to attack, and which we shall take leave to call the Mediocracy.

A great outcry was made against the tyranny of the nobles; in these days
the cry is against that of capitalists, against abuses of power, which
may be merely the inevitable galling of the social yoke, called Compact
by Rousseau, Constitution by some, Charter by others; Czar here,
King there, Parliament in Great Britain; while in France the general
levelling begun in 1789 and continued in 1830 has paved the way for the
juggling dominion of the middle classes, and delivered the nation
into their hands without escape. The portrayal of one fact alone,
unfortunately only too common in these days, namely, the subjection of
a canton, a little town, a sub-prefecture, to the will of a family
clique,--in short, the power acquired by Gaubertin,--will show this
social danger better than all dogmatic statements put together. Many
oppressed communities will recognize the truth of this picture; many
persons secretly and silently crushed by this tyranny will find in these
words an obituary, as it were, which may half console them for their
hidden woes.

At the very moment when the general imagined himself to be renewing a
warfare in which there had really been no truce, his former steward had
just completed the last meshes of the net-work in which he now held the
whole arrondissement of Ville-aux-Fayes. To avoid too many explanations
it is necessary to state, once for all, succinctly, the genealogical
ramifications by means of which Gaubertin wound himself about the
country, as a boa-constrictor winds around a tree,--with such art that a
passing traveller thinks he beholds some natural effect of the tropical
vegetation.

In 1793 there were three brothers of the name of Mouchon in the valley
of the Avonne. After 1793 they changed the name of the valley to that of
the Valley des Aigues, out of hatred to the old nobility.

The eldest brother, steward of the property of the Ronquerolles family,
was elected deputy of the department to the Convention. Like his
friend, Gaubertin's father, the prosecutor of those days, who saved
the Soulanges family, he saved the property and the lives of the
Ronquerolles. He had two daughters; one married to Gendrin, the lawyer,
the other to Gaubertin. He died in 1804.

The second, through the influence of his elder brother, was made
postmaster at Conches. His only child was a daughter, married to a rich
farmer named Guerbet. He died in 18