The peasant changed his master without knowing it.
The three orders were not yet united closely enough to form, in the modern sense of the word, a state.
Little by little the royal power united the French.

This union became stronger in proportion as royalty grew more powerful.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that desire to think and act in common, which creates great nations, became very strong among us--at least in those families which furnished officers to the Crown--and it even spread among the lower orders of society.

Rabelais introduces Francois Villon and the King of England into a tale so inflamed with military bravado that it might have been told over the camp fire in an almost identical manner by one of Napoleon's grenadiers.[140] In his preface to the poem we have just quoted, Chapelain writes of the occasions when "_la patrie_ who is our common mother, has need of all her children." Already the old poet expresses himself like the author of the _Marseillaise_.[141] [Footnote 140: _Pantagruel_, book iv, chap.

lxvii.] [Footnote 141: _La Pucelle_, Preface.] It cannot be denied that the feeling for _la patrie_ did exist under the old _regime_.