rental of about fifteen thousand francs a year. Louis XVIII. gave the
post of grand equerry to the son, who, under Charles X., received the

usual pension of twelve thousand francs which was granted to the
pauper peers of France. But what were these twenty-seven thousand

francs a year and the salary of grand equerry to such a family? In
Paris, of course, the young duke used the king's coaches, and had a

mansion provided for him in the rue Saint-Thomas-du-Louvre, near the
royal stables; his salary paid for his winters in the city, and his

twenty-seven thousand francs for the summers in Normandy. If this
noble personage was still a bachelor he was less to blame than his

aunt, who was not versed in La Fontaine's fables. Mademoiselle
d'Herouville made enormous pretensions wholly out of keeping with the

spirit of the times; for great names, without the money to keep them
up, can seldom win rich heiresses among the higher French nobility,

who are themselves embarrassed to provide for their sons under the new
law of the equal division of property. To marry the young Duc

d'Herouville, it was necessary to conciliate the great banking-houses;
but the haughty pride of the daughter of the house alienated these

people by cutting speeches. During the first years of the Restoration,
from 1817 to 1825, Mademoiselle d'Herouville, though in quest of

millions, refused, among others, the daughter of Mongenod the banker,
with whom Monsieur de Fontaine afterwards contented himself.

At last, having lost several good opportunities to establish her
nephew, entirely through her own fault, she was just considering

whether the property of the Nucingens was not too basely acquired, or
whether she should lend herself to the ambition of Madame de Nucingen,

who wished to make her daughter a duchess. The king, anxious to
restore the d'Herouvilles to their former splendor, had almost brought

about this marriage, and when it failed he openly accused Mademoiselle
d'Herouville of folly. In this way the aunt made the nephew

ridiculous, and the nephew, in his own way, was not less absurd. When
great things disappear they leave crumbs, "frusteaux," Rabelais would

say, behind them; and the French nobility of this century has left us
too many such fragments. Neither the clergy nor the nobility have

anything to complain of in this long history of manners and customs.
Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well

represented; but we ought surely to renounce the noble title of
historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the

present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have already
done so elsewhere,--in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in "The

Lily of the Valley"), in the "Duchesse de Langeais," and the very
nobleness of the nobility in the "Marquis d'Espard." How then could it

be that the race of heroes and valiant men belonging to the proud
house of Herouville, who gave the famous marshal to the nation,

cardinals to the church, great leaders to the Valois, knights to Louis
XIV., was reduced to a little fragile being smaller than Butscha? That

is a question which we ask ourselves in more than one salon in Paris
when we hear the greatest names of France announced, and see the

entrance of a thin, pinched, undersized young man, scarcely possessing
the breath of life, or a premature old one, or some whimsical creature

in whom an observer can with great difficulty trace the signs of a
past grandeur. The dissipations of the reign of Louis XV., the orgies

of that fatal and egotistic period, have produced an effete
generation, in which manners alone survive the nobler vanished

qualities,--forms, which are the sole heritage our nobles have
preserved. The abandonment in which Louis XVI. was allowed to perish

may thus be explained, with some slight reservations, as a wretched
result of the reign of Madame de Pompadour.

The grand equerry, a fair young man with blue eyes and a pallid face,
was not without a certain dignity of thought; but his thin, undersized

figure, and the follies of his aunt who had taken him to the Vilquins
and elsewhere to pay his court, rendered him extremely diffident. The

house of Herouville had already been threatened with extinction by the
deed of a deformed being (see the "Enfant Maudit" in "Philosophical

Studies"). The grand marshal, that being the family term for the
member who was made duke by Louis XIII., married at the age of eighty.

The young duke admired women, but he placed them too high and
respected them too much; in fact, he adored them, and was only at his

ease with those whom he could not respect. This characteristic caused
him to lead a double life. He found compensation with women of easy

virtue for the worship to which he surrendered himself in the salons,
or, if you like, the boudoirs, of the faubourg Saint-Germain. Such

habits and his puny figure, his suffering face with its blue eyes
turning upward in ecstasy, increased the ridicule already bestowed

upon him,--very unjustly bestowed, as it happened, for he was full of
wit and delicacy; but his wit, which never sparkled, only showed

itself when he felt at ease. Fanny Beaupre, an actress who was
supposed to be his nearest friend (at a price), called him "a sound

wine so carefully corked that you break all your corkscrews." The
beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, whom the grand equerry could only

worship, annihilated him with a speech which, unfortunately, was
repeated from mouth to mouth, like all such pretty and malicious

sayings.
"He always seems to me," she said, "like one of those jewels of fine

workmanship which we exhibit but never wear, and keep in cotton-wool."
Everything about him, even to his absurdly contrasting title of grand

equerry, amused the good-natured king, Charles X., and made him laugh,
--although the Duc d'Herouville justified his appointment in the

matter of being a fine horseman. Men are like books, often understood
and appreciated too late. Modeste had seen the duke during his

fruitless visit to the Vilquins, and many of these reflections passed
through her mind as she watched him come and go. But under the

circumstances in which she now found herself, she saw plainly that the
courtship of the Duc d'Herouville would save her from being at the

mercy of either Canalis.
"I see no reason," she said to Latournelle, "why the Duc d'Herouville

should not be received. I have passed, in spite of our indigence," she
continued, with a mischievous look at her father, "to the condition of

heiress. Haven't you observed Gobenheim's glances? They have quite
changed their character within a week. He is in despair at not being

able to make his games of whist count for mute adoration of my
charms."

"Hush, my darling!" cried Madame Latournelle, "here he comes."
"Old Althor is in despair," said Gobenheim to Monsieur Mignon as he

entered.
"Why?" asked the count.

"Vilquin is going to fail; and the Bourse thinks you are worth several
millions. What ill-luck for his son!"

"No one knows," said Charles Mignon, coldly, "what my liabilities in
India are; and I do not intend to take the public into my confidence

as to my private affairs. Dumay," he whispered to his friend, "if
Vilquin is embarrassed we could get back the villa by paying him what

he gave for it."
Such was the general state of things, due chiefly to accident, when on

Sunday morning Canalis and La Briere arrived, with a courier in
advance, at the villa of Madame Amaury. It was known that the Duc

d'Herouville, his sister, and his aunt were coming the following
Tuesday to occupy, also under pretext of ill-health, a hired house at

Graville. This assemblage of suitors made the wits of the Bourse
remark that, thanks to Mademoiselle Mignon, rents would rise at

Ingouville. "If this goes on, she will have a hospital here," said the
younger Mademoiselle Vilquin, vexed at not becoming a duchess.

The everlastingcomedy of "The Heiress," about to be played at the
Chalet, might very well be called, in view of Modeste's frame of mind,

"The Designs of a Young Girl"; for since the overthrow of her
illusions she had fully made up her mind to give her hand to no man

whose qualifications did not fully satisfy her.
The two rivals, still intimate friends, intended to pay their first

visit at the Chalet on the evening of the day succeeding their
arrival. They had spent Sunday and part of Monday in unpacking and

arranging Madame Amaury's house for a month's stay. The poet, always