g but coarse black bread, but cherishing the little treasure
in his breast on which he builds so many hopes, he watches for the
opportunity which never fails to come. "In spite of privileges," writes
a gentleman in 1755,[5146] "the nobles are daily being ruined and
reduced, the Third-Estate making all the fortunes." A number of
domains, through forced or voluntary sales, thus pass into the hands
of financiers, of men of the quill, of merchants, and of the well-to-do
bourgeois. Before undergoing this total dispossession, however, the
seignior, involved in debt, is evidently resigned to partial alienation
of his property. The peasant who has bribed the steward is at hand with
his hoard. "It is poor property, my lord, and it costs you more than you
get from it." This may refer to an isolated patch, one end of a field or
meadow, sometimes a farm whose farmer pays nothing, and generally worked
by a metayer whose wants and indolence make him an annual expense to his
master. The latter may say to himself that the alienated parcel is not
lost, since, some day or other, through his right of repurchase, he may
take it back, while, in the meantime, he enjoys a cens, drawbacks,
and the lord's dues. Moreover, there is on his domain and around him,
extensive open spaces which the decline of cultivation and depopulation
have left a desert. To restore the value of this he must surrender its
proprietorship. There is no other way by which to attach man permanently
to the soil. And the government helps him along in this matter.
Obtaining no revenue from the abandoned soil, it assents to a
provisional withdrawal of its too weighty hand. By the edict of 1766,
a piece of cleared waste land remains free of the taille for fifteen
years, and, thereupon, in twenty-eight provinces 400,000 arpents are
cleared in three years[5147].

This is the mode by which the seigniorial domain gradually crumbles away
and decreases. Towards the last, in many places, with the exception
of the chateau and the small adjoining farm which brings in 2 or
3000 francs a year, nothing is left to the seignior but his feudal
dues;[5148] the rest of the soil belongs to the peasantry. Forbonnais
already remarks, towards 1750, that many of the nobles and of the
ennobled "reduced to extreme poverty but with titles to immense
possessions," have sold off portions to small cultivators at low prices,
and often for the amount of the taille. Towards 1760, one-quarter of the
soil is