And
indeed, for people accustomed to a stately life, can there be
more unseemly surroundings than the bustle, the mud, the street
cries, the bad smells, and narrow thoroughfares of a populous
quarter? The very habits of life in a mercantile or
manufacturing district are completely at variance with the lives
of nobles. The shopkeeper and artisan are just going to bed when
the great world is thinking of dinner; and the noisy stir of life
begins among the former when the latter have gone to rest. Their
day's calculations never coincide; the one class represents the
expenditure, the other the receipts. Consequently their manners
and customs are diametrically opposed.
Nothing contemptuous is intended by this statement. An
aristocracy is in a manner the intellect of the social system, as
the middle classes and the proletariat may be said to be its
organizing and working power. It naturally follows that these
forces are differently situated; and of their antagonism there is
bred a seeming antipathy produced by the performance of different
functions, all of them, however, existing for one common end.
Such social dissonances are so inevitably the outcome of any
charter of the constitution, that however much a Liberal may be
disposed to complain of them, as of treason against those sublime
ideas with which the ambitious plebeian is apt to cover his
designs, he would none the less think it a preposterous notion
that M. le Prince de Montmorency, for instance, should continue
to live in the Rue Saint-Martin at the corner of the street which
bears that nobleman's name; or that M.
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