This fossil greatness finds a rival in another house, wealthier, though of less ancient lineage.  Husband and wife spend a couple of months of every winter in Paris, bringing back with them its frivolous tone and short-lived contemporary crazes.  Madame is a woman of fashion, though she looks rather conscious of her clothes, and is always behind the mode.  She scoffs, however, at the ignorance affected by her neighbors. Her plate is of modern fashion; she has “grooms,” Negroes, a valet-de-chambre, and what-not.  Her oldest son drives a tilbury, and does nothing (the estate is entailed upon him), his younger brother is auditor to a Council of State.  The father is well posted up in official scandals, and tells you anecdotes of Louis XVIII. and Madame du Cayla.  He invests his money in the five per cents, and is careful to avoid the topic of cider, but has been known occasionally to fall a victim to the craze for rectifying the conjectural sums-total of the various fortunes of the department.  He is a member of the Departmental Council, has his clothes from Paris, and wears the Cross of the Legion of Honor.  In short, he is a country gentleman who has fully grasped the significance of the Restoration, and is coining money at the Chamber, but his Royalism is less pure than that of the rival house; he takes the Gazette and the Debats, the other family only read the Quotidienne.

His lordship the Bishop, a sometime Vicar-General, fluctuates between the two powers, who pay him the respect due to religion, but at times they bring home to him the moral appended by the worthy Lafontaine to the fable of the Ass laden with Relics.  The good man’s origin is distinctly plebeian.

Then come stars of the second magnitude, men of family with ten or twelve hundred livres a year, captains in the navy or cavalry regiments, or nothing at all.  Out on the roads, on horseback, they rank half-way between the cure bearing the sacraments and the tax collector on his rounds.  Pretty nearly all of them have been in the Pages or in the Household Troops, and now are peaceably ending their days in a faisance-valoir, more interested in felling timber and the cider prospects than in the Monarchy.

Still they talk of the Charter and the Liberals while the cards are making, or over a game at backgammon, when they have exhausted the usual stock of dots, and have married everybody off according to the genealogies which they all know by heart.  Their womenkind are haughty dames, who assume the airs of Court ladies in their basket chaises.  They huddle themselves up in shawls and caps by way of full dress; and twice a year, after ripe deliberation, have a new bonnet from Paris, brought as opportunity offers.  Exemplary wives are they for the most part, and garrulous.