for of all that they once possessed there was nothing left but
tradition. For their misfortune there was just precisely enough
of their former wealth left them as a class to keep up their
bitter pride. They were content with their past. Not one of
them seriously thought of bidding the son of the house take up
arms from the pile of weapons which the nineteenth century flings
down in the market-place. Young men, shut out from office, were
dancing at Madame's balls, while they should have been doing the
work done under the Republic and the Empire by young,
conscientious, harmlessly employed energies. It was their place
to carry out at Paris the programme which their seniors should
have been following in the country. The heads of houses might
have won back recognition of their titles by unremitting
attention to local interests, by falling in with the spirit of
the age, by recasting their order to suit the taste of the times.

But, pent up together in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, where the
spirit of the ancient court and traditions of bygone feuds
between the nobles and the Crown still lingered on, the
aristocracy was not whole-hearted in its allegiance to the
Tuileries, and so much the more easily defeated because it was
concentrated in the Chamber of Peers, and badly organized even
there. If the noblesse had woven themselves into a network over
the country, they could have held their own; but cooped up in
their Faubourg, with their backs against the Chateau, or spread
at full length over the Budget, a single blow cut the thread of a
fast-expiring life, and a petty, smug-faced lawyer came forward
with the axe. In spite of M. Royer-Collard's admirable
discourse, the hereditary peerage and law of entail fell before
the lampoons of a man who made it a boast that he had adroitly