their use. If he is intelligent and a good manager of men, if he seeks
to derive the greatest profit from his ground, he gradually relaxes,
or allows to become relaxed, the meshes of the net in which his
peasants and serfs work unprofitably because they are too tightly
drawn. Habits, necessity, a voluntary or forced conformity, have their
effect. Lords, peasants, serfs, and bourgeois, in the end adapted to
their condition, bound together by a common interest, form together a
society, a veritable corporation. The seigniory, the county, the duchy
becomes a patrimony which is loved through a blind instinct, and to
which all are devoted. It is confounded with the seignior and his
family; in this relation people are proud of him. They narrate his
feats of arms; they cheer him as his cavalcade passes along the
street; they rejoice in his magnificence through sympathy.[13] If he
becomes a widower and has no children, they send deputations to him to
entreat him to remarry, in order that at his death the country may not
fall into a war of succession or be given up to the encroachment of
neighbors. Thus there is a revival, after a thousand years, of the
most powerful and the most vivacious of the sentiments that support
human society. This one is the more precious because it is capable of
expanding. In order that the small feudal patrimony to become the
great national patrimony, it now suffices for the seigniories to be
combined in the hands of a single lord, and that the king, chief of
the nobles, should overlay the work of the nobles with the third
foundation of France.

III. Services and Recompenses of the King.

Kings built the whole of this foundation, one stone after
another. Hugues Capet laid the first one. Before him royalty conferred
on the King no right to a province, not even Laon; it is he who added