“Terrible calamities are in store for us, in case our party fails.  Nothing will be left but penal or fiscal laws—­your money or your life.  The most generous nation on the earth will have ceased to obey the call of noble instincts.  Wounds past curing will have been fostered and aggravated, an all pervading jealousy being the first.  Then the upper classes will be submerged; equality of desire will be taken for equality of strength; true distinction, even when proved and recognized, will be threatened by the advancing tide of middle-class prejudice.  It was possible to choose one man out of a thousand, but, amongst three millions, discrimination becomes impossible, when all are moved by the same ambitions and attired in the same livery of mediocrity.  No foresight will warn this victorious horde of that other terrible horde, soon to be arrayed against them in the peasant proprietors; in other words, twenty million acres of land, alive, stirring, arguing, deaf to reason, insatiable of appetite, obstructing progress, masters in their brute force——­”

“But,” said I, interrupting my father, “what can I do to help the State.  I feel no vocation for playing Joan of Arc in the interests of the family, or for finding a martyr’s block in the convent.”

“You are a little hussy,” cried my father.  “If I speak sensibly to you, you are full of jokes; when I jest, you talk like an ambassadress.”

“Love lives on contrasts,” was my reply.

And he laughed till the tears stood in his eyes.

“You will reflect on what I have told you; you will do justice to the large and confiding spirit in which I have broached the matter, and possibly events may assist my plans.  I know that, so far as you are concerned, they are injurious and unfair, and this is the reason why I appeal for your sanction of them less to your heart and your imagination than to your reason.  I have found more judgment and commonsense in you than in any one I know——­”

“You flatter yourself,” I said, with a smile, “for I am every inch your child!”

“In short,” he went on, “one must be logical.  You can’t have the end without the means, and it is our duty to set an example to others.  From all this I deduce that you ought not to have money of your own till your younger brother is provided for, and I want to employ the whole of your inheritance in purchasing an estate for him to go with the title.”

“But,” I said, “you won’t interfere with my living in my own fashion and enjoying life if I leave you my fortune?”

“Provided,” he replied, “that your view of life does not conflict with the family honor, reputation, and, I may add, glory.”

“Come, come,” I cried, “what has become of my excellent judgment?”

“There is not in all France,” he said with bitterness, “a man who would take for wife a daughter of one of our noblest families without a dowry and bestow one on her.  If such a husband could be found, it would be among the class of rich parvenus; on this point I belong to the eleventh century.”