Worldly ambition was a thing which my grandmother was so little capable of feeling, or indeed of understanding, that it seemed to her futile to apply so much heat to its condemnation. Besides, she thought it in not very good taste that M. Legrandin, whose sister was married to a country gentleman of Lower Normandy near Balbec, should deliver himself of such violent attacks upon the nobles, going so far as to blame the Revolution for not having guillotined them all.
"Well met, my friends!" he would say as he came towards us. "You are lucky to spend so much time here; to-morrow I have to go back to Paris, to squeeze back into my niche.
"Oh, I admit," he went on, with his own peculiar smile, gently ironical, disillusioned and vague, "I have every useless thing in the world in my house there
