aints. It was not so. The noble order, with due form,
entered complaint that theirs was the injured order. They asked relief
from familiarities and assumptions of equality on the part of the
people. Said the Baron de Senecce, "It is a great piece of insolence to
pretend to establish any sort of equality between the people and the
nobility": other nobles declared, "There is between them and us as much
difference as between master and lackey."

To match these complaints and theories, the nobles made demands; demands
that commoners should not be allowed to keep firearms, nor to possess
dogs unless the dogs were ham-strung; nor to clothe themselves like
nobles, nor to clothe their wives like the wives of nobles; nor to wear
velvet or satin under a penalty of five thousand livres. And
preposterous as such claims may seem to us, they carried them into
practice. A deputy of the Third Estate having been severely beaten by a
noble, his demands for redress were treated as absurd. One of the
orators of the lower order having spoken of the French as forming one
great family in which the nobles were the elder brothers and the
commoners the younger, the nobles made a formal complaint to the King,
charging the Third Estate with insolence insufferable. Next came the
complaints and demands of the clergy. They insisted on the adoption in
France of the decrees of the Council of Trent, and the destruction of
the liberties of the Gallican Church.

But far stronger than these came the voice of the people: first spoke
Montaigne, denouncing the grasping spirit of the nobles. Then spoke
Savaron, stinging them with sarcasm, torturing them with rhetoric,
crushing them with statements of facts.

But chief among the speakers was the president of the Third Estate,
Robert Miron, provost of the merchants of Paris. His speech, though
spoken across the great abyss of time and space and thought and custom
which separates him from us, warms a true man's heart even now. With
touching fidelity he pictured the sad life of the lower orders--their
thankless toil, their constant misery; then with a sturdiness which awes
us, he arraigned, first, royalty for its crushing taxation; next, the
whole upper class for its oppressions, and then, daring death, he thus
launched into popular thought an idea:

"It is nothing less than a miracle that the people are able to answer so
many demands. On the labor of their hands depends the maintenance of
your majesty, of the