Capets are descended from a Parisian butcher. In any event the noble
of that epoch is the brave, the powerful man, expert in the use of
arms, who, at the head of a troop, instead of flying or paying ransom,
offers his breast, stands firm, and protects a patch of the soil with
his sword. To perform this service he has no need of ancestors; all
that he requires is courage, for he is himself an ancestor; security
for the present, which he insures, is too acceptable to permit any
quibbling about his title.-Finally, after so many centuries, we find
each district possessing its armed men, a settled body of troops
capable of resisting nomadic invasion; the community is no longer a
prey to strangers. At the end of a century this Europe, which had been
sacked by the Vikings, is to throw 200,000 armed men into Asia.
Henceforth, both north and south, in the face of Moslems and of
pagans, instead of being conquered it is to conquer. For the second
time an ideal figure becomes apparent after that of the saint,[10]
the hero; and the newborn sentiment, as effective as the old one, thus
groups men together into a stable society. -This consists of a
resident corps of men-at-arms, in which, from father to son, one is
always a soldier. Each individual is born into it with his hereditary
rank, his local post, his pay in landed property, with the certainty
of never being abandoned by his chieftain, and with the obligation of
giving his life for his chieftain in time of need. In this epoch of
perpetual warfare only one set-up is valid, that of a body of men
confronting the enemy, and such is the feudal system; we can judge by
this trait alone of the perils which it wards off, and of the service
which it enjoins. "In those days," says the Spanish general chronicle,
"kings, counts, nobles, and knights, in order to be ready at all
hours, kept their horses in the rooms in which they slept with their
wives." The viscount in his tower defending the entrance to a valley
or the passage of a ford, the marquis thrown as a forlorn hope on the