled. The
monkish lords especially assail the nunneries. The austere Rigault,
Archbishop of Rouen, confessor of the holy king, conducts a personal
inquiry into the state of Normandy. Every evening he comes to a
monastery. In all of them he finds the monks leading the life of great
feudal lords, wearing arms, getting drunk, fighting duels, keen
huntsmen over all the cultivated land; the nuns living among them in
wild confusion, and betraying everywhere the fruits of their shameless
deeds.

If things are so in the Church, what must the lay lords have been?
What like was the inside of those dark towers which the folk below
regarded with so much horror? Two tales, undoubtedly historical,
namely, _Blue-Beard_ and _Griselda_, tell us something thereanent. To
his vassals, his serfs, what indeed must have been this devotee of
torture who treated his own family in such a way? He is known to us
through the only man who was brought to trial for such deeds; and that
not earlier than the fifteenth century,--Gilles de Retz, who kidnapped
children.

Sir Walter Scott's Front de Boeuf, and the other lords of melodramas
and romances, are but poor creatures in the face of these dreadful
realities. The Templar also in _Ivanhoe_, is a weak artificial
conception. The author durst not assay the foul reality of celibate
life in the Temple, or within the castle walls. Few women were taken
in there, being accounted not worth their keep. The romances of
chivalry altogether belie the truth. It is remarkable, indeed, how
often the literature of an age expresses the very opposite of its
manners, as, for instance, the washy theatre of eclogues after
Florian,[24] during the years of the Great Terror.

[24] A writer of eclogues, fables and dramas; in youth a
friend of Voltaire, afterwards imprisoned during the
Terror.--TRANS.

The rooms in these castles, in such at least as may be seen to-day,
speak more plainly than any books. Men-at-arms, pages, footmen,
crammed together of nights under low-vaulted roofs, in the daytime
kept on the battlements, on narrow terraces, in a state of most
sickening weariness, lived only in their pranks down below; in feats
no longer of arms on the neighbouring domains, but of hunting, ay, and
hunting of men; insults, I may say, without number, outrages untold on
families of serfs. The lord h