ersal
creditor and paid to do nothing, grazes over all the ground and feeds
on all the products. Let the opportunity come to enkindle all this
covetousness, and the rent-roll will burn, and with it the turret, and
with the turret, the chateau.

III. Absentee Seigniors.

Vast extent of their fortunes and rights.--Possessing
greater advantages they owe greater services.-Reasons for
their absenteeism.--Effect of it.--Apathy of the provinces.--
Condition of their estates.--They give no alms.--Misery of
their tenants.--Exactions of their agents.--Exigencies of
their debts.--State of their justiciary.--Effects of their
hunting rights.--Sentiments of the peasantry towards them.

The spectacle becomes still gloomier, on passing from the estates on
which the seigniors reside to those on which they are non-residents.
Noble or ennobled, lay and ecclesiastic, the latter are privileged among
the privileged, and form an aristocracy inside of an aristocracy. Almost
all the powerful and accredited families belong to it whatever may be
their origin and their date.[1323] Through their habitual or frequent
residence near the court, through their alliances or mutual visits,
through their habits and their luxuries, through the influence which
they exercise and the enmities which they provoke, they form a group
apart, and are those who possess the most extensive estates, the leading
suzerainties, and the most complete and comprehensive jurisdictions.
Of the court nobility and of the higher clergy, they number perhaps,
a thousand in each order, while their small number only brings out in
higher relief the enormity of their advantages. We have seen that
the appanages of the princes of the blood comprise a seventh of the
territory; Necker estimates the revenue of the estates enjoyed by the
king's two brothers at two millions.[1324] The domains of the Ducs de
Bouillon, d'Aiguillon, and some others cover entire leagues, and,
in immensity and continuity, remind one of those, which the Duke of
Sutherland and the Duke of Bedford now possess in England. With nothing
else than his forests and his canal, the Duke of Orleans, before
marrying his wife, as rich as himself, obtains an income of a million.
A certain seigniory, le Clermontois, belonging to the Prince de Conde,
contains forty thousand inhabitants, which is the extent of a German
principality; "moreover all the taxes or subsidies occurring in le
Cle