e and his followers raised the cry that the Regent
must convoke the States-General.

Any who have read much in the history of France, and especially in the
history of the French Revolution, know in part how terrible this cry
was. By the court, and by the great privileged classes of France, this
great assembly of the three estates of the realm was looked upon as the
last resort amid direst calamities. For at its summons came stalking
forth from the foul past the long train of Titanic abuses and satanic
wrongs; and came surging up from the seething present the great hoarse
cry of the people; then loomed up, dim in the distance, vast shadowy
ideas of new truth and new right; and at the bare hint of these, all
that was proud in France trembled.

This cry for the States-General, then, brought the Regent to terms at
once, and, instead of acting vigorously, she betook herself to her old
vicious fashion of compromising--buying off the rebels at prices more
enormous than ever. By her treaty of Ste. Menehould, Conde received a
half a million of livres, and his followers received payments
proportionate to the evil they had done.

But this compromise succeeded no better than the previous compromises.
Even if the nobles had wished to remain quiet, they could not. Their
lordship over a servile class made them independent of all ordinary
labor and all care arising from labor; some exercise of mind and body
they must have; Conde took this needed exercise by attempting to seize
the city of Poitiers, and, when the burgesses were too strong for him,
by ravaging the neighboring country. The other nobles broke the
compromise in ways wonderfully numerous and ingenious. France was again
filled with misery.

Dull as Regent Mary was, she now saw that she must call that dreaded
States-General, or lose not only the nobles, but the people. Undecided
as she was, she soon saw that she must do it at once; that if she
delayed it, her great nobles would raise the cry for it again and again
just as often as they wished to extort office or money. Accordingly, on
October 14, 1614, she summoned the deputies of the three estates to
Paris, and then the storm set in.

Each of the three orders presented its "portfolio of grievances" and its
programme of reforms. It might seem, to one who has not noted closely
the spirit which serf-mastering thrusts into a man, that the nobles
would appear in the States-General, not to make complaints, but to
answer compl