their glass cage, for the fun of the thing. But as soon
as I caught sight of Mlle. Armande's sweet face, I used to tremble;
and there was a trace of jealousy in my admiration for the lovely child
Victurnien, who belonged, as we all instinctively felt, to a different
and higher order of being from our own. It struck me as something
indescribably strange that the young fresh creature should be there in
that cemetery awakened before the time. We could not have explained
our thoughts to ourselves, yet we felt that we were bourgeois and
insignificant in the presence of that proud court."

The disasters of 1813 and 1814, which brought about the downfall of
Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was
more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but
the events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the
vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes,
all contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the
personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore, only
begins to shape itself in 1822.

In 1822 the Marquis d'Esgrignon's fortunes had not improved in spite of
the changes worked by the Restoration in the condition of emigres. Of
all the nobles hardly hit by Revolutionary legislation, his case was the
hardest. Like other great families, the d'Esgrignons before 1789 derived
the greater part of their income from their rights as lords of the manor
in the shape of dues paid by those who held of them; and, naturally, the
old seigneurs had reduced the size of the holdings in order to swell the
amounts paid in quit-rents and heriots. Families in this position were
hopelessly ruined. They were not affected by the ordinance by which
Louis XVIII. put the emigres into possession of such of their lands as
had not been sold; and at a later date it was impossible that the law of
indemnity should indemnify them. Their suppressed rights, as everybody
knows, were revived in the shape of a land tax known by the very name of
domaines, but the money went into the coffers of the State.

The Marquis by his position belonged to that small section of the
Royalist party which would hear of no kind of compromise with those whom
they styled, not Revolutionaries, but revolted subjects, or, in
more parliamentary language, they had no dealings with Liberals or
Constitutionnels. Such Royalists, nicknamed Ultras by the opposition,
took for leaders an