ent by selling
the wits of the Count de Montrond, the two went on their respective
ways, leaving to Providence the task of redeeming the lands which the
wits had sold and the income which the wits had scattered to the four
winds of heaven.

Space is wanting to recount the struggles of the different parties
which succeeded each other with such frightful rapidity in France
to obtain possession of the Count de Montrond's influence. But he
remained true to one principle, the one with which he started--"to
make straight for the cash-box." Yet with all this prosaic prudence,
amid the poetry of his position, the moral of this man's life was
fulfilled to the very letter. The Count de Montrond managed to outlive
every pecuniary resource save the one afforded by the remembrance of
"auld lang syne" and the unforgotten days of bygone love. He died in
the house of Madame Hamelin, after having been soothed and sheltered
by this friend and protectress through the revolutionary storm of
1848. He died dependent, subject to the same changes and caprice he
had so long inflicted upon others.

Montrond's successor, the Count de Cambis, the man who has represented
the premier gentilhomme de France in our day, died lately at as good
an old age as the Count de Montrond. _Autres tems, autres moeurs_: no
more cheating at cards, no more beating the watch, as in the case of
the Chevalier de Grammont; no more dueling and killing the adversary
by surprise, as in that of the Count de Montrond. When the bourgeois
king, Louis Philippe, succeeded to the elder branch, the gentilhomme
Francais entirely lost his prestige, and the necessity of his
existence was ignored. Everything bourgeois had become the fashion at
court: the court itself was denominated a _basse-cour_ (farm-yard) by
the Faubourg St. Germain, and all who frequented it "les oies de Frere
Philippe" or "les canards d'Orleans." The Count de Cambis appeared at
that moment at the Tuileries in search of office. His name stood high
in the annals of the French noblesse: society had, however, ceased to
confound the gentilhomme with the roue. The conditions necessary
to fulfill the character were changed, and it was now the bourgeois
gentilhomme and not the gentilhomme roue whose claim to the vacant
place was more likely to be accepted. The Count de Cambis had held the
place of honorary equerry to the Duc d'Angouleme, having obtained
it less on account of his patent of nobility than by reason of hi