Let us complete this survey. Let us now consider the middle classes as distinguished from the people, just as we have previously considered the nobility as distinguished from the middle classes.[42] We shall discover in this small portion of the French nation, thus set apart from the rest, infinite subdivisions. It seems as if the people of France was like those pretended simple substances in which modern chemistry perpetually detects new elements by the force of its analysis. I have discovered not less than thirty-six distinct bodies among the notables of one small town. These distinct bodies, though already very diminutive, were constantly employed in reducing each other to still narrower dimensions. They were perpetually throwing off the heterogeneous particles they might still contain, so as to reduce themselves to the most simple elements. Some of them were reduced by this elaborate process to no more than three or four members, but their personality only became more intense and their tempers more contentious. All of them were separated from each other by some diminutive privileges, the least honourable of which was still a mark of honour. Between them raged incessant disputes for precedency. The Intendant, and even the Courts of Justice, were distracted by their quarrels. ‘It has just been decided that holy-water is to be offered to the magistrates (_le présidial_) before it is offered to the corporation. The Parliament hesitated, but the King has called up the affair to his Council, and decided it himself. It was high time; this question had thrown the whole town into a ferment.’ If one of these bodies obtained precedency over another in the general Assembly of Notables, the latter instantly withdrew, and preferred abandoning altogether the public business of the community rather than submit to an outrage on his dignity.--The body of periwig-makers of the town of La Flèche decided ‘that it would express in this manner its well-founded grief occasioned by the precedency which had been granted to the bakers.’ A portion of the notables of another town obstinately refused to perform their office, because, as the Intendant reported, ‘some artisans have been introduced into the Assembly, with whom the principal burgesses cannot bear to associate.’ ‘If the place of sheriff,’ said the Intendant of another province, ‘be given to a notary, the other notables will be disgusted, as the notaries are here men of no birth, not being of the families of the notables, and all of them having been clerks.’ The ‘six best citizens,’ whom I have already mentioned, and who so readily decided that the people ought to be deprived of their political rights, were singularly perplexed when they had to determine who the notables were to be, and what order of precedency was to be established amongst them. In such a strait they presume only to express their doubts, fearing, as they said, ‘to cause to some of their fellow-citizens too sensible a mortification.’