the royal treasury; the rest was eaten up by people at the court; his donations to the Comte Artois are estimated at 56,000,000; the portion of Monsieur is 5,000,000; he gave to the Prince de Condé, in exchange for 300,000 livres income, 12,000,000 paid down and 600,000 livres annuity, and he causes the most burdensome acquisition to be made for the State, in exchanges of which the damage is more than five to one." We must not forget that in actual rates all these donations, pensions, and salaries are worth double the amount.--Such is the use of the great in relation to the central power; instead of constituting themselves representatives of the people, they aimed to be the favorites of the Sovereign, and they shear the flock which they ought to preserve. IV. Isolation of the Chiefs--Sentiments of subordinates --Provincial nobility--The Curates. The fleeced flock is to discover finally what is done with its wool. "Sooner or later," says a parliament of 1764,[1421] "the people will learn that the remnants of our finances continue be wasted in donations which are frequently undeserved; in excessive and multiplied pensions for the same persons; in dowries and promises of dowry, and in useless offices and salaries." Sooner or later they will thrust back "these greedy hands which are always open and never full; that insatiable crowd which seems to be born only to seize all and possess nothing, and pitiless as it is shameless."--And when this day arrives the extortioners will find that they stand alone. For the characteristic of an aristocracy which cares only for itself is to live aloof in a closed circle. Having forgotten the public, it also neglects its subordinates; after being separated from the nation it separates itself from its own adherents. Like a group of staff-officers on furlough, it indulges in Sports without giving itself further concern about inferior officers; when the hour of battle comes nobody will march under its orders, and chieftains are sought elsewhere. Such is the isolation of the seigniors of the court and of the prelates among the lower grades of the nobility and the clergy; they appropriate to themselves too large a share, and give nothing, or almost nothing, to the people who are not of their society. For a century a steady murmur against them rising, and 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,[1422] "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