nners. He had watched the Revolution pass through the violent phase
of 1793, when men, women, and children wore arms, and heads fell on the
scaffold, and victories were won in pitched battles with Europe; and now
he saw the same forces quietly at work in men's minds, in the shape of
ideas which sanctioned the issues. The soil had been cleared, the seed
sown, and now came the harvest. To his thinking, the Revolution had
formed the mind of the younger generation; he touched the hard facts,
and knew that although there were countless unhealed wounds, what had
been done was past recall. The death of a king on the scaffold, the
protracted agony of a queen, the division of the nobles' lands, in his
eyes were so many binding contracts; and where so many vested interests
were involved, it was not likely that those concerned would allow them
to be attacked. Chesnel saw clearly. His fanatical attachment to the
d'Esgrignons was whole-hearted, but it was not blind, and it was all the
fairer for this. The young monk's faith that sees heaven laid open and
beholds the angels, is something far below the power of the old monk who
points them out to him. The ex-steward was like the old monk; he would
have given his life to defend a worm-eaten shrine.

He tried to explain the "innovations" to his old master, using a
thousand tactful precautions; sometimes speaking jestingly, sometimes
affecting surprise or sorrow over this or that; but he always met the
same prophetic smile on the Marquis' lips, the same fixed conviction in
the Marquis' mind, that these follies would go by like others. Events
contributed in a way which has escaped attention to assist such noble
champions of forlorn hope to cling to their superstitions. What could
Chesnel do when the old Marquis said, with a lordly gesture, "God swept
away Bonaparte with his armies, his new great vassals, his crowned
kings, and his vast conceptions! God will deliver us from the rest." And
Chesnel hung his head sadly, and did not dare to answer, "It cannot be
God's will to sweep away France." Yet both of them were grand figures;
the one, standing out against the torrent of facts like an ancient block
of lichen-covered granite, still upright in the depths of an Alpine
gorge; the other, watching the course of the flood to turn it to
account. Then the good gray-headed notary would groan over the
irreparable havoc which the superstitions were sure to work in the mind,
the habits, and ideas of th