Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public

business, which was, to let everything go on its own way; of

particular public business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble

idea that it must all go his waytend to his own power and pocket.

Of his pleasures, general and particular, Monseigneur had the

other truly noble idea, that the world was made for them. The text

of his order (altered from the original by only a pronoun, which is

not much) ran: “The earth and the fullness thereof are mine, saith

Monseigneur.”

Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar

embarrassments crept into his affairs, both private and public; and

he had, as to both classes of affairs, allied himself perforce with a

Farmer-General. As to finances public, because Monseigneur

could not make anything at all of them, and must consequently let

them out to somebody who could; as to finances private, because

Farmer-Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after generations of

great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence Monseigneur

had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet time to

ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could wear,

and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General,

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poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate

cane with a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the

company in the outer rooms, much prostrated before by

mankindalways excepting superior mankind of the blood of

Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked down upon him

with the loftiest contempt.

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood

in his stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six bodywomen

waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing

but plunder and forage where he could, the Farmer-General

howsoever his matrimonial relations conduced to social morality

was at least the greatest reality among the personages who

attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.

For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and

adorned with every device of decoration that the taste and skill of

the time could achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business;

considered with any reference to the scarecrows in the rags and

nightcaps elsewhere (and not so far off, either, but that the

watching towers of Notre Dame, almost equidistant from the two

extremes, could see them both), they would have been an

exceedingly uncomfortable businessif that could have been

anybody’s business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers

destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a

ship; civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics,

of the worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and

looser lives; all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying

horribly in pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or

remotely of the order of Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all

public employments from which anything was to be got; these