n quiet, they could not. Their lordship
over a servile class made them independent of all ordinary labor and of
all care arising from labor; some exercise of mind and body they must
have; Conde soon 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 the fourteenth of October, 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
complaints. So it was not. The noble order, with due form, entered
complaint that theirs was the injured order. They asked relief from
familiarities and assumptions of equality on the part of the people.
Said the Baron de Senece, "It is a great piece of insolence to pretend
to establish any sort of equality between the people and the nobility":
other nobles declared, "There is between them and us as much difference
as between master and lackey."

To match these complaints and theories, the nobles made
demands,--demands that commoners should not be allowed to keep
fire-arms,--nor to possess dogs, unless the dogs were hamstrung,--nor to
clothe themselves like the nobles,--nor to clothe their wives like the
wives of nobles,--nor to wear velvet or satin under a penalty of five
thousand livres. And, preposterous as such claims may seem to us, they
carried them into practice. A deputy of the Third Estate having been
severely beaten by a noble, his demands for redress were treated as
absurd. One of the orators of the lower order having spoken of the
French as forming one great family in which the nobles were the elder
brothers and the commoners the younger, the nobles made a formal
complaint to the King, charging th