name he bore, the elder branch would have been as securely seated
on the throne as the House of Hanover at this day.

In 1814 the noblesse of France were called upon to assert their
superiority over the most aristocratic bourgeoisie in the most

feminine of all countries, to take the lead in the most highly
educated epoch the world had yet seen. And this was even more

notably the case in 1820. The Faubourg Saint-Germain might very
easily have led and amused the middle classes in days when

people's heads were turned with distinctions, and art and science
were all the rage. But the narrow-minded leaders of a time of

great intellectual progress all of them detested art and science.
They had not even the wit to present religion in attractive

colours, though they needed its support. While Lamartine,
Lamennais, Montalembert, and other writers were putting new life

and elevation into men's ideas of religion, and gilding it with
poetry, these bunglers in the Government chose to make the

harshness of their creed felt all over the country. Never was
nation in a more tractable humour; La France, like a tired woman,

was ready to agree to anything; never was mismanagement so
clumsy; and La France, like a woman, would have forgiven wrongs

more easily than bungling.
If the noblesse meant to reinstate themselves, the better to

found a strong oligarchy, they should have honestly and
diligently searched their Houses for men of the stamp that

Napoleon used; they should have turned themselves inside out to
see if peradventure there was a Constitutionalist Richelieu

lurking in the entrails of the Faubourg; and if that genius was
not forthcoming from among them, they should have set out to find

him, even in the fireless garret where he might happen to be
perishing of cold; they should have assimilated him, as the

English House of Lords continually assimilates aristocrats made
by chance; and finally ordered him to be ruthless, to lop away

the old wood, and cut the tree down to the living shoots. But,
in the first place, the great system of English Toryism was far

too large for narrow minds; the importation required time, and in
France a tardy success is no better than a fiasco. So far,

moreover, from adopting a policy of redemption, and looking for
new forces where God puts them, these petty great folk took a

dislike to any capacity that did not issue from their midst; and,
lastly, instead of growing young again, the Faubourg

Saint-Germain grew positively older.
Etiquette, not an institution of primary necessity, might have

been maintained if it had appeared only on state occasions, but
as it was, there was a daily wrangle over precedence; it ceased

to be a matter of art or court ceremonial, it became a question
of power. And if from the outset the Crown lacked an adviser

equal to so great a crisis, the aristocracy was still more
lacking in a sense of its wider interests, an instinct which

might have supplied the deficiency. They stood nice about M. de
Talleyrand's marriage, when M. de Talleyrand was the one man

among them with the steel-encompassed brains that can forge a new
political system and begin a new career of glory for a nation.

The Faubourg scoffed at a minister if he was not gently born, and
produced no one of gentle birth that was fit to be a minister.

There were plenty of nobles fitted to serve their country by
raising the dignity of justices of the peace, by improving the

land, by opening out roads and canals, and taking an active and
leading part as country gentlemen; but these had sold their

estates to gamble on the Stock Exchange. Again the Faubourg
might have absorbed the energetic men among the bourgeoisie, and

opened their ranks to the ambition which was undermining
authority; they preferred instead to fight, and to fight unarmed,

for of all that they once possessed there was nothing left but
tradition. For their misfortune there was just precisely enough

of their former wealth left them as a class to keep up their
bitter pride. They were content with their past. Not one of

them seriously thought of bidding the son of the house take up
arms from the pile of weapons which the nineteenth century flings

down in the market-place. Young men, shut out from office, were
dancing at Madame's balls, while they should have been doing the

work done under the Republic and the Empire by young,
conscientious, harmlessly employed energies. It was their place

to carry out at Paris the programme which their seniors should
have been following in the country. The heads of houses might

have won back recognition of their titles by unremitting
attention to local interests, by falling in with the spirit of

the age, by recasting their order to suit the taste of the times.
But, pent up together in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the

spirit of the ancient court and traditions of bygone feuds
between the nobles and the Crown still lingered on, the

aristocracy was not whole-hearted in its allegiance to the
Tuileries, and so much the more easily defeated because it was

concentrated in the Chamber of Peers, and badly organised even
there. If the noblesse had woven themselves into a network over

the country, they could have held their own; but cooped up in
their Faubourg, with their backs against the Chateau, or spread

at full length over the Budget, a single blow cut the thread of a
fast-expiring life, and a petty, smug-faced lawyer came forward

with the axe. In spite of M. Royer-Collard's admirable
discourse, the hereditary peerage and law of entail fell before

the lampoons of a man who made it a boast that he had adroitly
argued some few heads out of the executioner's clutches, and now

forsooth must clumsily proceed to the slaying of old
institutions.

There are examples and lessons for the future in all this. For
if there were not still a future before the French aristocracy,

there would be no need to do more than find a suitable
sarcophagus; it were something pitilessly cruel to burn the dead

body of it with fire of Tophet.
But though the surgeon's scalpel is ruthless, it sometimes gives

back life to a dying man; and the Faubourg Saint-Germain may wax
more powerful under persecution than in its day of triumph, if it

but chooses to organise itself under a leader.
And now it is easy to give a summary of this semi-political

survey. The wish to re-establish a large fortune was uppermost
in everyone's mind; a lack of broad views, and a mass of small

defects, a real need of religion as a political factor, combined
with a thirst for pleasure which damaged the cause of religion

and necessitated a good deal of hypocrisy; a certain attitude of
protest on the part of loftier and clearer-sighted men who set

their faces against Court jealousies; and the disaffection of the
provincial families, who often came of purer descent than the

nobles of the Court which alienated them from itself--all these
things combined to bring about a most discordant state of things

in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was neither compact in its
organisation, nor consequent in its action; neither completely

moral, nor frankly dissolute; it did not corrupt, nor was it
corrupted; it would neither whollyabandon the disputed points

which damaged its cause, nor yet adopt the policy that might have
saved it. In short, however effete individuals might be, the

party as a whole was none the less armed with all the great
principles which lie at the roots of national existence. What

was there in the Faubourg that it should perish in its strength?
It was very hard to please in the choice of candidates; the

Faubourg had good taste, it was scornfully fastidious, yet there
was nothing very glorious nor chivalrous truly about its fall.

In the Emigration of 1789 there were some traces of a loftier
feeling; but in the Emigration of 1830 from Paris into the

country there was nothing discernible but self-interest. A few
famous men of letters, a few oratorical triumphs in the Chambers,

M. de Talleyrand's attitude in the Congress, the taking of
Algiers, and not a few names that found their way from the

battlefield into the pages of history--all these things were so
many examples set before the French noblesse to show that it was

still open to them to take their part in the national existence,
and to win recognition of their claims, if, indeed, they could