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In this council the "chief matron" of the family, a noble dame whose position and right were well defined, had the deciding voice. Des que l'arbre est tombe, il fault, disent ils, le relever. Elle n'a pas toujours egard au droit d'ainesse, et d'ordinaire, elle prend celui qui paroit le plus propre a soutenir ce rang par ses bonnes qualites."
Tom, of course, took as droit d'ainesse, before the division, the family clock which still bore signs of strife, and had refused to go since that night when Gard's buffet had sent him headlong into it; and the farm-ladders and the pilotins the stone props on which the haystacks were built; and in addition to his own full share, as between himself and Nance and Bernel, he exacted from them to the uttermost farthing the extra seventh part of the value of all they received an Island right, but honoured more in the breach than in the observance, and one which, in its exercise, tended to label the exerciser as unduly mean and grasping.
He, haplessly for himself, thought that he had a grievance. The rights of primogeniture droits d'ainesse were not respected in the family of the Baldwins as they should have been, had prudence and common sense had their way. No sacred or divine right is conferred by the fact of a man's being the first-born son.
From 1821 to 1824 he wrote thirty-one volumes, and it is an extraordinary proof of his versatility, that in 1824, in the midst of the production of these romantic novels, he published a pamphlet entitled "Du Droit d'Ainesse" which argues with singular force, logic, and erudition against the revolutionary and Napoleonic theories on the division of property; and a small volume entitled "Histoire impartiale des Jesuites," which is an impassioned defence of religion and the monarchy.
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