"There is not in the kingdom," says the Marquis de Mirabeau, "a single estate of any size of which the proprietor is not in Paris and who, consequently, neglects his buildings and chateaux."[1332] The lay grand seigniors have their hotels in the capital, their entresol at Versailles, and their pleasure-house within a circuit of twenty leagues; if they visit their estates at long intervals, it is to hunt.

The fifteen hundred commendatory abbes and priors enjoy their benefices as if they were so many remote farms.

The two thousand seven hundred vicars and canons visit each other and dine out.

With the exception of a few apostolic characters the one hundred and thirty-one bishops stay at home as little as they can; nearly all of them being nobles, all of them men of society, what could they do out of the world, confined to a provincial town?
Can we imagine a grand seignior, once a gay and gallant abbe and now a bishop with a hundred thousand livres income, voluntarily burying himself for the entire year at Mende, at Comminges, in a paltry cloister?
The interval has become too great between the refined, varied and literary life of the great center, and the monotonous, inert, practical life of the provinces.

Hence it is that the grand seignior who withdraws from the former cannot enter into the latter, and he remains an absentee, at least in feeling.
A country in which the heart ceases to impel the blood through its veins presents a somber aspect.