love with each other. It would be charming,
Madame thought; but, alas! Albert would be wise to look for a dot.

The Marquis paused. Again he temporised. For he could not all in an
instant decide which side of this question to take. He looked at Albert,
frail, romantic; an ideal representative of that old nobility of France
which was never practical, and elected to go to the guillotine rather
than seek to cultivate that modern virtue.

"At the same time, Madame, it is well to remember that a loan offered
now may reasonably be expected to bring such a return in the future as
will provide dots for the de Chantonnays to the end of time."

Madame was about to make a spirited reply; she might even have suggested
that the Beauvoir estate would be better apportioned to Albert's wife
than to Juliette as the wife of another, but Albert himself stopped in
front of them and swept away all argument by a passionate gesture of his
small, white hand.

"It is concluded," he said. "I sell the Beauvoir estate! Have not the
Chantonnays proved a hundred times that they are equal to any sacrifice
for the sake of France?"

CHAPTER XXXV. A SQUARE MAN

All through the summer of 1851--a year to be marked for all time in
the minds of historians, not in red, but in black letters--the war of
politics tossed France hither and thither.

There were, at this time, five parties contending for mastery. Should
one of these appear for the moment to be about to make itself secure in
power, the other four would at once unite to tear the common adversary
from his unstable position. Of these parties, only two were of real
cohesion: the Legitimists and the Bonapartists. The Socialists, the
Moderate Republicans, and the Orleanists were too closely allied in the
past to be friendly in the present. Socialists are noisy, but rarely
clever. A man who in France describes himself as Moderate must not
expect to be popular for any length of time. The Orleanists were only
just out of office. It was scarcely a year since Louis Philippe had died
in exile at Claremont--only three years since he signed his abdication
and hurried across to Newhaven. It was not the turn of the Orleanists.

There is no quarrel so deadly as a family quarrel; no fall so sudden
as that of a house divided against itself. All through the spring and
summer of 1851 France exhibited herself in the eyes of the world a
laughing-stock to her enemies, a thing of pity to those who loved that