species, favored to the detriment of the rest, a universal creditor
and paid to do nothing, grazes over all the ground and feeds on all
the products. Let the opportunity come to enkindle all this
covetousness, and the rent-roll will burn, and with it the turret, and
with the turret, the chateau.

III. Absentee Seigniors.

Vast extent of their fortunes and rights.-Possessing greater
advantages they owe greater services.-Reasons for their absenteeism.-
Effect of it.-- Apathy of the provinces.-Condition of their estates.-
They give no alms.-Misery of their tenants.-Exactions of their
agents.-Exigencies of their debts. - State of their justiciary. -
Effects of their hunting rights. - Sentiments of the peasantry towards
them.

The spectacle becomes still gloomier, on passing from the estates
on which the seigniors reside to those on which they are non-
residents. Noble or ennobled, lay and ecclesiastic, the latter are
privileged among the privileged, and form an aristocracy inside of an
aristocracy. Almost all the powerful and accredited families belong to
it whatever may be their origin and their date.[23] Through their
habitual or frequent residence near the court, through their alliances
or mutual visits, through their habits and their luxuries, through the
influence which they exercise and the enmities which they provoke,
they form a group apart, and are those who possess the most extensive
estates, the leading suzerainties, and the most complete and
comprehensive jurisdictions. Of the court nobility and of the higher
clergy, they number perhaps, a thousand in each order, while their
small number only brings out in higher relief the enormity of their