called the court,
'The court!" exclaims D'Argenson. "The entire evil is found in this
word, The court has become the senate of the nation; the least of
the valets at Versailles is a senator; chambermaids take part in
the government, if not to legislate, at least to impede laws and
regulations; and by dint of hindrance there are no longer either laws,
or rules, or law-makers. . . . Under Henry IV courtiers remained each
one at home; they had not entered into ruinous expenditure to belong to
the court; favors were not thus due to them as at the present day. . .
The court is the sepulcher of the nation." Many noble officers, finding
that high grades are only for courtiers, abandon the service, and betake
themselves with their discontent to their estates. Others, who have
not left their domains, brood there in discomfort, idleness, and ennui,
their ambition embittered by their powerlessness. In 1789, says the
Marquis de Ferrieres, most of them "are so weary of the court and of the
ministers, they are almost democrats." At least, "they want to withdraw
the government from the ministerial oligarchy in whose hands it is
concentrated;" there are no grand seigniors for deputies; they set them
aside and "absolutely reject them, saying that they would traffic with
the interests of the nobles;" they themselves, in their registers,
insist that there be no more court nobility.

The same sentiments prevail among the lower clergy, and still more
actively; for they are excluded from the high offices, not only as
inferiors, but also as commoner.[1423] Already, in 1766, the Marquis
de Mirabeau writes: "It would be an insult to most of our pretentious
ecclesiastics to offer them a curacy. Revenues and honors are for the
abbes-commendatory, for tonsured beneficiaries not in orders, for the
numerous chapters (of nobility)." On the contrary, "the true pastors
of souls, the collaborators in the holy ministry, scarcely obtain a
subsistence." The first class "drawn from the nobility and from the
best of the bourgeoisie have pretensions only, without being of the true
ministry. The other, only having duties to fulfill without expectations
and almost without income. . . can be recruited only from the lowest
ranks of civil society," while the parasites who despoil the laborers
"affect to subjugate them and to degrade them more and more." "I pity,"
said Voltaire, "the lot of a country curate, obliged to contend for a
sheaf of wheat with his unfortu