first of May to the middle of October.  At Chartrettes the deer cross the Seine, approach the doors of the Comtesse de Larochefoucauld and destroy entire plantations of poplars.  A domain rented for two thousand livres brings in only four hundred after the establishment of the captaincy of Versailles.  In short, eleven regiments of an enemy’s cavalry, quartered on the eleven captaincies near the capital, and starting out daily to forage, could not do more mischief. — We need not be surprised if, in the neighborhood of these lairs, the people become weary of cultivating.[54] Near Fontainebleau and Melun, at Bois-le-Roi, three-quarters of the ground remains waste.  Almost all the houses in Brolle are in ruins, only half-crumbling gables being visible; at Coutilles and at Chapelle-Rablay, five farms are abandoned; at Arbonne, numerous fields are neglected.  At Villiers, and at Dame-Marie, where there were four farming companies and a number of special cultures, eight hundred arpents remain untilled. — Strange to say, as the century becomes more easygoing the enforcement of the chase becomes increasingly harsh.  The officers of the captaincy are zealous because they labor under the eye and for the “pleasures” of their master.  In 1789, eight hundred preserves had just been planted in one single canton of the captaincy of Fontainebleau, and in spite of the proprietors of the soil.  According to the regulations of 1762 every private individual domiciled on the reservation of a captaincy is forbidden from enclosing his homestead or any ground whatever with hedges or ditches, or walls without a special permit.[55] In case of a permit being given he must leave a wide, open and continuous space in order to let the huntsmen easily pass through.  He is not allowed to keep any ferret, any fire-arm, any instrument adapted to the chase, nor to be followed by any dog even if not adapted to it, except the dog be held by a leash or clog fastened around its neck.  And better still.  He is forbidden to reap his meadow or his Lucerne before St. John’s day, to enter his own field between the first of May and the twenty-fourth of June, to visit any island in the Seine, to cut grass on it or osiers, even if the grass and osiers belong to him.  The reason is, that now the partridge is hatching and the legislator protects it; he would take less pains for a woman in confinement; the old chroniclers would say of him, as with William Rufus, that his bowels are paternal only for animals.  Now, in France, four hundred square leagues of territory are subject to the control of the captaincies,[56] and, over all France, game, large or small, is the tyrant of the peasant.  We may conclude, or rather listen to the people’s conclusion.  “Every time,” says M. Montlosier, in 1789,[57] “that I chanced to encounter herds of deer or does on my road my guides immediately shouted:  ‘Make room for the gentry!’ in this way alluding to the ravages committed by them on their land.”  Accordingly,