The Government and the Ministers of the Crown looked, however, with an unfavourable eye on these provincial liberties. Richelieu had first mutilated and afterwards abolished them. The spiritless and indolent Louis XIII., who loved nothing, detested them; the horror he felt for all provincial privileges was such, said Boulainvilliers, that his anger was excited by the mere name of them. It is hard to sound the hatred of feeble souls for whatever compels them to exert themselves. All that they retain of manhood is turned in that direction, and they exhibit strength in their animosity, however weak they may be in everything else. Fortunately the ancient constitution of Languedoc was restored under the minority of Louis XIV., who consequently respected it as his own work. Louis XV. suspended it for a couple of years, but afterwards allowed it to go on. The creation of municipal offices for sale exposed the constitution of the province to dangers less direct, but not less formidable. That pernicious institution not only destroyed the constitution of the towns; it tended to vitiate that of the provinces. I know not whether the deputies of the commons in the Provincial Assemblies had ever been elected _ad hoc_, but at any rate they had long ceased to be so; the municipal officers of the towns were _ex officio_ the sole representatives of the burgesses and the people in those bodies. This absence of a direct constituency acting with reference to the affairs of the day was but little remarked as long as the towns freely elected their own magistrates by universal suffrage, and generally for a very limited period. Thus the mayor, the council, or the syndic represented the wishes of the population in the Hall of the Estates as faithfully as if they had been elected by their fellow-citizens for that purpose. But very different was the case with a civic officer who had purchased for money the right of governing. Such an officer represented no one but himself, or, at best, the petty interests or the petty passions of his own coterie. Yet this magistrate by contract retained the powers which had been exercised by his elected predecessors. The character of the institution was, therefore, immediately changed. The nobles and the clergy, instead of having the representatives of the people sitting with them or opposite to them in the Provincial Assembly, met there none but a few isolated, timid, and powerless burgesses, and thus the commons occupied a more subordinate place in the government at the very time when they were every day becoming richer and stronger in society. This was not the case in Languedoc, the province having always taken care to buy up these offices as fast as they were established by the Crown. The loan contracted by the States for this purpose, in the year 1773 only, amounted to more than four millions of livres.