The Deserted Woman | Page 4

quitrents and heriots, the pack of hounds
and the laced coats; full of honor among themselves, and one and all
loyally devoted to princes whom they only see at a distance. The
historical house /incognito/ is as quaint a survival as a piece of ancient
tapestry. Vegetating somewhere among them there is sure to be an
uncle or a brother, a lieutenant-general, an old courtier of the Kings's,
who wears the red ribbon of the order of Saint-Louis, and went to
Hanover with the Marechal de Richelieu: and here you will find him
like a stray leaf out of some old pamphlet of the time of Louis Quinze.
This fossil greatness finds a rival in another house, wealthier, though of
less ancient lineage. Husband and wife spend a couple of months of
every winter in Paris, bringing back with them its frivolous tone and
short-lived contemporary crazes. Madame is a woman of fashion,

though she looks rather conscious of her clothes, and is always behind
the mode. She scoffs, however, at the ignorance affected by her
neighbors. /Her/ plate is of modern fashion; she has "grooms," Negroes,
a valet-de-chambre, and what-not. Her oldest son drives a tilbury, and
does nothing (the estate is entailed upon him), his younger brother is
auditor to a Council of State. The father is well posted up in official
scandals, and tells you anecdotes 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 memory, its
quintessence, the /genius loci/ incarnate. There is something frigid and
monumental about these ladies; they know exactly when to laugh and
when to shake their heads, and every now and then give out some
utterance which passes current as a witticism.
A few rich townspeople have crept into the miniature Faubourg Saint-
Germain, thanks to their money or their aristocratic leanings. But
despite their forty years, the circle still say of them, "Young So- and-so
has sound opinions," and of such do they make deputies. As a rule, the
elderly spinsters are their patronesses, not without comment.
Finally, in this exclusive little set include two or three ecclesiastics,
admitted for the sake of their cloth, or for their wit; for these great
nobles find their own society rather dull, and introduce the bourgeois
element into their drawing-rooms, as a baker puts leaven