always behind the mode. She scoffs, however, at the ignorance affected
by her neighbors. /Her/ plate is of modern fashion; she has "grooms,"
Negroes, a valet-de-chambre, and what-not. Her oldest son drives a
tilbury, and does nothing (the estate is entailed upon him), his
younger brother is auditor to a Council of State. The father is well
posted up in official scandals, and tells you anecdotes of Louis
XVIII. and Madame du Cayla. He invests his money in the five per
cents, and is careful to avoid the topic of cider, but has been known
occasionally to fall a victim to the craze for rectifying the
conjectural sums-total of the various fortunes of the department. He
is a member of the Departmental Council, has his clothes from Paris,
and wears the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In short, he is a country
gentleman who has fully grasped the significance of the Restoration,
and is coining money at the Chamber, but his Royalism is less pure
than that of the rival house; he takes the /Gazette/ and the /Debats/,
the other family only read the /Quotidienne/.

His lordship the Bishop, a sometime Vicar-General, fluctuates between
the two powers, who pay him the respect due to religion, but at times
they bring home to him the moral appended by the worthy Lafontaine to
the fable of the /Ass laden with Relics/. The good man's origin is
distinctly plebeian.

Then come stars of the second magnitude, men of family with ten or
twelve hundred livres a year, captains in the navy or cavalry
regiments, or nothing at all. Out on the roads, on horseback, they
rank half-way between the cure bearing the sacraments and the tax
collector on his rounds. Pretty nearly all of them have been in the
Pages or in the Household Troops, and now are peaceably ending their
days in a /faisance-valoir/, more interested in felling timber and the