destructive. Such rights as these, especially where they were harshly
enforced, caused both loss and irritation to the poor. Although there
were far too many absentees among the great families, yet the larger
number of the nobles spent most of their time at home on their estates,
looking after their farms and their tenants, attending to local
business, and saving up money to be spent in visits to the towns, or to
Paris. When they were absent, their bailiffs were harder masters than
themselves. Unfortunately the eyes of the noble class were turned rather
to the enjoyments of the city and the court than to the duties of
country life on their estates, an inevitable consequence of their loss
of local power.

If the nobles had few political rights, they had plenty of public
privileges. They were exempt from the most onerous taxes, and the best
places under the government were reserved for them. Therefore every man
who rose to eminence or to wealth in France strove to enter their ranks,
and since nobility was a purchasable commodity, through the
multiplication of venal offices which conferred it, none who had much
money to spend failed to secure the coveted rank. Thus the order had
come to comprise almost all persons of note, and a great part of the
educated class. To describe its ideas and aspirations is to describe
those of most of the leaders of France. Nobility was no longer a mark of
high birth, nor a brevet of distinction; it was merely a sign that a
man, or some of his ancestors, had had property. Of course all persons
in the order were not equal. The descendants of the old families, which
had been great in the land for hundreds of years, despised the mushroom
noblemen of yesterday, and talked contemptuously of "nobility of the
gown." Theirs was of the sword, and dated from the Crusades. And under
Louis XVI., after the first dismissal of Necker, there was a reaction,
and ground gained by the older nobility over the newer, and by both over