retirement in less than a
year--managed to make herself and her husband the great dispensers at
court of place and pelf. Penniless though Concini had been, he was in a
few months able to buy the Marquisate of Ancre, which cost him nearly a
half a million livres; and, soon after, the post of first gentleman of
the bedchamber, and that cost him nearly a quarter of a million; and,
soon after that, a multitude of broad estates and high offices at
immense prices. Leonora also was not idle; among her many gains was the
bribe of three hundred thousand livres to screen certain financiers
under trial for fraud.

Next came the turn of the great nobles. For ages the nobility of France
had been the worst among her many afflictions. From age to age attempts
had been made to curb them. In the fifteenth century Charles VII had
done much to undermine their power, and Louis XI had done much to crush
it. But strong as was the policy of Charles, and cunning as was the
policy of Louis, they had made one omission, and that omission left
France, though advanced, miserable. For these monarchs had not cut the
root of the evil. The French nobility continued practically a
serf-holding nobility.

Despite, then, the curb put upon many old pretensions of the nobles, the
serf-owning spirit continued to spread a network of curses over every
arm of the French government, over every acre of the French soil, and,
worst of all, over the hearts and minds of the French people. Enterprise
was deadened, invention crippled. Honesty was nothing, honor everything.
Life was of little value. Labor was the badge of servility; laziness the
very badge and passport of gentility. The serf-owning spirit was an iron
wall between noble and not noble--the only unyielding wall between
France and prosperous peace.

But the serf-owning spirit begat another evil far more terrible: it
begat a substitute for patriotism--a substitute which crushed out
patriotism just at the very emergencies when patriotism was most needed.
For the first question which in any state emergency sprang into the mind
of a French noble was not, How does this affect the welfare of the
nation? but, How does this affect the position of my order? The
serf-owning spirit developed in the French aristocracy an instinct which
led them in national troubles to guard the serf-owning class first and
the nation afterward, and to acknowledge fealty to the serf-owning
interest first and to the national interest a