Montrond’s successor, the Count de Cambis, the man who has represented the premier gentilhomme de France in our day, died lately at as good an old age as the Count de Montrond. Autres tems, autres moeurs:  no more cheating at cards, no more beating the watch, as in the case of the Chevalier de Grammont; no more dueling and killing the adversary by surprise, as in that of the Count de Montrond.  When the bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, succeeded to the elder branch, the gentilhomme Francais entirely lost his prestige, and the necessity of his existence was ignored.  Everything bourgeois had become the fashion at court:  the court itself was denominated a basse-cour (farm-yard) by the Faubourg St. Germain, and all who frequented it “les oies de Frere Philippe” or “les canards d’Orleans.”  The Count de Cambis appeared at that moment at the Tuileries in search of office.  His name stood high in the annals of the French noblesse:  society had, however, ceased to confound the gentilhomme with the roue.  The conditions necessary to fulfill the character were changed, and it was now the bourgeois gentilhomme and not the gentilhomme roue whose claim to the vacant place was more likely to be accepted.  The Count de Cambis had held the place of honorary equerry to the Duc d’Angouleme, having obtained it less on account of his patent of nobility than by reason of his unblemished character.  He was now in search of some place about the court, and soon found favor in the eyes of the citizen-king, to whom the quiet virtues of the Tiers-Etat were of more value than the flash and tinsel of the Regence.  The count was of fine, commanding person and handsome countenance:  moreover, he was “the man with a story,” and a painful one it was, creative of the greatest interest in the tender bosoms of the Orleans princesses.  Although poor, belonging to a ruined family, his prospects had been good at the court of Charles Dix, and one of the greatest ladies of the court had cast her eyes upon him as a suitable parti for her daughter.  The young lady, nothing loath, had accepted with alacrity the proposition of marriage, seconded as it was by the Duchesse d’Angouleme, and backed by the promise of high office on its realization.  A marriage is easy to arrange in France; not so the execution of the marriage-contract, which is rendered as wearisome by delays as the still more dilatory proceedings of the law; and therefore it was deemed advisable, in order to pass this dismal period, to despatch the Count de Cambis to Holland for the purchase of horses for the royal stable.  Arrived at The Hague, he was seized with an attack of smallpox, which laid him prostrate on the low flock bed of the miserable little inn to which he had been conveyed on landing from the boat.  Here he lay for some time incognito, his identity unknown to any save the faithful valet who attended him, until he had perfectly recovered from the disease, which, however, was found to have