Thus is the feudal staff wholly transformed, from the lowest to the highest grades. Taking in at one glance its 30 or 40,000 palaces, mansions, manors and abbeys, what a brilliant and engaging scene France presents! She is one vast drawing-room, and I detect only drawing room company. Everywhere the rude chieftains once possessing authority have become the masters of households administering favors. Their society is that in which, before fully admiring a great general, the question is asked, "is he amiable?" Undoubtedly they still wear swords, and are brave through pride and tradition, and they know how to die, especially in duels and according to form. But worldly traits have hidden the ancient military groundwork; at the end of the eighteenth century their genius is to be wellbred and their employment consists in entertaining or in being entertained. ***** NOTES: [Footnote 2101: "Mémoires de Laporte" (1632). "M. d'Epernon came to Bordeaux, where he found His Eminence very ill. He visited him regularly every morning, having two hundred guards to accompany him to the door of his chamber."--"Mémoires de Retz." "We came to the audience, M. de Beaufort and myself; with a corps of nobles which might number three hundred gentlemen; MM. the princes had with them nearly a thousand gentlemen."--All the memoirs of the time show on every page that these escorts were necessary to make or repel sudden attacks.] [Footnote 2102: Mercier, "Tableau de Paris." IX. 3.] [Footnote 2103: Leroi, "Histoire de Versailles," Il. 21. (70,000 fixed population and 10,000 floating population according to the registers of the mayoralty.)] [Footnote 2104: Warroquier, "Etat de la France" (1789). The list of persons presented at court between 1779 and 1789, contains 463 men and 414 women. Vol. II. p. 515.] [Footnote 2105: People were run over almost every day in Paris by the fashionable vehicles, it being the habit of the great to ride very fast.] [Footnote 2106: 153,222,827 livres, 10 sous, 3 deniers. ( "Souvenirs d'un page de la cour de Louis XVI.," by the Count d'Hézecques, p. 142.)--In 1690, before the chapel and the theater were constructed, it had already cost 100,000,000, (St. Simon, XII. 514. Memoirs of Marinier, clerk of the king's buildings.)] [Footnote 2107: Museum of Engravings, National Library. "Histoire de France par estampes," passim, and particularly the plans and views of Versailles, by Aveline; also, "the drawing of a collation given by M. le Prince in the Labyrinth of Chantilly," Aug. 29, 1687.] [Footnote 2108: Memoirs, I. 221. He was presented at court February 19, 1787.] [Footnote 2109: For these details cf. Warroquier, vol. I. passim.--Archives imperiales, O1, 710 bis, the king's household, expenditure of 1771.--D'Argenson, February 25, 1752.--In 1772 three millions are expended on the installation of the Count d'Artois. A suite of rooms for Mme. Adelaide cost 800,000 livres.]