LETTER XLIV. Usbek to Rhedi, at Venice.

IN France there are three kinds of professions; the church, the sword, and the long robe. Each hath a sovereign contempt for the other two: for example, a man who ought to be despised only for being a fool, is often so because he is a lawyer. There are none, even to the meanest mechanic, who does not contend for the excellency of the trade they have chosen; each values himself above him who is of a different profession, according to the idea he has formed to himself of the superiority of his own. These men are, more or less, like that woman in the province of Erivan, who having received a favour from one of our monarchs, wished a thousand times, in the blessings she bestowed upon him, that heaven would make him governor of Erivan. I have read, that a French ship putting in upon the coast of Guinea, some of the crew went on shore to buy sheep. They were carried to the king, who administered justice to his subjects under a tree. He was seated on a throne, that is to say, a piece of timber, as stately as though he had sat upon the throne of the Great Mogul, attended by three or four guards armed with hedge stakes; an umbrella in the form of a canopy, secured him from the heat of the sun; his whole regalia, and that of the queen his wife, consisted in their black skins and some rings. This prince, yet more vain than miserable, asked these strangers if he was not much talked of in France. He imagined that his name could not but have reached from pole to pole; and different from that conqueror of whom it is said, that he had silenced the whole earth, he fancied that the whole world must talk of him. When the Cham of Tartary hath dined, a herald proclaims, that all the princes of the earth may

go to dinner, if they please: and this barbarian who feeds only upon milk, who hath no house to dwell in, and who lives only by murder and robbery, regards all the potentates in the world as his slaves, and formally insults them twice a-day.

Paris, the 28th of the moon Rhegeb,
1713.