should unite all
the distinctions of birth and beauty, wit and wealth, and character.

The intimates who came to play their game of cards of an evening--the
Troisvilles (pronounced Treville), the La Roche-Guyons, the Casterans
(pronounced Cateran), and the Duc de Verneuil--had all so long been
accustomed to look up to the Marquis as a person of immense consequence,
that they encouraged him in such notions as these. They were perfectly
sincere in their belief; and indeed, it would have been well founded if
they could have wiped out the history of the last forty years. But the
most honorable and undoubted sanctions of right, such as Louis
XVIII. had tried to set on record when he dated the Charter from the
one-and-twentieth year of his reign, only exist when ratified by the
general consent. The d'Esgrignons not only lacked the very rudiments
of the language of latter-day politics, to wit, money, the great modern
_relief_, or sufficient rehabilitation of nobility; but, in their case,
too, "historical continuity" was lacking, and that is a kind of renown
which tells quite as much at Court as on the battlefield, in diplomatic
circles as in Parliament, with a book, or in connection with an
adventure; it is, as it were, a sacred ampulla poured upon the heads
of each successive generation. Whereas a noble family, inactive
and forgotten, is very much in the position of a hard-featured,
poverty-stricken, simple-minded, and virtuous maid, these qualifications
being the four cardinal points of misfortune. The marriage of a daughter
of the Troisvilles with General Montcornet, so far from opening the
eyes of the Antiquities, very nearly brought about a rupture between
the Troisvilles and the salon d'Esgrignon, the latter declaring that the
Troisvilles were mixing themselves up with all sorts of people.

There was one, and one only, among all these folk who did not share
their illusions. And that one, needless to say, was Chesnel the notary.
Although his devotion, sufficiently proved already, was simply unbounded
for the great house now reduced to three persons; although he accepted
all their ideas, and thought them nothing less than right, he had too
much common sense, he was too good a man of business to more than half
the families in the department, to miss the significance of the great
changes that were taking place in people's minds, or to be blind to the
different conditions brought about by industrial development and modern
ma