on of power. And if from
the outset the Crown lacked an adviser equal to so great a crisis, the
aristocracy was still more lacking in a sense of its wider interests, an
instinct which might have supplied the deficiency. They stood nice about
M. de Talleyrand's marriage, when M. de Talleyrand was the one man among
them with the steel-encompassed brains that can forge a new political
system and begin a new career of glory for a nation. The Faubourg
scoffed at a minister if he was not gently born, and produced no one of
gentle birth that was fit to be a minister. There were plenty of nobles
fitted to serve their country by raising the dignity of justices of
the peace, by improving the land, by opening out roads and canals, and
taking an active and leading part as country gentlemen; but these had
sold their estates to gamble on the Stock Exchange. Again the Faubourg
might have absorbed the energetic men among the bourgeoisie, and opened
their ranks to the ambition which was undermining authority; they
preferred instead to fight, and to fight unarmed, for of all that
they once possessed there was nothing left but tradition. For their
misfortune there was just precisely enough of their former wealth left
them as a class to keep up their bitter pride. They were content with
their past. Not one of them seriously thought of bidding the son of the
house take up arms from the pile of weapons which the nineteenth century
flings down in the market-place. Young men, shut out from office, were
dancing at Madame's balls, while they should have been doing the
work done under the Republic and the Empire by young, conscientious,
harmlessly employed energies. It was their place to carry out at Paris
the programme which their seniors should have been following in the
country. The heads of houses might have won back recognition of their
titles by unremitting attention to local interests, by falling in with
the spirit of the age, by recasting their order to suit the taste of the
times.

But, pent up together in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the spirit of
the ancient court and traditions of bygone feuds between the nobles and
the Crown still lingered on, the aristocracy was not whole-hearted in
its allegiance to the Tuileries, and so much the more easily defeated
because it was concentrated in the Chamber of Peers, and badly organized
even there. If the noblesse had woven themselves into a network over
the country, they could have held the