all the noble families who emigrated having debts and property,
dowagers and tact.

Madame la Baronne de Maulincour had a friend in the old Vidame de
Pamiers, formerly a commander of the Knights of Malta. This was one of
those undying friendships founded on sexagenary ties which nothing can
weaken, because at the bottom of such intimacies there are certain
secrets of the human heart, delightful to guess at when we have the
time, insipid to explain in twenty words, and which might make the
text of a work in four volumes as amusing as the Doyen de Killerine,
--a work about which young men talk and judge without having read it.

Auguste de Maulincour belonged therefore to the faubourg Saint-Germain
through his grandmother and the vidame, and it sufficed him to date
back two centuries to take the tone and opinions of those who assume
to go back to Clovis. This young man, pale, slender, and delicate in
appearance, a man of honor and true courage, who would fight a duel
for a yes or a no, had never yet fought upon a battle-field, though he
wore in his button-hole the cross of the Legion of honor. He was, as
you perceive, one of the blunders of the Restoration, perhaps the most
excusable of them. The youth of those days was the youth of no epoch.
It came between the memories of the Empire and those of the
Emigration, between the old traditions of the court and the
conscientious education of the _bourgeoisie_; between religion and
fancy-balls; between two political faiths, between Louis XVIII., who
saw only the present, and Charles X., who looked too far into the
future; it was moreover bound to accept the will of the king, though
the king was deceiving and tricking it. This unfortunate youth, blind
and yet clear-sighted, was counted as nothing by old men jealously
keeping the reins of the State in their feeble hands, while the