On the day Parisians stormed the Bastille, Georgiana's second guardian, Duke Leoncourt, had entered the royal palace sword in hand to protect Louis XVI. Old-era nobles like him did not fear bandits on the road, so shortly after returning to Paris to report, he was dispatched again to suppress the Chouans in western France, who had used the famine as an excuse to rebel.
So-called lords were not appointed to romance maidservants. They were the king's representatives in their parishes, intermediaries between the king and the inhabitants, responsible for enforcing the king's laws, summoning militia, levying taxes, distributing relief, and so on. Yet in truth, a lord was merely one inhabitant among many. In letters governors wrote to their subordinates, lords were specifically described as "the first inhabitant."
What distinguished this first inhabitant from ordinary inhabitants was his tax-exempt sphere and privileges. He possessed a different status, not power.
Napoleon Bonaparte was the lord of Rambouillet. He could hunt in the forest, live in the castle, force local inhabitants to grind flour in his mill and press grape juice in his winepress, but he could not force other inhabitants to work in his sugar factory.
But vagrants and those unwilling to farm could go there. The development of capitalism was closely tied to land ownership systems. After leaving The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, he took her to the canal they had visited last time and stood in the water to wash her feet.
He washed them with such concentration that it was as though her feet were not feet, but the hooves of some prey. Like a hunter, he was cleaning them before sprinkling them with spices and roasting them over a fire.
If Georgiana had been some Parisian woman who knew nothing of perpetual leaseholds and had nothing in her