as brought the boar to bay,
and gets his death on the tusks. He died as happily as might be, seeing
that he left the great House all but ruined, and the heir in penury,
bored to death by an idle life, and without a hope of establishing
himself. That bitter thought and his own exhaustion, no doubt, hastened
the old man's end. One great comfort came to him as he lay amid the
wreck of so many hopes, sinking under the burden of so many cares--the
old Marquis, at his sister's entreaty, gave him back all the old
friendship. The great lord came to the little house in the Rue du
Bercail, and sat by his old servant's bedside, all unaware how much
that servant had done and sacrificed for him. Chesnel sat upright, and
repeated Simeon's cry.--The Marquis allowed them to bury Chesnel in the
castle chapel; they laid him crosswise at the foot of the tomb which
was waiting for the Marquis himself, the last, in a sense, of the
d'Esgrignons.

And so died one of the last representatives of that great and beautiful
thing, Service; giving to that often discredited word its original
meaning, the relation between feudal lord and servitor. That relation,
only to be found in some out-of-the-way province, or among a few old
servants of the King, did honor alike to a noblesse that could call
forth such affection, and to a bourgeoisie that could conceive it. Such
noble and magnificent devotion is no longer possible among us. Noble
houses have no servitors left; even as France has no longer a King,
nor an hereditary peerage, nor lands that are bound irrevocably to
an historic house, that the glorious names of the nation may be
perpetuated. Chesnel was not merely one of the obscure great men
of private life; he was something more--he was a great fact. In his
sustained self-devotion is there not something indefinably solemn and
sublime, something that rises above the one beneficent deed, or the
heroic height which is reached by a moment's supreme effort? Chesnel's
virtues belong essentially to the classes which stand between the
poverty of the people on the one hand, and the greatness of the
aristocracy on the other; for these can combine homely burgher virtues
with the heroic ideals of the noble, enlightening both by a solid
education.

Victurnien was not well looked upon at Court; there was no more chance
of a great match for him, nor a place. His Majesty steadily refused to
raise the d'Esgrignons to the peerage, the one royal favor which could