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be stranger than to see a people obliged to follow laws that it never understands; bound in all its domestic affairs — marriages, donations, testaments, sales, and purchases — by rules of which it can not have knowledge, as they are neither written nor proclaimed in its own language, and of which it must necessarily purchase the interpretation and the practice. (c) Not according to the ingenious conception of Isocrates, who advised his king to make the traffic and negotiations of his subjects free, unrestrained, and lucrative, and their disputes and quarrels burdensome, loading them with heavy penalties,^[1] but according to a monstrous conception that the right itself should be made a matter of traffic, and the laws treated as merchandise. (a) I am grateful to fortune that, so our historians say, it was a Gascon gentleman, a countryman of mine, who first opposed Charlemagne when he desired to give us the laws of Rome and the Empire.^[2] What is more barbarous than to see a nation where, by a legalised custom, the office of judge is sold, and judgements are bought for ready money, and where justice is legally denied to him who has not the means to pay for it; and where this traffic is in such great repute that there exists in a government a fourth estate of persons dealing in lawsuits, alongside the three ancient estates of the church, the nobility, and the common people; which fourth estate, having the administration of the laws and sovereign authority over property and lives, forms a body apart from that of the nobility. Whence it happens that there are two sorts of laws, in many respects very different — those of honour and those of justice: thus, the former condemn as strictly the lie tamely submitted to, as the latter do the lies revenged; by the decree of arms he is stripped of honour and nobility who submits to an insult, and by civil decree he who takes vengeance for it incurs a disgraceful punishment; he who appeals to the laws to obtain satisfaction for an offence to his honour, dishonours himself, and he who does not so appeal is punished and chastised by the laws. And of these two bodies,^[3] so unlike yet connected under one head,^[4] those rep-

1. See Isocrates, Oratio ad Nicoclem, VI, 18.
2. Les loix Latines et Imperiales. See Paulus Jovius.
3. That is, the lawyers and the nobility.
4. The king.