There are but three or four houses of the lesser nobility in Nemours;
among them, at the period of which we write, that of the family of
Portenduere was the most important. These exclusives visited none but
nobles who possessed lands or chateaus in the neighbourhood; of the
latter we may mention the d'Aiglemonts, owners of the beautiful estate
of Saint-Lange, and the Marquis du Rouvre, whose property, crippled by
mortgages, was closely watched by the bourgeoisie. The nobles of the
town had no money. Madame de Portenduere's sole possessions were a
farm which brought a rental of forty-seven hundred francs, and her
town house.

In opposition to this very insignificant Faubourg St. Germain was a
group of a dozen rich families, those of retired millers, or former
merchants; in short a miniature bourgeoisie; below which, again, lived
and moved the retail shopkeepers, the proletaries and the peasantry.
The bourgeoisie presented (like that of the Swiss cantons and of other
small countries) the curious spectacle of the ramifications of certain
autochthonous families, old-fashioned and unpolished perhaps, but who
rule a whole region and pervade it, until nearly all its inhabitants
are cousins. Under Louis XI., an epoch at which the commons first made
real names of their surnames (some of which are united with those of
feudalism) the bourgeoisie of Nemours was made up of Minorets,
Massins, Levraults and Cremieres. Under Louis XIII. these four
families had already produced the Massin-Cremieres, the
Levrault-Massins, the Massin-Minorets, the Minoret-Minorets, the
Cremiere-Levraults, the Levrault-Minoret-Massins, Massin-Levraults,
Minoret-Massins, Massin-Massins, and Cremiere-Massins,--all these
varied with juniors and diversified with the names of eldest sons, as
for instance, Cremiere-Francois, Levrault-Jacques, Jean-Minoret--enough
to drive a Pere Anselme of the People frantic,--if the people should