It is very properly asked how the province of Burgundy obtained the nickname of "free," while distinguished by such a species of servitude? It is without doubt upon the principle that the Greeks called the furies Eumenides, "good hearts."
But the most curious and most consolatory circumstance attendant on this jurisprudence is that the lords of half these mainmortable territories are monks.
If by chance a prince of the blood, a minister of state, or a chancellor cast his eyes upon this article, it will be well for him to recollect, that the king of France, in his ordinance of May 18, 1731, declares to the nation, "that the monks and endowments possess more than half of the property of Franche-Comté."
The marquis d'Argenson, in "Le Droit Public Ecclesiastique," says, that in Artois, out of eighteen ploughs, the monks possess thirteen. The monks themselves are called mainmortables, and yet possess slaves. Let us refer these monkish possessions to the chapter of contradictions.
When we have made some modest remonstrances upon this strange tyranny on the part of people who have vowed to God to be poor and humble, they will then reply to us: We have enjoyed this right for six hundred years; why then despoil us of it? We may humbly rejoin, that for these thirty or forty thousand years, the weasels have been in the habit of sucking the blood of our pullets; yet we assume to ourselves the right of destroying them when we can catch them.
N.B. It is a mortal sin for a Chartreux to eat half an ounce of mutton, but he may with a safe conscience devour the entire substance of a family. I have seen the Chartreux in my neighborhood inherit a hundred thousand crowns from one of their mainmortable slaves, who had made a fortune by commerce at Frankfort. But all the truth must be told; it is no less true, that his family enjoys the right of soliciting alms at the gate of the convent.
Let us suppose that the monks have still fifty or sixty thousand slaves in the kingdom of France. Time has not been found hitherto to reform this Christian jurisprudence; but something is beginning to be thought about it. It is only to wait a few hundred years, until the debts of the state be paid.
SLEEPERS (THE SEVEN).
Fable supposes that one Epimenides in a single nap, slept twenty-seven years, and that on his awaking he was quite astonished at finding his grandchildren—who asked him his name—married, his friends dead, his town and the manners of its inhabitants changed. It was a fine field for criticism, and a pleasant subject for a comedy. The legend has borrowed all the features of the fable, and enlarged upon them.