said the Duc d’Orleans, “I settle matters, and pay about what I please,” and he calculated that the provincial administration, rigorously taxing him, would cause him to lose 300,000 livres rental.  It has been proved that the princes of the blood paid, for their two-twentieths, 188,000 instead of 2,400,000 livres.  In the main, in this régime, exception from taxation is the last remnant of sovereignty or, at least, of independence.  The privileged person avoids or repels taxation, not merely because it despoils him, but because it belittles him; it is a mark of the commoner, that is to say, of former servitude, and he resists the fisc (the revenue services) as much through pride as through interest.

IV.  Their Feudal Rights.

These advantages are the remains of primitive sovereignty.

Let us follow him home to his own domain.  A bishop, an abbé, a chapter of the clergy, an abbess, each has one like a lay seignior; for, in former times, the monastery and the church were small governments like the county and the duchy. -Intact on the other bank of the Rhine, almost ruined in France, the feudal structure everywhere discloses the same plan.  In certain places, better protected or less attacked, it has preserved all its ancient externals.  At Cahors, the bishop-count of the town had the right, on solemnly officiating, “to place his helmet, cuirass, gauntlets and sword on the altar."[20] At Besançon, the archbishop-prince has six high officers, who owe him homage for their fiefs, and who attend at his coronation and at his obsequies.  At Mende,[21] the bishop, seignior-suzerain for Gévaudan since the eleventh century, appoints “the courts, ordinary judges and judges of appeal, the commissaries and syndics of the country.”  He disposes of all the places, “municipal and judiciary.”  Entreated to appear in the assembly of the three orders of the province, he “replies that his place, his possessions and his rank exalting him above every individual in his diocese.  He cannot sit under the presidency of any person; that, being seignior-suzerain of all estates and particularly of the baronies, he cannot give way to his vassals.”  In brief that he is king, or but little short of it, in his own province.  At Remiremont, the noble chapter of canonesses has, “inferior, superior, and ordinary judicature in fifty-two bans of seigniories,” nominates seventy-five curacies and confers ten male canonships.  It appoints the municipal officers of the town, and, besides these, three lower and higher courts, and everywhere the officials in the jurisdiction over woods and forests.  Thirty-two bishops, without counting the chapters, are thus temporal seigniors, in whole or in part, of their episcopal town, sometimes of the surrounding district, and sometimes, like the bishop of St. Claude, of the entire country.  Here the feudal tower has been preserved.  Elsewhere it is plastered over anew, and more particularly in the appanages.  In these domains, comprising