"What of that? Can there be a more loyal Bourbonite than De
Rochebriant?--and he goes to the ball. It is given out of the season,
in celebration of a family marriage. And the Duchesse de Tarascon is
connected with Alain, and therefore with De Mauleon, though but
distantly."

"Ah! excuse my ignorance of genealogy."

"As if the genealogy of noble names were not the history of France,"
muttered Alain, indignantly.




CHAPTER II.

Yes, the "Sens Commun" was a success: it had made a sensation at
starting; the sensation was on the increase. It is difficult for an
Englishman to comprehend the full influence of a successful journal at
Paris; the station--political, literary, social--which it confers on the
contributors who effect the success. M. Lebeau had shown much more
sagacity in selecting Gustave Rameau for the nominal editor than Savarin
supposed or my reader might detect. In the first place, Gustave himself,
with all his defects of information and solidity of intellect, was not
without real genius,--and a sort of genius that when kept in restraint,
and its field confined to sentiment or sarcasm, was in unison with the
temper of the day; in the second place, it was only through Gustave that
Lebeau could have got at Savarin, and the names which that brilliant
writer had secured at the outset would have sufficed to draw attention to
the earliest numbers of the "Sens Commun," despite a title which did not