In whatever part of France
you may be, you will find the same thing under changed names, but
without the poetic charm which feudalism gave to it, and which Walter
Scott's genius reproduced so faithfully. Let us look a little higher
and examine humanity as it appears in history. All the noble families
of the eleventh century, most of them (except the royal race of Capet)
extinct to-day, will be found to have contributed to the birth of the
Rohans, Montmorencys, Beauffremonts, and Mortemarts of our time,--in
fact they will all be found in the blood of the last gentleman who is
indeed a gentleman. In other words, every bourgeois is cousin to a
bourgeois, and every noble is cousin to a noble. A splendid page of
biblical genealogy shows that in one thousand years three families,
Shem, Ham, and Japhet, peopled the globe. One family may become a
nation; unfortunately, a nation may become one family. To prove this
we need only search back through our ancestors and see their
accumulation, which time increases into a retrograde geometric
progression, which multiplies of itself; reminding us of the
calculation of the wise man who, being told to choose a reward from
the king of Persia for inventing chess, asked for one ear of wheat for
the first move on the board, the reward to be doubled for each
succeeding move; when it was found that the kingdom was not large
enough to pay it.
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