Page:Madame Rolland (Blind 1886).djvu/101

91

the life of Madame Roland will now become part of the History of the French Revolution, let us pause a moment, and briefly review the political and social condition of a people within whose capital stood the Bastile, its fortifications, bristling with cannon, being a visible embodiment of an invisible idea and a system of government. Glancing backwards, we find that the feudal order of the Middle Ages, with its graduated authority—vested in the hands of successive orders of agricultural and military chiefs, subordinated in their turn to one supreme chief, the Sovereign of the realm—had gradually become absorbed in an absolute monarchy. Louis XIV. had put the situation in a nutshell in his famous phrase, "I am the State." The "right divine" of kings had reached its utmost limit under the Grand Monarque, whose prestige was such that his frown snuffed out the great poet Racine, and the mere apprehension of whose frown drove Vâtel, the paragon of cooks, to suicide, because the fish had not arrived in time for the King's dinner.

This is the serio-comic aspect of a state of things of