not so imposing.  In these portraits of the fifteenth century beards had disappeared with the sword.  In those wearing caps and velvet toques, silk robes and heavy gold chains supporting a badge of the same metal, one recognized lords in full and tranquil possession of the fiefs won by their fathers, landowners who had degenerated a little and preferred mountain life in a manor to the chances of a more hazardous existence.  These pacific gentlemen were, for the most part, painted with the left hand gloved and resting upon the hip; the right one was bare, a sort of token of disarmament which one might take for a painter’s epigram.  Some of them had allowed their favorite dogs to share the honors of the picture.  All in this group indicated that this branch of the family had many points of resemblance with the more illustrious faces.  It was the period of idle kings.

A half dozen solemn personages with gold-braided hats and long red robes bordered with ermine, and wearing starched ruffles, occupied one corner of the parlor near the windows.  These worthy advisers of the Dukes of Lorraine explained the way in which the masters of the chateau had awakened from the torpor in which they had been plunged for several generations, in order to participate in the affairs of their country and enter a more active sphere.

Here the portraits assumed the proportions of history.  Did not this branch, descended from warlike stock, seem like a fragment taken from the European annals?  Was it not a symbolical image of the progress of civilization, of regular legislation struggling against barbaric customs?  Thanks to these respectable counsellors and judges, one might reverse the motto:  ‘Non solum toga’, in favor of their race.  But it did not seem as if these bearded ancestors looked with much gratitude upon this parliamentary flower added to their feudal crest.  They appeared to look down from the height of their worm-eaten frames upon their enrobed descendants with that disdainful smile with which the peers of France used to greet men of law the first time they were called to sit by their side, after being for so long a time at their feet.

In the space between the windows and upon the remaining woodwork was a crowd of military men, with here and there an Abbe with cross and mitre, a Commander of Malta, and a solemn Canon, sterile branches of this genealogical tree.  Several among the military ones wore sashes and plumes of the colors of Lorraine; others, even before the union of this province to France, had served the latter country; there were lieutenant-colonels of infantry and cavalry; some dressed in blue coats lined with buff serge and little round patches of black plush, which served as the uniform for the dragoons of the Lorraine legion.

Last of all was a young man with an agreeable face, who smiled superciliously from under a vast wig of powdered hair; a rose was in the buttonhole of his green cloth pelisse with orange facings, a red sabrecache hung against his boots a little lower than the hilt of his sabre.  The costume represented a sprightly officer of the Royal Nassau hussars.  The portrait was hung on the left of the entrance door and only separated by it from his great-grandfather of 1247, whom he might have assisted, had these venerable portraits taken some night a fancy to descend from their frames to execute a dance such as Hoffmann dreamed.