ir own; but cooped up in their
Faubourg, with their backs against the Chateau, or spread at full length
over the Budget, a single blow cut the thread of a fast-expiring life,
and a petty, smug-faced lawyer came forward with the axe. In spite of M.
Royer-Collard's admirable discourse, the hereditary peerage and law of
entail fell before the lampoons of a man who made it a boast that he had
adroitly argued some few heads out of the executioner's clutches, and
now forsooth must clumsily proceed to the slaying of old institutions.

There are examples and lessons for the future in all this. For if there
were not still a future before the French aristocracy, there would be
no need to do more than find a suitable sarcophagus; it were something
pitilessly cruel to burn the dead body of it with fire of Tophet. But
though the surgeon's scalpel is ruthless, it sometimes gives back life
to a dying man; and the Faubourg Saint-Germain may wax more powerful
under persecution than in its day of triumph, if it but chooses to
organize itself under a leader.

And now it is easy to give a summary of this semi-political survey. The
wish to re-establish a large fortune was uppermost in everyone's mind;
a lack of broad views, and a mass of small defects, a real need of
religion as a political factor, combined with a thirst for pleasure
which damaged the cause of religion and necessitated a good deal of
hypocrisy; a certain attitude of protest on the part of loftier and
clearer-sighted men who set their faces against Court jealousies; and
the disaffection of the provincial families, who often came of
purer descent than the nobles of the Court which alienated them from
itself--all these things combined to bring about a most discordant state
of things in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. It was neither compact in its
organisation, nor consequent in its action; neither completely moral,
nor frankly dissolute; it did not corrupt, nor was it corrupted; it
would neither wholly abandon the disputed points which damaged its
cause, nor yet adopt the policy that might have saved it. In short,
however effete individuals might be, the party as a whole was none
the less armed with all the great principles which lie at the roots of
national existence. What was there in the Faubourg that it should perish
in its strength?

It was very hard to please in the choice of candidates; the Faubourg
had good taste, it was scornfully fastidious, yet there was nothing very