Visitors wanting to see him commonly found him there, and often the two boys on their return from school resorted thither.Thus the ground-floor rooms were a sort of sanctuary where the father and sons spent their time from the hour of dinner till the next day, and his domestic life was carefully closed against the public eye.
His only servants were a cook--an old woman who had long been attached to his family--and a man-servant forty years old, who was with him when he married Mademoiselle de Blamont.His children's nurse had also remained with them, and the minute care to which the apartment bore witness revealed the sense of order and the maternal affections expended by this woman in her master's interest, in the management of his house, and the charge of his children.These three good souls, grave, and uncommunicative folk, seemed to have entered into the idea which ruled the Marquis' domestic life.And the contrast between their habits and those of most servants was a peculiarity which cast an air of mystery over the house, and fomented the calumny to which M.
d'Espard himself lent occasion.Very laudable motives had made him determine never to be on visiting terms with any of the other tenants in the house.In undertaking to educate his boys he wished to keep them from all contact with strangers.Perhaps, too, he wished to avoid the intrusion of neighbors.
In a man of his rank, at a time when the Quartier Latin was distracted by Liberalism, such conduct was sure to rouse in opposition a host of petty passions, of feelings whose folly is only to be measured by their meanness, the outcome of porters' gossip and malevolent tattle from door to door, all unknown to M.d'Espard and his retainers.His man-servant was stigmatized as a Jesuit, his cook as a sly fox; the nurse was in collusion with Madame Jeanrenaud to rob the madman.The madman was the Marquis.By degrees the other tenants came to regard as proofs of madness a number of things they had noticed in M.d'Espard, and passed through the sieve of their judgment without discerning any reasonable motive for them.
Having no belief in the success of the History of China, they had managed to convince the landlord of the house that M.d'Espard had no money just at a time when, with the forgetfulness which often befalls busy men, he had allowed the tax-collector to send him a summons for non-payment of arrears.The landlord forthwith claimed his quarter's rent from January 1st by sending in a receipt, which the porter's wife had amused herself by detaining.On the 15th a summons to pay was served on M.d'Espard, the portress had delivered it at her leisure, and he supposed it to be some misunderstanding, not conceiving of any incivility from a man in whose house he had been living for twelve years.The Marquis was actually seized by a bailiff at the time when his man-servant had gone to carry the money for the rent to the landlord.
This arrest, assiduously reported to the persons with whom he was in treaty for his undertaking, had alarmed some of them who were already doubtful of M.d'Espard's solvency in consequence of the enormous sums which Baron Jeanrenaud and his mother were said to be receiving from him.And, indeed, these suspicions on the part of the tenants, the creditors, and the landlord had some excuse in the Marquis' extreme economy in housekeeping.He conducted it as a ruined man might.His servants always paid in ready money for the most trifling necessaries of life, and acted as not choosing to take credit; if now they had asked for anything on credit, it would probably have been refused, calumnious gossip had been so widely believed in the neighborhood.
There are tradesmen who like those of their customers who pay badly when they see them often, while they hate others, and very good ones, who hold themselves on too high a level to allow of any familiarity as CHUMS, a vulgar but expressive word.Men are made so; in almost every class they will allow to a gossip, or a vulgar soul that flatters them, facilities and favors they refuse to the superiority they resent, in whatever form it may show itself.The shopkeeper who rails at the Court has his courtiers.
In short, the manners of the Marquis and his children were certain to arouse ill-feeling in their neighbors, and to work them up by degrees to the pitch of malevolence when men do not hesitate at an act of meanness if only it may damage the adversary they have themselves created.
M.d'Espard was a gentleman, as his wife was a lady, by birth and breeding; noble types, already so rare in France that the observer can easily count the persons who perfectly realize them.These two characters are based on primitive ideas, on beliefs that may be called innate, on habits formed in infancy, and which have ceased to exist.
To believe in pure blood, in a privileged race, to stand in thought above other men, must we not from birth have measured the distance which divides patricians from the mob? To command, must we not have never met our equal? And finally, must not education inculcate the ideas with which Nature inspires those great men on whose brow she has placed a crown before their mother has ever set a kiss there? These ideas, this education, are no longer possible in France, where for forty years past chance has arrogated the right of making noblemen by dipping them in the blood of battles, by gilding them with glory, by crowning them with the halo of genius; where the abolition of entail and of eldest sonship, by frittering away estates, compels the nobleman to attend to his own business instead of attending to affairs of state, and where personal greatness can only be such greatness as is acquired by long and patient toil: quite a new era.
Regarded as a relic of that great institution know as feudalism, M.
