The Collection of Antiquities

by Honore de Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage

DEDICATION
To Baron Von Hammer-Purgstall, Member of the Aulic Council, Author

of the History of the Ottoman Empire.
Dear Baron,--You have taken so warm an interest in my long, vast

"History of French Manners in the Nineteenth Century," you have
given me so much encouragement to persevere with my work, that you

have given me a right to associate your name with some portion of
it. Are you not one of the most important representatives of

conscientious, studious Germany? Will not your approval win for me
the approval of others, and protect this attempt of mine? So proud

am I to have gained your good opinion, that I have striven to
deserve it by continuing my labors with the unflagging courage

characteristic of your methods of study, and of that exhaustive
research among documents without which you could never have given

your monumental work to the world of letters. Your sympathy with
such labor as you yourself have bestowed upon the most brilliant

civilization of the East, has often sustained my ardor through
nights of toil given to the details of our modern civilization.

And will not you, whose naive kindliness can only be compared with
that of our own La Fontaine, be glad to know of this?

May this token of my respect for you and your work find you at
Dobling, dear Baron, and put you and yours in mind of one of your

most sincere admirers and friends.
DE BALZAC.

THE COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES
There stands a house at a corner of a street, in the middle of a town,

in one of the least important prefectures in France, but the name of
the street and the name of the town must be suppressed here. Every one

will appreciate the motives of this sage reticence demanded by
convention; for if a writer takes upon himself the office of annalist

of his own time, he is bound to touch on many sore subjects. The house
was called the Hotel d'Esgrignon; but let d'Esgrignon be considered a

mere fancy name, neither more nor less connected with real people than
the conventional Belval, Floricour, or Derville of the stage, or the

Adalberts and Mombreuses of romance. After all, the names of the
principal characters will be quite as much disguised; for though in

this history the chronicler would prefer to conceal the facts under a
mass of contradictions, anachronisms, improbabilities, and

absurdities, the truth will out in spite of him. You uproot a vine-
stock, as you imagine, and the stem will send up lusty shoots after

you have ploughed your vineyard over.
The "Hotel d'Esgrignon" was nothing more nor less than the house in

which the old Marquis lived; or, in the style of ancient documents,
Charles Marie Victor Ange Carol, Marquis d'Esgrignon. It was only an

ordinary house, but the townspeople and tradesmen had begun by calling
it the Hotel d'Esgrignon in jest, and ended after a score of years by

giving it that name in earnest.
The name of Carol, or Karawl, as the Thierrys would have spelt it, was

glorious among the names of the most powerful chieftains of the
Northmen who conquered Gaul and established the feudalsystem there.

Never had Carol bent his head before King or Communes, the Church or
Finance. Intrusted in the days of yore with the keeping of a French

March, the title of marquis in their family meant no shadow of
imaginary office; it had been a post of honor with duties to

discharge. Their fief had always been their domain. Provincial nobles
were they in every sense of the word; they might boast of an unbroken

line of great descent; they had been neglected by the court for two
hundred years; they were lords paramount in the estates of a province

where the people looked up to them with superstitious awe, as to the
image of the Holy Virgin that cures the toothache. The house of

d'Esgrignon, buried in its remote border country, was preserved as the
charred piles of one of Caesar's bridges are maintained intact in a

river bed. For thirteen hundred years the daughters of the house had
been married without a dowry or taken the veil; the younger sons of

every generation had been content with their share of their mother's
dower and gone forth to be captains or bishops; some had made a

marriage at court; one cadet of the house became an admiral, a duke,
and a peer of France, and died without issue. Never would the Marquis

d'Esgrignon of the elder branch accept the title of duke.
"I hold my marquisate as His Majesty holds the realm of France, and on

the same conditions," he told the Constable de Luynes, a very paltry
fellow in his eyes at that time.

You may be sure that d'Esgrignons lost their heads on the scaffold
during the troubles. The old blood showed itself proud and high even

in 1789. The Marquis of that day would not emigrate; he was answerable
for his March. The reverence in which he was held by the countryside

saved his head; but the hatred of the genuine sans-culottes was strong
enough to compel him to pretend to fly, and for a while he lived in

hiding. Then, in the name of the Sovereign People, the d'Esgrignon
lands were dishonored by the District, and the woods sold by the

Nation in spite of the personal protest made by the Marquis, then
turned forty. Mlle. d'Esgrignon, his half-sister, saved some portions

of the fief, thanks to the young steward of the family, who claimed on
her behalf the partage de presuccession, which is to say, the right of

a relative to a portion of the emigre's lands. To Mlle. d'Esgrignon,
therefore, the Republic made over the castle itself and a few farms.

Chesnel [Choisnel], the faithfulsteward, was obliged to buy in his
own name the church, the parsonage house, the castle gardens, and

other places to which his patron was attached--the Marquis advancing
the money.

The slow, swift years of the Terror went by, and the Marquis, whose
character had won the respect of the whole country, decided that he

and his sister ought to return to the castle and improve the property
which Maitre Chesnel--for he was now a notary--had contrived to save

for them out of the wreck. Alas! was not the plundered and dismantled
castle all too vast for a lord of the manor shorn of all his ancient

rights; too large for the landowner whose woods had been sold
piecemeal, until he could scarce draw nine thousand francs of income

from the pickings of his old estates?
It was in the month of October 1800 that Chesnel brought the Marquis

back to the old feudal castle, and saw with deep emotion, almost
beyound his control, his patronstanding in the midst of the empty

courtyard, gazing round upon the moat, now filled up with rubbish, and
the castle towers razed to the level of the roof. The descendant of

the Franks looked for the missing Gothic turrets and the picturesque
weather vanes which used to rise above them; and his eyes turned to

the sky, as if asking of heaven the reason of this social upheaval. No
one but Chesnel could understand the profoundanguish of the great

d'Esgrignon, now known as Citizen Carol. For a long while the Marquis
stood in silence, drinking in the influences of the place, the ancient

home of his forefathers, with the air that he breathed; then he flung
out a most melancholy exclamation.

"Chesnel," he said, "we will come back again some day when the
troubles are over; I could not bring myself to live here until the

edict of pacification has been published; THEY will not allow me to
set my scutcheon on the wall."

He waved his hand toward the castle, mounted his horse, and rode back
beside his sister, who had driven over in the notary's shabby basket-

chaise.
The Hotel d'Esgrignon in the town had been demolished; a couple of

factories now stood on the site of the aristocrat's house. So Maitre
Chesnel spent the Marquis' last bag of louis on the purchase of the

old-fashioned building in the square, with its gables, weather-vane,
turret, and dovecote. Once it had been the courthouse of the

bailiwick, and subsequently the presidial; it had belonged to the
d'Esgrignons from generation to generation; and now, in consideration

of five hundred louis d'or, the present owner made it over with the
title given by the Nation to its rightful lord. And so, half in jest,

half in earnest, the old house was christened the Hotel d'Esgrignon.
In 1800 little or no difficulty was made over erasing names from the