, Levrault-Jacques, Jean-Minoret--enough to drive a
Pere Anselme of the People frantic,--if the people should ever want a
genealogist.

The variations of this family kaleidoscope of four branches was now so
complicated by births and marriages that the genealogical tree of
the bourgeoisie of Nemours would have puzzled the Benedictines of
the Almanach of Gotha, in spite of the atomic science with which they
arrange those zigzags of German alliances. For a long time the Minorets
occupied the tanneries, the Cremieres kept the mills, the Massins were
in trade, and the Levraults continued farmers. Fortunately for the
neighbourhood these four stocks threw out suckers instead of depending
only on their tap-roots; they scattered cuttings by the expatriation
of sons who sought their fortune elsewhere; for instance, there are
Minorets who are cutlers at Melun; Levraults at Montargis; Massins
at Orleans; and Cremieres of some importance in Paris. Divers are the
destinies of these bees from the parent hive. Rich Massins employ, of
course, the poor working Massins--just as Austria and Prussia take the
German princes into their service. It may happen that a public office is
managed by a Minoret millionaire and guarded by a Minoret sentinel. Full
of the same blood and called by the same name (for sole likeness), these
four roots had ceaselessly woven a human network of which each thread
was delicate or strong, fine or coarse, as the case might be. The same
blood was in the head and in the feet and in the heart, in the working
hands, in the weakly lungs, in the forehead big with genius.

The chiefs of the clan were faithful to the little town, where the
ties of family were relaxed or tightened according to the events which
happened under this curious cognomenism. In whatever part of France you
may be, you will find the same thing under changed names, but without
the poetic charm which feudalism gave to it, and which Walter Scott's
genius reproduced so faithfully. Let us look a little higher and
examine humanity as it appears in history. All the noble families of the
eleventh century, most of them (except the royal race of Capet) extinct
to-day, will be found to have contributed to the birth of the Rohans,
Montmorencys, Beauffremonts, and Mortemarts of our time,--in fact they
will all be found in the blood of the last gentleman who is indeed a
gentleman. In other words, every bourgeois is cousin to a bourgeois, and
every noble is cousin