"Even so," rejoined the marquis; "you have summed up the whole history of the common people in the example of your family. Two or three generations are conscious of a connecting bond; but all those which preceded and all those which will follow are strangers to them forever. Do you consider that just and as it should be, my dear Michel? Is not this utter neglect of the past, this heedlessness of the future, this absence of interest in the intermediate generations, a sort of barbarism, an uncivilized condition of affairs, indicating a most revolting contempt for the human race?" "You are right, and I understand you, signor marquis," Michel replied. "The history of each family is the history of the human race, and whoever knows one knows the other. Certainly the man who knows his own ancestors, and who derives from a scrutiny of their successive existences a series of examples to follow or to shun, has, so to speak, a more intense and more complete life in his heart than he who can refer only to two or three vague and intangible shadows of the past. Therefore nobility of birth is a great social privilege; if it imposes grave duties, it furnishes vast enlightenment and vast powers. The child who spells out the knowledge of good and evil in books written with the blood which flows in his own veins, and in the features of the painted faces which reflect his own image like mirrors in which he loves to recognize himself, should always become a great man, or at least, as you said, a man enamored of true grandeur, which is an acquired virtue supplying the place of inborn virtue. I realize now what there is that is true and estimable in this principle of heredity which binds the generations together. What there is in it that is unfortunate, I will not remind you; you know it better than I."