ayed a
more than usually important part in this particular district, and yet
it was one which a mere stranger looking down from the terrace would
never have suspected. Few of the tenements could claim to be anything
better than mere farm-houses. Yet every second building you came upon
was a chateau--yes, a veritable chateau, the actual abode of some
seigneur of the old noblesse of France, whose name might be like enough
to call up the memory of some illustrious deed done in the old
chivalric days of France. The country literally swarmed with chateaux
and with nobles. Do you see yon rickety, tumble-down building, scarce
big enough for a good-sized family? That is the chateau of Monsieur le
Comte de Joliment, not one of your new nobles, who have become such in
virtue of some one or other of the thousands of royal patent places
that conferred nobility on their upstart holders as a right. No; these
latter gentry have fine salaries or pensions attached to their
appointments; they are comfortable enough as to means, and profess not
to care about pedigree or descent, though the old nobles hold
themselves aloof and look down upon them as _parvenus_. The Count de
Joliment would probably prefer starving to giving up even for a fat
pension his rights over the miserable remnants of the old family
estates that he can still call his own. Did not one of his ancestors
fight by the side of Charles Martel himself at the battle of Tours?
You may almost read something of the kind in the aristocratic bearing
of the old noble, though the most liberal old-clothes-man would
scarcely like to give twenty francs for the whole of the count's
wardrobe, including those clod-hopping boots, but excluding, of course,
the somewhat antiquated rapier which his rank gives him the privilege
of wearing. "How does he manage to live?" you ask. Well, it is not so
easy to say, as incumbrances in many quarters swallow up every sou of
the slender rental. But then the count being a noble, is free from all
the heavy taxes that crush his poor and wretched tenants; his tailor's
bills are nominal, and as he exacts to the last ounce the seigneurial
rights payable in kind, and enjoys besides the lordly privilege of
keeping pigeons and rabbits, he manages to hold body and soul together.
He does not trouble himself about the muttered curses of the commoners
against him and his class, or dream of their taking shape some day in
the hideous cry of "Down with the ari