ned, 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.[4155]--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 Besancon;[4156] 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
generalite 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 elite 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.--Not that they were superior politicians: for in those
days there were none, scarcely a few hundred competent men, almost all
of them being specialists. Nevertheless, it was in these few men that
nearly the entire political capacity, information and common sense of
France was to be found. Outside of their heads the other twenty-six
millions of brains contained but little else than dangerous and barren
formulas; as they alone had commanded, negotiated, deliberated and
governed, they were the only ones who understood men and things
tolerably well, and, consequently, the only ones who were not completely
disqualified for their ma