The Parisians — Complete, Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton [christmas read aloud .TXT] 📗

to yield you some such income as your father gave to his chef de cuisine, is still one of those superb ‘terres’ which bankers and Jews and stock-jobbers court and hunt after, for which they will give enormous sums. If you place it in good hands, I do not doubt that you could dispose of the property within three months, on terms that would leave you a considerable surplus, which, invested with judgment, would afford you whereon you could live at Paris in a way suitable to your rank and age. Need we go further?—does this course smile to you?”

“Pass on, Count; I will defend to the last what I take from my ancestors, and cannot voluntarily sell their roof-tree and their tombs.”

“Your name would still remain, and you would be just as well received in Paris, and your ‘noblesse’ just as implicitly conceded, if all Judaea encamped upon Rochebriant. Consider how few of us ‘gentilshommes’ of the old regime have any domains left to us. Our names alone survive: no revolution can efface them.”

“It may be so, but pardon me; there are subjects on which we cannot reason,—we can but feel. Rochebriant may be torn from me, but I cannot yield it.”

“I proceed to the third course. Keep the chateau and give up its traditions; remain ‘de facto’ Marquis of Rochebriant, but accept the new order of things. Make yourself known to the people in power. They will be charmed to welcome you a convert from the old noblesse is a guarantee of stability to the new system. You will be placed in diplomacy; effloresce into an ambassador, a minister,—and ministers nowadays have opportunities to become enormously rich.”

“That course is not less impossible than the last. Till Henry V. formally resign his right to the throne of Saint Louis, I can be servant to no other man seated on that throne.”

“Such, too, is my creed,” said the Count, “and I cling to it; but my estate is not mortgaged, and I have neither the tastes nor the age for public employments. The last course is perhaps better than the rest; at all events it is the easiest. A wealthy marriage; even if it must be a ‘mesalliance.’ I think at your age, with your appearance, that your name is worth at least two million francs in the eyes of a rich ‘roturier’ with an ambitious daughter.”

“Alas!” said the young man, rising, “I see I shall have to go back to Rochebriant. I cannot sell my castle, I cannot sell my creed, and I cannot sell my name and myself.”

“The last all of us did in the old ‘regime,’ Marquis. Though I still retain the title of Vandemar, my property comes from the Farmer-General’s daughter, whom my great-grandfather, happily for us, married in the days of Louis Quinze. Marriages with people of sense and rank have always been ‘marriages de convenance’ in France. It is only in ‘le petit monde’ that men having nothing marry girls having nothing, and I don’t believe they are a bit the happier for it. On the contrary, the ‘quarrels de menage’ leading to frightful crimes appear by the ‘Gazette des Tribunaux’ to be chiefly found among those who do not sell themselves at the altar.”

The old Count said this with a grim ‘persiflage.’ He was a Voltairian.

Voltairianism, deserted by the modern Liberals of France, has its chief cultivation nowadays among the wits of the old ‘regime.’ They pick up its light weapons on the battle-field on which their fathers perished, and re-feather against the ‘canaille’ the shafts which had been pointed against the ‘noblesse.’

“Adieu, Count,” said Alain, rising; “I do not thank you less for your advice because I have not the wit to profit by it.”

“‘Au revoir,’ my cousin; you will think better of it when you have been a month or two at Paris. By the way, my wife receives every Wednesday; consider our house yours.”

“Count, can I enter into the world which Madame la Comtesse receives, in the way that becomes my birth, on the income I take from my fortune?”

The Count hesitated. “No,” said he at last, frankly; “not because you will be less welcome or less respected, but because I see that you have all the pride and sensitiveness of a ‘seigneur de province.’ Society would therefore give you pain, not pleasure. More than this, I know, by the remembrance of my own youth and the sad experience of my own sons, that you would be irresistibly led into debt, and debt in your circumstances would be the loss of Rochebriant. No; I invite you to visit us. I offer you the most select but not the most brilliant circles of Paris, because my wife is religious, and frightens away the birds of gay plumage with the scarecrows of priests and bishops. But if you accept my invitation and my offer, I am bound, as an old man of the world to a young kinsman, to say that the chances are that you will be ruined.”

“I thank you, Count, for your candour; and I now acknowledge that I have found a relation and a guide,” answered the Marquis, with nobility of mien that was not without a pathos which touched the hard heart of the old man.

“Come at least whenever you want a sincere if a rude friend;” and though he did not kiss his cousin’s cheek this time, he gave him, with more sincerity, a parting shake of the hand.

And these made the principal events in Alain’s Paris life till he met Frederic Lemercier. Hitherto he had received no definite answer from M. Gandrin, who had postponed an interview, not having had leisure to make himself master of all the details in the abstract sent to him.