lone survive the nobler vanished qualities,--forms, which are
the sole heritage our nobles have preserved. The abandonment in which
Louis XVI. was allowed to perish may thus be explained, with some slight
reservations, as a wretched result of the reign of Madame de Pompadour.

The grand equerry, a fair young man with blue eyes and a pallid face,
was not without a certain dignity of thought; but his thin, undersized
figure, and the follies of his aunt who had taken him to the Vilquins
and elsewhere to pay his court, rendered him extremely diffident. The
house of Herouville had already been threatened with extinction by the
deed of a deformed being (see the "Enfant Maudit" in "Philosophical
Studies"). The grand marshal, that being the family term for the member
who was made duke by Louis XIII., married at the age of eighty. The
young duke admired women, but he placed them too high and respected them
too much; in fact, he adored them, and was only at his ease with those
whom he could not respect. This characteristic caused him to lead a
double life. He found compensation with women of easy virtue for the
worship to which he surrendered himself in the salons, or, if you like,
the boudoirs, of the faubourg Saint-Germain. Such habits and his puny
figure, his suffering face with its blue eyes turning upward in ecstasy,
increased the ridicule already bestowed upon him,--very unjustly
bestowed, as it happened, for he was full of wit and delicacy; but his
wit, which never sparkled, only showed itself when he felt at ease.
Fanny Beaupre, an actress who was supposed to be his nearest friend (at
a price), called him "a sound wine so carefully corked that you break
all your corkscrews." The beautiful Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, whom the
grand equerry could only worship, annihilated him with a speech which,
unfortunately, was repeated from mouth to mouth, like all such pretty
and malicious sayings.

"He always seems to me," she said, "like one of those jewels of fine
workmanship which we exhibit but never wear, and keep in cotton-wool."

Everything about him, even to his absurdly contrasting title of
grand equerry, amused the good-natured king, Charles X., and made him
laugh,--although the Duc d'Herouville justified his appointment in the
matter of being a fine horseman. Men are like books, often understood
and appreciated too late. Modeste had seen the duke during his fruitless
visit to the Vilquins, and many of these reflections pass