The Meeker Herald

No Caste of Nobility in France.

By Max Nordau.

In France the caste of all the nobility has ceased to exist. The revolution beheaded parchments and letters patent, destroyed them, banished them, tore in pieces and burned their castles, appropriated their estates and thoroughly abolished them.

The emigrants who returned a quarter of a century after the deluge were mere memories--ghosts, spooks, apparitions; they had lost their reality. Napoleon sought to re-establish a nobility. He could create titles, but not an aristocracy. Even the titles have become worthless. A flavor of the adventurer clings to those assuming titles, for every one knows most of them are usurped. That they are to be found in the Blue Books and registers proves nothing, for clever swindlers assume the titles of extinct families, the genuine owners being no longer able to challenge their right. In this manner they possess themselves of coats-of-arms, genealogical trees and family history, entirely genuine except that the honors do not belong to those that bear them.

The very few families who have inherited a legal title of nobility in regular descent from father to son no longer form the first ranks of French society. In matters of state they have nothing to say. In diplomacy and in the army they are scarcely to be found, and in the leading professions not at all. They have no power and therefore no influence.

They are not the richest and therefore are not the most elegant. The greatest millionaires do not think of cultivating them. Rather they expect to be cultivated by them. They would smile if any should esteem them honored by becoming related in marriage with people who bear crests or coats-of-arms upon their visiting cards or carriages. They do not regard such thing as an honor.