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Updated: July 16, 2025
Then came M. de Montrond, and he again was premier gentilhomme de France while he lived and le dernier des gentilhommes Français when he died. M. de Montrond belonged to two generations, two strongly-contrasted epochs. At his first ball at court he wore a powdered cadogan and danced in talons rouges: at his last he lolled with bald head against a doorway, in varnished boots and starched cravat.
Then, as he hastened along with riding-whip in hand and jingling spurs upon his heels, some old bourgeois sipping his demi-tasse at the door of a café would exclaim, "There goes the Count de Cambis, le dernier gentilhomme de France!"
Of him, an accomplished foreigner, whose knowledge of the courts was more perfect than that of the English language, said, 'He seems to me one grand gentilhomme in disguise." Mr. Hay adds that Lincoln's simplicity of manner "was marked in his total lack of consideration of what was due his exalted station.
"And now, mon cher, what day will you dine with me to meet Raoul and Enguerrand, and some others whom you would like to know?" "Thanks, and hearty ones, but we move now in different spheres, and I shall not trespass on yours. Je suis trop bourgeois to incur the ridicule of le bourgeois gentilhomme." "Frederic, how dare you speak thus? My dear fellow, my friends shall honour you as I do."
All this, however, had been often done before his time; and I cannot see how, in this department, he can stand alone, as a creative and altogether original artist: for example, is Plautus' braggadocio soldier less meritorious in grotesque characterization than the Bourgeois Gentilhomme?
Talking well is given so little serious consideration that the average person, when he probes even slightly into the art, is as surprized as was Molière's bourgeois gentilhomme upon discovering that he had spoken prose for forty years. Plato says: "Whosoever seeketh must know that which he seeketh for in a general notion, else how shall he know it when he hath found it?"
Yet, now examining his neighbour with more attentive eye, he wondered at his stupidity in not having recognized at once the ci-devant gentilhomme and beau garcon. It happens frequently that our imagination plays us this trick; we form to ourselves an idea of some one eminent for good or for evil, a poet, a statesman, a general, a murderer, a swindler, a thief.
Yet, as thus presented, Twelfth Night lingers in my mind with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme as presented at the Comedie Francaise, so presented that, by force of tradition wrought with faultless art, a play becomes an embodied symphony, a visible manifestation of gracious music. March 13.
The Russian Dvoryanin easily learned the language and assumed the manners of the French gentilhomme, and succeeded in changing his physical and intellectual exterior; but all those deeper and more delicate parts of human nature which are formed by the accumulated experience of past generations could not be so easily and rapidly changed.
"In God's name, is this thy servant?" asked his Highness. "In good faith am I," said Essper; "his valet, his cook, and his secretary, all in one; and also his Jagd Junker, or Gentilhomme de la Chasse, as a puppy with a bugle horn told me this morning."
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