“The religious war,” said the historian of Languedoc,[427] “almost entirely destroyed the Hospital of Montpellier ... and even the order of Saint Esprit was dying out throughout France.”
It was a curious and disjointed society, that of the France of that day. Kingdoms there were within the royal domain; the laws of the large city frequently clashing with those of the province within which it was located; here and there provinces following their own laws rather than the laws of the kingdom itself. In some provinces the Church dominated; in others the nobles; elsewhere, the two classes were beginning to melt into the body of the nation which occasionally overrode both.[428]
At Aix, for instance, it was the custom to place the abandoned child in a religious home where, as in the rest of Provence, the unknown bastard was charged to the nearest hospital. Practically the same law was observed in Bretagne.
At Poitiers, a decree on September 15, 1579, “condemning the provision by which religious orders nourished infants found at their door,” ordered that the monasteries and ecclesiastic chapters of the place should be called on to regulate their contributions to the support of the children.
But as a rule the great nobles were obliged to take care of the foundlings abandoned within their jurisdiction. In the origin of the fiefs, the bastards had been set down as épaves (waifs), and the interpreters of the law (jurisconsults) had decided that the lord had no right to refuse to take care of the épaves. The parliaments too took the view that, inasmuch as the seigneur profited by all deaths that occurred and succeeded to all titles in the case of disinheritance within his domain, he should accept the liability for the care of the unknown children found within their domain.
Of the many decrees which touch on this important point, the oldest is that of the Parliament of Paris in the year 1547. Many other arrêts followed, until on September 3, 1667, the following, in the interest of the special hospitals, declared that:
“All the seigneurs (hauts justiciers) will be held responsible for the expense and nourishment of all infants whose parents are unknown, and who are found exposed on their lands and taken to hospitals.”
This regulation, as Ramcle says, failed in its purpose, for it was not possible to force what was considered charity on the none too generous nobles. The laws were evaded, and each community tried to send to its neighbours the unfortunate infants it should have guarded.
The mortality of infants increased, and as in Rome in the days of the Empire, mothers threw their children into the sewers or left them on the highways. Those less inhuman left them at the doors of the hospitals, where, during the winter, in the morning, they were frequently taken in more dead than alive.