[Footnote 2: The expenses of the royal table amounted to nearly three hundred thousand pounds a year.] [Footnote 3: I have taken all these figures from M. Taine's _Ancien Régime_, and have reduced them roughly to their equivalents in English money of our own day. I have, however, throughout calculated the _livre_ at 10_d._, although Arthur Young puts it as high as 10-1/2_d._; so that the amounts in the text are, if anything, understated.] [Footnote 4: One part of the _taille_, that which fell upon the cultivator, reached the privileged orders indirectly through their farmers, but even then there were certain exemptions in their favour. The franc-fief was the tax of one year's revenue levied every twenty years on non-noble holders of noble lands. The calculation of income given here I take from the note on the subject contained in the appendix to M. Taine's volume on the _Ancien Régime_, which is founded on the _procès-verbaux_ of the provincial assemblies. On an income of 100 francs, he estimates the _taille_ (with its accessories), the poll-tax, and the road-tax together, at 42 fr. 15 c.; the two _vingtièmes_ at 11 fr., the tithe at 14 fr. 28 c., and the feudal dues at 14 fr. 28 c.; total 81 fr. 71 c.] CHAPTER II. THE LAST YEARS OF THE ANCIEN RÉGIME. The decay of the old society was accompanied in France by a decay of the ideas which were inseparably associated with it, and which, long kept alive by authoritative sanctions, had exacted, not always without violence, the reverence of men. As the State had usurped the control of every department of action, so the Roman Catholic Church had usurped the control of every department of thought. Resting serenely upon authority and dogma, it had dictated and circumscribed the knowledge of its subjects, had directed their intellectual interests, and had aimed at supplying not only a religion to govern their conduct, but also a complete theory to govern their lives. Against this monopoly, and the conceptions on which it was established, the best minds of the eighteenth century rose in revolt, and their revolt was celebrated by an outbreak of active and intrepid thought. Beginning in the mysterious domain of physical science, with great discoveries in astronomy, chemistry, physics, geology and mathematics, the new spirit of enquiry spread like a flame to illumine other topics. Its votaries, rejecting ancient tradition and immemorial habit, turned with sudden enthusiasm to observation and analysis, and built up for themselves step by step new systems of knowledge, based, not on what their teachers taught them, but on positive facts which they had ascertained and tested for themselves. The vivid curiosity thus aroused woke in them distrust of all preconceived notions, banished the reverent awe which had restrained earlier generations, and broke down the old barriers of belief.