| England, | £14,000,000 | |
| Country Banks, | 8,000,000 | |
| Ireland, | 6,400,000 | |
| Scotland, | 3,300,000 | |
| £31,700,000 |
[23] Mémoires de Fléchier sur les Grands-Jours tenus à Clermont, en 1665-66: publiés par B. Gonod, Bibliothécaire de la Ville de Clermont. Paris 1844.
[24] These letters were addressed to a young Norman Lady, Mademoiselle Anne de Lavigne, who wrote sonnets in the Scudéry style, and with whom Fléchier kept up a gallant and high-flown correspondence in mingled prose and verse. As far as can be ascertained the liaison was an innocent one; it is quite certain that it caused no scandal at the time. Most of the letters bear date three or four years subsequently to the Grands-Jours.
[25] Voyage en Auvergne, and Resumé de l'Histoire d'Auvergne.
[26] From the end of the fifteenth century there were no serfs in Auvergne, as is shown by the municipal law of 1510; "Toutes personnes estans et demeurans au dict pays sont francs et de franche condition." All persons being and dwelling in the said country are free and of free condition. Nevertheless, there were still "héritaiges tenus à condition de mainmorte."—(Coutume, titre xxvii. art. 1.) But on the confines of Auvergne, in the Pays de Combrailles, there were persons "de serve condition, de mainmorte et de suyte;" ibid. art. 2, which means that the servitude of those persons was attached to their flesh and bone; that it followed them every where, even when they abandoned their inheritance and fled the country. One is glad to hear Fléchier and Talon stigmatising, in the names of religion and humanity, those iniquitous rights, which subsisted more than a century after them. Personal servitude was abolished only by an edict of August 1779; for which Louis XVI. and his minister Necker are to be thanked. It took ten more years and the revolution of 1789 to do away with real servitude, which was general in France.—Mémoires, p. 112.
[27] This included Upper and Lower Auvergne, the Bourbonnais, the Nivernais, the Forez, the Beaujolais, the Lyonnais, the Pays de Combrailles, Berry and the Upper and Lower Marche.—Vide Mémoires, Introduction, xvi.
In plain good French,
Each gentleman
From morn till night
Doth swell his rents,
And multiply his gain.
Observes no faith,
Takes field and hay,
The farmer's grass and grain;
Then plays the steward
With his pease and pork,
And cudgels all at leisure;
And like a king, with crown on head,
Proclaims it his good pleasure.
[29] An anecdote told of Louis XIII. and Mademoiselle d'Hutefort.
[30] A species of thread lace, in which there was formerly a great trade in Upper Auvergne. It is now scarcely used except by peasant women, and its manufacture is almost abandoned.