Saint-Simon and other court historians, on mentioning a ceremony, repeatedly state that “all France was there”; in fact, every one of consequence in France is there, and each recognizes the other by this sign.  Paris and the court become, accordingly, the necessary sojourn of all fine people.  In such a situation departure begets departure; the more a province is forsaken the more they forsake it.  “There is not in the kingdom,” says the Marquis de Mirabeau, “a single estate of any size of which the proprietor is not in Paris and who, consequently, neglects his buildings and chateaux."[32] The lay grand seigniors have their hotels in the capital, their entresol at Versailles, and their pleasure-house within a circuit of twenty leagues; if they visit their estates at long intervals, it is to hunt.  The fifteen hundred commendatory abbés and priors enjoy their benefices as if they were so many remote farms.  The two thousand seven hundred vicars and canons visit each other and dine out.  With the exception of a few apostolic characters the one hundred and thirty-one bishops stay at home as little as they can; nearly all of them being nobles, all of them men of society, what could they do out of the world, confined to a provincial town?  Can we imagine a grand seignior, once a gay and gallant abbé and now a bishop with a hundred thousand livres income, voluntarily burying himself for the entire year at Mende, at Comminges, in a paltry cloister?  The interval has become too great between the refined, varied and literary life of the great center, and the monotonous, inert, practical life of the provinces.  Hence it is that the grand seignior who withdraws from the former cannot enter into the latter, and he remains an absentee, at least in feeling.

A country in which the heart ceases to impel the blood through its veins presents a somber aspect.  Arthur Young, who traveled over France between 1787 and 1789, is surprised to find at once such a vital center and such dead extremities.  Between Paris and Versailles the double file of vehicles going and coming extends uninterruptedly for five leagues from morning till night.[33] The contrast on other roads is very great.  Leaving Paris by the Orleans road, says Arthur Young, “we met not one stage or diligence for ten miles; only two messageries and very few chaises, not a tenth of what would have been met had we been leaving London at the same hour.”  On the highroad near Narbonne, “for thirty-six miles,” he says, “I came across but one cabriolet, half a dozen carts and a few women leading asses.”  Elsewhere, near St. Girons, he notices that in two hundred and fifty miles he encountered in all, “two cabriolets and three miserable things similar to our old one-horse post chaise, and not one gentleman.”  Throughout this country the inns are execrable; it is impossible to hire a wagon, while in England, even in a town of fifteen hundred or two thousand inhabitants, there are comfortable