For him, his noble birth was a stepping-stone which raised him above other men.He felt that the idol of Noblesse, before which they burned incense at home, was hollow; he had come to be one of the commonest as well as one of the worst types from a social point of view--a consistent egoist.The aristocratic cult of the EGO simply taught him to follow his own fancies; he had been idolized by those who had the care of him in childhood, and adored by the companions who shared in his boyish escapades, and so he had formed a habit of looking and judging everything as it affected his own pleasure; he took it as a matter of course when good souls saved him from the consequences of his follies, a piece of mistaken kindness which could only lead to his ruin.Victurnien's early training, noble and pious though it was, had isolated him too much.He was out of the current of the life of the time, for the life of a provincial town is certainly not in the main current of the age; Victurnien's true destiny lifted him above it.He had learned to think of an action, not as it affected others, nor relatively, but absolutely from his own point of view.Like despots, he made the law to suit the circumstance, a system which works in the lives of prodigal sons the same confusion which fancy brings into art.
Victurnien was quick-sighted, he saw clearly and without illusion, but he acted on impulse, and unwisely.An indefinable flaw of character, often seen in young men, but impossible to explain, led him to will one thing and do another.In spite of an active mind, which showed itself in unexpected ways, the senses had but to assert themselves, and the darkened brain seemed to exist no longer.He might have astonished wise men; he was capable of setting fools agape.His desires, like a sudden squall of bad weather, overclouded all the clear and lucid spaces of his brain in a moment; and then, after the dissipations which he could not resist, he sank, utterly exhausted in body, heart, and mind, into a collapsed condition bordering upon imbecility.Such a character will drag a man down into the mire if he is left to himself, or bring him to the highest heights of political power if he has some stern friend to keep him in hand.Neither Chesnel, nor the lad's father, nor Aunt Armande had fathomed the depths of a nature so nearly akin on many sides to the poetic temperament, yet smitten with a terrible weakness at its core.
By the time the old town lay several miles away, Victurnien felt not the slightest regret; he thought no more about the father, who had loved ten generations in his son, nor of the aunt, and her almost insane devotion.He was looking forward to Paris with vehement ill-starred longings; in thought he had lived in that fairyland, it had been the background of his brightest dreams.He imagined that he would be first in Paris, as he had been in the town and the department where his father's name was potent; but it was vanity, not pride, that filled his soul, and in his dreams his pleasures were to be magnified by all the greatness of Paris.The distance was soon crossed.The traveling coach, like his own thoughts, left the narrow horizon of the province for the vast world of the great city, without a break in the journey.He stayed in the Rue de Richelieu, in a handsome hotel close to the boulevard, and hastened to take possession of Paris as a famished horse rushes into a meadow.
He was not long in finding out the difference between country and town, and was rather surprised than abashed by the change.His mental quickness soon discovered how small an entity he was in the midst of this all-comprehending Babylon; how insane it would be to attempt to stem the torrent of new ideas and new ways.A single incident was enough.He delivered his father's letter of introduction to the Duc de Lenoncourt, a noble who stood high in favor with the King.He saw the duke in his splendid mansion, among surroundings befitting his rank.
Next day he met him again.This time the Peer of France was lounging on foot along the boulevard, just like any ordinary mortal, with an umbrella in his hand; he did not even wear the Blue Ribbon, without which no knight of the order could have appeared in public in other times.And, duke and peer and first gentleman of the bedchamber though he was, M.de Lenoncourt, in spite of his high courtesy, could not repress a smile as he read his relative's letter; and that smile told Victurnien that the Collection of Antiquities and the Tuileries were separated by more than sixty leagues of road; the distance of several centuries lay between them.
The names of the families grouped about the throne are quite different in each successive reign, and the characters change with the names.It would seem that, in the sphere of court, the same thing happens over and over again in each generation; but each time there is a quite different set of personages.If history did not prove that this is so, it would seem incredible.The prominent men at the court of Louis XVIII., for instance, had scarcely any connection with the Rivieres, Blacas, d'Avarays, Vitrolles, d'Autichamps, Pasquiers, Larochejaqueleins, Decazes, Dambrays, Laines, de Villeles, La Bourdonnayes, and others who shone at the court of Louis XV.Compare the courtiers of Henri IV.with those of Louis XIV.; you will hardly find five great families of the former time still in existence.The nephew of the great Richelieu was a very insignificant person at the court of Louis XIV.; while His Majesty's favorite, Villeroi, was the grandson of a secretary ennobled by Charles IX.And so it befell that the d'Esgrignons, all but princes under the Valois, and all-powerful in the time of Henri IV., had no fortune whatever at the court of Louis XVIII., which gave them not so much as a thought.At this day there are names as famous as those of royal houses--the Foix-Graillys, for instance, or the d'Herouvilles--left to obscurity tantamount to extinction for want of money, the one power of the time.