What could be said of any private individual who, with 477,000 livres income, should, for once in his life, give his wife diamonds worth 7,000 or 8,000 livres ?"[1438] People would say that the gift is moderate, and that the husband is reasonable.
To properly understand the history of our kings, let the fundamental principle be always recognized that France is their land, a farm transmitted from father to son, at first small, then slowly enlarged, and, at last, prodigiously enlarged, because the proprietor, always alert, has found means to make favorable additions to it at the expense of his neighbors; at the end of eight hundred years it comprises about 27,000 square leagues of territory.

His interests and his vanity harmonize, certainly, in several areas with public welfare; he is, all in all, not a poor administrator, and, since he has always expanded his territory, he has done better than many others.

Moreover, around him, a number of expert individuals, old family councilors, withdrawn from business and devoted to the domain, with good heads an gray beards, respectfully remonstrate with him when he spends too freely; they often interest him in public improvements, in roads, canals, homes for the invalids, military schools, scientific institutions and charity workshops; in the control of trust-funds and foundations, in the tolerance of heretics, in the postponement of monastic vows to the age of twenty-one, in provincial assemblies, and in other reforms by which a feudal domain becomes transformed into a modern domain.

Nevertheless, the country, feudal or modern, remains his property, which he can abuse as well as use; however, whoever uses with full sway ends by abusing with full license.

If, in his ordinary conduct, personal motives do not prevail over public motives, he might be a saint like Louis IX, a stoic like Marcus Aurelius, while remaining a seignior, a man of the world like the people of his court, yet more badly brought up, worse surrounded, more solicited, more tempted and more blindfolded.