tion to substantiate a claim to ancient lineage, and
that, of the three hundred and forty-six princely families of France,
which are all that are left, not one has the right to wear the closed
coronet. All the titles of the latter are usurped, and are purely
fanciful. No fewer than twenty-five thousand families put the particle
_de_ in front of their names without a shadow of right; and it appears
that the Republic manufactures another forty of such families every
year. When official permission to thus distinguish the family name is
refused, it is simply dispensed with. In addition, the Pope gives or
sells, on an average, sixty titles of "count" or "prince" every year,
and though these are not current, the possessors wear them, just the
same. The Paris _Journal_ demanded, indignantly, if M. de Royer thought
he was doing a patriotic work in thus closing the French market to
American heiresses.

To conclude: we quote what M. Henri Lavedan, in his recent work: _Les
Jeunes, ou L'Espoir de la France_, gives as a typical conversation
between three young men of the highest society in Paris, "the hope of
France." The scene is laid in the apartments of D'Allarege, about five
o'clock in the afternoon. All three are smoking. The day is declining;
they comprehend each other in silence. At intervals, they alternately
allow a monosyllable to fall, which is as the affirmation of their
absence of thought:

BRIOUZE.--"Yes...." (_Puff of smoke._)

MONTOIS.--"Yes...."

(_Then a black hole of silence. Puffs. Spirals. Sound of carriages.
Paris continues its murmur._)

MONTOIS.--"Ah! la, la!"

D'ALLAREGE.--"Is it not?"

BRIOUZE.--"To whom do you say it?"

(_Blue smoke through the nose. Ashes fall from the cigar. And time
passes._)

D'ALLAREGE (to Montois).--"And besides that?"

MONTOIS.--"Not much."

THE BOURGEOIS AND THE LOWER CLASSES

FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE PRESENT DAY

[Illustration: TWO SANS-CULOTTES. PERIOD, 1792.]

If the history of a city were written with anything like a due exactness
of proportion, much of it would be but a weary record of human misery,
and through even the most decorous and conventional of chronicles there
appear constantly unpleasant glimpses of the terrible under-strata that
sometimes upheave and make ruin. So long as this apparently inevitable
and irremediable discord does not appear to affect the general march of
events, it is glozed over. The condition of the mi