to grind their corn at the landlord’s mill, bake their bread in his ovens, and carry their grapes to his wine-press.  They had not the benefit of schools, or of institutions which would enable them to improve their minds.  They could not rise above the miserable condition in which they were born, or even make their complaints heard.  Feudalism, in all its social distinctions, and in all its oppressive burdens, crushed them as with an iron weight, or bound them as with iron fetters.  This weight they could not throw off, these fetters they could not break.  There was no alternative but in submission,—­forced submission to overwhelming taxes, robberies, insults, and injustice, both from landed proprietors and the officers of the crown.

Those, however, who lived upon the unrequited toil of the people lived out of sight of their sorrows,—­not in beautiful chateaux, as their ancestors did, by the side of placid rivers and on the skirts of romantic forests, or amid vineyards and olive-groves, but in the capital or the court.  Here, like Roman senators of old, they squandered the money which they had obtained by extortion and corruption of every sort.  Amid the palaces of Versailles they displayed all the vanities of dress, all the luxuries of their favored life.  Here, as lesser stars, they revolved around the great central orb of regal splendor, proud to belong to another world than that in which the plebeian millions toiled and suffered.  At Versailles they attempted to ignore their own humanity, to forget their most pressing duties, and to despise the only pursuits which could have elevated their minds or warmed their hearts.

But they were not great feudal nobles, like the Guises and the Epernons, such as combined to awe even regal power under the House of Valois,—­men who could coin money and exercise judicial authority in their own domain,—­but timid and subservient courtiers, as embarrassed in their affairs as was the King himself.  Nevertheless, many of the ancient privileges of feudalism were enjoyed by them.  They were exempt from many taxes which oppressed merchants and farmers; they alone were appointed to command in the army and navy; they alone were made prelates and dignitaries in the Church; they were comparatively free from arrest when their crimes were against society and God rather than the government; they were distinguished from the plebeian class by dress as well as by privileges; and they only had access to court and a share in the plunder of the kingdom.  Craving greater excitements than that which even Versailles afforded, they built, in the Faubourg St. Germain, those magnificent hotels which are still the dreary but imposing monuments of aristocratic pride; and here they plunged into every form of excess and folly for which Paris has always been distinguished.  But it was in their splendid equipages, and in their boxes at the opera, that they displayed the most striking contrast to the habits of the plebeian people with whom they were surrounded.