The
most corrupt, a Duke of Orleans, the most frivolous and the most
blas?, a Duc de Biron, meet death with stoical coolness and
disdain.[54] Delicate women who complain of a draught in their
drawing-rooms, make no complaint of a straw mattress in a damp, gloomy
dungeon, where they sleep in their clothes so that they may not wake
up stiffened, and they come down into the court of the Conciergerie
with their accustomed cheerfulness. Men and women, in prison, dress
themselves as formerly, with the same care, that they may meet and
talk together with the same grace and spirit, in a corridor with an
iron grating within a step of the revolutionary Tribunal, and on the
eve of the scaffold.[55] -- This moral temper is evidently of the
rarest; if it errs on either side it is on that of being too refined,
bad for use, good for ornament.
And yet, in the upper class there were associated with two or three
thousand idlers amongst a frivolous aristocracy, as many serious men,
who, to their drawing-room experience, added experience in business.
Almost all who held office or had been in the service, were of this
number, either ambassadors, general officers or former ministers, from
Marshal de Brogue down to Machaut and Malesherbes; resident bishops,
like Monseigneur de Durfort, at Besan?on;[56] vicars-general and
canons who really governed their dioceses on the spot; prelates, like
those in Provence, Languedoc and Brittany, who, by right, had seats in
the provincial "Etats", agents and representatives of the clergy at
Paris; heads of Orders and Congregations; the chief and lieutenant
commandants of the seventeen military departments, intendants of each
generalit? head-clerks of each ministry, magistrates of each
parliament, farmers-general, collectors-general, and, more
particularly in each province, the dignitaries and local proprietors
of the two first orders, and all leading manufacturers, merchants,
ship-owners, bankers and prominent bourgeois; in short, that ?lite of
the nobles, clergy, and Third Estate, which, from 1778 to 1789,
constituted the twenty-one provincial assemblies, and which certainly
formed in France the great social staff.
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