The Old Maid by Honoré de Balzac — Read

Plenty of people must have come across at least one Chevalier de Valois in the provinces; there was one in Normandy, another was extant at Bourges, a third flourished at Alencon in the year 1816, and the South very likely possessed one of its own. But we are not here concerned with the numbering of the Valois tribe. Some of them, no doubt, were about as much of Valois as Louis XIV was a Bourbon; and every Chevalier was so slightly acquainted with the rest, that it was anything but politic to mention one of them when speaking to another. All of them, however, agreed to leave the Bourbons in perfect tranquillity on the throne of France, for it is a little too well proven that Henri IV succeeded to the crown in default of heirs male in the Orléans, otherwise the Valois branch; so that if any Valois exist at all, they must be descendants of Charles of Valois, Duke of Angoulême, and Marie Touchet; and even there the direct line was extinct (unless proof to the contrary is forthcoming) in the person of the Abbé de Rothelin. As for the Valois Saint-Remy, descended from Henri II, they likewise came to an end with the too famous Lamothe-Valois of the Diamond Necklace affair.

Every one of the Chevaliers, if information is correct, was, like the Chevalier of Alencon, an elderly noble, tall, lean, and without fortune. The Bourges Chevalier had emigrated, the Touraine Valois went into hiding during the Revolution, and the Alencon Chevalier was mixed up in the Vendean war, and implicated to some extent in Chouannerie. The last-named gentleman spent the most part of his youth in Paris, where, at the age of thirty, the Revolution broke in upon his career of conquests. Accepted as a true Valois by persons of the highest quality in his province, the Chevalier de Valois d'Alencon (like his namesakes) was remarkable for his fine manners, and had evidently been accustomed to move in the best society.