I have read many hundreds of investigations in the original manuscripts, and almost always I have admired the humanity of the nobles, their forbearance, their horror of bloodshed.

Not only are a great many of them men of courage and all men of honor, but also, educated in the philosophy of the eighteenth century, they are mild, sensitive, and deeds of violence are repugnant to them.

Military officers especially are exemplary, their great defect being their weakness: rather than fire on the crowd they surrender the forts under their command, and allow themselves to be insulted and stoned by the people.

For two years,[2232] "exposed to a thousand outrages, to defamation, to daily peril, persecuted by clubs and misguided soldiers," disobeyed, menaced, put under arrest by their own men, they remain at their post to prevent the ranks from being broken up; "with stoic perseverance they put up with contempt of their authority that they may preserve its semblance, their courage is of that rarest kind which consists in remaining at the post of duty, impassive beneath both affronts and blows .-- Through a wrong of the greatest magnitude, an entire class which have no share in the favors of the Court, and which suffered as many injuries as any of the common plebeians, is confounded with the titled parasites who besiege the antechambers of Versailles.

Twenty-five thousand families, "the nursery of the army and the fleet," the elite of the agricultural proprietors, also many gentlemen who look after and turn to account the little estates on which they live, and "who have not left their homes a year in their lives," become the pariahs of their canton.[2233] After 1789, they begin to feel that their position is no longer tenable.[2234] " It is absolutely in opposition to the rights of man," says another letter from Franche-Comte, "to find one's self in perpetual fear of having one's throat cut by scoundrels who are daily confounding liberty with license." "I never knew anything so wearying," says another letter from Champagne, "as this anxiety about property and security.