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.
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