eking assistance and power in vain."

"Seeking them from me, my nephew," said the Marquis, touching him on the
breast with his forefinger,--they were now standing by the hearth,--"you
will forever seek them in vain, be assured."

Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face was cruelly,
craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking quietly at his
nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he touched him on the
breast, as though his finger were the fine point of a small sword, with
which in delicate finesse he ran him through the body, and said, "My
friend, I will die perpetuating the system under which I have lived."

When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his
box in his pocket.

"Better to be a rational creature," he added then, after ringing a small
bell on the table, "and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost,
Monsieur Charles, I see."

"This property and France are lost to me," said the nephew, sadly; "I
renounce them."

"Are they both yours to renounce? France may be, but is the property? It
is scarcely worth mentioning; but is it, yet?"

"I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed
to me from you to-morrow--"

"Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable."

"--or twenty years hence--"

"You do me too much honor," said the Marquis; "still, I prefer that
supposition."

"--I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is little to
relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!"

"Hah!" said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.

"To the eye it is fair enough here; but seen in its integrity, under the
sky and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste,
mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness,
and suffering."

"Hah!" said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.

"If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better
qualified to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the
weight that drags it down, so that the miserable people who cannot leave
it, and who have been long wrung to the last point of endurance, may in
another generation suffer less; but it is not for me. There is a curse
on it, and on all this land."

"And you?" said the uncle. "Forgive my curiosity; do you, under your new
philosophy, graciously intend to live?"

"I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at
th