inate dowager. When
the Restoration came, the young man, then eighteen years of age, entered
the Maison-Rouge, followed the princes to Ghent, was made an officer in
the body-guard, left it to serve in the line, but was recalled later to
the Royal Guard, where, at twenty-three years of age, he found
himself major of a cavalry regiment,--a splendid position, due to his
grandmother, who had played her cards well to obtain it, in spite of his
youth. This double biography is a compendium of the general and special
history, barring variations, of all the noble families who emigrated
having debts and property, dowagers and tact.

Madame la Baronne de Maulincour had a friend in the old Vidame de
Pamiers, formerly a commander of the Knights of Malta. This was one of
those undying friendships founded on sexagenary ties which nothing
can weaken, because at the bottom of such intimacies there are certain
secrets of the human heart, delightful to guess at when we have the
time, insipid to explain in twenty words, and which might make the text
of a work in four volumes as amusing as the Doyen de Killerine,--a work
about which young men talk and judge without having read it.

Auguste de Maulincour belonged therefore to the faubourg Saint-Germain
through his grandmother and the vidame, and it sufficed him to date back
two centuries to take the tone and opinions of those who assume to
go back to Clovis. This young man, pale, slender, and delicate in
appearance, a man of honor and true courage, who would fight a duel for
a yes or a no, had never yet fought upon a battle-field, though he wore
in his button-hole the cross of the Legion of honor. He was, as you
perceive, one of the blunders of the Restoration, perhaps the most
excusable of them. The youth of those days was the youth of no epoch.
It came between the memories of the Empire and those of the Emigration,
between the old traditions of the court and the conscientious education
of the _bourgeoisie_; between religion and fancy-balls; between two
political faiths, between Louis XVIII., who saw only the present, and
Charles X., who looked too far into the future; it was moreover bound to
accept the will of the king, though the king was deceiving and tricking
it. This unfortunate youth, blind and yet clear-sighted, was counted
as nothing by old men jealously keeping the reins of the State in
their feeble hands, while the monarchy could have been saved by their
retirement and the acces