the Place Royale and the centre of
Paris for good, and crossed the river to breathe freely in the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, where palaces were reared already about the great
hotel built by Louis XIV for the Duc de Maine--the Benjamin among his
legitimated offspring. And indeed, for people accustomed to a stately
life, can there be more unseemly surroundings than the bustle, the mud,
the street cries, the bad smells, and narrow thoroughfares of a populous
quarter? The very habits of life in a mercantile or manufacturing
district are completely at variance with the lives of nobles. The
shopkeeper and artisan are just going to bed when the great world is
thinking of dinner; and the noisy stir of life begins among the former
when the latter have gone to rest. Their day's calculations never
coincide; the one class represents the expenditure, the other the
receipts. Consequently their manners and customs are diametrically
opposed.

Nothing contemptuous is intended by this statement. An aristocracy is in
a manner the intellect of the social system, as the middle classes and
the proletariat may be said to be its organizing and working power. It
naturally follows that these forces are differently situated; and of
their antagonism there is bred a seeming antipathy produced by the
performance of different functions, all of them, however, existing for
one common end.

Such social dissonances are so inevitably the outcome of any charter
of the constitution, that however much a Liberal may be disposed to
complain of them, as of treason against those sublime ideas with which
the ambitious plebeian is apt to cover his designs, he would none the
less think it a preposterous notion that M. le Prince de Montmorency,
for instance, should continue to live in the Rue Saint-Martin at the
corner of the street which bears that nobleman's name; or that M. le Duc
de Fitz-James, descendant of the royal house of Scotland, should have
his hotel at the angle of the Rue Marie Stuart and the Rue Montorgueil.
_Sint ut sunt, aut non sint_, the grand words of the Jesuit, might be
taken as a motto by the great in all countries. These social differences
are patent in all ages; the fact is always accepted by the people; its
"reasons of state" are self-evident; it is at once cause and effect, a
principle and a law. The common sense of the masses never deserts them
until demagogues stir them up to gain ends of their own; that common
sense is based on the veri