g beneath the utmost
polish tricked itself out in Voltairean wit. If the Chevalier went
rather too far at times, he always added as a corrective that a man must
always behave himself like a gentleman.

Of all this discourse, Victurnien comprehended just so much as flattered
his passions. From the first he saw his old father laughing with
the Chevalier. The two elderly men considered that the pride of a
d'Esgrignon was a sufficient safeguard against anything unbefitting;
as for a dishonorable action, no one in the house imagined that a
d'Esgrignon could be guilty of it. _Honor_, the great principle of
Monarchy, was planted firm like a beacon in the hearts of the family;
it lighted up the least action, it kindled the least thought of a
d'Esgrignon. "A d'Esgrignon ought not to permit himself to do such and
such a thing; he bears a name which pledges him to make a future worthy
of the past"--a noble teaching which should have been sufficient in
itself to keep alive the tradition of noblesse--had been, as it were,
the burden of Victurnien's cradle song. He heard them from the old
Marquis, from Mlle. Armande, from Chesnel, from the intimates of the
house. And so it came to pass that good and evil met, and in equal
forces, in the boy's soul.

At the age of eighteen, Victurnien went into society. He noticed some
slight discrepancies between the outer world of the town and the inner
world of the Hotel d'Esgrignon, but he in no wise tried to seek the
causes of them. And, indeed, the causes were to be found in Paris. He
had yet to learn that the men who spoke their minds out so boldly in
evening talk with his father, were extremely careful of what they
said in the presence of the hostile persons with whom their interests
compelled them to mingle. His own father had won the right of freedom
of speech. Nobody dreamed of contradicting an old man of seventy, and
besides, every one was willing to overlook fidelity to the old order of
things in a man who had been violently despoiled.

Victurnien was deceived by appearances, and his behavior set up the
backs of the townspeople. In his impetuous way he tried to carry matters
with too high a hand over some difficulties in the way of sport, which
ended in formidable lawsuits, hushed up by Chesnel for money paid down.
Nobody dared to tell the Marquis of these things. You may judge of
his astonishment if he had heard that his son had been prosecuted for
shooting over his lands, his domains