Their drawing-rooms are frequented by a few priests only.

They spend the summer in the chateaux which they possess in the environs; in the winter, they sit round their firesides.

They are, as it were, dead people weary of life.

And thus the gloomy silence of a cemetery hangs over their quarter of the town.

The doors and windows are carefully barricaded; one would think their mansions were so many convents shut off from all the tumult of the world.