added Goupil, "we'll drown this little grief in
floods of champagne in honor of Desire!--sha'n't we, old fellow?" he
cried, tapping the stomach of the giant, and inviting himself to the
feast for fear he should be left out.

CHAPTER II. THE RICH UNCLE

Before proceeding further, persons of an exact turn of mind may like to
read a species of family inventory, so as to understand the degrees
of relationship which connected the old man thus suddenly converted
to religion with these three heads of families or their wives. This
cross-breeding of families in the remote provinces might be made the
subject of many instructive reflections.

There are but three or four houses of the lesser nobility in Nemours;
among them, at the period of which we write, that of the family of
Portenduere was the most important. These exclusives visited none but
nobles who possessed lands or chateaus in the neighbourhood; of the
latter we may mention the d'Aiglemonts, owners of the beautiful estate
of Saint-Lange, and the Marquis du Rouvre, whose property, crippled by
mortgages, was closely watched by the bourgeoisie. The nobles of the
town had no money. Madame de Portenduere's sole possessions were a
farm which brought a rental of forty-seven hundred francs, and her town
house.

In opposition to this very insignificant Faubourg St. Germain was a
group of a dozen rich families, those of retired millers, or former
merchants; in short a miniature bourgeoisie; below which, again, lived
and moved the retail shopkeepers, the proletaries and the peasantry. The
bourgeoisie presented (like that of the Swiss cantons and of other
small countries) the curious spectacle of the ramifications of certain
autochthonous families, old-fashioned and unpolished perhaps, but who
rule a whole region and pervade it, until nearly all its inhabitants are
cousins. Under Louis XI., an epoch at which the commons first made
real names of their surnames (some of which are united with those of
feudalism) the bourgeoisie of Nemours was made up of Minorets, Massins,
Levraults and Cremieres. Under Louis XIII. these four families had
already produced the Massin-Cremieres, the Levrault-Massins, the
Massin-Minorets, the Minoret-Minorets, the Cremiere-Levraults,
the Levrault-Minoret-Massins, Massin-Levraults, Minoret-Massins,
Massin-Massins, and Cremiere-Massins,--all these varied with juniors
and diversified with the names of eldest sons, as for instance,
Cremiere-Francois