tienne, proposed that their personal
liberty should be subject to a special kind of imprisonment at the
prayer of their relations, or in other words to a regular 'lettre de
cachet.'

It is a curious illustration, by the way, of the incapacity of this
National Assembly that in July 1789 its Committee for framing a
Constitution actually invited a foreign envoy, Jefferson, to take part
with them in their work. Jefferson had sense enough to decline the
invitation; but what gleam of sense, political or other, had the
blundering tinkers who gave it? The outcome of their gabble was that mob
violence destroyed for Paris in the Bastille what London possesses in
the Tower, an 'architectural document' of the highest authenticity and
importance. To talk of French feudalism as having been overthrown by
such men is absurd. If it had existed when they met, it would have very
soon sent them about their business. But it did not exist when they met.
The author of the curious _Precis d'une Histoire Generale de la Vie
Privee des Francais_, published in 1779, treats the whole subject of the
private life, homes, manners, and fortunes of the French people
expressly from the point of view of the great change which had come over
them, 'since the abolition of feudalism.' The magnanimous achievement of
the Vicomte de Noailles ought to rank in history with the victory of Don
Quixote over the wine-skins, or with the revolutionary feat of that
drum-major of the National Guard who slashed with his sabre the corpse
of the unfortunate procureur-syndic Bayeux, lying battered to death in
the Place des Tribunaux at Caen, on September 6, 1792, and whom the
honest Normans of the Calvados afterwards kicked out of the city as 'fit
only for killing dead men.'

Even in the chateaux of the end of the sixteenth century and the
beginning of the seventeenth we get unanswerable architectural evidence
to show a steady improvement in the social relations of the people with
the noblesse. The Chateau d'Eu, for example, in the Seine-Inferieure, in
which Louis Philippe entertained Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, and
from which the Comte de Paris and his family were so lawlessly expelled
in 1886, was a true fortress in the days when the Norman princes and
their armies went and came between England and France, and Treport saw
many an armada. But in the fourteenth century we find Raoul de Brienne,
Comte d'Eu, confirming to the people of Eu the immunity of their cattle,
b