Of all the social miseries of France, none are more fruitful in catastrophes of every kind than the idle uselessness of the well-born, and the over-education of those who are not so. France being, as one of her writers observes, the China of Europe, her habits, customs, and traditions, endure, in fact, through the organized destruction of succeeding revolutions, and whilst throne after throne lies in the dust, the prejudices of that fictitious universe called the world, are standing still, fixed, firm, and uprising in inflexible strength from roots that plunge deep into the soil. For instance, the old idea that a _gentilhomme_ or a _Grand Seigneur_ should not know how to spell, although obsolete as far as grammar and orthography are concerned, lives on yet in the notion that a gentleman _must not work_. This has hitherto proved an uneradicable opinion, and the general incapability and instinctive laziness of the upper classes in France, can, alas! amply testify to its prevalence throughout the country. It is not that the aristocracy of France are wanting in talent or intelligence; on the contrary, they have far more of what may be called native capacity than the classes beneath them—but they are unpractical, unbusiness-like, unused to any things in the shape of affairs. They are admirable if always in the first place, but rebel at the bare thought of helping on the governing machine in its hidden wheels; and whilst with us every public office counts gentlemen by the dozen, and noble names are to be found even in the most unconspicuous, though useful places; in France an ancient family would think itself degraded if one of its sons were to be discovered amongst the workers of a bureau. The following tale, the circumstances of which are yet uneffaced from many a memory in Paris, will perhaps serve to exemplify the sad truth of what I advance, and give a slight notion of the immediate action of certain false principles upon our neighbors’ mind. The hero of the ensuing pages, Ferdinand de Candolles, was the last scion of one of the most ancient houses in France. Ferdinand’s father died whilst the boy was in early infancy, and the entire charge of her son, whom she idolized, fell upon Madame de Candolles. At eighteen, Ferdinand was a tall, handsome youth, prodigiously proud of his name, highly romantic in his notions, ready to do battle with any given number of individuals in honor of _Dieu, le Roi, ou sa fame_, making a terrible quantity of bad verses, but as incapable of explaining to you M. de Villèle’s last financial measure, or the probable influence of the increasing growth of beet-root sugar upon the colonial markets, as he would have been of expounding the doctrines of Confucius in Chinese.