2159] with this example before
them all the rich establishments soon glory in providing an open
table for all comers. Naturally the parvenus, the financiers who have
purchased or taken the name of an estate, all those traffickers and
sons of traffickers who, since Law, associate with the nobility, imitate
their ways. And I do not allude to the Bourets, the Beaujons, the St.
Jameses and other financial wretches whose paraphernalia effaces that
of the princes; but take a plain associe des fermes, M. d'Epinay, whose
modest and refined wife refuses such excessive display.[2160] He had
just completed his domestic arrangements, and was anxious that his
wife should take a second maid; but she resisted; nevertheless, in this
curtailed household.

"The officers, women and valets, amounted to sixteen. . . . When M.
d'Epinay gets up his valet enters on his duties. Two lackeys stand
by awaiting his orders. The first secretary enters for the purpose of
giving an account of the letters received by him and which he has to
open; but he is interrupted two hundred times in this business by all
sorts of people imaginable. Now it is a horse-jockey with the finest
horses to sell. . . . Again some saucy girl who calls to bawl out a
piece of music, and on whose behalf some influence has been exerted to
get her into the opera, after giving her a few lessons in good taste and
teaching her what is proper in French music. This young lady has been
made to wait to ascertain if I am still at home. . . . I get up and go
out. Two lackeys open the folding doors to let me make it through
this eye of a needle, while two servants bawl out in the ante-chamber,
'Madame, gentlemen, Madame!' All form a line, the gentlemen consisting
of dealers in fabrics, in instruments, jewellers, hawkers, lackeys,
shoeblacks, creditors, in short everything imaginable that is most
ridiculous and annoying. The clock strikes twelve or one before this
toilet matter is over, and the secretary, who, doubtless, knows by
experience the impossibility of rendering a detailed statement of his
business, hands to his master a small memorandum informing him what he
must say in the assembly of fermiers."

Indolence, disorder, debts, ceremony, the tone and ways of the patron,
all seems a parody of the real thing. We are beholding the last
stages of aristocracy. And yet the court of M. d'Epinay is a miniature
resemblance of that of the king.

So much more essential is it that the ambassa