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.