had one truly noble idea of general public business, which
was to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public
business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all
go his way--tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general
and particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the
world was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the
original by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran, "The earth and the
fullness thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur."

Yet Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept into
his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both classes of
affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General. As to finances
public, because Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and
must consequently let them out to somebody who could; as to finances
private, because Farmers-General were rich, and Monseigneur, after
generations of great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence
Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent while there was yet time
to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could wear, and
had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General, poor in
family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with a golden
apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer rooms,
much prostrated before by mankind--always excepting superior mankind of
the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down upon
him with the loftiest contempt.

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his
stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women
waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and
forage where he could, the Farmer-General--howsoever his matrimonial
relations conduced to social morality--was at least the greatest reality
among the personages who attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.

For the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with
every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could
achieve, were in truth not a sound business; considered with any
reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not
so far off, either, but that the watching towers of Notre-Dame, almost
equidistant from the two extremes, could see them both), they would have
been an exceedingly uncomfortable business--if that could have been
anybody's