Thus the anarchy of the tenth and eleventh centuries was the chaotic period of France. Out of that abyss first rose the feudal oligarchy,—a state of orderly disorder. Then succeeded the Capetian despotism, destined to crush, one by one, the countless feudal privileges, whether legislative, administrative, or judicial. When the iron grasp of “royalty” had subdued and conquered them all, then “royalty,” in the midst of the triumphs she had won, presented herself to the nation in the person of Louis XIV., the king _par excellence_, the _one_ gigantic privilege, the conqueror and survivor of all the rest. This was the golden age of kings. The crown was everything; the people, nothing. Robbed under the name of custom and of law, the peasants toiled joylessly from the cradle to the grave. Their sons were sent to strew Europe with their bodies, in wars undertaken at the nod of a courtesan. Their wives and daughters were torn from them; and for the purpose of supporting lascivious, and riotous splendor, of building _Parcs aux Cerfs_, of pensioning discarded favorites, and of enriching corrupt minions of every stamp, they were taxed,—so taxed that the light and air of heaven hardly came to them free; and, sunk in the dregs of indigence, a short crop compelled them to live on food that the hounds of their taskmasters would reject; and, finally, when in their agony they asked some mitigation of their hard fate, they were answered by the bayonets of foreign mercenaries. “And a people,—stout manhood, gentle womanhood, gray-haired age, and tender infancy, might turn their pale faces upward and shriek for food, while fierce, licentious nobles would scornfully bid them eat grass.” Such was the condition of the greater part of the French people during the reign of that vilest of monarchs, King Louis XV. “Royalty” had sinned right royally. Right royally must “royalty” atone for it. And the guillotine upon the Place de la Concorde was but the expiation of St. Bartholomew, of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and of the _Parc aux Cerfs_. And though we know that a people, crushed and downtrodden, are striving to free themselves from lawless oppression, we cannot but sympathize with Marie Antoinette, through no fault of her own made queen of France, to reap the whirlwind of wicked deeds sown by her husband’s royal ancestors. Frederick the Great, amid the battle-smoke at Sohr, or Napoleon, upon the ensanguined field of Waterloo, never struggled harder in support of their respective causes, than did she, in the _salons_ of Versailles and the Tuileries, to sustain the falling monarchy.