. Every one will
appreciate the motives of this sage reticence demanded by convention;
for if a writer takes upon himself the office of annalist of his own
time, he is bound to touch on many sore subjects. The house was called
the Hotel d'Esgrignon; but let d'Esgrignon be considered a mere
fancy name, neither more nor less connected with real people than
the conventional Belval, Floricour, or Derville of the stage, or
the Adalberts and Mombreuses of romance. After all, the names of the
principal characters will be quite as much disguised; for though in this
history the chronicler would prefer to conceal the facts under a mass
of contradictions, anachronisms, improbabilities, and absurdities, the
truth will out in spite of him. You uproot a vine-stock, as you imagine,
and the stem will send up lusty shoots after you have ploughed your
vineyard over.

The "Hotel d'Esgrignon" was nothing more nor less than the house in
which the old Marquis lived; or, in the style of ancient documents,
Charles Marie Victor Ange Carol, Marquis d'Esgrignon. It was only an
ordinary house, but the townspeople and tradesmen had begun by calling
it the Hotel d'Esgrignon in jest, and ended after a score of years by
giving it that name in earnest.

The name of Carol, or Karawl, as the Thierrys would have spelt it, was
glorious among the names of the most powerful chieftains of the Northmen
who conquered Gaul and established the feudal system there. Never had
Carol bent his head before King or Communes, the Church or Finance.
Intrusted in the days of yore with the keeping of a French March, the
title of marquis in their family meant no shadow of imaginary office; it
had been a post of honor with duties to discharge. Their fief had always
been their domain. Provincial nobles were they in every sense of the
word; they might boast of an unbroken line of great descent; they had
been neglected by the court for two hundred years; they were lords
paramount in the estates of a province where the people looked up to
them with superstitious awe, as to the image of the Holy Virgin that
cures the toothache. The house of d'Esgrignon, buried in its remote
border country, was preserved as the charred piles of one of Caesar's
bridges are maintained intact in a river bed. For thirteen hundred years
the daughters of the house had been married without a dowry or taken the
veil; the younger sons of every generation had been content with their
share of their mother's