red and twenty-one, more
than half, belonged to the Third Estate, and of the six hundred and
twenty-one more than four hundred had some connection with the law,
while less than forty belonged to the farming class. Little
preparation had been made for them; the King had continued to attend to
his hounds and horses, the Queen to her balls and dresses, and Necker
to his columns of figures, his hopes, and his illusions. But the
arrival of this formidable body of men of trained intellect in the
royal city, now that it had occurred, at once caused a certain
uneasiness. As they walked about the city in curious groups, it was as
though France were surveying the phenomenon of Versailles with critical
eye; at the very first occasion the courtiers, feeling this, set to
work to teach the {53} deputies of the Third Estate a lesson, to put
them in their place.

On the 4th and 5th of May the opening ceremonies took place,
processions, mass, a sermon, speeches; and the Court's policy, if such
it could be called, was revealed. The powerful engine known as
etiquette was brought into play, to indicate to the deputies what
position and what influence in the State the King intended they should
have. This was perhaps the greatest revelation of the inherent
weakness of Bourbonism; the system had, in its decline, become little
more than etiquette, and Louis XVI seen hard at work in his
shirt-sleeves would have shattered the illusions of centuries. And so,
by means of the myriad contrivances of masters of ceremonies and Court
heralds the Third Estate was carefully made to feel its social
inferiority, its political insignificance.

The Third Estate noted these manifestations of the Court with due
sobriety, and met the attack squarely. But while on the part of the
Court this way of approaching the great national problem never attained
a higher dignity than a policy of pin pricks, with the Third Estate it
was at once converted into a constitutional question of fundamental
importance. Was the distinction between the three orders {54} to be
maintained? was the noble or priest a person of social and political
privilege? or were the deputies of all to meet in one assembly and have
equal votes? That was the great question, as the Third Estate chose to
state it, and, translated into historical terms, it meant no less than
the passing of the feudal arrangement of society in separate castes
into the new system of what is known at our day as dem