The melancholy interest which surrounds a deathbed attaches to this the last meeting of the States-General of monarchical France. [Sidenote: =Meeting of the States-General, 1614.=] The Estates assembled at Paris on the 14th of October 1614, according to their three orders. There appeared 140 representatives of the clergy, 132 of the noblesse, 192 of the Tiers État, but these last were not in any real sense representatives of the commonalty of France. The name of a merchant or a farmer or a small landowner does not appear among them. They were for the most part of the official and professional classes, officers of the petty districts into which France was divided, financial and municipal officers, with a sprinkling of lawyers and citizens, and they at once assumed the rôle which their composition marked out for them, and organised themselves as the official order in opposition to the other orders of the clergy and the noblesse. [Sidenote: =Quarrels between the orders.=] From the beginning the jealousy of the three orders among themselves, and the fatal determination of the Tiers État to defend the privileges of their own official class against the nobles, instead of urging the grievances of the country upon the Crown, rendered the possibility of obtaining any real check upon the Crown absolutely hopeless. The nobles not unnaturally looked with jealous eyes on the gradual formation of an hereditary privileged class of officials, by means of the purchase of offices and the right of transmission secured by the _paulette_, which could not fail to grow in a little time into a second noblesse, and they directed their efforts mainly to procuring the abolition of purchase in the civil services. The Tiers État on their side, numbering as they did but comparatively few of the privileged ‘exempt’ among their ranks, fixed their eyes on the inordinate pensions enjoyed by the great nobles, and demanded the abolition of the pension list and the reduction of the _taille_. This was to hit the nobles in their weakest place, and the contention between the two orders became so keen that the court had to interfere and bring about a reconciliation. Hardly however had the Tiers État finished their controversy with the nobles, than they became involved in a quarrel with the clergy. The magistracy, especially the lawyers, were strongly Gallican in their views of ecclesiastical government, that is, they maintained the right of the national authorities to govern the Church in France in all matters which were not directly spiritual in their nature, and repudiated interference from the Pope. Especially they disliked the Jesuits, and wished to avoid the recognition of the decrees of the Council of Trent, which had not as yet been formally accepted by France. The Tiers État accordingly drew up an article in their _cahier_, or list of grievances, which, under the form of asserting the right divine of the French kings, and denouncing the crime of regicide,