Note 50 — Chapter XI

They haunted, therefore, by preference, the less well frequented restaurants and cafés, the wings of the minor theatres, on the pretext that they were the elect of the people, and that the people were their fittest companions. Their erstwhile leader and chief scorned to stoop to such tricks. He was an educated man, with a thick veneer of the gentleman about him, which, however, did not prevent him from being one of the two most arrant snobs I have met anywhere. I advisedly say anywhere, for France herself does not produce that objectionable genus to any appreciable extent. You may find a good many cads, you will find comparatively few snobs. Compared to Armand Marrast, Eugène Sue was nowhere as a snob. He was a thickset man with a rubicund face, with a mass of grey woolly hair and a kind of stubbly, small moustache. His manners were supposed to be modelled on those of the nobles of the old régime; said manners mainly consisting of swaggering impudence to those whom he considered his equals, and freezing insolence to those he deemed his inferiors. The latter, I need not say, were by far the most numerous. He who bellowed most loudly that birth should carry no privilege, never forgot to remind his hearers, by deeds, if not by words, that he was of noble descent. "Si sa famille était noble, sa mère s'est surement endormie dans l'antichambre un jour qu'un valet-de-chambre entreprenant était trop près," said the Marquis d'Arragon one evening.[50] He felt greatly flattered at the caricaturists of the day representing him in the court dress of Louis XVI.'s reign, though to most people he looked like a "marquis de quatre sous."[51]