Those great and magnificent social necessities have been well represented; but we ought surely to renounce the noble title of historian if we are not impartial, if we do not here depict the present degeneracy of the race of nobles, although we have already done so elsewhere,--in the character of the Comte de Mortsauf (in "The Lily of the Valley"), in the "Duchesse de Langeais," and the very nobleness of the nobility in the "Marquis d'Espard." How then could it be that the race of heroes and valiant men belonging to the proud house of Herouville, who gave the famous marshal to the nation, cardinals to the church, great leaders to the Valois, knights to Louis XIV., was reduced to a little fragile being smaller than Butscha?
That is a question which we ask ourselves in more than one salon in Paris when we hear the greatest names of France announced, and see the entrance of a thin, pinched, undersized young man, scarcely possessing the breath of life, or a premature old one, or some whimsical creature in whom an observer can with great difficulty trace the signs of a past grandeur.

The dissipations of the reign of Louis XV., the orgies of that fatal and egotistic period, have produced an effete generation, in which manners alone survive the nobler vanished qualities,--forms, which are the sole heritage our nobles have preserved.

The abandonment in which Louis XVI.

was allowed to perish may thus be explained, with some slight reservations, as a wretched result of the reign of Madame de Pompadour.
The grand equerry, a fair young man with blue eyes and a pallid face, was not without a certain dignity of thought; but his thin, undersized figure, and the follies of his aunt who had taken him to the Vilquins and elsewhere to pay his court, rendered him extremely diffident.

The house of Herouville had already been threatened with extinction by the deed of a deformed being (see the "Enfant Maudit" in "Philosophical Studies").