The French have no word in their language which exactly translates "snob," so they adopt with enthusiasm the English syllable (mispronouncing it fearfully); and this curious weakness in so great a writer and so keen a student of humanity would be even more remarkable if it were not so very common among other civilized people. M. Jules Lemaître, a couple of years ago, read before the five Academies of the Institute a careful study of this particular social class; there were said to be a crowd of amateur playwrights besieging the managers with plays with this title, and the pretentious claimer of things that are not his in the great world, "the great nephew of Mascarille in the _Précieuses ridicules_," was honored with more analysis, comment, and reconstruction than he was probably entitled to. [Illustration: ASSASSINATION OF HENRY IV, RUE DE LA FERRONNERIE, MAY 14, 1610. From a drawing by L. Marold.] In addition to the three great classes that have ruled over France, and which, with the commons or serfs, have been known to almost every European nation, a third class, the _tiers état_, still in process of formation elsewhere on the Continent, but which arose in Paris and other great cities in the thirteenth century, is claimed by the historians of this nation as peculiarly French. Previous to Pepin and Charlemagne, Paris was generally recognized as the capital, though the wandering and barbaric Frankish kings much preferred as places of residence their great country-houses or _villas_, when they were neither hunting nor fighting. The court of Charlemagne, in the later years of his reign, was held at Aix-la-Chapelle, his favorite abode. In 775 he was present at the dedication of the new church of Saint-Denis, and the Parisians are said to have made a _fête_ of the occasion. Louis le Débonnaire, his son, more monk than king, also neglected the city, excepting in the matter of founding churches and increasing the privileges of the clergy. But under the last of the Carlovingian emperors, Charles le Gros, the capital redeemed its right to that title by its gallant defence against the Northmen, or Normans, and its valiant count, Eudes, having brought the sluggish emperor to the heights of Montmartre only to see him conclude an unworthy peace with the invaders, founded himself the first national dynasty when his fat suzerain was deposed in the following year. "One of the greatest figures of the Carlovingian decadence," says M. Faure, in a recent monograph, "he continued the monarchy of Charlemagne without changing anything in the institutions, and he gave a precise form to a power that before him was still undecided, that of duke of the Franks."