great people. Of course the chateau
has been much restored during the present century, but its general
disposition is what it was in 1789, and, like that of all the French
chateaux of the eighteenth century, it attests the friendly relations
which must have existed before the Revolution between the _chateau_ and
the _chaumiere_. The English mansions even of the time of Queen Anne are
more defensible than these _chateaux_. The windows, of the sort which to
this day are called French windows in England and America, are long
windows opening like doors. On the ground floor they come down, indeed,
nearly to the level of the lawn. It is perfectly obvious that no thought
of a war of classes can have entered the minds of the architects who
planned these edifices or of the owners for whom they were planned. Yet
the problems of government which we imagine to be of our own times had
been hotly discussed and were hotly discussing when these edifices were
built. The ideas, not of Villegardelle only, but of Proudhon, were put
forth in germ by De la Jonchere in 1720, in his 'Plan of a New
Government.' The Chateau de Broglie resembles a feudal castle of the
fourteenth or even of the sixteenth century no more than it resembles a
Roman villa of the first century. The magnificent liberality with which
the Vicomte de Noailles, himself a younger son, gave away all the feudal
rights and privileges of the _noblesse_ on the night of August 4, 1789,
has always, I am sorry to say, reminded me irresistibly of the patriotic
ardour with which Mr. Artemus Ward devoted to the battle-field of
freedom the remotest cousins of his wife. The evidence is overwhelming
which goes to show that these feudal rights and privileges were
practically no more oppressive in the France of 1789 than they were in
the England of 1830. It is not even clear that the New York anti-renters
of our time had not as good a case for ridding themselves of 'feudal'
rights and privileges by storming the Capitol at Albany as the people of
France for ridding themselves of those rights and privileges by storming
the practically defenceless Bastille. The Bastille interfered no more
with the liberty of Paris in 1789 than the Tower with the liberty of
London. The only people in any particular peril of it were the 'black
sheep' of the _noblesse_, as to whom even Jefferson, in the sketch of a
charter of French Rights which he drew up in June 1789 and sent to
Lafayette and the bookseller St.-E