Marquis de Mirabeau, "spent too much time over their cups, slept on
old chairs or pallets, mounted and started off to hunt before
daybreak, met together on St. Hubert's, and did not part until after
the octave of St. Martin's. . . . These nobles led a gay and hard
life, voluntarily, costing the State very little, and producing more
through its residence and manure than we of today with our tastes, our
researches, our cholics and our vapors . . The custom, and it may be
said, the obsession of making presents to the seigniors, is well
known. I have, in my lifetime, seen this custom everywhere disappear,
and rightly so . . . . The seigniors are no longer of any consequence
to them; is quite natural that they should be forgotten by them as
they forget . . . . The seignior being no longer known on his estates
everybody pillages him, which is right."[6] Everywhere, except in remote
comers, the affection and unity of the two classes has disappeared;
the shepherd is separated from his flock, and pastors of the people
end in being considered its parasites.

Let us first follow them into the provinces. We here find only the
minor class of nobles and a portion of those of medium rank; the rest
are in Paris.[7] There is the same line of separation in the church:
abbés-commendatory, bishops and archbishops very seldom live at home.
The grand-vicars and canons live in the large towns; only priors and
curates dwell in the rural districts. Ordinarily the entire
ecclesiastic or lay staff is absent; residents are furnished only by
the secondary or inferior grades. What are their relations with the
peasant? One point is certain, and that is that they are not usually
hard, nor even indifferent, to him. Separated by rank they are not so
by distance; neighborhood is of itself a bond among men. I have read
in vain, but I have not found them the rural tyrants, which the
declaimers of the Revolution portray them. Haughty with the bourgeois