Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/49

 these four shuttles had unceasingly woven a human canvas, every shred of which happened to be gown or towel, superb cambric or coarse lining. The same blood ran in the head, in the feet or the heart, in the industrious hands, in diseased lungs or in a brow, big with genius. The heads of the clan dwelt faithfully in the little town, where the ties of kindred slackened or contracted at the will of events enacted by this strange cognomenism. In whatever country you go, change the names and you will recognize the fact, but without the poetry that feudalism imparted to it and that Walter Scott has reproduced with so much talent Let us look higher and examine human nature in history. All the noble families of the eleventh century, now almost all extinct, except the royal race of the Capets, have necessarily all co-operated in the birth of a Rohan, a Montmorency, a Bauffremont, and a Mortemart of to-day; in fact they must all necessarily be in the blood of the last gentleman who is truly a gentleman. In other words, every bourgeois is cousin to a bourgeois, and every nobleman, cousin to a nobleman. As it says in the sublime pages of the biblical genealogies, in a thousand years, three families, Shem, Ham and Japheth, can cover the globe with their children. A family can become a nation, and, unfortunately, a nation can once more become a single, simple family. To prove this, it suffices to apply to the investigation of ancestors and their accumulation that time increases in a retrograde geometrical progression multiplied by itself, the