would not suffice to keep him alive a week.”  He indemnifies himself out of the peasants.  Processes of chicanery, delays and willful complications in the proceedings, sittings at three livres the hour for the advocate and three livres the hour for the bailiff.  The black brood of judicial leeches suck so much the more eagerly, because the more numerous, a still more scrawny prey, having paid for the privilege of sucking it.[51] The arbitrariness, the corruption, the laxity of such a régime can be divined.  “Impunity,” says Renauldon, “is nowhere greater than in the seigniorial tribunals . . . .  The foulest crimes obtain no consideration there,” for the seignior dreads supplying the means for a criminal trial, while his judges or prosecuting attorneys fear that they will not be paid for their proceedings.  Moreover, his jail is often a cellar under the chateau; “there is not one tribunal out of a hundred in conformity with the law in respect of prisons;” their keepers shut their eyes or stretch out their hands.  Hence it is that “his estates become the refuge of all the scoundrels in the canton.”  The effect of his indifference is terrible and it is to react against him:  to-morrow, at the club, the attorneys whom he has multiplied will demand his head, and the bandits whom he has tolerated will place it on the end of a pike.

One-point remains, the chase, wherein the noble’s jurisdiction is still active and severe, and it is just the point which is found the most offensive.  Formerly, when one-half of the canton consisted of forest, or waste land, while the other half was being ravaged by wild beasts, he was justified in reserving the right to hunt them; it entered into his function as local captain.  He was the hereditary gendarme, always armed, always on horseback, as well against wild boars and wolves as against rovers and brigands.  Now that nothing is left to him of the gendarme but the title and the epaulettes he maintains his privilege through tradition, thus converting a service into an annoyance.  Hunt he must, and he alone must hunt; it is a physical necessity and, it the same time, a sign of his blood.  A Rohan, a Dillon, chases the stag although belonging to the church, in spite of edicts and in spite of the canons.  “You hunt too much,” said Louis XV.[52] to the latter; “I know something about it.  How can you prohibit your curates from hunting if you pass your life in setting them such an example? — Sire, for my curates the chase is a fault, for myself it is the fault of my ancestors.”  When the vanity and arrogance of caste thus mounts guard over a right it is with obstinate vigilance.  Accordingly, their captains of the chase, their game-keepers, their wood-rangers, their forest-wardens protect brutes as if they were men, and hunt men as if they were brutes.  In the bailiwick of Pont-l’Evèque in 1789 four instances are cited “of recent assassinations committed by the game-keepers of Mme. d’A——­, -Mme. N-—–­,