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.