All through his happy childhood and golden youth, Victurnien had never met with opposition to his wishes.  He had been the king of the house; no one curbed the little prince’s will; and naturally he grew up insolent and audacious, selfish as a prince, self-willed as the most high-spirited cardinal of the Middle Ages,—­defects of character which any one might guess from his qualities, essentially those of the noble.

The Chevalier was a man of the good old times when the Gray Musketeers were the terror of the Paris theatres, when they horsewhipped the watch and drubbed servers of writs, and played a host of page’s pranks, at which Majesty was wont to smile so long as they were amusing.  This charming deceiver and hero of the ruelles had no small share in bringing about the disasters which afterwards befell.  The amiable old gentleman, with nobody to understand him, was not a little pleased to find a budding Faublas, who looked the part to admiration, and put him in mind of his own young days.  So, making no allowance for the difference of the times, he sowed the maxims of a roue of the Encyclopaedic period broadcast in the boy’s mind.  He told wicked anecdotes of the reign of His Majesty Louis XV.; he glorified the manners and customs of the year 1750; he told of the orgies in petites maisons, the follies of courtesans, the capital tricks played on creditors, the manners, in short, which furnished forth Dancourt’s comedies and Beaumarchais’ epigrams.  And unfortunately, the corruption lurking beneath the utmost polish tricked itself out in Voltairean wit.  If the Chevalier went rather too far at times, he always added as a corrective that a man must always behave himself like a gentleman.

Of all this discourse, Victurnien comprehended just so much as flattered his passions.  From the first he saw his old father laughing with the Chevalier.  The two elderly men considered that the pride of a d’Esgrignon was a sufficient safeguard against anything unbefitting; as for a dishonorable action, no one in the house imagined that a d’Esgrignon could be guilty of it. Honor, the great principle of Monarchy, was planted firm like a beacon in the hearts of the family; it lighted up the least action, it kindled the least thought of a d’Esgrignon.  “A d’Esgrignon ought not to permit himself to do such and such a thing; he bears a name which pledges him to make a future worthy of the past”—­a noble teaching which should have been sufficient in itself to keep alive the tradition of noblesse—­had been, as it were, the burden of Victurnien’s cradle song.  He heard them from the old Marquis, from Mlle. Armande, from Chesnel, from the intimates of the house.  And so it came to pass that good and evil met, and in equal forces, in the boy’s soul.