General of 1789, had judged French youth of quality somewhat
behindhand, recommending king and nobles to take better care for the
future of their education, "to the end that, enlightened and
moralised, they might know their duties, and be less likely to abuse
their privileges."

And how becomingly that cleric pride, that self-respecting quiet, sat
upon their high-bred figures, their angelic, unspoiled faces,
saddened transiently as they came under the religious spell for a
moment. As for Gaston, they welcomed him with perfect friendliness,
kept their best side foremost for an hour, and would not leave his
very dreams. In absolute unconsciousness, they had brought from
their remote old homes all varieties of hereditary gifts, vices,
distinctions, dark fates, mercy, cruelty, madness. Appetite and
vanity abounded, but with an abundant superficial grace, befitting a
generation which, as by some aesthetic sense in the air, made the
most of the pleasant outsides of life. All the [34] various traits
of the dying Middle Age were still in evidence among them, in all
their crude effectiveness; only, blent, like rusty old armour
wreathed in flowers, with the peculiar fopperies of the time,
shrewdly divined from a distance, as happens with competent youth.
To be in Paris itself, amid the full, delightful, fragrance of those
dainty visible things which Huguenots despised:--that, surely, were
the sum of good-fortune! Half-clerical, they loved nevertheless the
touch of steel; had a laughing joy in trifling with its latent soul
of destruction. In mimicry of the great world, they had their
leaders, so inscrutably self-imposed:--instinctively, they felt and
underwent that mystery of leadership, with its consequent heats of
spirit, its tides and changes of influence.