Let the opportunity come to enkindle all this covetousness, and the rent-roll will burn, and with it the turret, and with the turret, the chateau.
III.

Absentee Seigniors.
Vast extent of their fortunes and rights .-- Possessing greater advantages they owe greater services.-Reasons for their absenteeism .-- Effect of it .-- Apathy of the provinces .-- Condition of their estates .-- They give no alms .-- Misery of their tenants .-- Exactions of their agents .-- Exigencies of their debts .-- State of their justiciary .-- Effects of their hunting rights .-- Sentiments of the peasantry towards them.
The spectacle becomes still gloomier, on passing from the estates on which the seigniors reside to those on which they are non-residents.
Noble or ennobled, lay and ecclesiastic, the latter are privileged among the privileged, and form an aristocracy inside of an aristocracy.

Almost all the powerful and accredited families belong to it whatever may be their origin and their date.[1323] Through their habitual or frequent residence near the court, through their alliances or mutual visits, through their habits and their luxuries, through the influence which they exercise and the enmities which they provoke, they form a group apart, and are those who possess the most extensive estates, the leading suzerainties, and the most complete and comprehensive jurisdictions.
Of the court nobility and of the higher clergy, they number perhaps, a thousand in each order, while their small number only brings out in higher relief the enormity of their advantages.

We have seen that the appanages of the princes of the blood comprise a seventh of the territory; Necker estimates the revenue of the estates enjoyed by the king's two brothers at two millions.[1324] The domains of the Ducs de Bouillon, d'Aiguillon, and some others cover entire leagues, and, in immensity and continuity, remind one of those, which the Duke of Sutherland and the Duke of Bedford now possess in England.

With nothing else than his forests and his canal, the Duke of Orleans, before marrying his wife, as rich as himself, obtains an income of a million.
A certain seigniory, le Clermontois, belonging to the Prince de Conde, contains forty thousand inhabitants, which is the extent of a German principality; "moreover all the taxes or subsidies occurring in le Clermontois are imposed for the benefit of His Serene Highness, the king receiving absolutely nothing."[1325] Naturally authority and wealth go together, and, the more an estate yields, the more its owner resembles a sovereign.