What produced more effect than the dispute of words was, that at the very moment when the axe was laid at the foot of the tree, dumb witnesses appeared, who, without making any deposition against it, showed all the injustice and barbarity that this fatal tree had covered with its shadow.

The clergy still possessed serfs in the time of the Revolution. The whole of the eighteenth century had passed away, together with all the liberators, both Rousseau and Voltaire, whose last thought was the enfranchisement of the Jura. Yet the priest had still his serfs !

Feudalism had blushed at its own misdeeds, and, in various ways, had abdicated those shameful rights. Much to its honour, it had rejected the last remnants on the night of the 4th of August. But the priest still possessed his serfs !

On the 22nd of October, one of them, named Jean Jacob, a peasant-tenant in mortmain of the Jura, a venerable man more than a hundred and twenty years old, was led forward by his children and requested the favour of thanking the Assembly for their decrees of the 4th of August. Great was the emotion. The National Assembly all arose in presence of that patriarch of mankind, and made him sit covered. A noble mark of respect paid to old age, and a reparation also to the poor serf, for so long an insult to the rights of humanity. This man had been a serf for half a century under Louis XIV., and for eighty years since then. And he still remained a serf: the decrees of the 4th of August were only in a state of general declaration; nothing had been executed. Bondage was not expressly abolished till March, 1790; and the old man died in December; so, this last of the serfs never saw the light of liberty.

On the same day (October 22nd) M. de Castellane, taking advantage of the emotion of the Assembly, demanded that the thirty-five prisons in Paris, and those of France, should be visited, and that prisons far more secret and horrible than the royal Bastilles, the ecclesiastical dungeons, should especially be opened. It was at length most necessary that on such a day of resurrection the sun should pierce through the veil of mystery, and that the beneficent light of the law should, for the first time, illumine those judgment-seats of darkness, those subterraneous dungeons, those in pace,* where often in their furious

* Cells in which the superiors imprisoned for life.-C. C.;

monastic hatred or jealousy, or on account of their amours, still more atrocious than their hatred, the monks buried their brethren alive.

Alas! what were convents altogether but so many in pace, in which families abandoned and forgot such of their members as happened to be a burden, and whom they sacrificed for the others? These persons were not able, like the serf of Jura, to crawl as far as the feet of the National Assembly to demand their liberty, and embrace the tribunal instead of the altar. At most, if they durst, they might with great difficulty, at a distance, and by letter, make known their complaints. A nun wrote on the 28th of October, timidly, and in general terms, asking nothing for herself, but entreating the Assembly to legislate on ecclesiastical vows. The Assembly durst not at that time come to any resolution; they merely suspended the pronouncing of vows, thus barring the entrance to fresh victims. But how would they have hastened to open the gates for the sad inhabitants of the cloisters, had they known the desperate state of misery to which they had been reduced! I have said in another book how every kind of cultivation and intellectual amusement had been gradually withdrawn from the poor nuns, how the distrust of the clergy had deprived them of food for the mind. They were literally dying, without a breath of anything vital; the absence of religion was also as great as that of worldly things, perhaps even greater. Death, ennui, vacancy; nothing to-day; nothing to-morrow; nothing in the morning, and nothing in the evening; only a confessor occasionally, and a little immorality. Or else they ran violently into the opposite extreme, from the cloister to Voltaire or Rousseau, into absolute Revolution. I have known many nuns who were very incredulous. A few had a faith of their own; and theirs was so powerful that they could have walked through fire. Witness Charlotte Corday, nourished in the cloister, with the precepts of Plutarch and Rousseau, beneath the vaulted roof of Matilda and William the Conqueror.+

*

It was like a review of all the unfortunate; all the phantoms

"Priests, Women, and Families," passim.

At the Abbaye-aux-Dames at Caen.-See her Biography, by Paul Delasalle, Louis Dubois, &c.

of the middle ages reappeared in their turn before the face of the clergy, the universal oppressor. The Jews came. After having been annually smitten on the cheek at Toulouse, or hung between two dogs, they came modestly to ask whether they were men. These ancestors of Christianity, so harshly treated by their own sons, were also, in one sense, the ancestors of the French Revolution; the latter, as a reaction of Right, would necessarily bow down before that austere law, wherein Moses foresaw the future triumph of Right.

Another victim of religious prejudices, the poor community of comedians, came also to claim their rights. O barbarous prejudices! The two first men of England and France, the author of Othello and the author of Tartufe, were they not comedians? And was not the great man who spoke for them in the National Assembly, even Mirabeau, a sublime comedian ? "Action, action, action!" is what makes the orator, said Demosthenes.

The Assembly decided nothing for the comedians, and nothing for the Jews. On the account of the latter, they granted to non-catholics access to civil employments. They also recalled from foreign countries our unfortunate brethren, the Protestants, driven away by the barbarous agents of Louis XIV., and promised to restore to them their property, as far as they were able. Several returned, after an exile of a century; but few recovered their fortune. This innocent and unjustly banished population did not find an indemnity of a milliard of francs (400,0007.), a sum so lavishly squandered on the guilty emigrants.*

What they found was equality, the most honourable rehabilitation, France restored to justice, and raised from the dead, and men of their belief in the foremost rank of the Assembly, Rabaut and Barnave at the tribune. Too just retribution! These two illustrious Protestants were members of the ecclesiastical committee, and were now judging their ancient judges, and deciding on the fate of those who banished, burnt, and broke their fathers on the wheel. By way of vengeance, they

*We must, however, make a distinction. There is the emigrant who goes to side with the enemy; and the emigrant, more than excusable, who departs through fear.

proposed to vote one hundred and thirty-three millions for the Catholic clergy!

Rabaut Saint-Etienne was, as is well known, the son of the old doctor, the persevering apostle and glorious martyr of Cévennes, who for fifty years knew no other roof than leaves and the canopy of heaven, hunted like a bandit, passing the winters on the snow among wolves, without any other weapon than his pen, with which he wrote his sermons in the woods. His son. after working many years at the task of religious liberty, had the happiness of voting it. It was he also who proposed and proclaimed the unity and indivisibility of France (August 9, 1791). A noble proposition, which all doubtless would have made, but which was to spring first from the heart of our Protestants, so long and so cruelly divorced from their native land. The Assembly raised Rabaut to the dignity of president, and he had the glorious happiness of writing to his venerable parent these words of solemn rehabilitation and honour for the proscribed: "The President of the National Assembly is at your feet."

CHAPTER III.

RESISTANCE. THE CLERGY. THE PARLIAMENTS. THE PROVINCIAL STATES.

The Clergy make an Appeal to Civil War, October 14th.-Enthusiastic Transport of the Towns of Brittany.-The Assembly reduces the Number of Primary Electors to four Millions and a half.—The Assembly annuls the Clergy, as a body, and also the Parliaments, November 3rd.--Resistance of the Tribunals.-Fatal Part played by the Parliaments in latter Ages. They no longer admitted any but Nobles.-The Parliaments of Rouen and Metz offer Resistance, November, 1789.

THE discussion on ecclesiastical estates began on the 8th of October; and on the 14th, the clergy raised the shout of civil war.

On the 14th, it was a bishop of Brittany; on the 24th, the clergy of the diocese of Toulouse: a tocsin in the west, and a tocsin in the south.

We must not forget that in this same month of October, the prelates and rich abbés of Belgium, whose estates were also in

danger, were creating an army and appointing a general. Brabant and Flanders unfurled the banner of the blood-red cross. The Capuchin friars, and other monks, were exciting the peasantry, intoxicating them with savage sermons and furious processions, and forcing upon them swords and daggers against the Emperor. Our peasantry were less prompt in making the movement, Their judgment in general is healthy, and far more clear and sober than that of the Belgians. The old frolicsome spirit of the fabliaux* and of Rabelais, but little favourable to the clergy, is never entirely extinct in France. 66 Monsieur le curé, and his housekeeper," is ever an inexhaustible text of scandal for the long winter's evenings. The curate, however, was rather lampooned then hated; but the bishops (all nobles at that time, Louis XVI. would elect no others) were, for the most part, far more scandalous. Without confining their amours to their provincial countesses, who used to do the honours of the episcopal palace, they had intrigues also with the actresses of Paris. These countesses, or marchionesses, mostly of the poorer ranks of the nobility, occasionally honoured their half-marriages by their real merit ; more than one governed the bishopric, and better than the bishop could have done it. One of these women, not far from Paris, made in her diocese the elections of 1789, and strove energetically to send two excellent deputies to the National Assembly.

An episcopacy so worldly, that remembered its religion only as soon as its estates were about to be touched, had really a difficult task in attempting to renew the ancient spirit of fanaticism in the rural districts. Even in Brittany, where the peasantry always belong to the priests, it was an imprudent blunder of the bishop of Tréguier to fling abroad the manifesto of civil war on the 14th of October; he fired too soon; and his gun missed fire. In his incendiary mandate he declared the king was a prisoner, and religion overthrown; that the priests would be nothing better than clerks paid by brigands-that is to say, the nation, the National Assembly. To be able to say such things on the 14th, it would have been necessary to be ready to make a civil war on the morrow. Indeed, a few giddy

*Satirical Poems.