[13] De Tocqueville considers the feudal system in France in many points more oppressive than that of Germany.—­Ancien Regime, p. 43.

[14] Silence des grenouilles.  Arthur Young, “Travels in France during 1787, ’88, ’89,” p. 537.  It is singular proof how entirely research into the condition of the country and the people of France had been neglected both by its philosophers and its statesmen, that there does not seem to have been any publication in the language which gave information on these subjects.  And this work of Mr. Young’s is the one to which modern French writers, such as M. Alexis de Tocqueville, chiefly refer.

[15] “The lettres de cachet were carried to an excess hardly credible; to the length of being sold, with blanks, to be filled up with names at the pleasure of the purchaser, who was thus able, in the gratification of private revenge, to tear a man from the bosom of his family, and bury him in a dungeon, where he would exist forgotten and die unknown.”—­A.  Young, p. 532.  And in a note he gives an instance of an Englishman, named Gordon, who was imprisoned in the Bastile for thirty years without even knowing the reason of his arrest.

[16] Arthur Young, writing January 10th, 1790, identifies Les Enrages with the club afterward so infamous as the Jacobins.  “The ardent democrats who have the reputation of being so much republican in principle that they do not admit any political necessity for having even the name of the king, are called the Enrages.  They have a meeting at the Jacobins’, the Revolution Club which assembles every night in the very room in which the famous League was formed in the reign of Henry III.” (p. 267).

[17] M. Droz asserts that a collector of such publications bought two thousand five hundred in the last three months of 1788, and that his collection was far from complete.—­Histoire de Louis XVI., ii., p. 180.

[18] “Tout auteur s’erige en legislateur.”—­Memorial of the Princes to the King, quoted in a note to the last chapter of Sismondi’s History, p. 551, Brussels ed., 1849.

[19] In reality the numbers were even more in favor of the Commons:  the representatives of the clergy were three hundred and eight, and those of the nobles two hundred and eighty-five, making only five hundred and ninety-three of the two superior orders, while the deputies of the Tiers-Etat were six hundred and twenty-one.—­Souvenirs de la Marquise de Crequy, vii., p. 58.

[20] “Se levant alors, ‘Non,’ dit le roi, ’ce ne peut etre qu’a Versailles, a cause des chasses.’”—­LOUIS BLANC, ii., p. 212, quoting Barante.

[21] “La reine adopta ce dernier avis [that the States should meet forty or sixty leagues from the capital], et elle insista aupres du roi que l’on s’eloignat de l’immense population de Paris.  Elle craignait des lors que le peuple n’influencat les deliberations des deputes.”—­MADAME DE CAMPAN, ch 83.