“Art. IX.—I advise Madame de Pomereu, or those she may authorize, to pay to the charcutiers of Paris the sum of 10,000 francs in remembrance of their predecessors, who before the Revolution dealt for their ham and other smoked meats at the Hôtel d’Aligre, Rue St. Honoré.
“Art. X.—I leave 20,000 francs a-year to the invalide who, being on guard on the Pont des Arts in 1839, and, judging from the shabbiness of my dress that I was in distress, paid for me the five centimes toll.”
“Art. XIII.—Considering that virtue ought to be encouraged, I consecrate 100,000 francs yearly to the formation of fifty dowries of 2000 francs in favour of fifty Rosières. The Mayor of Nanterre, who finds these maidens every year, will be good enough to undertake the distribution. If by chance his commune should not furnish him the necessary contingent, he is authorized to address himself to the Gymnase Theatre.
“Art. XIV.—I leave 200,000 francs a-year to the ‘Phalansterians’; but they are only to receive this sum on the day on which they shall have transformed the ocean into orangeade, and gratified mankind with that appendage he needs to make him equal to the gibbon.”
“Art. XVI.—Taking compassion on the poor of the first arrondissement, I desire that the value of the cereals harvested on my land at the next harvest shall be distributed to them in its entirety.
“Art. XX.—Finally, I leave to my relatives, oblivion; to my friends, ingratitude; to God, my soul. As for my body, it belongs to my family vault.”
The brother of the testator was put into the will for a legacy so absurdly disproportionate to what he considered he had a right to expect that the following not very maturely considered observation thereon appeared in a newspaper of the date (1847):
“The celebrated Crœsus who has just died has revealed in his will certain little peculiarities of which few suspected him. He was a great protector of rats; and on the day but one before that of his death he was at the races with four of these animals in his calêche. He had a brother who gave him very good advice on this subject, like the Cléante of ‘Tartuffe,’ to whom he replied by a little posthumous epigram, indicative of his churlish disposition; he has left him, out of his large fortune, a dole of 20,000 francs per annum. There is no revenge so hard and bitter as that of an old man. There are, we venture to think, many brothers, all the same, who would be very glad of a fraternal legacy of eight hundred a-year, and, moreover, we know nothing of the provocation that may have been given; like Lord Campbell, ‘we should like to hear the dog’s story.’”
Possibly the old Marquis felt the separation he contemplated between himself and the fortune he had amassed, but if he entertained any malicious sentiments against those to whom he was obliged to leave what he could not take away with him, he seems to have been fully justified in the somewhat severe animadversions he has passed on some of his legatees.
To a lady relative, who had been full of attentions for him, he left a broken cup, jeering her with the taunt that while she thought she was taking him in he was laughing in his sleeve at the grimace she would make when she found that it was he who had got all her little gifts, her smiles and favors out of her, knowing all the while that he had no intention of repaying them as she expected.