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Updated: June 13, 2025
And I think noblesse oblige ought to teach us another lesson in this matter of work. So many often say, or feel, "It's not my duty to do this or that; why should I? it's just as much her business, why shouldn't she do the dirty work?" The true lady says, "Somebody must do the dirty work, and why not I as well as another?"
In 1814 the noblesse of France were called upon to assert their superiority over the most aristocratic bourgeoisie in the most feminine of all countries, to take the lead in the most highly educated epoch the world had yet seen. And this was even more notably the case in 1820.
The governor applied to the petty nobles who preponderated in their order; ignorant and poor as they were, they allowed themselves to be bought, their votes carried the day, and the subsidies were at last voted, notwithstanding the opposition on the part of the most weighty of the noblesse; a hundred of them persistently staid away.
I have seen our whole noblesse at one of these festins, kept on the highway in summer, mingled with an immense crowd of peasants, mules, and asses, covered with dust, and sweating at every pore with the excessive heat of the weather.
"It is simple," said he aloud. "Read my Repertory of Genealogy, which is to be had for fifty livres of the bookseller Giraud, No. 79, Palais Royal, and which is the infallible standard upon the subject, and is read by the whole of the Court, the noblesse, the magistrature, and in general the French nation."
M. de Guersaint, who belonged to the petty Norman /noblesse/, was a combination of architect and inventor; and he was at that time busy with a scheme of model dwellings for the poor, to which churches and schools were to be attached; an affair of considerable magnitude, planned none too well, however, and in which, with his customary impetuosity, the lack of foresight of an imperfect artist, he was risking the three hundred thousand francs that he possessed.
Winona also he affected to believe an ornament of the old noblesse, a creature of maddening beauty, but without heart, so that despairing suitors slew themselves for her.
These gentlemen, as I have already mentioned, pointed out that the estates of the nobles were rapidly passing into the hands of the peasantry, and that if this process were allowed to continue the hereditary Noblesse, which had always been the civilising element in the rural population, and the surest support of the throne, would drift into the towns and there sink into poverty or amalgamate with the commercial plutocracy, and help to form a tiers etat which would be hostile to the Autocratic Power.
I saw that the noblesse had become tyrants; the peasants had become slaves, such slaves, savage from despair, even when they were most gay, most fearfully gay, from constitution.
The law is my vocation in an especial, and, I may say, in an hereditary way, my vocation; for although I have not the honour to belong to any of the great families who form in Scotland, as in France, the noblesse of the robe, and with us, at least, carry their heads as high, or rather higher, than the noblesse of the sword, for the former consist more frequently of the 'first-born of Egypt, yet my grandfather, who, I dare say, was a most excellent person, had the honour to sign a bitter protest against the Union, in the respectable character of town-clerk to the ancient Borough of Birlthegroat; and there is some reason shall I say to hope, or to suspect? that he may have been a natural son of a first cousin of the then Fairford of that Ilk, who had been long numbered among the minor barons.
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