High-born Angouleme shrieked against the introduction of a Giaour into the sanctuary, for Mme. de Bargeton’s salon was a kind of holy of holies in a society that kept itself unspotted from the world.  The only outsider intimate there was the bishop; the prefect was admitted twice or thrice in a year, the receiver-general was never received at all; Mme. de Bargeton would go to concerts and “at homes” at his house, but she never accepted invitations to dinner.  And now, she who had declined to open her doors to the receiver-general, welcomed a mere controller of excise!  Here was a novel order of precedence for snubbed authority; such a thing it had never entered their minds to conceive.

Those who by dint of mental effort can understand a kind of pettiness which, for that matter, can be found on any and every social level, will realize the awe with which the bourgeoisie of Angouleme regarded the Hotel de Bargeton.  The inhabitant of L’Houmeau beheld the grandeur of that miniature Louvre, the glory of the Angoumoisin Hotel de Rambouillet, shining at a solar distance; and yet, within it there was gathered together all the direst intellectual poverty, all the decayed gentility from twenty leagues round about.

Political opinion expanded itself in wordy commonplaces vociferated with emphasis; the Quotidienne was comparatively Laodicean in its loyalty, and Louis XVIII. a Jacobin.  The women, for the most part, were awkward, silly, insipid, and ill dressed; there was always something amiss that spoiled the whole; nothing in them was complete, toilette or talk, flesh or spirit.  But for his designs on Mme. de Bargeton, Chatelet could not have endured the society.  And yet the manners and spirit of the noble in his ruined manor-house, the knowledge of the traditions of good breeding,—­these things covered a multitude of deficiencies.  Nobility of feeling was far more real here than in the lofty world of Paris.  You might compare these country Royalists, if the metaphor may be allowed, to old-fashioned silver plate, antiquated and tarnished, but weighty; their attachment to the House of Bourbon as the House of Bourbon did them honor.  The very fixity of their political opinions was a sort of faithfulness.  The distance that they set between themselves and the bourgeoisie, their very exclusiveness, gave them a certain elevation, and enhanced their value.  Each noble represented a certain price for the townsmen, as Bambara Negroes, we are told, attach a money value to cowrie shells.

Some of the women, flattered by M. du Chatelet, discerned in him the superior qualities lacking in the men of their own sect, and the insurrection of self-love was pacified.  These ladies all hoped to succeed to the Imperial Highness.  Purists were of the opinion that you might see the intruder in Mme. de Bargeton’s house, but not elsewhere.  Du Chatelet was fain to put up with a good deal of insolence, but he held his ground by cultivating the