A lawyer of Dijon, named Bernard, was ordered to erase from the tomb of his wife the girdle of nobility he had had carved around her epitaph. Others who carried the full-faced open helmets, proper only for emperors, kings, and sovereign princes, on their fantastic achievements, were compelled to adopt the closed helmet in profile proper for a simple gentleman. Owners of assumed titles and of manufactured coats-of-arms were greatly alarmed a few years ago by the terribly sarcastic writings of an individual who styled himself the ghost of an ancient herald, _Le Toison d’Or_.[2] In a series of letters published in “Le Voltaire” he exposed the faulty and ignorant system of heraldry in vogue, and the deceptive assumptions of titles, coronets, and armorial bearings in modern French Society. Indeed, he remarked, to judge by appearances, one might imagine that the Revolution had destroyed nothing, but that, on the contrary, it had endeavoured to foster and encourage titles and aristocracy, so rapidly had they increased of late years. Toison d’Or wished to alter all this, and the salons were greatly disturbed as he went to work chipping off titles and prefixes of nobility right and left. But all to no purpose, except indeed to cast doubts upon all French heraldry since the downfall of the Bourbons. A title in France costs nothing, and deceives no one who has the slightest knowledge of family history and genealogy. The following letter appeared in “Notes and Queries,” London, August 25, 1894: “As there always appears to be a doubt in the public mind as to whether there is any office in France at all corresponding to our heralds’ offices in this country, I ventured to put out this query to a well-known authority in Paris, together with the queries as to whether there is any ground for the statement that the archives of the French Heralds’ College were destroyed by fire by the Commune, and also if there is any Heraldic or Genealogical Society at all corresponding to the Government Office; and I received the following reply: