to be able to understand the merits of her
soul; and a pride based no less on her birth than on her beauty. In
the absence of the overwhelming sentiment which, sooner or later, works
havoc in a woman's heart, she spent her young ardor in an immoderate
love of distinctions, and expressed the deepest contempt for persons of
inferior birth. Supremely impertinent to all newly-created nobility, she
made every effort to get her parents recognized as equals by the most
illustrious families of the Saint-Germain quarter.

These sentiments had not escaped the observing eye of Monsieur de
Fontaine, who more than once, when his two elder girls were married, had
smarted under Emilie's sarcasm. Logical readers will be surprised to see
the old Royalist bestowing his eldest daughter on a Receiver-General,
possessed, indeed, of some old hereditary estates, but whose name
was not preceded by the little word to which the throne owed so many
partisans, and his second to a magistrate too lately Baronified to
obscure the fact that his father had sold firewood. This noteworthy
change in the ideas of a noble on the verge of his sixtieth year--an age
when men rarely renounce their convictions--was due not merely to his
unfortunate residence in the modern Babylon, where, sooner or later,
country folks all get their corners rubbed down; the Comte de Fontaine's
new political conscience was also a result of the King's advice and
friendship. The philosophical prince had taken pleasure in converting
the Vendeen to the ideas required by the advance of the nineteenth
century, and the new aspect of the Monarchy. Louis XVIII. aimed at
fusing parties as Napoleon had fused things and men. The legitimate
King, who was not less clever perhaps than his rival, acted in a
contrary direction. The last head of the House of Bourbon was just as
eager to satisfy the third estate and the creations of the Empire, by
curbing the clergy, as the first of the Napoleons had been to attract
the grand old nobility, or to endow the Church. The Privy Councillor,
being in the secret of these royal projects, had insensibly become one
of the most prudent and influential leaders of that moderate party which
most desired a fusion of opinion in the interests of the nation. He
preached the expensive doctrines of constitutional government, and lent
all his weight to encourage the political see-saw which enabled his
master to rule France in the midst of storms. Perhaps Monsieur de
Fon