for their sons under the new law of the equal division of property.  To marry the young Duc d’Herouville, it was necessary to conciliate the great banking-houses; but the haughty pride of the daughter of the house alienated these people by cutting speeches.  During the first years of the Restoration, from 1817 to 1825, Mademoiselle d’Herouville, though in quest of millions, refused, among others, the daughter of Mongenod the banker, with whom Monsieur de Fontaine afterwards contented himself.

At last, having lost several good opportunities to establish her nephew, entirely through her own fault, she was just considering whether the property of the Nucingens was not too basely acquired, or whether she should lend herself to the ambition of Madame de Nucingen, who wished to make her daughter a duchess.  The king, anxious to restore the d’Herouvilles to their former splendor, had almost brought about this marriage, and when it failed he openly accused Mademoiselle d’Herouville of folly.  In this way the aunt made the nephew ridiculous, and the nephew, in his own way, was not less absurd.  When great things disappear they leave crumbs, “frusteaux,” Rabelais would say, behind them; and the French nobility of this century has left us too many such fragments.  Neither the clergy nor the nobility have anything to complain of in this long history of manners and customs.  Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well represented; but we ought surely to renounce the noble title of historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have already done so elsewhere,—­in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in “The Lily of the Valley"), in the “Duchesse de Langeais,” and the very nobleness of the nobility in the “Marquis d’Espard.”  How then could it be that the race of heroes and valiant men belonging to the proud house of Herouville, who gave the famous marshal to the nation, cardinals to the church, great leaders to the Valois, knights to Louis XIV., was reduced to a little fragile being smaller than Butscha?  That is a question which we ask ourselves in more than one salon in Paris when we hear the greatest names of France announced, and see the entrance of a thin, pinched, undersized young man, scarcely possessing the breath of life, or a premature old one, or some whimsical creature in whom an observer can with great difficulty trace the signs of a past grandeur.  The dissipations of the reign of Louis XV., the orgies of that fatal and egotistic period, have produced an effete generation, in which manners alone survive the nobler vanished qualities,—­forms, which are the sole heritage our nobles have preserved.  The abandonment in which Louis XVI. was allowed to perish may thus be explained, with some slight reservations, as a wretched result of the reign of Madame de Pompadour.