At Nemours there are not more than three or four noble families, of no great rank or fame; among them, at the time of our story, shone that of the Portenduères. These exclusive families visit the nobility who possess lands and châteaux in the neighboring country—the d’Aiglemonts, for instance, owners of the fine estate of Saint-Lange, and the Marquis du Rouvre, on whose property, eaten up with mortgages, the townsfolk kept a greedy eye. The nobility who live in the towns have no wealth. Madame de Portenduère’s whole estate consisted of a farm, yielding four thousand seven hundred francs a year, and her house in the town. In the opposite scale to this miniature Faubourg Saint-Germain are half a score of rich citizens, retired millers and tradespeople, in short, a miniature middle class, below whom struggle the small shopkeepers, the laboring class, and the peasants. This middle class affords here, as in the Swiss cantons and other small communities, the curious phenomenon of the dispersal of a few families native to the soil, perhaps ancient Gaulish clans, settling on a district, pervading it, and making all the inhabitants cousins. At the time of Louis XI, the period when the third estate at last took the by-names they were known by as permanent surnames, some of which presently mingled with those of the feudal class, the citizens of Nemours were all Minoret, Massin, Levrault, or Crémière. By Louis XIII’s time these four families had given rise to Massin-Crémière, Levrault-Massin, Massin-Minoret, Minoret-Minoret, Crémière-Levrault, Levrault-Minoret-Massin, Massin-Levrault, Minoret-Massin, Massin-Massin, and Crémière-Massin; all further diversified by “Junior” and “eldest son”; or by Crémière-François, Levrault-Jacques, and Jean-Minoret, enough to madden a Father Anselme, if the populace ever needed a genealogist.
The changes in this domestic kaleidoscope with four separate elements were so complicated by births and marriages, that the pedigree of the citizens of Nemours would have puzzled even the compilers of the Almanac de Gotha, notwithstanding the atomic science with which they work out the zigzags of German alliances. For a long time the Minorets held the tanneries, the Crémières were the millers, the Massins went into business, the Levraults remained farmers.
Happily for the country, these four stocks struck out rather than round the trunk, or threw out suckers by the expatriation of sons who sought a living elsewhere: there are Minorets, cutlers, at Melun, Levraults at Montargis, Massins at Orléans, and Crémières who have grown rich at Paris. Very various are the destinies of these bees that have swarmed outside the native hive. Rich Massins employ laboring Massins, just as there are German princes in the service of Austria or Prussia. In the same department may be seen a Minoret millionaire protected by a Minoret soldier with the same blood in their veins; but having only their names in common, these four shuttles had unceasingly woven a human web, of which each piece turned out a gown or a clout, the finest lawn or the coarsest lining. The same blood throbbed in their head, feet, or heart, in toiling hands, damaged lungs, or a brow big with genius. The heads of the clan faithfully clung to the little town where the ties of relationship could be relaxed or tightened, as the results of this community of names might dictate.
In every country, with a change of names, you will find the same fact; but bereft of the poetry with which feudality had invested it, and which Walter Scott has reproduced with so much talent.
Look a little higher, and study humanity in history. All the noble families of the eleventh century, now almost all extinct excepting the royal race of Capet, must have cooperated towards the birth of a Rohan, a Montmorency, a Bauffremont, a Mortemart of the present day; at last, all would coexist in the blood of the humblest man of really gentle birth. In other words, every citizen is cousin to other citizens, every noble is cousin to other nobles. As we are told in the sublime page of Biblical genealogy, in a thousand years the three families of Shem, Ham, and Japhet could people the whole earth. A family can become a nation; and, unfortunately, a nation may become one single family. To prove this we have only to apply to a family pedigree—in which the ancestors multiply backwards in geometrical progression—the sum worked out by the sage who invented the game of chess. He claimed, as his reward from the Persian king, an ear of com for the first square on the board, two for the second, and so on, doubling the number every time, and proved that the whole kingdom could not pay it. This network of the nobility entangled in the network of the middle class, this antagonism of blood—the one class protected by rigid traditions, the other by the active endurance of labor and the craft of trade instincts—brought about the Revolution of 1789. The two strains, almost united, are to be seen today face to face with collaterals bereft of their inheritance. What will they do? Our political future is big with the reply.
The family of the man who, in Louis XV’s time, was the representative Minoret, was so large, that one of the five—the very Minoret whose coming to church was making such a sensation—went to seek his fortune in Paris, and appeared in his native town only at long intervals, whither he came, no doubt, to acquire his share of the inheritance at the death of his grandparents. After suffering a great deal, as all young men must who are gifted with a strong will and desire a place in the brilliant world of Paris, this son of the Minorets made a career more splendid perhaps than he had dreamed of at the beginning; for he devoted himself to
