The Second Funeral of Napoleon
Page: 39

useless, haughty, insolent creature, because he despises us.
SOMETHING is there about Peacock that we don't possess. Strain your
neck ever so, you can't make it as long or as blue as his--cock your
tail as much as you please, and it will never be half so fine to
look at. But the most absurd, disgusting, contemptible sight in the
world would you and I be, leaving the barn-door for my lady's
flower-garden, forsaking our natural sturdy walk for the peacock's
genteel rickety stride, and adopting the squeak of his voice in the
place of our gallant lusty cock-a-doodle-dooing.

Do you take the allegory? I love to speak in such, and the above
types have been presented to my mind while sitting opposite a
gimcrack coat-of-arms and coronet that are painted in the Invalides
Church, and assigned to one of the Emperor's Generals.

Ventrebleu! Madam, what need have THEY of coats-of-arms and
coronets, and wretched imitations of old exploded aristocratic
gewgaws that they had flung out of the country--with the heads of
the owners in them sometimes, for indeed they were not particular--a
score of years before? What business, forsooth, had they to be
meddling with gentility and aping its ways, who had courage, merit,
daring, genius sometimes, and a pride of their own to support, if
proud they were inclined to be? A clever young man (who was not of
high family himself, but had been bred up genteelly at Eton and the
university)--young Mr. George Canning, at the commencement of the
French Revolution, sneered at "Roland the Just, with ribbons in his
shoes," and the dandies, who then wore buckles, voted the sarcasm
monstrous killing. It was a joke, my dear, worthy of a lackey, or
of a silly smart parvenu, not knowing the society into which his
luck had cast him (God help him! in later years, they taught him
what they were!), and fancying in his silly intoxication that
simplicity was ludicrous and fashion respectable. See, now, fifty
years are gone, and where are shoebuckles? Extinct, defunct, kicked
into the irrevocable past off the toes of all Europe!

How fatal to the parvenu, throughout history, has been this respect