Nothing short
of a continuous and laborious poring over the details of Government
furnished by these invaluable _paperasses_ could possibly enable a
student of the past century to frame to himself any clear conception of
the working of the social relations and authorities in old France. There
exists no such tableau. The manners of the higher classes and their daily
life and habits are well portrayed in heaps of memoirs, and even pretty
well understood by our contemporaries. But the whole structure of
society, in its relations with the authorised agents of supreme power,
including the pressure of those secondary obligations arising out of
_coutumes du pays_, is so little understood as to be scarcely available
to a general comprehension of the old French world before 1789.
Alexis says that the reason why the great upheaving of that period has
never been to this day sufficiently appreciated, never sufficiently
explained, is because the actual living hideousness of the social details
and relations of that period, seen from the points of view of a
penetrating contemporary looker-on, has never yet been depicted in
true colours and with minute particulars.
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