Thus they regarded a man who had been ennobled by a royal decree, or who had descended from a father or a grandfather thus ennobled, as a new man, an upstart, one hardly redeemed from contempt. The doors of their saloons were closed against him, and he was every where exposed to mortifying neglect. A noble whose lineage could be traced for two or three centuries, but whose origin was still _distinctly defined_, was considered as perhaps belonging to the aristocratic calendar, though of low estate. The fact that the time once was, when his ancestors were known to be low-born, was a damaging fact, which no subsequent ages of nobility could entirely efface. He only was the true noble, the origin of whose nobility was lost in the depths of the past, the line of whose ancestry ran so far back into the obscurity of by-gone ages that no one could tell when it commenced. It has generally been said that there were three estates in the realm; the clergy composing the first, the nobles the second, and the people the third. But the higher class of the clergy, luxuriating in the bishoprics and the abbacies, with their rich emoluments, were the sons of the nobility, and shared in all the privileges and popular odium pertaining to that class. The lower clergy, devoted to apostolic labors and poverty, belonged to the people, and were with them in all their sympathies. Thus there were in reality but two classes, the _privileged_ and the _unprivileged_, the _patrician_ and the _plebeian_, the _tax payer_ and the _tax receiver_. The castle, whether baronial or monastic in its architecture, was the emblem of the one, the thatched cottage the symbol of the other. Louis XIV., as Madame de Maintenon testifies, was _shocked_ to learn that Jesus Christ associated with the poor and the humble, and conversed freely with them.