unt to the nobles of the Faubourg connected
with his house. Now one reason why M. Hebert had urged his client to
undertake this important business in person, rather than volunteer his
own services in Paris, was somewhat extra-professional. He had a sincere
and profound affection for Alain; he felt compassion for that young life
so barrenly wasted in seclusion and severe privations; he respected,
but was too practical a man of business to share, those chivalrous
sentiments of loyalty to an exiled dynasty which disqualified the man
for the age he lived in, and, if not greatly modified, would cut him
off from the hopes and aspirations of his eager generation. He thought
plausibly enough that the air of the grand metropolis was necessary to
the mental health, enfeebled and withering amidst the feudal mists of
Bretagne; that once in Paris, Alain would imbibe the ideas of Paris,
adapt himself to some career leading to honour and to fortune, for which
he took facilities from his high birth, an historical name too national
for any dynasty not to welcome among its adherents, and an intellect
not yet sharpened by contact and competition with others, but in itself
vigorous, habituated to thought, and vivified by the noble aspirations
which belong to imaginative natures.

At the least, Alain would be at Paris in the social position which would
afford him the opportunities of a marriage, in which his birth and rank
would be readily accepted as an equivalent to some ample fortune that
would serve to redeem the endangered seigneuries. He therefore warned
Alain that the affair for which he went to Paris might be tedious, that
lawyers were always slow, and advised him to calculate on remaining
several months, perhaps a year; delicately suggesting that his rearing
hitherto had been too secluded for his age and rank, and that a year at
Paris, even if he failed in the object which took him there, would not
be thrown away in the knowledge of men and things that would fit him
better to grapple with his difficulties on his return.

Alain divided his spare income between his aunt and himself, and had
come to Paris resolutely determined to live within the L200 a year which
remained to his share. He felt the revolution in his whole being that
commenced when out of sight of the petty principality in which he
was the object of that feudal reverence, still surviving in the more
unfrequented parts of Bretagne, for the representatives of illustrious