ng a public service which he is no longer obliged to perform.

Other dues are also ancient taxes, but he still performs the service for
which they are a quittance. The king, in fact, suppresses many of the
tolls, twelve hundred in 1724, and the suppression is kept up. A
good many still remain to the profit of the seignior,--on bridges, on
highways, on fords, on boats ascending or descending, several being very
lucrative, one of them producing 90,000 livres[1225]. He pays for the
expense of keeping up bridge, road, ford and towpath. In like manner,
on condition of maintaining the market-place and of providing scales and
weights gratis, he levies a tax on provisions and on merchandise brought
to his fair or to his market.--At Angouleme a forty-eighth of the grain
sold, at Combourg near Saint-Malo, so much per head of cattle, elsewhere
so much on wine, eatables and fish[1226] Having formerly built the
oven, the winepress, the mill and the slaughterhouse, he obliges the
inhabitants to use these or pay for their support, and he demolishes all
constructions, which might enter into competition with him[1227]. These,
again, are evidently monopolies and octrois going back to the time when
he was in possession of public authority.

Not only did he then possess the public authority but also possessed the
soil and the men on it. Proprietor of men, he is so still, at least
in many respects and in many provinces. "In Champagne proper, in
the Senonais, in la Marche, in the Bourbonnais, in the Nivernais, in
Burgundy, in Franche-Comte, there are none, or very few domains, no
signs remaining of ancient servitude. . . . A good many personal
serfs, or so constituted through their own gratitude, or that of their
progenitors, are still found."[1228] There, man is a serf, sometimes by
virtue of his birth, and again through a territorial condition. Whether
in servitude, or as mortmains, or as cotters, one way or another,
1,500,000 individuals, it is said, wore about their necks a remnant of
the feudal collar; this is not surprising since, on the other side
of the Rhine, almost all the peasantry still wear it. The seignior,
formerly master and proprietor of all their goods and chattels and of
all their labor, can still exact of them from ten to twelve corvees per
annum and a fixed annual tax. In the barony of Choiseul near Chaumont in
Champagne, "the inhabitants are required to plow his lands, to sow and
reap them for his account and to put the