a good steward who returns a large amount of money.  He has no right to be generous at his master’s expense, and he is tempted to turn the subjects of his master to his own profit.  In vain might the soft seignorial hand be disposed to be easy or paternal; the hard hand of the proxy bears down on the peasants with all its weight, and the caution of a chief gives place to the exactions of a clerk.- How is it then when, instead of a clerk on the domain, a fermier is found, an adjudicator who, for an annual sum, purchases of seignior the management and product of his dues?  In election of Mayenne,[44] and certainly also in many others, the principal domains are rented in this way.  Moreover there are a number of dues, like the tolls, the market-place tax, that on the flock apart, the monopoly of the oven and of the mill which can scarcely be managed otherwise; the seignior must necessarily employ an adjudicator who spares him the disputes and trouble of collecting.[45] This happens often and the demands and the greed of the contractor, who is determined to gain or, at least, not to lose, falls on the peasantry: 

“He is a ravenous wolf,” says Renauldon, “let loose on the estate.  He draws upon it to the last sou, he crushes the subjects, reduces them to beggary, forces the cultivators to desert.  The owner, thus rendered odious, finds himself obliged to tolerate his exactions to able to profit by them.”

Imagine, if you can, the evil which a country usurer exercises, armed against them with such burdensome rights; it is the feudal seigniory in the hands of Harpagon, or rather of old Grandet.  When, indeed, a tax becomes insupportable we see, by the local complaints, that it is nearly always a fermier who enforces it.[46] It is one of these, acting for a body of canons, who claims Jeanne Mermet’s paternal inheritance on the pretense that she had passed her wedding night at her husband’s house.  One can barely find similar exactions in the Ireland of 1830, on those estates where, the farmer-general renting to sub-farmers and the latter to others still below them.  The poor tenant at the foot of the ladder himself bore the full weight of it, so much the more crushed because his creditor, crushed himself measured the requirements he exacted by those he had to submit to.

Suppose that, seeing this abuse of his name, the seignior is desirous of withdrawing the administration of his domains from these mercenary hands.  In most cases he is unable to do it:  he too deeply in debt, having appropriated to his creditors a certain portion of his land, a certain branch of his income.  For centuries, the nobles are involved through their luxury, their prodigality, their carelessness, and through that false sense of honor, which consists in looking upon attention to accounts as the occupation of an accountant.  They take pride in their negligence, regarding it, as they say, living nobly.[47] “Monsieur the archbishop,” said Louis XVI. to M. de Dillon,