ride, ambition, and party-hatred, roused
themselves from their slumber.

During a quarter of a century, our emigrants had sojourned in a
strange country. Useless and troublesome guests to the strangers by
whom they were fed, their lives had been droned away in shameless and
cowardly idleness. They could not cheat themselves into a belief that
they possessed the talents and experience of the sons of the
revolution. But they imagined that nobility, as in the old time, might
pass for worth; and that their patents and pedigrees still gave them
a right to monopolize all power and all honour.

The citizens, the soldiers, the nation, relied on the lawfulness of
their rights no less than on the promises of the king. The members of
the old privileged caste, instead of exciting suspicion, were only the
objects of harmless mirth. The people laughed at the grotesque
appearance of some, and at the decrepit sottishness of others. They
never dreamed that these pretended warriors, whose bloodless swords
had rusted in their scabbards, would attempt to snatch the staff of
command from the veteran generals of France; and that nobles who had
grown old in sloth and ignorance would aspire to the direction of
public affairs.

But though merit and valour were denied to them, they stood upon a
vantage ground, which gave them a direful and incalculable
preponderance in the state. They surrounded the throne. Soon did their
insolence announce that they had craftily availed themselves of the
advantages which they possessed; and we foresaw with affliction that
inveterate prejudice, malignant prepossessions, and old habits of
familiarity, would, sooner or later, crush the principles of justice
and equity, however solemnly proclaimed.

The emigrants, rendered arrogant by the prospects which opened upon
them, now treated their rivals with contemptuous disdain. They dared
not insult the defenders of our country face to face, because the
scars of the warriors scared them. But they were spitefully active in
disparaging their birth, their services, and their glory, and these
noble retainers of royalty took care to impress the soldiers of
Napoleon with a due sense of the width of the gulf which was
henceforth to separate a gentleman of good family, from an upstart
soldier of the revolution.

The women of the _ancien regime_ did not share in the timidity which,
to a certain degree, still restrained their husbands. They threw off
all decency and all re