rooms with figures from the Collection of Antiquities. Often, as
little schoolboys of eight or ten we used to propose to go and take a
look at the curiosities in their glass cage, for the fun of the thing.
But as soon as I caught sight of Mlle. Armande's sweet face, I used to
tremble; and there was a trace of jealousy in my admiration for the
lovely child Victurnien, who belonged, as we all instinctively felt,
to a different and higher order of being from our own. It struck me as
something indescribably strange that the young fresh creature should
be there in that cemetery awakened before the time. We could not have
explained our thoughts to ourselves, yet we felt that we were
bourgeois and insignificant in the presence of that proud court."



The disasters of 1813 and 1814, which brought about the downfall of
Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was
more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but the
events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the
vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes, all
contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the
personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore,
only begins to shape itself in 1822.

In 1822 the Marquis d'Esgrignon's fortunes had not improved in spite
of the changes worked by the Restoration in the condition of emigres.
Of all the nobles hardly hit by Revolutionary legislation, his case
was the hardest. Like other great families, the d'Esgrignons before
1789 derived the greater part of their income from their rights as
lords of the manor in the shape of dues paid by those who held of
them; and, naturally, the old seigneurs had reduced the size of the