goes on expanding until it becomes an uproar, which the old and the new spirit, feudal ideas and philosophic ideas, threaten in unison.  “I see,” said the bailiff of Mirabeau,[22] “that the nobility is demeaning itself and becoming a wreck.  It is extended to all those children of bloodsuckers, the vagabonds of finance, introduced by La Pompadour, herself the spring of this foulness.  One portion of it demeans itself in its servility to the court; the other portion is amalgamated with that quill-driving rabble who are converting the blood of the king’s subjects into ink; another perishes stifled beneath vile robes, the ignoble atoms of cabinet-dust which an office drags up out of the mire ;” and all, parvenus of the old or of the new stock, form a band called the court, ’The court!” exclaims D’Argenson.  “The entire evil is found in this word, The court has become the senate of the nation; the least of the valets at Versailles is a senator; chambermaids take part in the government, if not to legislate, at least to impede laws and regulations; and by dint of hindrance there are no longer either laws, or rules, or law-makers. . . .  Under Henry IV courtiers remained each one at home; they had not entered into ruinous expenditure to belong to the court; favors were not thus due to them as at the present day. . .  The court is the sepulcher of the nation.”  Many noble officers, finding that high grades are only for courtiers, abandon the service, and betake themselves with their discontent to their estates.  Others, who have not left their domains, brood there in discomfort, idleness, and ennui, their ambition embittered by their powerlessness.  In 1789, says the Marquis de Ferrières, most of them “are so weary of the court and of the ministers, they are almost democrats.”  At least, “they want to withdraw the government from the ministerial oligarchy in whose hands it is concentrated;” there are no grand seigniors for deputies; they set them aside and “absolutely reject them, saying that they would traffic with the interests of the nobles;” they themselves, in their registers, insist that there be no more court nobility.

The same sentiments prevail among the lower clergy, and still more actively; for they are excluded from the high offices, not only as inferiors, but also as commoner.[23] Already, in 1766, the Marquis de Mirabeau writes:  “It would be an insult to most of our pretentious ecclesiastics to offer them a curacy.  Revenues and honors are for the abbés-commendatory, for tonsured beneficiaries not in orders, for the numerous chapters (of nobility).”  On the contrary, “the true pastors of souls, the collaborators in the holy ministry, scarcely obtain a subsistence.”  The first class “drawn from the nobility and from the best of the bourgeoisie have pretensions only, without being of the true ministry.  The other, only having duties to fulfill without expectations and almost without income . . . can be recruited only from the lowest ranks of civil society,”