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The listless languor of these girls did not at least obviously claim Transatlantic cousinship; the gaiety of a Japanese street seemed so remote as to belong to a planet of another system; and the seriousness seemed reflected in the faces of the great mediocracy sauntering along inside the railings or solemnly seated in the chairs with their faces turned carriagewards.
Montcornet, who was wholly without suspicion of the strength and influence of the Mediocracy in his happy valley, did not even mention Gaubertin, whose hand kept these embers of opposition always alive, though smouldering. After breakfast the attorney-general took Montcornet by the arm and led him to the Prefect's study.
This clever ecclesiastic, devoted to the leading society, kind and obliging to the second, apostolic to the poor and unfortunate, made himself beloved by the whole town. He was cousin of the miller and cousin of the Sarcuses, and belonged therefore to the neighborhood and to its mediocracy.
Between those luxuriating on the grass, men lying in their shirt-sleeves, with heads a-resting in the laps of tired-faced women, whose children played or cried noisily around, and those who passed in the procession of carriages, was the intervening line of people from which all sorts of specimens could be taken of the great mediocracy of England those who could no more afford a carriage than they could afford to lie on the grass.
It was a part of the ingrained rebellion in him, that he revolted against the moneyed mediocracy of this country, a position in which he deserves much sympathy, and perhaps this underlies his want of deep literary identification with the national character in general.
How could such facts be understood unless we had previously taken that rapid glance at the Mediocracy. Fourchon was right; the middle classes now held the position of the former lords. The small land-owners, of whom Courtecuisse is a type, were tenants in mortmain of a Tiberius in the valley of the Avonne, just as, in Paris, traders without money are the peasantry of the banking system.
What thousands of friendless and lonely people there must be in this great Dingy City! The class that lies on the grass is more sociable; they are free from a thousand tyrannies that oppress the mediocracy. The face of a woman dressed in black, seated between two children, seemed familiar; not until she bowed did I recognise her as the wife of an old friend who had been killed in Ladysmith.
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