e in his
magnificence through sympathy.[1113] If he becomes a widower and has
no children, they send deputations to him to entreat him to remarry,
in order that at his death the country may not fall into a war of
succession or be given up to the encroachment of neighbors. Thus there
is a revival, after a thousand years, of the most powerful and the most
vivacious of the sentiments that support human society. This one is
the more precious because it is capable of expanding. In order that the
small feudal patrimony to become the great national patrimony, it now
suffices for the seigniories to be combined in the hands of a single
lord, and that the king, chief of the nobles, should overlay the work of
the nobles with the third foundation of France.

III. Services and Recompenses of the King.

Kings built the whole of this foundation, one stone after another.
Hugues Capet laid the first one. Before him royalty conferred on the
King no right to a province, not even Laon; it is he who added his
domain to the title. During eight hundred years, through conquest,
craft, inheritance, the work of acquisition goes on; even under Louis XV
France is augmented by the acquisition of Lorraine and Corsica. Starting
from nothing, the King is the maker of a compact State, containing
the population of twenty-six millions, and then the most powerful in
Europe.--Throughout this interval he is at the head of the national
defense. He is the liberator of the country against foreigners,
against the Pope in the fourteenth century, against the English in the
fifteenth, against the Spaniards in the sixteenth. In the interior, from
the twelfth century onward, with the helmet on his brow, and always
on the road, he is the great justiciary, demolishing the towers of the
feudal brigands, repressing the excesses of the powerful, and protecting
the oppressed.[1114] He puts an end to private warfare; he establishes
order and tranquility. This was an immense accomplishment, which,
from Louis le Gros to St. Louis, from Philippe le Bel to Charles VII,
continues uninterruptedly up to the middle of the eighteenth century in
the edict against duels and in the "Grand Jours."[1115] Meanwhile all
useful projects carried out under his orders, or developed under his
patronage, roads, harbors, canals, asylums, universities, academies,
institutions of piety, of refuge, of education, of science, of
industry, and of commerce, bears his imprint and proclaim the pub