As to fortune, we do not accurately know the amount of the family income during Danton’s boyhood, but we know that the office which was afterwards purchased for him was worth some three to four thousand pounds; that the money was found largely upon the credit of his father’s legacy,[11] and that the house in which the family lived was their own—a useful rule existing throughout provincial France. It is a substantial building, among the best of the little town, standing in the market-place, with the principal rooms giving upon the public square. What with the probable capital and the known emoluments of his position, we may regard Jacques Danton as a man disposing of an income of about four to five hundred pounds a year. His mother was of a somewhat lower rank. She was the daughter of a builder from the Champagne, and her brother was a master-carpenter of the town. Of her two sisters, one had married a postmaster and the other a shopkeeper, both in Troyes; her brother was the priest of Barberey, near Arcis. The father died when the boy was two and a half years old, leaving four children. We must presume, though we are not certain, that Danton had one brother: and we know he had two sisters, one of whom married in Troyes; the other died a nun at the same place in the middle of this century.[12] On both sides of his family, through the connections and marriages of his relations, their employment, their dwellings, their descendants, we see the origin of Danton absolutely separate from the lower and from the higher ranks of the old regime. Only by an effort of imagination could he later understand the workman or the peasant; only by daily conversation could he appreciate the strange nobles of 1790, with their absence of national pride. In fine, Danton came out of that middle class which has made the modern world, and which still insecurely sustains it. “Respectability and its gig” is an epigram that would exactly suit the dull and provincial surroundings of his first home; but the converse of such provincialism is sanity, order, and strength, and out of fuel so solid and so cold the bourgeoisie has time and again built a consuming fire. From his father’s death, before he was three years old, till his ninth year, the child was with his mother in the house at Arcis, for she had from the little fortune just enough revenue to keep the family together and to educate the children. The little boy was taught his Latin elements in the town, and then sent to the “Lower Seminary” at Troyes.[13] It was the intention of his uncle at Barberey to make him a priest, and in that case he would have passed through the regular stages, taking the higher forms in the Upper Seminary, and finally being admitted to orders a year or two after finishing his “Philosophie.” However, this programme was never completed, and the Church lost in him the material for a vigorous, charitable, and obscure country vicar.