IV

These ideas demand further development which form an essential

part of this episode; they are given here both as a succinct

statement of the causes, and an explanation of the things which

happen in the course of the story.

The stateliness of the castles and palaces where nobles dwell;

the luxury of the details; the constantly maintained

sumptuousness of the furniture; the "atmosphere" in which the

fortunate owner of landed estates (a rich man before he was born)

lives and moves easily and without friction; the habit of mind

which never descends to calculate the petty workaday gains of

existence; the leisure; the higher education attainable at a much

earlier age; and lastly, the aristocratic tradition that makes of

him a social force, for which his opponents, by dint of study and

a strong will and tenacity of vocation, are scarcely a match-all

these things should contribute to form a lofty spirit in a man,

possessed of such privileges from his youth up; they should stamp

his character with that high self-respect, of which the least

consequence is a nobleness of heart in harmony with the noble

name that he bears.  And in some few families all this is

realised.  There are noble characters here and there in the

Faubourg, but they are marked exceptions to a general rule of

egoism which has been the ruin of this world within a world.  The

privileges above enumerated are the birthright of the French

noblesse, as of every patrician efflorescence ever formed on the

surface of a nation; and will continue to be theirs so long as

their existence is based upon real estate, or money; domaine-sol

and domaine-argent alike, the only solid bases of an organised

society; but such privileges are held upon the understanding that

the patricians must continue to justify their existence.  There

is a sort of moral fief held on a tenure of service rendered to

the sovereign, and here in France the people are undoubtedly the

sovereigns nowadays.  The times are changed, and so are the

weapons.  The knight-banneret of old wore a coat of chain armour

and a hauberk,; he could handle a lance well and display his

pennon, and no more was required of him; today he is bound to

give proof of his intelligence.  A stout heart was enough in the

days of old; in our days he is required to have a capacious

brain-pan.  Skill and knowledge and capital--these three points

mark out a social triangle on which the scutcheon of power is

blazoned; our modern aristocracy must take its stand on these.

A fine theorem is as good as a great name.  The Rothschilds, the

Fuggers of the nineteenth century, are princes de facto.  A great

artist is in reality an oligarch; he represents a whole century,

and almost always he is a law to others.  And the art of words,

the high pressure machinery of the writer, the poet's genius, the

merchant's steady endurance, the strong will of the statesman who

concentrates a thousand dazzling qualities in himself, the

general's sword--all these victories, in short, which a single

individual will win, that he may tower above the rest of the

world, the patrician class is now bound to win and keep

exclusively.  They must head the new forces as they once headed

the material forces; how should they keep the position unless

they are worthy of it?  How, unless they are the soul and brain

of a nation, shall they set its hands moving?  How lead a people

without the power of command?  And what is the marshal's baton

without the innate power of the captain in the man who wields it?

The Faubourg Saint-Germain took to playing with batons, and

fancied that all the power was in its hands.  It inverted the

terms of the proposition which called it into existence.  And

instead of flinging away the insignia which offended the people,

and quietly grasping the power, it allowed the bourgeoisie to

seize the authority, clung with fatal obstinacy to its shadow,

and over and over again forgot the laws which a minority must

observe if it would live.  When an aristocracy is scarce a

thousandth part of the body social, it is bound today, as of old,

to multiply its points of action, so as to counterbalance the

weight of the masses in a great crisis.  And in our days those

means of action must be living forces, and not historical

memories.

In France, unluckily, the noblesse were still so puffed up with

the notion of their vanished power, that it was difficult to

contend against a kind of innate presumption in themselves.

Perhaps this is a national defect.  The Frenchman is less given

than anyone else to undervalue himself; it comes natural to him

to go from his degree to the one above it; and while it is a rare

thing for him to pity the unfortunates over whose heads he rises,

he always groans in spirit to see so many fortunate people above

him.  He is very far from heartless, but too often he prefers to

listen to his intellect.  The national instinct which brings the

Frenchman to the front, the vanity that wastes his substance, is

as much a dominant passion as thrift in the Dutch.  For three

centuries it swayed the noblesse, who, in this respect, were

certainly pre-eminently French.  The scion of the Faubourg

Saint-Germain, beholding his material superiority, was fully

persuaded of his intellectual superiority.  And everything

contributed to confirm him in his belief; for ever since the

Faubourg Saint-Germain existed at all--which is to say, ever

since Versailles ceased to be the royal residence--the Faubourg,

with some few gaps in continuity, was always backed up by the

central power, which in France seldom fails to support that side.

Thence its downfall in 1830.

At that time the party of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was rather

like an army without a base of operation.  It had utterly failed

to take advantage of the peace to plant itself in the heart of

the nation.  It sinned for want of learning its lesson, and

through an utter incapability of regarding its interests as a

whole.  A future certainty was sacrificed to a doubtful present

gain.  This blunder in policy may perhaps be attributed to the

following cause.

The class-isolation so strenuously kept up by the noblesse

brought about fatal results during the last forty years; even

caste-patriotism was extinguished by it, and rivalry fostered

among themselves.  When the French noblesse of other times were

rich and powerful, the nobles (gentilhommes) could choose their

chiefs and obey them in the hour of danger.  As their power

diminished, they grew less amenable to discipline; and as in the

last days of the Byzantine Empire, everyone wished to be emperor.

They mistook their uniform weakness for uniform strength.

Each family ruined by the Revolution and the abolition of the law

of primogeniture thought only of itself, and not at all of the

great family of the noblesse.  It seemed to them that as each

individual grew rich, the party as a whole would gain in

strength.  And herein lay their mistake.  Money, likewise, is

only the outward and visible sign of power.  All these families

were made up of persons who preserved a high tradition of

courtesy, of true graciousness of life, of refined speech, with a

family pride, and a squeamish sense of noblesse oblige which

suited well with the kind of life they led; a life wholly filled

with occupations which become contemptible so soon as they cease

to be accessories and take the chief place in existence.  There

was a certain intrinsic merit in all these people, but the merit

was on the surface, and none of them were worth their face-value.

Not a single one among those families had courage to ask itself

the question, "Are we strong enough for the responsibility of

power?"  They were cast on the top, like the lawyers of 1830;

and instead of taking the patron's place, like a great man, the

Faubourg Saint-Germain showed itself greedy as an upstart.  The

most intelligent nation in the world perceived clearly that the

restored nobles were organising everything for their own

particular benefit.  From that day the noblesse was doomed.  The

Faubourg Saint-Germain tried to be an aristocracy when it could

only be an oligarchy--two very different systems, as any man may

see for himself if he gives an intelligent perusal to the list of

the patronymics of the House of Peers.

The King's Government certainly meant well; but the maxim that

the people must be made to WILL everything, even their own

welfare, was pretty constantly forgotten, nor did they bear in

mind that La France is a woman and capricious, and must be happy

or chastised at her own good pleasure.  If there had been many

dukes like the Duc de Laval, whose modesty made him worthy of the

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 wholly abandon 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

condescend thus far.  In every living organism the work of

bringing the whole into harmony within itself is always going on.

If a man is indolent, the indolence shows itself in everything

that he does; and, in the same manner, the general spirit of a

class is pretty plainly manifested in the face it turns on the

world, and the soul informs the body.

The women of the Restoration displayed neither the proud

disregard of public opinion shown by the court ladies of olden

time in their wantonness, nor yet the simple grandeur of the

tardy virtues by which they expiated their sins and shed so

bright a glory about their names.  There was nothing either very

frivolous or very serious about the woman of the Restoration.

She was hypocritical as a rule in her passion, and compounded, so

to speak, with its pleasures.  Some few families led the domestic

life of the Duchesse d'Orleans, whose connubial couch was

exhibited so absurdly to visitors at the Palais Royal.  Two or

three kept up the traditions of the Regency, filling cleverer

women with something like disgust.  The great lady of the new

school exercised no influence at all over the manners of the

time; and yet she might have done much.  She might, at worst,

have presented as dignified a spectacle as English-women of the

same rank.  But she hesitated feebly among old precedents, became

a bigot by force of circumstances, and allowed nothing of herself

to appear, not even her better qualities.

Not one among the Frenchwomen of that day had the ability to

create a salon whither leaders of fashion might come to take

lessons in taste and elegance.  Their voices, which once laid

down the law to literature, that living expression of a time, now

counted absolutely for nought.  Now when a literature lacks a

general system, it fails to shape a body for itself, and dies out

with its period.

When in a nation at any time there is a people apart thus

constituted, the historian is pretty certain to find some

representative figure, some central personage who embodies the

qualities and the defects of the whole party to which he belongs;

there is Coligny, for instance, among the Huguenots, the

Coadjuteur in the time of the Fronde, the Marechal de Richelieu

under Louis XV, Danton during the Terror.  It is in the nature of

things that the man should be identified with the company in

which history finds him.  How is it possible to lead a party

without conforming to its ideas? or to shine in any epoch unless

a man represents the ideas of his time?  The wise and prudent

head of a party is continually obliged to bow to the prejudices

and follies of its rear; and this is the cause of actions for

which he is afterwards criticised by this or that historian

sitting at a safer distance from terrific popular explosions,

coolly judging the passion and ferment without which the great

struggles of the world could not be carried on at all.  And if

this is true of the Historical Comedy of the Centuries, it is

equally true in a more restricted sphere in the detached scenes

of the national drama known as the Manners of the Age.

At the beginning of that ephemeral life led by the Faubourg

Saint-Germain under the Restoration, to which, if there is any

truth in the above reflections, they failed to give stability,

the most perfect type of the aristocratic caste in its weakness

and strength, its greatness and littleness, might have been found

for a brief space in a young married woman who belonged to it.

This was a woman artificially educated, but in reality ignorant;

a woman whose instincts and feelings were lofty while the thought

which should have controlled them was wanting.  She squandered

the wealth of her nature in obedience to social conventions; she

was ready to brave society, yet she hesitated till her scruples

degenerated into artifice.  With more wilfulness than real force

of character, impressionable rather than enthusiastic, gifted

with more brain than heart; she was supremely a woman, supremely

a coquette, and above all things a Parisienne, loving a brilliant

life and gaiety, reflecting never, or too late; imprudent to the

verge of poetry, and humble in the depths of her heart, in spite

of her charming insolence.  Like some straight-growing reed, she

made a show of independence; yet, like the reed, she was ready to

bend to a strong hand.  She talked much of religion, and had it

not at heart, though she was prepared to find in it a solution of

her life.  How explain a creature so complex?  Capable of

heroism, yet sinking unconsciously from heroic heights to utter a

spiteful word; young and sweet-natured, not so much old at heart

as aged by the maxims of those about her; versed in a selfish

philosophy in which she was all unpractised, she had all the

vices of a courtier, all the nobleness of developing womanhood.

She trusted nothing and no one, yet there were times when she

quitted her sceptical attitude for a submissive credulity.

How should any portrait be anything but incomplete of her, in

whom the play of swiftly-changing colour made discord only to

produce a poetic confusion?  For in her there shone a divine

brightness, a radiance of youth that blended all her bewildering

characteristics in a certain completeness and unity informed by

her charm.  Nothing was feigned.  The passion or semi-passion,

the ineffectual high aspirations, the actual pettiness, the

coolness of sentiment and warmth of impulse, were all spontaneous

and unaffected, and as much the outcome of her own position as of

the position of the aristocracy to which she belonged.  She was

wholly self-contained; she put herself proudly above the world

and beneath the shelter of her name.  There was something of the

egoism of Medea in her life, as in the life of the aristocracy

that lay a-dying, and would not so much as raise itself or

stretch out a hand to any political physician; so well aware of

its feebleness, or so conscious that it was already dust, that it

refused to touch or be touched.

The Duchesse de Langeais (for that was her name) had been married

for about four years when the Restoration was finally

consummated, which is to say, in 1816.  By that time the

revolution of the Hundred Days had let in the light on the mind

of Louis XVIII.  In spite of his surroundings, he comprehended

the situation and the age in which he was living; and it was only

later, when this Louis XI, without the axe, lay stricken down by

disease, that those about him got the upper hand.  The Duchesse

de Langeais, a Navarreins by birth, came of a ducal house which

had made a point of never marrying below its rank since the reign

of Louis XIV.  Every daughter of the house must sooner or later

take a tabouret at Court.  So, Antoinette de Navarreins, at the

age of eighteen, came out of the profound solitude in which her

girlhood had been spent to marry the Duc de Langeais's eldest

son.  The two families at that time were living quite out of the

world; but after the invasion of France, the return of the

Bourbons seemed to every Royalist mind the only possible way of

putting an end to the miseries of the war.

The Ducs de Navarreins and de Langeais had been faithful

throughout to the exiled Princes, nobly resisting all the

temptations of glory under the Empire.  Under the circumstances

they naturally followed out the old family policy; and Mlle

Antoinette, a beautiful and portionless girl, was married to M.

le Marquis de Langeais only a few months before the death of the

Duke his father.

After the return of the Bourbons, the families resumed their

rank, offices, and dignity at Court; once more they entered

public life, from which hitherto they held aloof, and took their

place high on the sunlit summits of the new political world.  In

that time of general baseness and sham political conversions, the

public conscience was glad to recognise the unstained loyalty of

the two houses, and a consistency in political and private life

for which all parties involuntarily respected them.  But,

unfortunately, as so often happens in a time of transition, the

most disinterested persons, the men whose loftiness of view and

wise principles would have gained the confidence of the French

nation and led them to believe in the generosity of a novel and

spirited policy--these men, to repeat, were taken out of affairs,

and public business was allowed to fall into the hands of others,

who found it to their interest to push principles to their

extreme consequences by way of proving their devotion.

The families of Langeais and Navarreins remained about the Court,

condemned to perform the duties required by Court ceremonial amid

the reproaches and sneers of the Liberal party.  They were

accused of gorging themselves with riches and honours, and all

the while their family estates were no larger than before, and

liberal allowances from the civil list were wholly expended in

keeping up the state necessary for any European government, even

if it be a Republic.

In 1818, M. le Duc de Langeais commanded a division of the army,

and the Duchess held a post about one of the Princesses, in

virtue of which she was free to live in Paris and apart from her

husband without scandal.  The Duke, moreover, besides his

military duties, had a place at Court, to which he came during

his term of waiting, leaving his major-general in command.  The

Duke and Duchess were leading lives entirely apart, the world

none the wiser.  Their marriage of convention shared the fate of

nearly all family arrangements of the kind.  Two more

antipathetic dispositions could not well have been found; they

were brought together; they jarred upon each other; there was

soreness on either side; then they were divided once for all.

Then they went their separate ways, with a due regard for

appearances.  The Duc de Langeais, by nature as methodical as the

Chevalier de Folard himself, gave himself up methodically to his

own tastes and amusements, and left his wife at liberty to do as

she pleased so soon as he felt sure of her character.  He

recognised in her a spirit pre-eminently proud, a cold heart, a

profound submissiveness to the usages of the world, and a

youthful loyalty.  Under the eyes of great relations, with the

light of a prudish and bigoted Court turned full upon the

Duchess, his honour was safe.

So the Duke calmly did as the grands seigneurs of the eighteenth

century did before him, and left a young wife of two-and-twenty

to her own devices.  He had deeply offended that wife, and in her

nature there was one appalling characteristic--she would never

forgive an offence when woman's vanity and self-love, with all

that was best in her nature perhaps, had been slighted, wounded

in secret.  Insult and injury in the face of the world a woman

loves to forget; there is a way open to her of showing herself

great; she is a woman in her forgiveness; but a secret offence

women never pardon; for secret baseness, as for hidden virtues

and hidden love, they have no kindness

This was Mme la Duchesse de Langeais's real position, unknown to

the world.  She herself did not reflect upon it.  It was the time

of the rejoicings over the Duc de Berri's marriage.  The Court

and the Faubourg roused itself from its listlessness and reserve.

This was the real beginning of that unheard-of splendour which

the Government of the Restoration carried too far.  At that time

the Duchess, whether for reasons of her own, or from vanity,

never appeared in public without a following of women equally

distinguished by name and fortune.  As queen of fashion she had

her dames d'atours, her ladies, who modelled their manner and

their wit on hers.  They had been cleverly chosen.  None of her

satellites belonged to the inmost Court circle, nor to the

highest level of the Faubourg Saint-Germain; but they had set

their minds upon admission to those inner sanctuaries.  Being as

yet simple dominations, they wished to rise to the neighbourhood

of the throne, and mingle with the seraphic powers in the high

sphere known as le petit chateau.  Thus surrounded, the Duchess's

position was stronger and more commanding and secure.  Her

"ladies" defended her character and helped her to play her

detestable part of a woman of fashion.  She could laugh at men at

her ease, play with fire, receive the homage on which the

feminine nature is nourished, and remain mistress of herself. 

At Paris, in the highest society of all, a woman is a woman

still; she lives on incense, adulation, and honours.  No beauty,

however undoubted, no face, however fair, is anything without

admiration.  Flattery and a lover are proofs of power.  And what

is power without recognition?  Nothing.  If the prettiest of

women were left alone in a corner of a drawing-room, she would

droop.  Put her in the very centre and summit of social grandeur,

she will at once aspire to reign over all hearts--often because

it is out of her power to be the happy queen of one.  Dress and

manner and coquetry are all meant to please one of the poorest

creatures extant--the brainless coxcomb, whose handsome face is

his sole merit; it was for such as these that women threw

themselves away.  The gilded wooden idols of the Restoration, for

they were neither more nor less, had neither the antecedents of

the petits maitres of the time of the Fronde, nor the rough

sterling worth of Napoleon's heroes, not the wit and fine manners

of their grandsires; but something of all three they meant to be

without any trouble to themselves.  Brave they were, like all

young Frenchmen; ability they possessed, no doubt, if they had

had a chance of proving it, but their places were filled up by

the old worn-out men, who kept them in leading strings.  It was a

day of small things, a cold prosaic era.  Perhaps it takes a long

time for a Restoration to become a Monarchy.