answer as any king's favorite who has tried to climb yet higher, and
fears that being over-bold he is like to fall. This must seem a dark

saying to those who have never studied the manners and customs of
cities divided into the upper and lower town; wherefore it is

necessary to enter here upon some topographical details, and this so
much the more if the reader is to comprehend the position of one of

the principalcharacters in the story--Mme. de Bargeton.
The old city of Angouleme is perched aloft on a crag like a sugar-

loaf, overlooking the plain where the Charente winds away through the
meadows. The crag is an outlying spur on the Perigord side of a long,

low ridge of hill, which terminates abruptly just above the road from
Paris to Bordeaux, so that the Rock of Angouleme is a sort of

promontory marking out the line of three picturesque valleys. The
ramparts and great gateways and ruined fortress on the summit of the

crag still remain to bear witness to the importance of this stronghold
during the Religious Wars, when Angouleme was a military position

coveted alike of Catholics and Calvinists, but its old-world strength
is a source of weakness in modern days; Angouleme could not spread

down to the Charente, and shut in between its ramparts and the steep
sides of the crag, the old town is condemned to stagnation of the most

fatal kind.
The Government made an attempt about this very time to extend the town

towards Perigord, building a Prefecture, a Naval School, and barracks
along the hillside, and opening up roads. But private enterprise had

been beforehandelsewhere. For some time past the suburb of L'Houmeau
had sprung up, a mushroom growth at the foot of the crag and along the

river-side, where the direct road runs from Paris to Bordeaux.
Everybody has heard of the great paper-mills of Angouleme, established

perforce three hundred years ago on the Charente and its branch
streams, where there was a sufficient fall of water. The largest State

factory of marine ordnance in France was established at Ruelle, some
six miles away. Carriers, wheelwrights, posthouses, and inns, every

agency for public conveyance, every industry that lives by road or
river, was crowded together in Lower Angouleme, to avoid the

difficulty of the ascent of the hill. Naturally, too, tanneries,
laundries, and all such waterside trades stood within reach of the

Charente; and along the banks of the river lay the stores of brandy
and great warehouses full of the water-borne raw material; all the

carrying trade of the Charente, in short, had lined the quays with
buildings.

So the Faubourg of L'Houmeau grew into a busy and prosperous city, a
second Angouleme rivaling the upper town, the residence of the powers

that be, the lords spiritual and temporal of Angouleme; though
L'Houmeau, with all its business and increasing greatness, was still a

mere appendage of the city above. The noblesse and officialdom dwelt
on the crag, trade and wealth remained below. No love was lost between

these two sections of the community all the world over, and in
Angouleme it would have been hard to say which of the two camps

detested the other the more cordially. Under the Empire the machinery
worked fairly smoothly, but the Restoration wrought both sides to the

highest pitch of exasperation.
Nearly every house in the upper town of Angouleme is inhabited by

noble, or at any rate by old burgher, families, who live independently
on their incomes--a sort of autochthonous nation who suffer no aliens

to come among them. Possibly, after two hundred years of unbroken
residence, and it may be an intermarriage or two with one of the

primordial houses, a family from some neighboring district may be
adopted, but in the eyes of the aboriginal race they are still

newcomers of yesterday.
Prefects, receivers-general, and various administrations that have

come and gone during the last forty years, have tried to tame the
ancient families perched aloft like wary ravens on their crag; the

said families were always willing to accept invitations to dinners and
dances; but as to admitting the strangers to their own houses, they

were inexorable. Ready to scoff and disparage, jealous and niggardly,
marrying only among themselves, the families formed a serried phalanx

to keep out intruders. Of modern luxury they had no notion; and as for
sending a boy to Paris, it was sending him, they thought to certain

ruin. Such sagacity will give a sufficient idea of the old-world
manners and customs of this society, suffering from thick-headed

Royalism, infected with bigotry rather than zeal, all stagnating
together, motionless as their town founded upon a rock. Yet Angouleme

enjoyed a great reputation in the provinces round about for its
educational advantages, and neighboring towns sent their daughters to

its boarding schools and convents.
It is easy to imagine the influence of the class sentiment which held

Angouleme aloof from L'Houmeau. The merchant classes are rich, the
noblesse are usually poor. Each side takes its revenge in scorn of the

other. The tradespeople in Angouleme espouse the quarrel. "He is a man
of L'Houmeau!" a shopkeeper of the upper town will tell you, speaking

of a merchant in the lower suburb, throwing an accent into the speech
which no words can describe. When the Restoration defined the position

of the French noblesse, holding out hopes to them which could only be
realized by a complete and general topsy-turvydom, the distance

between Angouleme and L'Houmeau, already more strongly marked than the
distance between the hill and plain, was widened yet further. The

better families, all devoted as one man to the Government, grew more
exclusive here than in any other part of France. "The man of

L'Houmeau" became little better than a pariah. Hence the deep,
smothered hatred which broke out everywhere with such ugly unanimity

in the insurrection of 1830 and destroyed the elements of a durable
social system in France. As the overweening haughtiness of the Court

nobles detached the provincial noblesse from the throne, so did these
last alienate the bourgeoisie from the royal cause by behavior that

galled their vanity in every possible way.
So "a man of L'Houmeau," a druggist's son, in Mme. de Bargeton's house

was nothing less than a little revolution. Who was responsible for it?
Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne and Canalis, Beranger and

Chateaubriand. Davrigny, Benjamin Constant and Lamennais, Cousin and
Michaud,--all the old and young illustrious names in literature in

short, Liberals and Royalists, alike must divide the blame among them.
Mme. de Bargeton loved art and letters, eccentric taste on her part, a

craze deeply deplored in Angouleme. In justice to the lady, it is
necessary to give a sketch of the previous history of a woman born to

shine, and left by unlucky circumstances in the shade, a woman whose
influence decided Lucien's career.

M. de Bargeton was the great-grandson of an alderman of Bordeaux named
Mirault, ennobled under Louis XIII. for long tenure of office. His

son, bearing the name of Mirault de Bargeton, became an officer in the
household troops of Louis XIV., and married so great a fortune that in

the reign of Louis XV. his son dropped the Mirault and was called
simply M. de Bargeton. This M. de Bargeton, the alderman's grandson,

lived up to his quality so strenuously that he ran through the family
property and checked the course of its fortunes. Two of his brothers

indeed, great-uncles of the present Bargeton, went into business
again, for which reason you will find the name of Mirault among

Bordeaux merchants at this day. The lands of Bargeton, in Angoumois in
the barony of Rochefoucauld, being entailed, and the house in

Angouleme, called the Hotel Bargeton, likewise, the grandson of M. de
Bargeton the Waster came in for these hereditaments; though the year

1789 deprived him of all seignorial rights save to the rents paid by
his tenants, which amounted to some ten thousand francs per annum. If

his grandsire had but walked in the ways of his illustrious
progenitors, Bargeton I. and Bargeton II., Bargeton V. (who may be

dubbed Bargeton the Mute by way of distinction) should by rights have
been born to the title of Marquis of Bargeton; he would have been

connected with some great family or other, and in due time he would
have been a duke and a peer of France, like many another; whereas, in

1805, he thought himself uncommonly lucky when he married Mlle.
Marie-Louise-Anais de Negrepelisse, the daughter of a noble long

relegated to the obscurity of his manor-house, scion though he was of
the younger branch of one of the oldest families in the south of

France. There had been a Negrepelisse among the hostages of St. Louis.
The head of the elder branch, however, had borne the illustrious name

of d'Espard since the reign of Henri Quatre, when the Negrepelisse of
that day married an heiress of the d'Espard family. As for M. de

Negrepelisse, the younger son of a younger son, he lived upon his
wife's property, a small estate in the neighborhood of Barbezieux,

farming the land to admiration, selling his corn in the market
himself, and distilling his own brandy, laughing at those who

ridiculed him, so long as he could pile up silver crowns, and now and
again round out his estate with another bit of land.

Circumstances unusual enough in out-of-the-way places in the country