THE COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Ellen Marriage
DEDICATION
To Baron Von Hammer-Purgstall, Member of the Aulic Council, Author
of the History of the Ottoman Empire.
Dear Baron,--You have taken so warm an interest in my long, vast
“History of French Manners in the Nineteenth Century,” you have
given me so much encouragement to persevere with my work, that you
have given me a right to associate your name with some portion of
it. Are you not one of the most important representatives of
conscientious, studious Germany? Will not your approval win for me
the approval of others, and protect this attempt of mine? So proud
am I to have gained your good opinion, that I have striven to
deserve it by continuing my labors with the unflagging courage
characteristic of your methods of study, and of that exhaustive
research among documents without which you could never have given
your monumental work to the world of letters. Your sympathy with
such labor as you yourself have bestowed upon the most brilliant
civilization of the East, has often sustained my ardor through
nights of toil given to the details of our modern civilization.
And will not you, whose naive kindliness can only be compared with
that of our own La Fontaine, be glad to know of this?
May this token of my respect for you and your work find you at
Dobling, dear Baron, and put you and yours in mind of one of your
most sincere admirers and friends.
DE BALZAC.
THE COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES
There stands a house at a corner of a street, in the middle of a town,
in one of the least important prefectures in France, but the name of the
street and the name of the town must be suppressed here. Every one will
appreciate the motives of this sage reticence demanded by convention;
for if a writer takes upon himself the office of annalist of his own
time, he is bound to touch on many sore subjects. The house was called
the Hotel d’Esgrignon; but let d’Esgrignon be considered a mere
fancy name, neither more nor less connected with real people than
the conventional Belval, Floricour, or Derville of the stage, or
the Adalberts and Mombreuses of romance. After all, the names of the
principal characters will be quite as much disguised; for though in this
history the chronicler would prefer to conceal the facts under a mass
of contradictions, anachronisms, improbabilities, and absurdities, the
truth will out in spite of him. You uproot a vine-stock, as you imagine,
and the stem will send up lusty shoots after you have ploughed your
vineyard over.
The “Hotel d’Esgrignon” was nothing more nor less than the house in
which the old Marquis lived; or, in the style of ancient documents,
Charles Marie Victor Ange Carol, Marquis d’Esgrignon. It was only an
ordinary house, but the townspeople and tradesmen had begun by calling
it the Hotel d’Esgrignon in jest, and ended after a score of years by
giving it that name in earnest.
The name of Carol, or Karawl, as the Thierrys would have spelt it, was
glorious among the names of the most powerful chieftains of the Northmen
who conquered Gaul and established the feudal system there. Never had
Carol bent his head before King or Communes, the Church or Finance.
Intrusted in the days of yore with the keeping of a French March, the
title of marquis in their family meant no shadow of imaginary office; it
had been a post of honor with duties to discharge. Their fief had always
been their domain. Provincial nobles were they in every sense of the
word; they might boast of an unbroken line of great descent; they had
been neglected by the court for two hundred years; they were lords
paramount in the estates of a province where the people looked up to
them with superstitious awe, as to the image of the Holy Virgin that
cures the toothache. The house of d’Esgrignon, buried in its remote
border country, was preserved as the charred piles of one of Caesar’s
bridges are maintained intact in a river bed. For thirteen hundred years
the daughters of the house had been married without a dowry or taken the
veil; the younger sons of every generation had been content with their
share of their mother’s dower and gone forth to be captains or bishops;
some had made a marriage at court; one cadet of the house became an
admiral, a duke, and a peer of France, and died without issue. Never
would the Marquis d’Esgrignon of the elder branch accept the title of
duke.
“I hold my marquisate as His Majesty holds the realm of France, and on
the same conditions,” he told the Constable de Luynes, a very paltry
fellow in his eyes at that time.
You may be sure that d’Esgrignons lost their heads on the scaffold
during the troubles. The old blood showed itself proud and high even in
1789. The Marquis of that day would not emigrate; he was answerable for
his March. The reverence in which he was held by the countryside saved
his head; but the hatred of the genuine sans-culottes was strong enough
to compel him to pretend to fly, and for a while he lived in hiding.
Then, in the name of the Sovereign People, the d’Esgrignon lands were
dishonored by the District, and the woods sold by the Nation in spite
of the personal protest made by the Marquis, then turned forty. Mlle.
d’Esgrignon, his half-sister, saved some portions of the fief, thanks to
the young steward of the family, who claimed on her behalf the partage
de presuccession, which is to say, the right of a relative to a portion
of the emigre’s lands. To Mlle. d’Esgrignon, therefore, the Republic
made over the castle itself and a few farms. Chesnel [Choisnel], the
faithful steward, was obliged to buy in his own name the church, the
parsonage house, the castle gardens, and other places to which his
patron was attached--the Marquis advancing the money.
The slow, swift years of the Terror went by, and the Marquis, whose
character had won the respect of the whole country, decided that he and
his sister ought to return to the castle and improve the property which
Maitre Chesnel--for he was now a notary--had contrived to save for them
out of the wreck. Alas! was not the plundered and dismantled castle all
too vast for a lord of the manor shorn of all his ancient rights; too
large for the landowner whose woods had been sold piecemeal, until he
could scarce draw nine thousand francs of income from the pickings of
his old estates?
It was in the month of October 1800 that Chesnel brought the Marquis
back to the old feudal castle, and saw with deep emotion, almost beyond
his control, his patron standing in the midst of the empty courtyard,
gazing round upon the moat, now filled up with rubbish, and the castle
towers razed to the level of the roof. The descendant of the Franks
looked for the missing Gothic turrets and the picturesque weather vanes
which used to rise above them; and his eyes turned to the sky, as if
asking of heaven the reason of this social upheaval. No one but Chesnel
could understand the profound anguish of the great d’Esgrignon, now
known as Citizen Carol. For a long while the Marquis stood in silence,
drinking in the influences of the place, the ancient home of his
forefathers, with the air that he breathed; then he flung out a most
melancholy exclamation.
“Chesnel,” he said, “we will come back again some day when the troubles
are over; I could not bring myself to live here until the edict of
pacification has been published; _they_ will not allow me to set my
scutcheon on the wall.”
He waved his hand toward the castle, mounted his horse, and rode
back beside his sister, who had driven over in the notary’s shabby
basket-chaise.
The Hotel d’Esgrignon in the town had been demolished; a couple of
factories now stood on the site of the aristocrat’s house. So Maitre
Chesnel spent the Marquis’ last bag of louis on the purchase of the
old-fashioned building in the square, with its gables, weather-vane,
turret, and dovecote. Once it had been the courthouse of the bailiwick,
and subsequently the presidial; it had belonged to the d’Esgrignons
from generation to generation; and now, in consideration of five hundred
louis d’or, the present owner made it over with the title given by the
Nation to its rightful lord. And so, half in jest, half in earnest, the
old house was christened the Hotel d’Esgrignon.
In 1800 little or no difficulty was made over erasing names from the
fatal list, and some few emigres began to return. Among the very first
nobles to come back to the old town were the Baron de Nouastre and his
daughter. They were completely ruined. M. d’Esgrignon generously offered
them the shelter of his roof; and in his house, two months later, the
Baron died, worn out with grief. The Nouastres came of the best blood
in the province; Mlle. de Nouastre was a girl of two-and-twenty; the
Marquis d’Esgrignon married her to continue his line. But she died in
childbirth, a victim to the unskilfulness of her physician, leaving,
most fortunately, a son to bear the name of the d’Esgrignons. The old
Marquis--he was but fifty-three, but adversity and sharp distress had
added months to every year--the poor old Marquis saw the death of the
loveliest of human creatures, a noble woman in whom the charm of the
feminine figures of the sixteenth century lived again, a charm now lost
save to men’s imaginations. With her death the joy died out of his old
age. It was one of those terrible shocks which reverberate through every
moment of the years that follow. For a few moments he stood beside the
bed where his wife lay, with her hands folded like a saint, then he
kissed her on the forehead, turned away, drew out his watch, broke the
mainspring, and hung it up beside the hearth. It was eleven o’clock in
the morning.
“Mlle. d’Esgrignon,” he said, “let us pray God that this hour may not
prove fatal yet again to our house. My uncle the archbishop was murdered
at this hour; at this hour also my father died----”
He knelt down beside the bed and buried his face in the coverlet; his
sister did the same, in another moment they both rose to their feet.
Mlle. d’Esgrignon burst into tears; but the old Marquis looked with dry
eyes at the child, round the room, and again on his dead wife. To the
stubbornness of the Frank he united the fortitude of a Christian.
These things came to pass in the second year of the nineteenth century.
Mlle. d’Esgrignon was then twenty-seven years of age. She was a
beautiful woman. An ex-contractor for forage to the armies of the
Republic, a man of the district, with an income of six thousand francs,
persuaded Chesnel to carry a proposal of marriage to the lady. The
Marquis and his sister were alike indignant with such presumption in
their man of business, and Chesnel was almost heartbroken; he could not
forgive himself for yielding to the Sieur du Croisier’s [du Bousquier]
blandishments. The Marquis’ manner with his old servant changed
somewhat; never again was there quite the old affectionate kindliness,
which might almost have been taken for friendship. From that time forth
the Marquis was grateful, and his magnanimous and sincere gratitude
continually wounded the poor notary’s feelings. To some sublime natures
gratitude seems an excessive payment; they would rather have that sweet
equality of feeling which springs from similar ways of thought, and the
blending of two spirits by their own choice and will. And Maitre Chesnel
had known the delights of such high friendship; the Marquis had raised
him to his own level. The old noble looked on the good notary as
something more than a servant, something less than a child; he was the
voluntary liege man of the house, a serf bound to his lord by all the
ties of affection. There was no balancing of obligations; the sincere
affection on either side put them out of the question.
In the eyes of the Marquis, Chesnel’s official dignity was as nothing;
his old servitor was merely disguised as a notary. As for Chesnel, the
Marquis was now, as always, a being of a divine race; he believed in
nobility; he did not blush to remember that his father had thrown open
the doors of the salon to announce that “My Lord Marquis is served.”
His devotion to the fallen house was due not so much to his creed as to
egoism; he looked on himself as one of the family. So his vexation was
intense. Once he had ventured to allude to his mistake in spite of the
Marquis’ prohibition, and the old noble answered gravely--“Chesnel,
before the troubles you would not have permitted yourself to entertain
such injurious suppositions. What can these new doctrines be if they
have spoiled _you_?”
Maitre Chesnel had gained the confidence of the whole town; people
looked up to him; his high integrity and considerable fortune
contributed to make him a person of importance. From that time forth he
felt a very decided aversion for the Sieur du Crosier; and though there
was little rancor in his composition, he set others against the sometime
forage-contractor. Du Croisier, on the other hand, was a man to bear a
grudge and nurse a vengeance for a score of years. He hated Chesnel and
the d’Esgrignon family with the smothered, all-absorbing hate only to
be found in a country town. His rebuff had simply ruined him with the
malicious provincials among whom he had come to live, thinking to rule
over them. It was so real a disaster that he was not long in feeling the
consequences of it. He betook himself in desperation to a wealthy old
maid, and met with a second refusal. Thus failed the ambitious schemes
with which he had started. He had lost his hope of a marriage with Mlle.
d’Esgrignon, which would have opened the Faubourg Saint-Germain of the
province to him; and after the second rejection, his credit fell away
to such an extent that it was almost as much as he could do to keep his
position in the second rank.
In 1805, M. de la Roche-Guyon, the oldest son of an ancient family which
had previously intermarried with the d’Esgrignons, made proposals in
form through Maitre Chesnel for Mlle. Marie Armande Clair d’Esgrignon.
She declined to hear the notary.
“You must have guessed before now that I am a mother, dear Chesnel,” she
said; she had just put her nephew, a fine little boy of five, to bed.
The old Marquis rose and went up to his sister, but just returned from
the cradle; he kissed her hand reverently, and as he sat down again,
found words to say:
“My sister, you are a d’Esgrignon.”
A quiver ran through the noble girl; the tears stood in her eyes. M.
d’Esgrignon, the father of the present Marquis, had married a second
wife, the daughter of a farmer of taxes ennobled by Louis XIV. It was
a shocking mesalliance in the eyes of his family, but fortunately of no
importance, since a daughter was the one child of the marriage. Armande
knew this. Kind as her brother had always been, he looked on her as a
stranger in blood. And this speech of his had just recognized her as one
of the family.
And was not her answer the worthy crown of eleven years of her noble
life? Her every action since she came of age had borne the stamp of the
purest devotion; love for her brother was a sort of religion with her.
“I shall die Mlle. d’Esgrignon,” she said simply, turning to the notary.
“For you there could be no fairer title,” returned Chesnel, meaning to
convey a compliment. Poor Mlle. d’Esgrignon reddened.
“You have blundered, Chesnel,” said the Marquis, flattered by the
steward’s words, but vexed that his sister had been hurt. “A d’Esgrignon
may marry a Montmorency; their descent is not so pure as ours. The
d’Esgrignons bear or, two bends, gules,” he continued, “and nothing
during nine hundred years has changed their scutcheon; as it was at
first, so it is to-day. Hence our device, Cil est nostre, taken at
a tournament in the reign of Philip Augustus, with the supporters, a
knight in armor or on the right, and a lion gules on the left.”
“I do not remember that any woman I have ever met has struck my
imagination as Mlle. d’Esgrignon did,” said Emile Blondet, to whom
contemporary literature is indebted for this history among other things.
“Truth to tell, I was a boy, a mere child at the time, and perhaps my
memory-pictures of her owe something of their vivid color to a boy’s
natural turn for the marvelous.
“If I was playing with other children on the Parade, and she came to
walk there with her nephew Victurnien, the sight of her in the distance
thrilled me with very much the effect of galvanism on a dead body. Child
as I was, I felt as though new life had been given me.
“Mlle. Armande had hair of tawny gold; there was a delicate fine down on
her cheek, with a silver gleam upon it which I loved to catch, putting
myself so that I could see the outlines of her face lit up by the
daylight, and feel the fascination of those dreamy emerald eyes, which
sent a flash of fire through me whenever they fell upon my face. I used
to pretend to roll on the grass before her in our games, only to try
to reach her little feet, and admire them on a closer view. The soft
whiteness of her skin, her delicate features, the clearly cut lines of
her forehead, the grace of her slender figure, took me with a sense of
surprise, while as yet I did not know that her shape was graceful,
nor her brows beautiful, nor the outline of her face a perfect oval. I
admired as children pray at that age, without too clearly understanding
why they pray. When my piercing gaze attracted her notice, when she
asked me (in that musical voice of hers, with more volume in it, as it
seemed to me, than all other voices), ‘What are you doing little one?
Why do you look at me?’--I used to come nearer and wriggle and bite my
finger-nails, and redden and say, ‘I do not know.’ And if she chanced
to stroke my hair with her white hand, and ask me how old I was, I would
run away and call from a distance, ‘Eleven!’
“Every princess and fairy of my visions, as I read the Arabian Nights,
looked and walked like Mlle. d’Esgrignon; and afterwards, when my
drawing-master gave me heads from the antique to copy, I noticed that
their hair was braided like Mlle. d’Esgrignon’s. Still later, when the
foolish fancies had vanished one by one, Mlle. Armande remained vaguely
in my memory as a type; that Mlle. Armande for whom men made way
respectfully, following the tall brown-robed figure with their eyes
along the Parade and out of sight. Her exquisitely graceful form, the
rounded curves sometimes revealed by a chance gust of wind, and always
visible to my eyes in spite of the ample folds of stuff, revisited
my young man’s dreams. Later yet, when I came to think seriously over
certain mysteries of human thought, it seemed to me that the feeling
of reverence was first inspired in me by something expressed in Mlle.
d’Esgrignon’s face and bearing. The wonderful calm of her face, the
suppressed passion in it, the dignity of her movements, the saintly life
of duties fulfilled,--all this touched and awed me. Children are more
susceptible than people imagine to the subtle influences of ideas;
they never make game of real dignity; they feel the charm of real
graciousness, and beauty attracts them, for childhood itself is
beautiful, and there are mysterious ties between things of the same
nature.
“Mlle. d’Esgrignon was one of my religions. To this day I can never
climb the staircase of some old manor-house but my foolish imagination
must needs picture Mlle. Armande standing there, like the spirit of
feudalism. I can never read old chronicles but she appears before my
eyes in the shape of some famous woman of old times; she is Agnes Sorel,
Marie Touchet, Gabrielle; and I lend her all the love that was lost in
her heart, all the love that she never expressed. The angel shape seen
in glimpses through the haze of childish fancies visits me now sometimes
across the mists of dreams.”
Keep this portrait in mind; it is a faithful picture and sketch of
character. Mlle. d’Esgrignon is one of the most instructive figures in
this story; she affords an example of the mischief that may be done by
the purest goodness for lack of intelligence.
Two-thirds of the emigres returned to France during 1804 and 1805, and
almost every exile from the Marquis d’Esgrignon’s province came back to
the land of his fathers. There were certainly defections. Men of good
birth entered the service of Napoleon, and went into the army or held
places at the Imperial court, and others made alliances with the upstart
families. All those who cast in their lots with the Empire retrieved
their fortunes and recovered their estates, thanks to the Emperor’s
munificence; and these for the most part went to Paris and stayed there.
But some eight or nine families still remained true to the proscribed
noblesse and loyal to the fallen monarchy. The La Roche-Guyons,
Nouastres, Verneuils, Casterans, Troisvilles, and the rest were some of
them rich, some of them poor; but money, more or less, scarcely counted
for anything among them. They took an antiquarian view of themselves;
for them the age and preservation of the pedigree was the one
all-important matter; precisely as, for an amateur, the weight of
metal in a coin is a small matter in comparison with clean lettering,
a flawless stamp, and high antiquity. Of these families, the Marquis
d’Esgrignon was the acknowledged head. His house became their cenacle.
There His Majesty, Emperor and King, was never anything but “M. de
Bonaparte”; there “the King” meant Louis XVIII., then at Mittau;
there the Department was still the Province, and the prefecture the
intendance.
The Marquis was honored among them for his admirable behavior, his
loyalty as a noble, his undaunted courage; even as he was respected
throughout the town for his misfortunes, his fortitude, his steadfast
adherence to his political convictions. The man so admirable in
adversity was invested with all the majesty of ruined greatness. His
chivalrous fair-mindedness was so well known, that litigants many a
time had referred their disputes to him for arbitration. All gently bred
Imperialists and the authorities themselves showed as much indulgence
for his prejudices as respect for his personal character; but there was
another and a large section of the new society which was destined to
be known after the Restoration as the Liberal party; and these, with du
Croisier as their unacknowledged head, laughed at an aristocratic oasis
which nobody might enter without proof of irreproachable descent. Their
animosity was all the more bitter because honest country squires and the
higher officials, with a good many worthy folk in the town, were of the
opinion that all the best society thereof was to be found in the Marquis
d’Esgrignon’s salon. The prefect himself, the Emperor’s chamberlain,
made overtures to the d’Esgrignons, humbly sending his wife (a
Grandlieu) as ambassadress.
Wherefore, those excluded from the miniature provincial Faubourg
Saint-Germain nicknamed the salon “The Collection of Antiquities,”
and called the Marquis himself “M. Carol.” The receiver of taxes,
for instance, addressed his applications to “M. Carol (ci-devant des
Grignons),” maliciously adopting the obsolete way of spelling.
“For my own part,” said Emile Blondet, “if I try to recall my childhood
memories, I remember that the nickname of ‘Collection of Antiquities’
always made me laugh, in spite of my respect--my love, I ought to
say--for Mlle. d’Esgrignon. The Hotel d’Esgrignon stood at the angle of
two of the busiest thoroughfares in the town, and not five hundred paces
away from the market place. Two of the drawing-room windows looked upon
the street and two upon the square; the room was like a glass cage,
every one who came past could look through it from side to side. I was
only a boy of twelve at the time, but I thought, even then, that the
salon was one of those rare curiosities which seem, when you come to
think of them afterwards, to lie just on the borderland between reality
and dreams, so that you can scarcely tell to which side they most
belong.
“The room, the ancient Hall of Audience, stood above a row of cellars
with grated air-holes, once the prison cells of the old court-house,
now converted into a kitchen. I do not know that the magnificent lofty
chimney-piece of the Louvre, with its marvelous carving, seemed more
wonderful to me than the vast open hearth of the salon d’Esgrignon when
I saw it for the first time. It was covered like a melon with a network
of tracery. Over it stood an equestrian portrait of Henri III., under
whom the ancient duchy of appanage reverted to the crown; it was a great
picture executed in low relief, and set in a carved and gilded frame.
The ceiling spaces between the chestnut cross-beams in the fine old
roof were decorated with scroll-work patterns; there was a little faded
gilding still left along the angles. The walls were covered with Flemish
tapestry, six scenes from the Judgment of Solomon, framed in golden
garlands, with satyrs and cupids playing among the leaves. The parquet
floor had been laid down by the present Marquis, and Chesnel had picked
up the furniture at sales of the wreckage of old chateaux between
1793 and 1795; so that there were Louis Quatorze consoles, tables,
clock-cases, andirons, candle-sconces and tapestry-covered chairs, which
marvelously completed a stately room, large out of all proportion to the
house. Luckily, however, there was an equally lofty ante-chamber,
the ancient Salle des Pas Perdus of the presidial, which communicated
likewise with the magistrate’s deliberating chamber, used by the
d’Esgrignons as a dining-room.
“Beneath the old paneling, amid the threadbare braveries of a bygone
day, some eight or ten dowagers were drawn up in state in a quavering
line; some with palsied heads, others dark and shriveled like mummies;
some erect and stiff, others bowed and bent, but all of them tricked out
in more or less fantastic costumes as far as possible removed from
the fashion of the day, with be-ribboned caps above their curled and
powdered ‘heads,’ and old discolored lace. No painter however earnest,
no caricature however wild, ever caught the haunting fascination of
those aged women; they come back to me in dreams; their puckered faces
shape themselves in my memory whenever I meet an old woman who puts
me in mind of them by some faint resemblance of dress or feature. And
whether it is that misfortune has initiated me into the secrets of
irremediable and overwhelming disaster; whether that I have come to
understand the whole range of human feelings, and, best of all, the
thoughts of Old Age and Regret; whatever the reason, nowhere and never
again have I seen among the living or in the faces of the dying the wan
look of certain gray eyes that I remember, nor the dreadful brightness
of others that were black.
“Neither Hoffmann nor Maturin, the two weirdest imaginations of our
time, ever gave me such a thrill of terror as I used to feel when I
watched the automaton movements of those bodies sheathed in whalebone.
The paint on actors’ faces never caused me a shock; I could see below it
the rouge in grain, the rouge de naissance, to quote a comrade at least
as malicious as I can be. Years had leveled those women’s faces, and
at the same time furrowed them with wrinkles, till they looked like the
heads on wooden nutcrackers carved in Germany. Peeping in through the
window-panes, I gazed at the battered bodies, and ill-jointed limbs
(how they were fastened together, and, indeed, their whole anatomy was
a mystery I never attempted to explain); I saw the lantern jaws,
the protuberant bones, the abnormal development of the hips; and the
movements of these figures as they came and went seemed to me no whit
less extraordinary than their sepulchral immobility as they sat round
the card-tables.
“The men looked gray and faded like the ancient tapestries on the wall,
in dress they were much more like the men of the day, but even they
were not altogether convincingly alive. Their white hair, their withered
waxen-hued faces, their devastated foreheads and pale eyes, revealed
their kinship to the women, and neutralized any effects of reality
borrowed from their costume.
“The very certainty of finding all these folk seated at or among the
tables every day at the same hours invested them at length in my eyes
with a sort of spectacular interest as it were; there was something
theatrical, something unearthly about them.
“Whenever, in after times, I have gone through museums of old furniture
in Paris, London, Munich, or Vienna, with the gray-headed custodian
who shows you the splendors of time past, I have peopled the rooms with
figures from the Collection of Antiquities. Often, as little schoolboys
of eight or ten we used to propose to go and take a look at the
curiosities in their glass cage, for the fun of the thing. But as soon
as I caught sight of Mlle. Armande’s sweet face, I used to tremble;
and there was a trace of jealousy in my admiration for the lovely child
Victurnien, who belonged, as we all instinctively felt, to a different
and higher order of being from our own. It struck me as something
indescribably strange that the young fresh creature should be there in
that cemetery awakened before the time. We could not have explained
our thoughts to ourselves, yet we felt that we were bourgeois and
insignificant in the presence of that proud court.”
The disasters of 1813 and 1814, which brought about the downfall of
Napoleon, gave new life to the Collection of Antiquities, and what was
more than life, the hope of recovering their past importance; but
the events of 1815, the troubles of the foreign occupation, and the
vacillating policy of the Government until the fall of M. Decazes,
all contributed to defer the fulfilment of the expectations of the
personages so vividly described by Blondet. This story, therefore, only
begins to shape itself in 1822.
In 1822 the Marquis d’Esgrignon’s fortunes had not improved in spite of
the changes worked by the Restoration in the condition of emigres. Of
all the nobles hardly hit by Revolutionary legislation, his case was the
hardest. Like other great families, the d’Esgrignons before 1789 derived
the greater part of their income from their rights as lords of the manor
in the shape of dues paid by those who held of them; and, naturally, the
old seigneurs had reduced the size of the holdings in order to swell the
amounts paid in quit-rents and heriots. Families in this position were
hopelessly ruined. They were not affected by the ordinance by which
Louis XVIII. put the emigres into possession of such of their lands as
had not been sold; and at a later date it was impossible that the law of
indemnity should indemnify them. Their suppressed rights, as everybody
knows, were revived in the shape of a land tax known by the very name of
domaines, but the money went into the coffers of the State.
The Marquis by his position belonged to that small section of the
Royalist party which would hear of no kind of compromise with those whom
they styled, not Revolutionaries, but revolted subjects, or, in
more parliamentary language, they had no dealings with Liberals or
Constitutionnels. Such Royalists, nicknamed Ultras by the opposition,
took for leaders and heroes those courageous orators of the Right,
who from the very beginning attempted, with M. de Polignac, to protest
against the charter granted by Louis XVIII. This they regarded as
an ill-advised edict extorted from the Crown by the necessity of the
moment, only to be annulled later on. And, therefore, so far from
co-operating with the King to bring about a new condition of things, the
Marquis d’Esgrignon stood aloof, an upholder of the straitest sect of
the Right in politics, until such time as his vast fortune should
be restored to him. Nor did he so much as admit the thought of the
indemnity which filled the minds of the Villele ministry, and formed a
part of a design of strengthening the Crown by putting an end to those
fatal distinctions of ownership which still lingered on in spite of
legislation.
The miracles of the Restoration of 1814, the still greater miracle
of Napoleon’s return in 1815, the portents of a second flight of the
Bourbons, and a second reinstatement (that almost fabulous phase of
contemporary history), all these things took the Marquis by surprise at
the age of sixty-seven. At that time of life, the most high-spirited
men of their age were not so much vanquished as worn out in the
struggle with the Revolution; their activity, in their remote provincial
retreats, had turned into a passionately held and immovable conviction;
and almost all of them were shut in by the enervating, easy round of
daily life in the country. Could worse luck befall a political party
than this--to be represented by old men at a time when its ideas are
already stigmatized as old-fashioned?
When the legitimate sovereign appeared to be firmly seated on the throne
again in 1818, the Marquis asked himself what a man of seventy should
do at court; and what duties, what office he could discharge there?
The noble and high-minded d’Esgrignon was fain to be content with the
triumph of the Monarchy and Religion, while he waited for the results
of that unhoped-for, indecisive victory, which proved to be simply
an armistice. He continued as before, lord-paramount of his salon, so
felicitously named the Collection of Antiquities.
But when the victors of 1793 became the vanquished in their turn, the
nickname given at first in jest began to be used in bitter earnest.
The town was no more free than other country towns from the hatreds
and jealousies bred of party spirit. Du Croisier, contrary to all
expectation, married the old maid who had refused him at first; carrying
her off from his rival, the darling of the aristocratic quarter, a
certain Chevalier whose illustrious name will be sufficiently hidden by
suppressing it altogether, in accordance with the usage formerly adopted
in the place itself, where he was known by his title only. He was “the
Chevalier” in the town, as the Comte d’Artois was “Monsieur” at court.
Now, not only had that marriage produced a war after the provincial
manner, in which all weapons are fair; it had hastened the separation of
the great and little noblesse, of the aristocratic and bourgeois social
elements, which had been united for a little space by the heavy weight
of Napoleonic rule. After the pressure was removed, there followed that
sudden revival of class divisions which did so much harm to the country.
The most national of all sentiments in France is vanity. The wounded
vanity of the many induced a thirst for Equality; though, as the most
ardent innovator will some day discover, Equality is an impossibility.
The Royalists pricked the Liberals in the most sensitive spots, and
this happened specially in the provinces, where either party accused the
other of unspeakable atrocities. In those days the blackest deeds were
done in politics, to secure public opinion on one side or the other, to
catch the votes of that public of fools which holds up hands for those
that are clever enough to serve out weapons to them. Individuals are
identified with their political opinions, and opponents in public life
forthwith became private enemies. It is very difficult in a country town
to avoid a man-to-man conflict of this kind over interests or questions
which in Paris appear in a more general and theoretical form, with
the result that political combatants also rise to a higher level; M.
Laffitte, for example, or M. Casimir-Perier can respect M. de Villele
or M. de Payronnet as a man. M. Laffitte, who drew the fire on the
Ministry, would have given them an asylum in his house if they had fled
thither on the 29th of July 1830. Benjamin Constant sent a copy of his
work on Religion to the Vicomte de Chateaubriand, with a flattering
letter acknowledging benefits received from the former Minister. At
Paris men are systems, whereas in the provinces systems are identified
with men; men, moreover, with restless passions, who must always
confront one another, always spy upon each other in private life, and
pull their opponents’ speeches to pieces, and live generally like two
duelists on the watch for a chance to thrust six inches of steel between
an antagonist’s ribs. Each must do his best to get under his enemy’s
guard, and a political hatred becomes as all-absorbing as a duel to the
death. Epigram and slander are used against individuals to bring the
party into discredit.
In such warfare as this, waged ceremoniously and without rancor on the
side of the Antiquities, while du Croisier’s faction went so far as to
use the poisoned weapons of savages--in this warfare the advantages
of wit and delicate irony lay on the side of the nobles. But it should
never be forgotten that the wounds made by the tongue and the eyes, by
gibe or slight, are the last of all to heal. When the Chevalier turned
his back on mixed society and entrenched himself on the Mons Sacer
of the aristocracy, his witticisms thenceforward were directed at du
Croisier’s salon; he stirred up the fires of war, not knowing how far
the spirit of revenge was to urge the rival faction. None but purists
and loyal gentlemen and women sure one of another entered the Hotel
d’Esgrignon; they committed no indiscretions of any kind; they had
their ideas, true or false, good or bad, noble or trivial, but there
was nothing to laugh at in all this. If the Liberals meant to make the
nobles ridiculous, they were obliged to fasten on the political actions
of their opponents; while the intermediate party, composed of officials
and others who paid court to the higher powers, kept the nobles informed
of all that was done and said in the Liberal camp, and much of it was
abundantly laughable. Du Croisier’s adherents smarted under a sense of
inferiority, which increased their thirst for revenge.
In 1822, du Croisier put himself at the head of the manufacturing
interest of the province, as the Marquis d’Esgrignon headed the
noblesse. Each represented his party. But du Croisier, instead of giving
himself out frankly for a man of the extreme Left, ostensibly adopted
the opinions formulated at a later date by the 221 deputies.
By taking up this position, he could keep in touch with the magistrates
and local officials and the capitalists of the department. Du Croisier’s
salon, a power at least equal to the salon d’Esgrignon, larger
numerically, as well as younger and more energetic, made itself felt all
over the countryside; the Collection of Antiquities, on the other hand,
remained inert, a passive appendage, as it were, of a central authority
which was often embarrassed by its own partisans; for not merely did
they encourage the Government in a mistaken policy, but some of its most
fatal blunders were made in consequence of the pressure brought to bear
upon it by the Conservative party.
The Liberals, so far, had never contrived to carry their candidate. The
department declined to obey their command knowing that du Croisier, if
elected, would take his place on the Left Centre benches, and as far
as possible to the Left. Du Croisier was in correspondence with the
Brothers Keller, the bankers, the oldest of whom shone conspicuous among
“the nineteen deputies of the Left,” that phalanx made famous by the
efforts of the entire Liberal press. This same M. Keller, moreover, was
related by marriage to the Comte de Gondreville, a Constitutional
peer who remained in favor with Louis XVIII. For these reasons, the
Constitutional Opposition (as distinct from the Liberal party) was
always prepared to vote at the last moment, not for the candidate whom
they professed to support, but for du Croisier, if that worthy could
succeed in gaining a sufficient number of Royalist votes; but at every
election du Croisier was regularly thrown out by the Royalists. The
leaders of that party, taking their tone from the Marquis d’Esgrignon,
had pretty thoroughly fathomed and gauged their man; and with each
defeat, du Croisier and his party waxed more bitter. Nothing so
effectually stirs up strife as the failure of some snare set with
elaborate pains.
In 1822 there seemed to be a lull in hostilities which had been kept up
with great spirit during the first four years of the Restoration. The
salon du Croisier and the salon d’Esgrignon, having measured their
strength and weakness, were in all probability waiting for opportunity,
that Providence of party strife. Ordinary persons were content with
the surface quiet which deceived the Government; but those who knew du
Croisier better, were well aware that the passion of revenge in him, as
in all men whose whole life consists in mental activity, is implacable,
especially when political ambitions are involved. About this time
du Croisier, who used to turn white and red at the bare mention
of d’Esgrignon or the Chevalier, and shuddered at the name of the
Collection of Antiquities, chose to wear the impassive countenance of
a savage. He smiled upon his enemies, hating them but the more deeply,
watching them the more narrowly from hour to hour. One of his own party,
who seconded him in these calculations of cold wrath, was the President
of the Tribunal, M. du Ronceret, a little country squire, who had vainly
endeavored to gain admittance among the Antiquities.
The d’Esgrignons’ little fortune, carefully administered by Maitre
Chesnel, was barely sufficient for the worthy Marquis’ needs; for though
he lived without the slightest ostentation, he also lived like a noble.
The governor found by his Lordship the Bishop for the hope of the house,
the young Comte Victurnien d’Esgrignon, was an elderly Oratorian who
must be paid a certain salary, although he lived with the family. The
wages of a cook, a waiting-woman for Mlle. Armande, an old valet for
M. le Marquis, and a couple of other servants, together with the daily
expenses of the household, and the cost of an education for which
nothing was spared, absorbed the whole family income, in spite of Mlle.
Armande’s economies, in spite of Chesnel’s careful management, and the
servants’ affection. As yet, Chesnel had not been able to set about
repairs at the ruined castle; he was waiting till the leases fell in to
raise the rent of the farms, for rents had been rising lately, partly
on account of improved methods of agriculture, partly by the fall in
the value of money, of which the landlord would get the benefit at the
expiration of leases granted in 1809.
The Marquis himself knew nothing of the details of the management of
the house or of his property. He would have been thunderstruck if he had
been told of the excessive precautions needed “to make both ends of the
year meet in December,” to use the housewife’s saying, and he was so
near the end of his life, that every one shrank from opening his eyes.
The Marquis and his adherents believed that a House, to which no one at
Court or in the Government gave a thought, a House that was never
heard of beyond the gates of the town, save here and there in the same
department, was about to revive its ancient greatness, to shine forth in
all its glory. The d’Esgrignons’ line should appear with renewed lustre
in the person of Victurnien, just as the despoiled nobles came into
their own again, and the handsome heir to a great estate would be in a
position to go to Court, enter the King’s service, and marry (as other
d’Esgrignons had done before him) a Navarreins, a Cadignan, a d’Uxelles,
a Beausant, a Blamont-Chauvry; a wife, in short, who should unite all
the distinctions of birth and beauty, wit and wealth, and character.
The intimates who came to play their game of cards of an evening--the
Troisvilles (pronounced Treville), the La Roche-Guyons, the Casterans
(pronounced Cateran), and the Duc de Verneuil--had all so long been
accustomed to look up to the Marquis as a person of immense consequence,
that they encouraged him in such notions as these. They were perfectly
sincere in their belief; and indeed, it would have been well founded if
they could have wiped out the history of the last forty years. But the
most honorable and undoubted sanctions of right, such as Louis
XVIII. had tried to set on record when he dated the Charter from the
one-and-twentieth year of his reign, only exist when ratified by the
general consent. The d’Esgrignons not only lacked the very rudiments
of the language of latter-day politics, to wit, money, the great modern
_relief_, or sufficient rehabilitation of nobility; but, in their case,
too, “historical continuity” was lacking, and that is a kind of renown
which tells quite as much at Court as on the battlefield, in diplomatic
circles as in Parliament, with a book, or in connection with an
adventure; it is, as it were, a sacred ampulla poured upon the heads
of each successive generation. Whereas a noble family, inactive
and forgotten, is very much in the position of a hard-featured,
poverty-stricken, simple-minded, and virtuous maid, these qualifications
being the four cardinal points of misfortune. The marriage of a daughter
of the Troisvilles with General Montcornet, so far from opening the
eyes of the Antiquities, very nearly brought about a rupture between
the Troisvilles and the salon d’Esgrignon, the latter declaring that the
Troisvilles were mixing themselves up with all sorts of people.
There was one, and one only, among all these folk who did not share
their illusions. And that one, needless to say, was Chesnel the notary.
Although his devotion, sufficiently proved already, was simply unbounded
for the great house now reduced to three persons; although he accepted
all their ideas, and thought them nothing less than right, he had too
much common sense, he was too good a man of business to more than half
the families in the department, to miss the significance of the great
changes that were taking place in people’s minds, or to be blind to the
different conditions brought about by industrial development and modern
manners. He had watched the Revolution pass through the violent phase
of 1793, when men, women, and children wore arms, and heads fell on the
scaffold, and victories were won in pitched battles with Europe; and now
he saw the same forces quietly at work in men’s minds, in the shape of
ideas which sanctioned the issues. The soil had been cleared, the seed
sown, and now came the harvest. To his thinking, the Revolution had
formed the mind of the younger generation; he touched the hard facts,
and knew that although there were countless unhealed wounds, what had
been done was past recall. The death of a king on the scaffold, the
protracted agony of a queen, the division of the nobles’ lands, in his
eyes were so many binding contracts; and where so many vested interests
were involved, it was not likely that those concerned would allow them
to be attacked. Chesnel saw clearly. His fanatical attachment to the
d’Esgrignons was whole-hearted, but it was not blind, and it was all the
fairer for this. The young monk’s faith that sees heaven laid open and
beholds the angels, is something far below the power of the old monk who
points them out to him. The ex-steward was like the old monk; he would
have given his life to defend a worm-eaten shrine.
He tried to explain the “innovations” to his old master, using a
thousand tactful precautions; sometimes speaking jestingly, sometimes
affecting surprise or sorrow over this or that; but he always met the
same prophetic smile on the Marquis’ lips, the same fixed conviction in
the Marquis’ mind, that these follies would go by like others. Events
contributed in a way which has escaped attention to assist such noble
champions of forlorn hope to cling to their superstitions. What could
Chesnel do when the old Marquis said, with a lordly gesture, “God swept
away Bonaparte with his armies, his new great vassals, his crowned
kings, and his vast conceptions! God will deliver us from the rest.” And
Chesnel hung his head sadly, and did not dare to answer, “It cannot be
God’s will to sweep away France.” Yet both of them were grand figures;
the one, standing out against the torrent of facts like an ancient block
of lichen-covered granite, still upright in the depths of an Alpine
gorge; the other, watching the course of the flood to turn it to
account. Then the good gray-headed notary would groan over the
irreparable havoc which the superstitions were sure to work in the mind,
the habits, and ideas of the Comte Victurnien d’Esgrignon.