cdotes of Louis XVIII. and Madame du Cayla.
He invests his money in the five per cents, and is careful to avoid the
topic of cider, but has been known occasionally to fall a victim to the
craze for rectifying the conjectural sums-total of the various fortunes
of the department. He is a member of the Departmental Council, has
his clothes from Paris, and wears the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In
short, he is a country gentleman who has fully grasped the significance
of the Restoration, and is coining money at the Chamber, but his
Royalism is less pure than that of the rival house; he takes
the _Gazette_ and the _Debats_, the other family only read the
_Quotidienne_.

His lordship the Bishop, a sometime Vicar-General, fluctuates between
the two powers, who pay him the respect due to religion, but at times
they bring home to him the moral appended by the worthy Lafontaine
to the fable of the _Ass laden with Relics_. The good man's origin is
distinctly plebeian.

Then come stars of the second magnitude, men of family with ten or
twelve hundred livres a year, captains in the navy or cavalry regiments,
or nothing at all. Out on the roads, on horseback, they rank half-way
between the cure bearing the sacraments and the tax collector on his
rounds. Pretty nearly all of them have been in the Pages or in
the Household Troops, and now are peaceably ending their days in a
_faisance-valoir_, more interested in felling timber and the cider
prospects than in the Monarchy.

Still they talk of the Charter and the Liberals while the cards are
making, or over a game at backgammon, when they have exhausted the
usual stock of _dots_, and have married everybody off according to the
genealogies which they all know by heart. Their womenkind are haughty
dames, who assume the airs of Court ladies in their basket chaises. They
huddle themselves up in shawls and caps by way of full dress; and twice
a year, after ripe deliberation, have a new bonnet from Paris, brought
as opportunity offers. Exemplary wives are they for the most part, and
garrulous.

These are the principal elements of aristocratic gentility, with a
few outlying old maids of good family, spinsters who have solved the
problem: given a human being, to remain absolutely stationary. They
might be sealed up in the houses where you see them; their faces and
their dresses are literally part of the fixtures of the town, and the
province in which they dwell. They are its tradition, its