Prefects, receivers-general, and various administrations that have come and gone during the last forty years, have tried to tame the ancient families perched aloft like wary ravens on their crag; the said families were always willing to accept invitations to dinners and dances; but as to admitting the strangers to their own houses, they were inexorable. Ready to scoff and disparage, jealous and niggardly, marrying only among themselves, the families formed a serried phalanx to keep out intruders. Of modern luxury they had no notion; and as for sending a boy to Paris, it was sending him, they thought, to certain ruin. Such sagacity will give a sufficient idea of the old-world manners and customs of this society, suffering from thickheaded Royalism, infected with bigotry rather than zeal, all stagnating together, motionless as their town founded upon a rock. Yet Angoulême enjoyed a great reputation in the provinces round about for its educational advantages, and neighboring towns sent their daughters to its boarding schools and convents.
It is easy to imagine the influence of the class sentiment which held Angoulême aloof from L’Houmeau. The merchant classes are rich, the noblesse are usually poor. Each side takes its revenge in scorn of the other. The tradespeople in Angoulême espouse the quarrel. “He is a man of L’Houmeau!” a shopkeeper of the upper town will tell you, speaking of a merchant in the lower suburb, throwing an accent into the speech which no words can describe. When the Restoration defined the position of the French noblesse, holding out hopes to them which could only be realized by a complete and general topsy-turvydom, the distance between Angoulême and L’Houmeau, already more strongly marked than the distance between the hill and plain, was widened yet further. The better families, all devoted as one man to the Government, grew more exclusive here than in any other part of France. “The man of L’Houmeau” became little better than a pariah. Hence the deep, smothered hatred which broke out everywhere with such ugly unanimity in the insurrection of 1830 and destroyed the elements of a durable social system in France. As the overweening haughtiness of the Court nobles detached the provincial noblesse from the throne, so did these last alienate the bourgeoisie from the royal cause by behavior that galled their vanity in every possible way.
So “a man of L’Houmeau,” a druggist’s son, in Mme. de Bargeton’s house was nothing less than a little revolution. Who was responsible for it? Lamartine and Victor Hugo, Casimir Delavigne and Canalis, Béranger and Chateaubriand. Villemain and M. Aignan, Sourmet and Tissot, Étienne and Davrigny, Benjamin Constant and Lamennais, Cousin and Michaud—all the old and young illustrious names in literature in short, Liberals and Royalists, alike must divide the blame among them. Mme. de Bargeton loved art and letters, eccentric taste on her part, a craze deeply deplored in Angoulême. In justice to the lady, it is necessary to give a sketch of the previous history of a woman born to shine, and left by unlucky circumstances in the shade, a woman whose influence decided Lucien’s career.
M. de Bargeton was the great-grandson of an alderman of Bordeaux named Mirault, ennobled under Louis XIII for long tenure of office. His son, bearing the name of Mirault de Bargeton, became an officer in the household troops of Louis XIV, and married so great a fortune that in the reign of Louis XV his son dropped the Mirault and was called simply M. de Bargeton. This M. de Bargeton, the alderman’s grandson, lived up to his quality so strenuously that he ran through the family property and checked the course of its fortunes. Two of his brothers indeed, great-uncles of the present Bargeton, went into business again, for which reason you will find the name of Mirault among Bordeaux merchants at this day. The lands of Bargeton, in Angoumois in the barony of Rochefoucauld, being entailed, and the house in Angoulême, called the Hôtel Bargeton, likewise, the grandson of M. de Bargeton the Waster came in for these hereditaments; though the year 1789 deprived him of all seignorial rights save to the rents paid by his tenants, which amounted to some ten thousand francs per annum. If his grandsire had but walked in the ways of his illustrious progenitors, Bargeton I and Bargeton II, Bargeton V (who may be dubbed Bargeton the Mute by way of distinction) should by rights have been born to the title of Marquis of Bargeton; he would have been connected with some great family or other, and in due time he would have been a duke and a peer of France, like many another; whereas, in 1805, he thought himself uncommonly lucky when he married Mlle. Marie-Louise-Anaïs de Nègrepelisse, the daughter of a noble long relegated to the obscurity of his manor-house, scion though he was of the younger branch of one of the oldest families in the south of France. There had been a Nègrepelisse among the hostages of St. Louis. The head of the elder branch, however, had borne the illustrious name of d’Espard since the reign of Henri Quatre, when the Nègrepelisse of that day married an heiress of the d’Espard family. As for M. de Nègrepelisse, the younger son of a younger son, he lived upon his wife’s property, a small estate in the neighborhood of Barbezieux, farming the land to admiration, selling his corn in the market himself, and distilling his own brandy, laughing at those who ridiculed him, so long as he could pile up silver crowns, and now and again round out his estate with another bit of land.
Circumstances unusual enough in out-of-the-way places in
