ishop
nowadays," says one of them, "a man must be a gentleman." I regard them
as sergeants who, like their fellows in the army, have lost all hope of
becoming officers.--Hence there are some whose anger bursts its bounds:
"We, unfortunate curates at fixed rates; we, commonly assigned to the
largest parishes, like my own which, for two leagues in the woods,
includes hamlets that would form another; we, whose lot makes even
the stones and beams of our miserable dwellings cry aloud," we have
to endure prelates "who would still, through their forest-keepers,
prosecute a poor curate for cutting a stick in their forests, his sole
support on his long journeys over the road." On their passing, the poor
man "is obliged to jump close against a slope to protect himself from
the feet and the spattering of the horses, as likewise from the wheels
and, perhaps, the whip of an insolent coachman," and then, "begrimed
with dirt, with his stick in one hand and his hat, such as it is, in
the other, he must salute, humbly and quickly, through the door of the
close, gilded carriage, the counterfeit hierophant who is snoring on
the wool of the flock the poor curate is feeding, and of which he merely
leaves him the dung and the grease." The whole letter is one long cry of
rage; it is rancor of this stamp which is to fashion Joseph Lebons and
Fouches.--In this situation and with these sentiments it is evident
that the lower clergy will treat its chiefs as the provincial nobility
treated theirs.[1431] They will not select "for representatives those
who swim in opulence and who have always regarded their sufferings with
tranquility." The curates, on all sides "will confederate together"
to send only curates to the States-General, and to exclude "not only
canons, abbes, priors and other beneficiaries, but again the principal
superiors, the heads of the hierarchy," that is to say, the bishops. In
fact, in the States-General, out of three hundred clerical deputies we
count two hundred and eight curates, and, like the provincial nobles,
these bring along with them the distrust and the ill-will which they
have so long entertained against their chiefs. Events are soon to prove
this. If the first two orders are constrained to combine against the
communes it is at the critical moment when the curates withdraw. If
the institution of an upper chamber is rejected it is owing to the
commonalty of the gentry (la plebe des gentilshommes) being unwilling to
allo