and of eldest sonship, by frittering away estates, compels the
nobleman to attend to his own business instead of attending to affairs
of state, and where personal greatness can only be such greatness as
is acquired by long and patient toil: quite a new era.

Regarded as a relic of that great institution know as feudalism, M.
d'Espard deserved respectful admiration. If he believed himself to be
by blood the superior of other men, he also believed in all the
obligations of nobility; he had the virtues and the strength it
demands. He had brought up his children in his own principles, and
taught them from the cradle the religion of their caste. A deep sense
of their own dignity, pride of name, the conviction that they were by
birth great, gave rise in them to a kingly pride, the courage of
knights, and the protecting kindness of a baronial lord; their
manners, harmonizing with their notions, would have become princes,
and offended all the world of the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve
--a world, above all others, of equality, where every one believed
that M. d'Espard was ruined, and where all, from the lowest to the
highest, refused the privileges of nobility to a nobleman without
money, because they were all ready to allow an enriched bourgeois to
usurp them. Thus the lack of communion between this family and other
persons was as much moral as it was physical.

In the father and the children alike, their personality harmonized
with the spirit within. M. d'Espard, at this time about fifty, might
have sat as a model to represent the aristocracy of birth in the
nineteenth century. He was slight and fair; there was in the outline
and general expression of his face a native distinction which spoke of
lofty sentiments, but it bore the impress of a deliberate coldness
which commanded respect a little too decidedly. His aquiline nose bent