In 1822 the Marquis d'Esgrignon's fortunes had not improved in spite
of the changes worked by the Restoration in the condition of emigres.
Of all the nobles hardly hit by Revolutionary legislation, his case
was the hardest. Like other great families, the d'Esgrignons before
1789 derived the greater part of their income from their rights as
lords of the manor in the shape of dues paid by those who held of
them; and, naturally, the old seigneurs had reduced the size of the
holdings in order to swell the amounts paid in quit-rents and heriots.
Families in this position were hopelessly ruined. They were not
affected by the ordinance by which Louis XVIII. put the emigres into
possession of such of their lands as had not been sold; and at a later
date it was impossible that the law of indemnity should indemnify
them. Their suppressed rights, as everybody knows, were revived in the
shape of a land tax known by the very name of domaines, but the money
went into the coffers of the State.

The Marquis by his position belonged to that small section of the
Royalist party which would hear of no kind of compromise with those
whom they styled, not Revolutionaries, but revolted subjects, or, in
more parliamentary language, they had no dealings with Liberals or
Constitutionnels. Such Royalists, nicknamed Ultras by the opposition,
took for leaders and heroes those courageous orators of the Right, who
from the very beginning attempted, with M. de Polignac, to protest
against the charter granted by Louis XVIII. This they regarded as an
ill-advised edict extorted from the Crown by the necessity of the
moment, only to be annulled later on. And, therefore, so far from
co-operating with the King to bring about a new condition of things,
the Marquis d'Esgrignon stood aloof, an upholder of the straitest sect
of the Right in politics, until such time as his vast fortune should
be restored to him. Nor did he so much as admit the thought of the
indemnity which filled the minds of the Villele ministry, and formed a
part of a design of strengthening the Crown by putting an end to those
fatal distinctions of ownership which still lingered on in spite of
legislation.

The miracles of the Restoration of 1814, the still greater miracle of
Napoleon's return in 1815, the portents of a second flight of the
Bourbons, and a second reinstatement (that almost fabulous phase of
contemporary history), all these things took the Marquis by
surprise at the age