In the centre of the table flowers were disposed in a basket of gilded bronze, decorated with eagles, stars, and bees, and handles formed like horns of plenty.  On its sides winged Victorys supported the branches of candelabra.  This centrepiece of the Empire style had been given by Napoleon, in 1812, to Count Martin de l’Aisne, grandfather of the present Count Martin-Belleme.  Martin de l’Aisne, a deputy to the Legislative Corps in 1809, was appointed the following year member of the Committee on Finance, the assiduous and secret works of which suited his laborious temperament.  Although a Liberal, he pleased the Emperor by his application and his exact honesty.  For two years he was under a rain of favors.  In 1813 he formed part of the moderate majority which approved the report in which Laine censured power and misfortune, by giving to the Empire tardy advice.  January 1, 1814, he went with his colleagues to the Tuileries.  The Emperor received them in a terrifying manner.  He charged on their ranks.  Violent and sombre, in the horror of his present strength and of his coming fall, he stunned them with his anger and his contempt.

He came and went through their lines, and suddenly took Count Martin by the shoulders, shook him and dragged him, exclaiming:  “A throne is four pieces of wood covered with velvet?  No!  A throne is a man, and that man is I. You have tried to throw mud at me.  Is this the time to remonstrate with me when there are two hundred thousand Cossacks at the frontiers?  Your Laine is a wicked man.  One should wash one’s dirty linen at home.”  And while in his anger he twisted in his hand the embroidered collar of the deputy, he said:  “The people know me.  They do not know you.  I am the elect of the nation.  You are the obscure delegates of a department.”  He predicted to them the fate of the Girondins.  The noise of his spurs accompanied the sound of his voice.  Count Martin remained trembling the rest of his life, and tremblingly recalled the Bourbons after the defeat of the Emperor.  The two restorations were in vain; the July government and the Second Empire covered his oppressed breast with crosses and cordons.  Raised to the highest functions, loaded with honors by three kings and one emperor, he felt forever on his shoulder the hand of the Corsican.  He died a senator of Napoleon III, and left a son agitated by the same fear.

This son had married Mademoiselle Belleme, daughter of the first president of the court of Bourges, and with her the political glories of a family which gave three ministers to the moderate monarch.  The Bellemes, advocates in the time of Louis XV, elevated the Jacobin origins of the Martins.  The second Count Martin was a member of all the Assemblies until his death in 1881.  His son took without trouble his seat in the Chamber of Deputies.  Having married Mademoiselle Therese Montessuy, whose dowry supported his political fortune, he appeared discreetly among the four or five bourgeois, titled and wealthy, who rallied to democracy, and were received without much bad grace by the republicans, whom aristocracy flattered.