But this compromise succeeded no better than previous compromises.  Even if the nobles had wished to remain quiet, they could not.  Their lordship over a servile class made them independent of all ordinary labor and of all care arising from labor; some exercise of mind and body they must have; Conde soon took this needed exercise by attempting to seize the city of Poitiers, and, when the burgesses were too strong for him, by ravaging the neighboring country.  The other nobles broke the compromise in ways wonderfully numerous and ingenious.  France was again filled with misery.

Dull as Regent Mary was, she now saw that she must call that dreaded States-General, or lose not only the nobles, but the people:  undecided as she was, she soon saw that she must do it at once,—­that, if she delayed it, her great nobles would raise the cry for it, again and again, just as often as they wished to extort office or money.  Accordingly, on the fourteenth of October, 1614, she summoned the deputies of the three estates to Paris, and then the storm set in.

Each of the three orders presented its “portfolio of grievances” and its programme of reforms.  It might seem, to one who has not noted closely the spirit which serf-mastering thrusts into a man, that the nobles would appear in the States-General not to make complaints, but to answer complaints.  So it was not.  The noble order, with due form, entered complaint that theirs was the injured order.  They asked relief from familiarities and assumptions of equality on the part of the people.  Said the Baron de Senece, “It is a great piece of insolence to pretend to establish any sort of equality between the people and the nobility”:  other nobles declared, “There is between them and us as much difference as between master and lackey.”

To match these complaints and theories, the nobles made demands,—­demands that commoners should not be allowed to keep fire-arms,—­nor to possess dogs, unless the dogs were hamstrung,—­nor to clothe themselves like the nobles,—­nor to clothe their wives like the wives of nobles,—­nor to wear velvet or satin under a penalty of five thousand livres.  And, preposterous as such claims may seem to us, they carried them into practice.  A deputy of the Third Estate having been severely beaten by a noble, his demands for redress were treated as absurd.  One of the orators of the lower order having spoken of the French as forming one great family in which the nobles were the elder brothers and the commoners the younger, the nobles made a formal complaint to the King, charging the Third Estate with insolence insufferable.

Next came the complaints and demands of the clergy.  They insisted on the adoption in France of the Decrees of the Council of Trent, and the destruction of the liberties of the Gallican Church.

But far stronger than these came the voice of the people.

First spoke Montaigne, denouncing the grasping spirit of the nobles.  Then spoke Savaron, stinging them with sarcasm, torturing them with rhetoric, crushing them with statements of facts.