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Rh bœuf of Versailles or in the boudoirs of mistresses, and whose chiefs belonged to the same aristocracy, who paraded as court-domestics, so that the costumes of abbés and bishops, pallium and mitre, might be considered as a kind of court-costume. Despite which change, the nobility retained the privileges which it always had over the people; in fact, its pride as regards the latter rose the more it was abased before its royal lords. It usurped, as of old, all the enjoyments of life, oppressed and wronged as before, as did the clergy, who had long lost their hold on men's souls, but who still kept their titles, their Trinity monopoly, their privileges of suppressing intellect, and their churchly tricks and wiles. What the teachers of the Gospel had tried in the Peasants' War was now done by philosophers in France, and with better success. They demonstrated to the people the usurpations of the nobility and of the Church; they showed them that both had lost their power, and the people exulted; and on the 14th of June 1789, the weather being fine, they began the work of their emancipation, and he who on that day had sought the spot where the old, musty, grimly unpleasant Bastile had stood, would have found in its place an airy, cheerful building with the laughing inscription, "Ici on danse."

For seventeen years many writers in Europe have busied themselves unweariedly in trying to