aged
and infirm, were obliged to leave Rouen. A commission of fifteen
councillors of the Parliament of Paris came to replace provisionally the
interdicted Parliament of Normandy; and, when the magistrates were
empowered at last to resume their sitting, it was only a six months'
term: that is, the Parliament henceforth found itself divided into two
fragments, perfect strangers one to the other, which were to sit
alternately for six months. "A veritable thunderbolt for that sovereign
court, for by the six months' term," says M. Floquet, "there was no
longer any Parliament, properly speaking, but two phantoms of Parliament,
making war on each other, whilst the government had the field open to
carve and cut without control."

"All obedience is now from fear," wrote Grotius to Oxenstiern, chancellor
of Sweden; "the idea is to exorcise and annihilate hatred by means of
terror." "This year," wrote an inhabitant of Rouen, "there have been no
New Year's presents [_etrennes_], no singing of 'the king's drinking-song
[_le roi boit_], in any house. Little children will be able to tell
tales of it when they have attained to man's estate; for never, these
fifty years past, so far as I can learn, has it been so." [_Journal de
l'Abbe de la Rue_.] The heaviest imposts weighed upon the whole
province, which thus expiated the crime of an insignificant portion of
its inhabitants. "The king shall not lose the value of this handkerchief
that I hold," said the superintendent Bullion, on arriving at Rouen. And
he kept his word: Rouen alone had to pay more than three millions. The
province and its Parliament were henceforth reduced to submission.

It was not only the Parliaments that resisted the efforts of Cardinal
Richelieu to concentrate all the power of the government in the hands of
the king. From the time that the sovereigns had given up convoking the
states-general, the states-provincial had alone preserved the right of
bringing to the foot of the throne the plaints and petitions of subjects.
Unhappily few provinces enjoyed this privilege; Languedoc, Brittany,
Burgundy, Provence, Dauphiny, and the countship of Pau alone were
states-districts, that is to say, allowed to tax themselves
independently and govern themselves to a certain extent. Normandy,
though an elections-district, and, as such, subject to the royal agents
in respect of finance, had states which continued to meet even in 1666.
The states-provincial were always c