or any ground whatever with
hedges or ditches, or walls without a special permit.[1355] 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,[1356] 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,[1357] "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, in the eyes of their subjects, they are wild animals.--This
shows to what privileges can lead when divorced from duties. In this
manner an obligation to protect degenerates into a right of devastation.
Thus do humane and rational beings act, unconsciously, like irrational
and inhuman beings. Divorced from the people they misuse them; nominal
chiefs, they have unlearned the function of an effective chief;
having lost all public character they abate nothing of their private
advantages. So much the worse for the canton, and so much worse for
themselves. The thirty or forty poachers whom they prosecute to day on
their estates will march to-morrow to attack their chateaux at the
head of an insurrection. The absence of the masters, the apathy of the
provinces, the bad state of cultivation, the exactions of agents,
the corruption of the tribunals, the vexations of the captaincies,
indolence, the indebtedness and exigencies of the seignior, desertion,
misery, the brutality and hostility of vassals, all pr