ntatives of the people, they aimed to be the favorites of the
Sovereign, and they shear the flock which they ought to preserve.

IV.

Isolation of the Chiefs--Sentiments of subordinates
--Provincial nobility--The Curates.

The fleeced flock is to discover finally what is done with its wool.
"Sooner or later," says a parliament of 1764,[1421] "the people will
learn that the remnants of our finances continue be wasted in donations
which are frequently undeserved; in excessive and multiplied pensions
for the same persons; in dowries and promises of dowry, and in useless
offices and salaries." Sooner or later they will thrust back "these
greedy hands which are always open and never full; that insatiable
crowd which seems to be born only to seize all and possess nothing,
and pitiless as it is shameless."--And when this day arrives the
extortioners will find that they stand alone. For the characteristic of
an aristocracy which cares only for itself is to live aloof in a closed
circle. Having forgotten the public, it also neglects its subordinates;
after being separated from the nation it separates itself from its own
adherents. Like a group of staff-officers on furlough, it indulges in
Sports without giving itself further concern about inferior officers;
when the hour of battle comes nobody will march under its orders, and
chieftains are sought elsewhere. Such is the isolation of the seigniors
of the court and of the prelates among the lower grades of the nobility
and the clergy; they appropriate to themselves too large a share, and
give nothing, or almost nothing, to the people who are not of their
society. For a century a steady murmur against them rising, and goes on
expanding until it becomes an uproar, which the old and the new spirit,
feudal ideas and philosophic ideas, threaten in unison. "I see," said
the bailiff of Mirabeau,[1422] "that the nobility is demeaning
itself and becoming a wreck. It is extended to all those children of
bloodsuckers, the vagabonds of finance, introduced by La Pompadour,
herself the spring of this foulness. One portion of it demeans itself in
its servility to the court; the other portion is amalgamated with that
quill-driving rabble who are converting the blood of the king's subjects
into ink; another perishes stifled beneath vile robes, the ignoble atoms
of cabinet-dust which an office drags up out of the mire;" and all,
parvenus of the old or of the new stock, form a band