.” they say that you are in debt, and even largely.”  “Sire,” replied the prelate, with the irony of a grand seignior, “I will ask my intendant and inform Your Majesty.”  Marshal de Soubise has five hundred thousand livres income, which is not sufficient for him.  We know the debts of the Cardinal de Rohan and of the Comte Artois;[48] their millions of income were vainly thrown into this gulf.  The Prince de Guémenée happens to become bankrupt on thirty-five millions.  The Duke of Orleans, the richest proprietor in the kingdom, owed at his death seventy-four millions.  When became necessary to pay the creditors of the emigrants out of the proceeds of their possessions, it was proved that most of the large fortunes were eaten up with mortgages.[49] Readers of the various memoirs know that, for two hundred years, the deficiencies had to be supplied by marriages for money and by the favors of the king. — This explains why, following the king’s example, the nobles converted everything into money, and especially the places at their disposition, and, in relaxing authority for profit, why they alienated the last fragment of government remaining in their hands.  Everywhere they thus laid aside the venerated character of a chief to put on the odious character of a trafficker.  “Not only,” says a contemporary,[50] “do they give no pay to their officers of justice, or take them at a discount, but, what is worse, the greater portion of them make a sale of these offices.”  In spite of the edict of 1693, the judges thus appointed take no steps to be admitted into the royal courts and they take no oaths.  “What is the result?  Justice, too often administered by knaves, degenerates into brigandage or into a frightful impunity.” — Ordinarily the seignior who sells the office on a financial basis, deducts, in addition, the hundredth, the fiftieth, the tenth of the price, when it passes into other hands; and at other times he disposes of the survivorship.  He creates these offices and survivorships purposely to sell them.  “All the seigniorial courts, say the registers, are infested with a crowd of officials of every description, seigniorial sergeants, mounted and unmounted officers, keepers of the provostship of the funds, guards of the constabulary.  It is by no means rare to find as many as ten in an arrondissement which could hardly maintain two if they confined themselves within the limits of their duties.”  Also “they are at the same time judges, attorneys, fiscal-attorneys, registrars, notaries,” each in a different place, each practicing in several seigniories under various titles, all perambulating, all in league like thieves at a fair, and assembling together in the taverns to plan, prosecute and decide.  Sometimes the seignior, to economize, confers the title on one of his own dependents:  “At Hautemont, in Hainaut, the fiscal-attorney is a domestic.”  More frequently he nominates some starveling advocate of a petty village in the neighborhood on wages which