This supremacy
granted to one house is apt to wound the sensibilities of other natives
of the region, who console themselves by adding up the cost it involves,
and by which they profit. If it so happens that there is no fortune
large enough to keep open house in this way, the big-wigs of the place
choose a place of meeting, as they did at Alencon, in the house of some
inoffensive person, whose settled life and character and position offers
no umbrage to the vanities or the interests of any one.

For some years the upper classes of Alencon had met in this way at the
house of an old maid, whose fortune was, unknown to herself, the aim
and object of Madame Granson, her second cousin, and of the two old
bachelors whose secret hopes in that direction we have just unveiled.
This lady lived with her maternal uncle, a former grand-vicar of the
bishopric of Seez, once her guardian, and whose heir she was. The family
of which Rose-Marie-Victoire Cormon was the present representative had
been in earlier days among the most considerable in the province. Though
belonging to the middle classes, she consorted with the nobility, among
whom she was more or less allied, her family having furnished, in past
years, stewards to the Duc d'Alencon, many magistrates to the long robe,
and various bishops to the clergy. Monsieur de Sponde, the maternal
grandfather of Mademoiselle Cormon, was elected by the Nobility to the
States-General, and Monsieur Cormon, her father, by the Tiers-Etat,
though neither accepted the mission. For the last hundred years the
daughters of the family had married nobles belonging to the provinces;
consequently, this family had thrown out so many suckers throughout the
duchy as to appear on nearly all the genealogical trees. No bourgeois
family had ever seemed so like nobility.

The house in which Mademoiselle Cormon lived, build in Henri IV.'s time,
by Pierre Cormon, the steward of the last Duc d'Alencon, had always
belonged to the family; and among the old maid's visible possessions
this one was particularly stimulating to the covetous desires of the two
old lovers. Yet, far from producing revenue, the house was a cause of
expense. But it is so rare to find in the very centre of a provincial
town a private dwelling without unpleasant surroundings, handsome in
outward structure and convenient within, that Alencon shared the envy of
the lovers.

This old mansion stands exactly in the middle of the rue du Val-Noble.