Chapter 23 - Page 2

day. The digression is history.

In 1838, Fabien du Ronceret, son of a chief-justice of the Royal court
at Caen (who had lately died), left his native town of Alencon,
resigning his judgeship (a position in which his father had compelled
him, he said, to waste his time), and came to Paris, with the
intention of making a noise there,--a Norman idea, difficult to
realize, for he could scarcely scrape together eight thousand francs a
year; his mother still being alive and possessing a life-interest in a
valuable estate in Alencon. This young man had already, during
previous visits to Paris, tried his rope, like an acrobat, and had
recognized the great vice of the social replastering of 1830. He meant
to turn it to his own profit, following the example of the longest
heads of the bourgeoisie. This requires a rapid glance on one of the
effects of the new order of things.

Modern equality, unduly developed in our day, has necessarily
developed in private life, on a line parallel with political life, the
three great divisions of the social /I;/ namely, pride, conceit, and
vanity. Fools wish to pass for wits; wits want to be thought men of
talent; men of talent wish to be treated as men of genius; as for men
of genius, they are more reasonable; they consent to be only demigods.
This tendency of the public mind of these days, which, in the Chamber,
makes the manufacturer jealous of the statesman, and the administrator
jealous of the writer, leads fools to disparage wits, wits to
disparage men of talent, men of talent to disparage those who outstrip
them by an inch or two, and the demigods to threaten institutions, the
throne, or whatever does not adore them unconditionally. So soon as a
nation has, in a very unstatesmanlike spirit, pulled down all
recognized social superiorities, she opens the sluice through which
rushes a torrent of secondary ambitions, the meanest of which resolves
to lead. She had, so democrats declare, an evil in her aristocracy;
but a defined and circumscribed evil; she exchanges it for a dozen
armed and contending aristocracies--the worst of all situations. By
proclaiming the equality of all, she has promulgated a declaration of
the rights of Envy. We inherit to-day the saturnalias of the
Revolution transferred to the domain, apparently peaceful, of the
mind, of industry, of politics; it now seems that reputations won by
toil, by services rendered, by talent, are privileges granted at the
expense of the masses. Agrarian law will spread to the field of glory.
Never, in any age, have men demanded the affixing of their names on
the nation's posters for reasons more puerile. Distinction is sought
at any price, by ridicule, by an affectation of interest in the
cause of Poland, in