general impoverishment of the great feudal houses and of the clergy.
The result of the almost interminable series of civil and religious wars
had been to cause a general redistribution of property. Capital was
mainly in the hands of the middle and lower classes, and the consequence
of this general circulation of wealth through all the channels of society
was precisely what might have been expected, an increase of enterprise
and of productive industry in various branches. Although the financial
wisdom of the age was doing its best to impede commerce, to prevent the
influx of foreign wares, to prohibit the outflow of specie--in obedience
to the universal superstition, which was destined to survive so many
centuries, that gold and silver alone constituted wealth--while,
at the same time, in deference to the idiotic principle of sumptuary
legislation, it was vigorously opposing mulberry culture, silk
manufactures, and other creations of luxury, which, in spite of the
hostility of government sages, were destined from that time forward to
become better mines of wealth for the kingdom than the Indies had been
for Spain, yet on the whole the arts of peace were in the ascendant in
France.

The king, although an unscrupulous, self-seeking despot and the coarsest
of voluptuaries, was at least a man of genius. He had also too much
shrewd mother-wit to pursue such schemes as experience had shown to
possess no reality. The talisman "Espoir," emblazoned on his shield, had
led him to so much that it was natural for him at times to think all
things possible.

But he knew how to renounce as well as how to dare. He had abandoned his
hope to be declared Prince of Wales and successor to the English crown,
which he had cherished for a brief period, at the epoch of the Essex
conspiracy; he had forgotten his magnificent dream of placing the crown