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They're all wool and a yard wide, but you needn't think my handmade nobility is going to efface itself just because the Montmorencies and the Rohans don't ask it out to dine. My dukes and duchesses will have something to say, I fancy, and if my old laundress, the Duchess of Dantzig, doesn't take the starch out of the old regime I'll be mightily mistaken." And this was the exact situation.
It was a château of the Montmorencies, that had passed into the hands of the Condé family by marriage; and the courtly old domestic, who showed me the curiosities, pointed out to me the stone croix in the windows, which has caused the latter to be called croisées, as a pious usage of the crusaders.
In this semi-barbaric age Héloïse was born, about the year 1101. Nobody knew who was her father, although it was surmised that he belonged to the illustrious family of the Montmorencies, which traced an unbroken lineage to Pharimond, before the time of Clovis. She lived with her uncle Fulbert, an ignorant, worldly-wise old canon of the Cathedral Church of Notre Dame in Paris.
As for Monsieur le Comte de la Grinche, he was not bound for names; and, having the whole peerage to choose from, brought a host of Montmorencies, Crequis, De la Tours, and Guises at his back. His homme d'affaires brought his papers in a sack, and displayed the plans of his estates, and the titles of his glorious ancestry.
Further, M. de Balzac will prove to you that the Bourbons and the Montmorencies and other French gentlemen must lower their armorial bearings before him, who is a Gaul, and more a Gaul of an old family! M. de Balzac is therefore more noble than the King!"
The cherries, ranged one by one, resembled the short lips of smiling Chinese girls; the Montmorencies suggested the dumpy mouths of buxom women; the English ones were longer and graver-looking; the common black ones seemed as though they had been bruised and crushed by kisses; while the white-hearts, with their patches of rose and white, appeared to smile with mingled merriment and vexation.
Riccabocca gave truce to the shrewd but homely wisdom of his proverbs, perhaps he remembered that Lord Chesterfield denounces proverbs as vulgar; and gaunt though his figure, and far from elegant though his dressing-robe, there was that about him which spoke undeniably of the grand seigneur, of one to whom a Marquis de Dangeau would have offered a fauteuil by the side of the Rohans and Montmorencies.
Practically it may be said that there were two classes of nobles the old historic houses, as they were sometimes called, such as the Grammonts or Montmorencies, which were not numerous, and many of which had greatly decayed in wealth and influence; and an inferior class whose nobility was derived from their possession of office under the crown in any part of the kingdom.
"There are seventeen Huguenots in the palace besides their Highnesses," Nancay replied, in the same cautious tone. "Not counting two or three who are neither the one thing nor the other. In addition, there are the two Montmorencies; but they are to go safe for fear of their brother, who is not in the trap. He is too like his father, the old Bench-burner, to be lightly wronged!
Were the comrades of Murat and Bernadotte to sit down in contentment as peers of France, among the Montmorencies and the Rohans, who considered them at the best as low-born intruders, and scorned, in private society, to acknowledge them as members of their order?
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