The last
of these great gentlemen in France was the Prince de Talleyrand.--This
duke leaves four children, two of them girls. Granting that he has
great luck in marrying them all well, each of these descendants will
have but sixty or eighty thousand francs a year now; each is the
father or mother of children, and consequently obliged to live with
the strictest economy in a flat on the ground floor or first floor of
a large house. Who knows if they may not even be hunting a fortune?
Henceforth the eldest son's wife, a duchess in name only, has no
carriage, no people, no opera-box, no time to herself. She has not her
own rooms in the family mansion, nor her fortune, nor her pretty toys;
she is buried in trade; she buys socks for her dear little children,
nurses them herself, and keeps an eye on her girls, whom she no longer
sends to school at a convent. Thus your noblest dames have been turned
into worthy brood-hens."
"Alas! it is true," said Joseph Bridau. "In our day we cannot show
those beautiful flowers of womanhood which graced the golden ages of
the French Monarchy. The great lady's fan is broken.
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