grandson of my father,
whom we just had seen pass by on the promenade, everybody, young and
old, raising their hats to him from afar, would soon be seen at the
bar of a lower tribunal, there to contest minor legal matters with
pettifoggers; but I said to myself, however, that Louis XIV would
be still more astonished had he seen the wife of his grand-successor
dressed in a peasant's frock and apron, with no attendants, not a page
or any one else, running about the palace and the terraces, requesting
the first scamp in a frock-coat she encountered to give her his hand,
which he simply does, all the way down to the foot of the steps."

But the leveling of manners and appearances of life reflected, indeed,
only an equalization of minds and tempers. The antique scenery being
torn away indicates the disappearance of the sentiments to which it
belonged. It indicated gravity, dignity, custom of self-control and of
exposed, in authority and command. It was the rigid and sumptuous
parade of a social corps of staff-officers. At this time the parade is
discontinued because the corps has been dissolved. If the nobles dress
like the bourgeoisie it is owing to their having become bourgeois, that
is to say, idlers retired from business, with nothing to do but to talk
and amuse themselves.--Undoubtedly they amuse themselves and converse
like people of refinement; but it is not very difficult to equal them in
this respect. Now that the Third-Estate has acquired its wealth a good
many commoners have become people of society. The successors of
Samuel Bernard are no longer so many Turcarets, but Paris-Duverneys,
Saint-Jameses, Labordes, refined men, people of culture and of feeling,
possessing tact, literary and philosophical attainments, benevolent,
giving parties and knowing how to entertain[4317]. With them, slightly
different, we find the same company as with a grand lord, the same ideas
and the same tone. Their sons, messieurs de Villemer, de Francueil,
d'Epinay, throw money out of the window with as much elegance as the
young dukes with whom they sup. A parvenu with money and intellect
soon learns the ropes, and his son, if not himself, is initiated: a few
years' exercises in an academy, a dancing-master, and one of the four
thousand public offices which confer nobility, supply him with the
deficient appearances. Now, in these times, as soon as one knows how to
conform to the laws of good-breeding, how to bow and how to converse,
one