At James's time Bar was still a rather considerable provincial capital, the _chef-lieu_ of the largest _bailliage_ in Lorraine. And in that little "West End" of the _Haute Ville_, where a cluster of Louis-Quatorze houses still stand in decayed grandeur, to recall past fashionableness, the nobility of the little Barrois, locally always a powerful and influential body--the Bassompierres, the Haraucourts, the Lenoncourts, the Stainvilles, the Romécourts--had their town houses, and there also dwelt the pick of the bureaucracy, all ready to pay their court to the Stuart "king," to whom even the French envoy reckoned it "an honour" to be introduced. The town had its own municipal government--at one time with its own _clergé_, _noblesse_, and _tiers état_; in James's day still with its _syndic_, to represent the Crown, its elected _mayeur_, _Maître des Comptes_, so many _eschargeots_, _esvardeurs_, _gouverneurs de carrefours_, and so on. It had a wall all round with no fewer than eleven gates. When James was there, Bar was famed throughout France and Lorraine for its peculiarly "elegant" _poignées d'épée_ (sword-hilts) and other cutlery. Corneille tells us that the whole street of Entre Deux Ponts was full of cutlers' shops, and no visitor ever came to the place but he must carry off at least one sword-hilt as a keepsake. The town already manufactured its famous _dragées_ and _confitures_, and pressed that same sour wine which "Murray" will have it--on what ground I know not--"resembles champagne," and which then was appreciated as a delicacy. The sanitary arrangements were not perfect. The _Canal Urbain_ occasionally overflowed its banks and swamped the entire Rue des Tanneurs, in which the Pretender's house was situated. And, together with the rest of Bar and Lorraine, the town was still a little bit destitute after the havoc wrought by French and Swedes, Croats and Germans, _Cravates_ (local brigands) and Champenois peasants, and all that "omnium bipedum sceleratissima colluvies," which had again and again overrun the duchy, robbing, burning, pillaging, violating, desecrating, torturing, exacting, and sucking the country dry to the very bone. Of all the world "only Jerusalem" had experienced worse horrors, so a pious Lorrain chronicler affirms. Oh, how the Lorrains of that day--and long after--hated and detested the French! When in November, 1714, those habitual invaders at length evacuated Nancy, the mob dressed up a straw figure in a French uniform, and led it forth amid jeers and execrations to an _auto-da-fé_. Even after annexation, a Nancy housewife declared herself most grossly "insulted" by a French officer, who simply explained the benefits which he thought that annexation must bring with it, and in anger she threw the _friture_, just frizzling in her pan, straight in his face.