DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

fourths of the land; was sole possessor of the right of hunting and shooting; had authority to i] levy a feudal land-tax, while enjoying immunity i from taxation itself; had the monopoly of officering the army, and of filling certain exalted ecclesiastical | | | offices ; was exempt from the common law ; and in the criminal law was only amenable to the highest courts. Heroic in the field, the nobles were de- praved at home. While the great lords squandered, | at Paris and Versailles, money wrung from their | tenants and serfs, ignoring every principle of public | and private morality, the minor nobles, unlike the gentry of England, who occupied themselves with local affairs, looked down with indifference from the seclusion of their chditeaux on the wants of the people. The clergy was a worthy counterpart of the nobility. For instance, Cardinal Dubois drew an | | income of seventy thousand a-year from his see, but . . never visited it once. Comte Dillon, Archbishop of Narbonne, kept a pack of hounds in Normandy, ‘You hunt much, bishop,’ said Louis XVI. ‘How | can you prevent your curates from hunting if you spend so much time in giving them the example 2?’ ‘Sire,’ he rejoined, ‘for my curates hunting is their own vice, for me it is the vice of my ancestors.’ Being saddled with debt, the king remonstrated with him. ‘Iam told that you have debts, even |