oasts, swagger, and challenges followed.

Each renounced any pride in his own intellectual capacity, in order to
vindicate that of hogsheads, casks, and vats; and each made noise enough
for two. A time came when the footmen smiled, while their masters all
talked at once. A philosopher would have been interested, doubtless, by
the singularity of the thoughts expressed, a politician would have been
amazed by the incongruity of the methods discussed in the melee of words
or doubtfully luminous paradoxes, where truths, grotesquely caparisoned,
met in conflict across the uproar of brawling judgments, of arbitrary
decisions and folly, much as bullets, shells, and grapeshot are hurled
across a battlefield.

It was at once a volume and a picture. Every philosophy, religion, and
moral code differing so greatly in every latitude, every government,
every great achievement of the human intellect, fell before a scythe as
long as Time's own; and you might have found it hard to decide whether
it was wielded by Gravity intoxicated, or by Inebriation grown sober and
clear-sighted. Borne away by a kind of tempest, their minds, like the
sea raging against the cliffs, seemed ready to shake the laws which
confine the ebb and flow of civilization; unconsciously fulfilling the
will of God, who has suffered evil and good to abide in nature, and
reserved the secret of their continual strife to Himself. A frantic
travesty of debate ensued, a Walpurgis-revel of intellects. Between the
dreary jests of these children of the Revolution over the inauguration
of a newspaper, and the talk of the joyous gossips at Gargantua's
birth, stretched the gulf that divides the nineteenth century from the
sixteenth. Laughingly they had begun the work of destruction, and our
journalists laughed amid the ruins.

"What is the name of that young man over there?" said the notary,
indicating Raphael. "I thought I heard some one call him Valentin."

"What stuff is this?" said Emile, laughing; "plain Valentin, say you?
Raphael DE Valentin, if you please. We bear an eagle or, on a field
sable, with a silver crown, beak and claws gules, and a fine motto:
NON CECIDIT ANIMUS. We are no foundling child, but a descendant of the
Emperor Valens, of the stock of the Valentinois, founders of the cities
of Valence in France, and Valencia in Spain, rightful heirs to the
Empire of the East. If we suffer Mahmoud on the throne of Byzantium, it
is out of pure condescension, and for l