portion of them make a sale of these offices." In spite of the edict of 1693, the judges thus appointed take no steps to be admitted into the royal courts and they take no oaths. "What is the result? Justice, too often administered by knaves, degenerates into brigandage or into a frightful impunity."--Ordinarily the seignior who sells the office on a financial basis, deducts, in addition, the hundredth, the fiftieth, the tenth of the price, when it passes into other hands; and at other times he disposes of the survivorship. He creates these offices and survivorships purposely to sell them. "All the seigniorial courts, say the registers, are infested with a crowd of officials of every description, seigniorial sergeants, mounted and unmounted officers, keepers of the provostship of the funds, guards of the constabulary. It is by no means rare to find as many as ten in an arrondissement which could hardly maintain two if they confined themselves within the limits of their duties." Also "they are at the same time judges, attorneys, fiscal-attorneys, registrars, notaries," each in a different place, each practicing in several seigniories under various titles, all perambulating, all in league like thieves at a fair, and assembling together in the taverns to plan, prosecute and decide. Sometimes the seignior, to economize, confers the title on one of his own dependents: "At Hautemont, in Hainaut, the fiscal-attorney is a domestic." More frequently he nominates some starveling advocate of a petty village in the neighborhood on wages which would not suffice to keep him alive a week." He indemnifies himself out of the peasants. Processes of chicanery, delays and willful complications in the proceedings, sittings at three livres the hour for the advocate and three livres the hour for the bailiff. The black brood of judicial leeches suck so much the more eagerly, because the more numerous, a still more scrawny prey, having paid for the privilege of sucking it.[1351] The arbitrariness, the corruption, the laxity of such a régime can be divined. "Impunity," says Renauldon, "is nowhere greater than in the seigniorial tribunals. . . . The foulest crimes obtain no consideration there," for the seignior dreads supplying the means for a criminal trial, while his judges or prosecuting attorneys fear that they will not be paid for their proceedings. Moreover, his jail is often a cellar under the chateau; "there is not one tribunal out of a hundred in conformity with the law in respect of prisons;" their keepers shut their eyes or stretch out their hands. Hence it is that "his estates become the refuge of all the scoundrels in the canton." The effect of his indifference is terrible and it is to react against him: to-morrow, at the club, the attorneys whom he has multiplied will demand his head, and the bandits whom he has tolerated will place it on the end of a pike.