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Updated: June 13, 2025
Without an ounce of the soldier in him, he acted on instinct like most Englishmen; not troubling to analyse motives; simply in the spirit of Noblesse oblige; or, in the more casual modern equivalent 'one just does. Roy poet and dreamer became electrically alive to his double heritage of the soldier spirit.
That was really better; it was like marrying a bird or a monkey; one didn't have to think about her family at all. Our women have always done well; they have never even gone into the petite noblesse. There is, I believe, not a case on record of a misalliance among the women."
"See, there is Monsieur le Duc d'Orléans himself leading the noblesse," and she courtesied low, as did the rest of the company, when he looked toward the balcony and bowed.
All that I have now told you can be summed up in two words, two old-fashioned words, "Noblesse oblige." Now apply these precepts to the management of life. You will hear many persons say that strategy is the chief element of success; that the best way to press through the crowd is to set some men against other men and so take their places.
Sir, I saw the priest rack and grind, and the seigneur exact and pillage, and the tax-gatherer squeeze out the little the other oppressors had left; anger, discontent, wretchedness, famine, a terrible separation between one order of people and another; an incredible indifference to the miseries their despotism caused on the part of the aristocracy; a sullen and vindictive hatred for the perpetration of those miseries on the part of the people; all places sold even all honours priced at the court, which was become a public market, a province of peasants, of living men bartered for a few livres, and literally passed from one hand to another, to be squeezed and drained anew by each new possessor: in a word, Sir, an abandoned court; an unredeemed noblesse, unredeemed, Sir, by a single benefit which, in other countries, even the most feudal, the vassal obtains from the master; a peasantry famished; a nation loaded with debt which it sought to pay by tears, these are what I saw, these are the consequences of that heartless and miserable vanity from which arose wars neither useful nor honourable, these are the real components of that triumph, as you term it, which you wonder that I regret."
These men, who formed the Noblesse of the time, were to a certain extent under the authority of the Prince, but they were by no means mere obedient, silent executors of his will. The Boyars might refuse to take part in his military expeditions, and the "free-lances" might leave his service and seek employment elsewhere.
What a girl, well-born and well-dressed, could be doing at such an hour in such a neighborhood aroused his curiosity; but it was rather with a feeling of noblesse oblige, and a hope of being of use to one of his own people, that he crossed to the opposite side of the street and followed her.
Here a Protestant attested his belief; there a Leaguer cursed Henry IV.; elsewhere some bourgeois has carved the insignia of his noblesse de cloches, symbols of his long-forgotten magisterial glory. The whole history of France is there.
But, in France, it is different: the inferior noblesse are stiff, ceremonious, and ostentatious; while the higher ranks were always polite to strangers, and affable to their dependents.
If any of the noblesse, men or women, calling upon Nais, found Lucien in the room, they met him with the overwhelming graciousness that well-bred people use towards their inferiors. Lucien thought them very kind for a time, and later found out the real reason for their specious amiability.
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