It may astonish many who study the records of French history from the eleventh to the fourteenth century, not to find anywhere the words third estate; and a desire may arise to know whether those inquirers of our day who have devoted themselves professedly to this particular study, have been more successful in discovering that grand term at the time when it seems that we ought to expect to meet with it.  The question was, therefore, submitted to a learned member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, M. Littre, in fact, whose Dictionnaire etymologique de la Langur Francaise is consulted with respect by the whole literary world, and to a young magistrate, M. Picot, to whom the Acacdemie des Sciences morales et politiques but lately assigned the first prize for his great work on the question it had propounded, as to the history and influence of states-general in France; and here are inserted, textually, the answers given by two gentlemen of so much enlightenment and authority upon such a subject.

M. Littre, writing on the 3d of October, 1871, says, “I do not find, in my account of the word, third estate before the sixteenth century.  I quote these two instances of it:  ’As to the third order called third estate . . .’ (La Noue, Discours, p. 541); and ’clerks and deputies for the third estate, same for the estate of labor (laborers).’ (Coustumier general, t. i. p. 335.) In the fifteenth century, or at the end of the fourteenth, in the poems of Eustace Deschamps, I have—­

          ’Prince, dost thou yearn for good old times again? 
          In good old ways the Three Estates restrain.’

“At date of fourteenth century, in Du Cange, we read under the word status, ’Per tres status concilii generalis Praelatorum, Baronum, nobilium et universitatum comitatum.’ According to these documents, I think it is in the fourteenth century that they began to call the three orders tres status, and that it was only in the sixteenth century that they began to speak in French of the tiers estat (third estate).  But I cannot give this conclusion as final, seeing that it is supported only by the documents I consulted for my dictionary.”

M. Picot replied on the 3d of October, 1871, “It is certain that acts contemporary with King John frequently speak of the ‘three estates,’ but do not utter the word tiers-etat (third estate).  The great chronicles and Froissart say nearly always, ’the church-men, the nobles, and the good towns.’  The royal ordinances employ the same terms; but sometimes, in order not to limit their enumeration to the deputies of closed cities, they add, the good towns, and the open country (Ord. t. iii p. 221, note).  When they apply to the provincial estates of the Oil tongue it is the custom to say, the burghers and inhabitants; when it is a question of the Estates of Languedoc, the commonalties of the seneschalty.  Such were, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the only expressions for designating the third order.