their full weight to the king, "if the Parliament will consent to point
out to me of itself any other means of readily raising the sum of one
hundred and twenty thousand livres, which the king absolutely cannot do
without." The struggle was prolonged until the Parliament declared "that
it could not, without offending God and betraying its own conscience,
proceed to the registration; but that if it were the king's pleasure to
be obeyed at any price, he had only to depute his chancellor or some
other great personage, in whose presence and on whose requirement the
registration should take place." Chancellor Duprat did not care to
undertake this commission in person. Count de St. Pol, governor of
Paris, was charged with it, and the court caused to be written at the
bottom of the letters of command, "Read and published in presence of
Count de St. Pol, specially deputed for this purpose, who ordered viva
voce, in the king's name, that they be executed."

Thus began to be implanted in that which should be the most respected and
the most independent amongst the functions of government, namely, the
administration of justice, not only the practice, but the fundamental
maxim, of absolute government. "I am going to the court, and I will
speak the truth; after which the king will have to be obeyed," was said
in the middle of the seventeenth century by the premier president Mold to
Cardinal de Retz. Chancellor Duprat, if we are not mistaken, was, in the
sixteenth century, the first chief of the French magistracy to make use
of language despotic not only in fact, but also in principle. President
Mole was but the head of a body invested, so far as the king was
concerned, with the right of remonstrance and resistance; when once that
right was exercised, he might, without servility, give himself up to
resignation. Chancellor Duprat was the delegate, the organ, the
representative of the king; it was in the name of the king himself that
he affirmed the absolute power of the kingship and the absolute duty of