n of a Giaour into
the sanctuary, for Mme. de Bargeton's salon was a kind of holy of
holies in a society that kept itself unspotted from the world. The only
outsider intimate there was the bishop; the prefect was admitted twice
or thrice in a year, the receiver-general was never received at all;
Mme. de Bargeton would go to concerts and "at homes" at his house, but
she never accepted invitations to dinner. And now, she who had declined
to open her doors to the receiver-general, welcomed a mere controller of
excise! Here was a novel order of precedence for snubbed authority; such
a thing it had never entered their minds to conceive.

Those who by dint of mental effort can understand a kind of pettiness
which, for that matter, can be found on any and every social level, will
realize the awe with which the _bourgeoisie_ of Angouleme regarded the
Hotel de Bargeton. The inhabitant of L'Houmeau beheld the grandeur
of that miniature Louvre, the glory of the Angoumoisin Hotel de
Rambouillet, shining at a solar distance; and yet, within it there was
gathered together all the direst intellectual poverty, all the decayed
gentility from twenty leagues round about.

Political opinion expanded itself in wordy commonplaces vociferated with
emphasis; the _Quotidienne_ was comparatively Laodicean in its loyalty,
and Louis XVIII. a Jacobin. The women, for the most part, were awkward,
silly, insipid, and ill dressed; there was always something amiss that
spoiled the whole; nothing in them was complete, toilette or talk, flesh
or spirit. But for his designs on Mme. de Bargeton, Chatelet could not
have endured the society. And yet the manners and spirit of the noble
in his ruined manor-house, the knowledge of the traditions of good
breeding,--these things covered a multitude of deficiencies. Nobility
of feeling was far more real here than in the lofty world of Paris. You
might compare these country Royalists, if the metaphor may be allowed,
to old-fashioned silver plate, antiquated and tarnished, but weighty;
their attachment to the House of Bourbon as the House of Bourbon did
them honor. The very fixity of their political opinions was a sort of
faithfulness. The distance that they set between themselves and the
_bourgeoisie_, their very exclusiveness, gave them a certain elevation,
and enhanced their value. Each noble represented a certain price for
the townsmen, as Bambara Negroes, we are told, attach a money value to
cowrie shells.

S