take the lead in the most highly educated epoch the
world had yet seen. And this was even more notably the case in 1820. The
Faubourg Saint-Germain might very easily have led and amused the middle
classes in days when people's heads were turned with distinctions, and
art and science were all the rage. But the narrow-minded leaders of
a time of great intellectual progress all of them detested art and
science. They had not even the wit to present religion in attractive
colours, though they needed its support. While Lamartine, Lamennais,
Montalembert, and other writers were putting new life and elevation into
men's ideas of religion, and gilding it with poetry, these bunglers in
the Government chose to make the harshness of their creed felt all over
the country. Never was nation in a more tractable humour; La France,
like a tired woman, was ready to agree to anything; never was
mismanagement so clumsy; and La France, like a woman, would have
forgiven wrongs more easily than bungling.

If the noblesse meant to reinstate themselves, the better to found a
strong oligarchy, they should have honestly and diligently searched
their Houses for men of the stamp that Napoleon used; they should
have turned themselves inside out to see if peradventure there was a
Constitutionalist Richelieu lurking in the entrails of the Faubourg; and
if that genius was not forthcoming from among them, they should have set
out to find him, even in the fireless garret where he might happen to
be perishing of cold; they should have assimilated him, as the English
House of Lords continually assimilates aristocrats made by chance; and
finally ordered him to be ruthless, to lop away the old wood, and cut
the tree down to the living shoots. But, in the first place, the great
system of English Toryism was far too large for narrow minds; the
importation required time, and in France a tardy success is no better
than a fiasco. So far, moreover, from adopting a policy of redemption,
and looking for new forces where God puts them, these petty great folk
took a dislike to any capacity that did not issue from their midst; and,
lastly, instead of growing young again, the Faubourg Saint-Germain grew
positively older.

Etiquette, not an institution of primary necessity, might have been
maintained if it had appeared only on state occasions, but as it was,
there was a daily wrangle over precedence; it ceased to be a matter of
art or court ceremonial, it became a questi