There are tradesmen who like those of their customers who pay badly
when they see them often, while they hate others, and very good ones,
who hold themselves on too high a level to allow of any familiarity as
CHUMS, a vulgar but expressive word. Men are made so; in almost every
class they will allow to a gossip, or a vulgar soul that flatters
them, facilities and favors they refuse to the superiority they
resent, in whatever form it may show itself. The shopkeeper who rails
at the Court has his courtiers.

In short, the manners of the Marquis and his children were certain to
arouse ill-feeling in their neighbors, and to work them up by degrees
to the pitch of malevolence when men do not hesitate at an act of
meanness if only it may damage the adversary they have themselves
created.

M. d'Espard was a gentleman, as his wife was a lady, by birth and
breeding; noble types, already so rare in France that the observer can
easily count the persons who perfectly realize them. These two
characters are based on primitive ideas, on beliefs that may be called
innate, on habits formed in infancy, and which have ceased to exist.
To believe in pure blood, in a privileged race, to stand in thought
above other men, must we not from birth have measured the distance
which divides patricians from the mob? To command, must we not have
never met our equal? And finally, must not education inculcate the
ideas with which Nature inspires those great men on whose brow she has
placed a crown before their mother has ever set a kiss there? These
ideas, this education, are no longer possible in France, where for
forty years past chance has arrogated the right of making noblemen by
dipping them in the blood of battles, by gilding them with glory, by
crowning them with the halo of genius; where the abolition of entail