de Tresnes; but for us, as for the world, those names no longer exist.
These gentlemen are without heirs; they only advance by a little the
oblivion which awaits their names; they are simply Monsieur Nicolas
and Monsieur Joseph, as you will be Monsieur Godefroid."

As he heard those names,--one so celebrated in the annals of royalism
by the catastrophe which put an end to the uprising of the Chouans;
the other so revered in the halls of the old parliament of Paris,
--Godefroid could not repress a quiver. He looked at these relics of
the grandest things of the fallen monarchy,--the /noblesse/ and the law,
--and he could see no movement of the features, no change in the
countenance, that revealed the presence of a worldly thought. Those
men no longer remembered, or did not choose to remember, what they had
been. This was Godefroid's first lesson.

"Each of your names, gentlemen, is a whole history in itself," he said
respectfully.

"Yes, the history of my time,--ruins," replied Monsieur Joseph.

"You are in good company," said Monsieur Alain.

The latter can be described in a word: he was the small bourgeois of
Paris, the worthy middle-class being with a kindly face, relieved by
pure white hair, but made insipid by an eternal smile.

As for the priest, the Abbe de Veze, his presence said all. The priest
who fulfils his mission is known by the first glance he gives you, and
by the glance that others who know him give to him.