Habits, necessity, a voluntary or forced conformity, have their effect.

Lords, peasants, serfs, and bourgeois, in the end adapted to their condition, bound together by a common interest, form together a society, a veritable corporation.

The seigniory, the county, the duchy becomes a patrimony which is loved through a blind instinct, and to which all are devoted.
It is confounded with the seignior and his family; in this relation people are proud of him.

They narrate his feats of arms; they cheer him as his cavalcade passes along the street; they rejoice in his magnificence through sympathy.[1113] If he becomes a widower and has no children, they send deputations to him to entreat him to remarry, in order that at his death the country may not fall into a war of succession or be given up to the encroachment of neighbors.

Thus there is a revival, after a thousand years, of the most powerful and the most vivacious of the sentiments that support human society.