uses;
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 a