Book the Second - the Golden Thread
7. VII. Monseigneur in Town
(continued)
Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept
into his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both
classes of affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General.
As to finances public, because Monseigneur could not make anything
at all of them, and must consequently let them out to somebody who
could; as to finances private, because Farmer-Generals were rich, and
Monseigneur, after generations of great luxury and expense, was
growing poor. Hence Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent,
while there was yet time to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest
garment she could wear, and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very
rich Farmer-General, poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying
an appropriate cane with a golden apple on the top of it, was now
among the company in the outer rooms, much prostrated before by
mankind--always excepting superior mankind of the blood of Monseigneur,
who, his own wife included, looked down upon him with the loftiest
contempt.
A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his
stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women
waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder
and forage where he could, the Farmer-General--howsoever his
matrimonial relations conduced to social morality--was at least the
greatest reality among the personages who attended at the hotel of
Monseigneur that day.
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