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Such at that time was the power of prejudice! “The Cup-Bearer’s son announced that he was going to reform us and introduce order and civilisation; he proclaimed to us that some eloquent Frenchmen had made a discovery, that all men are equal—though this was written long ago in Holy Writ and every parish priest prates of it from the pulpit.
“Meanwhile the neighbourhood was already whispering; gossips would say to me: ‘Ah, Pan Soplica, your suit is vain; the threshold of a dignitary is too high for the feet of Jacek the Cup-Bearer’s son.’ I laughed, pretending that I mocked at magnates and their daughters, and that I cared nothing for aristocrats; that if I often visited them, I did it out of mere friendship, and that I would never marry outside my own station in life.
Everybody ran after him as after a buzzard;18 they envied the house before the threshold of which the Cup-Bearer’s son halted his two-wheeled chaise, which passed by the French name of cabriolet.
“I remember,—though then I was but a little child,—when the Cup-Bearer’s son came to visit my father in the district of Oszmiana, in a French carriage; he was the first man in Lithuania who wore French clothes.
The doctrine was ancient, the question was of its application. But at that time such general blindness prevailed that they did not believe the oldest things in the world if they did not read of them in a French newspaper. The Cup-Bearer’s son, despite equality, had taken the title of marquis.
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