smen had begun by calling
it the Hotel d'Esgrignon in jest, and ended after a score of years by
giving it that name in earnest.

The name of Carol, or Karawl, as the Thierrys would have spelt it, was
glorious among the names of the most powerful chieftains of the
Northmen who conquered Gaul and established the feudal system there.
Never had Carol bent his head before King or Communes, the Church or
Finance. Intrusted in the days of yore with the keeping of a French
March, the title of marquis in their family meant no shadow of
imaginary office; it had been a post of honor with duties to
discharge. Their fief had always been their domain. Provincial nobles
were they in every sense of the word; they might boast of an unbroken
line of great descent; they had been neglected by the court for two
hundred years; they were lords paramount in the estates of a province
where the people looked up to them with superstitious awe, as to the
image of the Holy Virgin that cures the toothache. The house of
d'Esgrignon, buried in its remote border country, was preserved as the
charred piles of one of Caesar's bridges are maintained intact in a
river bed. For thirteen hundred years the daughters of the house had
been married without a dowry or taken the veil; the younger sons of
every generation had been content with their share of their mother's
dower and gone forth to be captains or bishops; some had made a
marriage at court; one cadet of the house became an admiral, a duke,
and a peer of France, and died without issue. Never would the Marquis
d'Esgrignon of the elder branch accept the title of duke.

"I hold my marquisate as His Majesty holds the realm of France, and on
the same conditions," he told the Constable de Luynes, a very paltry
fellow in his eyes at that time.

You may be sure that d'Esgrignons lost their heads on the scaffold
during the troubles. The old blood showed itself proud and high even
in 1789. The Marquis of that day would not emigrate; he was answerable
for his March. The reverence in which he was held by the countryside
saved his head; but the hatred of the genuine sans-culottes was strong
enough to compel him to pretend to fly, and for a while he lived in
hiding. Then, in the name of the Sovereign People, the d'Esgrignon
lands were dishonored by the District, and the woods sold by the
Nation in spite of the personal protest made by the Marquis, then
turned forty. Mlle. d'Esgrignon, his half-sister, saved some