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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sons of the Soil, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
+
+
+Title: Sons of the Soil
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+Release Date: October 4, 2005 [EBook #1417]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SONS OF THE SOIL ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Bickers; and Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+                          SONS OF THE SOIL
+
+                                 BY
+
+                          HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+                           Translated by
+                    Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+
+
+                             DEDICATION
+
+                    To Monsieur P. S. B. Gavault.
+
+  Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote these words at the beginning of his
+  Nouvelle Heloise: "I have seen the morals of my time and I publish
+  these letters." May I not say to you, in imitation of that great
+  writer, "I have studied the march of my epoch and I publish this
+  work"?
+
+  The object of this particular study--startling in its truth so
+  long as society makes philanthropy a principle instead of
+  regarding it as an accident--is to bring to sight the leading
+  characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who
+  seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is
+  only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the
+  sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate
+  the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have
+  risen, and cried by every pen, "Arise, working-men!" just as
+  formerly they cried, "Arise!" to the "tiers etat." None of these
+  Erostrates, however, have dared to face the country solitudes and
+  study the unceasing conspiracy of those whom we term weak against
+  those others who fancy themselves strong,--that of the peasant
+  against the proprietor. It is necessary to enlighten not only the
+  legislator of to-day but him of to-morrow. In the midst of the
+  present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers
+  blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to exhibit the peasant who
+  renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land
+  to be a thing that is, and that is not.
+
+  You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which
+  undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides
+  an acre into a hundred fragments,--ever spurred on to his banquet
+  by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary
+  and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the
+  Revolution, will some day absorb the middle classes, just as the
+  middle classes have destroyed the nobility. Lifted above the law
+  by its own insignificance, this Robespierre, with one head and
+  twenty million arms, is at work perpetually; crouching in country
+  districts, intrenched in municipal councils, under arms in the
+  national guard of every canton in France,--one result of the year
+  1830, which failed to remember that Napoleon preferred the chances
+  of defeat to the danger of arming the masses.
+
+  If during the last eight years I have again and again given up the
+  writing of this book (the most important of those I have
+  undertaken to write), and as often returned to it, it was, as you
+  and other friends can well imagine, because my courage shrank from
+  the many difficulties, the many essential details of a drama so
+  doubly dreadful and so cruelly bloody. Among the reasons which
+  render me now almost, it may be thought, foolhardy, I count the
+  desire to finish a work long designed to be to you a proof of my
+  deep and lasting gratitude for a friendship that has ever been
+  among my greatest consolations in misfortune.
+
+                                                      De Balzac.
+
+
+
+
+                          SONS OF THE SOIL
+
+
+
+
+                               PART I
+
+                 Whoso land hath, contention hath.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER I
+
+                            THE CHATEAU
+
+Les Aigues, August 6, 1823.
+
+To Monsieur Nathan,
+
+My dear Nathan,--You, who provide the public with such delightful
+dreams through the magic of your imagination, are now to follow me
+while I make you dream a dream of truth. You shall then tell me
+whether the present century is likely to bequeath such dreams to the
+Nathans and the Blondets of the year 1923; you shall estimate the
+distance at which we now are from the days when the Florines of the
+eighteenth century found, on awaking, a chateau like Les Aigues in the
+terms of their bargain.
+
+My dear fellow, if you receive this letter in the morning, let your
+mind travel, as you lie in bed, fifty leagues or thereabouts from
+Paris, along the great mail road which leads to the confines of
+Burgundy, and behold two small lodges built of red brick, joined, or
+separated, by a rail painted green. It was there that the diligence
+deposited your friend and correspondent.
+
+On either side of this double pavilion grows a quick-set hedge, from
+which the brambles straggle like stray locks of hair. Here and there a
+tree shoots boldly up; flowers bloom on the slopes of the wayside
+ditch, bathing their feet in its green and sluggish water. The hedge
+at both ends meets and joins two strips of woodland, and the double
+meadow thus inclosed is doubtless the result of a clearing.
+
+These dusty and deserted lodges give entrance to a magnificent avenue
+of centennial elms, whose umbrageous heads lean toward each other and
+form a long and most majestic arbor. The grass grows in this avenue,
+and only a few wheel-tracks can be seen along its double width of way.
+The great age of the trees, the breadth of the avenue, the venerable
+construction of the lodges, the brown tints of their stone courses,
+all bespeak an approach to some half-regal residence.
+
+Before reaching this enclosure from the height of an eminence such as
+we Frenchmen rather conceitedly call a mountain, at the foot of which
+lies the village of Conches (the last post-house), I had seen the long
+valley of Aigues, at the farther end of which the mail road turns to
+follow a straight line into the little sub-prefecture of La
+Ville-aux-Fayes, over which, as you know, the nephew of our friend des
+Lupeaulx lords it. Tall forests lying on the horizon, along vast slopes
+which skirt a river, command this rich valley, which is framed in the
+far distance by the mountains of a lesser Switzerland, called the Morvan.
+These forests belong to Les Aigues, and to the Marquis de Ronquerolles
+and the Comte de Soulanges, whose castles and parks and villages, seen
+in the distance from these heights, give the scene a strong
+resemblance to the imaginary landscapes of Velvet Breughel.
+
+If these details do not remind you of all the castles in the air you
+have desired to possess in France you are not worthy to receive the
+present narrative of an astounded Parisian. At last I have seen a
+landscape where art is blended with nature in such a way that neither
+of them spoils the other; the art is natural, and the nature artistic.
+I have found the oasis that you and I have dreamed of when reading
+novels,--nature luxuriant and adorned, rolling lines that are not
+confused, something wild withal, unkempt, mysterious, not common. Jump
+that green railing and come on!
+
+When I tried to look up the avenue, which the sun never penetrates
+except when it rises or when it sets, striping the road like a zebra
+with its oblique rays, my view was obstructed by an outline of rising
+ground; after that is passed, the long avenue is obstructed by a
+copse, within which the roads meet at a cross-ways, in the centre of
+which stands a stone obelisk, for all the world like an eternal
+exclamation mark. From the crevices between the foundation stones of
+this erection, which is topped by a spiked ball (what an idea!), hang
+flowering plants, blue or yellow according to the season. Les Aigues
+must certainly have been built by a woman, or for a woman; no man
+would have had such dainty ideas; the architect no doubt had his cue.
+
+Passing through the little wood placed there as sentinel, I came upon
+a charming declivity, at the foot of which foamed and gurgled a little
+brook, which I crossed on a culvert of mossy stones, superb in color,
+the prettiest of all the mosaics which time manufactures. The avenue
+continues by the brookside up a gentle rise. In the distance, the
+first tableau is now seen,--a mill and its dam, a causeway and trees,
+linen laid out to dry, the thatched cottage of the miller, his
+fishing-nets, and the tank where the fish are kept,--not to speak of
+the miller's boy, who was already watching me. No matter where you are
+in the country, however solitary you may think yourself, you are
+certain to be the focus of the two eyes of a country bumpkin; a
+laborer rests on his hoe, a vine-dresser straightens his bent back, a
+little goat-girl, or shepherdess, or milkmaid climbs a willow to stare
+at you.
+
+Presently the avenue merges into an alley of acacias, which leads to
+an iron railing made in the days when iron-workers fashioned those
+slender filagrees which are not unlike the copies set us by a
+writing-master. On either side of the railing is a ha-ha, the edges
+of which bristle with angry spikes,--regular porcupines in metal. The
+railing is closed at both ends by two porter's-lodges, like those of
+the palace at Versailles, and the gateway is surmounted by colossal
+vases. The gold of the arabesques is ruddy, for rust has added its
+tints, but this entrance, called "the gate of the Avenue," which
+plainly shows the hand of the Great Dauphin (to whom, indeed, Les
+Aigues owes it), seems to me none the less beautiful for that. At the
+end of each ha-ha the walls of the park, built of rough-hewn stone,
+begin. These stones, set in a mortar made of reddish earth, display
+their variegated colors, the warm yellows of the silex, the white of
+the lime carbonates, the russet browns of the sandstone, in many a
+fantastic shape. As you first enter it, the park is gloomy, the walls
+are hidden by creeping plants and by trees that for fifty years have
+heard no sound of axe. One might think it a virgin forest, made primeval
+again through some phenomenon granted exclusively to forests. The trunks
+of the trees are swathed with lichen which hangs from one to another.
+Mistletoe, with its viscid leaves, droops from every fork of the
+branches where moisture settles. I have found gigantic ivies, wild
+arabesques which flourish only at fifty leagues from Paris, here where
+land does not cost enough to make one sparing of it. The landscape on
+such free lines covers a great deal of ground. Nothing is smoothed
+off; rakes are unknown, ruts and ditches are full of water, frogs are
+tranquilly delivered of their tadpoles, the woodland flowers bloom,
+and the heather is as beautiful as that I have seen on your mantle-shelf
+in January in the elegant beau-pot sent by Florine. This mystery is
+intoxicating, it inspires vague desires. The forest odors, beloved
+of souls that are epicures of poesy, who delight in the tiny mosses,
+the noxious fungi, the moist mould, the willows, the balsams, the wild
+thyme, the green waters of a pond, the golden star of the yellow
+water-lily,--the breath of all such vigorous propagations came to my
+nostrils and filled me with a single thought; was it their soul? I
+seemed to see a rose-tinted gown floating along the winding alley.
+
+The path ended abruptly in another copse, where birches and poplars
+and all the quivering trees palpitated,--an intelligent family with
+graceful branches and elegant bearing, the trees of a love as free! It
+was from this point, my dear fellow, that I saw a pond covered with
+the white water-lily and other plants with broad flat leaves and
+narrow slender ones, on which lay a boat painted white and black, as
+light as a nut-shell and dainty as the wherry of a Seine boatman.
+Beyond rose the chateau, built in 1560, of fine red brick, with stone
+courses and copings, and window-frames in which the sashes were of
+small leaded panes (O Versailles!). The stone is hewn in diamond
+points, but hollowed, as in the Ducal Palace at Venice on the facade
+toward the Bridge of Sighs. There are no regular lines about the
+castle except in the centre building, from which projects a stately
+portico with double flights of curving steps, and round balusters
+slender at their base and broadening at the middle. The main building
+is surrounded by clock-towers and sundry modern turrets, with
+galleries and vases more or less Greek. No harmony there, my dear
+Nathan! These heterogeneous erections are wrapped, so to speak, by
+various evergreen trees whose branches shed their brown needles upon
+the roofs, nourishing the lichen and giving tone to the cracks and
+crevices where the eye delights to wander. Here you see the Italian
+pine, the stone pine, with its red bark and its majestic parasol; here
+a cedar two hundred years old, weeping willows, a Norway spruce, and a
+beech which overtops them all; and there, in front of the main tower,
+some very singular shrubs,--a yew trimmed in a way that recalls some
+long-decayed garden of old France, and magnolias with hortensias at
+their feet. In short, the place is the Invalides of the heroes of
+horticulture, once the fashion and now forgotten, like all other
+heroes.
+
+A chimney, with curious copings, which was sending forth great volumes
+of smoke, assured me that this delightful scene was not an opera
+setting. A kitchen reveals human beings. Now imagine _me_, Blondet, who
+shiver as if in the polar regions at Saint-Cloud, in the midst of this
+glowing Burgundian climate. The sun sends down its warmest rays, the
+king-fisher watches on the shores of the pond, the cricket chirps, the
+grain-pods burst, the poppy drops its morphia in glutinous tears, and
+all are clearly defined on the dark-blue ether. Above the ruddy soil
+of the terraces flames that joyous natural punch which intoxicates the
+insects and the flowers and dazzles our eyes and browns our faces. The
+grape is beading, its tendrils fall in a veil of threads whose
+delicacy puts to shame the lace-makers. Beside the house blue
+larkspur, nasturtium, and sweet-peas are blooming. From a distance
+orange-trees and tuberoses scent the air. After the poetic exhalations
+of the woods (a gradual preparation) came the delectable pastilles of
+this botanic seraglio.
+
+Standing on the portico, like the queen of flowers, behold a woman
+robed in white, with hair unpowdered, holding a parasol lined with
+white silk, but herself whiter than the silk, whiter than the lilies
+at her feet, whiter than the starry jasmine that climbed the
+balustrade,--a woman, a Frenchwoman born in Russia, who said as I
+approached her, "I had almost given you up." She had seen me as I left
+the copse. With what perfection do all women, even the most guileless,
+understand the arrangement of a scenic effect? The movements of the
+servants, who were preparing to serve breakfast, showed me that the
+meal had been delayed until after the arrival of the diligence. She
+had not ventured to come to meet me.
+
+Is this not our dream,--the dream of all lovers of the beautiful,
+under whatsoever form it comes; the seraphic beauty that Luini put
+into his Marriage of the Virgin, that noble fresco at Sarono; the
+beauty that Rubens grasped in the tumult of his "Battle of the
+Thermodon"; the beauty that five centuries have elaborated in the
+cathedrals of Seville and Milan; the beauty of the Saracens at
+Granada, the beauty of Louis XIV. at Versailles, the beauty of the
+Alps, and that of this Limagne in which I stand?
+
+Belonging to the estate, about which there is nothing too princely,
+nor yet too financial, where prince and farmer-general have both lived
+(which fact serves to explain it), are four thousand acres of
+woodland, a park of some nine hundred acres, the mill, three leased
+farms, another immense farm at Conches, and vineyards,--the whole
+producing a revenue of about seventy thousand francs a year. Now you
+know Les Aigues, my dear fellow; where I have been expected for the
+last two weeks, and where I am at this moment, in the chintz-lined
+chamber assigned to dearest friends.
+
+Above the park, towards Conches, a dozen little brooks, clear, limpid
+streams coming from the Morvan, fall into the pond, after adorning
+with their silvery ribbons the valleys of the park and the magnificent
+gardens around the chateau. The name of the place, Les Aigues, comes
+from these charming streams of water; the estate was originally called
+in the old title-deeds "Les Aigues-Vives" to distinguish it from
+"Aigues-Mortes"; but the word "Vives" has now been dropped. The pond
+empties into the stream, which follows the course of the avenue,
+through a wide and straight canal bordered on both sides and along its
+whole length by weeping willows. This canal, thus arched, produces a
+delightful effect. Gliding through it, seated on a thwart of the
+little boat, one could fancy one's self in the nave of some great
+cathedral, the choir being formed of the main building of the house
+seen at the end of it. When the setting sun casts its orange tones
+mingled with amber upon the casements of the chateau, the effect is
+that of painted windows. At the other end of the canal we see Blangy,
+the county-town, containing about sixty houses, and the village
+church, which is nothing more than a tumble-down building with a
+wooden clock-tower which appears to hold up a roof of broken tiles.
+One comfortable house and the parsonage are distinguishable; but the
+township is a large one,--about two hundred scattered houses in all,
+those of the village forming as it were the capital. The roads are
+lined with fruit-trees, and numerous little gardens are strewn here
+and there,--true country gardens with everything in them; flowers,
+onions, cabbages and grapevines, currants, and a great deal of manure.
+The village has a primitive air; it is rustic, and has that decorative
+simplicity which we artists are forever seeking. In the far distance
+is the little town of Soulanges overhanging a vast sheet of water,
+like the buildings on the lake of Thune.
+
+When you stroll in the park, which has four gates, each superb in
+style, you feel that our mythological Arcadias are flat and stale.
+Arcadia is in Burgundy, not in Greece; Arcadia is at Les Aigues and
+nowhere else. A river, made by scores of brooklets, crosses the park
+at its lower level with a serpentine movement; giving a dewy freshness
+and tranquillity to the scene,--an air of solitude, which reminds one
+of a convent of Carthusians, and all the more because, on an
+artificial island in the river, is a hermitage in ruins, the interior
+elegance of which is worthy of the luxurious financier who constructed
+it. Les Aigues, my dear Nathan, once belonged to that Bouret who spent
+two millions to receive Louis XV. on a single occasion under his roof.
+How many ardent passions, how many distinguished minds, how many
+fortunate circumstances have contributed to make this beautiful place
+what it is! A mistress of Henri IV. rebuilt the chateau where it now
+stands. The favorite of the Great Dauphin, Mademoiselle Choin (to whom
+Les Aigues was given), added a number of farms to it. Bouret furnished
+the house with all the elegancies of Parisian homes for an Opera
+celebrity; and to him Les Aigues owes the restoration of its ground
+floor in the style Louis XV.
+
+I have often stood rapt in admiration at the beauty of the
+dining-room. The eye is first attracted to the ceiling, painted in fresco
+in the Italian manner, where lightsome arabesques are frolicking. Female
+forms, in stucco ending in foliage, support at regular distances
+corbeils of fruit, from which spring the garlands of the ceiling.
+Charming paintings, the work of unknown artists, fill the panels
+between the female figures, representing the luxuries of the table,
+--boar's-heads, salmon, rare shell-fish, and all edible things,--which
+fantastically suggest men and women and children, and rival the
+whimsical imagination of the Chinese,--the people who best understand,
+to my thinking at least, the art of decoration. The mistress of the
+house finds a bell-wire beneath her feet to summon servants, who enter
+only when required, disturbing no interviews and overhearing no
+secrets. The panels above the doorways represent gay scenes; all the
+embrasures, both of doors and windows, are in marble mosaics. The room
+is heated from below. Every window looks forth on some delightful
+view.
+
+This room communicates with a bath-room on one side and on the other
+with a boudoir which opens into the salon. The bath-room is lined with
+Sevres tiles, painted in monochrome, the floor is mosaic, and the bath
+marble. An alcove, hidden by a picture painted on copper, which turns
+on a pivot, contains a couch in gilt wood of the truest Pompadour. The
+ceiling is lapis-lazuli starred with gold. The tiles are painted from
+designs by Boucher. Bath, table and love are therefore closely united.
+
+After the salon, which, I should tell you, my dear fellow, exhibits
+the magnificence of the Louis XIV. manner, you enter a fine billiard-room
+unrivalled so far as I know in Paris itself. The entrance to this
+suite of ground-floor apartments is through a semi-circular
+antechamber, at the lower end of which is a fairy-like staircase,
+lighted from above, which leads to other parts of the house, all built
+at various epochs--and to think that they chopped off the heads of the
+wealthy in 1793! Good heavens! why can't people understand that the
+marvels of art are impossible in a land where there are no great
+fortunes, no secure, luxurious lives? If the Left insists on killing
+kings why not leave us a few little princelings with money in their
+pockets?
+
+At the present moment these accumulated treasures belong to a charming
+woman with an artistic soul, who is not content with merely restoring
+them magnificently, but who keeps the place up with loving care. Sham
+philosophers, studying themselves while they profess to be studying
+humanity, call these glorious things extravagance. They grovel before
+cotton prints and the tasteless designs of modern industry, as if we
+were greater and happier in these days than in those of Henri IV.,
+Louis XIV., and Louis XVI., monarchs who have all left the stamp of
+their reigns upon Les Aigues. What palace, what royal castle, what
+mansions, what noble works of art, what gold brocaded stuffs are
+sacred now? The petticoats of our grandmothers go to cover the chairs
+in these degenerate days. Selfish and thieving interlopers that we
+are, we pull down everything and plant cabbages where marvels once
+were rife. Only yesterday the plough levelled Persan, that magnificent
+domain which gave a title to one of the most opulent families of the
+old parliament; hammers have demolished Montmorency, which cost an
+Italian follower of Napoleon untold sums; Val, the creation of
+Regnault de Saint-Jean d'Angely, Cassan, built by a mistress of the
+Prince de Conti; in all, four royal houses have disappeared in the
+valley of the Oise alone. We are getting a Roman campagna around Paris
+in advance of the days when a tempest shall blow from the north and
+overturn our plaster palaces and our pasteboard decorations.
+
+Now see, my dear fellow, to what the habit of bombasticising in
+newspapers brings you to. Here am I writing a downright article. Does
+the mind have its ruts, like a road? I stop; for I rob the mail, and I
+rob myself, and you may be yawning--to be continued in our next; I
+hear the second bell, which summons me to one of those abundant
+breakfasts the fashion of which has long passed away, in the dining-rooms
+of Paris, be it understood.
+
+Here's the history of my Arcadia. In 1815, there died at Les Aigues
+one of the famous wantons of the last century,--a singer, forgotten of
+the guillotine and the nobility, after preying upon exchequers, upon
+literature, upon aristocracy, and all but reaching the scaffold;
+forgotten, like so many fascinating old women who expiate their golden
+youth in country solitudes, and replace their lost loves by another,
+--man by Nature. Such women live with the flowers, with the woodland
+scents, with the sky, with the sunshine, with all that sings and skips
+and shines and sprouts,--the birds, the squirrels, the flowers, the
+grass; they know nothing about these things, they cannot explain them,
+but they love them; they love them so well that they forget dukes,
+marshals, rivalries, financiers, follies, luxuries, their paste jewels
+and their real diamonds, their heeled slippers and their rouge,--all,
+for the sweetness of country life.
+
+I have gathered, my dear fellow, much precious information about the
+old age of Mademoiselle Laguerre; for, to tell you the truth, the
+after life of such women as Florine, Mariette, Suzanne de Val Noble,
+and Tullia has made me, every now and then, extremely inquisitive, as
+though I were a child inquiring what had become of the old moons.
+
+In 1790 Mademoiselle Laguerre, alarmed at the turn of public affairs,
+came to settle at Les Aigues, bought and given to her by Bouret, who
+passed several summers with her at the chateau. Terrified at the fate
+of Madame du Barry, she buried her diamonds. At that time she was only
+fifty-three years of age, and according to her lady's-maid, afterwards
+married to a gendarme named Soudry, "Madame was more beautiful than
+ever." My dear Nathan, Nature has no doubt her private reasons for
+treating women of this sort like spoiled children; excesses, instead
+of killing them, fatten them, preserve them, renew their youth. Under
+a lymphatic appearance they have nerves which maintain their
+marvellous physique; they actually preserve their beauty for reasons
+which would make a virtuous woman haggard. No, upon my word, Nature is
+not moral!
+
+Mademoiselle Laguerre lived an irreproachable life at Les Aigues, one
+might even call it a saintly one, after her famous adventure,--you
+remember it? One evening in a paroxysm of despairing love, she fled
+from the opera-house in her stage dress, rushed into the country, and
+passed the night weeping by the wayside. (Ah! how they have
+calumniated the love of Louis XV.'s time!) She was so unused to see
+the sunrise, that she hailed it with one of her finest songs. Her
+attitude, quite as much as her tinsel, drew the peasants about her;
+amazed at her gestures, her voice, her beauty, they took her for an
+angel, and dropped on their knees around her. If Voltaire had not
+existed we might have thought it a new miracle. I don't know if God
+gave her much credit for her tardy virtue, for love after all must be
+a sickening thing to a woman as weary of it as a wanton of the old
+Opera. Mademoiselle Laguerre was born in 1740, and her hey-day was in
+1760, when Monsieur (I forget his name) was called the "ministre de la
+guerre," on account of his liaison with her. She abandoned that name,
+which was quite unknown down here, and called herself Madame des
+Aigues, as if to merge her identity in the estate, which she delighted
+to improve with a taste that was profoundly artistic. When Bonaparte
+became First Consul, she increased her property by the purchase of
+church lands, for which she used the proceeds of her diamonds. As an
+Opera divinity never knows how to take care of her money, she
+intrusted the management of the estate to a steward, occupying herself
+with her flowers and fruits and with the beautifying of the park.
+
+After Mademoiselle was dead and buried at Blangy, the notary of
+Soulanges--that little town which lies between Ville-aux-Fayes and
+Blangy, the capital of the township--made an elaborate inventory, and
+sought out the heirs of the singer, who never knew she had any. Eleven
+families of poor laborers living near Amiens, and sleeping in cotton
+sheets, awoke one fine morning in golden ones. The property was sold
+at auction. Les Aigues was bought by Montcornet, who had laid by
+enough during his campaigns in Spain and Pomerania to make the
+purchase, which cost about eleven hundred thousand francs, including
+the furniture. The general, no doubt, felt the influence of these
+luxurious apartments; and I was arguing with the countess only
+yesterday that her marriage was a direct result of the purchase of Les
+Aigues.
+
+To rightly understand the countess, my dear Nathan, you must know that
+the general is a violent man, red as fire, five feet nine inches tall,
+round as a tower, with a thick neck and the shoulders of a blacksmith,
+which must have amply filled his cuirass. Montcornet commanded the
+cuirassiers at the battle of Essling (called by the Austrians
+Gross-Aspern), and came near perishing when that noble corps was driven
+back on the Danube. He managed to cross the river astride a log of wood.
+The cuirassiers, finding the bridge down, took the glorious
+resolution, at Montcornet's command, to turn and resist the entire
+Austrian army, which carried off on the morrow over thirty wagon-loads
+of cuirasses. The Germans invented a name for their enemies on this
+occasion which means "men of iron."[*] Montcornet has the outer man of
+a hero of antiquity. His arms are stout and vigorous, his chest deep
+and broad; his head has a leonine aspect, his voice is of those that
+can order a charge in the thick of battle; but he has nothing more
+than the courage of a daring man; he lacks mind and breadth of view.
+Like other generals to whom military common-sense, the natural
+boldness of those who spend their lives in danger, and the habit of
+command gives an appearance of superiority, Montcornet has an imposing
+effect when you first meet him; he seems a Titan, but he contains a
+dwarf, like the pasteboard giant who saluted Queen Elizabeth at the
+gates of Kenilworth. Choleric though kind, and full of imperial
+hauteur, he has the caustic tongue of a soldier, and is quick at
+repartee, but quicker still with a blow. He may have been superb on a
+battle-field; in a household he is simply intolerable. He knows no
+love but barrack love,--the love which those clever myth-makers, the
+ancients, placed under the patronage of Eros, son of Mars and Venus.
+Those delightful chroniclers of the old religions provided themselves
+with a dozen different Loves. Study the fathers and the attributes of
+these Loves, and you will discover a complete social nomenclature,
+--and yet we fancy that we originate things! When the world turns
+upside down like an hour-glass, when the seas become continents,
+Frenchmen will find canons, steamboats, newspapers, and maps wrapped
+up in seaweed at the bottom of what is now our ocean.
+
+[*] I do not, on principle, like foot-notes, and this is the first I
+have ever allowed myself. Its historical interest must be my
+excuse; it will prove, moreover, that descriptions of battles
+should be something more than the dry particulars of technical
+writers, who for the last three thousand years have told us about
+left and right wings and centres being broken or driven in, but
+never a word about the soldier himself, his sufferings, and his
+heroism. The conscientious care with which I prepared myself to
+write the "Scenes from Military Life," led me to many a battle-field
+once wet with the blood of France and her enemies. Among them I
+went to Wagram. When I reached the shores of the Danube, opposite
+Lobau, I noticed on the bank, which is covered with turf, certain
+undulations that reminded me of the furrows in a field of
+lucern. I asked the reason of it, thinking I should hear of some
+new method of agriculture: "There sleep the cavalry of the
+imperial guard," said the peasant who served us as a guide; "those
+are their graves you see there." The words made me shudder. Prince
+Frederic Schwartzenburg, who translated them, added that the man
+had himself driven one of the wagons laden with cuirasses. By one
+of the strange chances of war our guide had served a breakfast to
+Napoleon on the morning of the battle of Wagram. Though poor, he
+had kept the double napoleon which the Emperor gave him for his
+milk and his eggs. The curate of Gross-Aspern took us to the
+famous cemetery where French and Austrians struggled together
+knee-deep in blood, with a courage and obstinacy glorious to each.
+There, while explaining that a marble tablet (to which our
+attention had been attracted, and on which were inscribed the
+names of the owner of Gross-Aspern, who had been killed on the
+third day) was the sole compensation ever given to the family, he
+said, in a tone of deep sadness: "It was a time of great misery,
+and of great hopes; but now are the days of forgetfulness." The
+saying seemed to me sublime in its simplicity; but when I came to
+reflect upon the matter, I felt there was some justification for
+the apparent ingratitude of the House of Austria. Neither nations
+nor kings are wealthy enough to reward all the devotions to which
+these tragic struggles give rise. Let those who serve a cause with
+a secret expectation of recompense, set a price upon their blood
+and become mercenaries. Those who wield either sword or pen for
+their country's good ought to think of nothing but of _doing their
+best_, as our fathers used to say, and expect nothing, not even
+glory, except as a happy accident.
+
+It was in rushing to retake this famous cemetery for the third
+time that Massena, wounded and carried in the box of a cabriolet,
+made this splendid harangue to his soldiers: "What! you rascally
+curs, who have only five sous a day while I have forty thousand,
+do you let me go ahead of you?" All the world knows the order
+which the Emperor sent to his lieutenant by M. de Sainte-Croix,
+who swam the Danube three times: "Die or retake the village; it is
+a question of saving the army; the bridges are destroyed."
+
+The Author.
+
+
+Now, I must tell you that the Comtesse de Montcornet is a fragile,
+timid, delicate little woman. What do you think of such a marriage as
+that? To those who know society such things are common enough; a
+well-assorted marriage is the exception. Nevertheless, I have come to
+see how it is that this slender little creature handles her bobbins
+in a way to lead this heavy, solid, stolid general precisely as he
+himself used to lead his cuirassiers.
+
+If Montcornet begins to bluster before his Virginie, Madame lays a
+finger on her lips and he is silent. He smokes his pipes and his
+cigars in a kiosk fifty feet from the chateau, and airs himself before
+he returns to the house. Proud of his subjection, he turns to her,
+like a bear drunk on grapes, and says, when anything is proposed, "If
+Madame approves." When he comes to his wife's room, with that heavy
+step which makes the tiles creak as though they were boards, and she,
+not wanting him, calls out: "Don't come in!" he performs a military
+volte-face and says humbly: "You will let me know when I can see you?"
+--in the very tones with which he shouted to his cuirassiers on the
+banks of the Danube: "Men, we must die, and die well, since there's
+nothing else we can do!" I have heard him say, speaking of his wife,
+"Not only do I love her, but I venerate her." When he flies into a
+passion which defies all restraint and bursts all bonds, the little
+woman retires into her own room and leaves him to shout. But four or
+five hours later she will say: "Don't get into a passion, my dear, you
+might break a blood-vessel; and besides, you hurt me." Then the lion
+of Essling retreats out of sight to wipe his eyes. Sometimes he comes
+into the salon when she and I are talking, and if she says: "Don't
+disturb us, he is reading to me," he leaves us without a word.
+
+It is only strong men, choleric and powerful, thunder-bolts of war,
+diplomats with olympian heads, or men of genius, who can show this
+utter confidence, this generous devotion to weakness, this constant
+protection, this love without jealousy, this easy good humor with a
+woman. Good heavens! I place the science of the countess's management
+of her husband as far above the peevish, arid virtues as the satin of
+a causeuse is superior to the Utrecht velvet of a dirty bourgeois
+sofa.
+
+My dear fellow, I have spent six days in this delightful
+country-house, and I never tire of admiring the beauties of the park,
+surrounded by forests where pretty wood-paths lead beside the brooks.
+Nature and its silence, these tranquil pleasures, this placid life to
+which she woos me,--all attract. Ah! here is true literature; no fault
+of style among the meadows. Happiness forgets all things here,--even
+the Debats! It has rained all the morning; while the countess slept
+and Montcornet tramped over his domain, I have compelled myself to
+keep my rash, imprudent promise to write to you.
+
+Until now, though I was born at Alencon, of an old judge and a
+prefect, so they say, and though I know something of agriculture, I
+supposed the tale of estates bringing in four or five thousand francs
+a month to be a fable. Money, to me, meant a couple of dreadful
+things,--work and a publisher, journalism and politics. When shall we
+poor fellows come upon a land where gold springs up with the grass?
+That is what I desire for you and for me and the rest of us in the
+name of the theatre, and of the press, and of book-making! Amen!
+
+Will Florine be jealous of the late Mademoiselle Laguerre? Our modern
+Bourets have no French nobles now to show them how to live; they hire
+one opera-box among three of them; they subscribe for their pleasures;
+they no longer cut down magnificently bound quartos to match the
+octavos in their library; in fact, they scarcely buy even stitched
+paper books. What is to become of us?
+
+
+                                      Adieu; continue to care for
+                                      Your Blondet.
+
+
+If this letter, dashed off by the idlest pen of the century, had not
+by some lucky chance been preserved, it would have been almost
+impossible to describe Les Aigues; and without this description the
+history of the horrible events that occurred there would certainly be
+less interesting.
+
+After that remark some persons will expect to see the flashing of the
+cuirass of the former colonel of the guard, and the raging of his
+anger as he falls like a waterspout upon his little wife; so that the
+end of this present history may be like the end of all modern dramas,
+--a tragedy of the bed-chamber. Perhaps the fatal scene will take
+place in that charming room with the blue monochromes, where beautiful
+ideal birds are painted on the ceilings and the shutters, where
+Chinese monsters laugh with open jaws on the mantle-shelf, and
+dragons, green and gold, twist their tails in curious convolutions
+around rich vases, and Japanese fantasy embroiders its designs of many
+colors; where sofas and reclining-chairs and consoles and what-nots
+invite to that contemplative idleness which forbids all action.
+
+No; the drama here to be developed is not one of private life; it
+concerns things higher, or lower. Expect no scenes of passion; the
+truth of this history is only too dramatic. And remember, the
+historian should never forget that his mission is to do justice to
+all; the poor and the prosperous are equals before his pen; to him the
+peasant appears in the grandeur of his misery, and the rich in the
+pettiness of his folly. Moreover, the rich man has passions, the
+peasant only wants. The peasant is therefore doubly poor; and if,
+politically, his aggressions must be pitilessly repressed, to the eyes
+of humanity and religion he is sacred.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER II
+
+                   A BUCOLIC OVERLOOKED BY VIRGIL
+
+When a Parisian drops into the country he is cut off from all his
+usual habits, and soon feels the dragging hours, no matter how
+attentive his friends may be to him. Therefore, because it is so
+impossible to prolong in a tete-a-tete conversations that are soon
+exhausted, the master and mistress of a country-house are apt to say,
+calmly, "You will be terribly bored here." It is true that to
+understand the delights of country life one must have something to do,
+some interests in it; one must know the nature of the work to be done,
+and the alternating harmony of toil and pleasure,--eternal symbol of
+human life.
+
+When a Parisian has recovered his powers of sleeping, shaken off the
+fatigues of his journey, and accustomed himself to country habits, the
+hardest period of the day (if he wears thin boots and is neither a
+sportsman nor an agriculturalist) is the early morning. Between the
+hours of waking and breakfasting, the women of the family are sleeping
+or dressing, and therefore unapproachable; the master of the house is
+out and about on his own affairs; a Parisian is therefore compelled to
+be alone from eight to eleven o'clock, the hour chosen in all
+country-houses for breakfast. Now, having got what amusement he can out
+of carefully dressing himself, he has soon exhausted that resource.
+Then, perhaps, he has brought with him some work, which he finds it
+impossible to do, and which goes back untouched, after he sees the
+difficulties of doing it, into his valise; a writer is then obliged to
+wander about the park and gape at nothing or count the big trees. The
+easier the life, the more irksome such occupations are,--unless,
+indeed, one belongs to the sect of shaking quakers or to the honorable
+guild of carpenters or taxidermists. If one really had, like the
+owners of estates, to live in the country, it would be well to supply
+one's self with a geological, mineralogical, entomological, or
+botanical hobby; but a sensible man doesn't give himself a vice merely
+to kill time for a fortnight. The noblest estate, and the finest
+chateaux soon pall on those who possess nothing but the sight of them.
+The beauties of nature seem rather squalid compared to the
+representation of them at the opera. Paris, by retrospection, shines
+from all its facets. Unless some particular interest attaches us, as
+it did in Blondet's case, to scenes honored by the steps and lighted
+by the eyes of a certain person, one would envy the birds their wings
+and long to get back to the endless, exciting scenes of Paris and its
+harrowing strifes.
+
+The long letter of the young journalist must make most intelligent
+minds suppose that he had reached, morally and physically, that
+particular phase of satisfied passions and comfortable happiness which
+certain winged creatures fed in Strasbourg so perfectly represent
+when, with their heads sunk behind their protruding gizzards, they
+neither see nor wish to see the most appetizing food. So, when the
+formidable letter was finished, the writer felt the need of getting
+away from the gardens of Armida and doing something to enliven the
+deadly void of the morning hours; for the hours between breakfast and
+dinner belonged to the mistress of the house, who knew very well how
+to make them pass quickly. To keep, as Madame de Montcornet did, a man
+of talent in the country without ever seeing on his face the false
+smile of satiety, or detecting the yawn of a weariness that cannot be
+concealed, is a great triumph for a woman. The affection which is
+equal to such a test certainly ought to be eternal. It is to be
+wondered at that women do not oftener employ it to judge of their
+lovers; a fool, an egoist, or a petty nature could never stand it.
+Philip the Second himself, the Alexander of dissimulation, would have
+told his secrets if condemned to a month's tete-a-tete in the country.
+Perhaps this is why kings seek to live in perpetual motion, and allow
+no one to see them more than fifteen minutes at a time.
+
+Notwithstanding that he had received the delicate attentions of one of
+the most charming women in Paris, Emile Blondet was able to feel once
+more the long forgotten delights of a truant schoolboy; and on the
+morning of the day after his letter was written he had himself called
+by Francois, the head valet, who was specially appointed to wait on
+him, for the purpose of exploring the valley of the Avonne.
+
+The Avonne is a little river which, being swollen above Conches by
+numerous rivulets, some of which rise in Les Aigues, falls at
+Ville-aux-Fayes into one of the large affluents of the Seine. The
+geographical position of the Avonne, navigable for over twelve miles,
+had, ever since Jean Bouvet invented rafts, given full money value to
+the forests of Les Aigues, Soulanges, and Ronquerolles, standing on
+the crest of the hills between which this charming river flows. The
+park of Les Aigues covers the greater part of the valley, between the
+river (bordered on both sides by the forest called des Aigues) and the
+royal mail road, defined by a line of old elms in the distance along
+the slopes of the Avonne mountains, which are in fact the foot-hills
+of that magnificent ampitheatre called the Morvan.
+
+However vulgar the comparison may be, the park, lying thus at the
+bottom of the valley, is like an enormous fish with its head at
+Conches and its tail in the village of Blangy; for it widens in the
+middle to nearly three hundred acres, while towards Conches it counts
+less than fifty, and sixty at Blangy. The position of this estate,
+between three villages, and only three miles from the little town of
+Soulanges, from which the descent is rapid, may perhaps have led to
+the strife and caused the excesses which are the chief interest
+attaching to the place. If, when seen from the mail road or from the
+uplands beyond Ville-aux-Fayes, the paradise of Les Aigues induces
+mere passing travellers to commit the mortal sin of envy, why should
+the rich burghers of Soulanges and Ville-aux-Fayes who had it before
+their eyes and admired it every day of their lives, have been more
+virtuous?
+
+This last topographical detail was needed to explain the site, also
+the use of the four gates by which alone the park of Les Aigues was
+entered; for it was completely surrounded by walls, except where
+nature had provided a fine view, and at such points sunk fences or
+ha-has had been placed. The four gates, called the gate of Conches, the
+gate of Avonne, the gate of Blangy, and the gate of the Avenue, showed
+the styles of the different periods at which they were constructed so
+admirably that a brief description, in the interest of archaeologists,
+will presently be given, as brief as the one Blondet has already
+written about the gate of the Avenue.
+
+After eight days of strolling about with the countess, the illustrious
+editor of the "Journal des Debats" knew by heart the Chinese kiosk,
+the bridges, the isles, the hermitage, the dairy, the ruined temple,
+the Babylonian ice-house, and all the other delusions invented by
+landscape architects which some nine hundred acres of land can be made
+to serve. He now wished to find the sources of the Avonne, which the
+general and the countess daily extolled in the evening, making plans
+to visit them which were daily forgotten the next morning. Above Les
+Aigues the Avonne really had the appearance of an alpine torrent.
+Sometimes it hollowed a bed among the rocks, sometimes it went
+underground; on this side the brooks came down in cascades, there they
+flowed like the Loire on sandy shallows where rafts could not pass on
+account of the shifting channels. Blondet took a short cut through the
+labyrinths of the park to reach the gate of Conches. This gate demands
+a few words, which give, moreover, certain historical details about
+the property.
+
+The original founder of Les Aigues was a younger son of the Soulanges
+family, enriched by marriage, whose chief ambition was to make his
+elder brother jealous,--a sentiment, by the bye, to which we owe the
+fairy-land of Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore. In the middle ages the
+castle of Les Aigues stood on the banks of the Avonne. Of this old
+building nothing remains but the gateway, which has a porch like the
+entrance to a fortified town, flanked by two round towers with conical
+roofs. Above the arch of the porch are heavy stone courses, now draped
+with vegetation, showing three large windows with cross-bar sashes. A
+winding stairway in one of the towers leads to two chambers, and a
+kitchen occupies the other tower. The roof of the porch, of pointed
+shape like all old timber-work, is noticeable for two weathercocks
+perched at each end of a ridge-pole ornamented with fantastic iron-work.
+Many an important place cannot boast of so fine a town hall. On the
+outside of this gateway, the keystone of the arch still bears the
+arms of Soulanges, preserved by the hardness of the stone on which the
+chisel of the artist carved them, as follows: Azure, on a pale,
+argent, three pilgrim's staff's sable; a fess bronchant, gules,
+charged with four grosses patee, fitched, or; with the heraldic form
+of a shield awarded to younger sons. Blondet deciphered the motto, "Je
+soule agir,"--one of those puns that crusaders delighted to make upon
+their names, and which brings to mind a fine political maxim, which,
+as we shall see later, was unfortunately forgotten by Montcornet. The
+gate, which was opened for Blondet by a very pretty girl, was of
+time-worn wood clamped with iron. The keeper, wakened by the creaking
+of the hinges, put his nose out of the window and showed himself in his
+night-shirt.
+
+"So our keepers sleep till this time of day!" thought the Parisian,
+who thought himself very knowing in rural customs.
+
+After a walk of about quarter of an hour, he reached the sources of
+the river above Conches, where his ravished eyes beheld one of those
+landscapes that ought to be described, like the history of France, in
+a thousand volumes or in only one. We must here content ourselves with
+two paragraphs.
+
+A projecting rock, covered with dwarf trees and abraded at its base by
+the Avonne, to which circumstance it owes a slight resemblance to an
+enormous turtle lying across the river, forms an arch through which
+the eye takes in a little sheet of water, clear as a mirror, where the
+stream seems to sleep until it reaches in the distance a series of
+cascades falling among huge rocks, where little weeping willows with
+elastic motion sway back and forth to the flow of waters.
+
+Beyond these cascades is the hillside, rising sheer, like a Rhine rock
+clothed with moss and heather, gullied like it, again, by sharp ridges
+of schist and mica sending down, here and there, white foaming
+rivulets to which a little meadow, always watered and always green,
+serves as a cup; farther on, beyond the picturesque chaos and in
+contrast to this wild, solitary nature, the gardens of Conches are
+seen, with the village roofs and the clock-tower and the outlying
+fields.
+
+There are the two paragraphs, but the rising sun, the purity of the
+air, the dewy sheen, the melody of woods and waters--imagine them!
+
+"Almost as charming as at the Opera," thought Blondet, making his way
+along the banks of the unnavigable portion of the Avonne, whose
+caprices contrast with the straight and deep and silent stream of the
+lower river, flowing between the tall trees of the forest of Les
+Aigues.
+
+Blondet did not proceed far on his morning walk, for he was presently
+brought to a stand-still by the sight of a peasant,--one of those who,
+in this drama, are supernumeraries so essential to its action that it
+may be doubted whether they are not in fact its leading actors.
+
+When the clever journalist reached a group of rocks where the main
+stream is imprisoned, as it were, between two portals, he saw a man
+standing so motionless as to excite his curiosity, while the clothes
+and general air of this living statue greatly puzzled him.
+
+The humble personage before him was a living presentment of the old
+men dear to Charlet's pencil; resembling the troopers of that Homer of
+soldiery in a strong frame able to endure hardship, and his immortal
+skirmishers in a fiery, crimson, knotted face, showing small capacity
+for submission. A coarse felt hat, the brim of which was held to the
+crown by stitches, protected a nearly bald head from the weather;
+below it fell a quantity of white hair which a painter would gladly
+have paid four francs an hour to copy,--a dazzling mass of snow, worn
+like that in all the classical representations of Deity. It was easy
+to guess from the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing the
+lines of the mouth, that the toothless old fellow was more given to
+the bottle than the trencher. His thin white beard gave a threatening
+expression to his profile by the stiffness of its short bristles. The
+eyes, too small for his enormous face, and sloping like those of a
+pig, betrayed cunning and also laziness; but at this particular moment
+they were gleaming with the intent look he cast upon the river. The
+sole garments of this curious figure were an old blouse, formerly
+blue, and trousers of the coarse burlap used in Paris to wrap bales.
+All city people would have shuddered at the sight of his broken
+sabots, without even a wisp of straw to stop the cracks; and it is
+very certain that the blouse and the trousers had no money value at
+all except to a paper-maker.
+
+As Blondet examined this rural Diogenes, he admitted the possibility
+of a type of peasantry he had seen in old tapestries, old pictures,
+old sculptures, and which, up to this time, had seemed to him
+imaginary. He resolved for the future not to utterly condemn the
+school of ugliness, perceiving a possibility that in man beauty may be
+but the flattering exception, a chimera in which the race struggles to
+believe.
+
+"What can be the ideas, the morals, the habits, of such a being? What
+is he thinking of?" thought Blondet, seized with curiosity. "Is he my
+fellow-creature? We have nothing in common but shape, and even
+that!--"
+
+He noticed in the old man's limbs the peculiar rigidity of the tissues
+of persons who live in the open air, accustomed to the inclemencies of
+the weather and to the endurance of heat and cold,--hardened to
+everything, in short,--which makes their leathern skin almost a hide,
+and their nerves an apparatus against physical pain almost as powerful
+as that of the Russians or the Arabs.
+
+"Here's one of Cooper's Red-skins," thought Blondet; "one needn't go
+to America to study savages."
+
+Though the Parisian was less than ten paces off, the old man did not
+turn his head, but kept looking at the opposite bank with a fixity
+which the fakirs of India give to their vitrified eyes and their
+stiffened joints. Compelled by the power of a species of magnetism,
+more contagious than people have any idea of, Blondet ended by gazing
+at the water himself.
+
+"Well, my good man, what do you see there?" he asked, after the lapse
+of a quarter of an hour, during which time he saw nothing to justify
+this intent contemplation.
+
+"Hush!" whispered the old man, with a sign to Blondet not to ruffle
+the air with his voice; "You will frighten it--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"An otter, my good gentleman. If it hears us it'll go quick under
+water. I'm certain it jumped there; see! see! there, where the water
+bubbles! Ha! it sees a fish, it is after that! But my boy will grab it
+as it comes back. The otter, don't you know, is very rare; it is
+scientific game, and good eating, too. I get ten francs for every one
+I carry to Les Aigues, for the lady fasts Fridays, and to-morrow is
+Friday. Years agone the deceased madame used to pay me twenty francs,
+and gave me the skin to boot! Mouche," he called, in a low voice,
+"watch it!"
+
+Blondet now perceived on the other side of the river two bright eyes,
+like those of a cat, beneath a tuft of alders; then he saw the tanned
+forehead and tangled hair of a boy about ten years of age, who was
+lying on his stomach and making signs towards the otter to let his
+master know he kept it well in sight. Blondet, completely mastered by
+the eagerness of the old man and boy, allowed the demon of the chase
+to get the better of him,--that demon with the double claws of hope
+and curiosity, who carries you whithersoever he will.
+
+"The hat-makers buy the skin," continued the old man; "it's so soft,
+so handsome! They cover caps with it."
+
+"Do you really think so, my old man?" said Blondet, smiling.
+
+"Well truly, my good gentleman, you ought to know more than I, though
+I am seventy years old," replied the old fellow, very humbly and
+respectfully, falling into the attitude of a giver of holy water;
+"perhaps you can tell me why conductors and wine-merchants are so fond
+of it?"
+
+Blondet, a master of irony, already on his guard from the word
+"scientific," recollected the Marechal de Richelieu and began to
+suspect some jest on the part of the old man; but he was reassured by
+his artless attitude and the perfectly stupid expression of his face.
+
+"In my young days we had lots of otters," whispered the old fellow;
+"but they've hunted 'em so that if we see the tail of one in seven
+years it is as much as ever we do. And the sub-prefect at
+Ville-aux-Fayes,--doesn't monsieur know him? though he be a Parisian,
+he's a fine young man like you, and he loves curiosities,--so, as I was
+saying, hearing of my talent for catching otters, for I know 'em as
+you know your alphabet, he says to me like this: 'Pere Fourchon,' says
+he, 'when you find an otter bring it to me, and I'll pay you well; and
+if it's spotted white on the back,' says he, 'I'll give you thirty
+francs.' That's just what he did say to me as true as I believe in God
+the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And there's a learned man at
+Soulanges, Monsieur Gourdon, our doctor, who is making, so they tell
+me, a collection of natural history which hasn't its mate at Dijon
+even; indeed he is first among the learned men in these parts, and
+he'll pay me a fine price, too; he stuffs men and beasts. Now my boy
+there stands me out that that otter has got the white spots. 'If
+that's so,' says I to him, 'then the good God wishes well to us this
+morning!' Ha! didn't you see the water bubble? yes, there it is! there
+it is! Though it lives in a kind of a burrow, it sometimes stays whole
+days under water. Ha, there! it heard you, my good gentleman; it's on
+its guard now; for there's not a more suspicious animal on earth; it's
+worse than a woman."
+
+"So you call women suspicious, do you?" said Blondet.
+
+"Faith, monsieur, if you come from Paris you ought to know about that
+better than I. But you'd have done better for me if you had stayed in
+your bed and slept all the morning; don't you see that wake there?
+that's where she's gone under. Get up, Mouche! the otter heard
+monsieur talking, and now she's scary enough to keep us at her heels
+till midnight. Come, let's be off! and good-bye to our thirty francs!"
+
+Mouche got up reluctantly; he looked at the spot where the water
+bubbled, pointed to it with his finger and seemed unable to give up
+all hope. The child, with curly hair and a brown face, like the angels
+in a fifteenth-century picture, seemed to be in breeches, for his
+trousers ended at the knee in a ragged fringe of brambles and dead
+leaves. This necessary garment was fastened upon him by cords of
+tarred oakum in guise of braces. A shirt of the same burlap which made
+the old man's trousers, thickened, however, by many darns, open in
+front showed a sun-burnt little breast. In short, the attire of the
+being called Mouche was even more startlingly simple than that of Pere
+Fourchon.
+
+"What a good-natured set of people they are here," thought Blondet;
+"if a man frightened away the game of the people of the suburbs of
+Paris, how their tongues would maul him!"
+
+As he had never seen an otter, even in a museum, he was delighted with
+this episode of his early walk. "Come," said he, quite touched when
+the old man walked away without asking him for a compensation, "you
+say you are a famous otter catcher. If you are sure there is an otter
+down there--"
+
+From the other side of the water Mouche pointed his finger to certain
+air-bubbles coming up from the bottom of the Avonne and bursting on
+its surface.
+
+"It has come back!" said Pere Fourchon; "don't you see it breathe, the
+beggar? How do you suppose they manage to breathe at the bottom of the
+water? Ah, the creature's so clever it laughs at science."
+
+"Well," said Blondet, who supposed the last word was a jest of the
+peasantry in general rather than of this peasant in particular, "wait
+and catch the otter."
+
+"And what are we to do about our day's work, Mouche and I?"
+
+"What is your day worth?"
+
+"For the pair of us, my apprentice and me?--Five francs," said the old
+man, looking Blondet in the eye with a hesitation which betrayed an
+enormous overcharge.
+
+The journalist took ten francs from his pocket, saying, "There's ten,
+and I'll give you ten more for the otter."
+
+"And it won't cost you dear if there's white on its back; for the
+sub-prefect told me there wasn't one o' them museums that had the like;
+but he knows everything, our sub-prefect,--no fool he! If I hunt the
+otter, he, M'sieur des Lupeaulx, hunts Mademoiselle Gaubertin, who has
+a fine white 'dot' on her back. Come now, my good gentleman, if I may
+make so bold, plunge into the middle of the Avonne and get to that
+stone down there. If we head the otter off, it will come down stream;
+for just see their slyness, the beggars! they always go above their
+burrow to feed, for, once full of fish, they know they can easily
+drift down, the sly things! Ha! if I'd been trained in their school I
+should be living now on an income; but I was a long time finding out
+that you must go up stream very early in the morning if you want to
+bag the game before others. Well, somebody threw a spell over me when
+I was born. However, we three together ought to be slyer than the
+otter."
+
+"How so, my old necromancer?"
+
+"Why, bless you! we are as stupid as the beasts, and so we come to
+understand the beasts. Now, see, this is what we'll do. When the otter
+wants to get home Mouche and I'll frighten it here, and you'll
+frighten it over there; frightened by us and frightened by you it will
+jump on the bank, and when it takes to earth, it is lost! It can't
+run; it has web feet for swimming. Ho, ho! it will make you laugh,
+such floundering! you don't know whether you are fishing or hunting!
+The general up at Les Aigues, I have known him to stay here three days
+running, he was so bent on getting an otter."
+
+Blondet, armed with a branch cut for him by the old man, who requested
+him to whip the water with it when he called to him, planted himself
+in the middle of the river by jumping from stone to stone.
+
+"There, that will do, my good gentleman."
+
+Blondet stood where he was told without remarking the lapse of time,
+for every now and then the old fellow made him a sign as much as to
+say that all was going well; and besides, nothing makes time go so
+fast as the expectation that quick action is to succeed the perfect
+stillness of watching.
+
+"Pere Fourchon," whispered the boy, finding himself alone with the old
+man, "there's _really_ an otter!"
+
+"Do you see it?"
+
+"There, see there!"
+
+The old fellow was dumb-founded at beholding under water the
+reddish-brown fur of an actual otter.
+
+"It's coming my way!" said the child.
+
+"Hit him a sharp blow on the head and jump into the water and hold him
+fast down, but don't let him go!"
+
+Mouche dove into the water like a frightened frog.
+
+"Come, come, my good gentleman," cried Pere Fourchon to Blondet,
+jumping into the water and leaving his sabots on the bank, "frighten
+him! frighten him! Don't you see him? he is swimming fast your way!"
+
+The old man dashed toward Blondet through the water, calling out with
+the gravity that country people retain in the midst of their greatest
+excitements:--
+
+"Don't you see him, there, along the rocks?"
+
+Blondet, placed by direction of the old fellow in such a way that the
+sun was in his eyes, thrashed the water with much satisfaction to
+himself.
+
+"Go on, go on!" cried Pere Fourchon; "on the rock side; the burrow is
+there, to your left!"
+
+Carried away by excitement and by his long waiting, Blondet slipped
+from the stones into the water.
+
+"Ha! brave you are, my good gentleman! Twenty good Gods! I see him
+between your legs! you'll have him!-- Ah! there! he's gone--he's
+gone!" cried the old man, in despair.
+
+Then, in the fury of the chase, the old fellow plunged into the
+deepest part of the stream in front of Blondet.
+
+"It's your fault we've lost him!" he cried, as Blondet gave him a hand
+to pull him out, dripping like a triton, and a vanquished triton. "The
+rascal, I see him, under those rocks! He has let go his fish,"
+continued Fourchon, pointing to something that floated on the surface.
+"We'll have that at any rate; it's a tench, a real tench."
+
+Just then a groom in livery on horseback and leading another horse by
+the bridle galloped up the road toward Conches.
+
+"See! there's the chateau people sending after you," said the old man.
+"If you want to cross back again I'll give you a hand. I don't mind
+about getting wet; it saves washing!"
+
+"How about rheumatism?"
+
+"Rheumatism! don't you see the sun has browned our legs, Mouche and
+me, like tobacco-pipes. Here, lean on me, my good gentleman--you're
+from Paris; you don't know, though you _do_ know so much, how to walk on
+our rocks. If you stay here long enough, you'll learn a deal that's
+written in the book o' nature,--you who write, so they tell me, in the
+newspapers."
+
+Blondet had reached the bank before Charles, the groom, perceived him.
+
+"Ah, monsieur!" he cried; "you don't know how anxious Madame has been
+since she heard you had gone through the gate of Conches; she was
+afraid you were drowned. They have rung the great bell three times,
+and Monsieur le cure is hunting for you in the park."
+
+"What time is it, Charles?"
+
+"A quarter to twelve."
+
+"Help me to mount."
+
+"Ha!" exclaimed the groom, noticing the water that dripped from
+Blondet's boots and trousers, "has monsieur been taken in by Pere
+Fourchon's otter?"
+
+The words enlightened the journalist.
+
+"Don't say a word about it, Charles," he cried, "and I'll make it all
+right with you."
+
+"Oh, as for that!" answered the man, "Monsieur le comte himself has
+been taken in by that otter. Whenever a visitor comes to Les Aigues,
+Pere Fourchon sets himself on the watch, and if the gentleman goes to
+see the sources of the Avonne he sells him the otter; he plays the
+trick so well that Monsieur le comte has been here three times and
+paid him for six days' work, just to stare at the water!"
+
+"Heavens!" thought Blondet. "And I imagined I had seen the greatest
+comedians of the present day!--Potier, the younger Baptiste, Michot,
+and Monrose. What are they compared to that old beggar?"
+
+"He is very knowing at the business, Pere Fourchon is," continued
+Charles; "and he has another string to his bow, besides. He calls
+himself a rope-maker, and has a walk under the park wall by the gate
+of Blangy. If you merely touch his rope he'll entangle you so cleverly
+that you will want to turn the wheel and make a bit of it yourself;
+and for that you would have to pay a fee for apprenticeship. Madame
+herself was taken in, and gave him twenty francs. Ah! he is the king
+of tricks, that old fellow!"
+
+The groom's gossip set Blondet thinking of the extreme craftiness and
+wiliness of the French peasant, of which he had heard a great deal
+from his father, a judge at Alencon. Then the satirical meaning hidden
+beneath Pere Fourchon's apparent guilelessness came back to him, and
+he owned himself "gulled" by the Burgundian beggar.
+
+"You would never believe, monsieur," said Charles, as they reached the
+portico at Les Aigues, "how much one is forced to distrust everybody
+and everything in the country,--especially here, where the general is
+not much liked--"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"That's more than I know," said Charles, with the stupid air servants
+assume to shield themselves when they wish not to answer their
+superiors, which nevertheless gave Blondet a good deal to think of.
+
+"Here you are, truant!" cried the general, coming out on the terrace
+when he heard the horses. "Here he is; don't be uneasy!" he called
+back to his wife, whose little footfalls were heard behind him. "Now
+the Abbe Brossette is missing. Go and find him, Charles," he said to
+the groom.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER III
+
+                            THE TAVERN
+
+The gate of Blangy, built by Bouret, was formed of two wide pilasters
+of projecting rough-hewn stone; each surmounted by a dog sitting on
+his haunches and holding an escutcheon between his fore paws. The
+proximity of a small house where the steward lived dispensed with the
+necessity for a lodge. Between the two pilasters, a sumptuous iron
+gate, like those made in Buffon's time for the Jardin des Plantes,
+opened on a short paved way which led to the country road (formerly
+kept in order by Les Aigues and the Soulanges family) which unites
+Conches, Cerneux, Blangy, and Soulanges to Ville-aux-Fayes, like a
+wreath, for the whole road is lined with flowering hedges and little
+houses covered with roses and honey-suckle and other climbing plants.
+
+There, along a pretty wall which extends as far as a terrace from
+which the land of Les Aigues falls rapidly to the valley till it meets
+that of Soulanges, are the rotten posts, the old wheel, and the forked
+stakes which constituted the manufactory of the village rope-maker.
+
+Soon after midday, while Blondet was seating himself at table opposite
+the Abbe Brossette and receiving the tender expostulations of the
+countess, Pere Fourchon and Mouche arrived at this establishment. From
+that vantage-ground Pere Fourchon, under pretence of rope-making,
+could watch Les Aigues and see every one who went in and out. Nothing
+escaped him, the opening of the blinds, tete-a-tete loiterings, or the
+least little incidents of country life, were spied upon by the old
+fellow, who had set up this business within the last three years,--a
+trifling circumstance which neither the masters, nor the servants, nor
+the keepers of Les Aigues had as yet remarked upon.
+
+"Go round to the house by the gate of the Avonne while I put away the
+tackle," said Pere Fourchon to his attendant, "and when you have
+blabbed about the thing, they'll no doubt send after me to the
+Grand-I-Vert, where I am going for a drop of drink,--for it makes one
+thirsty enough to wade in the water that way. If you do just as I tell
+you, you'll hook a good breakfast out of them; try to meet the
+countess, and give a slap at me, and that will put it into her head to
+come and preach morality or something! There's lots of good wine to
+get out of it."
+
+After these last instructions, which the sly look in Mouche's face
+rendered quite superfluous, the old peasant, hugging the otter under
+his arm, disappeared along the country road.
+
+Half-way between the gate and the village there stood, at the time
+when Emile Blondet stayed at Les Aigues, one of those houses which are
+never seen but in parts of France where stone is scarce. Bits of
+bricks picked up anywhere, cobblestones set like diamonds in the clay
+mud, formed very solid walls, though worn in places; the roof was
+supported by stout branches and covered with rushes and straw, while
+the clumsy shutters and the broken door--in short, everything about
+the cottage was the product of lucky finds, or of gifts obtained by
+begging.
+
+The peasant has an instinct for his habitation like that of an animal
+for its nest or its burrow, and this instinct was very marked in all
+the arrangements of this cottage. In the first place, the door and the
+window looked to the north. The house, placed on a little rise in the
+stoniest angle of a vineyard, was certainly healthful. It was reached
+by three steps, carefully made with stakes and planks filled in with
+broken stone and gravel, so that the water ran off rapidly; and as the
+rain seldom comes from the northward in Burgundy, no dampness could
+rot the foundations, slight as they were. Below the steps and along
+the path ran a rustic paling, hidden beneath a hedge of hawthorn and
+sweet-brier. An arbor, with a few clumsy tables and wooden benches,
+filled the space between the cottage and the road, and invited the
+passers-by to rest themselves. At the upper end of the bank by the
+house roses grew, and wall-flowers, violets, and other flowers that
+cost nothing. Jessamine and honey-suckle had fastened their tendrils
+on the roof, mossy already, though the building was far from old.
+
+To the right of the house, the owner had built a stable for two cows.
+In front of this erection of old boards, a sunken piece of ground
+served as a yard where, in a corner, was a huge manure-heap. On the
+other side of the house and the arbor stood a thatched shed, supported
+on trunks of trees, under which the various outdoor properties of the
+peasantry were put away,--the utensils of the vine-dressers, their
+empty casks, logs of wood piled about a mound which contained the
+oven, the mouth of which opened, as was usual in the houses of the
+peasantry, under the mantle-piece of the chimney in the kitchen.
+
+About an acre of land adjoined the house, inclosed by an evergreen
+hedge and planted with grape-vines; tended as peasants tend them,
+--that is to say, well-manured, and dug round, and layered so that they
+usually set their fruit before the vines of the large proprietors in a
+circuit of ten miles round. A few trees, almond, plum, and apricot,
+showed their slim heads here and there in this enclosure. Between the
+rows of vines potatoes and beans were planted. In addition to all
+this, on the side towards the village and beyond the yard was a bit of
+damp low ground, favorable for the growth of cabbages and onions
+(favorite vegetables of the working-classes), which was closed by a
+wooden gate, through which the cows were driven, trampling the path
+into mud and covering it with dung.
+
+The house, which had two rooms on the ground-floor, opened upon the
+vineyard. On this side an outer stairway, roofed with thatch and
+resting against the wall of the house, led up to the garret, which was
+lighted by one round window. Under this rustic stairway opened a
+cellar built of Burgundy brick, containing several casks of wine.
+
+Though the kitchen utensils of the peasantry are usually only two,
+namely, a frying-pan and an iron pot, with which they manage to do all
+their cooking, exceptions to this rule, in the shape of two enormous
+saucepans hanging beneath the mantle-shelf and above a small portable
+stove, were to be seen in this cottage. In spite, however, of this
+indication of luxury, the furniture was in keeping with the external
+appearance of the place. A jar held water, the spoons were of wood or
+pewter, the dishes, of red clay without and white within, were scaling
+off and had been mended with pewter rivets; the heavy table and chairs
+were of pine wood, and for flooring there was nothing better than the
+hardened earth. Every fifth year the walls received a coat of
+white-wash and so did the narrow beams of the ceiling, from which hung
+bacon, strings of onions, bundles of tallow candles, and the bags in
+which a peasant keeps his seeds; near the bread-box stood an
+old-fashioned wardrobe in walnut, where the scanty household linen,
+and the one change of garments together with the holiday attire of the
+entire family were kept.
+
+Above the mantel of the chimney gleamed a poacher's old gun, not worth
+five francs,--the wood scorched, the barrel to all appearances never
+cleaned. An observer might reflect that the protection of a hovel with
+only a latch, and an outer gate that was only a paling and never
+closed, needed no better weapon; but still the wonder was to what use
+it was put. In the first place, though the wood was of the commonest
+kind, the barrel was carefully selected, and came from a valuable gun,
+given in all probability to a game-keeper. Moreover, the owner of this
+weapon never missed his aim; there was between him and his gun the
+same intimate acquaintance that there is between a workman and his
+tool. If the muzzle must be raised or lowered the merest fraction in
+its aim, because it carries just an atom above or below the range, the
+poacher knows it; he obeys the rule and never misses. An officer of
+artillery would have found the essential parts of this weapon in good
+condition notwithstanding its uncleanly appearance. In all that the
+peasant appropriates to his use, in all that serves him, he displays
+just the amount of force that is needed, neither more nor less; he
+attends to the essential and to nothing beyond. External perfection he
+has no conception of. An unerring judge of the necessary in all
+things, he thoroughly understands degrees of strength, and knows very
+well when working for an employer how to give the least possible for
+the most he can get. This contemptible-looking gun will be found to
+play a serious part in the life of the family inhabiting this cottage,
+and you will presently learn how and why.
+
+Have you now taken in all the many details of this hovel, planted
+about five hundred feet away from the pretty gate of Les Aigues? Do
+you see it crouching there, like a beggar beside a palace? Well, its
+roof covered with velvet mosses, its clacking hens, its grunting pig,
+its straying heifer, all its rural graces have a horrible meaning.
+
+Fastened to a pole, which was stuck in the ground beside the entrance
+through the fence, was a withered bunch of three pine branches and
+some old oak-leaves tied together with a rag. Above the door of the
+house a roving artist had painted, probably in return for his
+breakfast, a huge capital "I" in green on a white ground two feet
+square; and for the benefit of those who could read, this witty joke
+in twelve letters: "Au Grand-I-Vert" (hiver). On the left of the door
+was a vulgar sign bearing, in colored letters, "Good March beer," and
+the picture of a foaming pot of the same, with a woman, in a dress
+excessively low-necked, on one side, and an hussar on the other,--both
+coarsely colored. Consequently, in spite of the blooming flowers and
+the fresh country air, this cottage exhaled the same strong and
+nauseous odor of wine and food which assails you in Paris as you pass
+the door of the cheap cook-shops of the faubourg.
+
+Now you know the surroundings. Behold the inhabitants and hear their
+history, which contains more than one lesson for philanthropists.
+
+The proprietor of the Grand-I-Vert, named Francois Tonsard, commends
+himself to the attention of philosophers by the manner in which he had
+solved the problem of an idle life and a busy life, so as to make the
+idleness profitable, and occupation nil.
+
+A jack-of-all-trades, he knew how to cultivate the ground, but for
+himself only. For others, he dug ditches, gathered fagots, barked the
+trees, or cut them down. In all such work the employer is at the mercy
+of the workman. Tonsard owned his plot of ground to the generosity of
+Mademoiselle Laguerre. In his early youth he had worked by the day for
+the gardener at Les Aigues; and he really had not his equal in
+trimming the shrubbery-trees, the hedges, the horn-beams, and the
+horse-chestnuts. His very name shows hereditary talent. In remote
+country-places privileges exist which are obtained and preserved with
+as much care as the merchants of a city display in getting theirs.
+Mademoiselle Laguerre was one day walking in the garden, when she
+overheard Tonsard, then a strapping fellow, say, "All I need to live
+on, and live happily, is an acre of land." The kind creature,
+accustomed to make others happy, gave him the acre of vineyard near
+the gate of Blangy, in return for one hundred days' work (a delicate
+regard for his feelings which was little understood), and allowed him
+to stay at Les Aigues, where he lived with her servants, who thought
+him one of the best fellows in Burgundy.
+
+Poor Tonsard (that is what everybody called him) worked about thirty
+days out of the hundred that he owed; the rest of the time he idled
+about, talking and laughing with Mademoiselle's women, particularly
+with Mademoiselle Cochet, the lady's maid, though she was ugly, like
+all confidential maids of handsome actresses. Laughing with
+Mademoiselle Cochet signified so many things that Soudry, the
+fortunate gendarme mentioned in Blondet's letter, still looked askance
+at Tonsard after the lapse of nearly twenty-five years. The walnut
+wardrobe, the bedstead with the tester and curtains, and the ornaments
+about the bedroom were doubtless the result of the said laughter.
+
+Once in possession of his care, Tonsard replied to the first person
+who happened to mention that Mademoiselle Laguerre had given it to
+him, "I've bought it deuced hard, and paid well for it. Do rich folks
+ever give us anything? Are one hundred days' work nothing? It has cost
+me three hundred francs, and the land is all stones." But that speech
+never got beyond the regions of his own class.
+
+Tonsard built his house himself, picking up the materials here and
+there as he could,--getting a day's work out of this one and that one,
+gleaning in the rubbish that was thrown away, often asking for things
+and always obtaining them. A discarded door cut in two for convenience
+in carrying away became the door of the stable; the window was the
+sash of a green-house. In short, the rubbish of the chateau, served to
+build the fatal cottage.
+
+Saved from the draft by Gaubertin, the steward of Les Aigues, whose
+father was prosecuting-attorney of the department, and who, moreover,
+could refuse nothing to Mademoiselle Cochet, Tonsard married as soon
+as his house was finished and his vines had begun to bear. A
+well-grown fellow of twenty-three, in everybody's good graces at Les
+Aigues, on whom Mademoiselle had bestowed an acre of her land, and who
+appeared to be a good worker, he had the art to ring the praises of
+his negative merits, and so obtained the daughter of a farmer on the
+Ronquerolles estate, which lies beyond the forest of Les Aigues.
+
+This farmer held the lease of half a farm, which was going to ruin in
+his hands for want of a helpmate. A widower, and inconsolable for the
+loss of his wife, he tried to drown his troubles, like the English, in
+wine, and then, when he had put the poor deceased out of his mind, he
+found himself married, so the village maliciously declared, to a woman
+named Boisson. From being a farmer he became once more a laborer, but
+an idle and drunken laborer, quarrelsome and vindictive, capable of
+any ill-deed, like most of his class when they fall from a well-to-do
+state of life into poverty. This man, whose practical information and
+knowledge of reading and writing placed him far above his fellow-workmen,
+while his vices kept him at the level of pauperism, you have already
+seen on the banks of the Avonne, measuring his cleverness with that of
+one of the cleverest men in Paris, in a bucolic overlooked by Virgil.
+
+Pere Fourchon, formerly a schoolmaster at Blangy, lost that place
+through misconduct and his singular ideas as to public education. He
+helped the children to make paper boats with their alphabets much
+oftener than he taught them how to spell; he scolded them in so
+remarkable a manner for pilfering fruit that his lectures might really
+have passed for lessons on the best way of scaling the walls. From
+teacher he became a postman. In this capacity, which serves as a
+refuge to many an old soldier, Pere Fourchon was daily reprimanded.
+Sometimes he forgot the letters in a tavern, at other times he kept
+them in his pocket. When he was drunk he left those for one village in
+another village; when he was sober he read them. Consequently, he was
+soon dismissed. No longer able to serve the State, Pere Fourchon ended
+by becoming a manufacturer. In the country a poor man can always get
+something to do, and make at least a pretence of gaining an honest
+livelihood. At sixty-eight years of age the old man started his
+rope-walk, a manufactory which requires the very smallest capital. The
+workshop is, as we have seen, any convenient wall; the machinery costs
+about ten francs. The apprentice slept, like his master, in a hay-loft,
+and lived on whatever he could pick up. The rapacity of the law in
+the matter of doors and windows expires "sub dio." The tow to make
+the first rope can be borrowed. But the principal revenue of Pere
+Fourchon and his satellite Mouche, the natural son of one of his
+natural daughters, came from the otters; and then there were
+breakfasts and dinners given them by peasants who could neither read
+nor write, and were glad to use the old fellow's talents when they had
+a bill to make out, or a letter to dispatch. Besides all this, he knew
+how to play the clarionet, and he went about with his friend
+Vermichel, the miller of Soulanges, to village weddings and the grand
+balls given at the Tivoli of Soulanges.
+
+Vermichel's name was Michel Vert, but the transposition was so
+generally used that Brunet, the clerk of the municipal court of
+Soulanges, was in the habit of writing Michel-Jean-Jerome Vert, called
+Vermichel, practitioner. Vermichel, a famous violin in the Burgundian
+regiment of former days, had procured for Pere Fourchon, in
+recognition of certain services, a situation as practitioner, which in
+remote country-places usually devolves on those who are able to sign
+their name. Pere Fourchon therefore added to his other avocations that
+of witness, or practitioner of legal papers, whenever the Sieur Brunet
+came to draw them in the districts of Cerneux, Conches, and Blangy.
+Vermichel and Fourchon, allied by a friendship of twenty years'
+tippling, might really be considered a business firm.
+
+Mouche and Fourchon, bound together by vice as Mentor and Telemachus
+by virtue, travelled like the latter, in search of their father,
+"panis angelorum,"--the only Latin words which the old fellow's memory
+had retained. They went about scraping up the pickings of the
+Grand-I-Vert, and those of the adjacent chateaux; for between them, in
+their busiest and most prosperous years, they had never contrived to
+make as much as three hundred and sixty fathoms of rope. In the first
+place, no dealer within a radius of fifty miles would have trusted his
+tow to either Mouche or Fourchon. The old man, surpassing the miracles
+of modern chemistry, knew too well how to resolve the tow into the
+all-benignant juice of the grape. Moreover, his triple functions of
+public writer for three townships, legal practitioner for one, and
+clarionet-player at large, hindered, so he said, the development of his
+business.
+
+Thus it happened that Tonsard was disappointed from the start in the
+hope he had indulged of increasing his comfort by an increase of
+property in marriage. The idle son-in-law had chanced, by a very
+common accident, on an idler father-in-law. Matters went all the worse
+because Tonsard's wife, gifted with a sort of rustic beauty, being
+tall and well-made, was not fond of work in the open air. Tonsard
+blamed his wife for her father's short-comings, and ill-treated her,
+with the customary revenge of the common people, whose minds take in
+only an effect and rarely look back to causes.
+
+Finding her fetters heavy, the woman lightened them. She used
+Tonsard's vices to get the better of him. Loving comfort and good
+eating herself, she encouraged his idleness and gluttony. In the first
+place, she managed to procure the good-will of the servants of the
+chateau, and Tonsard, in view of the results, made no complaint as to
+the means. He cared very little what his wife did, so long as she did
+all he wanted of her. That is the secret agreement of many a
+household. Madame Tonsard established the wine-shop of the
+Grand-I-Vert, her first customers being the servants of Les Aigues and
+the keepers and huntsmen.
+
+Gaubertin, formerly steward to Mademoiselle Laguerre, one of La
+Tonsard's chief patrons, gave her several puncheons of excellent wine
+to attract custom. The effect of these gifts (continued as long as
+Gaubertin remained a bachelor) and the fame of her rather lawless
+beauty commended this beauty to the Don Juans of the valley, and
+filled the wine-shop of the Grand-I-Vert. Being a lover of good
+eating, La Tonsard was naturally an excellent cook; and though her
+talents were only exercised on the common dishes of the country,
+jugged hare, game sauce, stewed fish and omelets, she was considered
+in all the country round to be an admirable cook of the sort of food
+which is eaten at a counter and spiced in a way to excite a desire for
+drink. By the end of two years, she had managed to rule Tonsard, and
+turn him to evil courses, which, indeed, he asked no better than to
+indulge in.
+
+The rascal was continually poaching, and with nothing to fear from it.
+The intimacies of his wife with Gaubertin and the keepers and the
+rural authorities, together with the laxity of the times, secured him
+impunity. As soon as his children were large enough he made them
+serviceable to his comfort, caring no more for their morality than for
+that of his wife. He had two sons and two daughters. Tonsard, who
+lived, as did his wife, from hand to mouth, might have come to an end
+of this easy life if he had not maintained a sort of martial law over
+his family, which compelled them to work for the preservation of it.
+When he had brought up his children, at the cost of those from whom
+his wife was able to extort gifts, the following charter and budget
+were the law at the Grand-I-Vert.
+
+Tonsard's old mother and his two daughters, Catherine and Marie, went
+into the woods at certain seasons twice a-day, and came back laden
+with fagots which overhung the crutch of their poles at least two feet
+beyond their heads. Though dried sticks were placed on the outside of
+the heap, the inside was made of live wood cut from young trees. In
+plain words, Tonsard helped himself to his winter's fuel in the woods
+of Les Aigues. Besides this, father and sons were constantly poaching.
+From September to March, hares, rabbits, partridges, deer, in short,
+all the game that was not eaten at the chateau, was sold at Blangy and
+at Soulanges, where Tonsard's two daughters peddled milk in the early
+mornings,--coming back with the news of the day, in return for the
+gossip they carried about Les Aigues, and Cerneux, and Conches. In the
+months when the three Tonsards were unable to hunt with a gun, they
+set traps. If the traps caught more game than they could eat, La
+Tonsard made pies of it and sent them to Ville-aux-Fayes. In
+harvest-time seven Tonsards--the old mother, the two sons (until they
+were seventeen years of age), the two daughters, together with old
+Fourchon and Mouche--gleaned, and generally brought in about sixteen
+bushels a day of all grains, rye, barley, wheat, all good to grind.
+
+The two cows, led to the roadside by the youngest girl, always managed
+to stray into the meadows of Les Aigues; but as, if it ever chanced
+that some too flagrant trespass compelled the keepers to take notice
+of it, the children were either whipped or deprived of a coveted
+dainty, they had acquired such extraordinary aptitude in hearing the
+enemy's footfall that the bailiff or the park-keeper of Les Aigues was
+very seldom able to detect them. Besides, the relations of those
+estimable functionaries with Tonsard and his wife tied a bandage over
+their eyes. The cows, held by long ropes, obeyed a mere twitch or a
+special low call back to the roadside, knowing very well that, the
+danger once past, they could finish their browsing in the next field.
+Old mother Tonsard, who was getting more and more infirm, succeeded
+Mouche in his duties, after Fourchon, under pretence of caring for his
+natural grandson's education, kept him to himself; while Marie and
+Catherine made hay in the woods. These girls knew the exact spots
+where the fine forest-grass abounded, and there they cut and spread
+and cocked and garnered it, supplying two thirds, at least, of the
+winter fodder, and leading the cows on all fine days to sheltered
+nooks where they could still find pasture. In certain parts of the
+valley of Les Aigues, as in all places protected by a chain of
+mountains, in Piedmont and in Lombardy for instance, there are spots
+where the grass keeps green all the year. Such fields, called in Italy
+"marciti," are of great value; though in France they are often in
+danger of being injured by snow and ice. This phenomenon is due, no
+doubt, to some favorable exposure, and to the infiltration of water
+which keeps the ground at a warmer temperature.
+
+The calves were sold for about eighty francs. The milk, deducting the
+time when the cows calved or went dry, brought in about one hundred
+and sixty francs a year besides supplying the wants of the family.
+Tonsard himself managed to earn another hundred and sixty by doing odd
+jobs of one kind or another.
+
+The sale of food and wine in the tavern, after all costs were paid,
+returned a profit of about three hundred francs, for the great
+drinking-bouts happened only at certain times and in certain seasons;
+and as the topers who indulged in them gave Tonsard and his wife due
+notice, the latter bought in the neighboring town the exact quantity
+of provisions needed and no more. The wine produced by Tonsard's
+vineyard was sold in ordinary years for twenty francs a cask to a
+wine-dealer at Soulanges with whom Tonsard was intimate. In very
+prolific years he got as much as twelve casks from his vines; but
+eight was the average; and Tonsard kept half for his own traffic. In
+all wine-growing districts the gleaning of the large vineyards gives a
+good perquisite, and out of it the Tonsard family usually managed to
+obtain three casks more. But being, as we have seen, sheltered and
+protected by the keepers, they showed no conscience in their
+proceedings,--entering vineyards before the harvesters were out of
+them, just as they swarmed into the wheat-fields before the sheaves
+were made. So, the seven or eight casks of wine, as much gleaned as
+harvested, were sold for a good price. However, out of these various
+proceeds the Grand-I-Vert was mulcted in a good sum for the personal
+consumption of Tonsard and his wife, who wanted the best of everything
+to eat, and better wine than they sold,--which they obtained from
+their friend at Soulanges in payment for their own. In short, the
+money scraped together by this family amounted to about nine hundred
+francs, for they fattened two pigs a year, one for themselves and the
+other to sell.
+
+The idlers and scapegraces and also the laborers took a fancy to the
+tavern of the Grand-I-Vert, partly because of La Tonsard's merits, and
+partly on account of the hail-fellow-well-met relation existing
+between this family and the lower classes of the valley. The two
+daughters, both remarkably handsome, followed the example of their
+mother as to morals. Moreover, the long established fame of the
+Grand-I-Vert, dating from 1795, made it a venerable spot in the eyes of
+the common people. From Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes, workmen came there
+to meet and make their bargains and hear the news collected by the
+Tonsard women and by Mouche and old Fourchon, or supplied by Vermichel
+and Brunet, that renowned official, when he came to the tavern in
+search of his practitioner. There the price of hay and of wine was
+settled; also that of a day's work and of piece-work. Tonsard, a
+sovereign judge in such matters, gave his advice and opinion while
+drinking with his guests. Soulanges, according to a saying in these
+parts, was a town for society and amusement only, while Blangy was a
+business borough; crushed, however, by the great commercial centre of
+Ville-aux-Fayes, which had become in the last twenty-five years the
+capital of this flourishing valley. The cattle and grain market was
+held at Blangy, in the public square, and the prices there obtained
+served as a tariff for the whole arrondissement.
+
+By staying in the house and doing no out-door work, La Tonsard
+continued fresh and fair and dimpled, in comparison with the women who
+worked in the fields and faded as rapidly as the flowers, becoming old
+and haggard before they were thirty. She liked to be well-dressed. In
+point of fact, she was only clean, but in a village cleanliness is a
+luxury. The daughters, better dressed than their means warranted,
+followed their mother's example. Beneath their outer garment, which
+was relatively handsome, they wore linen much finer than that of the
+richest peasant women. On fete-days they appeared in dresses that were
+really pretty, obtained, Heaven knows how! For one thing, the
+men-servants at Les Aigues sold to them, at prices that were easily
+paid, the cast-off clothing of the lady's-maids, which, after sweeping
+the streets of Paris and being made over to fit Marie and Catherine,
+appeared triumphantly in the precincts of the Grand-I-Vert. These
+girls, bohemians of the valley, received not one penny in money from
+their parents, who gave them food only, and the wretched pallets on
+which they slept with their grandmother in the barn, where their
+brothers also slept, curled up in the hay like animals. Neither father
+nor mother paid any heed to this propinquity.
+
+The iron age and the age of gold are more alike than we think for. In
+the one nothing aroused vigilance; in the other, everything rouses it;
+the result to society is, perhaps, very much the same. The presence of
+old Mother Tonsard, which was more a necessity than a precaution, was
+simply one immorality the more. And thus it was that the Abbe
+Brossette, after studying the morals of his parishioners, made this
+pregnant remark to his bishop:--
+
+"Monseigneur, when I observe the stress that the peasantry lay on
+their poverty, I realize how they fear to lose that excuse for their
+immorality."
+
+Though everybody knew that the family had no principles and no
+scruples, nothing was ever said against the morals of the
+Grand-I-Vert. At the beginning of this book it is necessary to
+explain, once for all, to persons accustomed to the decencies of
+middle-class life, that the peasants have no decency in their
+domestic habits and customs. They make no appeal to morality when
+their daughters are seduced, unless the seducer is rich and timid.
+Children, until the State takes possession of them, are used either
+as capital or as instruments of convenience. Self-interest has become,
+specially since 1789, the sole motive of the masses; they never ask if
+an action is legal or immoral, but only if it is profitable. Morality,
+which is not to be confounded with religion, begins only at a certain
+competence,--just as one sees, in a higher sphere, how delicacy blossoms
+in the soul when fortune decorates the furniture. A positively moral and
+upright man is rare among the peasantry. Do you ask why? Among the
+many reasons that may be given for this state of things, the principal
+one is this: Through the nature of their social functions, the
+peasants live a purely material life which approximates to that of
+savages, and their constant union with nature tends to foster it. When
+toil exhausts the body it takes from the mind its purifying action,
+especially among the ignorant. The Abbe Brossette was right in saying
+that the state policy of the peasant is his poverty.
+
+Meddling in everybody's interests, Tonsard heard everybody's
+complaints, and often instigated frauds to benefit the needy. His
+wife, a kindly appearing woman, had a good word for evil-doers, and
+never withheld either approval or personal help from her customers in
+anything they undertook against the rich. This inn, a nest of vipers,
+brisk and venomous, seething and active, was a hot-bed for the hatred
+of the peasants and the workingmen against the masters and the
+wealthy.
+
+The prosperous life of the Tonsards was, therefore, an evil example.
+Others asked themselves why they should not take their wood, as the
+Tonsards did, from the forest; why not pasture their cows and have
+game to eat and to sell as well as they; why not harvest without
+sowing the grapes and the grain. Accordingly, the pilfering thefts
+which thin the woods and tithe the ploughed lands and meadows and
+vineyards became habitual in this valley, and soon existed as a right
+throughout the districts of Blangy, Conches, and Cerneux, all adjacent
+to the domain of Les Aigues. This sore, for certain reasons which will
+be given in due time, did far greater injury to Les Aigues than to the
+estates of Ronquerolles or Soulanges. You must not, however, fancy
+that Tonsard, his wife and children, and his old mother ever
+deliberately said to themselves, "We will live by theft, and commit it
+as cleverly as we can." Such habits grow slowly. To the dried sticks
+they added, in the first instance, a single bit of good wood; then,
+emboldened by habit and a carefully prepared immunity (necessary to
+plans which this history will unfold), they ended at last in cutting
+"their wood," and stealing almost their entire livelihood. Pasturage
+for the cows and the abuses of gleaning were established as customs
+little by little. When the Tonsards and the do-nothings of the valley
+had tasted the sweets of these four rights (thus captured by rural
+paupers, and amounting to actual robbery) we can easily imagine they
+would never give them up unless compelled by a power greater than
+their own audacity.
+
+At the time when this history begins Tonsard, then about fifty years
+of age, tall and strong, rather stout than thin, with curly black
+hair, skin highly colored and marbled like a brick with purple
+blotches, yellow whites to the eyes, large ears with broad flaps, a
+muscular frame, encased, however, in flabby flesh, a retreating
+forehead, and a hanging lip,--Tonsard, such as you see him, hid his
+real character under an external stupidity, lightened at times by a
+show of experience, which seemed all the more intelligent because he
+had acquired in the company of his father-in-law a sort of bantering
+talk, much affected by old Fourchon and Vermichel. His nose, flattened
+at the end as if the finger of God intended to mark him, gave him a
+voice which came from his palate, like that of all persons disfigured
+by a disease which thickens the nasal passages, through which the air
+then passes with difficulty. His upper teeth overlapped each other,
+and this defect (which Lavater calls terrible) was all the more
+apparent because they were as white as those of a dog. But for a
+certain lawless and slothful good humor, and the free-and-easy ways of
+a rustic tippler, the man would have alarmed the least observing of
+spectators.
+
+If the portraits of Tonsard, his inn, and his father-in-law take a
+prominent place in this history, it is because that place belongs to
+him and to the inn and to the family. In the first place, their
+existence, so minutely described, is the type of a hundred other
+households in the valley of Les Aigues. Secondly, Tonsard, without
+being other than the instrument of deep and active hatreds, had an
+immense influence on the struggle that was about to take place, being
+the friend and counsellor of all the complainants of the lower
+classes. His inn, as we shall presently see, was the rendezvous for
+the aggressors; in fact, he became their chief, partly on account of
+the fear he inspired throughout the valley--less, however, by his
+actual deeds than by those that were constantly expected of him. The
+threat of this man was as much dreaded as the thing threatened, so
+that he never had occasion to execute it.
+
+Every revolt, open or concealed, has its banner. The banner of the
+marauders, the drunkards, the idlers, the sluggards of the valley des
+Aigues was the terrible tavern of the Grand-I-Vert. Its frequenters
+found amusement there,--as rare and much-desired a thing in the
+country as in a city. Moreover, there was no other inn along the
+country-road for over twelve miles, a distance which conveyances (even
+when laden) could easily do in three hours; so that those who went
+from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes always stopped at the Grand-I-Vert, if
+only to refresh themselves. The miller of Les Aigues, who was also
+assistant-mayor, and his men came there. The grooms and valets of the
+general were not averse to Tonsard's wine, rendered attractive by
+Tonsard's daughters; so the Grand-I-Vert held subterraneous
+communication with the chateau through the servants, and knew
+immediately everything that they knew. It is impossible either by
+benefits or through their own self-interests, to break up the
+perpetual understanding that exists between the servants of a
+household and the people from whom they come. Domestic service is of
+the masses, and to the masses it will ever remain attached. This fatal
+comradeship explains the reticence of the last words of Charles the
+groom, as he and Blondet reached the portico of the chateau.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IV
+
+                           ANOTHER IDYLL
+
+"Ha! by my pipe, papa!" exclaimed Tonsard, seeing his father-in-law as
+the old man entered and supposing him in quest of food, "your stomach
+is lively this morning! We haven't anything to give you. How about
+that rope,--the rope, you know, you were to make for us? It is amazing
+how much you make over night and how little there is made in the
+morning! You ought long ago to have twisted the one that is to twist
+you out of existence; you are getting too costly for us."
+
+The wit of a peasant or laborer is very Attic; it consists in speaking
+out his mind and giving it a grotesque expression. We find the same
+thing in a drawing-room. Delicacy of wit takes the place of
+picturesque vulgarity, and that is really all the difference there is.
+
+"That's enough for the father-in-law!" said the old man. "Talk
+business; I want a bottle of the best."
+
+So saying, Fourchon rapped a five-franc piece that gleamed in his hand
+on the old table at which he was seated,--which, with its coating of
+grease, its scorched black marks, its wine stains, and its gashes, was
+singular to behold. At the sound of coin Marie Tonsard, as trig as a
+sloop about to start on a cruise, glanced at her grandfather with a
+covetous look that shot from her eyes like a spark. La Tonsard came
+out of her bedroom, attracted by the music of metal.
+
+"You are always rough to my poor father," she said to her husband,
+"and yet he has earned a deal of money this year; God grant he came by
+it honestly. Let me see that," she added, springing at the coin and
+snatching it from Fourchon's fingers.
+
+"Marie," said Tonsard, gravely, "above the board you'll find some
+bottled wine. Go and get a bottle."
+
+Wine is of only one quality in the country, but it is sold as of two
+kinds,--cask wine and bottled wine.
+
+"Where did you get this, papa" demanded La Tonsard, slipping the coin
+into her pocket.
+
+"Philippine! you'll come to a bad end," said the old man, shaking his
+head but not attempting to recover his money. Doubtless he had long
+realized the futility of a struggle between his daughter, his terrible
+son-in-law, and himself.
+
+"Another bottle of wine for which you get five francs out of me," he
+added, in a peevish tone. "But it shall be the last. I shall give my
+custom to the Cafe de la Paix."
+
+"Hold your tongue, papa!" remarked his fair and fat daughter, who bore
+some resemblance to a Roman matron. "You need a shirt, and a pair of
+clean trousers, and a hat; and I want to see you with a waistcoat.
+That's what I take the money for."
+
+"I have told you again and again that such things would ruin me," said
+the old man. "People would think me rich and stop giving me anything."
+
+The bottle brought by Marie put an end to the loquacity of the old
+man, who was not without that trait, characteristic of those whose
+tongues are ready to tell out everything, and who shrink from no
+expression of their thought, no matter how atrocious it may be.
+
+"Then you don't want to tell where you filched that money?" said
+Tonsard. "We might go and get more where that came from,--the rest of
+us."
+
+He was making a snare, and as he finished it the ferocious innkeeper
+happened to glance at his father-in-law's trousers, and there he spied
+a raised round spot which clearly defined a second five-franc piece.
+
+"Having become a capitalist I drink your health," said Pere Fourchon.
+
+"If you choose to be a capitalist you can be," said Tonsard; "you have
+the means, you have! But the devil has bored a hole in the back of
+your head through which everything runs out."
+
+"Hey! I only played the otter trick on that young fellow they have got
+at Les Aigues. He's from Paris. That's all there is to it."
+
+"If crowds of people would come to see the sources of the Avonne,
+you'd be rich, Grandpa Fourchon," said Marie.
+
+"Yes," he said, drinking the last glassful the bottle contained, "and
+I've played the sham otter so long, the live otters have got angry,
+and one of them came right between my legs to-day; Mouche caught it,
+and I am to get twenty francs for it."
+
+"I'll bet your otter is made of tow," said Tonsard, looking slyly at
+his father-in-law.
+
+"If you will give me a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, and some list
+braces, so as not to disgrace Vermichel on the music stand at Tivoli
+(for old Socquard is always scolding about my clothes), I'll let you
+keep that money, my daughter; your idea is a good one. I can squeeze
+that rich young fellow at Les Aigues; may be he'll take to otters."
+
+"Go and get another bottle," said Tonsard to his daughter. "If your
+father really had an otter, he would show it to us," he added,
+speaking to his wife and trying to touch up Fourchon.
+
+"I'm too afraid it would get into your frying-pan," said the old man,
+winking one of his little green eyes at his daughter. "Philippine has
+already hooked my five-franc piece; and how many more haven't you
+bagged under pretence of clothing me and feeding me? and now you say
+that my stomach is too lively, and that I go half-naked."
+
+"You sold your last clothes to drink boiled wine at the Cafe de la
+Paix, papa," said his daughter, "though Vermichel tried to prevent
+it."
+
+"Vermichel! the man I treated! Vermichel is incapable of betraying my
+friendship. It must have been that lump of old lard on two legs that
+he is not ashamed to call his wife!"
+
+"He or she," replied Tonsard, "or Bonnebault."
+
+"If it was Bonnebault," cried Fourchon, "he who is one of the pillars
+of the place, I'll--I'll--Enough!"
+
+"You old sot, what has all that got to do with having sold your
+clothes? You sold them because you did sell them; you're of age!" said
+Tonsard, slapping the old man's knee. "Come, do honor to my drink and
+redden up your throat! The father of Mam Tonsard has a right to do so;
+and isn't that better than spending your silver at Socquard's?"
+
+"What a shame it is that you have been fifteen years playing for
+people to dance at Tivoli and you have never yet found out how
+Socquard cooks his wine,--you who are so shrewd!" said his daughter;
+"and yet you know very well that if we had the secret we should soon
+get as rich as Rigou."
+
+Throughout the Morvan, and in that region of Burgundy which lies at
+its feet on the side toward Paris, this boiled wine with which Mam
+Tonsard reproached her father is a rather costly beverage which plays
+a great part in the life of the peasantry, and is made by all grocers
+and wine-dealers, and wherever a drinking-shop exists. This precious
+liquor, made of choice wine, sugar, and cinnamon and other spices, is
+preferable to all those disguises or mixtures of brandy called
+ratafia, one-hundred-and-seven, brave man's cordial, black currant
+wine, vespetro, spirit-of-sun, etc. Boiled wine is found throughout
+France and Switzerland. Among the Jura, and in the wild districts
+trodden only by a few special tourists, the innkeepers call it, on the
+word of commercial travellers, the wine of Syracuse. Excellent it is,
+however, and their guests, hungry as hounds after ascending the
+surrounding peaks, very gladly pay three and four francs a bottle for
+it. In the homes of the Morvan and in Burgundy the least illness or
+the slightest agitation of the nerves is an excuse for boiled wine.
+Before and after childbirth the women take it with the addition of
+burnt sugar. Boiled wine has soaked up the property of many a peasant,
+and more than once the seductive liquid has been the cause of marital
+chastisement.
+
+"Ha! there's no chance of grabbing that secret," replied Fourchon,
+"Socquard always locks himself in when he boils his wine; he never
+told how he does it to his late wife. He sends to Paris for his
+materials."
+
+"Don't plague your father," cried Tonsard; "doesn't he know? well,
+then, he doesn't know! People can't know everything!"
+
+Fourchon grew very uneasy on seeing how his son-in-law's countenance
+softened as well as his words.
+
+"What do you want to rob me of now?" he asked, candidly.
+
+"I?" said Tonsard, "I take none but my legitimate dues; if I get
+anything from you it is in payment of your daughter's portion, which
+you promised me and never paid."
+
+Fourchon, reassured by the harshness of this remark, dropped his head
+on his breast as though vanquished and convinced.
+
+"Look at that pretty snare," resumed Tonsard, coming up to his
+father-in-law and laying the trap upon his knee. "Some of these days
+they'll want game at Les Aigues, and we shall sell them their own,
+or there will be no good God for the poor folks."
+
+"A fine piece of work," said the old man, examining the mischievous
+machine.
+
+"It is very well to pick up the sous now, papa," said Mam Tonsard,
+"but you know we are to have our share in the cake of Les Aigues."
+
+"Oh, what chatterers women are!" cried Tonsard. "If I am hanged it
+won't be for a shot from my gun, but for the gabble of your tongue."
+
+"And do you really suppose that Les Aigues will be cut up and sold in
+lots for your pitiful benefit?" asked Fourchon. "Pshaw! haven't you
+discovered in the last thirty years that old Rigou has been sucking
+the marrow out of your bones that the middle-class folks are worse
+than the lords? Mark my words, when that affair happens, my children,
+the Soudrys, the Gaubertins, the Rigous, will make you kick your heels
+in the air. 'I've the good tobacco, it never shall be thine,' that's
+the national air of the rich man, hey? The peasant will always be the
+peasant. Don't you see (but you never did understand anything of
+politics!) that government puts such heavy taxes on wine only to
+hinder our profits and keep us poor? The middle classes and the
+government, they are all one. What would become of them if everybody
+was rich? Could they till their fields? Would they gather the harvest?
+No, they _want_ the poor! I was rich for ten years and I know what I
+thought of paupers."
+
+"Must hunt with them, though," replied Tonsard, "because they mean to
+cut up the great estates; after that's done, we can turn against them.
+If I'd been Courtecuisse, whom that scoundrel Rigou is ruining, I'd
+have long ago paid his bill with other balls than the poor fellow
+gives him."
+
+"Right enough, too," replied Fourchon. "As Pere Niseron says (and he
+stayed republican long after everybody else), 'The people are tough;
+they don't die; they have time before them.'"
+
+Fourchon fell into a sort of reverie; Tonsard profited by his
+inattention to take back the trap, and as he took it up he cut a slip
+below the coin in his father-in-law's pocket at the moment when the
+old man raised his glass to his lips; then he set his foot on the
+five-franc piece as it dropped on the earthen floor just where it was
+always kept damp by the heel-taps which the customers flung from their
+glasses. Though quickly and lightly done, the old man might, perhaps,
+have felt the theft, if Vermichel had not happened to appear at that
+moment.
+
+"Tonsard, do you know where you father is?" called that functionary
+from the foot of the steps.
+
+Vermichel's shout, the theft of the money, and the emptying of old
+Fourchon's glass, were simultaneous.
+
+"Present, captain!" cried Fourchon, holding out a hand to Vermichel to
+help him up the steps.
+
+Of all Burgundian figures, Vermichel would have seemed to you the most
+Burgundian. The practitioner was not red, he was scarlet. His face,
+like certain tropical portions of the globe, was fissured, here and
+there, with small extinct volcanoes, defined by flat and greenish
+patches which Fourchon called, not unpoetically, the "flowers of
+wine." This fiery face, the features of which were swelled out of
+shape by continual drunkenness, looked cyclopic; for it was lighted on
+the right side by a gleaming eye, and darkened on the other by a
+yellow patch over the left orb. Red hair, always tousled, and a beard
+like that of Judas, made Vermichel as formidable in appearance as he
+was meek in reality. His prominent nose looked like an
+interrogation-mark, to which the wide-slit mouth seemed to be always
+answering, even when it did not open. Vermichel, a short man, wore
+hob-nail shoes, bottle-green velveteen trousers, an old waistcoat
+patched with diverse stuffs which seemed to have been originally made
+of a counterpane, a jacket of coarse blue cloth and a gray hat with a
+broad brim. All this luxury, required by the town of Soulanges where
+Vermichel fulfilled the combined functions of porter at the town-hall,
+drummer, jailer, musician, and practitioner, was taken care of by
+Madame Vermichel, an alarming antagonist of Rabelaisian philosophy.
+This virago with moustachios, about one yard in width and one hundred
+and twenty kilograms in weight (but very active), ruled Vermichel with
+a rod of iron. Thrashed by her when drunk, he allowed her to thrash
+him still when sober; which caused Pere Fourchon to say, with a sniff
+at Vermichel's clothes, "It is the livery of a slave."
+
+"Talk of the sun and you'll see its beams," cried Fourchon, repeating
+a well-worn allusion to the rutilant face of Vermichel, which really
+did resemble those copper suns painted on tavern signs in the
+provinces. "Has Mam Vermichel spied too much dust on your back, that
+you're running away from your four-fifths,--for I can't call her your
+better half, that woman! What brings you here at this hour,
+drum-major?"
+
+"Politics, always politics," replied Vermichel, who seemed accustomed
+to such pleasantries.
+
+"Ah! business is bad in Blangy, and there'll be notes to protest, and
+writs to issue," remarked Pere Fourchon, filling a glass for his
+friend.
+
+"That APE of ours is right behind me," replied Vermichel, with a
+backward gesture.
+
+In workmen's slang "ape" meant master. The word belonged to the
+dictionary of the worthy pair.
+
+"What's Monsieur Brunet coming bothering about here?" asked Tonsard.
+
+"Hey, by the powers, you folks!" said Vermichel, "you've brought him
+in for the last three years more than you are worth. Ha! that master
+at Les Aigues, he has his eye upon you; he'll punch you in the ribs;
+he's after you, the Shopman! Brunet says, if there were three such
+landlords in the valley his fortune would be made."
+
+"What new harm are they going to do to the poor?" asked Marie.
+
+"A pretty wise thing for themselves," replied Vermichel. "Faith!
+you'll have to give in, in the end. How can you help it? They've got
+the power. For the last two years haven't they had three foresters and
+a horse-patrol, all as active as ants, and a field-keeper who is a
+terror? Besides, the gendarmerie is ready to do their dirty work at
+any time. They'll crush you--"
+
+"Bah!" said Tonsard, "we are too flat. That which can't be crushed
+isn't the trees, it's ground."
+
+"Don't you trust to that," said Fourchon to his son-in-law; "you own
+property."
+
+"Those rich folks must love you," continued Vermichel, "for they think
+of nothing else from morning till night! They are saying to themselves
+now like this: 'Their cattle eat up our pastures; we'll seize their
+cattle; they can't eat grass themselves.' You've all been condemned,
+the warrants are out, and they have told our ape to take your cows. We
+are to begin this morning at Conches by seizing old mother
+Bonnebault's cow and Godin's cow and Mitant's cow."
+
+The moment the name of Bonnebault was mentioned, Marie, who was in
+love with the old woman's grandson, sprang into the vineyard with a
+nod to her father and mother. She slipped like an eel through a break
+in the hedge, and was off on the way to Conches with the speed of a
+hunted hare.
+
+"They'll do so much," remarked Tonsard, tranquilly, "that they'll get
+their bones broken; and that will be a pity, for their mothers can't
+make them any new ones."
+
+"Well, perhaps so," said old Fourchon, "but see here, Vermichel, I
+can't go with you for an hour or more, for I have important business
+at the chateau."
+
+"More important than serving three warrants at five sous each? 'You
+shouldn't spit into the vintage,' as Father Noah says."
+
+"I tell you, Vermichel, that my business requires me to go to the
+chateau des Aigues," repeated the old man, with an air of laughable
+self-importance.
+
+"And anyhow," said Mam Tonsard, "my father had better keep out of the
+way. Do you really mean to find the cows?"
+
+"Monsieur Brunet, who is a very good fellow, would much rather find
+nothing but their dung," answered Vermichel. "A man who is obliged to
+be out and about day and night had better be careful."
+
+"If he is, he has good reason to be," said Tonsard, sententiously.
+
+"So," continued Vermichel, "he said to Monsieur Michaud, 'I'll go as
+soon as the court is up.' If he had wanted to find the cows he'd have
+gone at seven o'clock in the morning. But that didn't suit Michaud,
+and Brunet has had to be off. You can't take in Michaud, he's a
+trained hound! Ha, the brigand!"
+
+"Ought to have stayed in the army, a swaggerer like that," said
+Tonsard; "he is only fit to deal with enemies. I wish he would come
+and ask me my name. He may call himself a veteran of the young guard,
+but I know very well that if I measured spurs with him, I'd keep my
+feathers up longest."
+
+"Look here!" said Mam Tonsard to Vermichel, "when are the notices for
+the ball at Soulanges coming out? Here it is the eighth of August."
+
+"I took them yesterday to Monsieur Bournier at Ville-aux-Fayes, to be
+printed," replied Vermichel; "they do talk of fireworks on the lake."
+
+"What crowds of people we shall have!" cried Fourchon.
+
+"Profits for Socquard!" said Tonsard, spitefully.
+
+"If it doesn't rain," said his wife, by way of comfort.
+
+At this moment the trot of a horse coming from the direction of
+Soulanges was heard, and five minutes later the sheriff's officer
+fastened his horse to a post placed for the purpose near the wicket
+gate through which the cows were driven. Then he showed his head at
+the door of the Grand-I-Vert.
+
+"Come, my boys, let's lose no time," he said, pretending to be in a
+hurry.
+
+"Hey!" said Vermichel. "Here's a refractory, Monsieur Brunet; Pere
+Fourchon wants to drop off."
+
+"He has had too many drops already," said the sheriff; "but the law in
+this case does not require that he shall be sober."
+
+"Please excuse me, Monsieur Brunet," said Fourchon, "I am expected at
+Les Aigues on business; they are in treaty for an otter."
+
+Brunet, a withered little man dressed from head to foot in black
+cloth, with a bilious skin, a furtive eye, curly hair, lips
+tight-drawn, pinched nose, anxious expression, and gruff in speech,
+exhibited the phenomenon of a character and bearing in perfect harmony
+with his profession. He was so well-informed as to the law, or, to
+speak more correctly, the quibbles of the law, that he had come to be
+both the terror and the counsellor of the whole canton. He was not
+without a certain popularity among the peasantry, from whom he usually
+took his pay in kind. The compound of his active and negative
+qualities and his knowledge of how to manage matters got him the
+custom of the canton, to the exclusion of his coadjutor Plissoud,
+about whom we shall have something to say later. This chance
+combination of a sheriff's officer who does everything and a sheriff's
+officer who does nothing is not at all uncommon in the country justice
+courts.
+
+"So matters are getting warm, are they?" said Tonsard to little
+Brunet.
+
+"What can you expect? you pilfer the man too much, and he's going to
+protect himself," replied the officer. "It will be a bad business for
+you in the end; government will interfere."
+
+"Then we, poor unfortunates, must give up the ghost!" said Mam
+Tonsard, offering him a glass of brandy on a saucer.
+
+"The unfortunate may all die, yet they'll never be lacking in the
+land," said Fourchon, sententiously.
+
+"You do great damage to the woods," retorted the sheriff.
+
+"Now don't believe that, Monsieur Brunet," said Mam Tonsard; "they
+make such a fuss about a few miserable fagots!"
+
+"We didn't crush the rich low enough during the Revolution, that's
+what's the trouble," said Tonsard.
+
+Just then a horrible, and quite incomprehensible noise was heard. It
+seemed to be a rush of hurried feet, accompanied with a rattle of
+arms, half-drowned by the rustling of leaves, the dragging of
+branches, and the sound of still more hasty feet. Two voices, as
+different as the two footsteps, were venting noisy exclamations.
+Everybody inside the inn guessed at once that a man was pursuing a
+woman; but why? The uncertainty did not last long.
+
+"It is mother!" said Tonsard, jumping up; "I know her shriek."
+
+Then suddenly, rushing up the broken steps of the Grand-I-Vert by a
+last effort that can be made only by the sinews of smugglers, old
+Mother Tonsard fell flat on the floor in the middle of the room. The
+immense mass of wood she carried on her head made a terrible noise as
+it crashed against the top of the door and then upon the ground. Every
+one had jumped out of the way. The table, the bottles, the chairs were
+knocked over and scattered. The noise was as great as if the cottage
+itself had come tumbling down.
+
+"I'm dead! The scoundrel has killed me!"
+
+The words and the flight of the old woman were explained by the
+apparition on the threshold of a keeper, dressed in green livery,
+wearing a hat edged with silver cord, a sabre at his side, a leathern
+shoulder-belt bearing the arms of Montcornet charged with those of the
+Troisvilles, the regulation red waistcoat, and buckskin gaiters which
+came above the knee.
+
+After a moment's hesitation the keeper said, looking at Brunet and
+Vermichel, "Here are witnesses."
+
+"Witnesses of what?" said Tonsard.
+
+"That woman has a ten-year-old oak, cut into logs, inside those
+fagots; it is a regular crime!"
+
+The moment the word "witness" was uttered Vermichel thought best to
+breathe the fresh air of the vineyard.
+
+"Of what? witnesses of what?" cried Tonsard, standing in front of the
+keeper while his wife helped up the old woman. "Do you mean to show
+your claws, Vatel? Accuse persons and arrest them on the highway,
+brigand,--that's your domain; but get out of here! A man's house is
+his castle."
+
+"I caught her in the act, and your mother must come with me."
+
+"Arrest my mother in my house? You have no right to do it. My house is
+inviolable,--all the world knows that, at least. Have you got a
+warrant from Monsieur Guerbet, the magistrate? Ha! you must have the
+law behind you before you come in here. You are not the law, though
+you have sworn an oath to starve us to death, you miserable
+forest-gauger, you!"
+
+The fury of the keeper waxed so hot that he was on the point of
+seizing hold of the wood, when the old woman, a frightful bit of black
+parchment endowed with motion, the like of which can be seen only in
+David's picture of "The Sabines," screamed at him, "Don't touch it, or
+I'll fly at your eyes!"
+
+"Well, then, undo that pile in presence of Monsieur Brunet," said the
+keeper.
+
+Though the sheriff's officer had assumed the indifference that the
+routine of business does really give to officials of his class, he
+threw a glance at Tonsard and his wife which said plainly, "A bad
+business!" Old Fourchon looked at his daughter, and slyly pointed at a
+pile of ashes in the chimney. Mam Tonsard, who understood in a moment
+from that significant gesture both the danger of her mother-in-law and
+the advice of her father, seized a handful of ashes and flung them in
+the keeper's eyes. Vatel roared with pain; Tonsard pushed him roughly
+upon the broken door-steps where the blinded man stumbled and fell,
+and then rolled nearly down to the gate, dropping his gun on the way.
+In an instant the load of sticks was unfastened, and the oak logs
+pulled out and hidden with a rapidity no words can describe. Brunet,
+anxious not to witness this manoeuvre, which he readily foresaw,
+rushed after the keeper to help him up; then he placed him on the bank
+and wet his handkerchief in water to wash the eyes of the poor fellow,
+who, in spite of his agony, was trying to reach the brook.
+
+"You are in the wrong, Vatel," said Brunet; "you have no right to
+enter houses, don't you see?"
+
+The old woman, a little hump-backed creature, stood on the sill of the
+door, with her hands on her hips, darting flashes from her eyes and
+curses from her foaming lips shrill enough to be heard at Blangy.
+
+"Ha! the villain, 'twas well done! May hell get you! To suspect me of
+cutting trees!--_me_, the most honest woman in the village. To hunt me
+like vermin! I'd like to see you lose your cursed eyes, for then we'd
+have peace. You are birds of ill-omen, the whole of you; you invent
+shameful stories to stir up strife between your master and us."
+
+The keeper allowed the sheriff to bathe his eyes and all the while the
+latter kept telling him that he was legally wrong.
+
+"The old thief! she has tired us out," said Vatel at last. "She has
+been at work in the woods all night."
+
+As the whole family had taken an active hand in hiding the live wood
+and putting things straight in the cottage, Tonsard presently appeared
+at the door with an insolent air. "Vatel, my man, if you ever again
+dare to force your way into my domain, my gun shall answer you," he
+said. "To-day you have had the ashes; the next time you shall have the
+fire. You don't know your own business. That's enough. Now if you feel
+hot after this affair take some wine, I offer it to you; and you may
+come in and see that my old mother's bundle of fagots hadn't a scrap
+of live wood in it; it is every bit brushwood."
+
+"Scoundrel!" said the keeper to the sheriff, in a low voice, more
+enraged by this speech than by the smart of his eyes.
+
+Just then Charles, the groom, appeared at the gate of the
+Grand-I-Vert.
+
+"What is the matter, Vatel?" he said.
+
+"Ah!" said the keeper, wiping his eyes, which he had plunged wide open
+into the rivulet to give them a final cleansing. "I have some debtors
+in there that I'll cause to rue the day they saw the light."
+
+"If you take it that way, Monsieur Vatel," said Tonsard, coldly, "you
+will find we don't want for courage in Burgundy."
+
+Vatel departed. Not feeling much curiosity to know what the trouble
+was, Charles went up the steps and looked into the house.
+
+"Come to the chateau, you and your otter,--if you really have one," he
+said to Pere Fourchon.
+
+The old man rose hurriedly and followed him.
+
+"Well, where is it,--that otter of yours?" said Charles, smiling
+doubtfully.
+
+"This way," said the old fellow, going toward the Thune.
+
+The name is that of a brook formed by the overflow of the mill-race
+and of certain springs in the park of Les Aigues. It runs by the side
+of the county road as far as the lakelet of Soulanges, which it
+crosses, and then falls into the Avonne, after feeding the mills and
+ponds on the Soulanges estate.
+
+"Here it is; I hid it in the brook, with a stone around its neck."
+
+As he stooped and rose again the old man missed the coin out of his
+pocket, where metal was so uncommon that he was likely to notice its
+presence or its absence immediately.
+
+"Ah, the sharks!" he cried. "If I hunt otters they hunt fathers-in-law!
+They get out of me all I earn, and tell me it is for my good! If it
+were not for my poor Mouche, who is the comfort of my old age, I'd
+drown myself. Children! they are the ruin of their fathers. You
+haven't married, have you, Monsieur Charles? Then don't; never get
+married, and then you can't reproach yourself for spreading bad blood.
+I, who expected to buy my tow with that money, and there it is
+filched, stolen! That monsieur up at Les Aigues, a fine young fellow,
+gave me ten francs; ha! well! it'll put up the price of my otter now."
+
+Charles distrusted the old man so profoundly that he took his
+grievances (this time very sincere) for the preliminary of what he
+called, in servant's slang, "varnish," and he made the great mistake
+of letting his opinion appear in a satirical grin, which the spiteful
+old fellow detected.
+
+"Come, come! Pere Fourchon, now behave yourself; you are going to see
+Madame," said Charles, noticing how the rubies flashed on the nose and
+cheeks of the old drunkard.
+
+"I know how to attend to business, Charles; and the proof is that if
+you will get me out of the kitchen the remains of the breakfast and a
+bottle or two of Spanish wine, I'll tell you something which will save
+you from a 'foul.'"
+
+"Tell me, and Francois shall get Monsieur's own order to give you a
+glass of wine," said the groom.
+
+"Promise?"
+
+"I promise."
+
+"Well then, I know you meet my granddaughter Catherine under the
+bridge of the Avonne. Godain is in love with her; he saw you, and he
+is fool enough to be jealous,--I say fool, for a peasant oughtn't to
+have feelings which belong only to rich folks. If you go to the ball
+of Soulanges at Tivoli and dance with her, you'll dance higher than
+you'll like. Godain is rich and dangerous; he is capable of breaking
+your arm without your getting a chance to arrest him."
+
+"That would be too dear; Catherine is a fine girl, but she is not
+worth all that," replied Charles. "Why should Godain be so angry?
+others are not."
+
+"He loves her enough to marry her."
+
+"If he does, he'll beat her," said Charles.
+
+"I don't know about that," said the old man. "She takes after her
+mother, against whom Tonsard never raised a finger,--he's too afraid
+she'll be off, hot foot. A woman who knows how to hold her own is
+mighty useful. Besides, if it came to fisticuffs with Catherine,
+Godain, though he's pretty strong, wouldn't give the last blow."
+
+"Well, thank you, Pere Fourchon; here's forty sous to drink my health
+in case I can't get you the sherry."
+
+Pere Fourchon turned his head aside as he pocketed the money lest
+Charles should see the expression of amusement and sarcasm which he
+was unable to repress.
+
+"Catherine," he resumed, "is a proud minx; she likes sherry. You had
+better tell her to go and get it at Les Aigues."
+
+Charles looked at Pere Fourchon with naive admiration, not suspecting
+the eager interest the general's enemies took in slipping one more spy
+into the chateau.
+
+"The general ought to feel happy now," continued Fourchon; "the
+peasants are all quiet. What does he say? Is he satisfied with
+Sibilet?"
+
+"It is only Monsieur Michaud who finds fault with Sibilet. They say
+he'll get him sent away."
+
+"Professional jealousy!" exclaimed Fourchon. "I'll bet you would like
+to get rid of Francois and take his place."
+
+"Hang it! he has twelve hundred francs wages," said Charles; "but they
+can't send him off,--he knows the general's secrets."
+
+"Just as Madame Michaud knows the countess's," remarked Fourchon,
+watching the other carefully. "Look here, my boy, do you know whether
+Monsieur and Madame have separate rooms?"
+
+"Of course; if they didn't, Monsieur wouldn't be so fond of Madame."
+
+"Is that all you know?" said Fourchon.
+
+As they were now before the kitchen windows nothing more was said.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER V
+
+                       ENEMIES FACE TO FACE
+
+While breakfast was in progress at the chateau, Francois, the head
+footman, whispered to Blondet, but loud enough for the general to
+overhear him,--
+
+"Monsieur, Pere Fourchon's boy is here; he says they have caught the
+otter, and wants to know if you would like it, or whether they shall
+take it to the sub-prefect at Ville-aux-Fayes."
+
+Emile Blondet, though himself a past-master of hoaxing, could not keep
+his cheeks from blushing like those of a virgin who hears an
+indecorous story of which she knows the meaning.
+
+"Ha! ha! so you have hunted the otter this morning with Pere
+Fourchon?" cried the general, with a roar of laughter.
+
+"What is it?" asked the countess, uneasy at her husband's laugh.
+
+"When a man of wit and intelligence is taken in by old Fourchon,"
+continued the general, "a retired cuirassier need not blush for having
+hunted that otter; which bears an enormous resemblance to the third
+posthorse we are made to pay for and never see." With that he went off
+into further explosions of laughter, in the midst of which he
+contrived to say: "I am not surprised you had to change your boots
+--and your trousers; I have no doubt you have been wading! The joke
+didn't go as far as that with me,--I stayed on the bank; but then, you
+know, you are so much more intelligent than I--"
+
+"But you forget," interrupted Madame de Montcornet, "that I do not
+know what you are talking of."
+
+At these words, said with some pique, the general grew serious, and
+Blondet told the story of his fishing for the otter.
+
+"But if they really have an otter," said the countess, "those poor
+people are not to blame."
+
+"Oh, but it is ten years since an otter has been seen about here,"
+said the pitiless general.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said Francois, "the boy swears by all that's
+sacred that he has got one."
+
+"If they have one I'll buy it," said the general.
+
+"I don't suppose," remarked the Abbe Brossette, "that God has
+condemned Les Aigues to never have otters."
+
+"Ah, Monsieur le cure!" cried Blondet, "if you bring the Almighty
+against me--"
+
+"But what is all this? Who is here?" said the countess, hastily.
+
+"Mouche, madame,--the boy who goes about with old Fourchon," said the
+footman.
+
+"Bring him in--that is, if Madame will allow it?" said the general;
+"he may amuse you."
+
+Mouche presently appeared, in his usual state of comparative nudity.
+Beholding this personification of poverty in the middle of this
+luxurious dining-room, the cost of one panel of which would have been
+a fortune to the bare-legged, bare-breasted, and bare-headed child, it
+was impossible not to be moved by an impulse of charity. The boy's
+eyes, like blazing coals, gazed first at the luxuries of the room, and
+then at those on the table.
+
+"Have you no mother?" asked Madame de Montcornet, unable otherwise to
+explain the child's nakedness.
+
+"No, ma'am; m'ma died of grief for losing p'pa, who went to the army
+in 1812 without marrying her with papers, and got frozen, saving your
+presence. But I've my Grandpa Fourchon, who is a good man,--though he
+does beat me bad sometimes."
+
+"How is it, my dear, that such wretched people can be found on your
+estate?" said the countess, looking at the general.
+
+"Madame la comtesse," said the abbe, "in this district we have none
+but voluntary paupers. Monsieur le comte does all he can; but we have
+to do with a class of persons who are without religion and who have
+but one idea, that of living at your expense."
+
+"But, my dear abbe," said Blondet, "you are here to improve their
+morals."
+
+"Monsieur," replied the abbe, "my bishop sent me here as if on a
+mission to savages; but, as I had the honor of telling him, the
+savages of France cannot be reached. They make it a law unto
+themselves not to listen to us; whereas the church does get some hold
+on the savages of America."
+
+"M'sieur le cure, they do help me a bit now," remarked Mouche; "but if
+I went to your church they _wouldn't_, and the other folks would make
+game of my breeches."
+
+"Religion ought to begin by giving him trousers, my dear abbe," said
+Blondet. "In your foreign missions don't you begin by coaxing the
+savages?"
+
+"He would soon sell them," answered the abbe, in a low tone; "besides,
+my salary does not enable me to begin on that line."
+
+"Monsieur le cure is right," said the general, looking at Mouche.
+
+The policy of the little scamp was to appear not to hear what they
+were saying when it was against himself.
+
+"The boy is intelligent enough to know good from evil," continued the
+count, "and he is old enough to work; yet he thinks of nothing but how
+to commit evil without being found out. All the keepers know him. He
+is very well aware that the master of an estate may witness a trespass
+on his property and yet have no right to arrest the trespasser. I have
+known him keep his cows boldly in my meadows, though he knew I saw
+him; but now, ever since I have been mayor, he runs away fast enough."
+
+"Oh, that is very wrong," said the countess; "you should not take
+other people's things, my little man."
+
+"Madame, we must eat. My grandpa gives me more slaps than food, and
+they don't fill my stomach, slaps don't. When the cows come in I milk
+'em just a little and I live on that. Monseigneur isn't so poor but
+what he'll let me drink a drop o' milk the cows get from his grass?"
+
+"Perhaps he hasn't eaten anything to-day," said the countess, touched
+by his misery. "Give him some bread and the rest of that chicken; let
+him have his breakfast," she added, looking at the footman. "Where do
+you sleep, my child?"
+
+"Anywhere, madame; under the stars in summer, and wherever they'll let
+us in winter."
+
+"How old are you?"
+
+"Twelve."
+
+"There is still time to bring him up to better ways," said the
+countess to her husband.
+
+"He will make a good soldier," said the general, gruffly; "he is well
+toughened. I went through that kind of thing myself, and here I am."
+
+"Excuse me, general, I don't belong to nobody," said the boy. "I can't
+be drafted. My poor mother wasn't married, and I was born in a field.
+I'm a son of the 'airth,' as grandpa says. M'ma saved me from the
+army, that she did! My name ain't no more Mouche than nothing at all.
+Grandpa keeps telling me all my advantages. I'm not on the register,
+and when I'm old enough to be drafted I can go all over France and
+they can't take me."
+
+"Are you fond of your grandfather?" said the countess, trying to look
+into the child's heart.
+
+"My! doesn't he box my ears when he feels like it! but then, after
+all, he's such fun; he's such good company! He says he pays himself
+that way for having taught me to read and write."
+
+"Can you read?" asked the count.
+
+"Yah, I should think so, Monsieur le comte, and fine writing too--just
+as true as we've got that otter."
+
+"Read that," said the count, giving him a newspaper.
+
+"The Qu-o-ti-dienne," read Mouche, hesitating only three times.
+
+Every one, even the abbe, laughed.
+
+"Why do you make me read that newspaper?" cried Mouche, angrily. "My
+grandpa says it is made up to please the rich, and everybody knows
+later just what's in it."
+
+"The child is right, general," said Blondet; "and he makes me long to
+see my hoaxing friend again."
+
+Mouche understood perfectly that he was posing for the amusement of
+the company; the pupil of Pere Fourchon was worthy of his master, and
+he forthwith began to cry.
+
+"How can you tease a child with bare feet?" said the countess.
+
+"And who thinks it quite natural that his grandfather should recoup
+himself for his education by boxing his ears," said Blondet.
+
+"Tell me, my poor little fellow, have you really caught an otter?"
+
+"Yes, madame; as true as that you are the prettiest lady I have seen,
+or ever shall see," said the child, wiping his eyes.
+
+"Then show me the otter," said the general.
+
+"Oh M'sieur le comte, my grandpa has hidden it; but it was kicking
+still when we were at work at the rope-walk. Send for my grandpa,
+please; he wants to sell it to you himself."
+
+"Take him into the kitchen," said the countess to Francois, "and give
+him his breakfast, and send Charles to fetch Pere Fourchon. Find some
+shoes, and a pair of trousers and a waistcoat for the poor child;
+those who come here naked must go away clothed."
+
+"May God bless you, my beautiful lady," said Mouche, departing.
+"M'sieur le cure may feel quite sure that I'll keep the things and
+wear 'em fete-days, because you give 'em to me."
+
+Emile and Madame Montcornet looked at each other with some surprise,
+and seemed to say to the abbe, "The boy is not a fool!"
+
+"It is quite true, madame," said the abbe after the child had gone,
+"that we cannot reckon with Poverty. I believe it has hidden excuses
+of which God alone can judge,--physical excuses, often congenital;
+moral excuses, born in the character, produced by an order of things
+that are often the result of qualities which, unhappily for society,
+have no vent. Deeds of heroism performed upon the battle-field ought
+to teach us that the worst scoundrels may become heroes. But here in
+this place you are living under exceptional circumstances; and if your
+benevolence is not controlled by reflection and judgment you run the
+risk of supporting your enemies."
+
+"Our enemies?" exclaimed the countess.
+
+"Cruel enemies," said the general, gravely.
+
+"Pere Fourchon and his son-in-law Tonsard," said the abbe, "are the
+strength and the intelligence of the lower classes of this valley, who
+consult them on all occasions. The Machiavelism of these people is
+beyond belief. Ten peasants meeting in a tavern are the small change
+of great political questions."
+
+Just then Francois announced Monsieur Sibilet.
+
+"He is my minister of finance," said the general, smiling; "ask him
+in. He will explain to you the gravity of the situation," he added,
+looking at his wife and Blondet.
+
+"Because he has reasons of his own for not concealing it," said the
+cure, in a low tone.
+
+Blondet then beheld a personage of whom he had heard much ever since
+his arrival, and whom he desired to know, the land-steward of Les
+Aigues. He saw a man of medium height, about thirty years of age, with
+a sulky look and a discontented face, on which a smile sat ill.
+Beneath an anxious brow a pair of greenish eyes evaded the eyes of
+others, and so disguised their thought. Sibilet was dressed in a brown
+surtout coat, black trousers and waistcoat, and wore his hair long and
+flat to the head, which gave him a clerical look. His trousers barely
+concealed that he was knock-kneed. Though his pallid complexion and
+flabby flesh gave the impression of an unhealthy constitution, Sibilet
+was really robust. The tones of his voice, which were a little thick,
+harmonized with this unflattering exterior.
+
+Blondet gave a hasty look at the abbe, and the glance with which the
+young priest answered it showed the journalist that his own suspicions
+about the steward were certainties to the curate.
+
+"Did you not tell me, my dear Sibilet," said the general, "that you
+estimate the value of what the peasants steal from us at a quarter of
+the whole revenue?"
+
+"Much more than that, Monsieur le comte," replied the steward. "The
+poor about here get more from your property than the State exacts in
+taxes. A little scamp like Mouche can glean his two bushels a day. Old
+women, whom you would really think at their last gasp, become at the
+harvest and vintage times as active and healthy as girls. You can
+witness that phenomenon very soon," said Sibilet, addressing Blondet,
+"for the harvest, which was put back by the rains in July will begin
+next week, when they cut the rye. The gleaners must have a certificate
+of pauperism from the mayor of the district, and no district should
+allow any one to glean except the paupers; but the districts of one
+canton do glean in those of another without certificate. If we have
+sixty real paupers in our district, there are at least forty others
+who could support themselves if they were not so idle. Even persons
+who have a business leave it to glean in the fields and in the
+vineyards. All these people, taken together, gather in this
+neighborhood something like three hundred bushels a day; the harvest
+lasts two weeks, and that makes four thousand five hundred bushels in
+this district alone. The gleaning takes more from an estate than the
+taxes. As to the abuse of pasturage, it robs us of fully one-sixth the
+produce of the meadows; and as to that of the woods, it is
+incalculable,--they have actually come to cutting down six-year-old
+trees. The loss to you, Monsieur le comte, amounts to fully twenty-odd
+thousand francs a year."
+
+"Do you hear that, madame?" said the general to his wife.
+
+"Is it not exaggerated?" asked Madame de Montcornet.
+
+"No, madame, unfortunately not," said the abbe. "Poor Niseron, that
+old fellow with the white head, who combines the functions of
+bell-ringer, beadle, grave-digger, sexton, and clerk, in defiance of
+his republican opinions,--I mean the grandfather of the little
+Genevieve whom you placed with Madame Michaud--"
+
+"La Pechina," said Sibilet, interrupting the abbe.
+
+"Pechina!" said the countess, "whom do you mean?"
+
+"Madame la comtesse, when you met little Genevieve on the road in a
+miserable condition, you cried out in Italian, 'Piccina!' The word
+became a nickname, and is now corrupted all through the district into
+Pechina," said the abbe. "The poor girl comes to church with Madame
+Michaud and Madame Sibilet."
+
+"And she is none the better for it," said Sibilet, "for the others
+ill-treat her on account of her religion."
+
+"Well, that poor old man of seventy gleans, honestly, about a bushel
+and a half a day," continued the priest; "but his natural uprightness
+prevents him from selling his gleanings as others do,--he keeps them
+for his own consumption. Monsieur Langlume, your miller, grinds his
+flour gratis at my request, and my servant bakes his bread with mine."
+
+"I had quite forgotten my little protegee," said the countess,
+troubled at Sibilet's remark. "Your arrival," she added to Blondet,
+"has quite turned my head. But after breakfast I will take you to the
+gate of the Avonne and show you the living image of those women whom
+the painters of the fifteenth century delighted to perpetuate."
+
+The sound of Pere Fourchon's broken sabots was now heard; after
+depositing them in the antechamber, he was brought to the door of the
+dining-room by Francois. At a sign from the countess, Francois allowed
+him to pass in, followed by Mouche with his mouth full and carrying
+the otter, hanging by a string tied to its yellow paws, webbed like
+those of a palmiped. He cast upon his four superiors sitting at table,
+and also upon Sibilet, that look of mingled distrust and servility
+which serves as a veil to the thoughts of the peasantry; then he
+brandished his amphibian with a triumphant air.
+
+"Here it is!" he cried, addressing Blondet.
+
+"My otter!" returned the Parisian, "and well paid for."
+
+"Oh, my dear gentleman," replied Pere Fourchon, "yours got away; she
+is now in her burrow, and she won't come out, for she's a female,
+--this is a male; Mouche saw him coming just as you went away. As true
+as you live, as true as that Monsieur le comte covered himself and his
+cuirassiers with glory at Waterloo, the otter is mine, just as much as
+Les Aigues belongs to Monseigneur the general. But the otter is _yours_
+for twenty francs; if not I'll take it to the sub-prefect. If Monsieur
+Gourdon thinks it too dear, then I'll give you the preference; that's
+only fair, as we hunted together this morning!"
+
+"Twenty francs!" said Blondet. "In good French you can't call that
+_giving_ the preference."
+
+"Hey, my dear gentleman," cried the old fellow. "Perhaps I don't know
+French, and I'll ask it in good Burgundian; as long as I get the
+money, I don't care, I'll talk Latin: 'latinus, latina, latinum'!
+Besides, twenty francs is what you promised me this morning. My
+children have already stolen the silver you gave me; I wept about it,
+coming along,--ask Charles if I didn't. Not that I'd arrest 'em for
+the value of ten francs and have 'em up before the judge, no! But just
+as soon as I earn a few pennies, they make me drink and get 'em out of
+me. Ah! it is hard, hard to be reduced to go and get my wine
+elsewhere. But just see what children are these days! That's what we
+got by the Revolution; it is all for the children now-a-days, and
+parents are suppressed. I'm bringing up Mouche on another tack; he
+loves me, the little scamp,"--giving his grandson a poke.
+
+"It seems to me you are making him a little thief, like all the rest,"
+said Sibilet; "he never lies down at night without some sin on his
+conscience."
+
+"Ha! Monsieur Sibilet, his conscience is as clean as yours any day!
+Poor child! what can he steal? A little grass! that's better than
+throttling a man! He don't know mathematics like you, nor subtraction,
+nor addition, nor multiplication,--you are very unjust to us, that you
+are! You call us a nest of brigands, but you are the cause of the
+misunderstandings between our good landlord here, who is a worthy man,
+and the rest of us, who are all worthy men,--there ain't an honester
+part of the country than this. Come, what do you mean? do I own
+property? don't I go half-naked, and Mouche too? Fine sheets we slept
+in, washed by the dew every morning! and unless you want the air we
+breathe and the sunshine we drink, I should like to know what we have
+that you can take away from us! The rich folks rob as they sit in
+their chimney-corners,--and more profitably, too, than by picking up a
+few sticks in the woods. I don't see no game-keepers or patrols after
+Monsieur Gaubertin, who came here as naked as a worm and is now worth
+his millions. It's easy said, 'Robbers!' Here's fifteen years that old
+Guerbet, the tax-gatherer at Soulanges, carries his money along the
+roads by the dead of night, and nobody ever took a farthing from him;
+is that like a land of robbers? has robbery made us rich? Show me
+which of us two, your class or mine, live the idlest lives and have
+the most to live on without earning it."
+
+"If you were to work," said the abbe, "you would have property. God
+blesses labor."
+
+"I don't want to contradict you, M'sieur l'abbe, for you are wiser
+than I, and perhaps you'll know how to explain something that puzzles
+me. Now see, here I am, ain't I?--that drunken, lazy, idle,
+good-for-nothing old Fourchon, who had an education and was a farmer,
+and got down in the mud and never got up again,--well, what difference
+is there between me and that honest and worthy old Niseron, seventy
+years old (and that's my age) who has dug the soil for sixty years and
+got up every day before it was light to go to his work, and has made
+himself an iron body and a fine soul? Well, isn't he as bad off as I
+am? His little granddaughter, Pechina, is at service with Madame
+Michaud, whereas my little Mouche is as free as air. So that poor good
+man gets rewarded for his virtues in exactly the same way that I get
+punished for my vices. He don't know what a glass of good wine is,
+he's as sober as an apostle, he buries the dead, and I--I play for the
+living to dance. He is always in a peck o' troubles, while I slip
+along in a devil-may-care way. We have come along about even in life;
+we've got the same snow on our heads, the same funds in our pockets,
+and I supply him with rope to ring his bell. He's a republican and I'm
+not even a publican,--that's all the difference as far as I can see. A
+peasant may do good or do evil (according to your ideas) and he'll go
+out of the world just as he came into it, in rags; while you wear the
+fine clothes."
+
+No one interrupted Pere Fourchon, who seemed to owe his eloquence to
+his potations. At first Sibilet tried to cut him short, but desisted
+at a sign from Blondet. The abbe, the general, and the countess, all
+understood from the expression of the writer's eye that he wanted to
+study the question of pauperism from life, and perhaps take his
+revenge on Pere Fourchon.
+
+"What sort of education are you giving Mouche?" asked Blondet. "Do you
+expect to make him any better than your daughters?"
+
+"Does he ever speak to him of God?" said the priest.
+
+"Oh, no, no! Monsieur le cure, I don't tell him to fear God, but men.
+God is good; he has promised us poor folks, so you say, the kingdom of
+heaven, because the rich people keep the earth to themselves. I tell
+him: 'Mouche! fear the prison, and keep out of it,--for that's the way
+to the scaffold. Don't steal anything, make people give it to you.
+Theft leads to murder, and murder brings down the justice of men. The
+razor of justice,--_that's_ what you've got to fear; it lets the rich
+sleep easy and keeps the poor awake. Learn to read. Education will
+teach you ways to grab money under cover of the law, like that fine
+Monsieur Gaubertin; why, you can even be a land-steward like Monsieur
+Sibilet here, who gets his rations out of Monsieur le comte. The thing
+to do is to keep well with the rich, and pick up the crumbs that fall
+from their tables.' That's what I call giving him a good, solid
+education; and you'll always find the little rascal on the side of the
+law,--he'll be a good citizen and take care of me."
+
+"What do you mean to make of him?" asked Blondet.
+
+"A servant, to begin with," returned Fourchon, "because then he'll see
+his masters close by, and learn something; he'll complete his
+education, I'll warrant you. Good example will be a fortune to him,
+with the law on his side like the rest of you. If M'sieur le comte
+would only take him in his stables and let him learn to groom the
+horses, the boy will be mighty pleased, for though I've taught him to
+fear men, he don't fear animals."
+
+"You are a clever fellow, Pere Fourchon," said Blondet; "you know what
+you are talking about, and there's sense in what you say."
+
+"Oh, sense? no; I left my sense at the Grand-I-Vert when I lost those
+silver pieces."
+
+"How is it that a man of your capacity should have dropped so low? As
+things are now, a peasant can only blame himself for his poverty; he
+is a free man, and he can become a rich one. It is not as it used to
+be. If a peasant lays by his money, he can always buy a bit of land
+and become his own master."
+
+"I've seen the olden time and I've seen the new, my dear wise
+gentleman," said Fourchon; "the sign over the door has changed, that's
+true, but the wine is the same,--to-day is the younger brother of
+yesterday, that's all. Put that in your newspaper! Are we poor folks
+free? We still belong to the same parish, and its lord is always
+there,--I call him Toil. The hoe, our sole property, has never left
+our hands. Let it be the old lords or the present taxes which take the
+best of our earnings, the fact remains that we sweat our lives out in
+toil."
+
+"But you could undertake a business, and try to make your fortune,"
+said Blondet.
+
+"Try to make my fortune! And where shall I try? If I wish to leave my
+own province, I must get a passport, and that costs forty sous. Here's
+forty years that I've never had a slut of a forty-sous piece jingling
+against another in my pocket. If you want to travel you need as many
+crowns as there are villages, and there are mighty few Fourchons who
+have enough to get to six of 'em. It is only the draft that gives us a
+chance to get away. And what good does the army do us? The colonels
+live by the solider, just as the rich folks live by the peasant; and
+out of every hundred of 'em you won't find more than one of our breed.
+It is just as it is the world over, one rolling in riches, for a
+hundred down in the mud. Why are we in the mud? Ask God and the
+usurers. The best we can do is to stay in our own parts, where we are
+penned like sheep by the force of circumstances, as our fathers were
+by the rule of the lords. As for me, what do I care what shackles they
+are that keep me here? let it be the law of public necessity or the
+tyranny of the old lords, it is all the same; we are condemned to dig
+the soil forever. There, where we are born, there we dig it, that
+earth! and spade it, and manure it, and delve in it, for you who are
+born rich just as we are born poor. The masses will always be what
+they are, and stay what they are. The number of us who manage to rise
+is nothing like the number of you who topple down! We know that well
+enough, if we have no education! You mustn't be after us with your
+sheriff all the time,--not if you're wise. We let you alone, and you
+must let us alone. If not, and things get worse, you'll have to feed
+us in your prisons, where we'd be much better off than in our homes.
+You want to remain our masters, and we shall always be enemies, just
+as we were thirty years ago. You have everything, we have nothing; you
+can't expect we should ever be friends."
+
+"That's what I call a declaration of war," said the general.
+
+"Monseigneur," retorted Fourchon, "when Les Aigues belonged to that
+poor Madame (God keep her soul and forgive her the sins of her youth!)
+we were happy. _She_ let us get our food from the fields and our fuel
+from the forest; and was she any the poorer for it? And you, who are
+at least as rich as she, you hunt us like wild beasts, neither more
+nor less, and drag the poor before the courts. Well, evil will come of
+it! you'll be the cause of some great calamity. Haven't I just seen
+your keeper, that shuffling Vatel, half kill a poor old woman for a
+stick of wood? It is such fellows as that who make you an enemy to the
+poor; and the talk is very bitter against you. They curse you every
+bit as hard as they used to bless the late Madame. The curse of the
+poor, monseigneur, is a seed that grows,--grows taller than your tall
+oaks, and oak-wood builds the scaffold. Nobody here tells you the
+truth; and here it is, yes, the truth! I expect to die before long,
+and I risk very little in telling it to you, the _truth_! I, who play
+for the peasants to dance at the great fetes at Soulanges, I heed what
+the people say. Well, they're all against you; and they'll make it
+impossible for you to stay here. If that damned Michaud of yours
+doesn't change, they'll force you to change him. There! that
+information _and_ the otter are worth twenty francs, and more too."
+
+As the old fellow uttered the last words a man's step was heard, and
+the individual just threatened by Fourchon entered unannounced. It was
+easy to see from the glance he threw at the old man that the threat
+had reached his ears, and all Fourchon's insolence sank in a moment.
+The look produced precisely the same effect upon him that the eye of a
+policeman produces on a thief. Fourchon knew he was wrong, and that
+Michaud might very well accuse him of saying these things merely to
+terrify the inhabitants of Les Aigues.
+
+"This is the minister of war," said the general to Blondet, nodding at
+Michaud.
+
+"Pardon me, madame, for having entered without asking if you were
+willing to receive me," said the newcomer to the countess; "but I have
+urgent reasons for speaking to the general at once."
+
+Michaud, as he said this, took notice of Sibilet, whose expression of
+keen delight in Fourchon's daring words was not seen by the four
+persons seated at the table, because they were so preoccupied by the
+old man; whereas Michaud, who for secret reasons watched Sibilet
+constantly, was struck with his air and manner.
+
+"He has earned his twenty francs, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet;
+"the otter is fully worth it."
+
+"Give him twenty francs," said the general to the footman.
+
+"Do you mean to take my otter away from me?" said Blondet to the
+general.
+
+"I shall have it stuffed," replied the latter.
+
+"Ah! but that good gentleman said I might keep the skin," cried
+Fourchon.
+
+"Well, then," exclaimed the countess, hastily, "you shall have five
+francs more for the skin; but go away now."
+
+The powerful odor emitted by the pair made the dining-room so horribly
+offensive that Madame de Montcornet, whose senses were very delicate,
+would have been forced to leave the room if Fourchon and Mouche had
+remained. To this circumstance the old man was indebted for his
+twenty-five francs. He left the room with a timid glance at Michaud,
+making him an interminable series of bows.
+
+"What I was saying to monseigneur, Monsieur Michaud," he added, "was
+really for your good."
+
+"Or for that of those who pay you," replied Michaud, with a searching
+look.
+
+"When you have served the coffee, leave the room," said the general to
+the servants, "and see that the doors are shut."
+
+Blondet, who had not yet seen the bailiff of Les Aigues, was
+conscious, as he now saw him, of a totally different impression from
+that conveyed by Sibilet. Just as the steward inspired distrust and
+repulsion, so Michaud commanded respect and confidence. The first
+attraction of his presence was a happy face, of a fine oval, pure in
+outline, in which the nose bore part,--a regularity which is lacking
+in the majority of French faces. Though the features were correct in
+drawing, they were not without expression, due, perhaps, to the
+harmonious coloring of the warm brown and ochre tints, indicative of
+physical health and strength. The clear brown eyes, which were bright
+and piercing, kept no reserves in the expression of his thought; they
+looked straight into the eyes of others. The broad white forehead was
+thrown still further into relief by his abundant black hair. Honesty,
+decision, and a saintly serenity were the animating points of this
+noble face, where a few deep lines upon the brow were the result of
+the man's military career. Doubt and suspicion could there be read the
+moment they had entered his mind. His figure, like that of all men
+selected for the elite of the cavalry service, though shapely and
+elegant, was vigorously built. Michaud, who wore moustachios,
+whiskers, and a chin beard, recalled that martial type of face which a
+deluge of patriotic paintings and engravings came very near to making
+ridiculous. This type had the defect of being common in the French
+army; perhaps the continuance of the same emotions, the same camp
+sufferings from which none were exempt, neither high nor low, and more
+especially the same efforts of officers and men upon the battle-fields,
+may have contributed to produce this uniformity of countenance.
+Michaud, who was dressed in dark blue cloth, still wore the black satin
+stock and high boots of a soldier, which increased the slight stiffness
+and rigidity of his bearing. The shoulders sloped, the chest expanded,
+as though the man were still under arms. The red ribbon of the Legion
+of honor was in his buttonhole. In short, to give a last touch in one
+word about the moral qualities beneath this purely physical presentment,
+it may be said that while the steward, from the time he first entered
+upon his functions, never failed to call his master "Monsieur le
+comte," Michaud never addressed him otherwise than as "General."
+
+Blondet exchanged another look with the Abbe Brossette, which meant,
+"What a contrast!" as he signed to him to observe the two men. Then,
+as if to know whether the character and mind and speech of the bailiff
+harmonized with his form and countenance, he turned to Michaud and
+said:--
+
+"I was out early this morning, and found your under-keepers still
+sleeping."
+
+"At what hour?" said the late soldier, anxiously.
+
+"Half-past seven."
+
+Michaud gave a half-roguish glance at the general.
+
+"By what gate did monsieur leave the park?" he asked.
+
+"By the gate of Conches. The keeper, in his night-shirt, looked at me
+through the window," replied Blondet.
+
+"Gaillard had probably just gone to bed," answered Michaud. "You said
+you were out early, and I thought you meant day-break. If my man were
+at home at that time, he must have been ill; but at half-past seven he
+was sure to be in bed. We are up all night," added Michaud, after a
+slight pause, replying to a surprised look on the countess's face,
+"but our watchfulness is often wasted. You have just given twenty-five
+francs to a man who, not an hour ago, was quietly helping to hide the
+traces of a robbery committed upon you this very morning. I came to
+speak to you about it, general, when you have finished breakfast; for
+something will have to be done."
+
+"You are always for maintaining the right, my dear Michaud, and
+'summum jus, summum injuria.' If you are not more tolerant, you will
+get into trouble, so Sibilet here tells me. I wish you could have
+heard Pere Fourchon just now; the wine he had been drinking made him
+speak out."
+
+"He frightened me," said the countess.
+
+"He said nothing I did not know long ago," replied the general.
+
+"Oh! the rascal wasn't drunk; he was playing a part; for whose benefit
+I leave you to guess. Perhaps you know?" returned Michaud, fixing an
+eye on Sibilet which caused the latter to turn red.
+
+"O rus!" cried Blondet, with another look at the abbe.
+
+"But these poor creatures suffer," said the countess, "and there is a
+great deal of truth in what old Fourchon has just screamed at us,--for
+I cannot call it speaking."
+
+"Madame," replied Michaud, "do you suppose that for fourteen years the
+soldiers of the Emperor slept on a bed of roses? My general is a
+count, he is a grand officer of the Legion of honor, he has had
+perquisites and endowments given to him; am I jealous of him, I who
+fought as he did? Do I wish to cheat him of his glory, to steal his
+perquisites, to deny him the honor due to his rank? The peasant should
+obey as the soldier obeys; he should feel the loyalty of a soldier,
+his respect for acquired rights, and strive to become an officer
+himself, honorably, by labor and not by theft. The sabre and the
+plough are twins; though the soldier has something more than the
+peasant,--he has death hanging over him at any minute."
+
+"I want to say that from the pulpit," cried the abbe.
+
+"Tolerant!" continued the keeper, replying to the general's remark
+about Sibilet, "I would tolerate a loss of ten per cent upon the gross
+returns of Les Aigues; but as things are now thirty per cent is what
+you lose, general; and, if Monsieur Sibilet's accounts show it, I
+don't understand his tolerance, for he benevolently gives up a
+thousand or twelve hundred francs a year."
+
+"My dear Monsieur Michaud," replied Sibilet, in a snappish tone, "I
+have told Monsieur le comte that I would rather lose twelve hundred
+francs a year than my life. Think of it seriously; I have warned you
+often enough."
+
+"Life!" exclaimed the countess; "you can't mean that anybody's life is
+in danger?"
+
+"Don't let us argue about state affairs here," said the general,
+laughing. "All this, my dear, merely means that Sibilet, in his
+capacity of financier, is timid and cowardly, while the minister of
+war is brave and, like his general, fears nothing."
+
+"Call me prudent, Monsieur le comte," interposed Sibilet.
+
+"Well, well!" cried Blondet, laughing, "so here we are, like Cooper's
+heroes in the forests of America, in the midst of sieges and savages."
+
+"Come, gentlemen, it is your business to govern without letting me
+hear the wheels of the administration," said Madame de Montcornet.
+
+"Ah! madame," said the cure, "but it may be right that you should know
+the toil from which those pretty caps you wear are derived."
+
+"Well, then, I can go without them," replied the countess, laughing.
+"I will be very respectful to a twenty-franc piece, and grow as
+miserly as the country people themselves. Come, my dear abbe, give me
+your arm. Leave the general with his two ministers, and let us go to
+the gate of the Avonne to see Madame Michaud, for I have not had time
+since my arrival to pay her a visit, and I want to inquire about my
+little protegee."
+
+And the pretty woman, already forgetting the rags and tatters of
+Mouche and Fourchon, and their eyes full of hatred, and Sibilet's
+warnings, went to have herself made ready for the walk.
+
+The abbe and Blondet obeyed the behest of the mistress of the house
+and followed her from the dining-room, waiting till she was ready on
+the terrace before the chateau.
+
+"What do you think of all this?" said Blondet to the abbe.
+
+"I am a pariah; they dog me as they would a common enemy. I am forced
+to keep my eyes and ears perpetually open to escape the traps they are
+constantly laying to get me out of the place," replied the abbe. "I am
+even doubtful, between ourselves, as to whether they will not shoot
+me."
+
+"Why do you stay?" said Blondet.
+
+"We can't desert God's cause any more than that of an emperor,"
+replied the priest, with a simplicity that affected Blondet. He took
+the abbe's hand and shook it cordially.
+
+"You see how it is, therefore, that I know very little of the plots
+that are going on," continued the abbe. "Still, I know enough to feel
+sure that the general is under what in Artois and in Belgium is called
+an 'evil grudge.'"
+
+A few words are here necessary about the curate of Blangy.
+
+This priest, the fourth son of a worthy middle-class family of Autun,
+was an intelligent man carrying his head high in his collar. Small and
+slight, he redeemed his rather puny appearance by the precise and
+carefully dressed air that belongs to Burgundians. He accepted the
+second-rate post of Blangy out of pure devotion, for his religious
+convictions were joined to political opinions that were equally
+strong. There was something of the priest of the olden time about him;
+he held to the Church and to the clergy passionately; saw the bearings
+of things, and no selfishness marred his one ambition, which was _to
+serve_. That was his motto,--to serve the Church and the monarchy
+wherever it was most threatened; to serve in the lowest rank like a
+soldier who feels that he is destined, sooner or later, to attain
+command through courage and the resolve to do his duty. He made no
+compromises with his vows of chastity, and poverty, and obedience; he
+fulfilled them, as he did the other duties of his position, with that
+simplicity and cheerful good-humor which are the sure indications of
+an honest heart, constrained to do right by natural impulses as much
+as by the power and consistency of religious convictions.
+
+The priest had seen at first sight Blondet's attachment to the
+countess; he saw that between a Troisville and a monarchical
+journalist he could safely show himself to be a man of broad
+intelligence, because his calling was certain to be respected. He
+usually came to the chateau very evening to make the fourth at a game
+of whist. The journalist, able to recognize the abbe's real merits,
+showed him so much deference that the pair grew into sympathy with
+each other; as usually happens when men of intelligence meet their
+equals, or, if you prefer it, the ears that are able to hear them.
+Swords are fond of their scabbards.
+
+"But to what do you attribute this state of things, Monsieur l'abbe,
+you who are able, through your disinterestedness, to look over the
+heads of things?"
+
+"I shall not talk platitudes after such a flattering speech as that,"
+said the abbe, smiling. "What is going on in this valley is spreading
+more or less throughout France; it is the outcome of the hopes which
+the upheaval of 1789 caused to infiltrate, if I may use that
+expression, the minds of the peasantry, the sons of the soil. The
+Revolution affected certain localities more than others. This side of
+Burgundy, nearest to Paris, is one of those places where the
+revolutionary ideas spread like the overrunning of the Franks by the
+Gauls. Historically, the peasants are still on the morrow of the
+Jacquerie; that defeat is burnt in upon their brain. They have long
+forgotten the facts which have now passed into the condition of an
+instinctive idea. That idea is bred in the peasant blood, just as the
+idea of superiority was once bred in noble blood. The revolution of
+1789 was the retaliation of the vanquished. The peasants then set foot
+in possession of the soil which the feudal law had denied them for
+over twelve hundred years. Hence their desire for land, which they now
+cut up among themselves until actually they divide a furrow into two
+parts; which, by the bye, often hinders or prevents the collection of
+taxes, for the value of such fractions of property is not sufficient
+to pay the legal costs of recovering them."
+
+"Very true, for the obstinacy of the small owners--their
+aggressiveness, if you choose--on this point is so great that in at
+least one thousand cantons of the three thousand of French territory,
+it is impossible for a rich man to buy an inch of land from a
+peasant," said Blondet, interrupting the abbe. "The peasants who are
+willing to divide up their scraps of land among themselves would not
+sell a fraction on any condition or at any price to the middle
+classes. The more money the rich man offers, the more the vague
+uneasiness of the peasant increases. Legal dispossession alone is able
+to bring the landed property of the peasant into the market. Many
+persons have noticed this fact without being able to find a reason for
+it."
+
+"This is the reason," said the abbe, rightly believing that a pause
+with Blondet was equivalent to a question: "twelve centuries have done
+nothing for a caste whom the historic spectacle of civilization has
+never yet diverted from its one predominating thought,--a caste which
+still wears proudly the broad-brimmed hat of its masters, ever since
+an abandoned fashion placed it upon their heads. That all-pervading
+thought, the roots of which are in the bowels of the people, and which
+attached them so vehemently to Napoleon (who was personally less to
+them than he thought he was) and which explains the miracle of his
+return in 1815,--that desire for land is the sole motive power of the
+peasant's being. In the eyes of the masses Napoleon, ever one with
+them through his million of soldiers, is still the king born of the
+Revolution; the man who gave them possession of the soil and sold to
+them the national domains. His anointing was saturated with that
+idea."
+
+"An idea to which 1814 dealt a blow, an idea which monarchy should
+hold sacred," said Blondet, quickly; "for the people may some day find
+on the steps of the throne a prince whose father bequeathed to him the
+head of Louis XVI. as an heirloom."
+
+"Here is madame; don't say any more," said the abbe, in a low voice.
+"Fourchon has frightened her; and it is very desirable to keep her
+here in the interests of religion and of the throne, and, indeed, in
+those of the people themselves."
+
+Michaud, the bailiff of Les Aigues, had come to the chateau in
+consequence of the assault on Vatel's eyes. But before we relate the
+consultation which then and there took place, the chain of events
+requires a succinct account of the circumstances under which the
+general purchased Les Aigues, the serious causes which led to the
+appointment of Sibilet as steward of that magnificent property, and
+the reasons why Michaud was made bailiff, with all the other
+antecedents to which were due the tension of the minds of all, and the
+fears expressed by Sibilet.
+
+This rapid summary will have the merit of introducing some of the
+principal actors in this drama, and of exhibiting their individual
+interests; we shall thus be enabled to show the dangers which
+surrounded the General comte de Montcornet at the moment when this
+history opens.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VI
+
+                         A TALE OF THIEVES
+
+When Mademoiselle Laguerre first visited her estate, in 1791, she took
+as steward the son of the ex-bailiff of Soulanges, named Gaubertin.
+The little town of Soulanges, at present nothing more than the chief
+town of a canton, was once the capital of a considerable county, in
+the days when the House of Burgundy made war upon France.
+Ville-aux-Fayes, now the seat of the sub-prefecture, then a mere fief,
+was a dependency of Soulanges, like Les Aigues, Ronquerolles, Cerneux,
+Conches, and a score of other parishes. The Soulanges have remained
+counts, whereas the Ronquerolles are now marquises by the will of that
+power, called the Court, which made the son of Captain du Plessis duke
+over the heads of the first families of the Conquest. All of which
+serves to prove that towns, like families, are variable in their
+destiny.
+
+Gaubertin, a young man without property of any kind, succeeded a
+steward enriched by a management of thirty years, who preferred to
+become a partner in the famous firm of Minoret rather than continue to
+administer Les Aigues. In his own interests he introduced into his
+place as land-steward Francois Gaubertin, his accountant for five
+years, whom he now relied on to cover his retreat, and who, out of
+gratitude for his instructions, promised to obtain for him a release
+in full of all claims from Madame Laguerre, who by this time was
+terrified at the Revolution. Gaubertin's father, the attorney-general
+of the department, henceforth protected the timid woman. This
+provincial Fouquier-Tinville raised a false alarm of danger in the
+mind of the opera-divinity on the ground of her former relations to
+the aristocracy, so as to give his son the equally false credit of
+saving her life; on the strength of which Gaubertin the younger
+obtained very easily the release of his predecessor. Mademoiselle
+Laguerre then made Francois Gaubertin her prime minister, as much
+through policy as from gratitude. The late steward had not spoiled
+her. He sent her, every year, about thirty thousand francs, though Les
+Aigues brought in at that time at least forty thousand. The
+unsuspecting opera-singer was therefore much delighted when the new
+steward Gaubertin promised her thirty-six thousand.
+
+To explain the present fortune of the land-steward of Les Aigues
+before the judgment-seat of probability, it is necessary to state its
+beginnings. Pushed by his father's influence, he became mayor of
+Blangy. Thus he was able, contrary to law, to make the debtors pay in
+coin, by "terrorizing" (a phrase of the day) such of them as might, in
+his opinion, be subjected to the crushing demands of the Republic. He
+himself paid the citizens in assignats as long as the system of paper
+money lasted,--a system which, if it did not make the nation
+prosperous, at least made the fortunes of private individuals. From
+1793 to 1795, that is, for three years, Francois Gaubertin wrung one
+hundred and fifty thousand francs out of Les Aigues, with which he
+speculated on the stock-market in Paris. With her purse full of
+assignats Mademoiselle was actually obliged to obtain ready money from
+her diamonds, now useless to her. She gave them to Gaubertin, who sold
+them, and faithfully returned to her their full price. This proof of
+honesty touched her heart; henceforth she believed in Gaubertin as she
+did in Piccini.
+
+In 1796, at the time of his marriage with the citoyenne Isaure
+Mouchon, daughter of an old "conventional," a friend of his father,
+Gaubertin possessed about three hundred and fifty thousand francs in
+money. As the Directory seemed to him likely to last, he determined,
+before marrying, to have the accounts of his five years' stewardship
+ratified by Mademoiselle, under pretext of a new departure.
+
+"I am to be the head of a family," he said to her; "you know the
+reputation of land-stewards; my father-in-law is a republican of Roman
+austerity, and a man of influence as well; I want to prove to him that
+I am as upright as he."
+
+Mademoiselle Laguerre accepted his accounts at once in very flattering
+terms.
+
+In those earlier days the steward had endeavored, in order to win the
+confidence of Madame des Aigues (as Mademoiselle was then called) to
+repress the depredations of the peasantry; fearing, and not without
+reason, that the revenues would suffer too severely, and that his
+private bonus from the buyers of the timber would sensibly diminish.
+But in those days the sovereign people felt the soil was their own
+everywhere; Madame was afraid of the surrounding kings and told her
+Richelieu that the first desire of her soul was to die in peace. The
+revenues of the late singer were so far in excess of her expenses that
+she allowed all the worst, and, as it proved, fatal precedents to be
+established. To avoid a lawsuit, she allowed the neighbors to encroach
+upon her land. Knowing that the park walls were sufficient protection,
+she did not fear any interruption of her personal comfort, and cared
+for nothing but her peaceful existence, true philosopher that she was!
+A few thousand a year more or less, the indemnities exacted by the
+wood-merchants for the damages committed by the peasants,--what were
+they to a careless and extravagant Opera-girl, who had gained her
+hundred thousand francs a year at the cost of pleasure only, and who
+had just submitted, without a word of remonstrance, to a reduction of
+two thirds of an income of sixty thousand francs?
+
+"Dear me!" she said, in the easy tone of the wantons of the old time,
+"people must live, even if they are republicans."
+
+The terrible Mademoiselle Cochet, her maid and female vizier, had
+tried to enlighten her mistress when she saw the ascendency Gaubertin
+was obtaining over one whom he began by calling "Madame" in defiance
+of the revolutionary laws about equality; but Gaubertin, in his turn,
+enlightened Mademoiselle Cochet by showing her a so-called
+denunciation sent to his father, the prosecuting attorney, in which
+she was vehemently accused of corresponding with Pitt and Coburg. From
+that time forward the two powers went on shares--shares a la
+Montgomery. Cochet praised Gaubertin to Madame, and Gaubertin praised
+Cochet. The waiting-maid had already made her own bed, and knew she
+was down for sixty thousand francs in the will. Madame could not do
+without Cochet, to whom she was accustomed. The woman knew the secrets
+of dear mistress's toilet; she alone could put dear mistress to sleep
+at night with her gossip, and get her up in the morning with her
+flattery; to the day of dear mistress's death the maid never could see
+the slightest change in her, and when dear mistress lay in her coffin,
+she doubtless thought she had never seen her looking so well.
+
+The annual pickings of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet, their wages
+and perquisites, became so large that the most affectionate relative
+could not possibly have been more devoted than they to their kindly
+mistress. There is really no describing how a swindler cossets his
+dupe. A mother is not so tender nor so solicitous for a beloved
+daughter as the practitioner of tartuferie for his milch cow. What
+brilliant success attends the performance of Tartufe behind the closed
+doors of a home! It is worth more than friendship. Moliere died too
+soon; he would otherwise have shown us the misery of Orgon, wearied by
+his family, harassed by his children, regretting the blandishments of
+Tartufe, and thinking to himself, "Ah, those were the good times!"
+
+During the last eight years of her life the mistress of Les Aigues
+received only thirty thousand francs of the fifty thousand really
+yielded by the estate. Gaubertin had reached the same administrative
+results as his predecessor, though farm rents and territorial products
+were notably increased between 1791 and 1815,--not to speak of
+Madame's continual purchases. But Gaubertin's fixed idea of acquiring
+Les Aigues at the old lady's death led him to depreciate the value of
+the magnificent estate in the matter of its ostensible revenues.
+Mademoiselle Cochet, a sharer in the scheme, was also to share the
+profits. As the ex-divinity in her declining years received an income
+of twenty thousand francs from the Funds called consolidated (how
+readily the tongue of politics can jest!), and with difficulty spent
+the said sum yearly, she was much surprised at the annual purchases
+made by her steward to use up the accumulating revenues, remembering
+how in former times she had always drawn them in advance. The result
+of having few wants in her old age seemed, to her mind, a proof of the
+honesty and uprightness of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet.
+
+"Two pearls!" she said to the persons who came to see her.
+
+Gaubertin kept his accounts with apparent honesty. He entered all
+rentals duly. Everything that could strike the feeble mind of the late
+singer, so far as arithmetic went, was clear and precise. The steward
+took his commission on all disbursements,--on the costs of working the
+estate, on rentals made, on suits brought, on work done, on repairs of
+every kind,--details which Madame never dreamed of verifying, and for
+which he sometimes charged twice over by collusion with the
+contractors, whose silence was bought by permission to charge the
+highest prices. These methods of dealing conciliated public opinion in
+favor of Gaubertin, while Madame's praise was on every lip; for
+besides the payments she disbursed for work, she gave away large sums
+of money in alms.
+
+"May God preserve her, the dear lady!" was heard on all sides.
+
+The truth was, everybody got something out of her, either indirectly
+or as a downright gift. In reprisals, as it were, of her youth the old
+actress was pillaged; so discreetly pillaged, however, that those who
+throve upon her kept their depredations within certain limits lest
+even her eyes might be opened and she should sell Les Aigues and
+return to Paris.
+
+This system of "pickings" was, alas! the cause of Paul-Louis Carter's
+assassination; he committed the mistake of advertising the sale of his
+estate and allowing it to be known that he should take away his wife,
+on whom a number of the Tonsards of Lorraine were battening. Fearing
+to lose Madame des Aigues, the marauders on the estate forbore to cut
+the young trees, unless pushed to extremities by finding no branches
+within reach of shears fastened to long poles. In the interests of
+robbery, they did as little harm as they could; although, during the
+last years of Madame's life, the habit of cutting wood became more and
+more barefaced. On certain clear nights not less than two hundred
+bundles were taken. As to the gleaning of fields and vineyards, Les
+Aigues lost, as Sibilet had pointed out, not less than one quarter of
+its products.
+
+Madame des Aigues had forbidden Cochet to marry during her lifetime,
+with the selfishness often shown in all countries by a mistress to a
+maid; which is not more irrational than the mania for keeping
+possession, until our last gasp, of property that is utterly useless
+to our material comfort, at the risk of being poisoned by impatient
+heirs. Twenty days after the old lady's burial Mademoiselle Cochet
+married the brigadier of the gendarmerie of Soulanges, named Soudry, a
+handsome man, forty-two years of age, who, ever since 1800 (in which
+year the gendarmerie was formed) had come every day to Les Aigues to
+see the waiting-maid, and dined with her at least three times a week
+at the Gaubertins'.
+
+During Madame's lifetime dinner was served to her and to her company
+by themselves. Neither Cochet nor Gaubertin, in spite of their great
+familiarity with the mistress, was ever admitted to her table; the
+leading lady of the Academie Royale retained, to her last hour, her
+sense of etiquette, her style of dress, her rouge and her heeled
+slippers, her carriage, her servants, and the majesty of her
+deportment. A divinity at the Opera, a divinity within her range of
+Parisian social life, she continued a divinity in the country
+solitudes, where her memory is still worshipped, and still holds its
+own against that of the old monarchy in the minds of the "best
+society" of Soulanges.
+
+Soudry, who had paid his addresses to Mademoiselle Cochet from the
+time he first came into the neighborhood, owned the finest house in
+Soulanges, an income of six thousand francs, and the prospect of a
+retiring pension whenever he should quit the service. As soon as
+Cochet became Madame Soudry she was treated with great consideration
+in the town. Though she kept the strictest secrecy as to the amount of
+her savings,--which were intrusted, like those of Gaubertin, to the
+commissary of wine-merchants of the department in Paris, a certain
+Leclercq, a native of Soulanges, to whom Gaubertin supplied funds as
+sleeping partner in his business,--public opinion credited the former
+waiting-maid with one of the largest fortunes in the little town of
+twelve hundred inhabitants.
+
+To the great astonishment of every one, Monsieur and Madame Soudry
+acknowledged as legitimate, in their marriage contract, a natural son
+of the gendarme, to whom, in future, Madame Soudry's fortune was to
+descend. At the time when this son was legally supplied with a mother,
+he had just ended his law studies in Paris and was about to enter into
+practice, with the intention of fitting himself for the magistracy.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to remark that a mutual understanding of
+twenty years had produced the closest intimacy between the families of
+Gaubertin and Soudry. Both reciprocally declared themselves, to the
+end of their days, "urbi et orbi," to be the most upright and
+honorable persons in all France. Such community of interests, based on
+the mutual knowledge of the secret spots on the white garment of
+conscience, is one of the ties least recognized and hardest to untie
+in this low world. You who read this social drama, have you never felt
+a conviction as to two persons which has led you to say to yourself,
+in order to explain the continuance of a faithful devotion which made
+your own egotism blush, "They must surely have committed some crime
+together"?
+
+After an administration of twenty-five years, Gaubertin, the
+land-steward, found himself in possession of six hundred thousand
+francs in money, and Cochet had accumulated nearly two hundred and
+fifty thousand. The rapid and constant turning over and over of their
+funds in the hands of Leclercq and Company (on the quai Bethume, Ile
+Saint Louis, rivals of the famous house of Grandet) was a great
+assistance to the fortunes of all parties. On the death of Mademoiselle
+Laguerre, Jenny, the steward's eldest daughter was asked in marriage by
+Leclercq. Gaubertin expected at that time to become owner of Les
+Aigues by means of a plot laid in the private office of Lupin, the
+notary, whom the steward had set up and maintained in business within
+the last twelve years.
+
+Lupin, a son of the former steward of the estate of Soulanges, had
+lent himself to various slight peculations,--investments at fifty per
+cent below par, notices published surreptitiously, and all the other
+manoeuvres, unhappily common in the provinces, to wrap a mantle, as
+the saying is, over the clandestine manipulations of property. Lately
+a company has been formed in Paris, so they say, to levy contributions
+upon such plotters under a threat of outbidding them. But in 1816
+France was not, as it is now, lighted by a flaming publicity; the
+accomplices might safely count on dividing Les Aigues among them, that
+is, between Cochet, the notary, and Gaubertin, the latter of whom
+reserved to himself, "in petto," the intention of buying the others
+out for a sum down, as soon as the property fairly stood in his own
+name. The lawyer employed by the notary to manage the sale of the
+estate was under personal obligations to Gaubertin, so that he favored
+the spoliation of the heirs, unless any of the eleven farmers of
+Picardy should take it into their heads to think they were cheated,
+and inquire into the real value of the property.
+
+Just as those interested expected to find their fortunes made, a
+lawyer came from Paris on the evening before the final settlement, and
+employed a notary at Ville-aux-Fayes, who happened to be one of his
+former clerks, to buy the estate of Les Aigues, which he did for
+eleven hundred thousand francs. None of the conspirators dared outbid
+an offer of eleven hundred thousand francs. Gaubertin suspected some
+treachery on Soudry's part, and Soudry and Lupin thought they were
+tricked by Gaubertin. But a statement on the part of the purchasing
+agent, the notary of Ville-aux-Fayes, disabused them of these
+suspicions. The latter, though suspecting the plan formed by
+Gaubertin, Lupin, and Soudry, refrained from informing the lawyer in
+Paris, for the reason that if the new owners indiscreetly repeated his
+words, he would have too many enemies at his heels to be able to stay
+where he was. This reticence, peculiar to provincials, was in this
+particular case amply justified by succeeding events. If the dwellers
+in the provinces are dissemblers, they are forced to be so; their
+excuse lies in the danger expressed in the old proverb, "We must howl
+with the wolves," a meaning which underlies the character of
+Phillinte.
+
+When General Montcornet took possession of Les Aigues, Gaubertin was
+no longer rich enough to give up his place. In order to marry his
+daughter to a rich banker he was obliged to give her a dowry of two
+hundred thousand francs; he had to pay thirty thousand for his son's
+practice; and all that remained of his accumulations was three hundred
+and seventy thousand, out of which he would be forced, sooner or
+later, to pay the dowry of his remaining daughter, Elise, for whom he
+hoped to arrange a marriage at least as good as that of her sister.
+The steward determined to study the general, in order to find out if
+he could disgust him with the place,--hoping still to be able to carry
+out his defeated plan in his own interests.
+
+With the peculiar instinct which characterizes those who make their
+fortunes by craft, Gaubertin believed in a resemblance of nature
+(which was not improbable) between an old soldier and an Opera-singer.
+An actress, and a general of the Empire,--surely they would have the
+same extravagant habits, the same careless prodigality? To the one as
+to the other, riches came capriciously and by lucky chances. If some
+soldiers are wily and astute and clever politicians, they are
+exceptions; a soldier is, usually, especially an accomplished cavalry
+officer like Montcornet, guileless, confident, a novice in business,
+and little fitted to understand details in the management of an
+estate. Gaubertin flattered himself that he could catch and hold the
+general with the same net in which Mademoiselle Laguerre had finished
+her days. But it so happened that the Emperor had once, intentionally,
+allowed Montcornet to play the same game in Pomerania that Gaubertin
+was playing at Les Aigues; consequently, the general fully understood
+a system of plundering.
+
+In planting cabbages, to use the expression of the first Duc de Biron,
+the old cuirassier sought to divert his mind, by occupation, from
+dwelling on his fall. Though he had yielded his "corps d'armee" to the
+Bourbons, that duty (performed by other generals and termed the
+disbanding of the army of the Loire) could not atone for the crime of
+having followed the man of the Hundred-Days to his last battle-field.
+In presence of the allied army it was impossible for the peer of 1815
+to remain in the service, still less at the Luxembourg. Accordingly,
+Montcornet betook himself to the country by advice of a dismissed
+marshal, to plunder Nature herself. The general was not deficient in
+the special cunning of an old military fox; and after he had spent a
+few days in examining his new property, he saw that Gaubertin was a
+steward of the old system,--a swindler, such as the dukes and marshals
+of the Empire, those mushrooms bred from the common earth, were well
+acquainted with.
+
+The wily general, soon aware of Gaubertin's great experience in rural
+administration, felt it was politic to keep well with him until he had
+himself learned the secrets of it; accordingly, he passed himself off
+as another Mademoiselle Laguerre, a course which lulled the steward
+into false security. This apparent simple-mindedness lasted all the
+time it took the general to learn the strength and weakness of Les
+Aigues, to master the details of its revenues and the manner of
+collecting them, and to ascertain how and where the robberies
+occurred, together with the betterments and economies which ought to
+be undertaken. Then, one fine morning, having caught Gaubertin with
+his hand in the bag, as the saying is, the general flew into one of
+those rages peculiar to the imperial conquerors of many lands. In
+doing so he committed a capital blunder,--one that would have ruined
+the whole life of a man of less wealth and less consistency than
+himself, and from which came the evils, both small and great, with
+which the present history teems. Brought up in the imperial school,
+accustomed to deal with men as a dictator, and full of contempt for
+"civilians," Montcornet did not trouble himself to wear gloves when it
+came to putting a rascal of a land-steward out of doors. Civil life
+and its precautions were things unknown to the soldier already
+embittered by his loss of rank. He humiliated Gaubertin ruthlessly,
+though the latter drew the harsh treatment upon himself by a cynical
+reply which roused Montcornet's anger.
+
+"You are living off my land," said the general, with jesting severity.
+
+"Do you think I can live off the sky?" returned Gaubertin, with a
+sneer.
+
+"Out of my sight, blackguard! I dismiss you!" cried the general,
+striking him with his whip,--blows which the steward always denied
+having received, for they were given behind closed doors.
+
+"I shall not go without my release in full," said Gaubertin, coldly,
+keeping at a distance from the enraged soldier.
+
+"We will see what is thought of you in a police court," replied
+Montcornet, shrugging his shoulders.
+
+Hearing the threat, Gaubertin looked at the general and smiled. The
+smile had the effect of relaxing Montcornet's arms as though the
+sinews had been cut. We must explain that smile.
+
+For the last two years, Gaubertin's brother-in-law, a man named
+Gendrin, long a justice of the municipal court of Ville-aux-Fayes, had
+become the president of that court through the influence of the Comte
+de Soulanges. The latter was made peer of France in 1814, and remained
+faithful to the Bourbons during the Hundred-Days, therefore the Keeper
+of the Seals readily granted an appointment at his request. This
+relationship gave Gaubertin a certain importance in the country. The
+president of the court of a little town is, relatively, a greater
+personage than the president of one of the royal courts of a great
+city, who has various equals, such as generals, bishops, and prefects;
+whereas the judge of the court of a small town has none,--the
+attorney-general and the sub-prefect being removable at will. Young
+Soudry, a companion of Gaubertin's son in Paris as well as at Les
+Aigues, had just been appointed assistant attorney in the capital of
+the department. Before the elder Soudry, a quartermaster in the
+artillery, became a brigadier of gendarmes, he had been wounded in a
+skirmish while defending Monsieur de Soulanges, then adjutant-general.
+At the time of the creation of the gendarmerie, the Comte de
+Soulanges, who by that time had become a colonel, asked for a brigade
+for his former protector, and later still he solicited the post we
+have named for the younger Soudry. Besides all these influences, the
+marriage of Mademoiselle Gaubertin with a wealthy banker of the quai
+Bethume made the unjust steward feel that he was far stronger in the
+community than a lieutenant-general driven into retirement.
+
+If this history provided no other instruction that that offered by the
+quarrel between the general and his steward, it would still be useful
+to many persons as a lesson for their conduct in life. He who reads
+Machiavelli profitably, knows that human prudence consists in never
+threatening; in doing but not saying; in promoting the retreat of an
+enemy and never stepping, as the saying is, on the tail of the
+serpent; and in avoiding, as one would murder, the infliction of a
+blow to the self-love of any one lower than one's self. An injury done
+to a person's interest, no matter how great it may be at the time, is
+forgiven or explained in the long run; but self-love, vanity, never
+ceases to bleed from a wound given, and never forgives it. The moral
+being is actually more sensitive, more living as it were, than the
+physical being. The heart and the blood are less impressible than the
+nerves. In short, our inward being rules us, no matter what we do. You
+may reconcile two families who have half-killed each other, as in
+Brittany and in La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more
+reconcile the calumniators and the calumniated than you can the
+spoilers and the despoiled. It is only in epic poems that men curse
+each other before they kill. The savage, and the peasant who is much
+like a savage, seldom speak unless to deceive an enemy. Ever since
+1789 France has been trying to make man believe, against all evidence,
+that they are equal. To say to a man, "You are a swindler," may be
+taken as a joke; but to catch him in the act and prove it to him with
+a cane on his back, to threaten him with a police-court and not follow
+up the threat, is to remind him of the inequality of conditions. If
+the masses will not brook any species of superiority, is it likely
+that a swindler will forgive that of an honest man?
+
+Montcornet might have dismissed his steward under pretext of paying
+off a military obligation by putting some old soldier in his place;
+Gaubertin and the general would have understood the matter, and the
+latter, by sparing the steward's self-love would have given him a
+chance to withdraw quietly. Gaubertin, in that case, would have left
+his late employer in peace, and possibly he might have taken himself
+and his savings to Paris for investment. But being, as he was,
+ignominiously dismissed, the man conceived against his late master one
+of those bitter hatreds which are literally a part of existence in
+provincial life, the persistency, duration, and plots of which would
+astonish diplomatists who are trained to let nothing astonish them. A
+burning desire for vengeance led him to settle at Ville-aux-Fayes, and
+to take a position where he could injure Montcornet and stir up
+sufficient enmity against to force him to sell Les Aigues.
+
+The general was deceived by appearances; for Gaubertin's external
+behavior was not of a nature to warn or to alarm him. The late steward
+followed his old custom of pretending, not exactly poverty, but
+limited means. For years he had talked of his wife and three children,
+and the heavy expenses of a large family. Mademoiselle Laguerre, to
+whom he had declared himself too poor to educate his son in Paris,
+paid the costs herself, and allowed her dear godson (for she was
+Claude Gaubertin's sponsor) two thousand francs a year.
+
+The day after the quarrel, Gaubertin came, with a keeper named
+Courtecuisse, and demanded with much insolence his release in full of
+all claims, showing the general the one he had obtained from his late
+mistress in such flattering terms, and asking, ironically, that a
+search should be made for the property, real and otherwise, which he
+was supposed to have stolen. If he had received fees from the
+wood-merchants on their purchases and from the farmers on their leases,
+Mademoiselle Laguerre, he said, had always allowed it; not only did
+she gain by the bargains he made, but everything went on smoothly
+without troubling her. The country-people would have died, he
+remarked, for Mademoiselle, whereas the general was laying up for
+himself a store of difficulties.
+
+Gaubertin--and this trait is frequently to be seen in the majority of
+those professions in which the property of others can be taken by
+means not foreseen by the Code--considered himself a perfectly honest
+man. In the first place, he had so long had possession of the money
+extorted from Mademoiselle Laguerre's farmers through fear, and paid
+in assignats, that he regarded it as legitimately acquired. It was a
+mere matter of exchange. He thought that in the end he should have
+quite as much risk with coin as with paper. Besides, legally,
+Mademoiselle had no right to receive any payment except in assignats.
+"Legally" is a fine, robust adverb, which bolsters up many a fortune!
+Moreover, he reflected that ever since great estates and land-agents
+had existed, that is, ever since the origin of society, the said
+agents had set up, for their own use, an argument such as we find our
+cooks using in this present day. Here it is, in its simplicity:--
+
+"If my mistress," says the cook, "went to market herself, she would
+have to pay more for her provisions than I charge her; she is the
+gainer, and the profits I make do more good in my hands than in those
+of the dealers."
+
+"If Mademoiselle," thought Gaubertin, "were to manage Les Aigues
+herself, she would never get thirty thousand francs a year out of it;
+the peasants, the dealers, the workmen would rob her of the rest. It
+is much better that I should have it, and so enable her to live in
+peace."
+
+The Catholic religion, and it alone, is able to prevent these
+capitulations of conscience. But, ever since 1789 religion has no
+influence on two thirds of the French people. The peasants, whose
+minds are keen and whose poverty drives them to imitation, had
+reached, specially in the valley of Les Aigues, a frightful state of
+demoralization. They went to mass on Sundays, but only at the outside
+of the church, where it was their custom to meet and transact business
+and make their weekly bargains.
+
+We can now estimate the extent of the evil done by the careless
+indifference of the great singer to the management of her property.
+Mademoiselle Laguerre betrayed, through mere selfishness, the
+interests of those who owned property, who are held in perpetual
+hatred by those who own none. Since 1792 the land-owners of Paris have
+become of necessity a combined body. If, alas, the feudal families,
+less numerous than the middle-class families, did not perceive the
+necessity of combining in 1400 under Louis XI., nor in 1600 under
+Richelieu, can we expect that in this nineteenth century of progress
+the middle classes will prove to be more permanently and solidly
+combined that the old nobility? An oligarchy of a hundred thousand
+rich men presents all the dangers of a democracy with none of its
+advantages. The principle of "every man for himself and for his own,"
+the selfishness of individual interests, will kill the oligarchical
+selfishness so necessary to the existence of modern society, and which
+England has practised with such success for the last three centuries.
+Whatever may be said or done, land-owners will never understand the
+necessity of the sort of internal discipline which made the Church
+such an admirable model of government, until, too late, they find
+themselves in danger from one another. The audacity with which
+communism, that living and acting logic of democracy, attacks society
+from the moral side, shows plainly that the Samson of to-day, grown
+prudent, is undermining the foundations of the cellar, instead of
+shaking the pillars of the hall.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VII
+
+                    CERTAIN LOST SOCIAL SPECIES
+
+The estate of Les Aigues could not do without a steward; for the
+general had no intention of renouncing his winter pleasures in Paris,
+where he owned a fine house in the rue Neuve-des-Mathurines. He
+therefore looked about for a successor to Gaubertin; but it is very
+certain that his search was not as eager as that of Gaubertin himself,
+who was seeking for the right person to put in his way.
+
+Of all confidential positions there is none that requires more trained
+knowledge of its kind, or more activity, than that of land-steward to
+a great estate. The difficulty of finding the right man is only fully
+known to those wealthy landlords whose property lies beyond a certain
+circle around Paris, beginning at a distance of about one hundred and
+fifty miles. At that point agricultural productions for the markets of
+Paris, which warrant rentals on long leases (collected often by other
+tenants who are rich themselves), cease to be cultivated. The farmers
+who raise them drive to the city in their own cabriolets to pay their
+rents in good bank-bills, unless they send the money through their
+agents in the markets. For this reason, the farms of the Seine-et-Oise,
+Seine-et-Marne, the Oise, the Eure-et-Loir, the Lower Seine, and
+the Loiret are so desirable that capital cannot always be invested
+there at one and a half per cent. Compared to the returns on estates
+in Holland, England, and Belgium, this result is enormous. But at one
+hundred miles from Paris an estate requires such variety of working,
+its products are so different in kind, that it becomes a business,
+with all the risks attendant on manufacturing. The wealthy owner is
+really a merchant, forced to look for a market for his products, like
+the owner of ironworks or cotton factories. He does not even escape
+competition; the peasant, the small proprietor, is at his heels with
+an avidity which leads to transactions to which well-bred persons
+cannot condescend.
+
+A land-steward must understand surveying, the customs of the locality,
+the methods of sale and of labor, together with a little quibbling in
+the interests of those he serves; he must also understand book-keeping
+and commercial matters, and be in perfect health, with a liking for
+active life and horse exercise. His duty being to represent his master
+and to be always in communication with him, the steward ought not to
+be a man of the people. As the salary of his office seldom exceeds
+three thousand francs, the problem seems insoluble. How is it possible
+to obtain so many qualifications for such a very moderate price,--in a
+region, moreover, where the men who are provided with them are
+admissible to all other employments? Bring down a stranger to fill the
+place, and you will pay dear for the experience he must acquire. Train
+a young man on the spot, and you are more than likely to get a thorn
+of ingratitude in your side. It therefore becomes necessary to choose
+between incompetent honesty, which injures your property through its
+blindness and inertia, and the cleverness which looks out for itself.
+Hence the social nomenclature and natural history of land-stewards as
+defined by a great Polish noble.
+
+"There are," he said, "two kinds of stewards: he who thinks only of
+himself, and he who thinks of himself and of us; happy the land-owner
+who lays his hands on the latter! As for the steward who would think
+only of us, he is not to be met with."
+
+Elsewhere can be found a steward who thought of this master's
+interests as well as of his own. ("Un Debut dans la vie," "Scenes de
+la vie privee.") Gaubertin is the steward who thinks of himself only.
+To represent the third figure of the problem would be to hold up to
+public admiration a very unlikely personage, yet one that was not
+unknown to the old nobility, though he has, alas! disappeared with
+them. (See "Le Cabinet des Antiques," "Scenes de la vie de province.")
+Through the endless subdivision of fortunes aristocratic habits and
+customs are inevitably changed. If there be not now in France twenty
+great fortunes managed by intendants, in fifty years from now there
+will not be a hundred estates in the hands of stewards, unless a great
+change is made in the law. Every land-owner will be brought by that
+time to look after his own interests.
+
+This transformation, already begun, suggested the following answer of
+a clever woman when asked why, since 1830, she stayed in Paris during
+the summer. "Because," she said, "I do not care to visit chateaux
+which are now turned into farms." What is to be the future of this
+question, getting daily more and more imperative,--that of man to man,
+the poor man and the rich man? This book is written to throw some
+light upon that terrible social question.
+
+It is easy to understand the perplexities which assailed the general
+after he had dismissed Gaubertin. While saying to himself, vaguely,
+like other persons free to do or not to do a thing, "I'll dismiss that
+scamp"; he had overlooked the risk and forgotten the explosion of his
+boiling anger,--the anger of a choleric fire-eater at the moment when
+a flagrant imposition forced him to raise the lids of his wilfully
+blind eyes.
+
+Montcornet, a land-owner for the first time and a denizen of Paris,
+had not provided himself with a steward before coming to Les Aigues;
+but after studying the neighborhood carefully he saw it was
+indispensable to a man like himself to have an intermediary to manage
+so many persons of low degree.
+
+Gaubertin, who discovered during the excitement of the scene (which
+lasted more than two hours) the difficulties in which the general
+would soon be involved, jumped on his pony after leaving the room
+where the quarrel took place, and galloped to Soulanges to consult the
+Soudrys. At his first words, "The general and I have parted; whom can
+we put in my place without his suspecting it?" the Soudrys understood
+their friend's wishes. Do not forget that Soudry, for the last
+seventeen years chief of police of the canton, was doubly shrewd
+through his wife, an adept in the particular wiliness of a
+waiting-maid of an Opera divinity.
+
+"We may go far," said Madame Soudry, "before we find any one to suit
+the place as well as our poor Sibilet."
+
+"Made to order!" exclaimed Gaubertin, still scarlet with
+mortification. "Lupin," he added, turning to the notary, who was
+present, "go to Ville-aux-Fayes and whisper it to Marechal, in case
+that big fire-eater asks his advice."
+
+Marechal was the lawyer whom his former patron, when buying Les Aigues
+for the general, had recommended to Monsieur de Montcornet as legal
+adviser.
+
+Sibilet, eldest son of the clerk of the court at Ville-aux-Fayes, a
+notary's clerk, without a penny of his own, and twenty-five years old,
+had fallen in love with the daughter of the chief-magistrate of
+Soulanges. The latter, named Sarcus, had a salary of fifteen hundred
+francs, and was married to a woman without fortune, the eldest sister
+of Monsieur Vermut, the apothecary of Soulanges. Though an only
+daughter, Mademoiselle Sarcus, whose beauty was her only dowry, could
+scarcely have lived on the salary paid to a notary's clerk in the
+provinces. Young Sibilet, a relative of Gaubertin, by a connection
+rather difficult to trace through family ramifications which make
+members of the middle classes in all the smaller towns cousins to each
+other, owed a modest position in a government office to the assistance
+of his father and Gaubertin. The unlucky fellow had the terrible
+happiness of being the father of two children in three years. His own
+father, blessed with five, was unable to assist him. His wife's father
+owned nothing beside his house at Soulanges and an income of two
+thousand francs. Madame Sibilet the younger spent most of her time at
+her father's home with her two children, where Adolphe Sibilet, whose
+official duty obliged him to travel through the department, came to
+see her from time to time.
+
+Gaubertin's exclamation, though easy to understand from this summary
+of young Sibilet's life, needs a few more explanatory details.
+
+Adolphe Sibilet, supremely unlucky, as we have shown by the foregoing
+sketch of him, was one of those men who cannot reach the heart of a
+woman except by way of the altar and the mayor's office. Endowed with
+the suppleness of a steel-spring, he yielded to pressure, certain to
+revert to his first thought. This treacherous habit is prompted by
+cowardice; but the business training which Sibilet underwent in the
+office of a provincial notary had taught him the art of concealing
+this defect under a gruff manner which simulated a strength he did not
+possess. Many false natures mask their hollowness in this way; be
+rough with them in return and the effect produced is that of a balloon
+collapsed by a prick. Such was Sibilet. But as most men are not
+observers, and as among observers three fourths observe only after a
+thing has taken place, Adolphe Sibilet's grumbling manner was
+considered the result of an honest frankness, of a capacity much
+praised by his master, and of a stubborn uprightness which no
+temptation could shake. Some men are as much benefited by their
+defects as others by their good qualities.
+
+Adeline Sarcus, a pretty young woman, brought up by a mother (who died
+three years before her marriage) as well as a mother can educate an
+only daughter in a remote country town, was in love with the handsome
+son of Lupin, the Soulanges notary. At the first signs of this
+romance, old Lupin, who intended to marry his son to Mademoiselle
+Elise Gaubertin, lost no time in sending young Amaury Lupin to Paris,
+to the care of his friend and correspondent Crottat, the notary,
+where, under pretext of drawing deeds and contracts, Amaury committed
+a variety of foolish acts, and made debts, being led thereto by a
+certain Georges Marest, a clerk in the same office, but a rich young
+man, who revealed to him the mysteries of Parisian life. By the time
+Lupin the elder went to Paris to bring back his son, Adeline Sarcus
+had become Madame Sibilet. In fact, when the adoring Adolphe offered
+himself, her father, the old magistrate, prompted by young Lupin's
+father, hastened the marriage, to which Adeline yielded in sheer
+despair.
+
+The situation of clerk in a government registration office is not a
+career. It is, like other such places which admit of no rise, one of
+the many holes of the government sieve. Those who start in life in
+these holes (the topographical, the professorial, the highway-and-canal
+departments) are apt to discover, invariably too late, that cleverer
+men then they, seated beside them, are fed, as the Opposition writers
+say, on the sweat of the people, every time the sieve dips down into
+the taxation-pot by means of a machine called the budget. Adolphe,
+working early and late and earning little, soon found out the barren
+depths of his hole; and his thoughts busied themselves, as he trotted
+from township to township, spending his salary in shoe-leather and
+costs of travelling, with how to find a permanent and more profitable
+place.
+
+No one can imagine, unless he happens to squint and to have two
+legitimate children, what ambitions three years of misery and love had
+developed in this young man, who squinted both in mind and vision, and
+whose happiness halted, as it were, on one leg. The chief cause of
+secret evil deeds and hidden meanness is, perhaps, an incompleted
+happiness. Man can better bear a state of hopeless misery than those
+terrible alternations of love and sunshine with continual rain. If the
+body contracts disease, the mind contracts the leprosy of envy. In
+petty minds that leprosy becomes a base and brutal cupidity, both
+insolent and shrinking; in cultivated minds it fosters anti-social
+doctrines, which serve a man as footholds by which to rise above his
+superiors. May we not dignify with the title of proverb the pregnant
+saying, "Tell me what thou hast, and I will tell thee of what thou art
+thinking"?
+
+Though Adolphe loved his wife, his hourly thought was: "I have made a
+mistake; I have three balls and chains, but I have only two legs. I
+ought to have made my fortune before I married. I could have found an
+Adeline any day; but Adeline stands in the way of my getting a fortune
+now."
+
+Adolphe had been to see his relation Gaubertin three times in three
+years. A few words exchanged between them let Gaubertin see the muck
+of a soul ready to ferment under the hot temptations of legal robbery.
+He warily sounded a nature that could be warped to the exigencies of
+any plan, provided it was profitable. At each of the three visits
+Sibilet grumbled at his fate.
+
+"Employ me, cousin," he said; "take me as a clerk and make me your
+successor. You shall see how I work. I am capable of overthrowing
+mountains to give my Adeline, I won't say luxury, but a modest
+competence. You made Monsieur Leclercq's fortune; why won't you put me
+in a bank in Paris?"
+
+"Some day, later on, I'll find you a place," Gaubertin would say;
+"meantime make friends and acquaintance; such things help."
+
+Under these circumstances the letter which Madame Soudry hastily
+dispatched brought Sibilet to Soulanges through a region of castles in
+the air. His father-in-law, Sarcus, whom the Soudrys advised to take
+steps in the interest of his daughter, had gone in the morning to see
+the general and to propose Adolphe for the vacant post. By advice of
+Madame Soudry, who was the oracle of the little town, the worthy man
+had taken his daughter with him; and the sight of her had had a
+favorable effect upon the Comte de Montcornet.
+
+"I shall not decide," he answered, "without thoroughly informing
+myself about all applicants; but I will not look elsewhere until I
+have examined whether or not your son-in-law possesses the
+requirements for the place." Then, turning to Madame Sibilet he added,
+"The satisfaction of settling so charming a person at Les Aigues--"
+
+"The mother of two children, general," said Adeline, adroitly, to
+evade the gallantry of the old cuirassier.
+
+All the general's inquiries were cleverly anticipated by the Soudrys,
+Gaubertin, and Lupin, who quietly obtained for their candidate the
+influence of the leading lawyers in the capital of the department,
+where a royal court held sessions,--such as Counsellor Gendrin, a
+distant relative of the judge at Ville-aux-Fayes; Baron Bourlac,
+attorney-general; and another counsellor named Sarcus, a cousin thrice
+removed of the candidate. The verdict of every one to whom the general
+applies was favorable to the poor clerk,--"so interesting," as they
+called him. His marriage had made Sibilet as irreproachable as a novel
+of Miss Edgeworth's, and presented him, moreover, in the light of a
+disinterested man.
+
+The time which the dismissed steward remained at Les Aigues until his
+successor could be appointed was employed in creating troubles and
+annoyances for his late master; one of the little scenes which he thus
+played off will give an idea of several others.
+
+The morning of his final departure he contrived to meet, as it were
+accidentally, Courtecuisse, the only keeper then employed at Les
+Aigues, the great extent of which really needed at least three.
+
+"Well, Monsieur Gaubertin," said Courtecuisse, "so you have had
+trouble with the count?"
+
+"Who told you that?" answered Gaubertin. "Well, yes; the general
+expected to order us about as he did his cavalry; he didn't know
+Burgundians. The count is not satisfied with my services, and as I am
+not satisfied with his ways, we have dismissed each other, almost with
+fisticuffs, for he raged like a whirlwind. Take care of yourself,
+Courtecuisse! Ah! my dear fellow, I expected to give you a better
+master."
+
+"I know that," said the keeper, "and I'd have served you well. Hang
+it, when friends have known each other for twenty years, you know! You
+put me here in the days of the poor dear sainted Madame. Ah, what a
+good woman she was! none like her now! The place has lost a mother."
+
+"Look here, Courtecuisse, if you are willing, you might help us to a
+fine stroke."
+
+"Then you are going to stay here? I heard you were off to Paris."
+
+"No; I shall wait to see how things turn out; meantime I shall do
+business at Ville-aux-Fayes. The general doesn't know what he is
+dealing with in these parts; he'll make himself hated, don't you see?
+I shall wait for what turns up. Do your work here gently; he'll tell
+you to manage the people with a high hand, for he begins to see where
+his crops and his woods are running to; but you'll not be such a fool
+as to let the country-folk maul you, and perhaps worse, for the sake
+of his timber."
+
+"But he would send me away, dear Monsieur Gaubertin, he would get rid
+of me! and you know how happy I am living there at the gate of the
+Avonne."
+
+"The general will soon get sick of the whole place," replied
+Gaubertin; "you wouldn't be long out even if he did happen to send you
+away. Besides, you know those woods," he added, waving his hand at the
+landscape; "I am stronger there than the masters."
+
+This conversation took place in an open field.
+
+"Those 'Arminac' Parisian fellows ought to stay in their own mud,"
+said the keeper.
+
+Ever since the quarrels of the fifteenth century the word 'Arminac'
+(Armagnacs, Parisians, enemies of the Dukes of Burgundy) has continued
+to be an insulting term along the borders of Upper Burgundy, where it
+is differently corrupted according to locality.
+
+"He'll go back to it when beaten," said Gaubertin, "and we'll plough
+up the park; for it is robbing the people to allow a man to keep nine
+hundred acres of the best land in the valley for his own pleasure."
+
+"Four hundred families could get their living from it," said
+Courtecuisse.
+
+"If you want two acres for yourself you must help us to drive that cur
+out," remarked Gaubertin.
+
+At the very moment that Gaubertin was fulminating this sentence of
+excommunication, the worthy Sarcus was presenting his son-in-law
+Sibilet to the Comte de Montcornet. They had come with Adeline and the
+children in a wicker carryall, lent by Sarcus's clerk, a Monsieur
+Gourdon, brother of the Soulanges doctor, who was richer than the
+magistrate himself. The general, pleased with the candor and dignity
+of the justice of the peace, and with the graceful bearing of Adeline
+(both giving pledges in good faith, for they were totally ignorant of
+the plans of Gaubertin), at once granted all requests and gave such
+advantages to the family of the new land-steward as to make the
+position equal to that of a sub-prefect of the first class.
+
+A lodge, built by Bouret as an object in the landscape and also as a
+home for the steward, an elegant little building, the architecture of
+which was sufficiently shown in the description of the gate of Blangy,
+was promised to the Sibilets for their residence. The general also
+conceded the horse which Mademoiselle Laguerre had provided for
+Gaubertin, in consideration of the size of the estate and the distance
+he had to go to the markets where the business of the property was
+transacted. He allowed two hundred bushels of wheat, three hogsheads
+of wine, wood in sufficient quantity, oats and barley in abundance,
+and three per cent on all receipts of income. Where the latter in
+Mademoiselle Laguerre's time had amounted to forty thousand francs,
+the general now, in 1818, in view of the purchases of land which
+Gaubertin had made for her, expected to receive at least sixty
+thousand. The new land-steward might therefore receive before long
+some two thousand francs in money. Lodged, fed, warmed, relieved of
+taxes, the costs of a horse and a poultry-yard defrayed for him, and
+allowed to plant a kitchen-garden, with no questions asked as to the
+day's work of the gardener, certainly such advantages represented much
+more than another two thousand francs; for a man who was earning a
+miserable salary of twelve hundred francs in a government office to
+step into the stewardship of Les Aigues was a change from poverty to
+opulence.
+
+"Be faithful to my interests," said the general, "and I shall have
+more to say to you. Doubtless I could get the collection of the rents
+of Conches, Blangy, and Cerneux taken away from the collection of
+those of Soulanges and given to you. In short, when you bring me in a
+clear sixty thousand a year from Les Aigues you shall be still further
+rewarded."
+
+Unfortunately, the worthy justice and his daughter, in the flush of
+their joy, told Madame Soudry the promise the general had made about
+these collections, without reflecting that the present collector of
+Soulanges, a man named Guerbet, brother of the postmaster of Conches,
+was closely allied, as we shall see later, with Gaubertin and the
+Gendrins.
+
+"It won't be so easy to do it, my dear," said Madame Soudry; "but
+don't prevent the general from making the attempt; it is wonderful how
+easily difficult things are done in Paris. I have seen the Chevalier
+Gluck at dear Madame's feet to get her to sing his music, and she did,
+--she who so adored Piccini, one of the finest men of his day; never
+did _he_ come into Madame's room without catching me round the waist and
+calling me a dear rogue."
+
+"Ha!" cried Soudry, when his wife reported this news, "does he think
+he is going to lead the notary by the nose, and upset everything to
+please himself and make the whole valley march in line, as he did his
+cuirassiers? These military fellows have a habit of command!--but
+let's have patience; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de
+Ronquerolles will be on our side. Poor Guerbet! he little suspects who
+is trying to pluck the best roses out of his garland!"
+
+Pere Guerbet, the collector of Soulanges, was the wit, that is to say,
+the jovial companion of the little town, and a hero in Madame Soudry's
+salon. Soudry's speech gives a fair idea of the opinion which now grew
+up against the master of Les Aigues from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes,
+and wherever else the public mind could be reached and poisoned by
+Gaubertin.
+
+The installation of Sibilet took place in the autumn of 1817. The year
+1818 went by without the general being able to set foot at Les Aigues,
+for his approaching marriage with Mademoiselle de Troisville, which
+was celebrated in January, 1819, kept him the greater part of the
+summer near Alencon, in the country-house of his prospective
+father-in-law. General Montcornet possessed, besides Les Aigues and a
+magnificent house in Paris, some sixty thousand francs a year in the
+Funds and the salary of a retired lieutenant-general. Though Napoleon
+had made him a count of the Empire and given him the following arms, a
+field quarterly, the first, azure, bordure or, three pyramids argent;
+the second, vert, three hunting horns argent; the third, gules, a
+cannon or on a gun-carriage sable, and, in chief, a crescent or; the
+fourth, or, a crown vert, with the motto (eminently of the middle
+ages!), "Sound the charge,"--Montcornet knew very well that he was the
+son of a cabinet-maker in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, though he was
+quite ready to forget it. He was eaten up with the desire to be a peer
+of France, and dreamed of his grand cordon of the Legion of honor, his
+Saint-Louis cross, and his income of one hundred and forty thousand
+francs. Bitten by the demon of aristocracy, the sight of the blue
+ribbon put him beside himself. The gallant cuirassier of Essling would
+have licked up the mud on the Pont-Royal to be invited to the house of
+a Navarreins, a Lenoncourt, a Grandlieu, a Maufrigneuse, a d'Espard, a
+Vandenesse, a Verneuil, a Herouville, or a Chaulieu.
+
+From 1818, when the impossibility of a change in favor of the
+Bonaparte family was made clear to him, Montcornet had himself
+trumpeted in the faubourg Saint-Germain by the wives of some of his
+friends, who offered his hand and heart, his mansion and his fortune
+in return for an alliance with some great family.
+
+After several attempts, the Duchesse de Carigliano found a match for
+the general in one of the three branches of the Troisville family,
+--that of the viscount in the service of Russia ever since 1789, who had
+returned to France in 1815. The viscount, poor as a younger son, had
+married a Princess Scherbellof, worth about a million, but the arrival
+of two sons and three daughters kept him poor. His family, ancient and
+formerly powerful, now consisted of the Marquis de Troisville, peer of
+France, head of the house and scutcheon, and two deputies, with
+numerous offspring, who were busy, for their part, with the budget and
+the ministries and the court, like fishes round bits of bread.
+Therefore, when Montcornet was presented by Madame de Carigliano,--the
+Napoleonic duchess, who was now a most devoted adherent of the
+Bourbons, he was favorably received. The general asked, in return for
+his fortune and tender indulgence to his wife, to be appointed to the
+Royal Guard, with the rank of marquis and peer of France; but the
+branches of the Troisville family would do no more than promise him
+their support.
+
+"You know what that means," said the duchess to her old friend, who
+complained of the vagueness of the promise. "They cannot oblige the
+king to do as they wish; they can only influence him."
+
+Montcornet made Virginie de Troisville his heir in the marriage
+settlements. Completely under the control of his wife, as Blondet's
+letter has already shown, he was still without children, but Louis
+XVIII. had received him, and given him the cordon of Saint-Louis,
+allowing him to quarter his ridiculous arms with those of the
+Troisvilles, and promising him the title of marquis as soon as he had
+deserved the peerage by his services.
+
+A few days after the audience at which this promise had been given,
+the Duc de Barry was assassinated; the Marsan clique carried the day;
+the Villele ministry came into power, and all the wires laid by the
+Troisvilles were snapped; it became necessary to find new ways of
+fastening them upon the ministry.
+
+"We must bide our time," said the Troisvilles to Montcornet, who was
+always overwhelmed with politeness in the faubourg Saint-Germain.
+
+This will explain how it was that the general did not return to Les
+Aigues until May, 1820.
+
+The ineffable happiness of the son of a shop-keeper of the faubourg
+Saint-Antoine in possessing a young, elegant, intelligent, and gentle
+wife, a Troisville, who had given him an entrance into all the salons
+of the faubourg Saint-Germain, and the delight of making her enjoy the
+pleasures of Paris, had kept him from Les Aigues and made him forget
+about Gaubertin, even to his very name. In 1820 he took the countess
+to Burgundy to show her the estate, and he accepted Sibilet's accounts
+and leases without looking closely into them; happiness never cavils.
+The countess, well pleased to find the steward's wife a charming young
+woman, made presents to her and to the children, with whom she
+occasionally amused herself. She ordered a few changes at Les Aigues,
+having sent to Paris for an architect; proposing, to the general's
+great delight, to spend six months of every year on this magnificent
+estate. Montcornet's savings were soon spent on the architectural work
+and the exquisite new furniture sent from Paris. Les Aigues thus
+received the last touch which made it a choice example of all the
+diverse elegancies of four centuries.
+
+In 1821 the general was almost peremptorily urged by Sibilet to be at
+Les Aigues before the month of May. Important matters had to be
+decided. A lease of nine years, to the amount of thirty thousand
+francs, granted by Gaubertin in 1812 to a wood-merchant, fell in on
+the 15th of May of the current year. Sibilet, anxious to prove his
+rectitude, was unwilling to be responsible for the renewal of the
+lease. "You know, Monsieur le comte," he wrote, "that I do not choose
+to profit by such matters." The wood-merchant claimed an indemnity,
+extorted from Madame Laguerre, through her hatred of litigation, and
+shared by him with Gaubertin. This indemnity was based on the injury
+done to the woods by the peasants, who treated the forest of Les
+Aigues as if they had a right to cut the timber. Messrs. Gravelot
+Brothers, wood-merchants in Paris, refused to pay their last quarter
+dues, offering to prove by an expert that the woods were reduced
+one-fifth in value, through, they said, the injurious precedent
+established by Madame Laguerre.
+
+"I have already," wrote Sibilet, "sued these men in the courts at
+Ville-aux-Fayes, for they have taken legal residence there, on account
+of this lease, with my old employer, Maitre Corbinet. I fear we shall
+lose the suit."
+
+"It is a question of income, my dear," said the general, showing the
+letter to his wife. "Will you go down to Les Aigues a little earlier
+this year than last?"
+
+"Go yourself, and I will follow you when the weather is warmer," said
+the countess, not sorry to remain in Paris alone.
+
+The general, who knew very well the canker that was eating into his
+revenues, departed without his wife, resolved to take vigorous
+measures. In so doing he reckoned, as we shall see, without his
+Gaubertin.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER VIII
+
+              THE GREAT REVOLUTIONS OF A LITTLE VALLEY
+
+"Well, Maitre Sibilet," said the general to his steward, the morning
+after his arrival, giving him a familiar title which showed how much
+he appreciated his services, "so we are, to use a ministerial phrase,
+at a crisis?"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, following the general.
+
+The fortunate possessor of Les Aigues was walking up and down in front
+of the steward's house, along a little terrace where Madame Sibilet
+grew flowers, at the end of which was a wide stretch of meadow-land
+watered by the canal which Blondet has described. From this point the
+chateau of Les Aigues was seen in the distance, and in like manner the
+profile, as it were, of the steward's lodge was seen from Les Aigues.
+
+"But," resumed the general, "what's the difficulty? If I do lose the
+suit against the Gravelots, a money wound is not mortal, and I'll have
+the leasing of my forest so well advertised that there will be
+competition, and I shall sell the timber at its true value."
+
+"Business is not done in that way, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet.
+"Suppose you get no lessees, what will you do?"
+
+"Cut the timber myself and sell it--"
+
+"You, a wood merchant?" said Sibilet. "Well, without looking at
+matters here, how would it be in Paris? You would have to hire a
+wood-yard, pay for a license and the taxes, also for the right of
+navigation, and duties, and the costs of unloading; besides the salary
+of a trustworthy agent--"
+
+"Yes, it is impracticable," said the general hastily, alarmed at the
+prospect. "But why can't I find persons to lease the right of cutting
+timber as before?"
+
+"Monsieur le comte has enemies."
+
+"Who are they?"
+
+"Well, in the first place, Monsieur Gaubertin."
+
+"Do you mean the scoundrel whose place you took?"
+
+"Not so loud, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, showing fear; "I beg
+of you, not so loud,--my cook might hear us."
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that I am not to speak on my own estate of a
+villain who robbed me?" cried the general.
+
+"For the sake of your own peace and comfort, come further away,
+Monsieur le comte. Monsieur Gaubertin is mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes."
+
+"Ha! I congratulate Ville-aux-Fayes. Thunder! what a nobly governed
+town!--"
+
+"Do me the honor to listen, Monsieur le comte, and to believe that I
+am talking of serious matters which may affect your future life in
+this place."
+
+"I am listening; let us sit down on this bench here."
+
+"Monsieur le comte, when you dismissed Gaubertin, he had to find some
+employment, for he was not rich--"
+
+"Not rich! when he stole twenty thousand francs a year from this
+estate?"
+
+"Monsieur le comte, I don't pretend to excuse him," replied Sibilet.
+"I want to see Les Aigues prosperous, if it were only to prove
+Gaubertin's dishonest; but we ought not to abuse him openly for he is
+one of the most dangerous scoundrels to be found in all Burgundy, and
+he is now in a position to injure you."
+
+"In what way?" asked the general, sobering down.
+
+"Gaubertin has control of nearly one third of the supplies sent to
+Paris. As general agent of the timber business, he orders all the work
+of the forests,--the felling, chopping, floating, and sending to
+market. Being in close relations with the workmen, he is the arbiter
+of prices. It has taken him three years to create this position, but
+he holds it now like a fortress. He is essential to all dealers, never
+favoring one more than another; he regulates the whole business in
+their interests, and their affairs are better and more cheaply looked
+after by him than they were in the old time by separate agents for
+each firm. For instance, he has so completely put a stop to
+competition that he has absolute control of the auction sales; the
+crown and the State are both dependent on him. Their timber is sold
+under the hammer and falls invariably to Gaubertin's dealers; in fact,
+no others attempt now to bid against them. Last year Monsieur
+Mariotte, of Auxerre, urged by the commissioner of domains, did
+attempt to compete with Gaubertin. At first, Gaubertin let him buy the
+standing wood at the usual prices; but when it came to cutting it, the
+Avonnais workmen asked such enormous prices that Monsieur Mariotte was
+obliged to bring laborers from Auxerre, whom the Ville-aux-Fayes
+workmen attacked and drove away. The head of the coalition, and the
+ringleader of the brawl were brought before the police court, and the
+suits cost Monsieur Mariotte a great deal of money; for, besides the
+odium of having convicted and punished poor men, he was forced to pay
+all costs, because the losing side had not a farthing to do it with. A
+suit against laboring men is sure to result in hatred to those who
+live among them. Let me warn you of this; for if you follow the course
+you propose, you will have to fight against the poor of this district
+at least. But that's not all. Counting it over, Monsieur Mariotte, a
+worthy man, found he was the loser by his original lease. Forced to
+pay ready money, he was nevertheless obliged to sell on time;
+Gaubertin delivered his timber at long credits for the purpose of
+ruining his competitor. He undersold him by at least five per cent,
+and the end of it is that poor Mariotte's credit is badly shaken.
+Gaubertin is now pressing and harassing the poor man so that he is
+driven, they tell me, to leave not only Auxerre, but even Burgundy
+itself; and he is right. In this way land-owners have long been
+sacrificed to dealers who now set the market-prices, just as the
+furniture-dealers in Paris dictate values to appraisers. But Gaubertin
+saves the owners so much trouble and worry that they are really
+gainers."
+
+"How so?" asked the general.
+
+"In the first place, because the less complicated a business is, the
+greater the profits to the owners," answered Sibilet. "Besides which,
+their income is more secure; and in all matters of rural improvement
+and development that is the main thing, as you will find out. Then,
+too, Monsieur Gaubertin is the friend and patron of working-men; he
+pays them well and keeps them always at work; therefore, though their
+families live on the estates, the woods leased to dealers and
+belonging to the land-owners who trust the care of their property to
+Gaubertin (such as MM. de Soulanges and de Ronquerolles) are not
+devastated. The dead wood is gathered up, but that is all--"
+
+"That rascal Gaubertin has lost no time!" cried the general.
+
+"He is a bold man," said Sibilet. "He really is, as he calls himself,
+the steward of the best half of the department, instead of being
+merely the steward of Les Aigues. He makes a little out of everybody,
+and that little on every two millions brings him in forty to fifty
+thousand francs a year. He says himself, 'The fires on the Parisian
+hearths pay it all.' He is your enemy, Monsieur le comte. My advice to
+you is to capitulate and be reconciled with him. He is intimate, as
+you know, with Soudry, the head of the gendarmerie at Soulanges; with
+Monsieur Rigou, our mayor at Blangy; the patrols are under his
+influence; therefore you will find it impossible to repress the
+pilferings which are eating into your estate. During the last two
+years your woods have been devastated. Consequently the Gravelots are
+more than likely to win their suit. They say, very truly: 'According
+to the terms of the lease, the care of the woods is left to the owner;
+he does not protect them, and we are injured; the owner is bound to
+pay us damages.' That's fair enough; but it doesn't follow that they
+should win their case."
+
+"We must be ready to defend this suit at all costs," said the general,
+"and then we shall have no more of them."
+
+"You shall gratify Gaubertin," remarked Sibilet.
+
+"How so?"
+
+"Suing the Gravelots is the same as a hand to hand fight with
+Gaubertin, who is their agent," answered Sibilet. "He asks nothing
+better than such a suit. He declares, so I hear, that he will bring
+you if necessary before the Court of Appeals."
+
+"The rascal! the--"
+
+"If you attempt to work your own woods," continued Sibilet, turning
+the knife in the wound, "you will find yourself at the mercy of
+workmen who will force you to pay rich men's prices instead of
+market-prices. In short, they'll put you, as they did that poor Mariotte,
+in a position where you must sell at a loss. If you then try to lease
+the woods you will get no tenants, for you cannot expect that any one
+should take risks for himself which Mariotte only took for the crown
+and the State. Suppose a man talks of his losses to the government!
+The government is a gentleman who is, like your obedient servant when
+he was in its employ, a worthy man with a frayed overcoat, who reads
+the newspapers at a desk. Let his salary be twelve hundred or twelve
+thousand francs, his disposition is the same, it is not a whit softer.
+Talk of reductions and releases from the public treasury represented
+by the said gentleman! He'll only pooh-pooh you as he mends his pen.
+No, the law is the wrong road for you, Monsieur le comte."
+
+"Then what's to be done?" cried the general, his blood boiling as he
+tramped up and down before the bench.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, abruptly, "what I say to you is not
+for my own interests, certainly; but I advise you to sell Les Aigues
+and leave the neighborhood."
+
+On hearing these words the general sprang back as if a cannon-ball had
+struck him; then he looked at Sibilet with a shrewd, diplomatic eye.
+
+"A general of the Imperial Guard running away from the rascals, when
+Madame la comtesse likes Les Aigues!" he said. "No, I'll sooner box
+Gaubertin's ears on the market-place of Ville-aux-Fayes, and force him
+to fight me that I may shoot him like a dog."
+
+"Monsieur le comte, Gaubertin is not such a fool as to let himself be
+brought into collision with you. Besides, you could not openly insult
+the mayor of so important a place as Ville-aux-Fayes."
+
+"I'll have him turned out; the Troisvilles can do that for me; it is a
+question of income."
+
+"You won't succeed, Monsieur le comte; Gaubertin's arms are long; you
+will get yourself into difficulties from which you cannot escape."
+
+"Let us think of the present," interrupted the general. "About that
+suit?"
+
+"That, Monsieur le comte, I can manage to win for you," replied
+Sibilet, with a knowing glance.
+
+"Bravo, Sibilet!" said the general, shaking his steward's hand; "how
+are you going to do it?"
+
+"You will win it on a writ of error," replied Sibilet. "In my opinion
+the Gravelots have the right of it. But it is not enough to be in the
+right, they must also be in order as to legal forms, and that they
+have neglected. The Gravelots ought to have summoned you to have the
+woods better watched. They can't ask for indemnity, at the close of a
+lease, for damages which they know have been going on for nine years;
+there is a clause in the lease as to this, on which we can file a bill
+of exceptions. You will lose the suit at Ville-aux-Fayes, possibly in
+the upper court as well, but we will carry it to Paris and you will
+win at the Court of Appeals. The costs will be heavy and the expenses
+ruinous. You will have to spend from twelve to fifteen thousand francs
+merely to win the suit,--but you will win it, if you care to. The suit
+will only increase the enmity of the Gravelots, for the expenses will
+be even heavier on them. You will be their bugbear; you will be called
+litigious and calumniated in every way; still, you can win--"
+
+"Then, what's to be done?" repeated the general, on whom Sibilet's
+arguments were beginning to produce the effect of a violent poison.
+
+Just then the remembrance of the blows he had given Gaubertin with his
+cane crossed his mind, and made him wish he had bestowed them on
+himself. His flushed face was enough to show Sibilet the irritation
+that he felt.
+
+"You ask me what can be done, Monsieur le comte? Why, only one thing,
+compromise; but of course you can't negotiate that yourself. I must be
+thought to cheat you! We, poor devils, whose only fortune and comfort
+is in our good name, it is hard on us to even seem to do a
+questionable thing. We are always judged by appearances. Gaubertin
+himself saved Mademoiselle Laguerre's life during the Revolution, but
+it seemed to others that he was robbing her. She rewarded him in her
+will with a diamond worth ten thousand francs, which Madame Gaubertin
+now wears on her head."
+
+The general gave Sibilet another glance still more diplomatic than the
+first; but the steward seemed to take no notice of the challenge it
+expressed.
+
+"If I were to appear dishonest, Monsieur Gaubertin would be so
+overjoyed that I could instantly obtain his help," continued Sibilet.
+"He would listen with all his ears if I said to him: 'Suppose I were
+to extort twenty thousand francs from Monsieur le comte for Messrs.
+Gravelot, on condition that they shared them with me?' If your
+adversaries consented to that, Monsieur le comte, I should return you
+ten thousand francs; you lose only the other ten, you save
+appearances, and the suit is quashed."
+
+"You are a fine fellow, Sibilet," said the general, taking his hand
+and shaking it. "If you can manage the future as well as you do the
+present, I'll call you the prince of stewards."
+
+"As to the future," said Sibilet, "you won't die of hunger if no
+timber is cut for two or three years. Let us begin by putting proper
+keepers in the woods. Between now and then things will flow as the
+water does in the Avonne. Gaubertin may die, or get rich enough to
+retire from business; at any rate, you will have sufficient time to
+find him a competitor. The cake is too rich not to be shared. Look for
+another Gaubertin to oppose the original."
+
+"Sibilet," said the old soldier, delighted with this variety of
+solutions. "I'll give you three thousand francs if you'll settle the
+matter as you propose. For the rest, we'll think about it."
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, "first and foremost have the forest
+properly watched. See for yourself the condition in which the
+peasantry have put it during your two years' absence. What could I do?
+I am steward; I am not a bailiff. To guard Les Aigues properly you
+need a mounted patrol and three keepers."
+
+"I certainly shall have the estate properly guarded. So it is to be
+war, is it? Very good, then we shall make war. That doesn't frighten
+me," said Montcornet, rubbing his hands.
+
+"A war of francs," said Sibilet; "and you may find that more difficult
+than the other kind; men can be killed but you can't kill self-interest.
+You will fight your enemy on the battle-field where all landlords are
+compelled to fight,--I mean cash results. It is not enough to produce,
+you must sell; and in order to sell, you must be on good terms with
+everybody."
+
+"I shall have the country people on my side."
+
+"By what means?"
+
+"By doing good among them."
+
+"Doing good to the valley peasants! to the petty shopkeepers of
+Soulanges!" exclaimed Sibilet, squinting horribly, by reason of the
+irony which flamed brighter in one eye than in the other. "Monsieur le
+comte doesn't know what he undertakes. Our Lord Jesus Christ would die
+again upon the cross in this valley! If you wish an easy life, follow
+the example of the late Mademoiselle Laguerre; let yourself be robbed,
+or else make people afraid of you. Women, children, and the masses are
+all governed by fear. That was the great secret of the Convention, and
+of the Emperor, too."
+
+"Good heavens! is this the forest of Bondy?" cried the general.
+
+"My dear," said Sibilet's wife, appearing at this moment, "your
+breakfast is ready. Pray excuse him, Monsieur le comte; he has eaten
+nothing since morning for he was obliged to go to Ronquerolles to
+deliver some barley."
+
+"Go, go, Sibilet," said the general.
+
+The next morning the count rose early, before daylight, and went to
+the gate of the Avonne, intending to talk with the one forester whom
+he employed and find out what the man's sentiments really were.
+
+Some seven or eight hundred acres of the forest of Les Aigues lie
+along the banks of the Avonne; and to preserve the majestic beauty of
+the river the large trees that border it have been left untouched for
+a distance of three leagues on both sides in an almost straight line.
+The mistress of Henri IV., to whom Les Aigues formerly belonged, was
+as fond of hunting as the king himself. In 1593 she ordered a bridge
+to be built of a single arch with shelving roadway by which to ride
+from the lower side of the forest to a much larger portion of it,
+purchased by her, which lay upon the slopes of the hills. The gate of
+the Avonne was built as a place of meeting for the huntsmen; and we
+know the magnificence bestowed by the architects of that day upon all
+buildings intended for the delight of the crown and the nobility. Six
+avenues branched away from it, their place of meeting forming a
+half-moon. In the centre of the semi-circular space stood an obelisk
+surmounted by a round shield, formerly gilded, bearing on one side the
+arms of Navarre and on the other those of the Countess de Moret.
+Another half-moon, on the side toward the river, communicated with the
+first by a straight avenue, at the opposite end of which the steep
+rise of the Venetian-shaped bridge could be seen. Between two elegant
+iron railings of the same character as that of the magnificent railing
+which formerly surrounded the garden of the Place Royale in Paris, now
+so unfortunately destroyed, stood a brick pavilion, with stone courses
+hewn in facets like those of the chateau, with a very pointed roof and
+window-casings of stone cut in the same manner. This old style, which
+gave the building a regal air, is suitable only to prisons when used
+in cities; but standing in the heart of forests it derives from its
+surroundings a splendor of its own. A group of trees formed a screen,
+behind which the kennels, an old falconry, a pheasantry, and the
+quarters of the huntsmen were falling into ruins, after being in their
+day the wonder and admiration of Burgundy.
+
+In 1595, the royal hunting-parties set forth from this magnificent
+pavilion, preceded by those fine dogs so dear to Rubens and to Paul
+Veronese; the huntsmen mounted on high-steeping steeds with stout and
+blue-white satiny haunches, seen no longer except in Wouverman's
+amazing work, followed by footmen in livery; the scene enlivened by
+whippers-in, wearing the high top-boots with facings and the yellow
+leathern breeches which have come down to the present day on the
+canvas of Van der Meulen. The obelisk was erected in commemoration of
+the visit of the Bearnais, and his hunt with the beautiful Comtesse de
+Moret; the date is given below the arms of Navarre. That jealous
+woman, whose son was afterwards legitimatized, would not allow the
+arms of France to figure on the obelisk, regarding them as a rebuke.
+
+At the time of which we write, when the general's eyes rested on this
+splendid ruin, moss had gathered for centuries on the four faces of
+the roof; the hewn-stone courses, mangled by time, seemed to cry with
+yawning mouths against the profanation; disjointed leaden settings let
+fall their octagonal panes, so that the windows seemed blind of an eye
+here and there. Yellow wallflowers bloomed about the copings; ivy slid
+its white rootlets into every crevice.
+
+All things bespoke a shameful want of care,--the seal set by mere
+life-possessors on the ancient glories that they possess. Two windows
+on the first floor were stuffed with hay. Through another, on the
+ground-floor, was seen a room filled with tools and logs of wood;
+while a cow pushed her muzzle through a fourth, proving that
+Courtecuisse, to avoid having to walk from the pavilion to the
+pheasantry, had turned the large hall of the central building into a
+stable,--a hall with panelled ceiling, and in the centre of each panel
+the arms of all the various possessors of Les Aigues!
+
+Black and dirty palings disgraced the approach to the pavilion, making
+square inclosures with plank roofs for pigs, ducks, and hens, the
+manure of which was taken away every six months. A few ragged garments
+were hung to dry on the brambles which boldly grew unchecked here and
+there. As the general came along the avenue from the bridge, Madame
+Courtecuisse was scouring a saucepan in which she had just made her
+coffee. The forester, sitting on a chair in the sun, considered his
+wife as a savage considers his. When he heard a horse's hoofs he
+turned round, saw the count, and seemed taken aback.
+
+"Well, Courtecuisse, my man," said the general, "I'm not surprised
+that the peasants cut my woods before Messrs. Gravelot can do so. So
+you consider your place a sinecure?"
+
+"Indeed, Monsieur le comte, I have watched the woods so many nights
+that I'm ill from it. I've got a chill, and I suffer such pain this
+morning that my wife has just made me a poultice in that saucepan."
+
+"My good fellow," said the count, "I don't know of any pain that a
+coffee poultice cures except that of hunger. Listen to me, you rascal!
+I rode through my forest yesterday, and then through those of Monsieur
+de Soulanges and Monsieur de Ronquerolles. Theirs are carefully
+watched and preserved, while mine is in a shameful state."
+
+"Ah, monsieur! but they are the old lords of the neighborhood;
+everybody respects their property. How can you expect me to fight
+against six districts? I care for my life more than for your woods. A
+man who would undertake to watch your woods as they ought to be
+watched would get a ball in his head for wages in some dark corner of
+the forest--"
+
+"Coward!" cried the general, trying to control the anger the man's
+insolent reply provoked in him. "Last night was as clear as day, yet
+it cost me three hundred francs in actual robbery and over a thousand
+in future damages. You will leave my service unless you do better. All
+wrong-doing deserves some mercy; therefore these are my conditions:
+You may have the fines, and I will pay you three francs for every
+indictment you bring against these depredators. If I don't get what I
+expect, you know what you have to expect, and no pension either.
+Whereas, if you serve me faithfully and contrive to stop these
+depredations, I'll give you an annuity of three hundred francs for
+life. You can think it over. Here are six ways," continued the count,
+pointing to the branching roads; "there's only one for you to take,
+--as for me also, who am not afraid of balls; try and find the right
+one."
+
+Courtecuisse, a small man about forty-six years of age, with a
+full-moon face, found his greatest happiness in doing nothing. He
+expected to live and die in that pavilion, now considered by him _his_
+pavilion. His two cows were pastured in the forest, from which he got
+his wood; and he spent his time in looking after his garden instead of
+after the delinquents. Such neglect of duty suited Gaubertin, and
+Courtecuisse knew it did. The keeper chased only those depredators who
+were the objects of his personal dislike,--young women who would not
+yield to his wishes, or persons against whom he held a grudge; though
+for some time past he had really felt no dislikes, for every one yielded
+to him on account of his easy-going ways with them.
+
+Courtecuisse had a place always kept for him at the table of the
+Grand-I-Vert; the wood-pickers feared him no longer; indeed, his wife
+and he received many gifts in kind from them; his wood was brought in;
+his vineyard dug; in short, all delinquents at whom he blinked did him
+service.
+
+Counting on Gaubertin for the future, and feeling sure of two acres
+whenever Les Aigues should be brought to the hammer, he was roughly
+awakened by the curt speech of the general, who, after four quiescent
+years, was now revealing his true character,--that of a bourgeois rich
+man who was determined to be no longer deceived. Courtecuisse took his
+cap, his game-bag, and his gun, put on his gaiters and his belt (which
+bore the very recent arms of Montcornet), and started for Ville-aux-Fayes,
+with the careless, indifferent air and manner under which country-people
+often conceal very deep reflections, while he gazed at the woods and
+whistled to the dogs to follow him.
+
+"What! you complain of the Shopman when he proposes to make your
+fortune?" said Gaubertin. "Doesn't the fool offer to give you three
+francs for every arrest you make, and the fines to boot? Have an
+understanding with your friends and you can bring as many indictments
+as you please,--hundreds if you like! With one thousand francs you can
+buy La Bachelerie from Rigou, become a property owner, live in your
+own house, and work for yourself, or rather, make others work for you,
+and take your ease. Only--now listen to me--you must manage to arrest
+only such as haven't a penny in the world. You can't shear sheep
+unless the wool is on their backs. Take the Shopman's offer and leave
+him to collect the costs,--if he wants them; tastes differ. Didn't old
+Mariotte prefer losses to profits, in spite of my advice?"
+
+Courtecuisse, filled with admiration for these words of wisdom,
+returned home burning with the desire to be a land-owner and a
+bourgeois like the rest.
+
+When the general reached Les Aigues he related his expedition to
+Sibilet.
+
+"Monsieur le comte did very right," said the steward, rubbing his
+hands; "but he must not stop short half-way. The field-keeper of the
+district who allows the country-people to prey upon the meadows and
+rob the harvests ought to be changed. Monsieur le comte should have
+himself chosen mayor, and appoint one of his old soldiers, who would
+have the courage to carry out his orders, in place of Vaudoyer. A
+great land-owner should be master in his own district. Just see what
+difficulties we have with the present mayor!"
+
+The mayor of the district of Blangy, formerly a Benedictine, named
+Rigou, had married, in the first year of the Republic, the servant-woman
+of the late priest of Blangy. In spite of the repugnance which a
+married monk excited at the Prefecture, he had continued to be mayor
+after 1815, for the reason that there was no-one else at Blangy who
+was capable of filling the post. But in 1817, when the bishop sent the
+Abbe Brossette to the parish of Blangy (which had then been vacant
+over twenty-five years), a violent opposition not unnaturally broke
+out between the old apostate and the young ecclesiastic, whose
+character is already known to us. The war which was then and there
+declared between the mayor's office and the parsonage increased the
+popularity of the magistrate, who had hitherto been more or less
+despised. Rigou, whom the peasants had disliked for usurious dealings,
+now suddenly represented their political and financial interests,
+supposed to be threatened by the Restoration, and more especially by
+the clergy.
+
+A copy of the "Constitutionnel," that great organ of liberalism, after
+making the rounds of the Cafe de la Paix, came back to Rigou on the
+seventh day,--the subscription, standing in the name of old Socquard
+the keeper of the coffee-house, being shared by twenty persons. Rigou
+passed the paper on to Langlume the miller, who, in turn, gave it in
+shreds to any one who knew how to read. The "Paris items," and the
+anti-religion jokes of the liberal sheet formed the public opinion of
+the valley des Aigues. Rigou, like the _venerable_ Abbe Gregoire, became
+a hero. For him, as for certain Parisian bankers, politics spread a
+mantle of popularity over his shameful dishonesty.
+
+At this particular time the perjured monk, like Francois Keller the
+great orator, was looked upon as a defender of the rights of the
+people,--he who, not so very long before, dared not walk in the fields
+after dark, lest he should stumble into pitfalls where he would seem
+to have been killed by accident! Persecute a man politically and you
+not only magnify him, but you redeem his past and make it innocent.
+The liberal party was a great worker of miracles in this respect. Its
+dangerous journal, which had the wit to make itself as commonplace, as
+calumniating, as credulous, and as sillily perfidious as every
+audience made up the general masses, did in all probability as much
+injury to private interests as it did to those of the Church.
+
+Rigou flattered himself that he should find in a Bonapartist general
+now laid on the shelf, in a son of the people raised from nothing by
+the Revolution, a sound enemy to the Bourbons and the priests. But the
+general, bearing in mind his private ambitions, so arranged matters as
+to evade the visit of Monsieur and Madame Rigou when he first came to
+Les Aigues.
+
+When you have become better acquainted with the terrible character of
+Rigou, the lynx of the valley, you will understand the full extent of
+the second capital blunder which the general's aristocratic ambitions
+led him to commit, and which the countess made all the greater by an
+offence which will be described in the further history of Rigou.
+
+If Montcornet had courted the mayor's good-will, if he had sought his
+friendship, perhaps the influence of the renegade might have
+neutralized that of Gaubertin. Far from that, three suits were now
+pending in the courts of Ville-aux-Fayes between the general and the
+ex-monk. Until the present time the general had been so absorbed in
+his personal interests and in his marriage that he had never
+remembered Rigou, but when Sibilet advised him to get himself made
+mayor in Rigou's place, he took post-horses and went to see the
+prefect.
+
+The prefect, Comte Martial de la Roche-Hugon, had been a friend of the
+general since 1804; and it was a word from him said to Montcornet in a
+conversation in Paris, which brought about the purchase of Les Aigues.
+Comte Martial, a prefect under Napoleon, remained a prefect under the
+Bourbons, and courted the bishop to retain his place. Now it happened
+that Monseigneur had several times requested him to get rid of Rigou.
+Martial, to whom the condition of the district was perfectly well
+known, was delighted with the general's request; so that in less than
+a month the Comte de Montcornet was mayor of Blangy.
+
+By one of those accidents which come about naturally, the general met,
+while at the prefecture where his friend put him up, a non-commissioned
+officer of the ex-Imperial guard, who had been cheated out of his
+retiring pension. The general had already, under other circumstances,
+done a service to the brave cavalryman, whose name was Groison; the
+man, remembering it, now told him his troubles, admitting that he was
+penniless. The general promised to get him his pension, and proposed
+that he should take the place of field-keeper to the district of Blangy,
+as a way of paying off his score of gratitude by devotion to the new
+mayor's interests. The appointments of master and man were made
+simultaneously, and the general gave, as may be supposed, very firm
+instructions to his subordinate.
+
+Vaudoyer, the displaced keeper, a peasant on the Ronquerolles estate,
+was only fit, like most field-keepers, to stalk about, and gossip, and
+let himself be petted by the poor of the district, who asked nothing
+better than to corrupt at subaltern authority,--the advanced guard, as
+it were, of the land-owners. He knew Soudry, the brigadier at
+Soulanges, for brigadiers of gendarmerie, performing functions that
+are semi-judicial in drawing up criminal indictments, have much to do
+with the rural keepers, who are, in fact, their natural spies. Soudry,
+being appealed to, sent Vaudoyer to Gaubertin, who received his old
+acquaintance very cordially, and invited him to drink while listening
+to the recital of his troubles.
+
+"My dear friend," said the mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes, who could talk to
+every man in his own language, "what has happened to you is likely to
+happen to us all. The nobles are back upon us. The men to whom the
+Emperor gave titles make common cause with the old nobility. They all
+want to crush the people, re-establish their former rights and take
+our property from us. But we are Burgundians; we must resist, and
+drive those Arminacs back to Paris. Return to Blangy; you shall be
+agent for Monsieur Polissard, the wood-merchant, who is contractor for
+the forest of Ronquerolles. Don't be uneasy, my lad; I'll find you
+enough to do for the whole of the coming year. But remember one thing;
+the wood is for ourselves! Not a single depredation, or the thing is
+at an end. Send all interlopers to Les Aigues. If there's brush or
+fagots to sell make people buy ours; don't let them buy of Les Aigues.
+You'll get back to your place as field-keeper before long; this thing
+can't last. The general will get sick of living among thieves. Did you
+know that that Shopman called me a thief, me!--son of the stanchest
+and most incorruptible of republicans; me!--the son in law of Mouchon,
+that famous representative of the people, who died without leaving me
+enough to bury him?"
+
+The general raised the salary of the new field-keeper to three hundred
+francs; and built a town-hall, in which he gave him a residence. Then
+he married him to a daughter of one of his tenant-farmers, who had
+lately died, leaving her an orphan with three acres of vineyard.
+Groison attached himself to the general as a dog to his master. This
+legitimate fidelity was admitted by the whole community. The keeper
+was feared and respected, but like the captain of a vessel whose
+ship's company hate him; the peasantry shunned him as they would a
+leper. Met either in silence or with sarcasms veiled under a show of
+good-humor, the new keeper was a sentinel watched by other sentinels.
+He could do nothing against such numbers. The delinquents took delight
+in plotting depredations which it was impossible for him to prove, and
+the old soldier grew furious at his helplessness. Groison found the
+excitement of a war of factions in his duties, and all the pleasures
+of the chase,--a chase after petty delinquents. Trained in real war to
+a loyalty which consists in part of playing a fair game, this enemy of
+traitors came at last to hate these people, so treacherous in their
+conspiracies, and so clever in their thefts that they mortified his
+self-esteem. He soon observed that the depredations were committed
+only at Les Aigues; all the other estates were respected. At first he
+despised a peasantry ungrateful enough to pillage a general of the
+Empire, an essentially kind and generous man; presently, however, he
+added hatred to contempt. But multiply himself as he would, he could
+not be everywhere, and the enemy pillaged everywhere that he was not.
+Groison made the general understand that it was necessary to organize
+the defence on a war footing, and proved to him the insufficiency of
+his own devoted efforts and the evil disposition of the inhabitants of
+the valley.
+
+"There is something behind it all, general," he said; "these people
+are so bold they fear nothing; they seem to rely on the favor of the
+good God."
+
+"We shall see," replied the count.
+
+Fatal word! The verb "to see" has no future tense for politicians.
+
+At the moment, Montcornet was considering another difficulty, which
+seemed to him more pressing. He needed an alter ego to do his work in
+the mayor's office during the months he lived in Paris. Obliged to
+find some man who knew how to read and write for the position of
+assistant mayor, he knew of none and could hear of none throughout the
+district but Langlume, the tenant of his own flour-mill. The choice
+was disastrous. Not only were the interests of mayor and miller
+diametrically opposed, but Langlume had long hatched swindling
+projects with Rigou, who lent him money to carry on his business, or
+to acquire property. The miller had bought the right to the hay of
+certain fields for his horses, and Sibilet could not sell it except to
+him. The hay of all the fields in the district was sold at better
+prices than that of Les Aigues, though the yield of the latter was the
+best.
+
+Langlume, then, became the provisional mayor; but in France the
+provisional is eternal,--though Frenchmen are suspected of loving
+change. Acting by Rigou's advice, he played a part of great devotion
+to the general; and he was still assistant-mayor at the moment when,
+by the omnipotence of the historian, this drama begins.
+
+In the absence of the mayor, Rigou, necessarily a member of the
+district council, reigned supreme, and brought forward resolutions all
+injuriously affecting the general. At one time he caused money to be
+spent for purposes that were profitable to the peasants only,--the
+greater part of the expenses falling upon Les Aigues, which, by reason
+of its great extent, paid two thirds of the taxes; at other times the
+council refused, under his influence, certain useful and necessary
+allowances, such as an increase in salary for the abbe, repairs or
+improvements to the parsonage, or "wages" to the school-master.
+
+"If the peasants once know how to read and write, what will become of
+us?" said Langlume, naively, to the general, to excuse this anti-liberal
+action taken against a brother of the Christian Doctrine whom the Abbe
+Brossette wished to establish as a public school-master in Blangy.
+
+The general, delighted with his old Groison, returned to Paris and
+immediately looked about him for other old soldiers of the late
+imperial guard, with whom to organize the defence of Les Aigues on a
+formidable footing. By dint of searching out and questioning his
+friends and many officers on half-pay, he unearthed Michaud, a former
+quartermaster at headquarters of the cuirassiers of the guard; one of
+those men whom troopers call "hard-to-cook," a nickname derived from
+the mess kitchen where refractory beans are not uncommon. Michaud
+picked out from among his friends and acquaintances, three other men
+fit to be his helpers, and able to guard the estate without fear and
+without reproach.
+
+The first, named Steingel, a pure-blooded Alsacian, was a natural son
+of the general of that name, who fell in one of Bonaparte's first
+victories with the army of Italy. Tall and strong, he belonged to the
+class of soldiers accustomed, like the Russians, to obey, passively
+and absolutely. Nothing hindered him in the performance of his duty;
+he would have collared an emperor or a pope if such were his orders.
+He ignored danger. Perfectly fearless, he had never received the
+smallest scratch during his sixteen years' campaigning. He slept in
+the open air or in his bed with stoical indifference. At any increased
+labor or discomfort, he merely remarked, "It seems to be the order of
+the day."
+
+The second man, Vatel, son of the regiment, corporal of voltigeurs,
+gay as a lark, rather free and easy with the fair sex, brave to
+foolhardiness, was capable of shooting a comrade with a laugh if
+ordered to execute him. With no future before him and not knowing how
+to employ himself, the prospect of finding an amusing little war in
+the functions of keeper, attracted him; and as the grand army and the
+Emperor had hitherto stood him in place of a religion, so now he swore
+to serve the brave Montcornet against and through all and everything.
+His nature was of that essentially wrangling quality to which a life
+without enemies seems dull and objectless,--the nature, in short, of a
+litigant, or a policeman. If it had not been for the presence of the
+sheriff's officer, he would have seized Tonsard and the bundle of wood
+at the Grand-I-Vert, snapping his fingers at the law on the
+inviolability of a man's domicile.
+
+The third man, Gaillard, also an old soldier, risen to the rank of
+sub-lieutenant, and covered with wounds, belonged to the class of
+mechanical soldiers. The fate of the Emperor never left his mind and
+he became indifferent to everything else. With the care of a natural
+daughter on his hands, he accepted the place that was now offered to
+him as a means of subsistence, taking it as he would have taken
+service in a regiment.
+
+When the general reached Les Aigues, whither he had gone in advance of
+his troopers, intending to send away Courtecuisse, he was amazed at
+discovering the impudent audacity with which the keeper had fulfilled
+his commands. There is a method of obeying which makes the obedience
+of the servant a cutting sarcasm on the master's order. But all things
+in this world can be reduced to absurdity, and Courtecuisse in this
+instance went beyond its limits.
+
+One hundred and twenty-six indictments against depredators (most of
+whom were in collusion with Courtecuisse) and sworn to before the
+justice court of Soulanges, had resulted in sixty-nine commitments for
+trial, in virtue of which Brunet, the sheriff's officer, delighted at
+such a windfall of fees, had rigorously enforced the warrants in such
+a way as to bring about what is called, in legal language, a
+declaration of insolvency; a condition of pauperism where the law
+becomes of course powerless. By this declaration the sheriff proves
+that the defendant possesses no property of any kind, and is therefore
+a pauper. Where there is absolutely nothing, the creditor, like the
+king, loses his right to sue. The paupers in this case, carefully
+selected by Courtecuisse, were scattered through five neighboring
+districts, whither Brunet betook himself duly attended by his
+satellites, Vermichel and Fourchon, to serve the writs. Later he
+transmitted the papers to Sibilet with a bill of costs for five
+thousand francs, requesting him to obtain the further orders of
+Monsieur le comte de Montcornet.
+
+Just as Sibilet, armed with these papers, was calmly explaining to the
+count the result of the rash orders he had given to Courtecuisse, and
+witnessing, as calmly, a burst of the most violent anger a general of
+the French cavalry was ever known to indulge in, Courtecuisse entered
+to pay his respects to his master and to bring his own account of
+eleven hundred francs, the sum to which his promised commission now
+amounted. The natural man took the bit in his teeth and ran off with
+the general, who totally forgot his coronet and his field rank; he was
+a trooper once more, vomiting curses of which he probably was ashamed
+when he thought of them later.
+
+"Ha! eleven hundred francs!" he shouted, "eleven hundred slaps in your
+face! eleven hundred kicks!--Do you think I can't see straight through
+your lies? Out of my sight, or I'll strike you flat!"
+
+At the mere look of the general's purple face and before that warrior
+could get out the last words, Courtecuisse was off like a swallow.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, gently, "you are wrong."
+
+"Wrong! I, wrong?"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur le comte, take care, you will have trouble with that
+rascal; he will sue you."
+
+"What do I care for that? Tell the scoundrel to leave the place
+instantly! See that he takes nothing of mine, and pay him his wages."
+
+Four hours later the whole country-side was gossiping about this
+scene. The general, they said, had assaulted the unfortunate
+Courtecuisse, and refused to pay his wages and two thousand francs
+besides, which he owed him. Extraordinary stories went the rounds, and
+the master of Les Aigues was declared insane. The next day Brunet, who
+had served all the warrants for the general, now brought him on behalf
+of Courtecuisse a summon to appear before the police court. The lion
+was stung by gnats; but his misery was only just beginning.
+
+The installation of a keeper is not done without a few formalities; he
+must, for instance, file an oath in the civil court. Some days
+therefore elapsed before the three keepers really entered upon their
+functions. Though the general had written to Michaud to bring his wife
+without waiting until the lodge at the gate of the Avonne was ready
+for them, the future head-keeper, or rather bailiff, was detained in
+Paris by his marriage and his wife's family, and did not reach Les
+Aigues until a fortnight later. During those two weeks, and during the
+time still further required for certain formalities which were carried
+out with very ill grace by the authorities at Ville-aux-Fayes, the
+forest of Les Aigues was shamefully devastated by the peasantry, who
+took advantage of the fact that there was practically no watch over
+it.
+
+The appearance of three keepers handsomely dressed in green cloth, the
+Emperor's color, with faces denoting firmness, and each of them
+well-made, active, and capable of spending their nights in the woods,
+was a great event in the valley, from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes.
+
+Throughout the district Groison was the only man who welcomed these
+veterans. Delighted to be thus reinforced, he let fall a few threats
+against thieves, who before long, he said, would be watched so closely
+that they could do no damage. Thus the usual proclamation of all great
+commanders was not lacking to the present war; in this case it was
+said aloud and also whispered in secret.
+
+Sibilet called the general's attention to the fact that the
+gendarmerie of Soulanges, and especially its brigadier, Soudry, were
+thoroughly and hypocritically hostile to Les Aigues. He made him see
+the importance of substituting another brigade, which might show a
+better spirit.
+
+"With a good brigadier and a company of gendarmes devoted to your
+interests, you could manage the country," he said to him.
+
+The general went to the Prefecture and obtained from the general in
+command of the division the retirement of Soudry and the substitution
+of a man named Viallet, an excellent gendarme at headquarters, who was
+much praised by his general and the prefect. The company of gendarmes
+at Soulanges were dispersed to other places in the department by the
+colonel of the gendarmerie, an old friend of Montcornet, and chosen
+men were put in their places with secret orders to keep watch over the
+estate of the Comte de Montcornet, and prevent all future attempts to
+injure it; they were also particularly enjoined not to allow
+themselves to be gained over by the inhabitants of Soulanges.
+
+This last revolutionary measure, carried out with such rapidity that
+there was no possibility of countermining it created much astonishment
+in Soulanges and in Ville-aux-Fayes. Soudry, who felt himself
+dismissed, complained bitterly, and Gaubertin managed to get him
+appointed mayor, which put the gendarmerie under his orders. An outcry
+was made about tyranny. Montcornet became an object of general hatred.
+Not only were five or six lives radically changed by him, but many
+personal vanities were wounded. The peasants, taking their cue from
+words dropped by the small tradesmen of Ville-aux-Fayes and Soulanges,
+and by Rigou, Langlume, Guerbet, and the postmaster at Conches,
+thought they were on the eve of losing what they called their rights.
+
+The general stopped the suit brought by Courtecuisse by paying him all
+he demanded. The man then purchased, nominally for two thousand
+francs, a little property surrounded on all sides but one by the
+estate of Les Aigues,--a sort of cover into which the game escaped.
+Rigou, the owner, had never been willing to part with La Bachelerie,
+as it was called, to the possessors of the estate, but he now took
+malicious pleasure in selling it, at fifty per cent discount, to
+Courtecuisse; which made the ex-keeper one of Rigou's numerous
+henchmen, for all he actually paid for the property was one thousand
+francs.
+
+The three keepers, with Michaud the bailiff, and Groison the
+field-keeper of Blangy, led henceforth the life of guerrillas. Living
+night and day in the forest, they soon acquired that deep knowledge of
+woodland things which becomes a science among foresters, saving them
+much loss of time; they studied the tracks of animals, the species of
+the trees, and their habits of growth, training their ears to every
+sound and to every murmur of the woods. Still further, they observed
+faces, watched and understood the different families in the various
+villages of the district, and knew the individuals in each family,
+their habits, characters, and means of living,--a far more difficult
+matter than most persons suppose. When the peasants who obtained their
+living from Les Aigues saw these well-planned measures of defence,
+they met them with dumb resistance or sneering submission.
+
+From the first, Michaud and Sibilet mutually disliked each other. The
+frank and loyal soldier, with the sense of honor of a subaltern of the
+young "garde," hated the servile brutality and the discontented spirit
+of the steward. He soon took note of the objections with which Sibilet
+opposed all measures that were really judicious, and the reasons he
+gave for those that were questionable. Instead of calming the general,
+Sibilet, as the reader has already seen, constantly excited him and
+drove him to harsh measures, all the while trying to daunt him by
+drawing his attention to countless annoyances, petty vexations, and
+ever-recurring and unconquerable difficulties. Without suspecting the
+role of spy and exasperator undertaken by Sibilet (who secretly
+intended to eventually make choice in his own interests between
+Gaubertin and the general) Michaud felt that the steward's nature was
+bad and grasping, and he was unable to explain to himself its apparent
+honesty. The enmity which separated the two functionaries was
+satisfactory to the general. Michaud's hatred led him to watch the
+steward, though he would not have condescended to play the part of spy
+if the general had not required it. Sibilet fawned upon the bailiff
+and flattered him, without being able to get anything from him beyond
+an extreme politeness which the loyal soldier established between them
+as a barrier.
+
+Now, all preliminary details having been made known, the reader will
+understand the conduct of the general's enemies and the meaning of the
+conversation which he had with what he called his two ministers, after
+Madame de Montcornet, the abbe, and Blondet left the breakfast-table.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IX
+
+                     CONCERNING THE MEDIOCRACY
+
+"Well, Michaud, what's the news?" asked the general as soon as his
+wife had left the room.
+
+"General, if you will permit me to say so, it would be better not to
+talk over matters in this room. Walls have ears, and I should like to
+be certain that what we say reaches none but our own."
+
+"Very good," said the general, "then let us walk towards the steward's
+lodge by the path through the fields; no one can overhear us there."
+
+A few moments later the general, with Michaud and Sibilet, was
+crossing the meadows, while Madame de Montcornet, with the abbe and
+Blondet, was on her way to the gate of the Avonne.
+
+Michaud related the scene that had just taken place at the
+Grand-I-Vert.
+
+"Vatel did wrong," said Sibilet.
+
+"They made that plain to him at once," replied Michaud, "by blinding
+him; but that's nothing. General, you remember the plan we agreed
+upon,--to seize the cattle of those depredators against whom judgment
+was given? Well, we can't do it. Brunet, like his colleague Plissoud,
+is not loyal in his support. They both warn the delinquents when they
+are about to make a seizure. Vermichel, Brunet's assistant, went to
+the Grand-I-Vert this morning, ostensibly after Pere Fourchon; and
+Marie Tonsard, who is intimate with Bonnebault, ran off at once to
+give the alarm at Conches. The depredations have begun again."
+
+"A strong show of authority is becoming daily more and more
+necessary," said Sibilet.
+
+"What did I tell you?" cried the general. "We must demand the
+enforcement of the judgment of the court, which carried with it
+imprisonment; we must arrest for debt all those who do not pay the
+damages I have won and the costs of the suits."
+
+"These fellows imagine the law is powerless, and tell each other that
+you dare not arrest them," said Sibilet. "They think they frighten
+you! They have confederates at Ville-aux-Fayes; for even the
+prosecuting attorney seems to have ignored the verdicts against them."
+
+"I think," said Michaud, seeing that the general looked thoughtful,
+"that if you are willing to spend a good deal of money you can still
+protect the property."
+
+"It is better to spend money than to act harshly," remarked Sibilet.
+
+"What is your plan?" asked the general of his bailiff.
+
+"It is very simple," said Michaud. "Inclose the whole forest with
+walls, like those of the park, and you will be safe; the slightest
+depredation then becomes a criminal offence and is taken to the
+assizes."
+
+"At a franc and a half the square foot for the material only, Monsieur
+le comte would find his wall would cost him a third of the whole value
+of Les Aigues," said Sibilet, with a laugh.
+
+"Well, well," said Montcornet, "I shall go and see the
+attorney-general at once."
+
+"The attorney-general," remarked Sibilet, gently, "may perhaps share
+the opinion of his subordinate; for the negligence shown by the latter
+is probably the result of an agreement between them."
+
+"Then I wish to know it!" cried Montcornet. "If I have to get the
+whole of them turned out, judges, civil authorities, and the
+attorney-general to boot, I'll do it; I'll go the Keeper of the Seals,
+or to the king himself."
+
+At a vehement sign made by Michaud the general stopped short and said
+to Sibilet, as he turned to retrace his steps, "Good day, my dear
+fellow,"--words which the steward understood.
+
+"Does Monsieur le comte intend, as mayor, to enforce the necessary
+measures to repress the abuse of gleaning?" he said, respectfully.
+"The harvest is coming on, and if we are to publish the statutes about
+certificates of pauperism and the prevention of paupers from other
+districts gleaning our land, there is no time to be lost."
+
+"Do it at once, and arrange with Groison," said the count. "With such
+a class of people," he added, "we must follow out the law."
+
+So, without a moment's reflection, Montcornet gave in to a measure
+that Sibilet had been proposing to him for more than a fortnight, to
+which he had hitherto refused to consent; but now, in the violence of
+anger caused by Vatel's mishap, he instantly adopted it as the right
+thing to do.
+
+When Sibilet was at some distance the general said in a low voice to
+his bailiff:--
+
+"Well, my dear Michaud, what is it; why did you make me that sign?"
+
+"You have an enemy within the walls, general, yet you tell him plans
+which you ought not to confide even to the secret police."
+
+"I share your suspicions, my dear friend," replied Montcornet, "but I
+don't intend to commit the same fault twice over. I shall not part
+with another steward till I'm sure of a better. I am waiting to get
+rid of Sibilet, till you understand the business of steward well
+enough to take his place, and till Vatel is fit to succeed you. And
+yet, I have no ground of complaint against Sibilet. He is honest and
+punctual in all his dealings; he hasn't kept back a hundred francs in
+all these five years. He has a perfectly detestable nature, and that's
+all one can say against him. If it were otherwise, what would be his
+plan in acting as he does?"
+
+"General," said Michaud, gravely, "I will find out, for undoubtedly he
+has one; and if you would only allow it, a good bribe to that old
+scoundrel Fourchon will enable me to get at the truth; though after
+what he said just now I suspect the old fellow of having more secrets
+than one in his pouch. That swindling old cordwainer told me himself
+they want to drive you from Les Aigues. And let me tell you, for you
+ought to know it, that from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes there is not a
+peasant, a petty tradesman, a farmer, a tavern-keeper who isn't laying
+by his money to buy a bit of the estate. Fourchon confided to me that
+Tonsard has already put in his claim. The idea that you can be forced
+to sell Les Aigues has gone from end to end of the valley like an
+infection in the air. It may be that the steward's present house, with
+some adjoining land, will be the price paid for Sibilet's spying.
+Nothing is ever said among us that is not immediately known at
+Ville-aux-Fayes. Sibilet is a relative of your enemy Gaubertin. What you
+have just said about the attorney-general and the others will probably
+be reported before you have reached the Prefecture. You don't know
+what the inhabitants of this district are."
+
+"Don't I know them? I know they are the scum of the earth! Do you
+suppose I am going to yield to such blackguards?" cried the general.
+"Good heavens, I'd rather burn Les Aigues myself!"
+
+"No need to burn it; let us adopt a line of conduct which will baffle
+the schemes of these Lilliputians. Judging by threats, general, they
+are resolved on war to the knife against you; and therefore since you
+mention incendiarism, let me beg of you to insure all your buildings,
+and all your farmhouses."
+
+"Michaud, do you know whom they mean by 'Shopman'? Yesterday, as I was
+riding along by the Thune, I heard some little rascals cry out, 'The
+Shopman! here's the Shopman!' and then they ran away."
+
+"Ask Sibilet; the answer is in his line, he likes to make you angry,"
+said Michaud, with a pained look. "But--if you will have an answer
+--well, that's a nickname these brigands have given you, general."
+
+"What does it mean?"
+
+"It means, general--well, it refers to your father."
+
+"Ha! the curs!" cried the count, turning livid. "Yes, Michaud, my
+father was a shopkeeper, an upholsterer; the countess doesn't know it.
+Oh! that I should ever--well! after all, I have waltzed with queens
+and empresses. I'll tell her this very night," he cried, after a
+pause.
+
+"They also call you a coward," continued Michaud.
+
+"Ha!"
+
+"They ask how you managed to save yourself at Essling when nearly all
+your comrades perished."
+
+The accusation brought a smile to the general's lips. "Michaud, I
+shall go at once to the Prefecture!" he cried, with a sort of fury,
+"if it is only to get the policies of insurance you ask for. Let
+Madame la comtesse know that I have gone. Ha, ha! they want war, do
+they? Well, they shall have it; I'll take my pleasure in thwarting
+them,--every one of them, those bourgeois of Soulanges, and their
+peasantry! We are in the enemy's country, therefore prudence! Tell the
+foresters to keep within the limits of the law. Poor Vatel, take care
+of him. The countess is inclined to be timid; she must know nothing of
+all this; otherwise I could never get her to come back here."
+
+Neither the general nor Michaud understood their real peril. Michaud
+had been too short a time in this Burgundian valley to realize the
+enemy's power, though he saw its action. The general, for his part,
+believed in the supremacy of the law.
+
+The law, such as the legislature of these days manufactures it, has
+not the virtue we attribute to it. It strikes unequally; it is so
+modified in many of its modes of application that it virtually refutes
+its own principles. This fact may be noted more or less distinctly
+throughout all ages. Is there any historian ignorant enough to assert
+that the decrees of the most vigilant of powers were ever enforced
+throughout France?--for instance, that the requisitions of the
+Convention for men, commodities, and money were obeyed in Provence, in
+the depths of Normandy, on the borders of Brittany, as they were at
+the great centres of social life? What philosopher dares deny that a
+head falls to-day in such or such department, while in a neighboring
+department another head stays on its shoulders though guilty of a
+crime identically the same, and often more horrible? We ask for
+equality in life, and inequality reigns in law and in the death
+penalty!
+
+When the population of a town falls below a certain figure the
+administrative system is no longer the same. There are perhaps a
+hundred cities in France where the laws are vigorously enforced, and
+there the intelligence of the citizens rises to the conception of the
+problem of public welfare and future security which the law seeks to
+solve; but throughout the rest of France nothing is comprehended
+beyond immediate gratification; people rebel against all that lessens
+it. Therefore in nearly one half of France we find a power of inertia
+which defeats all legal action, both municipal and governmental. This
+resistance, be it understood, does not affect the essential things of
+public polity. The collection of taxes, recruiting, punishment of
+great crimes, as a general thing do systematically go on; but outside
+of such recognized necessities, all legislative decrees which affect
+customs, morals, private interests, and certain abuses, are a dead
+letter, owing to the sullen opposition of the people. At the very
+moment when this book is going to press, this dumb resistance, which
+opposed Louis XIV. in Brittany, may still be seen and felt. See the
+unfortunate results of the game-laws, to which we are now sacrificing
+yearly the lives of some twenty or thirty men for the sake of
+preserving a few animals.
+
+In France the law is, to at least twenty million of inhabitants,
+nothing more than a bit of white paper posted on the doors of the
+church and the town-hall. That gives rise to the term "papers," which
+Mouche used to express legality. Many mayors of cantons (not to speak
+of the district mayors) put up their bundles of seeds and herbs with
+the printed statutes. As for the district mayors, the number of those
+who do not know how to read and write is really alarming, and the
+manner in which the civil records are kept is even more so. The danger
+of this state of things, well-known to the governing powers, is
+doubtless diminishing; but what centralization (against which every
+one declaims, as it is the fashion in France to declaim against all
+things good and useful and strong),--what centralization cannot touch,
+the Power against which it will forever fling itself in vain, is that
+which the general was now about to attack, and which we shall take
+leave to call the Mediocracy.
+
+A great outcry was made against the tyranny of the nobles; in these
+days the cry is against that of capitalists, against abuses of power,
+which may be merely the inevitable galling of the social yoke, called
+Compact by Rousseau, Constitution by some, Charter by others; Czar
+here, King there, Parliament in Great Britain; while in France the
+general levelling begun in 1789 and continued in 1830 has paved the
+way for the juggling dominion of the middle classes, and delivered the
+nation into their hands without escape. The portrayal of one fact
+alone, unfortunately only too common in these days, namely, the
+subjection of a canton, a little town, a sub-prefecture, to the will
+of a family clique,--in short, the power acquired by Gaubertin,--will
+show this social danger better than all dogmatic statements put
+together. Many oppressed communities will recognize the truth of this
+picture; many persons secretly and silently crushed by this tyranny
+will find in these words an obituary, as it were, which may half
+console them for their hidden woes.
+
+At the very moment when the general imagined himself to be renewing a
+warfare in which there had really been no truce, his former steward
+had just completed the last meshes of the net-work in which he now
+held the whole arrondissement of Ville-aux-Fayes. To avoid too many
+explanations it is necessary to state, once for all, succinctly, the
+genealogical ramifications by means of which Gaubertin wound himself
+about the country, as a boa-constrictor winds around a tree,--with
+such art that a passing traveller thinks he beholds some natural
+effect of the tropical vegetation.
+
+In 1793 there were three brothers of the name of Mouchon in the valley
+of the Avonne. After 1793 they changed the name of the valley to that
+of the Valley des Aigues, out of hatred to the old nobility.
+
+The eldest brother, steward of the property of the Ronquerolles
+family, was elected deputy of the department to the Convention. Like
+his friend, Gaubertin's father, the prosecutor of those days, who
+saved the Soulanges family, he saved the property and the lives of the
+Ronquerolles. He had two daughters; one married to Gendrin, the
+lawyer, the other to Gaubertin. He died in 1804.
+
+The second, through the influence of his elder brother, was made
+postmaster at Conches. His only child was a daughter, married to a
+rich farmer named Guerbet. He died in 1817.
+
+The last of the Mouchons, who was a priest, and the curate of
+Ville-aux-Fayes before the Revolution, was again a priest after the
+re-establishment of Catholic worship, and again the curate of the same
+little town. He was not willing to take the oath, and was hidden for a
+long time in the hermitage of Les Aigues, under the protection of the
+Gaubertins, father and son. Now about sixty-seven years of age, he was
+treated with universal respect and affection, owing to the harmony of
+his nature with that of the inhabitants. Parsimonious to the verge of
+avarice, he was thought to be rich, and the credit of being so
+increased the respect that was shown to him. Monseigneur the bishop
+paid the greatest attention to the Abbe Mouchon, who was always spoken
+of as the venerable curate of Ville-aux-Fayes; and the fact that he
+had several times refused to go and live in a splendid parsonage
+attached to the Prefecture, where Monseigneur wished to settle him,
+made him dearer still to his people.
+
+Gaubertin, now mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes, received steady support from
+his brother-in-law Gendrin, who was judge of the municipal court.
+Gaubertin the younger, the solicitor who had the most practice before
+this court and much repute in the arrondissement, was already thinking
+of selling his practice after five years' exercise of it. He wanted to
+succeed his Uncle Gendrin as counsellor whenever the latter should
+retire from the profession. Gendrin's only son was commissioner of
+mortgages.
+
+Soudry's son, who for the last two years had been prosecuting-attorney
+at the prefecture, was Gaubertin's henchman. The clever Madame Soudry
+had secured the future of her husband's son by marrying him to Rigou's
+only daughter. The united fortunes of the Soudrys and the ex-monk,
+which would come eventually to the attorney, made that young man one
+of the most important personages of the department.
+
+The sub-prefect of Ville-aux-Fayes, Monsieur des Lupeaulx, nephew of
+the general-secretary of one of the most important ministries in
+Paris, was the prospective husband of Mademoiselle Elise Gaubertin,
+the mayor's youngest daughter, whose dowry, like that of her elder
+sister, was two hundred thousand francs, not to speak of
+"expectations." This functionary showed much sense, though not aware
+of it, in falling in love with Mademoiselle Elise when he first
+arrived at Ville-aux-Fayes, in 1819. If it had not been for his social
+position, which made him "eligible," he would long ago have been
+forced to ask for his exchange. But Gaubertin in marrying him to his
+daughter thought much more of the uncle, the general-secretary, than
+of the nephew; and in return, the uncle, for the sake of his nephew,
+gave all his influence to Gaubertin.
+
+Thus the Church, the magistracy both removable and irremovable, the
+municipality, and the prefecture, the four feet of power, walked as
+the mayor pleased. Let us now see how that functionary strengthened
+himself in the spheres above and below that in which he worked.
+
+The department to which Ville-aux-Fayes belongs is one the number of
+whose population gives it the right to elect six deputies. Ever since
+the creation of the Left Centre of the Chamber, the arrondissement of
+Ville-aux-Fayes had sent a deputy named Leclercq, formerly banking
+agent of the wine department of the custom-house, a son-in-law of
+Gaubertin, and now a governor of the Bank of France. The number of
+electors which this rich valley sent to the electoral college was
+sufficient to insure, if only through private dealing, the constant
+appointment of Monsieur de Ronquerolles, the patron of the Mouchon
+family. The voters of Ville-aux-Fayes lent their support to the
+prefect, on condition that the Marquis de Ronquerolles was maintained
+in the college. Thus Gaubertin, who was the first to broach the idea
+of this arrangement, was favorably received at the Prefecture, which
+he often, in return, saved from petty annoyances. The prefect always
+selected three firm ministerialists, and two deputies of the Left
+Centre. The latter, one of them being the Marquis de Ronquerolles,
+brother-in-law of the Comte de Serisy, and the other a governor of the
+Bank of France, gave little or no alarm to the cabinet, and the
+elections in this department were rated excellent at the ministry of
+the interior.
+
+The Comte de Soulanges, peer of France, selected to be the next
+marshal, and faithful to the Bourbons, knew that his forests and other
+property were all well-managed by the notary Lupin, and well-watched
+by Soudry. He was a patron of Gendrin's, having obtained his
+appointment as judge partly by the help of Monsieur de Ronquerolles.
+
+Messieurs Leclercq and de Ronquerolles sat in the Left Centre, but
+nearer to the left than to the centre,--a political position which
+offers great advantages to those who regard their political conscience
+as a garment.
+
+The brother of Monsieur Leclercq had obtained the situation of
+collector at Ville-aux-Fayes, and Leclercq himself, Gaubertin's
+son-in-law, had lately bought a fine estate beyond the valley of the
+Avonne, which brought him in a rental of thirty thousand francs, with
+park and chateau and a controlling influence in its own canton.
+
+Thus, in the upper regions of the State, in both Chambers, and in the
+chief ministerial department, Gaubertin could rely on an influence
+that was powerful and also active, and which he was careful not to
+weary with unimportant requests.
+
+The counsellor Gendrin, appointed judge by the Chamber, was the
+leading spirit of the Supreme Court; for the chief justice, one of the
+three ministerial deputies, left the management of it to Gendrin
+during half the year. The counsel for the Prefecture, a cousin of
+Sarcus, called "Sarcus the rich," was the right-hand man of the
+prefect, himself a deputy. Even without the family reasons which
+allied Gaubertin and young des Lupeaulx, a brother of Madame Sarcus
+would still have been desirable as sub-prefect to the arrondissement
+of Ville-aux-Fayes. Madame Sarcus, the counsellor's wife, was a Vallat
+of Soulanges, a family connected with the Gaubertins, and she was said
+to have "distinguished" the notary Lupin in her youth. Though she was
+now forty-five years old, with a son in the school of engineers, Lupin
+never went to the Prefecture without paying his respects and dining
+with her.
+
+The nephew of Guerbet, the postmaster, whose father was, as we have
+seen, collector of Soulanges, held the important situation of
+examining judge in the municipal court of Ville-aux-Fayes. The third
+judge, son of Corbinet, the notary, belonged body and soul to the
+all-powerful mayor; and, finally, young Vigor, son of the lieutenant
+of the gendarmerie, was the substitute judge.
+
+Sibilet's father, sheriff of the court, had married his sister to
+Monsieur Vigor the lieutenant, and that individual, father of six
+children, was cousin of the father of Gaubertin through his wife, a
+Gaubertin-Vallat. Eighteen months previously the united efforts of the
+two deputies, Monsieur de Soulanges and Gaubertin, had created the
+place of commissary of police for the sheriff's second son.
+
+Sibilet's eldest daughter married Monsieur Herve, a school-master,
+whose school was transformed into a college as a result of this
+marriage, so that for the past year Soulanges had rejoiced in the
+presence of a professor.
+
+The sheriff's youngest son was employed on the government domains,
+with the promise of succeeding the clerk of registrations so soon as
+that officer had completed the term of service which enabled him to
+retire on a pension.
+
+The youngest Sibilet girl, now sixteen years old, was betrothed to
+Corbinet, brother of the notary. And an old maid, Mademoiselle
+Gaubertin-Vallat, sister of Madame Sibilet, the sheriff's wife, held
+the office for the sale of stamped paper.
+
+Thus, wherever we turn in Ville-aux-Fayes we meet some member of the
+invisible coalition, whose avowed chief, recognized as such by every
+one, great and small, was the mayor of the town, the general agent for
+the entire timber business, Gaubertin!
+
+If we turn to the other end of the valley of the Avonne we shall see
+that Gaubertin ruled at Soulanges through the Soudrys, through Lupin
+the assistant mayor and steward of the Soulanges estate, who was
+necessarily in constant communication with the Comte de Soulanges,
+through Sarcus, justice of the peace, through Guerbet, the collector,
+through Gourdon, the doctor, who had married a Gendrin-Vatebled. He
+governed Blangy through Rigou, Conches through the post-master, the
+despotic ruler of his own district.
+
+Gaubertin's influence was so great and powerful that even the
+investments and the savings of Rigou, Soudry, Gendrin, Guerbet, Lupin,
+even Sarcus the rich himself, were managed by his advice. The town of
+Ville-aux-Fayes believed implicitly in its mayor. Gaubertin's ability
+was not less extolled than his honesty and his kindness; he was the
+servant of his relatives and constituents (always with an eye to a
+return of benefits), and the whole municipality adored him. The town
+never ceased to blame Monsieur Mariotte, of Auxerre, for having
+opposed and thwarted that worthy Monsieur Gaubertin.
+
+Not aware of their strength, no occasion for displaying it having
+arisen, the bourgeoisie of Ville-aux-Fayes contented themselves with
+boasting that no strangers intermeddled in their affairs and they
+believed themselves excellent citizens and faithful public servants.
+Nothing, however, escaped their despotic rule, which in itself was not
+perceived, the result being considered a triumph of the locality.
+
+The only stranger in this family community was the government engineer
+in the highway department; and his dismissal in favor of the son of
+Sarcus the rich was now being pressed, with a fair chance that this
+one weak thread in the net would soon be strengthened. And yet this
+powerful league, which monopolized all duties both public and private,
+sucked the resources of the region, and fastened on power like limpets
+to a ship, escaped all notice so completely that General Montcornet
+had no suspicion of it. The prefect boasted of the prosperity of
+Ville-aux-Fayes and its arrondissement; even the minister of the
+interior was heard to remark: "There's a model sub-prefecture, which
+runs on wheels; we should be lucky indeed if all were like it." Family
+designs were so involved with local interests that here, as in many
+other little towns and even prefectures, a functionary who did not
+belong to the place would have been forced to resign within a year.
+
+When this despotic middle-class cousinry seizes a victim, he is so
+carefully gagged and bound that complaint is impossible; he is smeared
+with slime and wax like a snail in a beehive. This invisible,
+imperceptible tyranny is upheld by powerful reasons,--such as the wish
+to be surrounded by their own family, to keep property in their own
+hands, the mutual help they ought to lend each other, the guarantees
+given to the administration by the fact that their agent is under the
+eyes of his fellow-citizens and neighbors. What does all this lead to?
+To the fact that local interests supersede all questions of public
+interest; the centralized will of Paris is frequently overthrown in
+the provinces, the truth of things is disguised, and country
+communities snap their fingers at government. In short, after the main
+public necessities have been attended to, it will be seen that the
+laws, instead of acting upon the masses, receive their impulse from
+them; the populations adapt the law to themselves and not themselves
+to the law.
+
+Whoever has travelled in the south or west of France, or in Alsace, in
+any other way than from inn to inn to see buildings and landscapes,
+will surely admit the truth of these remarks. The results of
+middle-class nepotism may be, at present, merely isolated evils; but
+the tendency of existing laws is to increase them. This low-level
+despotism can and will cause great disasters, and the events of the
+drama about to be played in the valley of Les Aigues will prove it.
+
+The monarchical and imperial systems, more rashly overthrown than
+people realize, remedied these abuses by means of certain consecrated
+lives, by classifications and categories and by those particular
+counterpoises since so absurdly defined as "privileges." There are no
+privileges now, when every human being is free to climb the greased
+pole of power. But surely it would be safer to allow open and avowed
+privileges than those which are underhand, based on trickery,
+subversive of what should be public spirit, and continuing the work of
+despotism to a lower and baser level than heretofore. May we not have
+overthrown noble tyrants devoted to their country's good, to create
+the tyranny of selfish interests? Shall power lurk in secret places,
+instead of radiating from its natural source? This is worth thinking
+about. The spirit of local sectionalism, such as we have now depicted,
+will soon be seen to invade the Chamber.
+
+Montcornet's friend, the late prefect, Comte de la Roche-Hugon, had
+lost his position just before the last arrival of the general at Les
+Aigues. This dismissal drove him into the ranks of the Liberal
+opposition, where he became one of the chorus of the Left, a position
+he soon after abandoned for an embassy. His successor, luckily for
+Montcornet, was a son-in-law of the Marquis de Troisville, uncle of
+the countess, the Comte de Casteran. He welcomed Montcornet as a
+relation and begged him to continue his intimacy at the Prefecture.
+After listening to the general's complaints the Comte de Casteran
+invited the bishop, the attorney-general, the colonel of the
+gendarmerie, counsellor Sarcus, and the general commanding the
+division to meet him the next day at breakfast.
+
+The attorney-general, Baron Bourlac (so famous in the Chanterie and
+Rifael suits), was one of those men well-known to all governments, who
+attach themselves to power, no matter in whose hands it is, and who
+make themselves invaluable by such devotion. Having owed his elevation
+in the first place to his fanaticism for the Emperor, he now owed the
+retention of his official rank to his inflexible character and the
+conscientiousness with which he fulfilled his duties. He who once
+implacably prosecuted the remnant of the Chouans now prosecuted the
+Bonapartists as implacably. But years and turmoils had somewhat
+subdued his energy and he had now become, like other old devils
+incarnate, perfectly charming in manner and ways.
+
+The general explained his position and the fears of his bailiff, and
+spoke of the necessity of making an example and enforcing the rights
+of property.
+
+The high functionaries listened gravely, making, however, no reply
+beyond mere platitudes, such as, "Undoubtedly, the laws must be
+upheld"; "Your cause is that of all land-owners"; "We will consider
+it; but, situated as we are, prudence is very necessary"; "A monarchy
+could certainly do more for the people than the people would do for
+itself, even if it were, as in 1793, the sovereign people"; "The
+masses suffer, and we are bound to do as much for them as for
+ourselves."
+
+The relentless attorney-general expressed such kindly and benevolent
+views respecting the condition of the lower classes that our future
+Utopians, had they heard him, might have thought that the higher grade
+of government officials were already aware of the difficulties of that
+problem which modern society will be forced to solve.
+
+It may be well to say here that at this period of the Restoration,
+various bloody encounters had taken place in remote parts of the
+kingdom, caused by this very question of the pillage of woods, and the
+marauding rights which the peasants were everywhere arrogating to
+themselves. Neither the government nor the court liked these
+outbreaks, nor the shedding of blood which resulted from repression.
+Though they felt the necessity of rigorous measures, they nevertheless
+treated as blunderers the officials who were compelled to employ them,
+and dismissed them on the first pretence. The prefects were therefore
+anxious to shuffle out of such difficulties whenever possible.
+
+At the very beginning of the conversation Sarcus (the rich) had made a
+sign to the prefect and the attorney-general which Montcornet did not
+see, but which set the tone of the discussion. The attorney-general
+was well aware of the state of mind of the inhabitants of the valley
+des Aigues through his subordinate, Soudry the young attorney.
+
+"I foresee a terrible struggle," the latter had said to him. "They
+mean to kill the gendarmes; my spies tell me so. It will be very hard
+to convict them for it. The instant the jury feel they are incurring
+the hatred of the friends of the twenty or thirty prisoners, they will
+not sustain us,--we could not get them to convict for death, nor even
+for the galleys. Possibly by prosecuting in person you might get a few
+years' imprisonment for the actual murderers. Better shut our eyes
+than open them, if by opening them we bring on a collision which costs
+bloodshed and several thousand francs to the State,--not to speak of
+the cost of keeping the guilty in prison. It is too high a price to
+pay for a victory which will only reveal our judicial weakness to the
+eyes of all."
+
+Montcornet, who was wholly without suspicion of the strength and
+influence of the Mediocracy in his happy valley, did not even mention
+Gaubertin, whose hand kept these embers of opposition always alive,
+though smouldering. After breakfast the attorney-general took
+Montcornet by the arm and led him to the Prefect's study. When the
+general left that room after their conference, he wrote to his wife
+that he was starting for Paris and should be absent a week. We shall
+see, after the execution of certain measures suggested by Baron
+Bourlac, the attorney-general, whether the secret advice he gave to
+Montcornet was wise, and whether in conforming to it the count and Les
+Aigues were enabled to escape the "Evil grudge."
+
+Some minds, eager for mere amusement, will complain that these various
+explanations are far too long; but we once more call attention to the
+fact that the historian of the manners, customs, and morals of his
+time must obey a law far more stringent than that imposed on the
+historian of mere facts. He must show the probability of everything,
+even the truth; whereas, in the domain of history, properly so-called,
+the impossible must be accepted for the sole reason that it did
+happen. The vicissitudes of social or private life are brought about
+by a crowd of little causes derived from a thousand conditions. The
+man of science is forced to clear away the avalanche under which whole
+villages lie buried, to show you the pebbles brought down from the
+summit which alone can determine the formation of the mountain. If the
+historian of human life were simply telling you of a suicide, five
+hundred of which occur yearly in Paris, the melodrama is so
+commonplace that brief reasons and explanations are all that need be
+given; but how shall he make you see that the self-destruction of an
+estate could happen in these days when property is reckoned of more
+value than life? "De re vestra agitur," said a maker of fables; this
+tale concerns the affairs and interests of all those, no matter who
+they be, who possess anything.
+
+Remember that this coalition of a whole canton and of a little town
+against a general, who, in spite of his rash courage, had escaped the
+dangers of actual war, is going on in other districts against other
+men who seek only to do what is right by those districts. It is a
+coalition which to-day threatens every man, the man of genius, the
+statesman, the modern agriculturalist,--in short, all innovators.
+
+This last explanation not only gives a true presentation of the
+personages of this drama, and a serious meaning even to its petty
+details, but it also throws a vivid light upon the scene where so many
+social interests are now marshalling.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER X
+
+                   THE SADNESS OF A HAPPY WOMAN
+
+At the moment when the general was getting into his caleche to go to
+the Prefecture, the countess and the two gentlemen reached the gate of
+the Avonne, where, for the last eighteen months, Michaud and his wife
+Olympe had made their home.
+
+Whose remembered the pavilion in the state in which we lately
+described it would have supposed it had been rebuilt. The bricks
+fallen or broken by time, and the cement lacking to their edges, were
+replaced; the slate roof had been cleaned, and the effect of the white
+balustrade against its bluish background restored the gay character of
+the architecture. The approaches to the building, formerly choked up
+and sandy, were now cared for by the man whose duty it was to keep the
+park roadways in order. The poultry-yard, stables, and cow-shed,
+relegated to the buildings near the pheasantry and hidden by clumps of
+trees, instead of afflicting the eye with their foul details, now
+blended those soft murmurs and cooings and the sound of flapping
+wings, which are among the most delightful accompaniments of Nature's
+eternal harmony, with the peculiar rustling sounds of the forest. The
+whole scene possessed the double charm of a natural, untouched forest
+and the elegance of an English park. The surroundings of the pavilion,
+in keeping with its own exterior, presented a certain noble,
+dignified, and cordial effect; while the hand of a young and happy
+woman gave to its interior a very different look from what it wore
+under the coarse neglect of Courtecuisse.
+
+Just now the rich season of the year was putting forth its natural
+splendors. The perfume of the flowerbeds blended with the wild odor of
+the woods; and the meadows near by, where the grass had been lately
+cut, sent up the fragrance of new-mown hay.
+
+When the countess and her guests reached the end of one of the winding
+paths which led to the pavilion, they saw Madame Michaud, sitting in
+the open air before the door, employed in making a baby's garment. The
+young woman thus placed, thus employed, added the human charm that was
+needed to complete the scene,--a charm so touching in its actuality
+that painters have committed the error of endeavoring to convey it in
+their pictures. Such artists forget that the SOUL of a landscape, if
+they represent it truly, is so grand that the human element is crushed
+by it; whereas such a scene added to Nature limits her to the
+proportions of the personality, like a frame to which the mind of the
+spectator confines it. When Poussin, the Raffaelle of France, made a
+landscape accessory to his Shepherds of Arcadia he perceived plainly
+enough that man becomes diminutive and abject when Nature is made the
+principal feature on a canvas. In that picture August is in its glory,
+the harvest is ready, all simple and strong human interests are
+represented. There we find realized in nature the dream of many men
+whose uncertain life of mingled good and evil harshly mixed makes them
+long for peace and rest.
+
+Let us now relate, in few words, the romance of this home. Justin
+Michaud did not reply very cordially to the advances made to him by
+the illustrious colonel of cuirassiers when first offered the
+situation of bailiff at Les Aigues. He was then thinking of
+re-entering the service. But while the negotiations, which naturally
+took him to the Hotel Montcornet, were going on, he met the countess's
+head waiting-maid. This young girl, who was entrusted to Madame de
+Montcornet by her parents, worthy farmers in the neighborhood of
+Alencon, had hopes of a little fortune, some twenty or thirty thousand
+francs, when the heirs were all of age. Like other farmers who marry
+young, and whose own parents are still living, the father and mother
+of the girl, being pinched for immediate means, placed her with the
+young countess. Madame de Montcornet had her taught to sew and to make
+dresses, arranged that she should take her meals alone, and was
+rewarded for the care she bestowed on Olympe Charel by one of those
+unconditional attachments which are so precious to Parisians.
+
+Olympe Charel, a pretty Norman girl, rather stout, with fair hair of a
+golden tint, an animated face lighted by intelligent eyes, and
+distinguished by a finely curved thoroughbred nose, with a maidenly
+air in spite of a certain swaying Spanish manner of carrying herself,
+possessed all the points that a young girl born just above the level
+of the masses is likely to acquire from whatever close companionship a
+mistress is willing to allow her. Always suitably dressed, with modest
+bearing and manner, and able to express herself well, Michaud was soon
+in love with her,--all the more when he found that his sweetheart's
+dowry would one day be considerable. The obstacles came from the
+countess, who could not bear to part with so invaluable a maid; but
+when Montcornet explained to her the affairs at Les Aigues, she gave
+way, and the marriage was no longer delayed, except to obtain the
+consent of the parents, which, of course, was quickly given.
+
+Michaud, like his general, looked upon his wife as a superior being,
+to whom he owed military obedience without a single reservation. He
+found in the peace of his home and his busy life out-of-doors the
+elements of a happiness soldiers long for when they give up their
+profession,--enough work to keep his body healthy, enough fatigue to
+let him know the charms of rest. In spite of his well-known
+intrepidity, Michaud had never been seriously wounded, and he had none
+of those physical pains which often sour the temper of veterans. Like
+all really strong men, his temper was even; his wife, therefore, loved
+him utterly. From the time they took up their abode in the pavilion,
+this happy home was the scene of a long honey-moon in harmony with
+Nature and with the art whose creations surrounded them,--a
+circumstance rare indeed! The things about us are seldom in keeping
+with the condition of our souls!
+
+The picture was so pretty that the countess stopped short and pointed
+it out to Blondet and the abbe; for they could see Madame Michaud from
+where they stood, without her seeing them.
+
+"I always come this way when I walk in the park," said the countess,
+softly. "I delight in looking at the pavilion and its two
+turtle-doves, as much as I delight in a fine view."
+
+She leaned significantly on Blondet's arm, as if to make him share
+sentiments too delicate for words but which all women feel.
+
+"I wish I were a gate-keeper at Les Aigues," said Blondet, smiling.
+"Why! what troubles you?" he added, noticing an expression of sadness
+on the countess's face.
+
+"Nothing," she replied.
+
+Women are always hiding some important thought when they say,
+hypocritically, "It is nothing."
+
+"A woman may be the victim of ideas which would seem very flimsy to
+you," she added, "but which, to us, are terrible. As for me, I envy
+Olympe's lot."
+
+"God hears you," said the abbe, smiling as though to soften the
+sternness of his remark.
+
+Madame de Montcornet grew seriously uneasy when she noticed an
+expression of fear and anxiety in Olympe's face and attitude. By the
+way a woman draws out her needle or sets her stitches another woman
+understands her thoughts. In fact, though wearing a rose-colored
+dress, with her hair carefully braided about her head, the bailiff's
+wife was thinking of matters that were out of keeping with her pretty
+dress, the glorious day, and the work her hands were engaged on. Her
+beautiful brow, and the glance she turned sometimes on the ground at
+her feet, sometimes on the foliage around, evidently seeing nothing,
+betrayed some deep anxiety,--all the more unconsciously because she
+supposed herself alone.
+
+"Just as I was envying her! What can have saddened her?" whispered the
+countess to the abbe.
+
+"Madame," he replied in the same tone, "tell me why man is often
+seized with vague and unaccountable presentiments of evil in the very
+midst of some perfect happiness?"
+
+"Abbe!" said Blondet, smiling, "you talk like a bishop. Napoleon said,
+'Nothing is stolen, all is bought!'"
+
+"Such a maxim, uttered by those imperial lips, takes the proportions
+of society itself," replied the priest.
+
+"Well, Olympe, my dear girl, what is the matter?" said the countess
+going up to her former maid. "You seem sad and thoughtful; is it a
+lover's quarrel?"
+
+Madame Michaud's face, as she rose, changed completely.
+
+"My dear," said Emile Blondet, in a fatherly tone, "I should like to
+know what clouds that brow of yours, in this pavilion where you are
+almost as well lodged as the Comte d'Artois at the Tuileries. It is
+like a nest of nightingales in a grove! And what a husband we have!
+--the bravest fellow of the young garde, and a handsome one, who loves
+us to distraction! If I had known the advantages Montcornet has given
+you here I should have left my diatribing business and made myself a
+bailiff."
+
+"It is not the place for a man of your talent, monsieur," replied
+Olympe, smiling at Blondet as an old acquaintance.
+
+"But what troubles you, dear?" said the countess.
+
+"Madame, I'm afraid--"
+
+"Afraid! of what?" said the countess, eagerly; for the word reminded
+her of Mouche and Fourchon.
+
+"Afraid of the wolves, is that it?" said Emile, making Madame Michaud
+a sign, which she did not understand.
+
+"No, monsieur,--afraid of the peasants. I was born in Le Perche, where
+of course there are some bad people, but I had no idea how wicked
+people could be until I came here. I try not to meddle in Michaud's
+affairs, but I do know that he distrusts the peasants so much that he
+goes armed, even in broad daylight, when he enters the forest. He
+warns his men to be always on the alert. Every now and then things
+happen about here that bode no good. The other day I was walking along
+the wall, near the source of that little sandy rivulet which comes
+from the forest and enters the park through a culvert about five
+hundred feet from here,--you know it, madame? it is called Silver
+Spring, because of the star-flowers Bouret is said to have sown there.
+Well, I overheard the talk of two women who were washing their linen
+just where the path to Conches crosses the brook; they did not know I
+was there. Our house can be seen from that point, and one old woman
+pointed it out to the other, saying: 'See what a lot of money they
+have spent on the man who turned out Courtecuisse.' 'They ought to pay
+a man well when they set him to harass poor people as that man does,'
+answered the other. 'Well, it won't be for long,' said the first one;
+'the thing is going to end soon. We have a right to our wood. The late
+Madame allowed us to take it. That's thirty years ago, so the right is
+ours.' 'We'll see what we shall see next winter,' replied the second.
+'My man has sworn the great oath that all the gendarmerie in the world
+sha'n't keep us from getting our wood; he says he means to get it
+himself, and if the worst happens so much the worse for them!' 'Good
+God!' cried the other; 'we can't die of cold, and we must bake bread
+to eat! They want for nothing, _those others_! the wife of that
+scoundrel of a Michaud will be taken care of, I warrant you!' And
+then, Madame, they said such horrible things of me and of you and of
+Monsieur le comte; and they finally declared that the farms would all
+be burned, and then the chateau."
+
+"Bah!" said Emile, "idle talk! They have been robbing the general, and
+they will not be allowed to rob him any longer. These people are
+furious, that's the whole of it. You must remember that the law and
+the government are always strongest everywhere, even in Burgundy. In
+case of an outbreak the general could bring a regiment of cavalry
+here, if necessary."
+
+The abbe made a sign to Madame Michaud from behind the countess,
+telling her to say no more about her fears, which were doubtless the
+effect of that second sight which true passion bestows. The soul,
+dwelling exclusively on one only being, grasps in the end the moral
+elements that surround it, and sees in them the makings of the future.
+The woman who loves feels the same presentiments that later illuminate
+her motherhood. Hence a certain melancholy, a certain inexplicable
+sadness which surprises men, who are one and all distracted from any
+such concentration of their souls by the cares of life and the
+continual necessity for action. All true love becomes to a woman an
+active contemplation, which is more or less lucid, more or less
+profound, according to her nature.
+
+"Come, my dear, show your home to Monsieur Emile," said the countess,
+whose mind was so pre-occupied that she forgot La Pechina, who was the
+ostensible object of her visit.
+
+The interior of the restored pavilion was in keeping with its
+exterior. On the ground-floor the old divisions had been replaced, and
+the architect, sent from Paris with his own workmen (a cause of bitter
+complaint in the neighborhood against the master of Les Aigues), had
+made four rooms out of the space. First, an ante-chamber, at the
+farther end of which was a winding wooden staircase, behind which came
+the kitchen; on either side of the antechamber was a dining-room and a
+parlor panelled in oak now nearly black, with armorial bearings in the
+divisions of the ceilings. The architect chosen by Madame de
+Montcornet for the restoration of Les Aigues had taken care to put the
+furniture of this room in keeping with its original decoration.
+
+At the time of which we write fashion had not yet given an exaggerated
+value to the relics of past ages. The carved settee, the high-backed
+chairs covered with tapestry, the consoles, the clocks, the tall
+embroidery frames, the tables, the lustres, hidden away in the
+second-hand shops of Auxerre and Ville-aux-Fayes were fifty per-cent
+cheaper than the modern, ready-made furniture of the faubourg Saint
+Antoine. The architect had therefore bought two or three cartloads of
+well-chosen old things, which, added to a few others discarded at the
+chateau, made the little salon of the gate of the Avonne an artistic
+creation. As to the dining-room, he painted it in browns and hung it
+with what was called a Scotch paper, and Madame Michaud added white
+cambric curtains with green borders at the windows, mahogany chairs
+covered with green cloth, two large buffets and a table, also in
+mahogany. This room, ornamented with engravings of military scenes,
+was heated by a porcelain stove, on each side of which were
+sporting-guns suspended on the walls. These adornments, which cost but
+little, were talked of throughout the whole valley as the last extreme
+of oriental luxury. Singular to say, they, more than anything else,
+excited the envy of Gaubertin, and whenever he thought of his fixed
+determination to bring Les Aigues to the hammer and cut it in pieces,
+he reserved for himself, "in petto," this beautiful pavilion.
+
+On the next floor three chambers sufficed for the household. At the
+windows were muslin curtains which reminded a Parisian of the
+particular taste and fancy of bourgeois requirements. Left to herself
+in the decoration of these rooms, Madame Michaud had chosen satin
+papers; on the mantel-shelf of her bedroom--which was furnished in
+that vulgar style of mahogany and Utrecht velvet which is seen
+everywhere, with its high-backed bed and canopy to which embroidered
+muslin curtains are fastened--stood an alabaster clock between two
+candelabra covered with gauze and flanked by two vases filled with
+artificial flowers protected by glass shades, a conjugal gift of the
+former cavalry sergeant. Above, under the roof, the bedrooms of the
+cook, the man-of-all-work, and La Pechina had benefited by the recent
+restoration.
+
+"Olympe, my dear, you did not tell me all," said the countess,
+entering Madame Michaud's bedroom, and leaving Emile and the abbe on
+the stairway, whence they descended when they heard her shut the door.
+
+Madame Michaud, to whom the abbe had contrived to whisper a word, was
+now anxious to say no more about her fears, which were really greater
+than she had intimated, and she therefore began to talk of a matter
+which reminded the countess of the object of her visit.
+
+"I love Michaud, madame, as you know. Well, how would you like to
+have, in your own house, a rival always beside you?"
+
+"A rival?"
+
+"Yes, madame; that swarthy girl you gave me to take care of loves
+Michaud without knowing it, poor thing! The child's conduct, long a
+mystery to me, has been cleared up in my mind for some days."
+
+"Why, she is only thirteen years old!"
+
+"I know that, madame. But you will admit that a woman who is three
+months pregnant and means to nurse her child herself may have some
+fears; but as I did not want to speak of this before those gentlemen,
+I talked a great deal of nonsense when you questioned me," said the
+generous creature, adroitly.
+
+Madame Michaud was not really afraid of Genevieve Niseron, but for the
+last three days she was in mortal terror of some disaster from the
+peasantry.
+
+"How did you discover this?" said the countess.
+
+"From everything and from nothing," replied Olympe. "The poor little
+thing moves with the slowness of a tortoise when she is obliged to
+obey me, but she runs like a lizard when Justin asks for anything, she
+trembles like a leaf at the sound of his voice; and her face is that
+of a saint ascending to heaven when she looks at him. But she knows
+nothing about love; she has no idea that she loves him."
+
+"Poor child!" said the countess with a smile and tone that were full
+of naivete.
+
+"And so," continued Madame Michaud, answering with a smile the smile
+of her late mistress, "Genevieve is gloomy when Justin is out of the
+house; if I ask her what she is thinking of she replies that she is
+afraid of Monsieur Rigou, or some such nonsense. She thinks people
+envy her, though she is as black as the inside of a chimney. When
+Justin is patrolling the woods at night the child is as anxious as I
+am. If I open my window to listen for the trot of his horse, I see a
+light in her room, which shows me that La Pechina (as they call here)
+is watching and waiting too. She never goes to bed, any more than I
+do, till he comes in."
+
+"Thirteen!" exclaimed the countess; "unfortunate child!"
+
+"Unfortunate? no. This passion will save her."
+
+"From what?" asked Madame de Montcornet.
+
+"From the fate which overtakes nearly all the girls of her age in
+these parts. Since I have taught her cleanliness she is much less ugly
+than she was; in fact, there is something odd and wild about her which
+attracts men. She is so changed that you would hardly recognize her.
+The son of that infamous innkeeper of the Grand-I-Vert, Nicolas, the
+worst fellow in the whole district, wants her; he hunts her like game.
+Though I can't believe that Monsieur Rigou, who changes his
+servant-girls every year or two is persecuting such a little fright, it
+is quite certain that Nicolas Tonsard is. Justin told me so. It would be
+a dreadful fate, for the people of this valley actually live like
+beasts; but Justin and our two servants and I watch her carefully.
+Therefore don't be uneasy, madame; she never goes out alone except in
+broad daylight, and then only as far as the gate of Conches. If by
+chance she fell into an ambush, her feeling for Justin would give her
+strength and wit to escape; for all women who have a preference in
+their hearts can resist a man they hate."
+
+"It was about her that I came," said the countess, "and I little
+thought my visit could be so useful to you. That child, you know,
+can't remain thirteen; and she will probably grow better-looking."
+
+"Oh, madame," replied Olympe, smiling, "I am quite sure of Justin.
+What a man! what a heart!-- If you only knew what a depth of gratitude
+he feels for his general, to whom, he says, he owes his happiness. He
+is only too devoted; he would risk his life for him here, as he would
+on the field of battle, and he forgets sometimes that he will one day
+be father of a family."
+
+"Ah! I once regretted losing you," said the countess, with a glance
+that made Olympe blush; "but I regret it no longer, for I see you
+happy. What a sublime and noble thing is married love!" she added,
+speaking out the thought she had not dared express before the abbe.
+
+Virginie de Troisville dropped into a revery, and Madame Michaud kept
+silence.
+
+"Well, at least the girl is honest, is she not?" said the countess, as
+if waking from a dream.
+
+"As honest as I am myself, madame."
+
+"Discreet?"
+
+"As the grave."
+
+"Grateful?"
+
+"Ah! madame; she has moments of humility and gentleness towards me
+which seem to show an angelic nature. She will kiss my hands and say
+the most upsetting things. 'Can we die of love?' she asked me
+yesterday. 'Why do you ask me that?' I said. 'I want to know if love
+is a disease.'"
+
+"Did she really say that?"
+
+"If I could remember her exact words I would tell you a great deal
+more," replied Olympe; "she appears to know much more than I do."
+
+"Do you think, my dear, that she could take your place in my service.
+I can't do without an Olympe," said the countess, smiling in a rather
+sad way.
+
+"Not yet, madame,--she is too young; but in two years' time, yes. If
+it becomes necessary that she should go away from here I will let you
+know. She ought to be educated, and she knows nothing of the world.
+Her grandfather, Pere Niseron, is a man who would let his throat be
+cut sooner than tell a lie; he would die of hunger in a baker's shop;
+he has the strength of his opinions, and the girl was brought up to
+all such principles. La Pechina would consider herself your equal; for
+the old man has made her, as he says, a republican,--just as Pere
+Fourchon has made Mouche a bohemian. As for me, I laugh at such ideas,
+but you might be displeased. She would revere you as her benefactress,
+but never as her superior. It can't be otherwise; she is wild and free
+like the swallows--her mother's blood counts for a good deal in what
+she is."
+
+"Who was her mother?"
+
+"Doesn't madame know the story?" said Olympe. "Well, the son of the
+old sexton at Blangy, a splendid fellow, so the people about here tell
+me, was drafted at the great conscription. In 1809 young Niseron was
+still only an artilleryman, in a corps d'armee stationed in Illyria
+and Dalmatia when it received sudden orders to advance through Hungary
+and cut off the retreat of the Austrian army in case the Emperor won
+the battle of Wagram. Michaud told me all about Dalmatia, for he was
+there. Niseron, being so handsome a man, captivated a Montenegrin girl
+of Zahara among the mountains, who was not averse to the French
+garrison. This lost her the good-will of her compatriots, and life in
+her own town became impossible after the departure of the French. Zena
+Kropoli, called in derision the Frenchwoman, followed the artillery,
+and came to France after the peace. Auguste Niseron asked permission
+to marry her; but the poor woman died at Vincennes in January, 1810,
+after giving birth to a daughter, our Genevieve. The papers necessary
+to make the marriage legal arrived a few days later. Auguste Niseron
+then wrote to his father to come and take the child, with a wetnurse
+he had got from its own country; and it was lucky he did, for he was
+killed soon after by the bursting of a shell at Montereau. Registered
+by the name of Genevieve and baptized at Soulanges, the little
+Dalmatian was taken under the protection of Mademoiselle Laguerre, who
+was touched by her story. It seems as if it were the destiny of the
+child to be taken care of by the owners of Les Aigues! Pere Niseron
+obtained its clothes, and now and then some help in money from
+Mademoiselle."
+
+The countess and Olympe were just then standing before a window from
+which they could see Michaud approaching the abbe and Blondet, who
+were walking up and down the wide, semi-circular gravelled space which
+repeated on the park side of the pavilion the exterior half-moon; they
+were conversing earnestly.
+
+"Where is she?" said the countess; "you make me anxious to see her."
+
+"She is gone to carry milk to Mademoiselle Gaillard at the gate of
+Conches; she will soon be back, for it is more than an hour since she
+started."
+
+"Well, I'll go and meet her with those gentlemen," said Madame de
+Montcornet, going downstairs.
+
+Just as the countess opened her parasol, Michaud came up and told her
+that the general had left her a widow for probably two days.
+
+"Monsieur Michaud," said the countess, eagerly, "don't deceive me,
+there is something serious going on. Your wife is frightened, and if
+there are many persons like Pere Fourchon, this part of the country
+will be uninhabitable--"
+
+"If it were so, madame," answered Michaud, laughing, "we should not be
+in the land of the living, for nothing would be easier than to make
+away with us. The peasant's grumble, that is all. But as to passing
+from growls to blows, from pilfering to crime, they care too much for
+life and the free air of the fields. Olympe has been saying something
+that frightened you, but you know she is in state to be frightened at
+nothing," he added, drawing his wife's hand under his arm and pressing
+it to warn her to say no more.
+
+"Cornevin! Juliette!" cried Madame Michaud, who soon saw the head of
+her old cook at the window. "I am going for a little walk; take care
+of the premises."
+
+Two enormous dogs, who began to bark, proved that the effectiveness of
+the garrison at the gate of the Avonne was not to be despised. Hearing
+the dogs, Cornevin, an old Percheron, Olympe's foster-father, came
+from behind the trees, showing a head such as no other region than La
+Perche can manufacture. Cornevin was undoubtedly a Chouan in 1794 and
+1799.
+
+The whole party accompanied the countess along that one of the six
+forest avenues which led directly to the gate of Conches, crossing the
+Silver-spring rivulet. Madame de Montcornet walked in front with
+Blondet. The abbe and Michaud and his wife talked in a low voice of
+the revelation that had just been made to the countess of the state of
+the country.
+
+"Perhaps it is providential," said the abbe; "for if madame is
+willing, we might, perhaps, by dint of benefits and constant
+consideration of their wants, change the hearts of these people."
+
+At about six hundred feet from the pavilion and below the brooke, the
+countess caught sight of a broken red jug and some spilt milk.
+
+"Something has happened to the poor child!" she cried, calling to
+Michaud and his wife, who were returning to the pavilion.
+
+"A misfortune like Perrette's," said Blondet, laughing.
+
+"No; the poor child has been surprised and pursued, for the jug was
+thrown outside the path," said the abbe, examining the ground.
+
+"Yes, that is certainly La Pechina's step," said Michaud; "the print
+of the feet, which have turned, you see, quickly, shows sudden terror.
+The child must have darted in the direction of the pavilion, trying to
+get back there."
+
+Every one followed the traces which the bailiff pointed out as he
+walked along examining them. Presently he stopped in the middle of the
+path about a hundred feet from the broken jug, where the girl's
+foot-prints ceased.
+
+"Here," he said, "she turned towards the Avonne; perhaps she was
+headed off from the direction of the pavilion."
+
+"But she has been gone more than an hour," cried Madame Michaud.
+
+Alarm was in all faces. The abbe ran towards the pavilion, examining
+the state of the road, while Michaud, impelled by the same thought,
+went up the path towards Conches.
+
+"Good God! she fell here," said Michaud, returning from a place where
+the footsteps stopped near the brook, to that where they had turned in
+the road, and pointing to the ground, he added, "See!"
+
+The marks were plainly seen of a body lying at full length on the
+sandy path.
+
+"The footprints which have entered the wood are those of some one who
+wore knitted soles," said the abbe.
+
+"A woman, then," said the countess.
+
+"Down there, by the broken pitcher, are the footsteps of a man," added
+Michaud.
+
+"I don't see traces of any other foot," said the abbe, who was
+tracking into the wood the prints of the woman's feet.
+
+"She must have been lifted and carried into the wood," cried Michaud.
+
+"That can't be, if it is really a woman's foot," said Blondet.
+
+"It must be some trick of that wretch, Nicolas," said Michaud. "He has
+been watching La Pechina for some time. Only this morning I stood two
+hours under the bridge of the Avonne to see what he was about. A woman
+may have helped him."
+
+"It is dreadful!" said the countess.
+
+"They call it amusing themselves," added the priest, in a sad and
+grieved tone.
+
+"Oh! La Pechina would never let them keep her," said the bailiff; "she
+is quite able to swim across the river. I shall look along the banks.
+Go home, my dear Olympe; and you gentlemen and madame, please to
+follow the avenue towards Conches."
+
+"What a country!" exclaimed the countess.
+
+"There are scoundrels everywhere," replied Blondet.
+
+"Is it true, Monsieur l'abbe," asked Madame de Montcornet, "that I
+saved the poor child from the clutches of Rigou?"
+
+"Every young girl over fiften years of age whom you may protect at the
+chateau is saved from that monster," said the abbe. "In trying to get
+possession of La Pechina from her earliest years, the apostate sought
+to satisfy both his lust and his vengeance. When I took Pere Niseron
+as sexton I told him what Rigou's intentions were. That is one of the
+causes of the late mayor's rancor against me; his hatred grew out of
+it. Pere Niseron said to him solemnly that he would kill him if any
+harm came to Genevieve, and he made him responsible for all attempts
+upon the poor child's honor. I can't help thinking that this pursuit
+of Nicolas is the result of some infernal collusion with Rigou, who
+thinks he can do as he likes with these people."
+
+"Doesn't he fear the law?"
+
+"In the first place, he is father-in-law of the prosecuting-attorney,"
+said the abbe, pausing to listen. "And then," he resumed, "you have no
+conception of the utter indifference of the rural police to what is
+done around them. So long as the peasants do not burn the farm-houses
+and buildings, commit no murders, poison no one, and pay their taxes,
+they let them do as they like; and as these people are not restrained
+by any religious principle, horrible things happen every day. On the
+other side of the Avonne helpless old men are afraid to stay in their
+own homes, for they are allowed nothing to eat; they wander out into
+the fields as far as their tottering legs can bear them, knowing well
+that if they take to their beds they will die for want of food.
+Monsieur Sarcus, the magistrate, tells me that if they arrested and
+tried all criminals, the costs would ruin the municipality."
+
+"Then he at least sees how things are?" said Blondet.
+
+"Monseigneur thoroughly understands the condition of the valley, and
+especially the state of this district," continued the abbe. "Religion
+alone can cure such evils; the law seems to me powerless, modified as
+it is now--"
+
+The words were interrupted by loud cries from the woods, and the
+countess, preceded by Emile and the abbe, sprang bravely into the
+brushwood in the direction of the sounds.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER XI
+
+          THE OARISTYS, EIGHTEENTH ECLOGUE OF THEOCRITUS;
+               LITTLE ADMIRED ON THE POLICE CALENDAR
+
+The sagacity of a savage, which Michaud's new occupation had developed
+among his faculties, joined to an acquaintance with the passions and
+interests of Blangy, enabled him partially to understand a third idyll
+in the Greek style, which poor villagers like Tonsard, and middle-aged
+rich men like Rigou, translate _freely_--to use the classic word--in the
+depths of their country solitudes.
+
+Nicolas, Tonsard's second son, had drawn an unlucky number at a recent
+conscription. Two years earlier his elder brother had been pronounced,
+through the influence of Soudry, Gaubertin, and Sarcus the rich, unfit
+for military service, on account of a pretended weakness in the
+muscles of the right arm; but as Jean-Louis had since wielded
+instruments of husbandry with remarkable force and skill, a good deal
+of talk on the subject had gone through the district. Soudry, Rigou,
+and Gaubertin, who were the special protectors of the family, had
+warned Tonsard that he must not expect to save Nicolas, who was tall
+and vigorous, from being recruited if he drew a fatal number.
+Nevertheless Gaubertin and Rigou were so well aware of the importance
+of conciliating bold men able and willing to do mischief, if properly
+directed against Les Aigues, that Rigou held out certain hopes of
+safety to Tonsard and his son. The late monk was occasionally visited
+by Catherine Tonsard who was very devoted to her brother Nicolas; on
+one such occasion Rigou advised her to appeal to the general and the
+countess.
+
+"They may be glad to do you this service to cajole you; in that case,
+it is just so much gained from the enemy," he said. "If the Shopman
+refuses, then we shall see what we shall see."
+
+Rigou foresaw that the general's refusal would pass as one wrong the
+more done by the land-owner to the peasantry, and would bind Tonsard
+by an additional motive of gratitude to the coalition, in case the
+crafty mind of the innkeeper could suggest to him some plausible way
+of liberating Nicolas.
+
+Nicolas, who was soon to appear before the examining board, had little
+hope of the general's intervention because of the harm done to Les
+Aigues by all the members of the Tonsard family. His passion, or to
+speak more correctly, his caprice and obstinate pursuit of La Pechina,
+were so aggravated by the prospect of his immediate departure, which
+left him no time to seduce her, that he resolved on attempting
+violence. The child's contempt for her prosecutor, plainly shown,
+excited the Lovelace of the Grand-I-Vert to a hatred whose fury was
+equalled only by his desires. For the last three days he had been
+watching La Pechina, and the poor child knew she was watched. Between
+Nicolas and his prey the same sort of understanding existed which
+there is between the hunter and the game. When the girl was at some
+little distance from the pavilion she saw Nicolas in one of the paths
+which ran parallel to the walls of the park, leading to the bridge of
+the Avonne. She could easily have escaped the man's pursuit had she
+appealed to her grandfather; but all young girls, even the most
+unsophisticated, have a strange fear, possibly instinctive, of
+trusting to their natural protectors under the like circumstances.
+
+Genevieve had heard Pere Niseron take an oath to kill any man, no
+matter who he was, who should dare to _touch_ (that was his word) his
+granddaughter. The old man thought the child amply protected by the
+halo of white hair and honor which a spotless life of three-score
+years and ten had laid upon his brow. The vision of bloody scenes
+terrifies the imagination of young girls so that they need not dive to
+the bottom of their hearts for other numerous and inquisitive reasons
+which seal their lips.
+
+When La Pechina started with the milk which Madame Michaud had sent to
+the daughter of Gaillard, the keeper of the gate of Conches, whose cow
+had just calved, she looked about her cautiously, like a cat when it
+ventures out onto the street. She saw no signs of Nicolas; she
+listened to the silence, as the poet says, and hearing nothing, she
+concluded that the rascal had gone to his day's work. The peasants
+were just beginning to cut the rye; for they were in the habit of
+getting in their own harvests first, so as to benefit by the best
+strength of the mowers. But Nicolas was not a man to mind losing a
+day's work,--especially now that he expected to leave the country
+after the fair at Soulanges and begin, as the country people say, the
+new life of a soldier.
+
+When La Pechina, with the jug on her head, was about half-way, Nicolas
+slid like a wild-cat down the trunk of an elm, among the branches of
+which he was hiding, and fell like a thunderbolt in front of the girl,
+who flung away her pitcher and trusted to her fleet legs to regain the
+pavilion. But a hundred feet farther on, Catherine Tonsard, who was on
+the watch, rushed out of the wood and knocked so violently against the
+flying girl that she was thrown down. The violence of the fall made
+her unconscious. Catherine picked her up and carried her into the
+woods to the middle of a tiny meadow where the Silver-spring brook
+bubbled up.
+
+Catherine Tonsard was tall and strong, and in every respect the type
+of woman whom painters and sculptors take, as the Republic did in
+former days, for their figures of Liberty. She charmed the young men
+of the valley of the Avonne with her voluminous bosom, her muscular
+legs, and a waist as robust as it was flexible; with her plump arms,
+her eyes that could flash and sparkle, and her jaunty air; with the
+masses of hair twisted in coils around her head, her masculine
+forehead and her red lips curling with that same ferocious smile which
+Eugene Delacroix and David (of Angers) caught and represented so
+admirably. True image of the People, this fiery and swarthy creature
+seemed to emit revolt through her piercing yellow eyes, blazing with
+the insolence of a soldier. She inherited from her father so violent a
+nature that the whole family, except Tonsard, and all who frequented
+the tavern feared her.
+
+"Well, how are you now?" she said to La Pechina as the latter
+recovered consciousness.
+
+Catherine had placed her victim on a little mound beside the brook and
+was bringing her to her senses with dashes of cold water. "Where am
+I?" said the child, opening her beautiful black eyes through which a
+sun-ray seemed to glide.
+
+"Ah!" said Catherine, "if it hadn't been for me you'd have been
+killed."
+
+"Thank you," said the girl, still bewildered; "what happened to me?"
+
+"You stumbled over a root and fell flat in the road over there, as if
+shot. Ha! how you did run!"
+
+"It was your brother who made me," said La Pechina, remembering
+Nicolas.
+
+"My brother? I did not see him," said Catherine. "What did he do to
+you, poor fellow, that should make you fly as if he were a wolf? Isn't
+he handsomer than your Monsieur Michaud?"
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, contemptuously.
+
+"See here, little one; you are laying up a crop of evils for yourself
+by loving those who persecute us. Why don't you keep to our side?"
+
+"Why don't you come to church; and why do you steal things night and
+day?" asked the child.
+
+"So you let those people talk you over!" sneered Catherine. "They love
+us, don't they?--just as they love their food which they get out of
+us, and they want new dishes every day. Did you ever know one of them
+to marry a peasant-girl? Not they! Does Sarcus the rich let his son
+marry that handsome Gatienne Giboulard? Not he, though she is the
+daughter of a rich upholsterer. You have never been at the Tivoli ball
+at Soulanges in Socquard's tavern; you had better come. You'll see 'em
+all there, these bourgeois fellows, and you'll find they are not worth
+the money we shall get out of them when we've pulled them down. Come
+to the fair this year!"
+
+"They say it's fine, that Soulanges fair!" cried La Pechina,
+artlessly.
+
+"I'll tell you what it is in two words," said Catherine. "If you are
+handsome, you are well ogled. What is the good of being as pretty as
+you are if you are not admired by the men? Ha! when I heard one of
+them say for the first time, 'What a fine sprig of a girl!' all my
+blood was on fire. It was at Socquard's, in the middle of a dance; my
+grandfather, Fourchon, who was playing the clarionet, heard it and
+laughed. Tivoli seemed to me as grand and fine as heaven itself. It's
+lighted up, my dear, with glass lamps, and you'll think you are in
+paradise. All the gentlemen of Soulanges and Auxerre and Ville-aux-Fayes
+will be there. Ever since that first night I've loved the place
+where those words rang in my ears like military music. It's worthy
+giving your eternity to hear such words said of you by a man you
+love."
+
+"Yes, perhaps," replied La Pechina, thoughtfully.
+
+"Then come, and get the praise of men; you're sure of it!" cried
+Catherine. "Ha! you'll have a fine chance, handsome as you are, to
+pick up good luck. There's the son of Monsieur Lupin, Amaury, he might
+marry you. But that's not all; if you only knew what comforts you can
+find there against vexation and worry. Why, Socquard's boiled wine
+will make you forget every trouble you ever had. Fancy! it can make
+you dream, and feel as light as a bird. Didn't you ever drink boiled
+wine? Then you don't know what life is."
+
+The privilege enjoyed by older persons to wet their throats with
+boiled wine excites the curiosity of the children of the peasantry
+over twelve years of age to such a degree that Genevieve had once put
+her lips to a glass of boiled wine ordered by the doctor for her
+grandfather when ill. The taste had left a sort of magic influence in
+the memory of the poor child, which may explain the interest with
+which she listened, and on which the evil-minded Catherine counted to
+carry out a plan already half-successful. No doubt she was trying to
+bring her victim, giddy from the fall, to the moral intoxication so
+dangerous to young women living in the wilds of nature, whose
+imagination, deprived of other nourishment, is all the more ardent
+when the occasion comes to exercise it. Boiled wine, which Catherine
+had held in reserve, was to end the matter by intoxicating the victim.
+
+"What do they put into it?" asked La Pechina.
+
+"All sorts of things," replied Catherine, glancing back to see if her
+brother were coming; "in the first place, those what d' ye call 'ems
+that come from India, cinnamon, and herbs that change you by magic,
+--you fancy you have everything you wish for; boiled wine makes you
+happy! you can snap your fingers at all your troubles!"
+
+"I should be afraid to drink boiled wine at a dance," said La Pechina.
+
+"Afraid of what?" asked Catherine. "There's not the slightest danger.
+Think what lots of people there will be. All the bourgeois will be
+looking at us! Ah! it is one of those days that make up for all our
+misery. See it and die,--for it's enough to satisfy any one."
+
+"If Monsieur and Madame Michaud would only take me!" cried La Pechina,
+her eyes blazing.
+
+"Ask your grandfather Niseron; you have not given him up, poor dear
+man, and he'd be pleased to see you admired like a little queen. Why
+do you like those Arminacs the Michauds better than your grandfather
+and the Burgundians. It's bad to neglect your own people. Besides, why
+should the Michauds object if your grandfather takes you to the fair?
+Oh! if you knew what it is to reign over a man and put him beside
+himself, and say to him, as I say to Godain, 'Go there!' and he goes,
+'Do that!' and he does it! You've got it in you, little one, to turn
+the head of a bourgeois like that son of Monsieur Lupin. Monsieur
+Amaury took a fancy to my sister Marie because she is fair and because
+he is half-afraid of me; but he'd adore you, for ever since those
+people at the pavilion have spruced you up a bit you've got the airs
+of an empress."
+
+Adroitly leading the innocent heart to forget Nicolas and so put it
+off its guard, Catherine distilled into the girl the insidious nectar
+of compliments. Unawares, she touched a secret wound. La Pechina,
+without being other than a poor peasant girl, was a specimen of
+alarming precocity, like many another creature doomed to die as
+prematurely as it blooms. Strange product of Burgundian and
+Montenegrin blood, conceived and born amid the toils of war, the girl
+was doubtless in many ways the result of her congenital circumstances.
+Thin, slender, brown as a tobacco leaf, and short in stature, she
+nevertheless possessed extraordinary strength,--a strength unseen by
+the eyes of peasants, to whom the mysteries of the nervous system are
+unknown. Nerves are not admitted into the medical rural mind.
+
+At thirteen years of age Genevieve had completed her growth, though
+she was hardly as tall as an ordinary girl of her age. Did her face
+owe its topaz skin, so dark and yet so brilliant, dark in tone and
+brilliant in the quality of its tissue, giving a look of age to the
+childish face, to her Montenegrin origin, or to the ardent sun of
+Burgundy? Medical science may dismiss the inquiry. The premature old
+age on the surface of the face was counterbalanced by the glow, the
+fire, the wealth of light which made the eyes two stars. Like all eyes
+which fill with sunlight and need, perhaps, some sheltering screen,
+the eyelids were fringed with lashes of extraordinary length. The
+hair, of a bluish black, long and fine and abundant, crowned a brow
+moulded like that of the Farnese Juno. That magnificent diadem of
+hair, those grand Armenian eyes, that celestial brow eclipsed the rest
+of the face. The nose, though pure in form as it left the brow, and
+graceful in curve, ended in flattened and flaring nostrils. Anger
+increased this effect at times, and then the face wore an absolutely
+furious expression. All the lower part of the face, like the lower
+part of the nose, seemed unfinished, as if the clay in the hands of
+the divine sculptor had proved insufficient. Between the lower lip and
+the chin the space was so short that any one taking La Pechina by the
+chin would have rubbed the lip; but the teeth prevented all notice of
+this defect. One might almost believe those little bones had souls, so
+brilliant were they, so polished, so transparent, so exquisitely
+shaped, disclosed as they were by too wide a mouth, curved in lines
+that bore resemblance to the fantastic shapes of coral. The shells of
+the ears were so transparent to the light that in the sunshine they
+were rose-colored. The complexion, though sun-burned, showed a
+marvellous delicacy in the texture of the skin. If, as Buffon
+declared, love lies in touch, the softness of the girl's skin must
+have had the penetrating and inciting influence of the fragrance of
+daturas. The chest and indeed the whole body was alarmingly thin; but
+the feet and hands, of alluring delicacy, showed remarkable nervous
+power, and a vigorous organism.
+
+This mixture of diabolical imperfections and divine beauties,
+harmonious in spite of discords, for they blended in a species of
+savage dignity, also this triumph of a powerful soul over a feeble
+body, as written in those eyes, made the child, when once seen,
+unforgettable. Nature had wished to make that frail young being a
+woman; the circumstances of her conception moulded her with the face
+and body of a boy. A poet observing the strange creature would have
+declared her native clime to be Arabia the Blest; she belonged to the
+Afrite and Genii of Arabian tales. Her face told no lies. She had the
+soul of that glance of fire, the intellect of those lips made
+brilliant by the bewitching teeth, the thought enshrined within that
+glorious brow, the passion of those nostrils ready at all moments to
+snort flame. Therefore love, such as we imagine it on burning sands,
+in lonely deserts, filled that heart of twenty in the breast of a
+child, doomed, like the snowy heights of Montenegro, to wear no
+flowers of the spring.
+
+Observers ought now to understand how it was that La Pechina, from
+whom passion issued by every pore, awakened in perverted natures the
+feelings deadened by abuse; just as water fills the mouth at sight of
+those twisted, blotched, and speckled fruits which gourmands know by
+experience, and beneath whose skin nature has put the rarest flavors
+and perfumes. Why did Nicolas, that vulgar laborer, pursue this being
+who was worthy of a poet, while the eyes of the country-folk pitied
+her as a sickly deformity? Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the
+passion of a young one for this girl? Which of the two men was young,
+and which was old? Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer?
+Why did these two extremes of life meet in one common and devilish
+caprice? Does the vigor that draws to its close resemble the vigor
+that is only dawning? The moral perversities of men are gulfs guarded
+by sphinxes; they begin and end in questions to which there is no
+answer.
+
+The exclamation, formerly quoted, of the countess, "Piccina!" when she
+first saw Genevieve by the roadside, open-mouthed at sight of the
+carriage and the elegantly dressed woman within it, will be
+understood. This girl, almost a dwarf, of Montenegrin vigor, loved the
+handsome, noble bailiff, as children of her age love, when they do
+love, that is to say, with childlike passion, with the strength of
+youth, with the devotion which in truly virgin souls gives birth to
+divinest poesy. Catherine had just swept her coarse hands across the
+sensitive strings of that choice harp, strung to the breaking-point.
+To dance before Michaud, to shine at the Soulanges ball and inscribe
+herself on the memory of that adored master! What glorious thoughts!
+To fling them into that volcanic head was like casting live coals upon
+straw dried in the August sun.
+
+"No, Catherine," replied La Pechina, "I am ugly and puny; my lot is to
+sit in a corner and never to be married, but live alone in the world."
+
+"Men like weaklings," said Catherine. "You see me, don't you?" she
+added, showing her handsome, strong arms. "I please Godain, who is a
+poor stick; I please that little Charles, the count's groom; but
+Lupin's son is afraid of me. I tell you it is the small kind of men
+who love me, and who say when they see me go by at Ville-aux-Fayes and
+at Soulanges, 'Ha! what a fine girl!' Now YOU, that's another thing;
+you'll please the fine men."
+
+"Ah! Catherine, if it were true--that!" cried the bewitched child.
+
+"It is true, it is so true that Nicolas, the handsomest man in the
+canton, is mad about you; he dreams of you, he is losing his mind; and
+yet all the other girls are in love with him. He is a fine lad! If
+you'll put on a white dress and yellow ribbons, and come to Socquard's
+for the midsummer ball, you'll be the handsomest girl there, and all
+the fine people from Ville-aux-Fayes will see you. Come, won't you?
+--See here, I've been cutting grass for the cows, and I brought some
+boiled wine in my gourd; Socquard gave it me this morning," she added
+quickly, seeing the half-delirious expression in La Pechina's eyes
+which women understand so well. "We'll share it together, and you'll
+fancy the men are in love with you."
+
+During this conversation Nicolas, choosing the grassy spots to step
+on, had noiselessly slipped behind the trunk of an old oak near which
+his sister had seated La Pechina. Catherine, who had now and then cast
+her eyes behind her, saw her brother as she turned to get the boiled
+wine.
+
+"Here, take some," she said, offering it.
+
+"It burns me!" cried Genevieve, giving back the gourd, after taking
+two or three swallows from it.
+
+"Silly child!" replied Catherine; "see here!" and she emptied the
+rustic bottle without taking breath. "See how it slips down; it goes
+like a sunbeam into the stomach."
+
+"But I ought to be carrying the milk to Mademoiselle Gaillard," cried
+Genevieve; "and it is all spilt! Nicolas frightened me so!"
+
+"Don't you like Nicolas?"
+
+"No," answered Genevieve. "Why does he persecute me? He can get plenty
+other girls, who are willing."
+
+"But if he likes you better than all the other girls in the valley--"
+
+"So much the worse for him."
+
+"I see you don't know him," answered Catherine, as she seized the girl
+rapidly by the waist and flung her on the grass, holding her down in
+that position with her strong arms. At this moment Nicolas appeared.
+Seeing her odious persecutor, the child screamed with all her might,
+and drove him five feet away with a violent kick in the stomach; then
+she twisted herself like an acrobat, with a dexterity for which
+Catherine was not prepared, and rose to run away. Catherine, still on
+the ground, caught her by one foot and threw her headlong on her face.
+This frightful fall stopped the brave child's cries for a moment.
+Nicolas attempted, furiously, to seize his victim, but she, though
+giddy from the wine and the fall, caught him by the throat in a grip
+of iron.
+
+"Help! she's strangling me, Catherine," cried Nicolas, in a stifled
+voice.
+
+La Pechina uttered piercing screams, which Catherine tried to choke by
+putting her hands over the girl's mouth, but she bit them and drew
+blood. It was at this moment that Blondet, the countess, and the abbe
+appeared at the edge of the wood.
+
+"Here are those Aigues people!" exclaimed Catherine, helping Genevieve
+to rise.
+
+"Do you want to live?" hissed Nicolas in the child's ear.
+
+"What then?" she asked.
+
+"Tell them we were all playing, and I'll forgive you," said Nicolas,
+in a threatening voice.
+
+"Little wretch, mind you say it!" repeated Catherine, whose glance was
+more terrifying than her brother's murderous threat.
+
+"Yes, I will, if you let me alone," replied the child. "But anyhow I
+will never go out again without my scissors."
+
+"You are to hold your tongue, or I'll drown you in the Avonne," said
+Catherine, ferociously.
+
+"You are monsters," cried the abbe, coming up; "you ought to be
+arrested and taken to the assizes."
+
+"Ha! and pray what do you do in your drawing-rooms?" said Nicolas,
+looking full at the countess and Blondet. "You play and amuse
+yourselves, don't you? Well, so do we, in the fields which are ours.
+We can't always work; we must play sometimes,--ask my sister and La
+Pechina."
+
+"How do you fight if you call that playing?" cried Blondet.
+
+Nicolas gave him a murderous look.
+
+"Speak!" said Catherine, gripping La Pechina by the forearm and
+leaving a blue bracelet on the flesh. "Were not we amusing ourselves?"
+
+"Yes, madame, we were amusing ourselves," said the child, exhausted by
+her display of strength, and now breaking down as though she were
+about to faint.
+
+"You hear what she says, madame," said Catherine, boldly, giving the
+countess one of those looks which women give each other like dagger
+thrusts.
+
+She took her brother's arm, and the pair walked off, not mistaking the
+opinion they left behind them in the minds of the three persons who
+had interrupted the scene. Nicolas twice looked back, and twice
+encountered Blondet's gaze. The journalist continued to watch the tall
+scoundrel, who was broad in the shoulders, healthy and vigorous in
+complexion, with black hair curling tightly, and whose rather soft
+face showed upon its lips and around the mouth certain lines which
+reveal the peculiar cruelty that characterizes sluggards and
+voluptaries. Catherine swung her petticoat, striped blue and white,
+with an air of insolent coquetry.
+
+"Cain and his wife!" said Blondet to the abbe.
+
+"You are nearer the truth than you know," replied the priest.
+
+"Ah! Monsieur le cure, what will they do to me?" said La Pechina, when
+the brother and sister were out of sight.
+
+The countess, as white as her handkerchief, was so overcome that she
+heard neither Blondet nor the abbe nor La Pechina.
+
+"It is enough to drive one from this terrestrial paradise," she said
+at last. "But the first thing of all is to save that child from their
+claws."
+
+"You are right," said Blondet in a low voice. "That child is a poem, a
+living poem."
+
+Just then the Montenegrin girl was in a state where soul and body
+smoke, as it were, after the conflagration of an anger which has
+driven all forces, physical and intellectual, to their utmost tension.
+It is an unspeakable and supreme splendor, which reveals itself only
+under the pressure of some frenzy, be it resistance or victory, love
+or martyrdom. She had left home in a dress with alternate lines of
+brown and yellow, and a collarette which she pleated herself by rising
+before daylight; and she had not yet noticed the condition of her gown
+soiled by her struggle on the grass, and her collar torn in
+Catherine's grasp. Feeling her hair hanging loose, she looked about
+her for a comb. At this moment Michaud, also attracted by the screams,
+came upon the scene. Seeing her god, La Pechina recovered her full
+strength. "Monsieur Michaud," she cried, "he did not even touch me!"
+
+The cry, the look, the action of the girl were an eloquent commentary,
+and told more to Blondet and the abbe than Madame Michaud had told the
+countess about the passion of that strange nature for the bailiff, who
+was utterly unconscious of it.
+
+"The scoundrel!" cried Michaud.
+
+Then, with an involuntary and impotent gesture, such as mad men and
+wise men can both be forced into giving, he shook his fist in the
+direction in which he had caught sight of Nicolas disappearing with
+his sister.
+
+"Then you were not playing?" said the abbe with a searching look at La
+Pechina.
+
+"Don't fret her," interposed the countess; "let us return to the
+pavilion."
+
+Genevieve, though quite exhausted, found strength under Michaud's eyes
+to walk. The countess followed the bailiff through one of the by-paths
+known to keepers and poachers where only two can go abreast, and which
+led to the gate of the Avonne.
+
+"Michaud," said the countess when they reached the depth of the wood,
+"We must find some way of ridding the neighborhood of such vile
+people; that child is actually in danger of death."
+
+"In the first place," replied Michaud, "Genevieve shall not leave the
+pavilion. My wife will be glad to take the nephew of Vatel, who has
+the care of the park roads, into the house. With Gounod (that is his
+name) and old Cornevin, my wife's foster-father, always at hand, La
+Pechina need never go out without a protector."
+
+"I will tell Monsieur to make up this extra expense to you," said the
+countess. "But this does not rid us of that Nicolas. How can we manage
+that?"
+
+"The means are easy and right at hand," answered Michaud. "Nicolas is
+to appear very soon before the court of appeals on the draft. The
+general, instead of asking for his release, as the Tonsards expect,
+has only to advise his being sent to the army--"
+
+"If necessary, I will go myself," said the countess, "and see my
+cousin, de Casteran, the prefect. But until then, I tremble for that
+child--"
+
+The words were said at the end of the path close to the open space by
+the bridge. As they reached the edge of the bank the countess gave a
+cry; Michaud advanced to help her, thinking she had struck her foot
+against a stone; but he shuddered at the sight that met his eyes.
+
+Marie Tonsard and Bonnebault, seated below the bank, seemed to be
+conversing, but were no doubt hiding there to hear what passed.
+Evidently they had left the wood as the party advanced towards them.
+
+Bonnebault, a tall, wiry fellow, had lately returned to Conches after
+six years' service in the cavalry, with a permanent discharge due to
+his evil conduct,--his example being likely to ruin better men. He
+wore moustachios and a small chin-tuft; a peculiarity which, joined to
+his military carriage, made him the reigning fancy of all the girls in
+the valley. His hair, in common with that of other soldiers, was cut
+very short behind, but he frizzed it on the top of his head, brushing
+up the ends with a dandy air; on it his foraging cap was jauntily
+tilted to one side. Compared to the peasants, who were mostly in rags,
+like Mouche and Fourchon, he seemed gorgeous in his linen trousers,
+boots, and short waistcoat. These articles, bought at the time of his
+liberation, were, it is true, somewhat the worse for a life in the
+fields; but this village cock-of-the-walk had others in reserve for
+balls and holidays. He lived, it must be said, on the gifts of his
+female friends, which, liberal as they were, hardly sufficed for the
+libations, the dissipations, and the squanderings of all kinds which
+resulted from his intimacy with the Cafe de la Paix.
+
+Cowardice is like courage; of both there are various kinds. Bonnebault
+would have fought like a brave soldier, but he was weak in presence of
+his vices and his desires. Lazy as a lizard, that is to say, active
+only when it suited him, without the slightest decency, arrogant and
+base, able for much but neglectful of all, the sole pleasure of this
+"breaker of hearts and plates," to use a barrack term, was to do evil
+or inflict damage. Such a nature does as much harm in rural
+communities as it does in a regiment. Bonnebault, like Tonsard and
+like Fourchon, desired to live well and do nothing; and he had his
+plans laid. Making the most of his gallant appearance with increasing
+success, and of his talents for billiards with alternate loss and
+gain, he flattered himself that the day would come when he could marry
+Mademoiselle Aglae Socquard, only daughter of the proprietor of the
+Cafe de la Paix, a resort which was to Soulanges what, relatively
+speaking, Ranelagh is to the Bois de Boulogne. To get into the
+business of tavern-keeping, to manage the public balls, what a fine
+career for the marshal's baton of a ne'er-do-well! These morals, this
+life, this nature, were so plainly stamped upon the face of the
+low-lived profligate that the countess was betrayed into an exclamation
+when she beheld the pair, for they gave her the sensation of beholding
+snakes.
+
+Marie, desperately in love with Bonnebault, would have robbed for his
+benefit. Those moustachios, the swaggering gait of a trooper, the
+fellow's smart clothes, all went to her heart as the manners and
+charms of a de Marsay touch that of a pretty Parisian. Each social
+sphere has its own standard of distinction. The jealous Marie rebuffed
+Amaury Lupin, the other dandy of the little town, her mind being made
+up to become Madame Bonnebault.
+
+"Hey! you there, hi! come on!" cried Nicolas and Catherine from afar,
+catching sight of Marie and Bonnebault.
+
+The sharp call echoed through the woods like the cry of savages.
+
+Seeing the pair at his feet, Michaud shuddered and deeply repented
+having spoken. If Bonnebault and Marie Tonsard had overheard the
+conversation, nothing but harm could come of it. This event,
+insignificant as it seems, was destined, in the irritated state of
+feeling then existing between Les Aigues and the peasantry, to have a
+decisive influence on the fate of all,--just as victory or defeat in
+battle sometimes depends upon a brook which shepherds jump while
+cannon are unable to pass it.
+
+Gallantly bowing to the countess, Bonnebault passed Marie's arm
+through his own with a conquering air and took himself off
+triumphantly.
+
+"The King of Hearts of the valley," muttered Michaud to the countess.
+"A dangerous man. When he loses twenty francs at billiards he would
+murder Rigou to get them back. He loves a crime as he does a
+pleasure."
+
+"I have seen enough for to-day; take me home, gentlemen," murmured the
+countess, putting her hand on Emile's arm.
+
+She bowed sadly to Madame Michaud, after watching La Pechina safely
+back to the pavilion. Olympe's depression was transferred to her
+mistress.
+
+"Ah, madame," said the abbe, as they continued their way, "can it be
+that the difficulty of doing good is about to deter you? For the last
+five years I have slept on a pallet in a parsonage which has no
+furniture; I say mass in a church without believers; I preach to no
+hearers; I minister without fees or salary; I live on the six hundred
+francs the law allows me, asking nothing of my bishop, and I give the
+third of that in charity. Still, I am not hopeless. If you knew what
+my winters are in this place you would understand the strength of
+those words,--I am not hopeless. I keep myself warm with the belief
+that we can save this valley and bring it back to God. No matter for
+ourselves, madame; think of the future! If it is our duty to say to
+the poor, 'Learn how to be poor; that is, how to work, to endure, to
+strive,' it is equally our duty to say to the rich, 'Learn your duty
+as prosperous men,'--that is to say, 'Be wise, be intelligent in your
+benevolence; pious and virtuous in the place to which God has called
+you.' Ah! madame, you are only the steward of Him who grants you
+wealth; if you do not obey His behests you will never transmit to your
+children the prosperity He gives you. You will rob your posterity. If
+you follow in the steps of that poor singer's selfishness, which
+caused the evils that now terrify us, you will bring back the
+scaffolds on which your fathers died for the faults of their fathers.
+To do good humbly, in obscurity, in country solitudes, as Rigou now
+does evil,--ah! that indeed is prayer in action and dear to God. If in
+every district three souls only would work for good, France, our
+country, might be saved from the abyss that yawns; into which we are
+rushing headlong, through spiritual indifference to all that is not
+our own self-interest. Change! you must change your morals, change
+your ethics, and that will change your laws."
+
+Though deeply moved as she listened to this grand utterance of true
+catholic charity, the countess answered in the fatal words, "We will
+consider it,"--words of the rich, which contain that promise to the
+ear which saves their purses and enables them to stand with arms
+crossed in presence of all disaster, under pretext that they were
+powerless.
+
+Hearing those words, the abbe bowed to Madame de Montcornet and turned
+off into a path which led him direct to the gate of Blangy.
+
+"Belshazzar's feast is the everlasting symbol of the dying days of a
+caste, of an oligarchy, of a power!" he thought as he walked away. "My
+God! if it be Thy will to loose the poor like a torrent to reform
+society, I know, I comprehend, why it is that Thou hast abandoned the
+wealthy to their blindness!"
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XII
+
+         SHOWETH HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE'S PARLIAMENT
+
+Old Mother Tonsard's screams brought a number of people from Blangy to
+know what was happening at the Grand-I-Vert, the distance from the
+village to the inn not being greater than that from the inn to the
+gate of Blangy. One of these inquiring visitors was old Niseron, La
+Pechina's grandfather, who was on his way, after ringing the second
+Angelus, to dig the vine-rows in his last little bit of ground.
+
+Bent by toil, with pallid face and silvery hair, the old vinedresser,
+now the sole representative of civic virtue in the community, had
+been, during the Revolution, president of the Jacobin club at
+Ville-aux-Fayes, and a juror in the revolutionary tribunal of the
+district. Jean-Francois Niseron, carved out of the wood that the
+apostles were made of, was of the type of Saint Peter; whom painters
+and sculptors have united in representing with the square brow of the
+people, the thick, naturally curling hair of the laborer, the muscles
+of the man of toil, the complexion of a fisherman; with the large nose,
+the shrewd, half-mocking lips that scoff at fate, the neck and
+shoulders of the strong man who cuts his wood to cook his dinner while
+the doctrinaires of his opinions talk.
+
+Such, at forty years of age on the breaking out of the Revolution, was
+this man, strong as iron, pure as gold. Advocate of the people, he
+believed in a republic through the very roll of that name, more
+formidable in sound perhaps than in reality. He believed in the
+republic of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the brotherhood of man, in the
+exchange of noble sentiments, in the proclamation of virtue, in the
+choice of merit without intrigue,--in short, in all that the narrow
+limits of one arrondissement like Sparta made possible, and which the
+vast proportions of an empire make chimerical. He signed his beliefs
+with his blood,--his only son went to war; he did more, he signed them
+with the prosperity of his life,--last sacrifice of self. Nephew and
+sole heir of the curate of Blangy, the then all-powerful tribune might
+have enforced his rights and recovered the property left by the priest
+to his pretty servant-girl, Arsene; but he respected his uncle's
+wishes and accepted poverty, which came upon him as rapidly as the
+fall of his cherished republic came upon France.
+
+Never a farthing's worth, never so much as the branch of a tree
+belonging to another passed into the hands of this notable republican,
+who would have made the republic acceptable to the world if he and
+such as he could have guided it. He refused to buy the national
+domains; he denied the right of the Republic to confiscate property.
+In reply to all demands of the committee of public safety he asserted
+that the virtue of citizens would do for their sacred country what low
+political intriguers did for money. This patriot of antiquity publicly
+reproved Gaubertin's father for his secret treachery, his underhand
+bargaining, his malversations. He reprimanded the virtuous Mouchon,
+that representative of the people whose virtue was nothing more nor
+less than incapacity,--as it is with so many other legislators who,
+gorged with the greatest political resources that any nation ever
+gave, armed with the whole force of a people, are still unable to
+bring forth from them the grandeur which Richelieu wrung for France
+out of the weakness of a king. Consequently, citizen Niseron became a
+living reproach to the people about him. They endeavored to put him
+out of sight and mind with the reproachful remark, "Nothing satisfies
+that man."
+
+The patriot peasant returned to his cot at Blangy and watched the
+destruction, one by one, of his illusions; he saw his republic come to
+an end at the heels of an emperor, while he himself fell into utter
+poverty, to which Rigou stealthily managed to reduce him. And why?
+Because Niseron had never been willing to accept anything from him.
+Reiterated refusals showed the ex-priest in what profound contempt the
+nephew of the curate held him; and now that icy scorn was revenged by
+the terrible threat as to his little granddaughter, about which the
+Abbe Brossette spoke to the countess.
+
+The old man had composed in his own mind a history of the French
+republic, filled with the glorious features which gave immortality to
+that heroic period to the exclusion of all else. The infamous deeds,
+the massacres, the spoliations, his virtuous soul ignored; he admired,
+with a single mind, the devotedness of the people, the "Vengeur," the
+gifts to the nation, the uprising of the country to defend its
+frontier; and he still pursued his dream that he might sleep in peace.
+
+The Revolution produced many poets like old Niseron, who sang their
+poems in the country solitudes, in the army, openly or secretly, by
+deeds buried beneath the whirlwind of that storm, just as the wounded
+left behind to die in the great wars of the empire cried out, "Long
+live the Emperor!" This sublimity of soul belongs especially to
+France. The Abbe Brossette respected the convictions of the old man,
+who became simply but deeply attached to the priest from hearing him
+say, "The true republic is in the Gospel." The stanch republican
+carried the cross, and wore the sexton's robe, half-red, half-black,
+and was grave and dignified in church,--supporting himself by the
+triple functions with which he was invested by the abbe, who was able
+to give the fine old man, not, to be sure, enough to live on, but
+enough to keep him from dying of hunger.
+
+Niseron, the Aristides of Blangy, spoke little, like all noble dupes
+who wrap themselves in the mantle of resignation; but he was never
+silent against evil, and the peasants feared him as thieves fear the
+police. He seldom came more than six times a year to the Grand-I-Vert,
+though he was always warmly welcomed there. The old man cursed the
+want of charity of the rich,--their selfishness disgusted him; and
+through this fiber of his mind he seemed to the peasants to belong to
+them; they were in the habit of saying, "Pere Niseron doesn't like the
+rich; he's one of us."
+
+The civic crown won by this noble life throughout the valley lay in
+these words: "That good old Niseron! there's not a more honest man."
+Often taken as umpire in certain kinds of disputes, he embodied the
+meaning of that archaic term,--the village elder. Always extremely
+clean, though threadbare, he wore breeches, coarse woollen stockings,
+hob-nailed shoes, the distinctively French coat with large buttons and
+the broad-brimmed felt hat to which all old peasants cling; but for
+daily wear he kept a blue jacket so patched and darned that it looked
+like a bit of tapestry. The pride of a man who feels he is free, and
+knows he is worthy of freedom, gave to his countenance and his whole
+bearing a _something_ that was inexpressibly noble; you would have felt
+he wore a robe, not rags.
+
+"Hey! what's happening so unusual?" he said, "I heard the noise down
+here from the belfry."
+
+They told him of Vatel's attack on the old woman, talking all at once
+after the fashion of country-people.
+
+"If she didn't cut the tree, Vatel was wrong; but if she did cut it,
+you have done two bad actions," said Pere Niseron.
+
+"Take some wine," said Tonsard, offering a full glass to the old man.
+
+"Shall we start?" said Vermichel to the sheriff's officer.
+
+"Yes," replied Brunet, "we must do without Pere Fourchon and take the
+assistant at Conches. Go on before me; I have a paper to carry to the
+chateau. Rigou has gained his second suit, and I've got to deliver the
+verdict."
+
+So saying, Monsieur Brunet, all the livelier for a couple of glasses
+of brandy, mounted his gray mare after saying good-bye to Pere
+Niseron; for the whole valley were desirous in their hearts of the
+good man's esteem.
+
+No science, not even that of statistics, can explain the rapidity with
+which news flies in the country, nor how it spreads over those
+ignorant and untaught regions which are, in France, a standing
+reproach to the government and to capitalists. Contemporaneous history
+can show that a famous banker, after driving post-horses to death
+between Waterloo and Paris (everybody knows why--he gained what the
+Emperor had lost, a commission!) carried the fatal news only three
+hours in advance of rumor. So, not an hour after the encounter between
+old mother Tonsard and Vatel, a number of the customers of the
+Grand-I-Vert assembled there to hear the tale.
+
+The first to come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have
+recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose
+wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen. Aged, and thin,
+and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned.
+"He tried to climb higher than the ladder," was what his neighbors
+said when others pitied him and blamed Rigou. "He wanted to be a
+bourgeois himself."
+
+In fact, Courtecuisse did intend to pass for a bourgeois in buying the
+Bachelerie, and he even boasted of it; though his wife went about the
+roads gathering up the horse-droppings. She and Courtecuisse got up
+before daylight, dug their garden, which was richly manured, and
+obtained several yearly crops from it, without being able to do more
+than pay the interest due to Rigou for the rest of the purchase-money.
+Their daughter, who was living at service in Auxerre, sent them her
+wages; but in spite of all their efforts, in spite of this help, the
+last day for the final payment was approaching, and not a penny in
+hand with which to meet it. Madame Courtecuisse, who in former times
+occasionally allowed herself a bottle of boiled wine or a bit of roast
+meat, now drank nothing but water. Courtecuisse was afraid to go to
+the Grand-I-Vert lest he should have to leave three sous behind him.
+Deprived of power, he had lost his privilege of free drinks, and he
+bitterly complained, like all other fools, of man's ingratitude. In
+short, he found, according to the experience of all peasants bitten
+with the demon of proprietorship, that toil had increased and food
+decreased.
+
+"Courtecuisse has done too much to the property," the people said,
+secretly envying his position. "He ought to have waited till he had
+paid the money down and was master before he put up those fruit
+palings."
+
+With the help of his wife he had managed to manure and cultivate the
+three acres of land sold to him by Rigou, together with the garden
+adjoining the house, which was beginning to be productive; and he was
+in danger of being turned out of it all. Clothed in rags like
+Fourchon, poor Courtecuisse, who lately wore the boots and gaiters of
+a huntsman, now thrust his feet into sabots and accused "the rich" of
+Les Aigues of having caused his destitution. These wearing anxieties
+had given to the fat little man and his once smiling and rosy face a
+gloomy and dazed expression, as though he were ill from the effects of
+poison or with some chronic malady.
+
+"What's the matter with you, Monsieur Courtecuisse; is your tongue
+tied?" asked Tonsard, as the man continued silent after he had told
+him about the battle which had just taken place.
+
+"No, no!" cried Madame Tonsard; "he needn't complain of the midwife
+who cut his string,--she made a good job of it."
+
+"It is enough to make a man dumb, thinking from morning till night of
+some way to escape Rigou," said the premature old man, gloomily.
+
+"Bah!" said old Mother Tonsard, "you've got a pretty daughter,
+seventeen years old. If she's a good girl you can easily manage
+matters with that old jail bird--"
+
+"We sent her to Auxerre two years ago to Madame Mariotte the elder, to
+keep her out of harm's way; I'd rather die than--"
+
+"What a fool you are!" said Tonsard, "look at my girls,--are they any
+the worse? He who dares to say they are not as virtuous as marble
+images will have to do with my gun."
+
+"It'll be hard to have to come to that," said Courtecuisse, shaking
+his head. "I'd rather earn the money by shooting one of those
+Arminacs."
+
+"Well, I call it better for a girl to save a father than to wrap up
+her virtue and let it mildew," retorted the innkeeper.
+
+Tonsard felt a sharp tap on his shoulder, delivered by Pere Niseron.
+
+"That is not a right thing to say!" cried the old man. "A father is
+the guardian of the honor of his family. It is by behaving as you do
+that scorn and contempt are brought upon us; it is because of such
+conduct that the People are accused of being unfit for liberty. The
+People should set an example of civic virtue and honor to the rich.
+You all sell yourselves to Rigou for gold; and if you don't sell him
+your daughters, at any rate you sell him your honor,--and it's wrong."
+
+"Just see what a position Courtecuisse is in," said Tonsard.
+
+"See what a position I am in," replied Pere Niseron; "but I sleep in
+peace; there are no thorns in my pillow."
+
+"Let him talk, Tonsard," whispered his wife, "you know they're just
+_his notions_, poor dear man."
+
+Bonnebault and Marie, Catherine and her brother came in at this moment
+in a state of exasperation, which had begun with Nicolas's failure,
+and was raised to the highest pitch by Michaud's advice to the
+countess about Bonnebault. As Nicolas entered the tavern he was
+uttering frightful threats against the Michaud family and Les Aigues.
+
+"The harvest's coming; well, I vow I'll not go before I've lighted my
+pipe at their wheat-stacks," he cried, striking his fist on the table
+as he sat down.
+
+"Mustn't yelp like that before people," said Godain, showing him Pere
+Niseron.
+
+"If the old fellow tells, I'll wring his neck," said Catherine. "He's
+had his day, that old peddler of foolish reasons! They call him
+virtuous; it's his temperament that keeps him so, that's all."
+
+Strange and noteworthy sight!--that of those lifted heads, that group
+of persons gathered in the reeking hovel, while old Mother Tonsard
+stood sentinel at the door as security for the secret words of the
+drinkers.
+
+Of all those faces, that of Godain, Catherine's suitor, was perhaps
+the most alarming, though the least pronounced. Godain,--a miser
+without money,--the cruelest of misers, for he who seeks money surely
+takes precedence of him who hoards it, one turning his eagerness
+within himself, the other looking outside with terrible intentness,
+--Godain represented the type of the majority of peasant faces.
+
+He was a journeyman, small in frame, and saved from the draft by not
+attaining the required military height; naturally lean and made more
+so by hard work and the enforced sobriety under which reluctant
+workers like Courtecuisse succumb. His face was no bigger than a man's
+fist, and was lighted by a pair of yellow eyes with greenish strips
+and brown spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was
+mingled with a concupiscence which had no heat,--for desire, once at
+the boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as
+that of a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled
+among his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. Godain never
+perspired, he reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like
+claws, nervous, never still, seemed to be made of old wood. Though
+scarcely twenty-seven years of age, white lines were beginning to show
+in his rusty black hair. He wore a blouse, through the breast opening
+of which could be seen a shirt of coarse linen, so black that he must
+have worn it a month and washed it himself in the Thune. His sabots
+were mended with old iron. The original stuff of his trousers was
+unrecognizable from the darns and the infinite number of patches. On
+his head was a horrible cap, evidently cast off and picked up in the
+doorway of some bourgeois house in Ville-aux-Fayes.
+
+Clear-sighted enough to estimate the elements of good fortune that
+centred in Catherine Tonsard, his ambition was to succeed her father
+at the Grand-I-Vert. He made use of all his craftiness and all his
+actual powers to capture her; he promised her wealth, he also promised
+her the license her mother had enjoyed; besides this, he offered his
+prospective father-in-law an enormous rental, five hundred francs a
+year, for his inn, until he could buy him out, trusting to an
+agreement he had made with Monsieur Brunet to pay these costs by notes
+on stamped paper. By trade a journeyman tool-maker, this gnome worked
+for the wheelwrights when work was plentiful, but he also hired
+himself out for any extra labor which was well paid. Though he
+possessed, unknown to the whole neighborhood, eighteen hundred francs
+now in Gaubertin's hands, he lived like a beggar, slept in a barn, and
+gleaned at the harvests. He wore Gaubertin's receipt for his money
+sewn into the waist-belt of his trousers,--having it renewed every
+year with its own added interest and the amount of his savings.
+
+"Hey! what do I care," cried Nicolas, replying to Godain's prudent
+advice not to talk before Niseron. "If I'm doomed to be a soldier I'd
+rather the sawdust of the basket sucked up my blood than have it
+dribbled out drop by drop in the battles. I'll deliver this country of
+at least one of those Arminacs that the devil has launched upon us."
+
+And he related what he called Michaud's plot against him, which Marie
+and Bonnebault had overheard.
+
+"Where do you expect France to find soldiers?" said the white-haired
+old man, rising and standing before Nicolas during the silence which
+followed the utterance of this threat.
+
+"We serve our time and come home again," remarked Bonnebault, twirling
+his moustache.
+
+Observing that all the worst characters of the neighborhood were
+collecting, Pere Niseron shook his head and left the tavern, after
+offering a farthing to Madame Tonsard in payment for his glass of
+wine. When the worthy man had gone down the steps a movement of relief
+and satisfaction passed through the assembled drinkers which would
+have told whoever watched them that each man in that company felt he
+was rid of the living image of his own conscience.
+
+"Well, what do you say to all that, hey, Courtecuisse?" asked
+Vaudoyer, who had just come in, and to whom Tonsard had related
+Vatel's attempt.
+
+Courtecuisse clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and set
+his glass on the table.
+
+"Vatel put himself in the wrong," he said. "If I were Mother Tonsard,
+I'd give myself a few wounds and go to bed and say I was ill, and have
+that Shopman and his keeper up before the assizes and get twenty
+crowns damages. Monsieur Sarcus would give them."
+
+"In any case the Shopman would give them to stop the talk it would
+make," said Godain.
+
+Vaudoyer, the former field-keeper, a man five feet six inches tall,
+with a face pitted with the small-pox and furrowed like a nut-cracker,
+kept silence with a hesitating air.
+
+"Well, you old ninny, does that ruffle you?" asked Tonsard, attracted
+by the idea of damages. "If they had broken twenty crowns' worth of my
+mother's bones we could turn it into good account; we might make a
+fine fuss for three hundred francs; Monsieur Gourdon would go to Les
+Aigues and tell them that the mother had got a broken hip--"
+
+"And break it, too," interrupted Madame Tonsard; "they do that in
+Paris."
+
+"It would cost too much," remarked Godain.
+
+"I have been too long among the people who rule us to believe that
+matters will go as you want them," said Vaudoyer at last, remembering
+his past official intercourse with the courts and the gendarmerie. "If
+it were at Soulanges, now, it might be done; Monsieur Soudry
+represents the government there, and he doesn't wish well to the
+Shopman; but if you attack the Shopman and Vatel they'll defend
+themselves viciously; they'll say, 'The woman was to blame; she had a
+tree, otherwise she would have let her bundle be examined on the
+highroad; she wouldn't have run away; if an accident happened to her
+it was through her own fault.' No, you can't trust to that plan."
+
+"The Shopman didn't resist when I sued him," said Courtecuisse; "he
+paid me at once."
+
+"I'll go to Soulanges, if you like," said Bonnebault, "and consult
+Monsieur Gourdon, the clerk of the court, and you shall know to-night
+if _there's money in it_."
+
+"You are only making an excuse to be after that big goose of a girl,
+Socquard's daughter," said Marie Tonsard, giving Bonnebault a slap on
+the shoulder that made his lungs hum.
+
+Just then a verse of an old Burgundian Christmas carol was heard:--
+
+  "One fine moment of his life
+  Was at the wedding feast;
+  He changed the water into wine,--
+  Madeira of the best."
+
+Every one recognized the vinous voice of old Fourchon, to whom the
+verse must have been peculiarly agreeable; Mouche accompanied in his
+treble tones.
+
+"Ha! they're full!" cried old Mother Tonsard to her daughter-in-law;
+"your father is as red as a grid-iron, and that chip o' the block as
+pink as vine-shoot."
+
+"Your healths!" cried the old man, "and a fine lot of scoundrels you
+are! All hail!" he said to his granddaughter, whom he spied kissing
+Bonnebault, "hail, Marie, full of vice! Satan is with three; cursed
+art thou among women, etcetera. All hail, the company present! you are
+done for, every one of you! you may just say good-bye to your sheaves.
+I being news. I always told you the rich would crush us; well now, the
+Shopman is going to have the law of you! Ha! see what it is to
+struggle against those bourgeois fellows, who have made so many laws
+since they got into power that they've a law to enforce every trick
+they play--"
+
+A violent hiccough gave a sudden turn to the ideas of the
+distinguished orator.
+
+"If Vermichel were only here I'd blow in his gullet, and he'd get an
+idea of sherry wine. Hey! what a wine it is! If I wasn't a Burgundian
+I'd be a Spaniard! It's God's own wine! the pope says mass with it
+-- Hey! I'm young again! Say, Courtecuisse! if your wife were only here
+we'd be young together. Don't tell me! Spanish wine is worth a dozen
+of boiled wine. Let's have a revolution if it's only to empty the
+cellars!"
+
+"But what's your news, papa?" said Tonsard.
+
+"There'll be no harvest for you; the Shopman has given orders to stop
+the gleaning."
+
+"Stop the gleaning!" cried the whole tavern, with one voice, in which
+the shrill tones of the four women predominated.
+
+"Yes," said Mouche, "he is going to issue an order, and Groison is to
+take it round, and post it up all over the canton. No one is to glean
+except those who have pauper certificates."
+
+"And what's more," said Fourchon, "the folks from the other districts
+won't be allowed here at all."
+
+"What's that?" cried Bonnebault, "do you mean to tell me that neither
+my grandmother nor I, nor your mother, Godain, can come here and
+glean? Here's tomfoolery for you; a pretty show of authority! Why, the
+fellow is a devil let loose from hell,--that scoundrel of a mayor!"
+
+"Shall you glean whether or no, Godain?" said Tonsard to the
+journeyman wheelwright, who was saying a few words to Catherine.
+
+"I? I've no property; I'm a pauper," he replied; "I shall ask for a
+certificate."
+
+"What did they give my father for his otter, bibi?" said Madame
+Tonsard to Mouche.
+
+Though nearly at his last gasp from an over-taxed digestion and two
+bottles of wine, Mouche, sitting on Madame Tonsard's lap, laid his
+head on his aunt's neck and whispered slyly in her ear:--
+
+"I don't know, but he has got gold. If you'll feed me high for a
+month, perhaps I can find out his hiding-place; he has one, I know
+that."
+
+"Father's got gold!" whispered La Tonsard to her husband, whose voice
+was loudest in the uproar of the excited discussion, in which all
+present took part.
+
+"Hush! here's Groison," cried the old sentinel.
+
+Perfect silence reigned in the tavern. When Groison had got to a safe
+distance, Mother Tonsard made a sign, and the discussion began again
+on the question as to whether they should persist in gleaning, as
+before, without a certificate.
+
+"You'll have to give in," said Pere Fourchon; "for the Shopman has
+gone to see the prefect and get troops to enforce the order. They'll
+shoot you like dogs,--and that's what we are!" cried the old man,
+trying to conquer the thickening of his speech produced by his
+potations of sherry.
+
+This fresh announcement, absurd as it was, made all the drinkers
+thoughtful; they really believed the government capable of
+slaughtering them without pity.
+
+"I remember just such troubles near Toulouse, when I was stationed
+there," said Bonnebault. "We were marched out, and the peasants were
+cut and slashed and arrested. Everybody laughed to see them try to
+resist cavalry. Ten were sent to the galleys, and eleven put in
+prison; the whole thing was crushed. Hey! what? why, soldiers are
+soldiers, and you are nothing but civilian beggars; they've a right,
+they think, to sabre peasants, the devil take you!"
+
+"Well, well," said Tonsard, "what is there in all that to frighten you
+like kids? What can they get out of my mother and daughters? Put 'em
+in prison? well, then they must feed them; and the Shopman can't
+imprison the whole country. Besides, prisoners are better fed at the
+king's expense than they are at their own; and they're kept warmer,
+too."
+
+"You are a pack of fools!" roared Fourchon. "Better gnaw at the
+bourgeois than attack him in front; otherwise, you'll get your backs
+broke. If you like the galleys, so be it,--that's another thing! You
+don't work as hard there as you do in the fields, true enough; but you
+don't have your liberty."
+
+"Perhaps it would be well," said Vaudoyer, who was among the more
+valiant in counsel, "if some of us risked our skins to deliver the
+neighborhood of that Languedoc fellow who has planted himself at the
+gate of the Avonne."
+
+"Do Michaud's business for him?" said Nicolas; "I'm good for that."
+
+"Things are not ripe for it," said old Fourchon. "We should risk too
+much, my children. The best way is to make ourselves look miserable
+and cry famine; then the Shopman and his wife will want to help us,
+and you'll get more out of them that way than you will by gleaning."
+
+"You are all blind moles," shouted Tonsard, "let 'em pick a quarrel
+with their law and their troops, they can't put the whole country in
+irons, and we've plenty of friends at Ville-aux-Fayes and among the
+old lords who'll sustain us."
+
+"That's true," said Courtecuisse; "none of the other land-owners
+complain, it is only the Shopman; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur
+de Ronquerolles and others, they are satisfied. When I think that if
+that cuirassier had only had the courage to let himself be killed like
+the rest I should still be happy at the gate of the Avonne, and that
+it was he that turned my life topsy-turvy, it just puts me beside
+myself."
+
+"They won't call out the troops for a Shopman who has set every one in
+the district against him," said Godain. "The fault's his own; he tried
+to ride over everybody here, and upset everything; and the government
+will just say to him, 'Hush up.'"
+
+"The government never says anything else; it can't, poor government!"
+said Fourchon, seized with a sudden tenderness for the government.
+"Yes, I pity it, that good government; it is very unlucky,--it hasn't
+a penny, like us; but that's very stupid of a government that makes
+the money itself, very stupid! Ah! if I were the government--"
+
+"But," cried Courtecuisse, "they tell me in Ville-aux-Fayes that
+Monsieur de Ronquerolles talked about our rights in the Assembly."
+
+"That's in Monsieur Rigou's newspaper," said Vaudoyer, who in his
+capacity of ex-field-keeper knew how to read and write; "I read it--"
+
+In spite of his vinous tenderness, old Fourchon, like many of the
+lower classes whose faculties are stimulated by drunkenness, was
+following, with an intelligent eye and a keen ear, this curious
+discussion which a variety of asides rendered still more curious.
+Suddenly, he stood up in the middle of the room.
+
+"Listen to the old one, he's drunk!" said Tonsard, "and when he is, he
+is twice as full of deviltry; he has his own and that of the wine--"
+
+"Spanish wine, and that trebles it!" cried Fourchon, laughing like a
+satyr. "My sons, don't butt your head straight at the thing,--you're
+too weak; go at it sideways. Lay low, play dead; the little woman is
+scared. I tell you, the thing'll come to an end before long; she'll
+leave the place, and if she does the Shopman will follow her, for
+she's his passion. That's your plan. Only, to make 'em go faster, my
+advice is to get rid of their counsellor, their support, our spy, our
+ape--"
+
+"Who's that?"
+
+"The damned abbe, of course," said Tonsard; "that hunter after sins,
+who thinks the host is food enough for us."
+
+"That's true," cried Vaudoyer; "we were happy enough till he came. We
+ought to get rid of that eater of the good God,--he's the real enemy."
+
+"Finikin," added Fourchon, using a nickname which the abbe owed to his
+prim and rather puny appearance, "might be led into temptation and
+fall into the power of some sly girl, for he fasts so much. Then if we
+could catch him in the act and drum him up with a good charivari, the
+bishop would be obliged to send him elsewhere. It would please old
+Rigou devilish well. Now if your daughter, Courtecuisse, would leave
+Auxerre--she's a pretty girl, and if she'd take to piety, she might
+save us all. Hey! ran tan plan!--"
+
+"Why don't _you_ do it?" said Godain to Catherine, in a low voice;
+"there'd be scuttles full of money to hush up the talk; and for the
+time being you'd be mistress here--"
+
+"Shall we glean, or shall we not glean? that's the point," said
+Bonnebault. "I don't care two straws for your abbe, not I; I belong to
+Conches, where we haven't a black-coat to poke up our consciences."
+
+"Look here," said Vaudoyer, "we had better go and ask Rigou, who knows
+the law, whether the Shopman can forbid gleaning, and he'll tell us if
+we've got the right of it. If the Shopman has the law on his side,
+well, then we must do as the old one says,--see about taking things
+sideways."
+
+"Blood will be spilt," said Nicolas, darkly, as he rose after drinking
+a whole bottle of wine, which Catherine drew for him in order to keep
+him silent. "If you'd only listen to me you'd down Michaud; but you
+are miserable weaklings,--nothing but poor trash!"
+
+"I'm not," said Bonnebault. "If you are all safe friends who'll keep
+your tongues between your teeth, I'll aim at the Shopman-- Hey! how
+I'd like to put a plum through his bottle; wouldn't it avenge me on
+those cursed officers?"
+
+"Tut! tut!" cried Jean-Louis Tonsard, who was supposed to be, more or
+less, Gaubertin's son, and who had just entered the tavern. This
+fellow, who was courting Rigou's pretty servant-girl, had succeeded
+his nominal father as clipper of hedges and shrubberies and other
+Tonsardial occupations. Going about among the well-to-do houses, he
+talked with masters and servants and picked up ideas which made him
+the man of the world of the family, the shrewd head. We shall
+presently see that in making love to Rigou's servant-girl, Jean-Louis
+deserved his reputation for shrewdness.
+
+"Well, what have you to say, prophet?" said the innkeeper to his son.
+
+"I say that you are playing into the hands of the rich folk," replied
+Jean-Louis. "Frighten the Aigues people to maintain your rights if you
+choose; but if you drive them out of the place and make them sell the
+estate, you are doing just what the bourgeois of the valley want, and
+it's against your own interest. If you help the bourgeois to divide
+the great estates among them, where's the national domain to be bought
+for nothing at the next Revolution? Wait till then, and you'll get
+your land without paying for it, as Rigou got his; whereas if you go
+and thrust this estate into the jaws of the rich folk of the valley,
+the rich folk will dribble it back to you impoverished and at twice
+the price they paid for it. You are working for their interests, I
+tell you; so does everybody who works for Rigou,--look at
+Courtecuisse."
+
+The policy contained in this allocution was too deep for the drunken
+heads of those present, who were all, except Courtecuisse, laying by
+their money to buy a slice of the Aigues cake. So they let Jean-Louis
+harangue, and continued, as in the Chamber of Deputies, their private
+confabs with one another.
+
+"Yes, that's so; you'll be Rigou's cats-paw!" cried Fourchon, who
+alone understood his grandson.
+
+Just then Langlume, the miller of Les Aigues, passed the tavern.
+Madame Tonsard hailed him.
+
+"Is it true," she said, "that gleaning is to be forbidden?"
+
+Langlume, a jovial white man, white with flour and dressed in
+grayish-white clothes, came up the steps and looked in. Instantly
+all the peasants became as sober as judges.
+
+"Well, my children, I am forced to answer yes, and no. None but the
+poor are to glean; but the measures they are going to take will turn
+out to your advantage."
+
+"How so?" asked Godain.
+
+"Why, they can prevent any but paupers from gleaning here," said the
+miller, winking in true Norman fashion; "but that doesn't prevent you
+from gleaning elsewhere,--unless all the mayors do as the Blangy mayor
+is doing."
+
+"Then it is true," said Tonsard, in a threatening voice.
+
+"As for me," said Bonnebault, putting his foraging-cap over one ear
+and making his hazel stick whiz in the air, "I'm off to Conches to
+warn the friends."
+
+And the Lovelace of the valley departed, whistling the tune of the
+martial song,--
+
+  "You who know the hussars of the Guard,
+  Don't you know the trombone of the regiment?"
+
+"I say, Marie! he's going a queer way to get to Conches, that friend
+of yours," cried old Mother Tonsard to her granddaughter.
+
+"He's after Aglae!" said Marie, who made one bound to the door. "I'll
+have to thrash her once for all, that baggage!" she cried, viciously.
+
+"Come, Vaudoyer," said Tonsard, "go and see Rigou, and then we shall
+know what to do; he's our oracle, and his spittle doesn't cost
+anything."
+
+"Another folly!" said Jean-Louis, in a low voice, "Rigou betrays
+everybody; Annette tells me so; she says he's more dangerous when he
+listens to you than other folks are when they bluster."
+
+"I advise you to be cautious," said Langlume. "The general has gone to
+the prefecture about your misdeeds, and Sibilet tells me he has sworn
+an oath to go to Paris and see the Chancellor of France and the King
+himself, and the whole pack of them if necessary, to get the better of
+his peasantry."
+
+"His peasantry!" shouted every one.
+
+"Ha, ha! so we don't belong to ourselves any longer?"
+
+As Tonsard asked the question, Vaudoyer left the house to see Rigou.
+
+Langlume, who had already gone out, turned on the door-step, and
+answered:--
+
+"Crowd of do-nothings! are you so rich that you think you are your own
+masters?"
+
+Though said with a laugh, the meaning contained in those words was
+understood by all present, as horses understand the cut of a whip.
+
+"Ran tan plan! masters indeed!" shouted old Fourchon. "I say, my lad,"
+he added to Nicolas, "after your performance this morning it's not my
+clarionet that you'll get between your thumb and four fingers!"
+
+"Don't plague him, or he'll make you throw up your wine by a punch in
+the stomach," said Catherine, roughly.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER XIII
+
+                   A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY USURER
+
+Strategically, Rigou's position at Blangy was that of a picket
+sentinel. He watched Les Aigues, and watched it well. The police have
+no spies comparable to those that serve hatred.
+
+When the general first came to Les Aigues Rigou apparently formed some
+plans about him which Montcornet's marriage with a Troisville put an
+end to; he seemed to have wished to patronize the new land-owner. In
+fact his intentions were so patent that Gaubertin thought best to let
+him into the secrets of the coalition against Les Aigues. Before
+accepting any part in the affair, Rigou determined, as he said, to put
+the general between two stools.
+
+One day, after the countess was fairly installed, a little wicker
+carriage painted green entered the grand courtyard of the chateau. The
+mayor, who was flanked by his mayoress, got out and came round to the
+portico on the garden side. As he did so Rigou saw Madame le comtesse
+at a window. She, however, devoted to the bishop and to religion and
+to the Abbe Brossette, sent word by Francois that "Madame was out."
+
+This act of incivility, worthy of a woman born in Russia, turned the
+face of the ex-Benedictine yellow. If the countess had seen the man
+whom the abbe told her was "a soul in hell who plunged into iniquity
+as into a bath in his efforts to cool himself," if she had seen his
+face then she might have refrained from exciting the cold, deliberate
+hatred felt by the liberals against the royalists, increased as it was
+in country-places by the jealousies of neighborhood, where the
+recollections of wounded vanity are kept constantly alive.
+
+A few details about this man and his morals will not only throw light
+on his share of the plot, called "the great affair" by his two
+associates, but it will have the merit of picturing an extremely
+curious type of man,--one of those rural existences which are peculiar
+to France, and which no writer has hitherto sought to depict. Nothing
+about this man is without significance,--neither his house, nor his
+manner of blowing the fire, nor his ways of eating; his habits,
+morals, and opinions will vividly illustrate the history of the
+valley. This renegade serves to show the utility of democracy; he is
+at once its theory and its practice, its alpha and its omega, in
+short, its "summum."
+
+Perhaps you will remember certain masters of avarice pictured in
+former scenes of this comedy of human life: in the first place the
+provincial minister, Pere Grandet of Saumur, miserly as a tiger is
+cruel; next Gobseck, the usurer, that Jesuit of gold, delighting only
+in its power, and relishing the tears of the unfortunate because gold
+produced them; then Baron Nucingen, lifting base and fraudulent money
+transactions to the level of State policy. Then, too, you may remember
+that portrait of domestic parsimony, old Hochon of Issoudun, and that
+other miser in behalf of family interests, little la Baudraye of
+Sancerre. Well, human emotions--above all, those of avarice--take on
+so many and diverse shades in the diverse centres of social existence
+that there still remains upon the stage of our comedy another miser to
+be studied, namely, Rigou,--Rigou, the miser-egoist; full of
+tenderness for his own gratifications, cold and hard to others; the
+ecclesiastical miser; the monk still a monk so far as he can squeeze
+the juice of the fruit called good-living, and becoming secular only
+to put a paw upon the public money. In the first place, let us explain
+the continual pleasure that he took in sleeping under his own roof.
+
+Blangy--by that we mean the sixty houses described by Blondet in his
+letter to Nathan--stands on a rise of land to the left of the Thune.
+As all the houses are surrounded by gardens, the village is a very
+pretty one. Some houses are built on the banks of the stream. At the
+upper end of the long rise stands the church, formerly flanked by a
+parsonage, its apse surrounded, as in many other villages, by a
+graveyard. The sacrilegious old Rigou had bought the parsonage, which
+was originally built by an excellent Catholic, Mademoiselle Choin, on
+land which she had bought for the purpose. A terraced garden, from
+which the eye looked down upon Blangy, Cerneux, and Soulanges standing
+between the two great seignorial parks, separated the late parsonage
+from the church. On its opposite side lay a meadow, bought by the last
+curate of the parish not long before his death, which the distrustful
+Rigou had since surrounded with a wall.
+
+The ex-monk and mayor having refused to sell back the parsonage for
+its original purpose, the parish was obliged to buy a house belonging
+to a peasant, which adjoined the church. It was necessary to spend
+five thousand francs to repair and enlarge it and to enclose it in a
+little garden, one wall of which was that of the sacristy, so that
+communication between the parsonage and the church was still as close
+as it ever was.
+
+These two houses, built on a line with the church, and seeming to
+belong to it by their gardens, faced a piece of open ground planted by
+trees, which might be called the square of Blangy,--all the more
+because the count had lately built, directly opposite to the new
+parsonage, a communal building intended for the mayor's office, the
+home of the field-keeper, and the quarters of that school of the
+Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, for which the Abbe Brossette had
+hitherto begged in vain. Thus, not only were the houses of the ex-monk
+and the young priest connected and yet separated by the church, but
+they were in a position to watch each other. Indeed, the whole village
+spied upon the abbe. The main street, which began at the Thune, crept
+tortuously up the hill to the church. Vineyards, the cottages of the
+peasantry, and a small grove crowned the heights.
+
+Rigou's house, the handsomest in the village, was built of the large
+rubble-stone peculiar to Burgundy, imbedded in yellow mortar smoothed
+by the trowel, which produced an uneven surface, still further broken
+here and there by projecting points of the stone, which was mostly
+black. A band of cement, in which no stones were allowed to show,
+surrounded each window with a sort of frame, where time had made some
+slight, capricious cracks, such as appear on plastered ceilings. The
+outer blinds, of a clumsy pattern, were noticeable for their color,
+which was dragon-green. A few mosses grew among the slates of the
+roof. The type is that of Burgundian homesteads; the traveller will
+see thousands like it when visiting this part of France.
+
+A double door opened upon a passage, half-way down which was the well
+of the staircase. By the entrance was the door of a large room with
+three windows looking out upon the square. The kitchen, built behind
+and beneath the staircase, was lighted from the courtyard, which was
+neatly paved with cobble-stones and entered by a porte-cochere. Such
+was the ground-floor. The first floor contained three bedrooms, above
+them a small attic chamber.
+
+A wood-shed, a coach-house, and a stable adjoined the kitchen, and
+formed two sides of a square around the courtyard. Above these rather
+flimsy buildings were lofts containing hay and grain, a fruit-room,
+and one servant's-chamber.
+
+A poultry-yard, the stable, and a pigsty faced the house across the
+courtyard.
+
+The garden, about an acre in size and enclosed by walls, was a true
+priest's garden; that is, it was full of wall-fruit and fruit-trees,
+grape-arbors, gravel-paths, closely trimmed box-trees, and square
+vegetable patches, made rich with the manure from the stable.
+
+Within, the large room, panelled in wainscot, was hung with old
+tapestry. The walnut furniture, brown with age and covered with stuffs
+embroidered in needle-work, was in keeping with the wainscot and with
+the ceiling, which was also panelled. The latter had three projecting
+beams, but these were painted, and between them the space was
+plastered. The mantel, also in walnut, surmounted by a mirror in the
+most grotesque frame, had no other ornament than two brass eggs
+standing on a marble base, each of which opened in the middle; the
+upper half when turned over showed a socket for a candle. These
+candlesticks for two lights, festooned with chains (an invention of
+the reign of Louis XV.), were becoming rare. On a green and gold
+bracket fastened to the wall opposite to the window was a common but
+excellent clock. The curtains, which squeaked upon their rods, were at
+least fifty years old; their material, of cotton in a square pattern
+like that of mattresses, alternately pink and white, came from the
+Indies. A sideboard and dinner-table completed the equipment of the
+room, which was kept with extreme nicety.
+
+At the corner of the fireplace was an immense sofa, Rigou's especial
+seat. In the angle, above a little "bonheur du jour," which served him
+as a desk, and hanging to a common screw, was a pair of bellows, the
+origin of Rigou's fortune.
+
+From this succinct description, in style like that of an auction sale,
+it will be easy to imagine that the bedrooms of Monsieur and Madame
+Rigou were limited to mere necessaries; yet it would be a mistake to
+suppose that such parsimony affected the essential excellence of those
+necessaries. For instance, the most fastidious of women would have
+slept well in Rigou's bed, with fine linen sheets, excellent
+mattresses, made luxurious by a feather-bed (doubtless bought for some
+abbe by a pious female parishioner) and protected from draughts by
+thick curtains. All the rest of Rigou's belongings were made
+comfortable for his use, as we shall see.
+
+In the first place, he had reduced his wife, who could neither read,
+write, nor cipher, to absolute obedience. After having ruled her
+deceased master, the poor creature was now the servant of her husband;
+she cooked and did the washing, with very little help from a pretty
+girl named Annette, who was nineteen years old and as much a slave to
+Rigou as her mistress, and whose wages were thirty francs a year.
+
+Tall, thin, and withered, Madame Rigou, a woman with a yellow face red
+about the cheek-bones, her head always wrapped in a colored
+handkerchief, and wearing the same dress all the year round, did not
+leave the house for two hours in a month's time, but kept herself in
+exercise by doing the hard work of a devoted servant. The keenest
+observer could not have found a trace of the fine figure, the Rubens
+coloring, the splendid lines, the superb teeth, the virginal eyes
+which first drew the attention of the Abbe Niseron to the young girl.
+The birth of her only daughter, Madame Soudry, Jr., had blighted her
+complexion, decayed her teeth, dimmed her eyes, and even caused the
+dropping of their lashes. It almost seemed as if the finger of God had
+fallen upon the wife of the priest. Like all well-to-do country
+house-wives, she liked to see her closets full of silk gowns, made and
+unmade, and jewels and laces which did her no good and only excited
+the sin of envy and a desire for her death in the minds of all the
+young women who served Rigou. She was one of those beings, half-woman,
+half-animal, who are born to live by instinct. This ex-beautiful
+Arsene was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe
+Niseron would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circumstance
+which prompted it, and which we give here for the edification of the
+vast tribe of expectant heirs.
+
+Madame Niseron, the wife of the old republican sexton, always paid the
+greatest attention to her husband's uncle, the priest of Blangy; the
+forty or fifty thousand francs soon to be inherited from the old man
+of seventy would put the family of his only nephew into a condition of
+affluence which she impatiently awaited, for besides her only son (the
+father of La Pechina) Madame Niseron had a charming little daughter,
+lively and innocent,--one of those beings that seem perfected only
+because they are to die, which she did at the age of fourteen from
+"pale color," the popular name for chlorosis among the peasantry. The
+darling of the parsonage, where the child fluttered about her great
+uncle the abbe as she did in her home, bringing clouds and sunshine
+with her, she grew to love Mademoiselle Arsene, the pretty servant
+whom the old abbe engaged in 1789. Arsene was the niece of his
+housekeeper, whose place the girl took by request of the latter on her
+deathbed.
+
+In 1791, just about the time that the Abbe Niseron offered his house
+as an asylum to Rigou and his brother Jean, the little girl played one
+of her mischievous but innocent tricks. She was playing with Arsene
+and some other children at a game which consists in hiding an object
+which the rest seek, and crying out, "You burn!" or "You freeze!"
+according as the searchers approach or leave the hidden article.
+Little Genevieve took it into her head to hide the bellows in Arsene's
+bed. The bellows could not be found, and the game came to an end;
+Genevieve was taken home by her mother and forgot to put the bellows
+back on the nail. Arsene and her aunt searched more than a week for
+them; then they stopped searching and managed to do without them, the
+old abbe blowing his fire with an air-cane made in the days when air-
+canes were the fashion,--a fashion which was no doubt introduced by
+some courtier of the reign of Henri III. At last, about a month before
+her death, the housekeeper, after a dinner at which the Abbe Mouchon,
+the Niseron family, and the curate of Soulanges were present, returned
+to her jeremiades about the loss of the bellows.
+
+"Why! they've been these two weeks in Arsene's bed!" cried the little
+one, with a peal of laughter. "Great lazy thing! if she had taken the
+trouble to make her bed she would have found them."
+
+As it was 1791 everybody laughed; but a dead silence succeeded the
+laugh.
+
+"There is nothing laughable in that," said the housekeeper; "since I
+have been ill Arsene sleeps in my room."
+
+In spite of this explanation the Abbe Niseron looked thunderbolts at
+Madame Niseron and his nephew, thinking they were plotting mischief
+against him. The housekeeper died. Rigou contrived to work up the
+abbe's resentment to such a pitch that he made a will disinheriting
+Jean-Francois Niseron in favor of Arsene Pichard.
+
+In 1823 Rigou, perhaps out of a sense of gratitude, still blew the
+fire with an air-cane, and left the bellows hanging to the screw.
+
+Madame Niseron, idolizing her daughter, did not long survive her.
+Mother and child died in 1794. The old abbe, too, was dead, and
+citizen Rigou took charge of Arsene's affairs by marrying her. A
+former convert in the monastery, attached to Rigou as a dog is to his
+master, became the groom, gardener, herdsman, valet, and steward of
+the sensual Harpagon. Arsene Rigou, the daughter, married in 1821
+without dowry to the prosecuting-attorney, inheriting something of her
+mother's rather vulgar beauty, together with the crafty mind of her
+father.
+
+Now about sixty-seven years of age, Rigou had never been ill in his
+life, and nothing seemed able to lessen his aggressively good health.
+Tall, lean, with brown circles round his eyes, the lids of which were
+nearly black, any one who saw him of a morning, when as he dressed he
+exposed the wrinkled, red, and granulated skin of his neck, would have
+compared him to a condor,--all the more because his long nose, sharp
+at the tip, increased the likeness by its sanguineous color. His head,
+partly bald, would have frightened phrenologists by the shape of its
+skull, which was like an ass's backbone, an indication of despotic
+will. His grayish eyes, half-covered by filmy, red-veined lids, were
+predestined to aid hypocrisy. Two scanty locks of hair of an undecided
+color overhung the large ears, which were long and without rim, a sure
+sign of cruelty, but cruelty of the moral nature only, unless where it
+means actual insanity. The mouth, very broad, with thin lips,
+indicated a sturdy eater and a determined drinker by the drop of its
+corners, which turned downward like two commas, from which drooled
+gravy when he ate and saliva when he talked. Heliogabalus must have
+been like this.
+
+His dress, which never varied, consisted of a long blue surtout with a
+military collar, a black cravat, with waistcoat and trousers of black
+cloth. His shoes, very thick soled, had iron nails outside, and inside
+woollen linings knit by his wife in the winter evenings. Annette and
+her mistress also knit the master's stockings. Rigou's name was
+Gregoire.
+
+Though this sketch gives some idea of the man's character, no one can
+imagine the point to which, in his private and unthwarted life, the
+ex-Benedictine had pushed the science of selfishness, good living, and
+sensuality. In the first place, he dined alone, waited upon by his
+wife and Annette, who themselves dined with Jean in the kitchen, while
+the master digested his meal and disposed of his wine as he read "the
+news."
+
+In the country the special names of journals are never mentioned; they
+are all called by the general name of "the news."
+
+Rigou's dinner, like his breakfast and supper, was always of choice
+delicacies, cooked with the art which distinguishes a priest's
+housekeeper from all other cooks. Madame Rigou made the butter herself
+twice a week. Cream was a concomitant of many sauces. The vegetables
+came at a jump, as it were, from their frames to the saucepan.
+Parisians, who are accustomed to eat the fruits of the earth after
+they have had a second ripening in the sun of a city, infected by the
+air of the streets, fermenting in close shops, and watered from time
+to time by the market-women to give them a deceitful freshness, have
+little idea of the exquisite flavors of really fresh produce, to which
+nature has lent fugitive but powerful charms when eaten as it were
+alive.
+
+The butcher of Soulanges brought his best meat under fear of losing
+Rigou's custom. The poultry, raised on the premises, was of the finest
+quality.
+
+This system of secret pampering embraced everything in which Rigou was
+personally concerned. Though the slippers of the knowing Thelemist
+were of stout leather they were lined with lamb's wool. Though his
+coat was of rough cloth it did not touch his skin, for his shirt,
+washed and ironed at home, was of the finest Frisian linen. His wife,
+Annette, and Jean drank the common wine of the country, the wine he
+reserved from his own vineyards; but in his private cellar, as well
+stocked as the cellars of Belgium, the finest vintages of Burgundy
+rubbed sides with those of Bordeaux, Champagne, Roussillon, not to
+speak of Spanish and Rhine wines, all bought ten years in advance of
+use and bottled by Brother Jean. The liqueurs in that cellar were
+those of the Isles, and came originally from Madame Amphoux. Rigou had
+laid in a supply to last him the rest of his days, at the national
+sale of a chateau in Burgundy.
+
+The ex-monk ate and drank like Louis XIV. (one of the greatest
+consumers of food and drink ever known), which reveals the costs of a
+life that was more than voluptuous. Careful and very shrewd in
+managing his secret prodigalities, he disputed all purchases as only
+churchmen can dispute. Instead of taking infinite precautions against
+being cheated, the sly monk kept patterns and samples, had the
+agreements reduced to writing, and warned those who forwarded his
+wines or his provisions that if they fell short of the mark in any way
+he should refuse to accept their consignments.
+
+Jean, who had charge of the fruit-room, was trained to keep fresh the
+finest fruits grown in the department; so that Rigou ate pears and
+apples and sometimes grapes, at Easter.
+
+No prophet regarded as a God was ever more blindly obeyed than was
+Rigou in his own home. A mere motion of his black eyelashes could
+plunge his wife, Annette, and Jean into the deepest anxiety. He held
+his three slaves by the multiplicity of their many duties, which were
+like a chain in his hands. These poor creatures were under the
+perpetual yoke of some ordered duty, with an eye always on them; but
+they had come to take a sort of pleasure in accomplishing these tasks,
+and did not suffer under them. All three had the comfort and
+well-being of that one man before their minds as the sole end and
+object of all their thoughts.
+
+Annette was (since 1795) the tenth pretty girl in Rigou's service, and
+he expected to go down to his grave with relays of such servants.
+Brought to him at sixteen, she would be sent away at nineteen. All
+these girls, carefully chosen at Auxerre, Clamecy, or in the Morvan,
+were enticed by the promise of future prosperity; but Madame Rigou
+persisted in living. So at the end of every three years some quarrel,
+usually brought about by the insolence of the servant to the poor
+mistress, caused their dismissal.
+
+Annette, who was a picture of delicate beauty, ingenuous and
+sparkling, deserved to be a duchess. Rigou knew nothing of the love
+affair between her and Jean-Louis Tonsard, which proves that he had
+let himself be fooled by the girl,--the only one of his many servants
+whose ambition had taught her to flatter the lynx as the only way to
+blind him.
+
+This uncrowned Louis XV. did not keep himself wholly to his pretty
+Annette. Being the mortgagee of lands bought by peasants who were
+unable to pay for them, he kept a harem in the valley, from Soulanges
+to five miles beyond Conches on the road to La Brie, without making
+other payments than "extension of time," for those fugitive pleasures
+which eat into the fortunes of so many old men.
+
+This luxurious life, a life like that of Bouret, cost Rigou almost
+nothing. Thanks to his white slaves, he could cut and mow down and
+gather in his wood, hay, and grain. To the peasant manual labor is a
+small matter, especially if it serves to postpone the payment of
+interest due. And so Rigou, while requiring little premiums on each
+month's delay, squeezed a great deal of manual labor out of his
+debtors,--positive drudgery, to which they submitted thinking they
+gave little because nothing left their pockets. Rigou sometimes
+obtained in this way more than the principal of a debt.
+
+Deep as a monk, silent as a Benedictine in the throes of writing
+history, sly as a priest, deceitful as all misers, carefully keeping
+within the limits of the law, the man might have been Tiberius in
+Rome, Richelieu under Louis XIII., or Fouche, had the ambition seized
+him to go to the Convention; but, instead of all that, Rigou had the
+common sense to remain a Lucullus without ostentation, in other words,
+a parsimonious voluptuary. To occupy his mind he indulged a hatred
+manufactured out of the whole cloth. He harassed the Comte de
+Montcornet. He worked the peasants like puppets by hidden wires, the
+handling of which amused him as though it were a game of chess where
+the pawns were alive, the knights caracoled, the bishops, like
+Fourchon, gabbled, the feudal castles shone in the sun, and the queen
+maliciously checkmated the king. Every day, when he got out of bed and
+saw from his window the proud towers of Les Aigues, the chimneys of
+the pavilions, and the noble gates, he said to himself: "They shall
+fall! I'll dry up the brooks, I'll chop down the woods." But he had
+two victims in mind, a chief one and a lesser one. Though he meditated
+the dismemberment of the chateau, the apostate also intended to make
+an end of the Abbe Brossette by pin-pricks.
+
+To complete the portrait of the ex-priest it will suffice to add that
+he went to mass regretting that his wife still lived, and expressed
+the desire to be reconciled with the Church as soon as he became a
+widower. He bowed deferentially to the Abbe Brossette whenever he met
+him, and spoke to him courteously and without heat. As a general thing
+all men who belong to the Church, or who have come out of it, have the
+patience of insects; they owe this to the obligation they have been
+under, ecclesiastically, to preserve decorum,--a training which has
+been lacking for the last twenty years to the vast majority of the
+French nation, even those who think themselves well-bred. All the
+monks which the Revolution brought out of their monasteries and forced
+into business, public or private, showed in their coldness and reserve
+the great advantage which ecclesiastical discipline gives to the sons
+of the Church, even those who desert her.
+
+Gaubertin had understood Rigou from the days when the Abbe Niseron
+made his will and the ex-monk married the heiress; he fathomed the
+craft hidden behind the jaundiced face of that accomplished hypocrite;
+and he made himself the man's fellow-worshipper before the altar of
+the Golden Calf. When the banking-house of Leclercq was first started
+he advised Rigou to put fifty thousand francs into it, guaranteeing
+their security himself. Rigou was all the more desirable as an
+investor, or sleeping partner, because he drew no interest but allowed
+his capital to accumulate. At the period of which we write it amounted
+to over a hundred thousand francs, although in 1816 he had taken out
+one hundred and eighty thousand for investment in the Public Funds,
+from which he derived an income of seventeen thousand francs. Lupin
+the notary had cognizance of at least one hundred thousand francs
+which Rigou had lent on small mortgages upon good estates. Ostensibly,
+Rigou derived about fourteen thousand francs a year from landed
+property actually owned by him. But as to his amassed hoard, it was
+represented by an "x" which no rule of equations could evolve, just as
+the devil alone knew the secret schemes he plotted with Langlume.
+
+This dangerous usurer, who proposed to live a score of years longer,
+had established fixed rules to work upon. He lent nothing to a peasant
+who bought less than seven acres, and who could not pay one-half of
+the purchase-money down. Rigou well understood the defects of the law
+of dispossession when applied to small holdings, and the danger both
+to the Public Treasury and to land-owners of the minute parcelling out
+of the soil. How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of
+vines when he owns only five? The bird's-eye view of self-interest is
+always twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative
+body. What a lesson for a nation! Law will ever emanate from one
+brain, that of a man of genius, and not from the nine hundred
+legislative heads, which, great as they may be in themselves, are
+belittled and lost in a crowd. Rigou's law contains the essential
+element which has yet to be found and introduced into public law to
+put an end to the absurd spectacle of landed property reduced to
+halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths,--as in the district of
+Argenteuil, where there are thirty thousand plots of land.
+
+Such operations as those Rigou was concerned in require extensive
+collusion, like those we have seen existing in this arrondissement.
+Lupin, the notary, whom Rigou employed to draw at least one third of
+the deeds annually entrusted to his notarial office, was devoted to
+him. This shark could thus include in the mortgage note (signed always
+in presence of the wife, when the borrower was married) the amount of
+the illegal interest. The peasant, delighted to feel he had to pay
+only his five per cent interest annually, always imagined he should be
+able to meet the payment by working doubly hard or by improving the
+land and getting double returns upon it.
+
+Hence the deceitful hopes excited by what imbecile economists call
+"small farming,"--a political blunder to which we owe such mistakes as
+sending French money to Germany to buy horses which our own land had
+ceased to breed; a blunder which before long will reduce the raising
+of cattle until meat will be unattainable not only by the people, but
+by the lower middle classes (see "Le Cure de Village.")
+
+So, not a little sweat bedewed men's brows between Conches and
+Ville-aux-Fayes to Rigou's profit, all being willing to give it; whereas
+the labor dearly paid for by the general, the only man who did spend
+money in the district, brought him curses and hatred, which were
+showered upon him simply because he was rich. How could such facts be
+understood unless we had previously taken that rapid glance at the
+Mediocracy. Fourchon was right; the middle classes now held the
+position of the former lords. The small land-owners, of whom
+Courtecuisse is a type, were tenants in mortmain of a Tiberius in the
+valley of the Avonne, just as, in Paris, traders without money are the
+peasantry of the banking system.
+
+Soudry followed Rigou's example from Soulanges to a distance of
+fifteen miles beyond Ville-aux-Fayes. These two usurers shared the
+district between them.
+
+Gaubertin, whose rapacity was in a higher sphere, not only did not
+compete against that of his associates, but he prevented all other
+capital in Ville-aux-Fayes from being employed in the same fruitful
+manner. It is easy to imagine what immense influence this triumvirate
+--Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin--wielded in election periods over
+electors whose fortunes depended on their good-will.
+
+Hate, intelligence, and means at command, such were the three sides of
+the terrible triangle which describes the general's closest enemy, the
+spy ever watching Les Aigues,--a shark having constant dealings with
+sixty to eighty small land-owners, relations or connections of the
+peasantry, who feared him as such men always fear their creditor.
+
+Rigou was in his way another Tonsard. The one throve on thefts from
+nature, the other waxed fat on legal plunder. Both liked to live well.
+It was the same nature in two species,--the one natural, the other
+whetted by his training in a cloister.
+
+It was about four o'clock when Vaudoyer left the tavern of the
+Grand-I-Vert to consult the former mayor. Rigou was at dinner. Finding
+the front door locked, Vaudoyer looked above the window blinds and
+called out:--
+
+"Monsieur Rigou, it is I,--Vaudoyer."
+
+Jean came round from the porte-cochere and said to Vaudoyer:--
+
+"Come into the garden; Monsieur has company."
+
+The company was Sibilet, who, under pretext of discussing the verdict
+Brunet had just handed in, was talking to Rigou of quite other
+matters. He had found the usurer finishing his dessert. On a square
+dinner-table covered with a dazzling white cloth--for, regardless of
+his wife and Annette who did the washing, Rigou exacted clean
+table-linen every day--the steward noted strawberries, apricots,
+peaches, figs, and almonds, all the fruits of the season in profusion,
+served in white porcelain dishes on vine-leaves as daintily as at Les
+Aigues.
+
+Seeing Sibilet, Rigou told him to run the bolts of the inside
+double-doors, which were added to the other doors as much to stifle
+sounds as to keep out the cold air, and asked him what pressing
+business brought him there in broad daylight when it was so much safer
+to confer together at night.
+
+"The Shopman talks of going to Paris to see the Keeper of the Seals;
+he is capable of doing you a great deal of harm; he may ask for the
+dismissal of your son-in-law, and the removal of the judges at
+Ville-aux-Fayes, especially after reading the verdict just rendered in
+your favor. He has turned at bay; he is shrewd, and he has an adviser
+in that abbe, who is quite able to tilt with you and Gaubertin. Priests
+are powerful. Monseigneur the bishop thinks a great deal of the Abbe
+Brossette. Madame la comtesse talks of going herself to her cousin the
+prefect, the Comte de Casteran, about Nicolas. Michaud begins to see
+into our game."
+
+"You are frightened," said Rigou, softly, casting a look on Sibilet
+which suspicion made less impassive than usual, and which was
+therefore terrific. "You are debating whether it would not be better
+on the whole to side with the Comte de Montcornet."
+
+"I don't see where I am to get the four thousand francs I save
+honestly and invest every year, after you have cut up and sold Les
+Aigues," said Sibilet, shortly. "Monsieur Gaubertin has made me many
+fine promises; but the crisis is coming on; there will be fighting,
+surely. Promising before victory and keeping a promise after it are
+two very different things."
+
+"I will talk to him about it," replied Rigou, imperturbably. "Meantime
+this is what I should say to you if I were in his place: 'For the last
+five years you have taken Monsieur Rigou four thousand francs a year,
+and that worthy man gives you seven and a half per cent; which makes
+your property in his hands at this moment over twenty-seven thousand
+francs, as you have not drawn the interest. But there exists a private
+signed agreement between you and Rigou, and the Shopman will dismiss
+his steward whenever the Abbe Brossette lays that document before his
+eyes; the abbe will be able to do so after receiving an anonymous
+letter which will inform him of your double-dealing. You would
+therefore do better for yourself by keeping well with us instead of
+clamoring for your pay in advance,--all the more because Monsieur
+Rigou, who is not legally bound to give you seven and a half per cent
+and the interest on your interest, will make you in court a legal
+tender of your twenty thousand francs, and you will not be able to
+touch that money until your suit, prolonged by legal trickery, shall
+be decided by the court at Ville-aux-Fayes. But if you act wisely you
+will find that when Monsieur Rigou gets possession of your pavilion at
+Les Aigues, you will have very nearly thirty thousand francs in his
+hands and thirty thousand more which the said Rigou may entrust to
+you,--which will be all the more advantageous to you then because the
+peasantry will have flung them themselves upon the estate of Les
+Aigues, divided into small lots like the poverty of the world.' That's
+what Monsieur Gaubertin might say to you. As for me, I have nothing to
+say, for it is none of my business. Gaubertin and I have our own
+quarrel with that son of the people who is ashamed of his own father,
+and we follow our own course. If my friend Gaubertin feels the need of
+using you, I don't; I need no one, for everybody is at my command. As
+to the Keeper of the Seals, that functionary is often changed; whereas
+we--WE are always here, and can bide our time."
+
+"Well, I've warned you," returned Sibilet, feeling like a donkey under
+a pack-saddle.
+
+"Warned me of what?" said Rigou, artfully.
+
+"Of what the Shopman is going to do," answered the steward, humbly.
+"He started for the Prefecture in a rage."
+
+"Let him go! If the Montcornets and their kind didn't use wheels, what
+would become of the carriage-makers?"
+
+"I shall bring you three thousand francs to-night," said Sibilet, "but
+you ought to make over some of your maturing mortgages to me,--say,
+one or two that would secure to me good lots of land."
+
+"Well, there's that of Courtecuisse. I myself want to be easy on him
+because he is the best shot in the canton; but if I make over his
+mortgage to you, you will seem to be harassing him on the Shopman's
+account, and that will be killing two birds with one stone; when
+Courtecuisse finds himself a beggar, like Fourchon, he'll be capable
+of anything. Courtecuisse has ruined himself on the Bachelerie; he has
+cultivated all the land, and trained fruit on the walls. The little
+property is now worth four thousand francs, and the count will gladly
+pay you that to get possession of the three acres that jut right into
+his land. If Courtecuisse were not such an idle hound he could have
+paid his interest with the game he might have killed there."
+
+"Well, transfer the mortgage to me, and I'll make my butter out of it;
+the count shall buy the three acres, and I shall get the house and
+garden for nothing."
+
+"What are you going to give me out of it?"
+
+"Good heavens! you'd milk an ox!" exclaimed Sibilet,--"when I have
+just done you such a service, too. I have at last got the Shopman to
+enforce the laws about gleaning--"
+
+"Have you, my dear fellow?" said Rigou, who a few days earlier had
+suggested this means of exasperating the peasantry to Sibilet, telling
+him to advise the general to try it. "Then we've got him; he's lost!
+But it isn't enough to hold him with one string; we must wind it round
+and round him like a roll of tobacco. Slip the bolts of the door, my
+lad; tell my wife to bring my coffee and the liqueurs, and tell Jean
+to harness up. I'm off to Soulanges; will see you to-night!--Ah!
+Vaudoyer, good afternoon," said the late mayor as his former
+field-keeper entered the room. "What's the news?"
+
+Vaudoyer related the talk which had just taken place at the tavern,
+and asked Rigou's opinion as to the legality of the rules which the
+general thought of enforcing.
+
+"He has the law with him," said Rigou, curtly. "We have a hard
+landlord; the Abbe Brossette is a malignant priest; he advises all
+such measures because you don't go to mass, you miserable unbelievers.
+I go; there's a God, I tell you. You peasants will have to bear
+everything, for the Shopman will always get the better of you--"
+
+"We shall glean," said Vaudoyer, in that determined tone which
+characterizes Burgundians.
+
+"Without a certificate of pauperism?" asked the usurer. "They say the
+Shopman has gone to the Prefecture to ask for troops so as to force
+you to keep the law."
+
+"We shall glean as we have always gleaned," repeated Vaudoyer.
+
+"Well, glean then! Monsieur Sarcus will decide whether you have the
+right to," said Rigou, seeming to promise the help of the justice of
+the peace.
+
+"We shall glean, and we shall do it in force, or Burgundy won't be
+Burgundy any longer," said Vaudoyer. "If the gendarmes have sabres we
+have scythes, and we'll see what comes of it!"
+
+At half-past four o'clock the great green gate of the former parsonage
+turned on its hinges, and the bay horse, led by Jean, was brought
+round to the front door. Madame Rigou and Annette came out on the
+steps and looked at the little wicker carriage, painted green, with a
+leathern hood, where their lord and master was comfortably seated on
+good cushions.
+
+"Don't be late home, monsieur," said Annette, with a little pout.
+
+The village folk, already informed of the measures the general
+proposed to take, were at their doors or standing in the main street
+as Rigou drove by, believing that he was going to Soulanges in their
+defence.
+
+"Well, Madame Courtecuisse, so our mayor is on his way to protect us,"
+remarked an old woman as she knitted; the question of depredating in
+the forest was of great interest to her, for her husband sold the
+stolen wood at Soulanges.
+
+"Ah! the good man, his heart bleeds to see the way we are treated; he
+is as unhappy as we are about it," replied the poor woman, who
+trembled at the very name of her husband's creditor, and praised him
+out of fear.
+
+"And he himself, too,--they've shamefully ill-used him! Good-day,
+Monsieur Rigou," said the old knitter to the usurer, who bowed to her
+and to his debtor's wife.
+
+As Rigou crossed the Thune, fordable at all seasons, Tonsard came out
+of the tavern and met him on the high-road.
+
+"Well, Pere Rigou," he said, "so the Shopman means to make dogs of
+us?"
+
+"We'll see about that," said the usurer, whipping up his horse.
+
+"He'll protect us," said Tonsard, turning to a group of women and
+children who were near him.
+
+"Rigou is thinking as much about you as a cook thinks of the gudgeons
+he is frying in his pan," called out Fourchon.
+
+"Take the clapper out of your throat when you are drunk," said Mouche,
+pulling his grandfather by the blouse, and tumbling him down on a bank
+under a poplar tree. "If that hound of a mayor heard you say that,
+he'd never buy any more of your tales."
+
+The truth was that Rigou was hurrying to Soulanges in consequence of
+the warning given him by the steward of Les Aigues, which, in his
+heart, he regarded as threatening the secret coalition of the valley.
+
+
+
+
+                              PART II
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER I
+
+                 THE LEADING SOCIETY OF SOULANGES
+
+About six kilometres (speaking legally) from Blangy, and at the same
+distance from Ville-aux-Fayes, on an elevation radiating from the long
+hillside at the foot of which flows the Avonne, stands the little town
+of Soulanges, surnamed La Jolie, with, perhaps, more right to that
+title than Mantes.
+
+At the foot of the hill, the Thune broadens over a clay bottom to a
+space of some seventy acres, at the end of which the Soulanges mills,
+placed on numerous little islets, present as graceful a group of
+buildings as any landscape architect could devise. After watering the
+park of Soulanges, where it feeds various other streams and artificial
+lakes, the Thune falls into the Avonne through a fine broad channel.
+
+The chateau of Soulanges, rebuilt under Louis XIV. from designs of
+Jules Mansart, and one of the finest in Burgundy, stands facing the
+town; so that Soulanges and its chateau mutually present to each other
+a charming and even elegant vista. The main road winds between the
+town and the pond, called by the country people, rather pompously, the
+lake of Soulanges.
+
+The little town is one of those natural compositions which are
+extremely rare in France, where _prettiness_ of its own kind is
+absolutely wanting. Here you would indeed find, as Blondet said in his
+letter, the charm of Switzerland, the prettiness of the environs of
+Neuf-chatel; while the bright vineyards which encircle Soulanges
+complete the resemblance,--leaving out, be it said, the Alps and the
+Jura. The streets, placed one above another on the slope of the hill,
+have but few houses; for each house stands in its own garden, which
+produces a mass of greenery rarely seen in a town. The roofs, red or
+blue, rising among flower-gardens, trees, and trellised terraces,
+present an harmonious variety of aspects.
+
+The church, an old Middle-Age structure, built of stone, thanks to the
+munificence of the lords of Soulanges, who reserved for themselves
+first a chapel near the chancel, then a crypt as their necropolis,
+has, by way of portal, an immense arcade, like that of the church at
+Lonjumeau, and is bordered by flower-beds adorned with statues, and
+flanked on either side by columns with niches, which terminate in
+spires. This portal, often seen in churches of the same period when
+chance has saved them from the ravages of Calvinism, is surmounted by
+a triglyph, above which stands a statue of the Virgin holding the
+infant Jesus. The sides of the structure are externally of five
+arches, defined by stone ribs and lighted by windows with small panes.
+The apse rests on arched abutments that are worthy of a cathedral. The
+clock-tower, placed in a transept of the cross, is square and
+surmounted by a belfry. The church can be seen from a great distance,
+for it stands at the top of the great square, at the lower end of
+which the high-road passes through the town.
+
+This square, large for the size of the town, is surrounded by very
+original buildings, all of different epochs. Many, half-wood,
+half-brick, with their timbers faced with slate, date back to the Middle
+Ages. Others, of stone, with balconies, show the form of gable so dear
+to our ancestors, which belongs to the twelfth century. Several charm
+the eye with those old projecting beams, carved with grotesque faces,
+which form the roof of a sort of shed, and recall the days when the
+middle classes were exclusively commercial. The finest house among
+them was that of the chief magistrate of former days,--a house with a
+sculptured front on a line with the church, to which it forms a fine
+accompaniment. Sold as national property, it was bought in by the
+commune, which turned it into a town-hall and court-house, where
+Monsieur Sarcus had presided ever since the establishment of municipal
+judges.
+
+This slight sketch will give an idea of the square of Soulanges,
+adorned in the centre with a charming fountain brought from Italy in
+1520 by the Marechal de Soulanges, which was not unworthy of a great
+capital. An unfailing jet of water, coming from a spring higher up the
+hill, was shed by four Cupids in white marble, bearing shells in their
+arms and baskets of grapes upon their heads.
+
+Literary travellers who may pass this way (should any such follow
+Emile Blondet) might imagine the spot to have inspired Moliere and the
+Spanish drama, which held its footing so long on French boards,
+showing that comedy is native to warm countries where so much of life
+is passed in the public streets. The square of Soulanges is all the
+more a reminder of that classic stage because the two principal
+streets, opening just on a line with the fountain, afford the exit and
+entrances so necessary for the dramatic masters and valets whose
+business it is either to meet or to avoid each other. At the corner of
+one of these streets, called the rue de la Fontaine, shone the
+notarial escutcheon of Maitre Lupin. The houses of Messieurs Sarcus,
+Guerbet the collector, Brunet, Gourdon, clerk of the court, and that
+of his brother the doctor, also that of old Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled,
+the keeper of the forests and streams,--all these houses, kept with
+extreme neatness by their owners, who held firmly to the flattering
+surname of their native town, stand in the neighborhood of the square
+and form the aristocratic quarter of Soulanges.
+
+The house of Madame Soudry--for the powerful individuality of
+Mademoiselle Laguerre's former waiting-maid took the lead of her
+husband in the community--was modern, having been built by a rich
+wine-merchant, born in Soulanges, who, after making his money in
+Paris, returned there in 1793 to buy wheat for his native town. He was
+slain as an "accapareur," a monopolist, by the populace, instigated by
+a mason, the uncle of Godain, with whom he had had some quarrel about
+the building of his ambitious house. The settlement of his estate,
+sharply contested by collateral heirs, dragged slowly along until, in
+1798, Soudry, who had then returned to Soulanges, was able to buy the
+wine-merchant's palace for three thousand francs in specie. He then
+let it, in the first instance, to the government for the headquarters
+of the gendarmerie. In 1811 Mademoiselle Cochet, whom Soudry consulted
+about all his affairs, strongly objected to the renewal of the lease,
+making the house uninhabitable, she declared, with barracks. The town
+of Soulanges, assisted by the department, then erected a building for
+the gendarmerie in a street running at right angles from the town-hall.
+Thereupon Soudry cleaned up his house and restored its primitive
+lustre, not a little dimmed by the stabling of horses and the
+occupancy of gendarmes.
+
+The house, only one story high, with projecting windows in the roof,
+has a view on three sides; one to the square, another to a lake, the
+third to a garden. The fourth side looks on a courtyard which
+separates the Soudrys from the adjoining house occupied by a grocer
+named Wattebled, a man of the SECOND-CLASS society of Soulanges,
+father of the beautiful Madame Plissoud, of whom we shall presently
+have occasion to speak.
+
+All little towns have a renowned beauty, just as they have a Socquard
+and a Cafe de la Paix.
+
+It will be apparent to every one that the frontage of the Soudry
+mansion on the lake must have a terraced garden confined by a stone
+balustrade which overlooks both the lake and the main road. A flight
+of steps leads down from the terrace to the road, and on it an
+orange-tree, a pomegranate, a myrtle, and other ornamental shrubs are
+placed, necessitating a greenhouse. On the side toward the square the
+house is entered from a portico raised several steps above the level
+of the street. According to the custom of small towns the gate of the
+courtyard, used only for the service of the house or for any unusual
+arrival, was seldom opened. Visitors, who mostly came on foot, entered
+by the portico.
+
+The style of the Hotel Soudry is plain. The courses are indicated by
+projecting lines; the windows are framed by mouldings alternately
+broad and slender, like those of the Gabriel and Perronnet pavilion in
+the place Louis XV. These ornaments in so small a town give a certain
+solid and monumental air to the building which has become celebrated.
+
+Opposite to this house, in another angle of the square stands the
+famous Cafe de la Paix, the characteristics of which, together with
+the fascinations of its Tivoli, will require, somewhat later, a less
+succinct description than that we have given of the Soudry mansion.
+
+Rigou very seldom came to Soulanges; everybody was in the habit of
+going to him,--Lupin and Gaubertin, Soudry and Gendrin,--so much were
+they afraid of him. But we shall presently understand why any educated
+man, such as the ex-Benedictine, would have done as Rigou did, and
+kept away from the little town, after reading the following sketch of
+the personages who composed what was called in those parts "the
+leading society of Soulanges."
+
+Of its principal figures, the most original, as you have already
+suspected, was that of Madame Soudry, whose personality, to be duly
+rendered, needs a minute and careful brush.
+
+Madame Soudry, respectfully imitating Mademoiselle Laguerre, began by
+allowing herself a "mere touch of rouge"; but this delicate tint had
+changed through force of habit to those vermilion patches
+picturesquely described by our ancestors as "carriage-wheels." The
+wrinkles growing deeper and deeper, it occurred to the ex-lady's-maid
+to fill them up with paint. Her forehead becoming unduly yellow, and
+the temples too shiny, she "laid on" a little white, and renewed the
+veins of her youth with a tracery of blue. All this color gave an
+exaggerated liveliness to her eyes which were already tricksy enough,
+so that the mask of her face would seem to a stranger even more than
+fantastic, though her friends and acquaintances, accustomed to this
+fictitious brilliancy, actually declared her handsome.
+
+This ungainly creature, always decolletee, showed a bosom and a pair
+of shoulders that were whitened and polished by the same process
+employed upon her face; happily, for the sake of exhibiting her
+magnificent laces, she partially veiled the charms of these chemical
+products. She always wore the body of her dress stiffened with
+whalebone and made in a long point and garnished with knots of ribbon,
+even on the point! Her petticoats gave forth a creaking noise,--so
+much did the silk and the furbelows abound.
+
+This attire, which deserves the name of apparel (a word that before
+long will be inexplicable), was, on the evening in question, of costly
+brocade,--for Madame Soudry possessed over a hundred dresses, each
+richer than the others, the remains of Mademoiselle Laguerre's
+enormous and splendid wardrobe, made over to fit Madame Soudry in the
+last fashion of the year 1808. Her blond wig, frizzed and powdered,
+sustained a superb cap with knots of cherry satin ribbon matching
+those on her dress. If you will kindly imagine beneath this
+ultra-coquettish cap the face of a monkey of extreme ugliness, on which
+a flat nose, fleshless as that of Death, is separated by a strong hairy
+line from a mouth filled with false teeth, whence issue sounds like
+the confused clacking of hunting-horns, you will have some difficulty
+in understanding why the leading society of Soulanges (all the town,
+in fact) thought this quasi-queen a beauty,--unless, indeed, you
+remember the succinct statement recently made "ex professo," by one of
+the cleverest women of our time, on the art of making her sex
+beautiful by surrounding accessories.
+
+As to accessories, in the first place, Madame Soudry was surrounded by
+the magnificent gifts accumulated by her late mistress, which the
+ex-Benedictine called "fructus belli." Then she made the most of her
+ugliness by exaggerating it, and by assuming that indescribable air
+and manner which belongs only to Parisian women, the secret of which
+is known even to the most vulgar among them,--who are always more or
+less mimics. She laced tight, wore an enormous bustle, also diamond
+earrings, and her fingers were covered with rings. At the top of her
+corsage, between two mounds of flesh well plastered with pearl-white,
+shone a beetle made of topaz with a diamond head, the gift of dear
+mistress,--a jewel renowned throughout the department. Like the late
+dear mistress, she wore short sleeves and bare arms, and flirted an
+ivory fan, painted by Boucher with two little rose-diamonds in the
+handle.
+
+When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true
+eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of
+which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe. When she walked
+about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar,
+might have thought her one of Watteau's dames.
+
+In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined
+with silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots
+of the good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of
+lilies upheld by Cupids--in this salon, filled with furniture in
+gilded wood of the "pied de biche" pattern, it is not impossible to
+understand why the people of Soulanges called the mistress of the
+house, "The beautiful Madame Soulanges." The mansion had actually
+become the civic pride of this capital of a canton.
+
+If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the
+queen as surely believed in herself. By a phenomenon not in the least
+rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all
+moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their
+marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end
+of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the
+mayoress, that she not only did not remember her past, but she
+actually believed herself a well-bred woman. She had studied the airs
+and graces, the dulcet tones, the gestures, the ways of her mistress,
+so long that when she found herself in the midst of an opulence of her
+own she was able to practice the natural insolence of it. She knew her
+eighteenth century, and the tales of its great lords and all their
+belongings, by heart. This back-stairs erudition gave to her
+conversation a flavor of "oeil-de-boeuf"; her soubrette gossip passed
+muster for courtly wit. Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say
+so, tinsel; but to savages paste diamonds are as good as real ones.
+
+The woman found herself courted and worshipped by the society in which
+she lived, just as her mistress had been worshipped in former days.
+She gave weekly dinners, with coffee and liqueurs to those who came in
+after the dessert. No female head could have resisted the exhilarating
+force of such continual adulation. In winter the warm salon, always
+well-lighted with wax candles, was well-filled with the richest people
+of Soulanges, who paid for the good liqueurs and the fine wines which
+came from dear mistress's cellars, with flatteries to their hostess.
+These visitors and their wives had a life-interest, as it were, in
+this luxury; which was to them a saving of lights and fuel. Thus it
+came to pass that in a circuit of fifteen miles and even as far as
+Ville-aux-Fayes, every voice was ready to declare: "Madame Soudry does
+the honors admirably. She keeps open house; every one enjoys her
+salon; she knows how to carry herself and her fortune; she always says
+the witty thing, she makes you laugh. And what splendid silver! There
+is not another house like it short of Paris--"
+
+The silver had been given to Mademoiselle Laguerre by Bouret. It was a
+magnificent service made by the famous Germain, and Madame Soudry had
+literally stolen it. At Mademoiselle Laguerre's death she merely took
+it into her own room, and the heirs, who knew nothing of the value of
+their inheritance, never claimed it.
+
+For some time past the twelve or fifteen personages who composed the
+leading society of Soulanges spoke of Madame Soudry as the _intimate
+friend_ of Mademoiselle Laguerre, recoiling at the term
+"waiting-woman," and making believe that she had sacrificed herself
+to the singer as her friend and companion.
+
+Strange yet true! all these illusions became realities, and spread
+even to the actual regions of the heart; Madame Soudry reigned
+supreme, in a way, over her husband.
+
+The gendarme, required to love a woman ten years older than himself
+who kept the management of her fortune in her own hands, behaved to
+her in the spirit of the ideas she had ended by adopting about her
+beauty. But sometimes, when persons envied him or talked to him of his
+happiness, he wished they were in his place, for, to hide his
+peccadilloes, he was forced to take as many precautions as the husband
+of a young and adoring wife; and it was not until very recently that
+he had been able to introduce into the family a pretty servant-girl.
+
+This portrait of the Queen of Soulanges may seem a little grotesque,
+but many specimens of the same kind could be found in the provinces at
+that period,--some more or less noble in blood, others belonging to
+the higher banking-circles, like the widow of a receiver-general in
+Touraine who still puts slices of veal upon her cheeks. This portrait,
+drawn from nature, would be incomplete without the diamonds in which
+it is set; without the surrounding courtiers, a sketch of whom is
+necessary, if only to explain how formidable such Lilliputians are,
+and who are the makers of public opinion in remote little towns. Let
+no one mistake me, however; there are many localities which, like
+Soulanges, are neither hamlets, villages, nor little towns, which
+have, nevertheless, the characteristics of all. The inhabitants are
+very different from those of the large and busy and vicious provincial
+cities. Country life influences the manners and morals of the smaller
+places, and this mixture of tints will be found to produce some truly
+original characters.
+
+The most important personage after Madame Soudry was Lupin, the
+notary. Though forty-five springs had bloomed for Lupin, he was still
+fresh and rosy, thanks to the plumpness which fills out the skin of
+sedentary persons; and he still sang ballads. Also, he retained the
+elegant evening dress of society warblers. He looked almost Parisian
+in his carefully-varnished boots, his sulphur-yellow waistcoats, his
+tight-fitting coats, his handsome silk cravats, his fashionable
+trousers. His hair was curled by the barber of Soulanges (the gossip
+of the town), and he maintained the attitude of a man "a bonne
+fortunes" by his liaison with Madame Sarcus, wife of Sarcus the rich,
+who was to his life, without too close a comparison, what the
+campaigns of Italy were to Napoleon. He alone of the leading society
+of Soulanges went to Paris, where he was received by the Soulanges
+family. It was enough to hear him talk to imagine the supremacy he
+wielded in his capacity as dandy and judge of elegance. He passed
+judgment on all things by the use of three terms: "out of date,"
+"antiquated," "superannuated."[*] A man, a woman, or a piece of
+furniture might be "out of date"; next, by a greater degree of
+imperfection, "antiquated"; but as to the last term, it was the
+superlative of contempt. The first might be remedied, the second was
+hopeless, but the third,--oh, better far never to have left the void
+of nothingness! As to praise, a single word sufficed him, doubly and
+trebly uttered: "Charming!" was the positive of his admiration.
+"Charming, charming!" made you feel you were safe; but after
+"Charming, charming, charming!" the ladder might be discarded, for the
+heaven of perfection was attained.
+
+
+[*] "Croute," "crouton," and "croute-au-pot," untranslatable, and
+without equivalent in English. A "croute" is the slang term for a
+man behind the age.--Tr.
+
+
+The tabellion,--he called himself "tabellion," petty notary, and
+keeper of notes (making fun of his calling in order to seem above it),
+--the tabellion was on terms of spoken gallantry with Madame Soudry,
+who had a weakness for Lupin, though he was blond and wore spectacles.
+Hitherto the late Cochet had loved none but dark men, with moustachios
+and hairy hands, of the Alcides type. But she made an exception in
+favor of Lupin on account of his elegance, and, moreover, because she
+thought her glory at Soulanges was not complete without an adorer;
+but, to Soudry's despair, the queen's adorers never carried their
+adoration so far as to threaten his rights.
+
+Lupin had married an heiress in wooden shoes and blue woollen
+stockings, the only daughter of a salt-dealer, who made his money
+during the Revolution,--a period when contraband salt-traders made
+enormous profits by reason of the reaction that set in against the
+gabelle. He prudently left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he
+called her, was supported under his absence by a platonic passion for
+a handsome clerk who had no other means than his salary,--a young man
+named Bonnac, belonging to the second-class society, where he played
+the same role that his master, the notary, played in the first.
+
+Madame Lupin, a woman without any education whatever, appeared on
+great occasions only, under the form of an enormous Burgundian barrel
+dressed in velvet and surmounted by a little head sunken in shoulders
+of a questionable color. No efforts could retain her waist-belt in its
+natural place. "Bebelle" candidly admitted that prudence forbade her
+wearing corsets. The imagination of a poet or, better still, that of
+an inventor, could not have found on Bebelle's back the slightest
+trace of that seductive sinuosity which the vertebrae of all women who
+are women usually produce. Bebelle, round as a tortoise, belonged to
+the genus of invertebrate females. This alarming development of
+cellular tissue no doubt reassured Lupin on the subject of the
+platonic passion of his fat wife, whom he boldly called Bebelle
+without raising a laugh.
+
+"Your wife, what is she?" said Sarcus the rich, one day, when unable
+to digest the fatal word "superannuated," applied to a piece of
+furniture he had just bought at a bargain.
+
+"My wife is not like yours," replied Lupin; "she is not defined as
+yet."
+
+Beneath his rosy exterior the notary possessed a subtle mind, and he
+had the sense to say nothing about his property, which was fully as
+large as that of Rigou.
+
+Monsieur Lupin's son, Amaury, was a great trouble to his father. An
+only son, and one of the Don Juans of the valley, he utterly refused
+to follow the paternal profession. He took advantage of his position
+as only son to bleed the strong-box cruelly, without, however,
+exhausting the patience of his father, who would say after every
+escapade, "Well, I was like that in my young days." Amaury never came
+to Madame Soudry's; he said she bored him; for, with a recollection of
+her early days, she attempted to "educate" him, as she called it,
+whereas he much preferred the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de
+la Paix. He frequented the worst company of Soulanges, even down to
+Bonnebault. He continued sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry
+remarked, and replied to all his father's remonstrances with one
+perpetual request: "Send me back to Paris, for I am bored to death
+here."
+
+Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was
+semi-conjugal. His known passion, in spite of his former liaison with
+Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the municipal
+court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer,
+who reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the
+first. Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the
+under-world of Soulanges on account of his wife's conduct, which it
+was said he authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of
+the leading society.
+
+If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon,
+the doctor, was its man of science. The town said of him, "We have
+here in our midst a scientific man of the first order." Madame Soudry
+(who believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini
+and Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera)
+persuaded society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his
+fortune by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting
+that the doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.
+
+Monsieur Gourdon merely repeated the ideas of Cuvier and Buffon, which
+might not have enabled him to pose as a scientist before the Soulanges
+world; but besides this he was making a collection of shells, and he
+possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds. He lived upon
+the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the
+town of Soulanges. After this was known he was considered throughout
+the department as a great naturalist and the successor of Buffon. Like
+a certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan
+propriety he copied, without possessing either his money or his
+shrewdness, Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the
+famous collection, consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which
+had died on their way to Soulanges), all the rodents of the
+department, mice and field-mice and dormice, rats, muskrats, and
+moles, etc.; all the interesting birds ever shot in Burgundy, and an
+Alpine eagle caught in the Jura. Gourdon also possessed a collection
+of lepidoptera,--a word which led society to hope for monstrosities,
+and to say, when it saw them, "Why, they are only butterflies!"
+Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil shells, mostly the
+collections of his friends which they bequeathed to him, and all the
+minerals of Burgundy and the Jura.
+
+These treasures, laid out on shelves with glass doors (the drawers
+beneath containing the insects), occupied the whole of the first floor
+of the doctor's house, and produced a certain effect through the
+oddity of the names on the tickets, the magic effect of the colors,
+and the gathering together of so many things which no one pays the
+slightest attention to when seen in nature, though much admired under
+glass. Society took a regular day to go and look at Monsieur Gourdon's
+collection.
+
+"I have," he said to all inquirers, "five hundred ornithological
+objects, two hundred mammifers, five thousand insects, three thousand
+shells, and seven thousand specimens of minerals."
+
+"What patience you have had!" said the ladies.
+
+"One must do something for one's country," replied the collector.
+
+He drew an enormous profit from his carcasses by the mere repetition
+of the words, "I have bequeathed everything to the town by my will."
+Visitors lauded his philanthropy; the authorities talked of devoting
+the second floor of the town hall to the "Gourdon Museum," after the
+collector's death.
+
+"I rely upon the gratitude of my fellow-citizens to attach my name to
+the gift," he replied; "for I dare not hope they would place a marble
+bust of me--"
+
+"It would be the very least we could do for you," they rejoined; "are
+you not the glory of our town?"
+
+Thus the man actually came to consider himself one of the celebrities
+of Burgundy. The surest incomes are not from consols after all; those
+our vanity obtains for us have better security. This man of science
+was, to employ Lupin's superlatives, happy! happy!! happy!!!
+
+Gourdon, the clerk of the court, brother of the doctor, was a pitiful
+little creature, whose features all gathered about his nose, so that
+the nose seemed the point of departure for the forehead, the cheeks,
+and the mouth, all of which were connected with it just as the ravines
+of a mountain begin at the summit. This pinched little man was thought
+to be one of the greatest poets in Burgundy,--a Piron, it was the
+fashion to say. The dual merits of the two brothers gave rise to the
+remark: "We have the brothers Gourdon at Soulanges--two very
+distinguished men; men who could hold their own in Paris."
+
+Devoted to the game of cup-and-ball, the clerk of the court became
+possessed by another mania,--that of composing an ode in honor of an
+amusement which amounted to a passion in the eighteenth century.
+Manias among mediocrats often run in couples. Gourdon junior gave
+birth to his poem during the reign of Napoleon. That fact is
+sufficient to show the sound and healthy school of poesy to which he
+belonged; Luce de Lancival, Parny, Saint-Lambert, Rouche, Vigee,
+Andrieux, Berchoux were his heroes. Delille was his god, until the day
+when the leading society of Soulanges raised the question as to
+whether Gourdon were not superior to Delille; after which the clerk of
+the court always called his competitor "Monsieur l'Abbe Delille," with
+exaggerated politeness.
+
+The poems manufactured between 1780 and 1814 were all of one pattern,
+and the one which Gourdon composed upon the Cup-and-Ball will give an
+idea of them. They required a certain knack or proficiency in the art.
+"The Chorister" is the Saturn of this abortive generation of jocular
+poems, all in four cantos or thereabouts, for it was generally
+admitted that six would wear the subject threadbare.
+
+Gourdon's poem entitled "Ode to the Cup-and-Ball" obeyed the poetic
+rules which governed these works, rules that were invariable in their
+application. Each poem contained in the first canto a description of
+the "object sung," preceded (as in the case of Gourdon) by a species
+of invocation, of which the following is a model:--
+
+  I sing the good game that belongeth to all,
+  The game, be it known, of the Cup and the Ball;
+  Dear to little and great, to the fools and the wise;
+  Charming game! where the cure of all tedium lies;
+  When we toss up the ball on the point of a stick
+  Palamedus himself might have envied the trick;
+  O Muse of the Loves and the Laughs and the Games,
+  Come down and assist me, for, true to your aims,
+  I have ruled off this paper in syllable squares.
+  Come, help me--
+
+After explaining the game and describing the handsomest cup-and-balls
+recorded in history, after relating what fabulous custom it had
+formerly brought to the Singe-Vert and to all dealers in toys and
+turned ivories, and finally, after proving that the game attained to
+the dignity of statics, Gourdon ended the first canto with the
+following conclusion, which will remind the erudite reader of all the
+conclusions of the first cantos of all these poems:--
+
+  'Tis thus that the arts and the sciences, too,
+  Find wisdom in things that seemed silly to you.
+
+The second canto, invariably employed to depict the manner of using
+"the object," explaining how to exhibit it in society and before
+women, and the benefit to be derived therefrom, will be readily
+conceived by the friends of this virtuous literature from the
+following quotation, which depicts the player going through his
+performance under the eyes of his chosen lady:--
+
+  Now look at the player who sits in your midst,
+  On that ivory ball how his sharp eye is fixt;
+  He waits and he watches with keenest attention,
+  Its least little movement in all its precision;
+  The ball its parabola thrice has gone round,
+  At the end of the string to which it is bound.
+  Up it goes! but the player his triumph has missed,
+  For the disc has come down on his maladroit wrist;
+  But little he cares for the sting of the ball,
+  A smile from his mistress consoles for it all.
+
+It was this delineation, worthy of Virgil, which first raised a doubt
+as to Delille's superiority over Gourdon. The word "disc," contested
+by the opinionated Brunet, gave matter for discussions which lasted
+eleven months; in fact, until Gourdon the scientist, one evening when
+all present were on the point of getting seriously angry, annihilated
+the anti-discers by observing:--
+
+"The moon, called a _disc_ by poets, is undoubtedly a ball."
+
+"How do you know that?" retorted Brunet. "We have never seen but one
+side."
+
+The third canto told the regulation story,--in this instance, the
+famous anecdote of the cup-and-ball which all the world knows by
+heart, concerning a celebrated minister of Louis XVI. According to the
+sacred formula delivered by the "Debats" from 1810 to 1814, in praise
+of these glorious words, Gourdon's ode "borrowed fresh charms from
+poesy to embellish the tale."
+
+The fourth canto summed up the whole, and concluded with these daring
+words,--not published, be it remarked, from 1810 to 1814; in fact,
+they did not see the light till 1824, after Napoleon's death.
+
+  'Twas thus that I sang in the time of alarms.
+  Oh, if kings would consent to bear no other arms,
+  And people enjoyed what was best for them all,
+  The sweet little game of the Cup and the Ball,
+  Our Burgundy then might be free of all fear,
+  And return to the good days of Saturn and Rhea.
+
+These fine verses were published in a first and only edition from the
+press of Bournier, printer of Ville-aux-Fayes. One hundred
+subscribers, in the sum of three francs, guaranteed the dangerous
+precedent of immortality to the poem,--a liberality that was all the
+greater because these hundred persons had heard the poem from
+beginning to end a hundred times over.
+
+Madame Soudry had lately suppressed the cup-and-ball, which usually
+lay on a pier-table in the salon and for the last seven years had
+given rise to endless quotations, for she finally discovered in the
+toy a rival to her own attractions.
+
+As to the author, who boasted of future poems in his desk, it is
+enough to quote the terms in which he mentioned to the leading society
+of Soulanges a rival candidate for literary honors.
+
+"Have you heard a curious piece of news?" he had said, two years
+earlier. "There is another poet in Burgundy! Yes," he added, remarking
+the astonishment on all faces, "he comes from Macon. But you could
+never imagine the subjects he takes up,--a perfect jumble, absolutely
+unintelligible,--lakes, stars, waves, billows! not a single
+philosophical image, not even a didactic effort! he is ignorant of the
+very meaning of poetry. He calls the sky by its name. He says 'moon,'
+bluntly, instead of naming it 'the planet of night.' That's what the
+desire to be thought original brings men to," added Gourdon,
+mournfully. "Poor young man! A Burgundian, and sing such stuff as
+that!--the pity of it! If he had only consulted me, I would have
+pointed out to him the noblest of all themes, wine,--a poem to be
+called the Baccheide; for which, alas! I now feel myself too old."
+
+This great poet is still ignorant of his finest triumph (though he
+owes it to the fact of being a Burgundian), namely, that of living in
+the town of Soulanges, so rounded and perfected within itself that it
+knows nothing of the modern Pleiades, not even their names.
+
+A hundred Gourdons made poetry under the Empire, and yet they tell us
+it was a period that neglected literature! Examine the "Journal de la
+Libraire" and you will find poems on the game of draughts, on
+backgammon, on tricks with cards, on geography, typography, comedy,
+etc.,--not to mention the vaunted masterpieces of Delille on Piety,
+Imagination, Conversation; and those of Berchoux on Gastromania and
+Dansomania, etc. Who can foresee the chances and changes of taste, the
+caprices of fashion, the transformations of the human mind? The
+generations as they pass along sweep out of sight the last fragments
+of the idols they found on their path and set up other gods,--to be
+overthrown like the rest.
+
+Sarcus, a handsome little man with a dapple-gray head, devoted himself
+in turn to Themis and to Flora,--in other words, to legislation and a
+greenhouse. For the last twelve years he had been meditating a book on
+the History of the Institution of Justices of the Peace, "whose
+political and judiciary role," he said, "had already passed through
+several phases, all derived from the Code of Brumaire, year IV.; and
+to-day that institution, so precious to the nation, had lost its power
+because the salaries were not in keeping with the importance of its
+functions, which ought to be performed by irremovable officials."
+Rated in the community as an able man, Sarcus was the accepted
+statesman of Madame Soudry's salon; you can readily imagine that he
+was the leading bore. They said he talked like a book. Gaubertin
+prophesied he would receive the cross of the Legion of honor, but not
+until the day when, as Leclercq's successor, he should take his seat
+on the benches of the Left Centre.
+
+Guerbet, the collector, a man of parts, a heavy, fat, individual with
+a buttery face, a toupet on his bald spot, gold earrings, which were
+always in difficulty with his shirt-collar, had the hobby of pomology.
+Proud of possessing the finest fruit-garden in the arrondissement, he
+gathered his first crops a month later than those of Paris; his
+hot-beds supplied him with pine-apples, nectarines, and peas, out of
+season. He brought bunches of strawberries to Madame Soudry with pride
+when the fruit could be bought for ten sous a basket in Paris.
+
+Soulanges possessed a pharmaceutist named Vermut, a chemist, who was
+more of a chemist than Sarcus was a statesman, or Lupin a singer, or
+Gourdon the elder a scientist, or his brother a poet. Nevertheless,
+the leading society of Soulanges did not take much notice of Vermut,
+and the second-class society took none at all. The instinct of the
+first may have led them to perceive the real superiority of this
+thinker, who said little but smiled at their absurdities so
+satirically that they first doubted his capacity and then whispered
+tales against it; as for the other class they took no notice of him
+one way or the other.
+
+Vermut was the butt of Madame Soudry's salon. No society is complete
+without a victim,--without an object to pity, ridicule, despise, and
+protect. Vermut, full of his scientific problems, often came with his
+cravat untied, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his little green surtout
+spotted.
+
+The little man, gifted with the patience of a chemist, could not enjoy
+(that is the term employed in the provinces to express the abolition
+of domestic rule) Madame Vermut,--a charming woman, a lively woman,
+capital company (for she could lose forty sous at cards and say
+nothing), a woman who railed at her husband, annoyed him with
+epigrams, and declared him to be an imbecile unable to distil anything
+but dulness. Madame Vermut was one of those women who in the society
+of a small town are the life and soul of amusement and who set things
+going. She supplied the salt of her little world, kitchen-salt, it is
+true; her jokes were somewhat broad, but society forgave them; though
+she was capable of saying to the cure Taupin, a man of seventy years
+of age, with white hair, "Hold your tongue, my lad."
+
+The miller of Soulanges, possessing an income of fifty thousand
+francs, had an only daughter whom Lupin desired for his son Amaury,
+since he had lost the hope of marrying him to Gaubertin's daughter.
+This miller, a Sarcus-Taupin, was the Nucingen of the little town. He
+was supposed to be thrice a millionaire; but he never transacted
+business with others, and thought only of grinding his wheat and
+keeping a monopoly of it; his most noticeable point was a total
+absence of politeness and good manners.
+
+The elder Guerbet, brother of the post-master at Conches, possessed an
+income of ten thousand francs, besides his salary as collector. The
+Gourdons were rich; the doctor had married the only daughter of old
+Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled, keeper of the forests and streams, whom the
+family were now _expecting to die_, while the poet had married the niece
+and sole heiress of the Abbe Taupin, the curate of Soulanges, a stout
+priest who lived in his cure like a rat in his cheese.
+
+This clever ecclesiastic, devoted to the leading society, kind and
+obliging to the second, apostolic to the poor and unfortunate, made
+himself beloved by the whole town. He was cousin of the miller and
+cousin of the Sarcuses, and belonged therefore to the neighborhood and
+to its mediocracy. He always dined out and saved expenses; he went to
+weddings but came away before the ball; he paid the costs of public
+worship, saying, "It is my business." And the parish let him do it,
+with the remark, "We have an excellent priest." The bishop, who knew
+the Soulanges people and was not at all misled as to the true value of
+the abbe, was glad enough to keep in such a town a man who made
+religion acceptable, and who knew how to fill his church and preach to
+sleepy heads.
+
+It is unnecessary to remark that not only each of these worthy
+burghers possessed some one of the special qualifications which are
+necessary to existence in the provinces, but also that each cultivated
+his field in the domain of vanity without a rival. Pere Guerbet
+understood finance, Soudry might have been minister of war; if Cuvier
+had passed that way incognito, the leading society of Soulanges would
+have proved to him that he knew nothing in comparison with Monsieur
+Gourdon the doctor. "Adolphe Nourrit with his thread of a voice,"
+remarked the notary with patronizing indulgence, "was scarcely worthy
+to accompany the nightingale of Soulanges." As to the author of the
+"Cup-and-Ball" (which was then being printed at Bournier's), society
+was satisfied that a poet of his force could not be met with in Paris,
+for Delille was now dead.
+
+This provincial bourgeoisie, so comfortably satisfied with itself,
+took the lead through the various superiorities of its members.
+Therefore the imagination of those who ever resided, even for a short
+time, in a little town of this kind can conceive the air of profound
+satisfaction upon the faces of these people, who believed themselves
+the solar plexus of France, all of them armed with incredible
+dexterity and shrewdness to do mischief,--all, in their wisdom,
+declaring that the hero of Essling was a coward, Madame de Montcornet
+a manoeuvring Parisian, and the Abbe Brossette an ambitious little
+priest.
+
+If Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin had lived at Ville-aux-Fayes, they
+would have quarrelled; their various pretensions would have clashed;
+but fate ordained that the Lucullus of Blangy felt too strongly the
+need of solitude, in which to wallow at his ease in usury and
+sensuality, to live anywhere but at Blangy; that Madame Soudry had
+sense enough to see that she could reign nowhere else except at
+Soulanges; and that Ville-aux-Fayes was Gaubertin's place of business.
+Those who enjoy studying social nature will admit that General
+Montcornet was pursued by special ill-luck in this accidental
+separation of his dangerous enemies, who thus accomplished the
+evolutions of their individual power and vanity at such distances from
+each other that neither star interfered with the orbit of the other,
+--a fact which doubled and trebled their powers of mischief.
+
+Nevertheless, though all these worthy bourgeois, proud of their
+accomplishments, considered their society as far superior in
+attractions to that of Ville-aux-Fayes, and repeated with comic
+pomposity the local dictum, "Soulanges is a town of society and social
+pleasures," it must not be supposed that Ville-aux-Fayes accepted this
+supremacy. The Gaubertin salon ridiculed ("in petto") the salon
+Soudry. By the manner in which Gaubertin remarked, "We are a financial
+community, engaged in actual business; we have the folly to fatigue
+ourselves in making fortunes," it was easy to perceive a latent
+antagonism between the earth and the moon. The moon believed herself
+useful to the earth, and the earth governed the moon. Earth and moon,
+however, lived in the closest intimacy. At the carnival the leading
+society of Soulanges went in a body to four balls given by Gaubertin,
+Gendrin, Leclercq, and Soudry, junior. Every Sunday the latter, his
+wife, Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoiselle Elise Gaubertin dined with
+the Soudrys at Soulanges. When the sub-prefect was invited, and when
+the postmaster of Conches arrived to take pot-luck, Soulanges enjoyed
+the sight of four official equipages drawn up at the door of the
+Soudry mansion.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER II
+
+              THE CONSPIRATORS IN THE QUEEN'S SALON
+
+Reaching Soulanges about half-past five o'clock, Rigou was sure of
+finding the usual party assembled at the Soudrys'. There, as
+everywhere else in town, the dinner-hour was three o'clock, according
+to the custom of the last century. From five to nine the notables of
+Soulanges met in Madame Soudry's salon to exchange the news, make
+their political speeches, comment upon the private lives of every one
+in the valley, and talk about Les Aigues, which latter topic kept the
+conversation going for at least an hour every day. It was everybody's
+business to learn at least something of what was going on, and also to
+pay their court to the mistress of the house.
+
+After this preliminary talk they played at boston, the only game the
+queen understood. When the fat old Guerbet had mimicked Madame Isaure,
+Gaubertin's wife, laughed at her languishing airs, imitated her thin
+voice, her pinched mouth, and her juvenile ways; when the Abbe Taupin
+had related one of the tales of his repertory; when Lupin had told of
+some event at Ville-aux-Fayes, and Madame Soudry had been deluged with
+compliments ad nauseum, the company would say: "We have had a charming
+game of boston."
+
+Too self-indulgent to be at the trouble of driving over to the
+Soudrys' merely to hear the vapid talk of its visitors and to see a
+Parisian monkey in the guise of an old woman, Rigou, far superior in
+intelligence and education to this petty society, never made his
+appearance unless business brought him over to meet the notary. He
+excused himself from visiting on the ground of his occupations, his
+habits, and his health, which latter did not allow him, he said, to
+return at night along a road which led by the foggy banks of the
+Thune.
+
+The tall, stiff usurer always had an imposing effect upon Madame
+Soudry's company, who instinctively recognized in his nature the
+cruelty of the tiger with steel claws, the craft of a savage, the
+wisdom of one born in a cloister and ripened by the sun of gold,--a
+man to whom Gaubertin had never yet been willing to fully commit
+himself.
+
+The moment the little green carriole and the bay horse passed the Cafe
+de la Paix, Urbain, Soudry's man-servant, who was seated on a bench
+under the dining-room windows, and was gossipping with the
+tavern-keeper, shades his eyes with his hand to see who was coming.
+
+"It's Pere Rigou," he said. "I must go round and open the door. Take
+his horse, Socquard." And Urbain, a former trooper, who could not get
+into the gendarmerie and had therefore taken service with Soudry, went
+round the house to open the gates of the courtyard.
+
+Socquard, a famous personage throughout the valley, was treated, as
+you see, with very little ceremony by the valet. But so it is with
+many illustrious people who are so kind as to walk and to sneeze and
+to sleep and to eat precisely like common mortals.
+
+Socquard, born a Hercules, could carry a weight of eleven hundred
+pounds; a blow of his fist applied on a man's back would break the
+vertebral column in two; he could bend an iron bar, or hold back a
+carriage drawn by one horse. A Milo of Crotona in the valley, his fame
+had spread throughout the department, where all sorts of foolish
+stories were current about him, as about all celebrities. It was told
+how he had once carried a poor woman and her donkey and her basket on
+his back to market; how he had been known to eat a whole ox and drink
+the fourth of a hogshead of wine in one day, etc. Gentle as a
+marriageable girl, Socquard, who was a stout, short man, with a placid
+face, broad shoulders, and a deep chest, where his lungs played like
+the bellows of a forge, possessed a flute-like voice, the limpid tones
+of which surprised all those who heard them for the first time.
+
+Like Tonsard, whose renown released him from the necessity of giving
+proofs of his ferocity, in fact, like all other men who are backed by
+public opinion of one kind or another, Socquard never displayed his
+extraordinary muscular force unless asked to do so by friends. He now
+took the horse as the usurer drew up at the steps of the portico.
+
+"Are you all well at home, Monsieur Rigou?" said the illustrious
+innkeeper.
+
+"Pretty well, my good friend," replied Rigou. "Do Plissoud and
+Bonnebault and Viollet and Amaury still continue good customers?"
+
+This question, uttered in a tone of good-natured interest, was by no
+means one of those empty speeches which superiors are apt to bestow
+upon inferiors. In his leisure moments Rigou thought over the smallest
+details of "the affair," and Fourchon had already warned him that
+there was something suspicious in the intimacy between Plissoud,
+Bonnebault, and the brigadier, Viollet.
+
+Bonnebault, in payment of a few francs lost at cards, might very
+likely tell the secrets he heard at Tonsard's to Viollet; or he might
+let them out over his punch without realizing the importance of such
+gossip. But as the information of the old otter man might be
+instigated by thirst, Rigou paid no attention except so far as it
+concerned Plissoud, whose situation was likely to inspire him with a
+desire to counteract the coalition against Les Aigues, if only to get
+his paws greased by one or the other of the two parties.
+
+Plissoud combined with his duties of under-sheriff other occupations
+which were poorly remunerated, that of agent of insurance (a new form
+of enterprise just beginning to show itself in France), agent, also,
+of a society providing against the chances of recruitment. His
+insufficient pay and a love of billiards and boiled wine made his
+future doubtful. Like Fourchon, he cultivated the art of doing
+nothing, and expected his fortune through some lucky but problematic
+chance. He hated the leading society, but he had measured its power.
+He alone knew the middle-class coalition organized by Gaubertin to its
+depths; and he continued to sneer at the rich men of Soulanges and
+Ville-aux-Fayes, as if he alone represented the opposition. Without
+money and not respected, he did not seem a person to be feared
+professionally, and so Brunet, glad to have a despised competitor,
+protected him and helped him along, to prevent him selling his
+business to some eager young man, like Bonnac for instance, who might
+force him, Brunet, to divide the patronage of the canton between them.
+
+"Thanks to those fellows, we keep the ball a-rolling," said Socquard.
+"But folks are trying to imitate my boiled wine."
+
+"Sue them," said Rigou, sententiously.
+
+"That would lead too far," replied the innkeeper.
+
+"Do your clients get on well together?"
+
+"Tolerably, yes; sometimes they'll have a row, but that's only natural
+for players."
+
+All heads were at the window of the Soudry salon which looked to the
+square. Recognizing the father of his daughter-in-law, Soudry came to
+the portico to receive him.
+
+"Well, comrade," said the mayor of Soulanges, "is Annette ill, that
+you give us your company of an evening?"
+
+Through an old habit acquired in the gendarmerie Soudry always went
+direct to the point.
+
+"No,-- There's trouble brewing," replied Rigou, touching his right
+fore-finger to the hand which Soudry held out to him. "I came to talk
+about it, for it concerns our children in a way--"
+
+Soudry, a handsome man dressed in blue, as though he were still a
+gendarme, with a black collar, and spurs at his heels, took Rigou by
+the arm and led him up to his imposing better-half. The glass door to
+the terrace was open, and the guests were walking about enjoying the
+summer evening, which brought out the full beauty of the glorious
+landscape which we have already described.
+
+"It is a long time since we have seen you, my dear Rigou," said Madame
+Soudry, taking the arm of the ex-Benedictine and leading him out upon
+the terrace.
+
+"My digestion is so troublesome!" he replied; "see! my color is almost
+as high as yours."
+
+Rigou's appearance on the terrace was the sign for an explosion of
+jovial greetings on the part of the assembled company.
+
+"And how may the lord of Blangy be?" said little Sarcus, justice of
+the peace.
+
+"Lord!" replied Rigou, bitterly, "I am not even cock of my own village
+now."
+
+"The hens don't say so, scamp!" exclaimed Madame Soudry, tapping her
+fan on his arm.
+
+"All well, my dear master?" said the notary, bowing to his chief
+client.
+
+"Pretty well," replied Rigou, again putting his fore-finger into his
+interlocutor's hand.
+
+This gesture, by which Rigou kept down the process of hand-shaking to
+the coldest and stiffest of demonstrations would have revealed the
+whole man to any observer who did not already know him.
+
+"Let us find a corner where we can talk quietly," said the ex-monk,
+looking at Lupin and at Madame Soudry.
+
+"Let us return to the salon," replied the queen.
+
+"What has the Shopman done now?" asked Soudry, sitting down beside his
+wife and putting his arm about her waist.
+
+Madame Soudry, like other old women, forgave a great deal in return
+for such public marks of tenderness.
+
+"Why," said Rigou, in a low voice, to set an example of caution, "he
+has gone to the Prefecture to demand the enforcement of the penalties;
+he wants the help of the authorities."
+
+"Then he's lost," said Lupin, rubbing his hands; "the peasants will
+fight."
+
+"Fight!" cried Soudry, "that depends. If the prefect and the general,
+who are friends, send a squadron of cavalry the peasants can't fight.
+They might at a pinch get the better of the gendarmes, but as for
+resisting a charge of cavalry!--"
+
+"Sibilet heard him say something much more dangerous than that," said
+Rigou; "and that's what brings me here."
+
+"Oh, my poor Sophie!" cried Madame Soudry, sentimentally, alluding to
+her _friend_, Mademoiselle Laguerre, "into what hands Les Aigues has
+fallen! This is what we have gained by the Revolution!--a parcel of
+swaggering epaulets! We might have foreseen that whenever the bottle
+was turned upside down the dregs would spoil the wine!"
+
+"He means to go to Paris and cabal with the Keeper of the Seals and
+others to get the whole judiciary changed down here," said Rigou.
+
+"Ha!" cried Lupin, "then he sees his danger."
+
+"If they appoint my son-in-law attorney-general we can't help
+ourselves; the general will get him replaced by some Parisian devoted
+to his interests," continued Rigou. "If he gets a place in Paris for
+Gendrin and makes Guerbet chief-justice of the court at Auxerre, he'll
+knock down our skittles! The gendarmerie is on his side now, and if he
+gets the courts as well, and keeps such advisers as the abbe and
+Michaud we sha'n't dance at the wedding; he'll play us some scurvy
+trick or other."
+
+"How is it that in all these five years you have never managed to get
+rid of that abbe?" said Lupin.
+
+"You don't know him; he's as suspicious as a blackbird," replied
+Rigou. "He is not a man at all, that priest; he doesn't care for
+women; I can't find out that he has any passion; there's no point at
+which one can attack him. The general lays himself open by his temper.
+A man with a vice is the servant of his enemies if they know how to
+pull its string. There are no strong men but those who lead their
+vices instead of being led by them. The peasants are all right; their
+hatred against the abbe keeps up; but we can do nothing as yet. He's
+like Michaud, in his way; such men are too good for this world,--God
+ought to call them to himself."
+
+"It would be a good plan to find some pretty servant-girl to scrub his
+staircase," remarked Madame Soudry. The words caused Rigou to give the
+little jump with which crafty natures recognize the craft of others.
+
+"The Shopman has another vice," he said; "he loves his wife; we might
+get hold of him that way."
+
+"We ought to find out how far she really influences him," said Madame
+Soudry.
+
+"There's the rub!" said Lupin.
+
+"As for you, Lupin," said Rigou, in a tone of authority, "be off to
+the Prefecture and see the beautiful Madame Sarcus at once! You must
+get her to tell you all the Shopman says and does at the Prefecture."
+
+"Then I shall have to stay all night," replied Lupin.
+
+"So much the better for Sarcus the rich; he'll be the gainer," said
+Rigou. "She is not yet out of date, Madame Sarcus--"
+
+"Oh! Monsieur Rigou," said Madame Soudry, in a mincing tone, "are
+women ever out of date?"
+
+"You may be right about Madame Sarcus; she doesn't paint before the
+glass," retorted Rigou, who was always disgusted by the exhibition of
+the Cochet's ancient charms.
+
+Madame Soudry, who thought she used only a "suspicion" of rouge, did
+not perceive the sarcasm and hastened to say:--
+
+"Is it possible that women paint?"
+
+"Now, Lupin," said Rigou, without replying to this naivete, "go over
+to Gaubertin's to-morrow morning. Tell him that my fellow-mayor and I"
+(striking Soudry on the thigh) "will break bread with him at breakfast
+somewhere about midday. Tell him everything, so that we may all have
+thought it over before we meet, for now's the time to make an end of
+that damned Shopman. As I drove over here I came to the conclusion it
+would be best to get up a quarrel between the courts and him, so that
+the Keeper of the Seals would be wary of making the changes he may ask
+in their members."
+
+"Bravo for the son of the Church!" cried Lupin, slapping Rigou on the
+shoulder.
+
+Madame Soudry was here struck by an idea which could come only to a
+former waiting-maid of an Opera divinity.
+
+"If," she said, "one could only get the Shopman to the fete at
+Soulanges, and throw some fine girl in his way who would turn his
+head, we could easily set his wife against him by letting her know
+that the son of an upholsterer has gone back to the style of his early
+loves."
+
+"Ah, my beauty!" said Soudry, "you have more sense in your head than
+the Prefecture of police in Paris."
+
+"That's an idea which proves that Madame reigns by mind as well as by
+beauty," said Lupin, who was rewarded by a grimace which the leading
+society of Soulanges were in the habit of accepting without protest
+for a smile.
+
+"One might do better still," said Rigou, after some thought; "if we
+could only turn it into a downright scandal."
+
+"Complaint and indictment! affair in the police court!" cried Lupin.
+"Oh! that would be grand!"
+
+"Glorious!" said Soudry, candidly. "What happiness to see the Comte de
+Montcornet, grand cross of the Legion of honor, commander of the Order
+of Saint Louis, and lieutenant-general, accused of having attempted,
+in a public resort, the virtue--just think of it!"
+
+"He loves his wife too well," said Lupin, reflectively. "He couldn't
+be got to that."
+
+"That's no obstacle," remarked Rigou; "but I don't know a single girl
+in the whole arrondissement who is capable of making a sinner of a
+saint. I have been looking out for one for the abbe."
+
+"What do you say to that handsome Gatienne Giboulard, of Auxerre, whom
+Sarcus, junior, is mad after?" asked Lupin.
+
+"That's the only one," answered Rigou, "but she is not suitable; she
+thinks she has only to be seen to be admired; she's not complying
+enough; we want a witch and a sly-boots, too. Never mind, the right
+one will turn up sooner or later."
+
+"Yes," said Lupin, "the more pretty girls he sees the greater the
+chances are."
+
+"But perhaps you can't get the Shopman to the fair," said the
+ex-gendarme. "And if he does come, will he go to the Tivoli ball?"
+
+"The reason that has always kept him away from the fair doesn't exist
+this year, my love," said Madame Soudry.
+
+"What reason, dearest?" asked Soudry.
+
+"The Shopman wanted to marry Mademoiselle de Soulanges," said the
+notary. "The family replied that she was too young, and that mortified
+him. That is why Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de Montcornet, two
+old friends who both served in the Imperial Guard, are so cool to each
+other that they never speak. The Shopman doesn't want to meet the
+Soulanges at the fair; but this year the family are not coming."
+
+Usually the Soulanges party stayed at the chateau from July to
+October, but the general was then in command of the artillery in
+Spain, under the Duc d'Angouleme, and the countess had accompanied
+him. At the siege of Cadiz the Comte de Soulanges obtained, as every
+one knows, the marshal's baton, which he kept till 1826.
+
+"Very true," cried Lupin. "Well, it is for you, papa," he added,
+addressing Rigou, "to manoeuvre the matter so that we can get him to
+the fair; once there, we ought to be able to entrap him."
+
+The fair of Soulanges, which takes place on the 15th of August, is one
+of the features of the town, and carries the palm over all other fairs
+in a circuit of sixty miles, even those of the capital of the
+department. Ville-aux-Fayes has no fair, for its fete-day, the
+Saint-Sylvestre, happens in winter.
+
+From the 12th to the 15th of August all sorts of merchants abounded at
+Soulanges, and set up their booths in two parallel lines, two rows of
+the well-known gray linen huts, which gave a lively appearance to the
+usually deserted streets. The two weeks of the fair brought in a sort
+of harvest to the little town, for the festival has the authority and
+prestige of tradition. The peasants, as old Fourchon said, flocked in
+from the districts to which labor bound them for the rest of the year.
+The wonderful show on the counters of the improvised shops, the
+collection of all sorts of merchandise, the coveted objects of the
+wants or the vanities of these sons of the soil, who have no other
+shows or exhibitions to enjoy exercise a periodical seduction over the
+minds of all, especially the women and children. So, after the first
+of August the authorities posted advertisements signed by Soudry,
+throughout the whole arrondissement, offering protection to merchants,
+jugglers, mountebanks, prodigies of all kinds, and stating how long
+the fair would last, and what would be its principal attractions.
+
+On these posters, about which it will be remembered Madame Tonsard
+inquired of Vermichel, there was always, on the last line, the
+following announcement:
+
+"Tivoli will be illuminated with colored-glass lamps."
+
+The town had adopted as the place for public a dance-ground created by
+Socquard out of a stony garden (stony, like the rest of the hill on
+which Soulanges is built, where the gardens are of made land), and
+called by him a Tivoli. This character of the soil explains the
+peculiar flavor of the Soulanges wine,--a white wine, dry and
+spirituous, very like Madeira or the Vouvray wine, or Johannisberger,
+--three vintages which resemble one another.
+
+The powerful effect produced by the Socquard ball upon the
+imaginations of the whole country-side made the inhabitants thereof
+very proud of their Tivoli. Such as had ventured as far as Paris
+declared that the Parisian Tivoli was superior to that of Soulanges
+only in size. Gaubertin boldly declared that, for his part, he
+preferred the Socquard ball to the Parisian ball.
+
+"Well, we'll think it all over," continued Rigou. "That Parisian
+fellow, the editor of a newspaper, will soon get tired of his present
+amusement and be glad of a change; perhaps we could through the
+servants give him the idea of coming to the fair, and he'd bring the
+others; I'll consider it. Sibilet might--although, to be sure, his
+influence is devilishly decreased of late--but he might get the
+general to think he could curry popularity by coming."
+
+"Find out if the beautiful countess keeps the general at arm's
+length," said Lupin; "that's the point if you want him to fall into
+the farce at Tivoli."
+
+"That little woman," cried Madame Soudry, "is too much of a Parisian
+not to know how to run with the hare and hold with the hounds."
+
+"Fourchon has got his granddaughter Catherine on good terms, he tells
+me, with Charles, the Shopman's groom. That gives us one ear more in
+Les Aigues--Are you sure of the Abbe Taupin," he added, as the priest
+entered the room from the terrace.
+
+"We hold him and the Abbe Mouchon, too, just as I hold Soudry," said
+the queen, stroking her husband's chin; "you are not unhappy, dearest,
+are you?" she said to Soudry.
+
+"If I can plan a scandal against that Tartufe of a Brossette we can
+win," said Rigou, in a low voice. "But I am not sure if the local
+spirit can succeed against the Church spirit. You don't realize what
+that is. I, myself, who am no fool, I can't say what I'll do when I
+fall ill. I believe I shall try to be reconciled with the Church."
+
+"Suffer me to hope it," said the Abbe Taupin, for whose benefit Rigou
+had raised his voice on the last words.
+
+"Alas! the wrong I did in marrying prevents it," replied Rigou. "I
+cannot kill off Madame Rigou."
+
+"Meantime, let us think of Les Aigues," said Madame Soudry.
+
+"Yes," said the ex-monk. "Do you know, I begin to think that our
+associate at Ville-aux-Fayes may be cleverer than the rest of us. I
+fancy that Gaubertin wants Les Aigues for himself, and that he means
+to trick us in the end."
+
+"But Les Aigues will not belong to any one of us; it will have to come
+down, from roof to cellar," said Soudry.
+
+"I shouldn't be surprised if there were treasure buried in those
+cellars," observed Rigou, cleverly.
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"Well, in the wars of the olden time the great lords, who were often
+besieged and surprised, did bury their gold until they should be able
+to recover it; and you know that the Marquis de Soulanges-Hautemer (in
+whom the younger branch came to an end) was one of the victims of the
+Biron conspiracy. The Comtesse de Moret received the property from
+Henri IV. when it was confiscated."
+
+"See what it is to know the history of France!" said Soudry. "You are
+right. It is time to come to an understanding with Gaubertin."
+
+"If he shirks," said Rigou, "we must smoke him out."
+
+"He is rich enough now," said Lupin, "to be an honest man."
+
+"I'll answer for him as I would for myself," said Madame Soudry; "he's
+the most loyal man in the kingdom."
+
+"We all believe in his loyalty," said Rigou, "but nevertheless nothing
+should be neglected, even among friends-- By the bye, I think there is
+some one in Soulanges who is hindering matters."
+
+"Who's that?" asked Soudry.
+
+"Plissoud," replied Rigou.
+
+"Plissoud!" exclaimed Soudry. "Poor fool! Brunet holds him by the
+halter, and his wife by the gullet; ask Lupin."
+
+"What can he do?" said Lupin.
+
+"He means to warn Montcornet," replied Rigou, "and get his influence
+and a place--"
+
+"It wouldn't bring him more than his wife earns for him at Soulanges,"
+said Madame Soudry.
+
+"He tells everything to his wife when he is drunk," remarked Lupin.
+"We shall know it all in good time."
+
+"The beautiful Madame Plissoud has no secrets from you," said Rigou;
+"we may be easy about that."
+
+"Besides, she's as stupid as she is beautiful," said Madame Soudry. "I
+wouldn't change with her; for if I were a man I'd prefer an ugly woman
+who has some mind, to a beauty who can't say two words."
+
+"Ah!" said the notary, biting his lips, "but she can make others say
+three."
+
+"Puppy!" cried Rigou, as he made for the door.
+
+"Well, then," said Soudry, following him to the portico, "to-morrow,
+early."
+
+"I'll come and fetch you-- Ha! Lupin," he said to the notary, who came
+out with him to order his horse, "try to make sure that Madame Sarcus
+hears all the Shopman says and does against us at the Prefecture."
+
+"If she doesn't hear it, who will?" replied Lupin.
+
+"Excuse me," said Rigou, smiling blandly, "but there are such a lot of
+ninnies in there that I forgot there was one clever man."
+
+"The wonder is that I don't grow rusty among them," replied Lupin,
+naively.
+
+"Is it true that Soudry has hired a pretty servant?"
+
+"Yes," replied Lupin; "for the last week our worthy mayor has set the
+charms of his wife in full relief by comparing her with a little
+peasant-girl about the age of an old ox; and we can't yet imagine how
+he settles it with Madame Soudry, for, would you believe it, he has
+the audacity to go to bed early."
+
+"I'll find out to-morrow," said the village Sardanapalus, trying to
+smile.
+
+The two plotters shook hands as they parted.
+
+Rigou, who did not like to be on the road after dark for,
+notwithstanding his present popularity, he was cautious, called to his
+horse, "Get up, Citizen,"--a joke this son of 1793 was fond of letting
+fly at the Revolution. Popular revolutions have no more bitter enemies
+than those they have trained themselves.
+
+"Pere Rigou's visits are pretty short," said Gourdon the poet to
+Madame Soudry.
+
+"They are pleasant, if they are short," she answered.
+
+"Like his own life," said the doctor; "his abuse of pleasures will cut
+that short."
+
+"So much the better," remarked Soudry, "my son will step into the
+property."
+
+"Did he bring you any news about Les Aigues?" asked the Abbe Taupin.
+
+"Yes, my dear abbe," said Madame Soudry. "Those people are the scourge
+of the neighborhood. I can't comprehend how it is that Madame de
+Montcornet, who is certainly a well-bred woman, doesn't understand
+their interests better."
+
+"And yet she has a model before her eyes," said the abbe.
+
+"Who is that?" asked Madame Soudry, smirking.
+
+"The Soulanges."
+
+"Ah, yes!" replied the queen after a pause.
+
+"Here I am!" cried Madame Vermut, coming into the room; "and without
+my re-active,--for Vermut is so inactive in all that concerns me that
+I can't call him an active of any kind."
+
+"What the devil is that cursed old Rigou doing there?" said Soudry to
+Guerbet, as they saw the green chaise stop before the gate of the
+Tivoli. "He is one of those tiger-cats whose every step has an
+object."
+
+"You may well say cursed," replied the fat little collector.
+
+"He has gone into the Cafe de la Paix," remarked Gourdon, the doctor.
+
+"And there's some trouble there," added Gourdon the poet; "I can hear
+them yelping from here."
+
+"That cafe," said the abbe, "is like the temple of Janus; it was
+called the Cafe de la Guerre under the Empire, and then it was peace
+itself; the most respectable of the bourgeoisie met there for
+conversation--"
+
+"Conversation!" interrupted the justice of the peace. "What kind of
+conversation was it which produced all the little Bourniers?"
+
+"--but ever since it has been called, in honor of the Bourbons, the
+Cafe de la Paix, fights take place there every day," said Abbe Taupin,
+finishing the sentence which the magistrate had taken the liberty of
+interrupting.
+
+This idea of the abbe was, like the quotations from "The
+Cup-and-Ball," of frequent recurrence.
+
+"Do you mean that Burgundy will always be the land of fisticuffs?"
+asked Pere Guerbet.
+
+"That's not ill said," remarked the abbe; "not at all; in fact it's
+almost an exact history of our country."
+
+"I don't know anything about the history of France," blurted Soudry;
+"and before I try to learn it, it is more important to me to know why
+old Rigou has gone into the Cafe de la Paix with Socquard."
+
+"Oh!" returned the abbe, "wherever he goes and wherever he stays, you
+may be quite certain it is for no charitable purpose."
+
+"That man gives me goose-flesh whenever I see him," said Madame
+Vermut.
+
+"He is so much to be feared," remarked the doctor, "that if he had a
+spite against me I should have no peace till he was dead and buried;
+he would get out of his coffin to do you an ill-turn."
+
+"If any one can force the Shopman to come to the fair, and manage to
+catch him in a trap, it'll be Rigou," said Soudry to his wife, in a
+low tone.
+
+"Especially," she replied, in a loud one, "if Gaubertin and you, my
+love, help him."
+
+"There! didn't I tell you so?" cried Guerbet, poking the justice of
+the peace. "I knew he would find some pretty girl at Socquard's,
+--there he is, putting her into his carriage."
+
+"You are quite wrong, gentlemen," said Madame Soudry; "Monsieur Rigou
+is thinking of nothing but the great affair; and if I'm not mistaken,
+that girl is only Tonsard's daughter."
+
+"He is like the chemist who lays in a stock of vipers," said old
+Guerbet.
+
+"One would think you were intimate with Monsieur Vermut to hear you
+talk," said the doctor, pointing to the little apothecary, who was
+then crossing the square.
+
+"Poor fellow!" said the poet, who was suspected of occasionally
+sharpening his wit with Madame Vermut; "just look at that waddle of
+his! and they say he is learned!"
+
+"Without him," said the justice of the peace, "we should be hard put
+to it about post-mortems; he found poison in poor Pigeron's stomach so
+cleverly that the chemists of Paris testified in the court at Auxerre
+that they couldn't have done better--"
+
+"He didn't find anything at all," said Soudry; "but, as President
+Gendrin says, it is a good thing to let people suppose that poison
+will always be found--"
+
+"Madame Pigeron was very wise to leave Auxerre," said Madame Vermut;
+"she was silly and wicked both. As if it were necessary to have
+recourse to drugs to annul a husband! Are not there other ways quite
+as sure, but innocent, to rid ourselves of that incumbrance? I would
+like to have a man dare to question my conduct! The worthy Monsieur
+Vermut doesn't hamper me in the least,--but he has never been ill yet.
+As for Madame de Montcornet, just see how she walks about the woods
+and the hermitage with that journalist whom she brought from Paris at
+her own expense, and how she pets him under the very eyes of the
+general!"
+
+"At her own expense!" cried Madame Soudry. "Are you sure? If we could
+only get proof of it, what a fine subject for an anonymous letter to
+the general!"
+
+"The general!" cried Madame Vermut, "he won't interfere with things;
+he plays his part."
+
+"What part, my dear?" asked Madame Soudry.
+
+"Oh! the paternal part."
+
+"If poor little Pigeron had had the wisdom to play it, instead of
+harassing his wife, he'd be alive now," said the poet.
+
+Madame Soudry leaned over to her neighbor, Monsieur Guerbet, and made
+one of those apish grimaces which she had inherited from dear
+mistress, together with her silver, by right of conquest, and twisting
+her face into a series of them she made him look at Madame Vermut, who
+was coquetting with the author of "The Cup-and-Ball."
+
+"What shocking style that woman has! what talk, what manners!" she
+said. "I really don't think I can admit her any longer into _our
+society_,--especially," she added, "when Monsieur Gourdon, the poet, is
+present."
+
+"There's social morality!" said the abbe, who had heard and observed
+all without saying a word.
+
+After this epigram, or rather, this satire on the company, so true and
+so concise that it hit every one, the usual game of boston was
+proposed.
+
+Is not this a picture of life as it is at all stages of what we agree
+to call society? Change the style, and you will find that nothing more
+and nothing less is said in the gilded salons of Paris.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER III
+
+                        THE CAFE DE LA PAIX
+
+It was about seven o'clock when Rigou drove by the Cafe de la Paix.
+The setting sun, slanting its beams across the little town, was
+diffusing its ruddy tints, and the clear mirror of the lake contrasted
+with the flashing of the resplendent window-panes, which originated
+the strangest and most improbable colors.
+
+The deep schemer, who had grown pensive as he revolved his plots, let
+his horse proceed so slowly that in passing the Cafe de la Paix he
+heard his own name banded about in one of those noisy disputes which,
+according to the Abbe Taupin, made the name of the establishment a
+gain-saying of its customary condition.
+
+For a clear understanding of the following scene we must explain the
+topography of this region of plenty and of misrule, which began with
+the cafe on the square, and ended on the country road with the famous
+Tivoli where the conspirators proposed to entrap the general. The
+ground-floor of the cafe, which stood at the angle of the square and
+the road, and was built in the style of Rigou's house, had three
+windows on the road and two on the square, the latter being separated
+by a glass door through which the house was entered. The cafe had,
+moreover, a double door which opened on a side alley that separated it
+from the neighboring house (that of Vallet the Soulanges mercer),
+which led to an inside courtyard.
+
+The house, which was painted wholly in yellow, except the blinds,
+which were green, is one of the few houses in the little town which
+has two stories and an attic. And this is why: Before the astonishing
+rise in the prosperity of Ville-aux-Fayes the first floor of this
+house, which had four chambers, each containing a bed and the meagre
+furniture thought necessary to justify the term "furnished lodgings,"
+was let to strangers who were obliged to come to Soulanges on matters
+connected with the courts, or to visitors who did not sleep at the
+chateau; but for the last twenty-five years these rooms had had no
+other occupants than the mountebanks, the merchants, the vendors of
+quack medicines who came to the fair, or else commercial travellers.
+During the fair-time they were let for four francs a day; and brought
+Socquard about two hundred and fifty francs, not to speak of the
+profits on the consumption of food which the guests took in his cafe.
+
+The front of the house on the square was adorned with painted signs;
+on the spaces that separated the windows from the glass door
+billiard-cues were represented, lovingly tied together with ribbons,
+and above these bows were depicted smoking bowls of punch, the bowls
+being in the form of Greek vases. The words "Cafe de la Paix" were over
+the door, brilliantly painted in yellow on a green ground, at each end
+of which rose pyramids of tricolored billiard-balls. The window-sashes,
+painted green, had small panes of the commonest glass.
+
+A dozen arbor-vitae, which ought to be called cafe-trees, stood to the
+left and right in pots, and presented their usual pretensions and
+sickly appearance. Awnings, with which shopkeepers of the large cities
+protect their windows from the head of the sun, were as yet an unknown
+luxury in Soulanges. The beneficent liquids in the bottles which stood
+on boards just behind the window-panes went through a periodic
+cooking. When the sun concentrated its rays through the lenticular
+knobs in the glass it boiled the Madeira, the syrups, the liqueurs,
+the preserved plums, and the cherry-brandy set out for show; for the
+heat was so great that Aglae, her father, and the waiter were forced
+to sit outside on benches poorly shaded by the wilted shrubs,--which
+Mademoiselle kept alive with water that was almost hot. All three,
+father, daughter, and servant, might be seen at certain hours of the
+day stretched out there, fast asleep, like domestic animals.
+
+In 1804, the period when "Paul and Virginia" was the rage, the inside
+of the cafe was hung with a paper which represented the chief scenes
+of that romance. There could be seen Negroes gathering the coffee-crop,
+though coffee was seldom seen in the establishment, not twenty cups of
+that beverage being served in the month. Colonial products were of so
+little account in the consumption of the place that if a stranger had
+asked for a cup of chocolate Socquard would have been hard put to it to
+serve him. Still, he would have done so with a nauseous brown broth
+made from tablets in which there were more flour, crushed almonds, and
+brown sugar than pure sugar and cacao, concoctions which were sold at
+two sous a cake by village grocers, and manufactured for the purpose of
+ruining the sale of the Spanish commodity.
+
+As for coffee, Pere Socquard simply boiled it in a utensil known to
+all such households as the "big brown pot"; he let the dregs (that
+were half chicory) settle, and served the decoction, with a coolness
+worthy of a Parisian waiter, in a china cup which, if flung to the
+ground, would not have cracked.
+
+At this period the sacred respect felt for sugar under the Emperor was
+not yet dispelled in the town of Soulanges, and Aglae Socquard boldly
+served three bits of it of the size of hazel-nuts to a foreign
+merchant who had rashly asked for the literary beverage.
+
+The wall decoration of the cafe, relieved by mirrors in gilt frames
+and brackets on which the hats were hung, had not been changed since
+the days when all Soulanges came to admire the romantic paper, also a
+counter painted like mahogany with a Saint-Anne marble top, on which
+shone vessels of plated metal and lamps with double-burners, which
+were, rumor said, given to the beautiful Madame Socquard by Gaubertin.
+A sticky coating of dirt covered everything, like that found on old
+pictures put away and long forgotten in a garret. The tables painted
+to resemble marble, the benches covered in red Utrecht velvet, the
+hanging glass lamp full of oil, which fed two lights, fastened by a
+chain to the ceiling and adorned with glass pendants, were the
+beginning of the celebrity of the then Cafe de la Guerre.
+
+There, from 1802 to 1804, all the bourgeois of Soulanges played at
+dominoes and a game of cards called "brelan," drank tiny glasses of
+liqueur or boiled wine, and ate brandied fruits and biscuits; for the
+dearness of colonial products had banished coffee, sugar, and
+chocolate. Punch was a great luxury; so was "bavaroise." These
+infusions were made with a sugary substance resembling molasses, the
+name of which is now lost, but which, at the time, made the fortune of
+its inventor.
+
+These succinct details will recall to the memory of all travellers
+many others that are analogous; and those persons who have never left
+Paris can imagine the ceiling blackened with smoke and the mirrors
+specked with millions of spots, showing in what freedom and
+independence the whole order of diptera lived in the Cafe de la Paix.
+
+The beautiful Madame Socquard, whose gallant adventures surpassed
+those of the mistress of the Grand-I-Vert, sat there, enthroned,
+dressed in the last fashion. She affected the style of a sultana, and
+wore a turban. Sultanas, under the Empire, enjoyed a vogue equal to
+that of the "angel" of to-day. The whole valley took pattern from the
+turbans, the poke-bonnets, the fur caps, the Chinese head-gear of the
+handsome Socquard, to whose luxury the big-wigs of Soulanges
+contributed. With a waist beneath her arm-pits, after the fashion of
+our mothers, who were proud of their imperial graces, Junie (she was
+named Junie!) made the fortune of the house of Socquard. Her husband
+owed to her the ownership of a vineyard, of the house they lived in,
+and also the Tivoli. The father of Monsieur Lupin was said to have
+committed some follies for the handsome Madame Socquard; and
+Gaubertin, who had taken her from him, certainly owed him the little
+Bournier.
+
+These details, together with the deep mystery with which Socquard
+manufactured his boiled wine, are sufficient to explain why his name
+and that of the Cafe de la Paix were popular; but there were other
+reasons for their renown. Nothing better than wine could be got at
+Tonsard's and the other taverns in the valley; from Conches to
+Ville-aux-Fayes, in a circumference of twenty miles, the Cafe Socquard
+was the only place where the guests could play billiards and drink the
+punch so admirably concocted by the proprietor. There alone could be
+found a display of foreign wines, fine liqueurs, and brandied fruits.
+Its name resounded daily throughout the valley, accompanied by ideas
+of superfine sensual pleasures such as men whose stomachs are more
+sensitive than their hearts dream about. To all these causes of
+popularity was added that of being an integral part of the great
+festival of Soulanges. The Cafe de la Paix was to the town, in a
+superior degree, what the tavern of the Grand-I-Vert was to the
+peasantry,--a centre of venom; it was the point of contact and
+transmission between the gossip of Ville-aux-Fayes and that of the
+valley. The Grand-I-Vert supplied the milk and the Cafe de la Paix the
+cream, and Tonsard's two daughters were in daily communication between
+the two.
+
+To Socquard's mind the square of Soulanges was merely an appendage to
+his cafe. Hercules went from door to door, talking with this one and
+that one, and wearing in summer no other garment than a pair of
+trousers and a half-buttoned waistcoat. If any one entered the tavern,
+the people with whom he gossiped warned him, and he slowly and
+reluctantly returned.
+
+Rigou stopped his horse, and getting out of the chaise, fastened the
+bridle to one of the posts near the gate of the Tivoli. Then he made a
+pretext to listen to what was going on without being noticed, and
+placed himself between two windows through one of which he could, by
+advancing his head, see the persons in the room, watch their gestures,
+and catch the louder tones which came through the glass of the windows
+and which the quiet of the street enabled him to hear.
+
+"If I were to tell old Rigou that your brother Nicolas is after La
+Pechina," cried an angry voice, "and that he waylays her, he'd rip the
+entrails out of every one of you,--pack of scoundrels that you are at
+the Grand-I-Vert!"
+
+"If you play me such a trick as that, Aglae," said the shrill voice of
+Marie Tonsard, "you sha'n't tell anything more except to the worms in
+your coffin. Don't meddle with my brother's business or with mine and
+Bonnebault's either."
+
+Marie, instigated by her grandmother, had, as we see, followed
+Bonnebault; she had watched him through the very window where Rigou
+was now standing, and had seen him displaying his graces and paying
+compliments so agreeable to Mademoiselle Socquard that she was forced
+to smile upon him. That smile had brought about the scene in the midst
+of which the revelation that interested Rigou came out.
+
+"Well, well, Pere Rigou, what are you doing here?" said Socquard,
+slapping the usurer on the shoulder; he was coming from a barn at the
+end of the garden, where he kept various contrivances for the public
+games, such as weighing-machines, merry-go-rounds, see-saws, all in
+readiness for the Tivoli when opened. Socquard stepped noiselessly,
+for he was wearing a pair of those yellow leather-slippers which cost
+so little by the gross that they have an enormous sale in the
+provinces.
+
+"If you have any fresh lemons, I'd like a glass of lemonade," said
+Rigou; "it is a warm evening."
+
+"Who is making that racket?" said Socquard, looking through the window
+and seeing his daughter and Marie Tonsard.
+
+"They are quarrelling for Bonnebault," said Rigou, sardonically.
+
+The anger of the father was at once controlled by the interest of the
+tavern-keeper. The tavern-keeper judged it prudent to listen outside,
+as Rigou was doing; the father was inclined to enter and declare that
+Bonnebault, possessed of admirable qualities in the eyes of a
+tavern-keeper, had none at all as son-in-law to one of the notables of
+Soulanges. And yet Pere Socquard had received but few offers for his
+daughter. At twenty-two Aglae already rivalled in size and weight
+Madame Vermichel, whose agility seemed phenomenal. Sitting behind a
+counter increased the adipose tendency which she derived from her
+father.
+
+"What devil is it that gets into girls?" said Socquard to Rigou.
+
+"Ha!" replied the ex-Benedictine, "of all the devils, that's the one
+the Church has most to do with."
+
+Just then Bonnebault came out of the billiard-room with a cue in his
+hand, and struck Marie sharply, saying:--
+
+"You've made me miss my stroke; but I'll not miss you, and I'll give
+it to you till you muffle that clapper of yours."
+
+Socquard and Rigou, who now thought it wise to interfere, entered the
+cafe by the front door, raising such a crowd of flies that the light
+from the windows was obscured; the sound was like that of the distant
+practising of a drum-corps. After their first excitement was over, the
+big flies with the bluish bellies, accompanied by the stinging little
+ones, returned to their quarters in the windows, where on three tiers
+of planks, the paint of which was indistinguishable under the
+fly-specks, were rows of viscous bottles ranged like soldiers.
+
+Marie was crying. To be struck before a rival by the man she loves is
+one of those humiliations that no woman can endure, no matter what her
+place on the social ladder may be; and the lower that place is, the
+more violent is the expression of her wrath. The Tonsard girl took no
+notice of Rigou or of Socquard; she flung herself on a bench, in
+gloomy and sullen silence, which the ex-monk carefully watched.
+
+"Get a fresh lemon, Aglae," said Pere Socquard, "and go and rinse that
+glass yourself."
+
+"You did right to send her away," whispered Rigou, "or she might have
+been hurt"; and he glanced significantly at the hand with which Marie
+grasped a stool she had caught up to throw at Aglae's head.
+
+"Now, Marie," said Socquard, standing before her, "people don't come
+here to fling stools; if you were to break one of my mirrors, the milk
+of your cows wouldn't pay for the damage."
+
+"Pere Socquard, your daughter is a reptile; I'm worth a dozen of her,
+I'd have you know. If you don't want Bonnebault for a son-in-law, it
+is high time for you to tell him to go and play billiards somewhere
+else; he's losing a hundred sous every minute."
+
+In the middle of this flux of words, screamed rather than said,
+Socquard took Marie round the waist and flung her out of the door,
+in spite of her cries and resistance. It was none too soon; for
+Bonnebault rushed out of the billiard-room, his eyes blazing.
+
+"It sha'n't end so!" cried Marie Tonsard.
+
+"Begone!" shouted Bonnebault, whom Viollet held back round the body
+lest he should do the girl some hurt. "Go to the devil, or I will
+never speak to you or look at you again!"
+
+"You!" said Marie, flinging him a furious glance. "Give me back my
+money, and I'll leave you to Mademoiselle Socquard if she is rich
+enough to keep you."
+
+Thereupon Marie, frightened when she saw that even Socquard-Alcides
+could scarcely hold Bonnebault, who sprang after her like a tiger,
+took to flight along the road.
+
+Rigou followed, and told her to get into his carriole to escape
+Bonnebault, whose shouts reached the hotel Soudry; then, after hiding
+Marie under the leather curtains, he came back to the cafe to drink
+his lemonade and examine the group it now contained, composed of
+Plissoud, Amaury, Viollet, and the waiter, who were all trying to
+pacify Bonnebault.
+
+"Come, hussar, it's your turn to play," said Amaury, a small, fair
+young man, with a dull eye.
+
+"Besides, she's taken herself off," said Viollet.
+
+If any one ever betrayed astonishment it was Plissoud when he beheld
+the usurer of Blangy sitting at one of the tables, and more occupied
+in watching him, Plissoud, than in noticing the quarrel that was going
+on. In spite of himself, the sheriff allowed his face to show the
+species of bewilderment which a man feels at an unexpected meeting
+with a person whom he hates and is plotting against, and he speedily
+withdrew into the billiard-room.
+
+"Adieu, Pere Socquard," said Rigou.
+
+"I'll get your carriage," said the innkeeper; "take your time."
+
+"How shall I find out what those fellows have been saying over their
+pool?" Rigou was asking himself, when he happened to see the waiter's
+face in the mirror beside him.
+
+The waiter was a jack at all trades; he cultivated Socquard's vines,
+swept out the cafe and the billiard-room, kept the garden in order,
+and watered the Tivoli, all for fifty francs a year. He was always
+without a jacket, except on grand occasions; usually his sole garments
+were a pair of blue linen trousers, heavy shoes, and a striped velvet
+waistcoat, over which he wore an apron of homespun linen when at work
+in the cafe or billiard-room. This apron, with strings, was the badge
+of his functions. The fellow had been hired by Socquard at the last
+annual fair; for in this valley, as throughout Burgundy, servants are
+hired in the market-place by the year, exactly as one buys horses.
+
+"What's your name?" said Rigou.
+
+"Michel, at your service," replied the waiter.
+
+"Doesn't old Fourchon come here sometimes?"
+
+"Two or three times a week, with Monsieur Vermichel, who gives me a
+couple of sous to warn him if his wife's after them."
+
+"He's a fine old fellow, Pere Fourchon; knows a great deal and is full
+of good sense," said Rigou, paying for his lemonade and leaving the
+evil-smelling place when he saw Pere Socquard leading his horse round.
+
+Just as he was about to get into the carriage, Rigou noticed the
+chemist crossing the square and hailed him with a "Ho, there, Monsieur
+Vermut!" Recognizing the rich man, Vermut hurried up. Rigou joined
+him, and said in a low voice:--
+
+"Are there any drugs that can eat into the tissue of the skin so as to
+produce a real disease, like a whitlow on the finger, for instance?"
+
+"If Monsieur Gourdon would help, yes," answered the little chemist.
+
+"Vermut, not a word of all this, or you and I will quarrel; but speak
+of the matter to Monsieur Gourdon, and tell him to come and see me the
+day after to-morrow. I may be able to procure him the delicate
+operation of cutting off a forefinger."
+
+Then, leaving the little man thoroughly bewildered, Rigou got into the
+carriole beside Marie Tonsard.
+
+"Well, you little viper," he said, taking her by the arm when he had
+fastened the reins to a hook in front of the leathern apron which
+closed the carriole and the horse had started on a trot, "do you think
+you can keep Bonnebault by giving way to such violence? If you were a
+wise girl you would promote his marriage with that hogshead of
+stupidity and take your revenge afterwards."
+
+Marie could not help smiling as she answered:--
+
+"Ah, how bad you are! you are the master of us all in wickedness."
+
+"Listen to me, Marie; I like the peasants, but it won't do for any one
+of you to come between my teeth and a mouthful of game. Your brother
+Nicolas, as Aglae said, is after La Pechina. That must not be; I
+protect her, that girl. She is to be my heiress for thirty thousand
+francs, and I intend to marry her well. I know that Nicolas, helped by
+your sister Catherine, came near killing the little thing this
+morning. You are to see your brother and sister at once, and say to
+them: 'If you let La Pechina alone, Pere Rigou will save Nicolas from
+the conscription.'"
+
+"You are the devil incarnate!" cried Marie. "They do say you've signed
+a compact with him. Is that true?"
+
+"Yes," replied Rigou, gravely.
+
+"I heard it, but I didn't believe it."
+
+"He has guaranteed that no attacks aimed at me shall hurt me; that I
+shall never be robbed; that I shall live a hundred years and succeed
+in everything I undertake, and be as young to the day of my death as a
+two-year old cockerel--"
+
+"Well, if that's so," said Marie, "it must be _devilishly_ easy for
+you to save my brother from the conscription--"
+
+"If he chooses, that's to say. He'll have to lose a finger," returned
+Rigou. "I'll tell him how."
+
+"Look out, you are taking the upper road!" exclaimed Marie.
+
+"I never go by the lower at night," said the ex-monk.
+
+"On account of the cross?" said Marie, naively.
+
+"That's it, sly-boots," replied her diabolical companion.
+
+They had reached a spot where the high-road cuts through a slight
+elevation of ground, making on each side of it a rather steep slope,
+such as we often see on the mail-roads of France. At the end of this
+little gorge, which is about a hundred feet long, the roads to
+Ronquerolles and to Cerneux meet and form an open space, in the centre
+of which stands a cross. From either slope a man could aim at a victim
+and kill him at close quarters, with all the more ease because the
+little hill is covered with vines, and the evil-doer could lie in
+ambush among the briers and brambles that overgrow them. We can
+readily imagine why the usurer did not take that road after dark. The
+Thune flows round the little hill; and the place is called the Close
+of the Cross. No spot was ever more adapted for revenge or murder, for
+the road to Ronquerolles continues to the bridge over the Avonne in
+front of the pavilion of the Rendezvous, while that to Cerneux leads
+off above the mail-road; so that between the four roads,--to Les
+Aigues, Ville-aux-Fayes, Ronquerolles, and Cerneux,--a murderer could
+choose his line of retreat and leave his pursuers in uncertainty.
+
+"I shall drop you at the entrance of the village," said Rigou when
+they neared the first houses of Blangy.
+
+"Because you are afraid of Annette, old coward!" cried Marie. "When
+are you going to send her away? you have had her now three years. What
+amuses me is that your old woman still lives; the good God knows how
+to revenge himself."
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IV
+
+                THE TRIUMVIRATE OF VILLE-AUX-FAYES
+
+The cautious usurer compelled his wife and Jean to go to bed and to
+rise by daylight; assuring them that the house would never be attacked
+if he sat up till midnight, and he never himself rose till late. Not
+only had he thus secured himself from interruption between seven at
+night and five the next morning but he had accustomed his wife and
+Jean to respect his morning sleep and that of Hagar, whose room was
+directly behind his.
+
+So, on the following morning, about half past six, Madame Rigou, who
+herself took care of the poultry-yard with some assistance from Jean,
+knocked timidly at her husband's door.
+
+"Monsieur Rigou," she said, "you told me to wake you."
+
+The tones of that voice, the attitude of the woman, her frightened air
+as she obeyed an order the execution of which might be ill-received,
+showed the utter self-abnegation in which the poor creature lived, and
+the affection she still bore to her petty tyrant.
+
+"Very good," replied Rigou.
+
+"Shall I wake Annette?" she asked.
+
+"No, let her sleep; she has been up half the night," he replied,
+gravely.
+
+The man was always grave, even when he allowed himself to jest.
+Annette had in fact opened the door secretly to Sibilet, Fourchon, and
+Catherine Tonsard, who all came at different hours between eleven and
+two o'clock.
+
+Ten minutes later Rigou, dressed with more care than usual, came
+downstairs and greeted his wife with a "Good-morning, my old woman,"
+which made her happier than if counts had knelt at her feet.
+
+"Jean," he said to the ex-lay-brother, "don't leave the house; if any
+one robs me it will be worse for you than for me."
+
+By thus mingling mildness and severity, hopes and rebuffs, the clever
+egoist kept his three slaves faithful and close at his heels, like
+dogs.
+
+Taking the upper-road, so-called, to avoid the Close of the Cross,
+Rigou reached the square of Soulanges about eight o'clock.
+
+Just as he was fastening his rein to the post nearest the little door
+with three steps, a blind opened and Soudry showed his face, pitted
+with the small-pox, which the expression of his small black eyes
+rendered crafty.
+
+"Let's begin by taking a crust here before we start," he said; "we
+sha'n't get breakfast at Ville-aux-Fayes before one o'clock."
+
+Then he softly called a servant-girl, as young and pretty as Annette,
+who came down noiselessly, and received his order for ham and bread;
+after which he went himself to the cellar and fetched some wine.
+
+Rigou contemplated for the hundredth time the well-known dining-room,
+floored in oak, with stuccoed ceiling and cornice, its high wainscot
+and handsome cupboards finely painted, its porcelain stone and
+magnificent tall clock,--all the property of Mademoiselle Laguerre.
+The chair-backs were in the form of lyres, painted white and highly
+varnished; the seats were of green morocco with gilt nails. A massive
+mahogany table was covered with green oilcloth, with large squares of
+a deeper shade of green, and a plain border of the lighter. The floor,
+laid in Hungarian point, was carefully waxed by Urbain and showed the
+care which ex-waiting-women know how to exact out of their servants.
+
+"Bah! it cost too much," thought Rigou for the hundredth time. "I can
+eat as good a dinner in my room as here, and I have the income of the
+money this useless splendor would have wasted. Where is Madame
+Soudry?" he asked, as the mayor returned armed with a venerable
+bottle.
+
+"Asleep."
+
+"And you no longer disturb her slumbers?" said Rigou.
+
+The ex-gendarme winked with a knowing air, and pointed to the ham
+which Jeannette, the pretty maid, was just bringing in.
+
+"That will pick you up, a pretty bit like that," he said. "It was
+cured in the house; we cut into it only yesterday."
+
+"Where did you find her?" said the ex-Benedictine in Soudry's ear.
+
+"She is like the ham," replied the ex-gendarme, winking again; "I have
+had her only a week."
+
+Jeannette, still in her night-cap, with a short petticoat and her bare
+feet in slippers, had slipped on a bodice made with straps over the
+arms in true peasant fashion, over which she had crossed a neckerchief
+which did not entirely hide her fresh and youthful attractions, which
+were at least as appetizing as the ham she carried. Short and plump,
+with bare arms mottled red, ending in large, dimpled hands with short
+but well-made fingers, she was a picture of health. The face was that
+of a true Burgundian,--ruddy, but white about the temples, throat, and
+ears; the hair was chestnut; the corners of the eyes turned up towards
+the top of the ears; the nostrils were wide, the mouth sensual, and a
+little down lay along the cheeks; all this, together with a jaunty
+expression, tempered however by a deceitfully modest attitude, made
+her the model of a roguish servant-girl.
+
+"On my honor, Jeannette is as good as the ham," said Rigou. "If I
+hadn't an Annette I should want a Jeannette."
+
+"One is as good as the other," said the ex-gendarme, "for your Annette
+is fair and delicate. How is Madame Rigou,--is she asleep?" added
+Soudry, roughly, to let Rigou see he understood his joke.
+
+"She wakes with the cock, but she goes to roost with the hens,"
+replied Rigou. "As for me, I sit up and read the 'Constitutionnel.' My
+wife lets me sleep at night and in the morning too; she wouldn't come
+into my room for all the world."
+
+"It's just the other way here," replied Jeanette. "Madame sits up with
+the company playing cards; sometimes there are sixteen of them in the
+salon; Monsieur goes to bed at eight o'clock, and we get up at
+daylight--"
+
+"You think that's different," said Rigou, "but it comes to the same
+thing in the end. Well, my dear, you come to me and I'll send Annette
+here, and that will be the same thing and different too."
+
+"Old scamp, you'll make her ashamed," said Soudry.
+
+"Ha! gendarme; you want your field to yourself! Well, we all get our
+happiness where we can find it."
+
+Jeanette, by her master's order, disappeared to lay out his clothes.
+
+"You must have promised to marry her when your wife dies," said Rigou.
+
+"At your age and mine," replied Soudry, "there's no other way."
+
+"With girls of any ambition it would be one way to become a widower,"
+added Rigou; "especially if Madame Soudry found fault with Jeannette
+for her way of scrubbing the staircase."
+
+The remark made the two husbands pensive. When Jeannette returned and
+announced that all was ready, Soudry said to her, "Come and help me!"
+--a precaution which made the ex-monk smile.
+
+"There's a difference, indeed!" said he. "As for me, I'd leave you
+alone with Annette, my good friend."
+
+A quarter of an hour later Soudry, in his best clothes, got into the
+wicker carriage, and the two friends drove round the lake of Soulanges
+to Ville-aux-Fayes.
+
+"Look at it!" said Rigou, as they reached an eminence from which the
+chateau of Soulanges could be seen in profile.
+
+The old revolutionary put into the tone of his words all the hatred
+which the rural middle classes feel to the great chateaux and the
+great estates.
+
+"Yes, but I hope it will never be destroyed as long as I live," said
+Soudry. "The Comte de Soulanges was my general; he did me kindness; he
+got my pension, and he allows Lupin to manage the estate. After Lupin
+some of us will have it, and as long as the Soulanges family exists
+they and their property will be respected. Such folks are
+large-minded; they let every one make his profit, and they find it
+pays."
+
+"Yes, but the Comte de Soulanges has three children, who, at his
+death, may not agree," replied Rigou. "The husband of his daughter and
+his sons may go to law, and end by selling the lead and iron mines to
+manufacturers, from whom we shall manage to get them back."
+
+The chateau just then showed up in profile, as if to defy the ex-monk.
+
+"Ah! look at it; in those days they built well," cried Soudry. "But
+just now Monsieur le Comte is economizing, so as to make Soulanges the
+entailed estate of his peerage."
+
+"My dear friend," said Rigou, "entailed estates won't exist much
+longer."
+
+When the topic of public matters was exhausted, the worthy pair began
+to discuss the merits of their pretty maids in terms too Burgundian to
+be printed here. That inexhaustible subject carried them so far that
+before they knew it they saw the capital of the arrondissement over
+which Gaubertin reigned, and which we hope excites enough curiosity in
+the reader's mind to justify a short digression.
+
+The name of Ville-aux-Fayes, singular as it is, is explained as the
+corruption of the words (in low Latin) "Villa in Fago,"--the manor of
+the woods. This name indicates that a forest once covered the delta
+formed by the Avonne before it joins its confluent the Yonne. Some
+Frank doubtless built a fortress on the hill which slopes gently to
+the long plain. The savage conqueror separated his vantage-ground from
+the delta by a wide and deep moat and made the position a formidable
+one, essentially seignorial, convenient for enforcing tolls across the
+bridges and for protecting his rights of profit on all grains ground
+in the mills.
+
+That is the history of the beginning of Ville-aux-Fayes. Wherever
+feudal or ecclesiastical dominion established there we find gathered
+together interests, inhabitants, and, later, towns when the localities
+were in a position to maintain them and to found and develop great
+industries. The method of floating timber discovered by Jean Rouvet in
+1549, which required certain convenient stations to intercept it, was
+the making of Ville-aux-Fayes, which, up to that time, had been,
+compared to Soulanges, a mere village. Ville-aux-Fayes became a
+storage place for timber, which covered the shores of the two rivers
+for a distance of over thirty miles. The work of taking out of the
+water, computing the lost logs, and making the rafts which the Yonne
+carried down to the Seine, brought together a large concourse of
+workmen. Such a population increased consumption and encouraged trade.
+Thus Ville-aux-Fayes, which had but six hundred inhabitants at the end
+of the seventeenth century, had two thousand in 1790, and Gaubertin
+had now raised the number to four thousand, by the following means.
+
+When the legislative assembly decreed the new laying out of territory,
+Ville-aux-Fayes, which was situated where, geographically, a
+sub-prefecture was needed, was chosen instead of Soulanges as chief
+town or capital of the arrondissement. The increased population of
+Paris, by increasing the demand for and the value of wood as fuel,
+necessarily increased the commerce of Ville-aux-Fayes. Gaubertin had
+founded his fortune, after losing his stewardship, on this growing
+business, estimating the effect of peace on the population of Paris,
+which did actually increase by over one-third between 1815 and 1825.
+
+The shape of Ville-aux-Fayes followed the conformation of the ground.
+Each side of the promontory was lined with wharves. The dam to stop
+the timber from floating further down was just below a hill covered by
+the forest of Soulanges. Between the dam and the town lay a suburb.
+The lower town, covering the greater part of the delta, came down to
+the shores of the lake of the Avonne.
+
+Above the lower town some five hundred houses with gardens, standing
+on the heights, were grouped round three sides of the promontory, and
+enjoyed the varied scene of the diamond waters of the lake, the rafts
+in construction along its edge, and the piles of wood upon the shores.
+The waters, laden with timber from the river and the rapids which fed
+the mill-races and the sluices of a few manufactories, presented an
+animated scene, all the more charming because inclosed in the greenery
+of forests, while the long valley of Les Aigues offered a glorious
+contrast to the dark foil of the heights above the town itself.
+
+Gaubertin had built himself a house on the level of the delta,
+intending to make a place which should improve the locality and render
+the lower town as desirable as the upper. It was a modern house built
+of stone, with a balcony of iron railings, outside blinds, painted
+windows, and no ornament but a line of fret-work under the eaves, a
+slate roof, one story in height with a garret, a fine courtyard, and
+behind it an English garden bathed by the waters of the Avonne. The
+elegance of the place compelled the department to build a fine edifice
+nearly opposite to it for the sub-prefecture, provisionally lodged in
+a mere kennel. The town itself also built a town-hall. The law-courts
+had lately been installed in a new edifice; so that Ville-aux-Fayes
+owed to the active influence of its present mayor a number of really
+imposing public buildings. The gendarmerie had also built barracks
+which completed the square formed by the marketplace.
+
+These changes, on which the inhabitants prided themselves, were due to
+the impetus given by Gaubertin, who within a day or two had received
+the cross of the Legion of honor, in anticipation of the coming
+birthday of the king. In a town so situated and so modern there was of
+course, neither aristocracy nor nobility. Consequently, the rich
+merchants of Ville-aux-Fayes, proud of their own independence,
+willingly espoused the cause of the peasantry against a count of the
+Empire who had taken sides with the Restoration. To them the
+oppressors were the oppressed. The spirit of this commercial town was
+so well known to the government that they send there as sub-prefect a
+man with a conciliatory temper, a pupil of his uncle, the well-known
+des Lupeaulx, one of those men, accustomed to compromise, who are
+familiar with the difficulties and necessities of administration, but
+whom puritan politicians, doing infinitely worse things, call corrupt.
+
+The interior of Gaubertin's house was decorated with the unmeaning
+commonplaces of modern luxury. Rich papers with gold borders, bronze
+chandeliers, mahogany furniture of a new pattern, astral lamps, round
+tables with marble tops, white china with gilt lines for dessert, red
+morocco chairs and mezzo-tint engravings in the dining-room, and blue
+cashmere furniture in the salon,--all details of a chilling and
+perfectly unmeaning character, but which to the eyes of Ville-aux-Fayes
+seemed the last efforts of Sardanapalian luxury. Madame Gaubertin
+played the role of elegance with great effect; she assumed little airs
+and was lackadaisical at forty-five years of age, as though certain of
+the homage of her court.
+
+We ask those who really know France, if these houses--those of Rigou,
+Soudry, and Gaubertin--are not a perfect presentation of the village,
+the little town, and the seat of a sub-prefecture?
+
+Without being a man of mind, or a man of talent, Gaubertin had the
+appearance of being both. He owed the accuracy of his perception and
+his consummate art to an extreme keenness after gain. He desired
+wealth, not for his wife, not for his children, not for himself, not
+for his family, not for the reputation that money gives; after the
+gratification of his revenge (the hope of which kept him alive) he
+loved the touch of money, like Nucingen, who, it was said, kept
+fingering the gold in his pockets. The rush of business was
+Gaubertin's wine; and though he had his belly full of it, he had all
+the eagerness of one who was empty. As with valets of the drama,
+intrigues, tricks to play, mischief to organize, deceptions,
+commercial over-reachings, accounts to render and receive, disputes,
+and quarrels of self-interest, exhilarated him, kept his blood in
+circulation, and his bile flowing. He went and came on foot, on
+horseback, in a carriage, by water; he was at all auctions and timber
+sales in Paris, thinking of everything, keeping hundreds of wires in
+his hands and never getting them tangled.
+
+Quick, decided in his movements as in his ideas, short and squat in
+figure, with a thin nose, a fiery eye, an ear on the "qui vive," there
+was something of the hunting-dog about him. His brown face, very round
+and sunburned, from which the tanned ears stood out predominantly,
+--for he always wore a cap,--was in keeping with that character. His
+nose turned up; his tightly-closed lips could never have opened to say
+a kindly thing. His bushy whiskers formed a pair of black and shiny
+tufts beneath the highly-colored cheek-bones, and were lost in his
+cravat. Hair that was pepper-and-salt in color and frizzled naturally
+in stages like those of a judge's wig, seeming scorched by the fury of
+the fire which heated his brown skull and gleamed in his gray eyes
+surrounded by circular wrinkles (no doubt from a habit of always
+blinking when he looked across the country in full sunlight),
+completed the characteristics of his physiognomy. His lean and
+vigorous hands were hairy, knobbed, and claw-like, like those of men
+who do their share of labor. His personality was agreeable to those
+with whom he had to do, for he wrapped it in a misleading gayety; he
+knew how to talk a great deal without saying a word of what he meant
+to keep unsaid. He wrote little, so as to deny anything that escaped
+him which might prove unfavorable in its after effects upon his
+interests. His books and papers were kept by a cashier,--an honest
+man, whom men of Gaubertin's stamp always seek to get hold of, and
+whom they make, in their own selfish interests, their first dupe.
+
+When Rigou's little green chaise appeared, towards twelve o'clock, in
+the broad avenue which skirts the river, Gaubertin, in cap, boots, and
+jacket, was returning from the wharves. He hastened his steps,
+--feeling very sure that Rigou's object in coming over could only be
+"the great affair."
+
+"Good morning, gendarme; good morning, paunch of gall and wisdom," he
+said, giving a little slap to the stomachs of his two visitors. "We
+have business to talk over, and, faith! we'll do it glass in hand;
+that's the true way to take things."
+
+"If you do your business that way, you ought to be fatter than you
+are," said Rigou.
+
+"I work too hard; I'm not like you two, confined to the house and
+bewitched there, like old dotards. Well, well, after all that's the
+best way; you can do your business comfortably in an arm-chair, with
+your back to the fire and your belly at table; custom goes to you, I
+have to go after it. But now, come in, come in! the house is yours for
+the time you stay."
+
+A servant, in blue livery edged with scarlet, took the horse by the
+bridle and led him into the courtyard, where were the offices and the
+stable.
+
+Gaubertin left his guests to walk about the garden for a moment, while
+he went to give his orders and arrange about the breakfast.
+
+"Well, my wolves," he said, as he returned, rubbing his hands, "the
+gendarmerie of Soulanges were seen this morning at daybreak, marching
+towards Conches; no doubt they mean to arrest the peasants for
+depredations; ha, ha! things are getting warm, warm! By this time," he
+added, looking at his watch, "those fellows may have been arrested."
+
+"Probably," said Rigou.
+
+"Well, what do you all say over there? Has anything been decided?"
+
+"What is there to decide?" asked Rigou. "We have no part in it," he
+added, looking at Soudry.
+
+"How do you mean nothing to decide? If Les Aigues is sold as the
+result of our coalition, who is to gain five or six hundred thousand
+francs out of it? Do you expect me to, all alone? No, my inside is not
+strong enough to split up two millions, with three children to
+establish, and a wife who hasn't the first idea about the value of
+money; no, I must have associates. Here's the gendarme, he has plenty
+of funds all ready. I know he doesn't hold a single mortgage that
+isn't ready to mature; he only lends now on notes at sight of which I
+endorse. I'll go into this thing by the amount of eight hundred
+thousand francs; my son, the judge, two hundred thousand; and I count
+on the gendarme for two hundred thousand more; now, how much will you
+put in, skull-cap?"
+
+"All the rest," replied Rigou, stiffly.
+
+"The devil! well, I wish I had my hand where your heart is!" exclaimed
+Gaubertin. "Now what are you going to do?"
+
+"Whatever you do; tell your plan."
+
+"My plan," said Gaubertin, "is to take double, and sell half to the
+Conches, and Cerneux, and Blangy folks who want to buy. Soudry has his
+clients, and you yours, and I, mine. That's not the difficulty. The
+thing is, how are we going to arrange among ourselves? How shall we
+divide up the great lots?"
+
+"Nothing easier," said Rigou. "We'll each take what we like best. I,
+for one, shall stand in nobody's way; I'll take the woods in common
+with Soudry and my son-in-law; the timber has been so injured that you
+won't care for it now, and you may have all the rest. Faith, it is
+worth the money you'll put into it!"
+
+"Will you sign that agreement?" said Soudry.
+
+"A written agreement is worth nothing," replied Gaubertin. "Besides,
+you know I am playing above board; I have perfect confidence in
+Rigou, and he shall be the purchaser."
+
+"That will satisfy me," said Rigou.
+
+"I will make only one condition," added Gaubertin. "I must have the
+pavilion of the Rendezvous, with all its appurtenances, and fifty
+acres of the surrounding land. I shall make it my country-house, and
+it shall be near my woods. Madame Gaubertin--Madame Isaure, for that's
+what she wants people to call her--says she shall make it her villa."
+
+"I'm willing," said Rigou.
+
+"Well, now, between ourselves," continued Gaubertin, after looking
+about him on all sides and making sure that no one could overhear him,
+"do you think they are capable of striking a blow?"
+
+"Such as?" asked Rigou, who never allowed himself to understand a
+hint.
+
+"Well, if the worst of the band, the best shot, sent a ball whistling
+round the ears of the count--just to frighten him?"
+
+"He's a man to rush at an assailant and collar him."
+
+"Michaud, then."
+
+"Michaud would do nothing at the moment, but he'd watch and spy till
+he found out the man and those who instigated him."
+
+"You are right," said Gaubertin; "those peasants must make a riot and
+a few must be sent to the galleys. Well, so much the better for us;
+the authorities will catch the worst, whom we shall want to get rid of
+after they've done the work. There are those blackguards, the Tonsards
+and Bonnebault--"
+
+"Tonsard is ready for mischief," said Soudry, "I know that; and we'll
+work him up by Vaudoyer and Courtecuisse."
+
+"I'll answer for Courtecuisse," said Rigou.
+
+"And I hold Vaudoyer in the hollow of my hand."
+
+"Be cautious!" said Rigou; "before everything else be cautious."
+
+"Now, papa skull-cap, do you mean to tell me that there's any harm in
+speaking of things as they are? Is it we who are indicting and
+arresting, or gleaning or depredating? If Monsieur le comte knows what
+he's about and leases the woods to the receiver-general it is all up
+with our schemes,--'Farewell baskets, the vintage is o'er'; in that
+case you will lose more than I. What we say here is between ourselves
+and for ourselves; for I certainly wouldn't say a word to Vaudoyer
+that I couldn't repeat to God and man. But it is not forbidden, I
+suppose, to profit by any events that may take place. The peasantry of
+this canton are hot-headed; the general's exactions, his severity,
+Michaud's persecutions, and those of his keepers have exasperated
+them; to-day things have come to a crisis and I'll bet there's a
+rumpus going on now with the gendarmerie. And so, let's go and
+breakfast."
+
+Madame Gaubertin came into the garden just then. She was a rather fair
+woman with long curls, called English, hanging down her cheeks, who
+played the style of sentimental virtue, pretended never to have known
+love, talked platonics to all the men about her, and kept the
+prosecuting-attorney at her beck and call. She was given to caps with
+large bows, but preferred to wear only her hair. She danced, and at
+forty-five years of age had the mincing manner of a girl; her feet,
+however, were large and her hands frightful. She wished to be called
+Isaure, because among her other oddities and absurdities she had the
+taste to repudiate the name of Gaubertin as vulgar. Her eyes were
+light and her hair of an undecided color, something like dirty
+nankeen. Such as she was, she was taken as a model by a number of
+young ladies, who stabbed the skies with their glances, and posed as
+angels.
+
+"Well, gentlemen," she said, bowing, "I have some strange news for
+you. The gendarmerie have returned."
+
+"Did they make any prisoners?"
+
+"None; the general, it seems, had previously obtained the pardon of
+the depredators. It was given in honor of this happy anniversary of
+the king's restoration to France."
+
+The three associates looked at each other.
+
+"He is cleverer than I thought for, that big cuirassier!" said
+Gaubertin. "Well, come to breakfast. After all, the game is not lost,
+only postponed; it is your affair now, Rigou."
+
+Soudry and Rigou drove back disappointed, not being able as yet to
+plan any other catastrophe to serve their ends and relying, as
+Gaubertin advised, on what might turn up. Like certain Jacobins at the
+outset of the Revolution who were furious with Louis XVI.'s
+conciliations, and who provoked severe measures at court in the hope
+of producing anarchy, which to them meant fortune and power, the
+formidable enemies of General Montcornet staked their present hopes on
+the severity which Michaud and his keepers were likely to employ
+against future depredators. Gaubertin promised them his assistance,
+without explaining who were his co-operators, for he did not wish them
+to know about his relations with Sibilet. Nothing can equal the
+prudence of a man of Gaubertin's stamp, unless it be that of an
+ex-gendarme or an unfrocked priest. This plot could not have been
+brought to a successful issue,--a successfully evil issue,--unless by
+three such men as these, steeped in hatred and self-interest.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER V
+
+                     VICTORY WITHOUT A FIGHT
+
+Madame Michaud's fears were the effect of that second sight which
+comes of true passion. Exclusively absorbed by one only being, the
+soul finally grasps the whole moral world which surrounds that being;
+it sees clearly. A woman when she loves feels the same presentiments
+which disquiet her later when a mother.
+
+While the poor young woman listened to the confused voices coming from
+afar across an unknown space, a scene was really happening in the
+tavern of the Grand-I-Vert which threatened her husband's life.
+
+About five o'clock that morning early risers had seen the gendarmerie
+of Soulanges on its way to Conches. The news circulated rapidly; and
+those whom it chiefly interested were much surprised to learn from
+others, who lived on high ground, that a detachment commanded by the
+lieutenant of Ville-aux-Fayes had marched through the forest of Les
+Aigues. As it was a Monday, there were already good reasons why the
+peasants should be at the tavern; but it was also the eve of the
+anniversary of the restoration of the Bourbons, and though the
+frequenters of Tonsard's den had no need of that "august cause" (as
+they said in those days) to explain their presence at the
+Grand-I-Vert, they did not fail to make the most of it if the mere
+shadow of an official functionary appeared.
+
+Vaudoyer, Courtecuisse, Tonsard and his family, Godain, and an old
+vine-dresser named Laroche, were there early in the morning. The
+latter was a man who scratched a living from day to day; he was one of
+the delinquents collected in Blangy under the sort of subscription
+invented by Sibilet and Courtecuisse to disgust the general by the
+results of his indictments. Blangy had supplied three men, twelve
+women, also eight girls and five boys for whom parent were answerable,
+all of whom were in a condition of pauperism; but they were the only
+ones who could be found that were so. The year 1823 had been a very
+profitable one to the peasantry, and 1826 as likely, through the
+enormous quantity of wine yielded, to bring them in a good deal of
+money; add to this the works at Les Aigues, undertaken by the general,
+which had put a great deal more in circulation throughout the three
+districts which bordered on the estate. It had therefore been quite
+difficult to find in Blangy, Conches, and Cerneux, one hundred and
+twenty indigent persons against whom to bring the suits; and in order
+to do so, they had taken old women, mothers, and grandmothers of those
+who owned property but who possessed nothing of their own, like
+Tonsard's mother. Laroche, an old laborer, possessed absolutely
+nothing; he was not, like Tonsard, hot-blooded and vicious,--his
+motive power was a cold, dull hatred; he toiled in silence with a
+sullen face; work was intolerable to him, but he had to work to live;
+his features were hard and their expression repulsive. Though sixty
+years old, he was still strong, except that his back was bent; he saw
+no future before him, no spot that he could call his own, and he
+envied those who possessed the land; for this reason he had no pity on
+the forests of Les Aigues, and took pleasure in despoiling them
+uselessly.
+
+"Will they be allowed to put us in prison?" he was saying. "After
+Conches they'll come to Blangy. I'm an old offender, and I shall get
+three months."
+
+"What can we do against the gendarmerie, old drunkard?" said Vaudoyer.
+
+"Why! cut the legs of their horses with our scythes. That'll bring
+them down; their muskets are not loaded, and when they find us ten to
+one against them they'll decamp. If the three villages all rose and
+killed two or three gendarmes, they couldn't guillotine the whole of
+us. They'd have to give way, as they did on the other side of
+Burgundy, where they sent a regiment. Bah! that regiment came back
+again, and the peasants cut the woods just as much as they ever did."
+
+"If we kill," said Vaudoyer; "it is better to kill one man; the
+question is, how to do it without danger and frighten those Arminacs
+so that they'll be driven out of the place."
+
+"Which one shall we kill?" asked Laroche.
+
+"Michaud," said Courtecuisse. "Vaudoyer is right, he's perfectly
+right. You'll see that when a keeper is sent to the shades there won't
+be one of them willing to stay even in broad daylight to watch us. Now
+they're there night and day,--demons!"
+
+"Wherever one goes," said old Mother Tonsard,--who was seventy-eight
+years old, and presented a parchment face honey-combed with the
+small-pox, lighted by a pair of green eyes, and framed with dirty-white
+hair, which escaped in strands from a red handkerchief,--"wherever one
+goes, there they are! they stop us, they open our bundles, and if
+there's a single branch, a single twig of a miserable hazel, they
+seize the whole bundle, and they say they'll arrest us. Ha, the
+villains! there's no deceiving them; if they suspect you, you've got
+to undo the bundle. Dogs! all three are not worth a farthing! Yes,
+kill 'em, and it won't ruin France, I tell you."
+
+"Little Vatel is not so bad," said Madame Tonsard.
+
+"He!" said Laroche, "he does his business, like the others; when
+there's a joke going he'll joke with you, but you are none the better
+with him for that. He's worse than the rest,--heartless to poor folks,
+like Michaud himself."
+
+"Michaud has got a pretty wife, though," said Nicolas Tonsard.
+
+"She's with young," said the old woman; "and if this thing goes on
+there'll be a queer kind of baptism for the little one when she
+calves."
+
+"Oh! those Arminacs!" cried Marie Tonsard; "there's no laughing with
+them; and if you did, they'd threaten to arrest you."
+
+"You've tried your hand at cajoling them, have you?" said
+Courtecuisse.
+
+"You may bet on that."
+
+"Well," said Tonsard with a determined air, "they are men like other
+men, and they can be got rid of."
+
+"But I tell you," said Marie, continuing her topic, "they won't be
+cajoled; I don't know what's the matter with them; that bully at the
+pavilion, he's married, but Vatel, Gaillard, and Steingel are not;
+they've not a woman belonging to them; indeed, there's not a woman in
+the place who would marry them."
+
+"Well, we shall see how things go at the harvest and the vintage,"
+said Tonsard.
+
+"They can't stop the gleaning," said the old woman.
+
+"I don't know that," remarked Madame Tonsard. "Groison said that the
+mayor was going to publish a notice that no one should glean without a
+certificate of pauperism; and who's to give that certificate? Himself,
+of course. He won't give many, I tell you! And they say he is going to
+issue an order that no one shall enter the fields till the carts are
+all loaded."
+
+"Why, the fellow's a pestilence!" cried Tonsard, beside himself with
+rage.
+
+"I heard that only yesterday," said Madame Tonsard. "I offered Groison
+a glass of brandy to get something out of him."
+
+"Groison! there's another lucky fellow!" said Vaudoyer, "they've built
+him a house and given him a good wife, and he's got an income and
+clothes fit for a king. There was I, field-keeper for twenty years,
+and all I got was the rheumatism."
+
+"Yes, he's very lucky," said Godain, "he owns property--"
+
+"And we go without, like the fools that we are," said Vaudoyer. "Come,
+let's be off and find out what's going on at Conches; they are not so
+patient over there as we are."
+
+"Come on," said Laroche, who was none too steady on his legs. "If I
+don't exterminate one of two of those fellows may I lose my name."
+
+"You!" said Tonsard, "you'd let them put the whole district in prison;
+but I--if they dare to touch my old mother, there's my gun and it
+never misses."
+
+"Well," said Laroche to Vaudoyer, "I tell you that if they make a
+single prisoner at Conches one gendarme shall fall."
+
+"He has said it, old Laroche!" cried Courtecuisse.
+
+"He has said it," remarked Vaudoyer, "but he hasn't done it, and he
+won't do it. What good would it do to get yourself guillotined for
+some gendarme or other? No, if you kill, I say, kill Michaud."
+
+During this scene Catherine Tonsard stood sentinel at the door to warn
+the drinkers to keep silent if any one passed. In spite of their
+half-drunken legs they sprang rather than walked out of the tavern,
+and their bellicose temper started them at a good pace on the road to
+Conches, which led for over a mile along the park wall of Les Aigues.
+
+Conches was a true Burgundian village, with one street, which was
+crossed by the main road. The houses were built either of brick or of
+cobblestones, and were squalid in aspect. Following the mail-road from
+Ville-aux-Fayes, the village was seen from the rear and there it
+presented rather a picturesque effect. Between the road and the
+Ronquerolles woods, which continued those of Les Aigues and crowned
+the heights, flowed a little river, and several houses, rather
+prettily grouped, enlivened the scene. The church and the parsonage
+stood alone and were seen from the park of Les Aigues, which came
+nearly up to them. In front of the church was a square bordered by
+trees, where the conspirators of the Grand-I-Vert saw the gendarmerie
+and hastened their already hasty steps. Just then three men on
+horseback rode rapidly out of the park of Les Aigues and the peasants
+at once recognized the general, his groom, and Michaud the bailiff,
+who came at a gallop into the square. Tonsard and his party arrived a
+minute or two after them. The delinquents, men and women, had made no
+resistance, and were standing between five of the Soulanges gendarmes
+and fifteen of those from Ville-aux-Fayes. The whole village had
+assembled. The fathers, mothers, and children of the prisoners were
+going and coming and bringing them what they might want in prison. It
+was a curious scene, that of a population one and all exasperated, but
+nearly all silent, as though they had made up their minds to a course
+of action. The old women and the young ones alone spoke. The children,
+boys and girls, were perched on piles of wood and heaps of stones to
+get a better sight of what was happening.
+
+"They have chosen their time, those hussars of the guillotine," said
+one old woman; "they are making a fete of it."
+
+"Are you going to let 'em carry of your man like that? How shall you
+manage to live for three months?--the best of the year, too, when he
+could earn so much."
+
+"It's they who rob us," replied the woman, looking at the gendarmes
+with a threatening air.
+
+"What do you mean by that, old woman?" said the sergeant. "If you
+insult us it won't take long to settle you."
+
+"I meant nothing," said the old woman, in a humble and piteous tone.
+
+"I heard you say something just now you may have cause to repent of."
+
+"Come, come, be calm, all of you," said the mayor of Conches, who was
+also the postmaster. "What the devil is the use of talking? These men,
+as you know very well, are under orders and must obey."
+
+"That's true; it's the owner of Les Aigues who persecutes us-- But
+patience!"
+
+Just then the general rode into the square and his arrival caused a
+few groans which did not trouble him in the least. He rode straight up
+to the lieutenant in command, and after saying a few words gave him a
+paper; the officer then turned to his men and said: "Release your
+prisoners; the general has obtained their pardon."
+
+General Montcornet was then speaking to the mayor; after a few
+moments' conversation in a low tone, the latter, addressing the
+delinquents, who expected to sleep in prison and were a good deal
+surprised to find themselves free, said to them:--
+
+"My friends, thank Monsieur le comte. You owe your release to him. He
+went to Paris and obtained your pardon in honor of the anniversary of
+the king's restoration. I hope that in future you will conduct
+yourself properly to a man who has behaved so well to you, and that
+you will in future respect his property. Long live the King!"
+
+The peasants shouted "Long live the King!" with enthusiasm, to avoid
+shouting, "Hurrah for the Comte de Montcornet!"
+
+The scene was a bit of policy arranged between the general, the
+prefect, and the attorney-general; for they were all anxious, while
+showing enough firmness to keep the local authorities up to their duty
+and awe the country-people, to be as gentle as possible, fully
+realizing as they did the difficulties of the question. In fact, if
+resistance had occurred, the government would have been in a tight
+place. As Laroche truly said, they could not guillotine or even
+convict a whole community.
+
+The general invited the mayor of Conches, the lieutenant, and the
+sergeant to breakfast. The conspirators of the Grand-I-Vert adjourned
+to the tavern of Conches, where the delinquents spent in drink the
+money their relations had given them to take to prison, sharing it
+with the Blangy people, who were naturally part of the wedding,--the
+word "wedding" being applied indiscriminately in Burgundy to all such
+rejoicings. To drink, quarrel, fight, eat and go home drunk and sick,
+--that is a wedding to these peasants.
+
+The general, who had come by the park, took his guests back through
+the forest that they might see for themselves the injury done to the
+timber, and so judge of the importance of the question.
+
+Just as Rigou and Soudry were on their way back to Blangy, the count
+and countess, Emile Blondet, the lieutenant of gendarmerie, the
+sergeant, and the mayor of Conches were finishing their breakfast in
+the splendid dining-room where Bouret's luxury had left the delightful
+traces already described by Blondet in his letter to Nathan.
+
+"It would be a terrible pity to abandon this beautiful home," said the
+lieutenant, who had never before been at Les Aigues, and who was
+glancing over a glass of champagne at the circling nymphs that
+supported the ceiling.
+
+"We intend to defend it to the death," said Blondet.
+
+"If I say that," continued the lieutenant, looking at his sergeant as
+if to enjoin silence, "it is because the general's enemies are not
+only among the peasantry--"
+
+The worthy man was quite moved by the excellence of the breakfast, the
+magnificence of the silver service, the imperial luxury that
+surrounded him, and Blondet's clever talk excited him as much as the
+champagne he had imbibed.
+
+"Enemies! have I enemies?" said the general, surprised.
+
+"He, so kind!" added the countess.
+
+"But you are on bad terms with our mayor, Monsieur Gaubertin," said
+the lieutenant. "It would be wise, for the sake of the future, to be
+reconciled with him."
+
+"With him!" cried the count. "Then you don't know that he was my
+former steward, and a swindler!"
+
+"A swindler no longer," said the lieutenant, "for he is mayor of
+Ville-aux-Fayes."
+
+"Ha, ha!" laughed Blondet, "the lieutenant's wit is keen; evidently a
+mayor is essentially an honest man."
+
+The lieutenant, convinced by the count's words that it was useless to
+attempt to enlighten him, said no more on that subject, and the
+conversation changed.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER VI
+
+                    THE FOREST AND THE HARVEST
+
+The scene at Conches had, apparently, a good effect on the peasantry;
+on the other hand, the count's faithful keepers were more than ever
+watchful that only dead wood should be gathered in the forest of Les
+Aigues. But for the last twenty years the woods had been so thoroughly
+cleared out that very little else than live wood was now there; and
+this the peasantry set about killing, in preparation for winter, by a
+simple process, the results of which could only be discovered in the
+course of time. Tonsard's mother went daily into the forest; the
+keepers saw her enter; knew where she would come out; watched for her
+and made her open her bundle, where, to be sure, were only fallen
+branches, dried chips, and broken and withered twigs. The old woman
+would whine and complain at the distance she had to go at her age to
+gather such a miserable bunch of fagots. But she did not tell that she
+had been in the thickest part of the wood and had removed the earth at
+the base of certain young trees, round which she had then cut off a
+ring of bark, replacing the earth, moss, and dead leaves just as they
+were before she touched them. It was impossible that any one could
+discover this annular incision, made, not like a cut, but more like
+the ripping or gnawing of animals or those destructive insects called
+in different regions borers, or turks, or white worms, which are the
+first stage of cockchafers. These destructive pests are fond of the
+bark of trees; they get between the bark and the sap-wood and eat
+their way round. If the tree is large enough for the insect to pass
+into its second state (of larvae, in which it remains dormant until
+its second metamorphose) before it has gone round the trunk, the tree
+lives, because so long as even a small bit of the sap-wood remains
+covered by the bark, the tree will still grow and recover itself. To
+realize to what a degree entomology affects agriculture, horticulture,
+and all earth products, we must know that naturalists like Latreille,
+the Comte Dejean, Klugg of Berlin, Gene of Turin, etc., find that the
+vast majority of all known insects live at the sacrifice of
+vegetation; that the coleoptera (a catalogue of which has lately been
+published by Monsieur Dejean) have twenty-seven thousand species, and
+that, in spite of the most earnest research on the part of
+entomologists of all countries, there is an enormous number of species
+of whom they cannot trace the triple transformations which belong to
+all insects; that there is, in short, not only a special insect to
+every plant, but that all terrestrial products, however much they may
+be manipulated by human industry, have their particular parasite. Thus
+flax, after covering the human body and hanging the human being, after
+roaming the world on the back of an army, becomes writing-paper; and
+those who write or who read are familiar with the habits and morals of
+an insect called the "paper-louse," an insect of really marvellous
+celerity and behavior; it undergoes its mysterious transformations in
+a ream of white paper which you have carefully put away; you see it
+gliding and frisking along in its shining robe, that looks like
+isinglass or mica,--truly a little fish of another element.
+
+The borer is the despair of the land-owner; he works underground; no
+Sicilian vespers for him until he becomes a cockchafer! If the
+populations only realized with what untold disasters they are
+threatened in case they let the cockchafers and the caterpillars get
+the upper hand, they would pay more attention than they do to
+municipal regulations.
+
+Holland came near perishing; its dikes were undermined by the teredo,
+and science is unable to discover the insect from which that mollusk
+derives, just as science still remains ignorant of the metamorphoses
+of the cochineal. The ergot, or spur, of rye is apparently a
+population of insects where the genius of science has been able, so
+far, to discover only one slight movement. Thus, while awaiting the
+harvest and gleaning, fifty old women imitated the borer at the feet
+of five or six hundred trees which were fated to become skeletons and
+to put forth no more leaves in the spring. They were carefully chosen
+in the least accessible places, so that the surrounding branches
+concealed them.
+
+Who conveyed the secret information by which this was done? No one.
+Courtecuisse happened to complain in Tonsard's tavern of having found
+a tree wilting in his garden; it seemed he said, to have a disease,
+and he suspected a borer; for he, Courtecuisse, knew what borers were,
+and if they once circled a tree just below the ground, the tree died.
+Thereupon he explained the process. The old women at once set to work
+at the same destruction, with the mystery and cleverness of gnomes;
+and their efforts were doubled by the rules now enforced by the mayor
+of Blangy and necessarily followed by the mayors of the adjoining
+districts.
+
+The great land-owners of the department applauded General de
+Montcornet's course; and the prefect in his private drawing-room
+declared that if, instead of living in Paris, other land-owners would
+come and live on their estates and follow such a course together, a
+solution of the difficulty could be obtained; for certain measures,
+added the prefect, ought to be taken, and taken in concert, modified
+by benefactions and by an enlightened philanthropy, such as every one
+could see actuated in General Montcornet.
+
+The general and his wife, assisted by the abbe, tried the effects of
+such benevolence. They studied the subject, and endeavored to show by
+incontestable results to those who pillaged them that more money could
+be made by legitimate toil. They supplied flax and paid for the
+spinning; the countess had the thread woven into linen suitable for
+towels, aprons, and coarse napkins for kitchen use, and for
+underclothing for the very poor. The general began improvements which
+needed many laborers, and he employed none but those in the adjoining
+districts. Sibilet was in charge of the works and the Abbe Brossette
+gave the countess lists of the most needy, and often brought them to
+her himself. Madame de Montcornet attended to these matters personally
+in the great antechamber which opened upon the portico. It was a
+beautiful waiting-room, floored with squares of white and red marble,
+warmed by a porcelain stove, and furnished with benches covered with
+red plush.
+
+It was there that one morning, just before harvest, old Mother Tonsard
+brought her granddaughter Catherine, who had to make, she said, a
+dreadful confession,--dreadful for the honor of a poor but honest
+family. While the old woman addressed the countess Catherine stood in
+an attitude of conscious guilt. Then she related on her own account
+the unfortunate "situation" in which she was placed, which she had
+confided to none but her grandmother; for her mother, she knew, would
+turn her out, and her father, an honorable man, might kill her. If she
+only had a thousand francs she could be married to a poor laborer
+named Godain, who _knew all_, and who loved her like a brother; he could
+buy a poor bit of ground and build a cottage if she had that sum. It
+was very touching. The countess promised the money; resolving to
+devote the price of some fancy to this marriage. The happy marriages
+of Michaud and Groison encouraged her. Besides, such a wedding would
+be a good example to the people of the neighborhood and stimulate to
+virtuous conduct. The marriage of Catherine Tonsard and Godain was
+accordingly arranged by means of the countess's thousand francs.
+
+Another time a horrible old woman, Mother Bonnebault, who lived in a
+hut between the gate of Conches and the village, brought back a great
+bundle of skeins of linen thread.
+
+"Madame la comtesse has done wonders," said the abbe, full of hope as
+to the moral progress of his savages. "That old woman did immense
+damage to your woods, but now she has no time for it; she stays at
+home and spins from morning till night; her time is all taken up and
+well paid for."
+
+Peace reigned everywhere. Groison made very satisfactory reports;
+depredations seemed to have ceased, and it is even possible that the
+state of the neighborhood and the feeling of the inhabitants might
+really have changed if it had not been for the revengeful eagerness of
+Gaubertin, the cabals of the leading society of Soulanges, and the
+intrigues of Rigou, who one and all, with "the affair" in view, blew
+the embers of hatred and crime in the hearts of the peasantry of the
+valley des Aigues.
+
+The keepers still complained of finding a great many branches cut with
+shears in the deeper parts of the wood and left to dry, evidently as a
+provision for winter. They watched for the delinquents without ever
+being able to catch them. The count, assisted by Groison, had given
+certificates of pauperism to only thirty or forty of the real poor of
+the district; but the other two mayors had been less strict. The more
+clement the count showed himself in the affair at Conches the more
+determined he was to enforce the laws about gleaning, which had now
+degenerated into theft. He did not interfere with the management of
+three of his farms which were leased to tenants, nor with those whose
+tenants worked for his profit, of which he had a number; but he
+managed six farms himself, each of about two hundred acres, and he now
+published a notice that it was forbidden, under pain of being arrested
+and made to pay the fine imposed by the courts, to enter those fields
+before the crop was carried away. The order concerned only his own
+immediate property. Rigou, who knew the country well, had let his
+farm-lands in portions and on short leases to men who knew how to get
+in their own crops, and who paid him in grain; therefore gleaning did
+not affect him. The other proprietors were peasants, and no nefarious
+gleaning was attempted on their land.
+
+When the harvest began the count went himself to Michaud to see how
+things were going on. Groison, who advised him to do this, was to be
+present himself at the gleaning of each particular field. The
+inhabitants of cities can have no idea what gleaning is to the
+inhabitants of the country; the passion of these sons of the soil for
+it seems inexplicable; there are women who will give up well-paid
+employments to glean. The wheat they pick up seems to them sweeter
+than any other; and the provision they thus make for their chief and
+most substantial food has to them an extraordinary attraction. Mothers
+take their babes and their little girls and boys; the feeblest old men
+drag themselves into the wheat-fields; and even those who own property
+are paupers for the nonce. All gleaners appear in rags.
+
+The count and Michaud were present on horseback when the first
+tattered batch entered the first fields from which the wheat had been
+carried. It was ten o'clock in the morning. August had been a hot
+month, the sky was cloudless, blue as a periwinkle; the earth was
+baked, the wheat flamed, the harvestmen worked with their faces
+scorched by the reflection of the sun-rays on the hard and arid earth.
+All were silent, their shirts wet with perspiration; while from time
+to time, they slaked their thirst with water from round, earthenware
+jugs, furnished with two handles and a mouth-piece stoppered with a
+willow stick.
+
+At the father end of the stubble-field stood the carts which contained
+the sheaves, and near them a group of at least a hundred beings who
+far exceeded the hideous conceptions of Murillo and Teniers, the
+boldest painters of such scenes, or of Callot, that poet of the
+fantastic in poverty. The pictured bronze legs, the bare heads, the
+ragged garments so curiously faded, so damp with grease, so darned and
+spotted and discolored, in short, the painters' ideal of the material
+of abject poverty was far surpassed by this scene; while the
+expression on those faces, greedy, anxious, doltish, idiotic, savage,
+showed the everlasting advantage which nature possesses over art by
+its comparison with the immortal compositions of those princes of
+color. There were old women with necks like turkeys, and hairless,
+scarlet eyelids, who stretched their heads forward like setters before
+a partridge; there were children, silent as soldiers under arms,
+little girls who stamped like animals waiting for their food; the
+natures of childhood and old age were crushed beneath the fierceness
+of a savage greed,--greed for the property of others now their own by
+long abuse. All eyes were savage, all gestures menacing; but every one
+kept silence in presence of the count, the field-keeper, and the
+bailiff. At this moment all classes were represented,--the great
+land-owners, the farmers, the working men, the paupers; the social
+question was defined to the eye; hunger had convoked the actors in the
+scene. The sun threw into relief the hard and hollow features of those
+faces; it burned the bare feet dusty with the soil; children were present
+with no clothing but a torn blouse, their blond hair tangled with
+straw and chips; some women brought their babes just able to walk, and
+left them rolling in the furrows.
+
+The gloomy scene was harrowing to the old soldier, whose heart was
+kind, and he said to Michaud: "It pains me to see it. One must know
+the importance of these measures to be able to insist upon them."
+
+"If every land-owner followed your example, lived on his property, and
+did the good that you and yours are doing, general, there would be, I
+won't say no poor, for they are always with us, but no poor man who
+could not live by his labor."
+
+"The mayors of Conches, Cerneux, and Soulanges have sent us all their
+paupers," said Groison, who had now looked at the certificates; "they
+had no right to do so."
+
+"No, but our people will go to their districts," said the general.
+"For the time being we have done enough by preventing the gleaning
+before the sheaves were taken away; we had better go step by step," he
+added, turning to leave the field.
+
+"Did you hear him?" said Mother Tonsard to the old Bonnebault woman,
+for the general's last words were said in a rather louder tone than
+the rest, and reached the ears of the two old women who were posted in
+the road which led beside the field.
+
+"Yes, yes! we haven't got to the end yet,--a tooth to-day and to-morrow
+an ear; if they could find a sauce for our livers they'd eat 'em as
+they do a calf's!" said old Bonnebault, whose threatening face was
+turned in profile to the general as he passed her, though in the
+twinkling of an eye she changed its expression to one of hypocritical
+softness and submission as she hastened to make him a profound
+curtsey.
+
+"So you are gleaning, are you, though my wife helps you to earn so
+much money?"
+
+"Hey! my dear gentleman, may God preserve you in good health! but,
+don't you see, my grandson squanders all I earn, and I'm forced to
+scratch up a little wheat to get bread in the winter,--yes, yes, I
+glean just a bit; it all helps."
+
+The gleaning proved of little profit to the gleaners. The farmers and
+tenant-farmers, finding themselves backed up, took care that their
+wheat was well reaped, and superintended the making of the sheaves and
+their safe removal, so that little or none of the pillage of former
+years could take place.
+
+Accustomed to get a good proportion of wheat in their gleaning, the
+false as well as the true poor, forgetting the count's pardon at
+Conches, now felt a deep but silent anger against him, which was
+aggravated by the Tonsards, Courtecuisse, Bonnebault, Laroche,
+Vaudoyer, Godain, and their adherents. Matters went worse still after
+the vintage; for the gathering of the refuse grape was not allowed
+until Sibilet had examined the vines with extreme care. This last
+restriction exasperated these sons of the soil to the highest pitch;
+but when so great a social distance separates the angered class from
+the threatened class, words and threats are lost; nothing comes to the
+surface or is perceived but facts; meantime the malcontents work
+underground like moles.
+
+The fair of Soulanges took place as usual quite peacefully, except for
+certain jarrings between the leading society and the second-class
+society of Soulanges, brought about by the despotism of the queen, who
+could not tolerate the empire founded and established over the heart
+of the brilliant Lupin by the beautiful Euphemie Plissoud, for she
+herself laid permanent claim to his fickle fervors.
+
+The count and countess did not appear at the fair nor at the Tivoli
+fete; and that, again, was counted a wrong by the Soudrys, the
+Gaubertins, and their adherents; it was pride, it was disdain, said
+the Soudry salon. During this time the countess was filling the void
+caused by Emile's return to Paris with the immense interest and
+pleasure all fine souls take in the good they are doing, or think they
+do; and the count, for his part, applied himself no less zealously to
+changes and ameliorations in the management of his estate, which he
+expected and believed would modify and benefit the condition of the
+people and hence their characters. Madame de Montcornet, assisted by
+the advice and experience of the Abbe Brossette, came, little by
+little, to have a thorough and statistical knowledge of all the poor
+families of the district, their respective condition, their wants,
+their means of subsistence, and the sort of help she must give to each
+to obtain work so as not to make them lazy or idle.
+
+The countess had placed Genevieve Niseron, La Pechina, in a convent at
+Auxerre, under pretext of having her taught to sew that she might
+employ her in her own house, but really to save her from the shameful
+attempts of Nicolas Tonsard, whom Rigou had managed to save from the
+conscription. The countess also believed that a religious education,
+the cloister, and monastic supervision, would subdue the ardent
+passions of the precocious little girl, whose Montenegrin blood seemed
+to her like a threatening flame which might one day set fire to the
+domestic happiness of her faithful Olympe.
+
+So all was at peace at the chateau des Aigues. The count, misled by
+Sibilet, reassured by Michaud, congratulated himself on his firmness,
+and thanked his wife for having contributed by her benevolence to the
+immense comfort of their tranquillity. The question of the sale of his
+timber was laid aside till he should go to Paris and arrange with the
+dealers. He had not the slightest notion of how to do business, and he
+was in total ignorance of the power wielded by Gaubertin over the
+current of the Yonne,--the main line of conveyance which supplied the
+timber of the Paris market.
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER VII
+
+                           THE GREYHOUND
+
+Towards the middle of September Emile Blondet, who had gone to Paris
+to publish a book, returned to refresh himself at Les Aigues and to
+think over the work he was planning for the winter. At Les Aigues, the
+loving and sincere qualities which succeed adolescence in a young
+man's soul reappeared in the used-up journalist.
+
+"What a fine soul!" was the comment of the count and the countess when
+they spoke of him.
+
+Men who are accustomed to move among the abysses of social nature, to
+understand all and to repress nothing, make themselves an oasis in the
+heart, where they forget their perversities and those of others; they
+become within that narrow and sacred circle,--saints; there, they
+possess the delicacy of women, they give themselves up to a momentary
+realization of their ideal, they become angelic for some one being who
+adores them, and they are not playing comedy; they join their soul to
+innocence, so to speak; they feel the need to brush off the mud, to
+heal their sores, to bathe their wounds. At Les Aigues Emile Blondet
+was without bitterness, without sarcasm, almost without wit; he made
+no epigrams, he was gentle as a lamb, and platonically tender.
+
+"He is such a good young fellow that I miss him terribly when he is
+not here," said the general. "I do wish he could make a fortune and
+not lead that Paris life of his."
+
+Never did the glorious landscape and park of Les Aigues seem as
+luxuriantly beautiful as it did just then. The first autumn days were
+beginning, when the earth, languid from her procreations and delivered
+of her products, exhales the delightful odors of vegetation. At this
+time the woods, especially, are delicious; they begin to take the
+russet warmth of Sienna earth, and the green-bronze tones which form
+the lovely tapestry beneath which they hide from the cold of winter.
+
+Nature, having shown herself in springtime jaunty and joyous as a
+brunette glowing with hope, becomes in autumn sad and gentle as a
+blonde full of pensive memories; the turf yellows, the last flowers
+unfold their pale corollas, the white-eyed daisies are fewer in the
+grass, only their crimson calices are seen. Yellows abound; the shady
+places are lighter for lack of leafage, but darker in tone; the sun,
+already oblique, slides its furtive orange rays athwart them, leaving
+long luminous traces which rapidly disappear, like the train of a
+woman's gown as she bids adieu.
+
+On the morning of the second day after his arrival, Emile was at a
+window of his bedroom, which opened upon a terrace with a balustrade
+from which a noble view could be seen. This balcony ran the whole
+length of the apartments of the countess, on the side of the chateau
+towards the forests and the Blangy landscape. The pond, which would
+have been called a lake were Les Aigues nearer Paris, was partly in
+view, so was the long canal; the Silver-spring, coming from across the
+pavilion of the Rendezvous, crossed the lawn with its sheeny ribbon,
+reflecting the yellow sand.
+
+Beyond the park, between the village and the walls, lay the cultivated
+parts of Blangy,--meadows where the cows were grazing, small
+properties surrounded by hedges, filled with fruit of all kinds, nut
+and apple trees. By way of frame, the heights on which the noble
+forest-trees were ranged, tier above tier, closed in the scene. The
+countess had come out in her slippers to look at the flowers in her
+balcony, which were sending up their morning fragrance; she wore a
+cambric dressing-gown, beneath which the rosy tints of her white
+shoulders could be seen; a coquettish little cap was placed in a
+bewitching manner on her hair, which escaped it recklessly; her little
+feet showed their warm flesh color through the transparent stockings;
+the cambric gown, unconfined at the waist, floated open as the breeze
+took it, and showed an embroidered petticoat.
+
+"Oh! are you there?" she said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What are you looking at?"
+
+"A pretty question! You have torn me from the contemplation of Nature.
+Tell me, countess, will you go for a walk in the woods this morning
+before breakfast?"
+
+"What an idea! You know I have a horror of walking."
+
+"We will only walk a little way; I'll drive you in the tilbury and
+take Joseph to hold the horses. You have never once set foot in your
+forest; and I have just noticed something very curious, a phenomenon;
+there are spots where the tree-tops are the color of Florentine
+bronze, the leaves are dried--"
+
+"Well, I'll dress."
+
+"Oh, if you do, we can't get off for two hours. Take a shawl, put on a
+bonnet, and boots; that's all you want. I shall tell them to harness."
+
+"You always make me do what you want; I'll be ready in a minute."
+
+"General," said Blondet, waking the count, who grumbled and turned
+over, like a man who wants his morning sleep. "We are going for a
+drive; won't you come?"
+
+A quarter of an hour later the tilbury was slowly rolling along the
+park avenue, followed by a liveried groom on horseback.
+
+The morning was a September morning. The dark blue of the sky burst
+forth here and there from the gray of the clouds, which seemed the sky
+itself, the ether seeming to be the accessory; long lines of
+ultramarine lay upon the horizon, but in strata, which alternated with
+other lines like sand-bars; these tones changed and grew green at the
+level of the forests. The earth beneath this overhanging mantle was
+moistly warm, like a woman when she rises; it exhaled sweet, luscious
+odors, which yet were wild, not civilized,--the scent of cultivation
+was added to the scents of the woods. Just then the Angelus was
+ringing at Blangy, and the sounds of the bell, mingling with the wild
+concert of the forest, gave harmony to the silence. Here and there
+were rising vapors, white, diaphanous.
+
+Seeing these lovely preparations of Nature, the fancy had seized
+Olympe Michaud to accompany her husband, who had to give an order to a
+keeper whose house was not far off. The Soulanges doctor advised her
+to walk as long as she could do so without fatigue; she was afraid of
+the midday heat and went out only in the early morning or evening.
+Michaud now took her with him, and they were followed by the dog he
+loved best,--a handsome greyhound, mouse-colored with white spots,
+greedy, like all greyhounds, and as full of vices as most animals who
+know they are loved and petted.
+
+So, then the tilbury reached the pavilion of the Rendezvous, the
+countess, who stopped to ask how Madame Michaud felt, was told she had
+gone into the forest with her husband.
+
+"Such weather inspires everybody," said Blondet, turning his horse at
+hazard into one of the six avenues of the forest; "Joseph, you know
+the woods, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+And away they went. The avenue they took happened to be one of the
+most delightful in the forest; it soon turned and grew narrower, and
+presently became a winding way, on which the sunshine flickered
+through rifts in the leafy roof, and where the breeze brought odors of
+lavender, and thyme, and the wild mint, and that of falling leaves,
+which sighed as they fell. Dew-drops on the trees and on the grass
+were scattered like seeds by the passing of the light carriage; the
+occupants as they rolled along caught glimpses of the mysterious
+visions of the woods,--those cool depths, where the verdure is moist
+and dark, where the light softens as it fades; those white-birch
+glades o'ertopped by some centennial tree, the Hercules of the forest;
+those glorious assemblages of knotted, mossy trunks, whitened and
+furrowed, and the banks of delicate wild plants and fragile flowers
+which grow between a woodland road and the forest. The brooks sang.
+Truly there is a nameless pleasure in driving a woman along the ups
+and downs of a slippery way carpeted with moss, where she pretends to
+be afraid or really is so, and you are conscious that she is drawing
+closer to you, letting you feel, voluntarily or involuntarily, the
+cool moisture of her arm, the weight of her round, white shoulder,
+though she merely smiles when told that she hinders you in driving.
+The horse seems to know the secret of these interruptions, and he
+looks about him from right to left.
+
+It was a new sight to the countess; this nature so vigorous in its
+effects, so little seen and yet so grand, threw her into a languid
+revery; she leaned back in the tilbury and yielded herself up to the
+pleasure of being there with Emile; her eyes were charmed, her heart
+spoke, she answered to the inward voice that harmonized with hers. He,
+too, glanced at her furtively; he enjoyed that dreamy meditation,
+while the ribbons of the bonnet floated on the morning breeze with the
+silky curls of the golden hair. In consequence of going they knew not
+where, they presently came to a locked gate, of which they had not the
+key. Joseph was called up, but neither had he a key.
+
+"Never mind, let us walk; Joseph can take care of the tilbury; we
+shall easily find it again."
+
+Emile and the countess plunged into the forest, and soon reached a
+small interior cleared space, such as is often met with in the woods.
+Twenty years earlier the charcoal-burners had made it their kiln, and
+the place still remained open, quite a large circumference having been
+burned over. But during those twenty years Nature had made herself a
+garden of flowers, a blooming "parterre" for her own enjoyment, just
+as an artist gives himself the delight of painting a picture for his
+own happiness. The enchanting spot was surrounded by fine trees, whose
+tops hung over like vast fringes and made a dais above this flowery
+couch where slept the goddess. The charcoal-burners had followed a
+path to a pond, always full of water. The path is there still; it
+invites you to step into it by a turn full of mystery; then suddenly
+it stops short and you come upon a bank where a thousand roots run
+down to the water and make a sort of canvas in the air. This hidden
+pond has a narrow grassy edge, where a few willows and poplars lend
+their fickle shade to a bank of turf which some lazy or pensive
+charcoal-burner must have made for his enjoyment. The frogs hop about,
+the teal bathe in the pond, the water-fowl come and go, a hare starts;
+you are the master of this delicious bath, decorated with iris and
+bulrushes. Above your head the trees take many attitudes; here the
+trunks twine down like boa-constrictors, there the beeches stand erect
+as a Greek column. The snails and the slugs move peacefully about. A
+tench shows its gills, a squirrel looks at you; and at last, after
+Emile and the countess, tired with her walk, were seated, a bird, but
+I know not what bird it was, sang its autumn song, its farewell song,
+to which the other songsters listened,--a song welcome to love, and
+heard by every organ of the being.
+
+"What silence!" said the countess, with emotion and in a whisper, as
+if not to trouble this deep peace.
+
+They looked at the green patches on the water,--worlds where life was
+organizing; they pointed to the lizard playing in the sun and escaping
+at their approach,--behavior which has won him the title of "the
+friend of man." "Proving, too, how well he knows him," said Emile.
+They watched the frogs, who, less distrustful, returned to the surface
+of the pond, winking their carbuncle eyes as they sat upon the
+water-cresses. The sweet and simple poetry of Nature permeated these
+two souls surfeited with the conventional things of life, and filled
+them with contemplative emotion. Suddenly Blondet shuddered. Turning
+to the countess he said,--
+
+"Did you hear that?"
+
+"What?" she asked.
+
+"A curious noise."
+
+"Ah, you literary men who live in your studies and know nothing of the
+country! that is only a woodpecker tapping a tree. I dare say you
+don't even know the most curious fact in the history of that bird. As
+soon as he has given his tap, and he gives millions to pierce an oak,
+he flies behind the tree to see if he is yet through it; and he does
+this every instant."
+
+"The noise I heard, dear instructress of natural history, was not a
+noise made by an animal; there was evidence of mind in it, and that
+proclaims a man."
+
+The countess was seized with panic, and she darted back through the
+wild flower-garden, seeking the path by which to leave the forest.
+
+"What is the matter?" cried Blondet, rushing after her.
+
+"I thought I saw eyes," she said, when they regained the path through
+which they had reached the charcoal-burner's open.
+
+Just then they heard the low death-rattle of a creature whose throat
+was suddenly cut, and the countess, with her fears redoubled, fled so
+quickly that Blondet could scarcely follow her. She ran like a
+will-o'-the-wisp, and did not listen to Blondet who called to her,
+"You are mistaken." On she ran, and Emile with her, till they suddenly
+came upon Michaud and his wife, who were walking along arm-in-arm.
+Emile was panting and the countess out of breath, and it was some time
+before they could speak; then they explained. Michaud joined Blondet
+in laughing at the countess's terror; then the bailiff showed the two
+wanderers the way to find the tilbury. When they reached the gate
+Madame Michaud called, "Prince!"
+
+"Prince! Prince!" called the bailiff; then he whistled,--but no
+greyhound.
+
+Emile mentioned the curious noise that began their adventure.
+
+"My wife heard that noise," said Michaud, "and I laughed at her."
+
+"They have killed Prince!" exclaimed the countess. "I am sure of it;
+they killed him by cutting his throat at one blow. What I heard was
+the groan of a dying animal."
+
+"The devil!" cried Michaud; "the matter must be cleared up."
+
+Emile and the bailiff left the two ladies with Joseph and the horses,
+and returned to the wild garden of the open. They went down the bank
+to the pond; looked everywhere along the slope, but found no clue.
+Blondet jumped back first, and as he did so he saw, in a thicket which
+stood on higher ground, one of those trees he had noticed in the
+morning with withered heads. He showed it to Michaud, and proposed to
+go to it. The two sprang forward in a straight line across the forest,
+avoiding the trunks and going round the matted tangles of brier and
+holly until they found the tree.
+
+"It is a fine elm," said Michaud, "but there's a worm in it,--a worm
+which gnaws round the bark close to the roots."
+
+He stopped and took up a bit of the bark, saying: "See how they work."
+
+"You have a great many worms in this forest," said Blondet.
+
+Just then Michaud noticed a red spot; a moment more and he saw the
+head of his greyhound. He sighed.
+
+"The scoundrels!" he said. "Madame was right."
+
+Michaud and Blondet examined the body and found, just as the countess
+had said, that some one had cut the greyhound's throat. To prevent his
+barking he had been decoyed with a bit of meat, which was still
+between his tongue and his palate.
+
+"Poor brute; he died of self-indulgence."
+
+"Like all princes," said Blondet.
+
+"Some one, whoever it is, has just gone, fearing that we might catch
+him or her," said Michaud. "A serious offence has been committed. But
+for all that, I see no branches about and no lopped trees."
+
+Blondet and the bailiff began a cautious search, looking at each spot
+where they set their feet before setting them. Presently Blondet
+pointed to a tree beneath which the grass was flattened down and two
+hollows made.
+
+"Some one knelt there, and it must have been a woman, for a man would
+not have left such a quantity of flattened grass around the impression
+of his two knees; yes, see! that is the outline of a petticoat."
+
+The bailiff, after examining the base of the tree, found the beginning
+of a hole beneath the bark; but he did not find the worm with the
+tough skin, shiny and squamous, covered with brown specks, ending in a
+tail not unlike that of a cockchafer, and having also the latter's
+head, antennae, and the two vigorous hooks or shears with which the
+creature cuts into the wood.
+
+"My dear fellow," said Blondet, "now I understand the enormous number
+of _dead_ trees that I noticed this morning from the terrace of the
+chateau, and which brought me here to find out the cause of the
+phenomenon. Worms are at work; but they are no other than your
+peasants."
+
+The bailiff gave vent to an oath and rushed off, followed by Blondet,
+to rejoin the countess, whom he requested to take his wife home with
+her. Then he jumped on Joseph's horse, leaving the man to return on
+foot, and disappeared with great rapidity to cut off the retreat of
+the woman who had killed his dog, hoping to catch her with the bloody
+bill-hook in her hand and the tool used to make the incisions in the
+bark of the tree.
+
+"Let us go and tell the general at once, before he breakfasts," cried
+the countess; "he might die of anger."
+
+"I'll prepare him," said Blondet.
+
+"They have killed the dog," said Olympe, in tears.
+
+"You loved the poor greyhound, dear, enough to weep for him?" said the
+countess.
+
+"I think of Prince as a warning; I fear some danger to my husband."
+
+"How they have ruined this beautiful morning for us," said the
+countess, with an adorable little pout.
+
+"How they have ruined the country," said Olympe, gravely.
+
+They met the general near the chateau.
+
+"Where have you been?" he asked.
+
+"You shall know in a minute," said Blondet, mysteriously, as he helped
+the countess and Madame Michaud to alight. A moment more and the two
+gentlemen were alone on the terrace of the apartments.
+
+"You have plenty of moral strength, general; you won't put yourself in
+a passion, will you?"
+
+"No," said the general; "but come to the point or I shall think you
+are making fun of me."
+
+"Do you see those trees with dead leaves?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you see those others that are wilting?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, every one of them has been killed by the peasants you think you
+have won over by your benefits."
+
+And Blondet related the events of the morning.
+
+The general was so pale that Blondet was frightened.
+
+"Come, curse, swear, be furious! your self-control may hurt you more
+than anger!"
+
+"I'll go and smoke," said the general, turning toward the kiosk.
+
+During breakfast Michaud came in; he had found no one. Sibilet, whom
+the count had sent for, came also.
+
+"Monsieur Sibilet, and you, Monsieur Michaud, are to make it known,
+cautiously, that I will pay a thousand francs to whoever will arrest
+_in the act_ the person or persons who are killing my trees; they must
+also discover the instrument with which the work is done, and where it
+was bought. I have settled upon a plan."
+
+"Those people never betray one another," said Sibilet, "if the crime
+done is for their benefit and premeditated. There is no denying that
+this diabolical business has been planned, carefully planned and
+contrived."
+
+"Yes, but a thousand francs means a couple of acres of land."
+
+"We can try," said Sibilet; "fifteen hundred francs might buy you a
+traitor, especially if you promise secrecy."
+
+"Very good; but let us act as if we suspected nothing, I especially;
+if not, we shall be the victims of some collusion; one has to be as
+wary with these brigands as with the enemy in war."
+
+"But the enemy is here," said Blondet.
+
+Sibilet threw him the furtive glance of a man who understood the
+meaning of the words, and then he withdrew.
+
+"I don't like your Sibilet," said Blondet, when he had seen the
+steward leave the house. "That man is playing false."
+
+"Up to this time he has done nothing I could complain of," said the
+general.
+
+Blondet went off to write letters. He had lost the careless gayety of
+his first arrival, and was now uneasy and preoccupied; but he had no
+vague presentiments like those of Madame Michaud; he was, rather, in
+full expectation of certain foreseen misfortunes. He said to himself,
+"This affair will come to some bad end; and if the general does not
+take decisive action and will not abandon a battle-field where he is
+overwhelmed by numbers there must be a catastrophe; and who knows who
+will come out safe and sound,--perhaps neither he nor his wife. Good
+God! that adorable little creature! so devoted, so perfect! how can he
+expose her thus! He thinks he loves her! Well, I'll share their
+danger, and if I can't save them I'll suffer with them."
+
+
+
+                            CHAPTER VIII
+
+                            RURAL VIRTUE
+
+That night Marie Tonsard was stationed on the road to Soulanges,
+sitting on the rail of a culvert waiting for Bonnebault, who had spent
+the day, as usual, at the Cafe de la Paix. She heard him coming at
+some distance, and his step told her that he was drunk, and she knew
+also that he had lost money, for he always sang if he won.
+
+"Is that you, Bonnebault?"
+
+"Yes, my girl."
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"I owe twenty-five francs, and they may wring my neck twenty-five
+times before I can pay them."
+
+"Well, I know how you can get five hundred," she said in his ear.
+
+"Oh! by killing a man; but I prefer to live."
+
+"Hold your tongue. Vaudoyer will give us five hundred francs if you
+will let him catch your mother at a tree."
+
+"I'd rather kill a man than sell my mother. There's your old
+grandmother; why don't you sell her?"
+
+"If I tried to, my father would get angry and stop the trick."
+
+"That's true. Well, anyhow, my mother sha'n't go to prison, poor old
+thing! She cooks my food and keeps me in clothes, I'm sure I don't
+know how. Go to prison,--and through me! I shouldn't have any bowels
+within me; no, no! And for fear any one else should sell her, I'll
+tell her this very night not to kill any more trees."
+
+"Well, my father may say and do what he likes, but I shall tell him
+there are five hundred francs to be had, and perhaps he'll ask my
+grandmother if she'll earn them. They'll never put an old woman
+seventy-eight years of age in prison,--though, to be sure, she'd be
+better off there than in her garret."
+
+"Five hundred francs! well, yes; I'll speak to my mother," said
+Bonnebault, "and if it suits her to give 'em to me, I'll let her have
+part to take to prison. She could knit, and amuse herself; and she'd
+be well fed and lodged, and have less trouble than she has at Conches.
+Well, to-morrow, my girl, I'll see you about it; I haven't time to
+stop now."
+
+The next morning at daybreak Bonnebault and his old mother knocked at
+the door of the Grand-I-Vert. Mother Tonsard was the only person up.
+
+"Marie!" called Bonnebault, "that matter is settled."
+
+"You mean about the trees?" said Mother Tonsard; "yes, it is all
+settled; I've taken it."
+
+"Nonsense!" cried Mother Bonnebault, "my son has got the promise of an
+acre of land from Monsieur Rigou--"
+
+The two old women squabbled as to which of them should be sold by her
+children. The noise of the quarrel woke up the household. Tonsard and
+Bonnebault took sides for their respective mothers.
+
+"Pull straws," suggested Tonsard's wife.
+
+The short straw gave it in favor of the tavern.
+
+Three days later, in the forest of Ville-aux-Fayes at daybreak, the
+gendarmes arrested old Mother Tonsard caught "in flagrante delicto" by
+the bailiff, his assistants, and the field-keeper, with a rusty file
+which served to tear the tree, and a chisel, used by the delinquent to
+scoop round the bark just as the insect bores its way. The indictment
+stated that sixty trees thus destroyed were found within a radius of
+five hundred feet. The old woman was sent to Auxerre, the case coming
+under the jurisdiction of the assize-court.
+
+Michaud could not refrain from saying when he discovered Mother
+Tonsard at the foot of the tree: "These are the persons on whom the
+general and Madame la comtesse have showered benefits! Faith, if
+Madame would only listen to me, she wouldn't give that dowry to the
+Tonsard girl, who is more worthless than her grandmother."
+
+The old woman raised her gray eyes and darted a venomous look at
+Michaud. When the count learned who the guilty person was, he forbade
+his wife to give the money to Catherine Tonsard.
+
+"Monsieur le comte is perfectly right," said Sibilet. "I know that
+Godain bought that land three days before Catherine came to speak to
+Madame. She is quite capable, that girl, of pretending she is with
+child, to get the money; very likely Godain has had nothing to do with
+it."
+
+"What a community!" said Blondet; "the scoundrels of Paris are saints
+by comparison."
+
+"Ah, monsieur," said Sibilet, "self-interest makes people guilty of
+horrors everywhere. Do you know who betrayed the old woman?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Her granddaughter Marie; she was jealous of her sister's marriage,
+and to get the money for her own--"
+
+"It is awful!" said the count. "Why! they'd murder!"
+
+"Oh yes," said Sibilet, "for a very small sum. They care so little for
+life, those people; they hate to have to work all their lives. Ah
+monsieur, queer things happen in country places, as queer as those of
+Paris,--but you will never believe it."
+
+"Let us be kind and benevolent," said the countess.
+
+The evening after the arrest Bonnebault came to the tavern of the
+Grand-I-Vert, where all the Tonsard family were in great jubilation.
+"Oh yes, yes!" said he, "make the most of your rejoicing; but I've
+just heard from Vaudoyer that the countess, to punish you, withdraws
+the thousand francs promised to Godain; her husband won't let her give
+them."
+
+"It's that villain of a Michaud who has put him up to it," said
+Tonsard. "My mother heard him say he would; she told me at
+Ville-aux-Fayes where I went to carry her some money and her clothes.
+Well; let that countess keep her money! our five hundred francs shall
+help Godain buy the land; and we'll revenge ourselves for this thing.
+Ha! Michaud meddles with our private matters, does he? it will bring
+him more harm than good. What business is it of his, I'd like to know?
+let him keep to the woods! It's he who is at the bottom of all this
+trouble--he found the clue that day my mother cut the throat of his
+dog. Suppose I were to meddle in the affairs of the chateau? Suppose I
+were to tell the general that his wife is off walking in the woods
+before he is up in the morning, with a young man."
+
+"The general, the general!" sneered Courtecuisse; "they can do what
+they like with him. But it's Michaud who stirs him up, the
+mischief-maker! a fellow who don't know his business; in my day,
+things went differently."
+
+"Ah!" said Tonsard, "those were the good days for all of us--weren't
+they, Vaudoyer?"
+
+"Yes," said the latter, "and the fact is that if Michaud were got rid
+of we should be left in peace."
+
+"Enough said," replied Tonsard. "We'll talk of this later--by
+moonlight--in the open field."
+
+Towards the end of October the countess returned to Paris, leaving the
+general at Les Aigues. He was not to rejoin her till some time later,
+but she did not wish to lose the first night of the Italian Opera, and
+moreover she was lonely and bored; she missed Emile, who was recalled
+by his avocations, for he had helped her to pass the hours when the
+general was scouring the country or attending to business.
+
+November was a true winter month, gray and gloomy, a mixture of snow
+and rain, frost and thaw. The trial of Mother Tonsard had required
+witnesses at Auxerre, and Michaud had given his testimony. Monsieur
+Rigou had interested himself for the old woman, and employed a lawyer
+on her behalf who relied in his defence on the absence of
+disinterested witnesses; but the testimony of Michaud and his
+assistants and the field-keeper was found to outweigh this objection.
+Tonsard's mother was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and the
+lawyer said to her son:--
+
+"It was Michaud's testimony which got her that."
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER IX
+
+                          THE CATASTROPHE
+
+One Saturday evening, Courtecuisse, Bonnebault, Godain, Tonsard, his
+daughters, wife, and Pere Fourchon, also Vaudoyer and several
+mechanics were supping at the tavern. The moon was at half-full, the
+first snow had melted, and frost had just stiffened the ground so that
+a man's step left no traces. They were eating a stew of hare caught in
+a trap; all were drinking and laughing. It was the day after the
+wedding of Catherine and Godain, and the wedded pair were to be
+conducted to their new home, which was not far from that of
+Courtecuisse; for when Rigou sold an acre of land it was sure to be
+isolated and close to the woods. Courtecuisse and Vaudoyer had brought
+their guns to accompany the bride. The neighborhood was otherwise fast
+asleep; not a light was to be seen; none but the wedding party were
+awake, but they made noise enough. In the midst of it the old
+Bonnebault woman entered, and every one looked at her.
+
+"I think she is going to lie-in," she whispered in Tonsard's ear. "_He_
+has saddled his horse and is going for the doctor at Soulanges."
+
+"Sit down," said Tonsard, giving her his place at the table, and going
+himself to lie on a bench.
+
+Just then the gallop of a horse passing rapidly along the road was
+heard. Tonsard, Courtecuisse, and Vaudoyer went out hurriedly, and saw
+Michaud on his way to the village.
+
+"He knows what he's about," said Courtecuisse; "he came down by the
+terrace and he means to go by Blangy and the road,--it's the safest
+way."
+
+"Yes," said Tonsard, "but he will bring the doctor back with him."
+
+"He won't find him," said Courtecuisse, "the doctor has been sent for
+to Conches for the postmistress."
+
+"Then he'll go from Soulanges to Conches by the mail-road; that's
+shortest."
+
+"And safest too, for us," said Courtecuisse, "there's a fine moon, and
+there are no keepers on the roads as there are in the woods; one can
+hear much farther; and down there, by the pavilions, behind the
+hedges, just where they join the little wood, one can aim at a man
+from behind, like a rabbit, at five hundred feet."
+
+"It will be half-past eleven before he comes past there," said
+Tonsard, "it will take him half an hour to go to Soulanges and as much
+more to get back,--but look here! suppose Monsieur Gourdon were on the
+road?"
+
+"Don't trouble about that," said Courtecuisse, "I'll stand ten minutes
+away from you to the right on the road towards Blangy, and Vaudoyer
+will be ten minutes away on your left towards Conches; if anything
+comes along, the mail, or the gendarmes, or whatever it is, we'll fire
+a shot into the ground,--a muffled sound, you'll know it."
+
+"But suppose I miss him?" said Tonsard.
+
+"He's right," said Courtecuisse, "I'm the best shot; Vaudoyer, I'll go
+with you; Bonnebault may watch in my place; he can give a cry; that's
+easier heard and less suspicious."
+
+All three returned to the tavern and the wedding festivities went on;
+but about eleven o'clock Vaudoyer, Courtecuisse, Tonsard, and
+Bonnebault went out, carrying their guns, though none of the women
+took any notice of them. They came back in about three-quarters of an
+hour, and sat drinking till past one o'clock. Tonsard's girls and
+their mother and the old Bonnebault woman had plied the miller, the
+mechanics, and the two peasants, as well as Fourchon, with so much
+drink that they were all on the ground and snoring when the four men
+left the tavern; on their return, the sleepers were shaken and roused,
+and every one seemed to them, as before, in his place.
+
+While this orgy was going on Michaud's household was in a scene of
+mortal anxiety. Olympe had felt false pains, and her husband, thinking
+she was about to be delivered, rode off instantly in haste for the
+doctor. But the poor woman's pains ceased as soon as she realized that
+Michaud was gone; for her mind was so preoccupied by the danger her
+husband ran at that hour of the night, in a lawless region filled with
+determined foes, that the anguish of her soul was powerful enough to
+deaden and momentarily subdue those of the body. In vain her
+servant-woman declared her fears were imaginary; she seemed not to
+comprehend a word that was said to her, and sat by the fire in her
+bed-chamber listening to every sound. In her terror, which increased
+every moment, she had the man wakened, meaning to give him some order
+which still she did not give. At last, the poor woman wandered up and
+down, coming and going in feverish agitation; she looked out of all the
+windows and opened them in spite of the cold; then she went downstairs
+and opened the door into the courtyard, looking out and listening.
+"Nothing! nothing!" she said. Then she went up again in despair. About
+a quarter past twelve, she cried out: "Here he is! I hear the horse!"
+Again she went down, followed by the man who went to open the iron gate
+of the courtyard. "It is strange," she said, "that he should return by
+the Conches woods!"
+
+As she spoke she stood still, horrorstruck, motionless, voiceless. The
+man shared her terror, for, in the furious gallop of the horse, the
+clang of the empty stirrups, the neigh of the frightened animal, there
+was something, they scarcely knew what, of unspeakable warning. Soon,
+too soon for the unhappy wife, the horse reached the gate, panting and
+sweating, but alone; he had broken the bridle, no doubt by entangling
+it. Olympe gazed with haggard eyes at the servant as he opened the
+gate; she saw the horse, and then, without a word, she ran to the
+chateau like a madwoman; when she reached it she fell to the ground
+beneath the general's windows crying out: "Monsieur, they have
+murdered him!"
+
+The cry was so terrible it awoke the count; he rang violently,
+bringing the whole household to their feet; and the groans of Madame
+Michaud, who as she lay on the ground, gave birth to a child that died
+in being born, brought the general and all the servants about her.
+They raised the poor dying woman, who expired, saying to the general:
+"They have murdered him!"
+
+"Joseph!" cried the count to his valet, "go for the doctor; there may
+yet be time to save her. No, better bring the curate; the poor woman
+is dead, and her child too. My God! my God! how thankful I am that my
+wife is not here. And you," he said to the gardener, "go and find out
+what has happened."
+
+"I can tell you," said the pavilion servant, coming up, "Monsieur
+Michaud's horse has come back alone, the reins broke, his legs bloody;
+and there's a spot of blood on the saddle."
+
+"What can be done at this time of night?" cried the count. "Call up
+Groison, send for the keepers, saddle the horses; we'll beat the
+country."
+
+By daybreak, eight persons--the count, Groison, the three keepers, and
+two gendarmes sent from Soulanges with their sergeant--searched the
+country. It was not till the middle of the morning that they found the
+body of the bailiff in a copse between the mail-road and the smaller
+road leading to Ville-aux-Fayes, at the end of the park of Les Aigues,
+not far from Conches. Two gendarmes started, one to Ville-aux-Fayes
+for the prosecuting attorney, the other to Soulanges for the justice
+of the peace. Meantime the general, assisted by the sergeant, noted
+down the facts. They found on the road, just above the two pavilions,
+the print of the stamping of the horse's feet as he roared, and the
+traces of his frightened gallop from there to the first opening in the
+woods above the hedge. The horse, no longer guided, turned into the
+wood-path. Michaud's hat was found there. The animal evidently took
+the nearest way to reach his stable. The bailiff had a ball though his
+back which broke the spine.
+
+Groison and the sergeant studied the ground around the spot where the
+horse reared (which might be called, in judicial language, the theatre
+of the crime) with remarkable sagacity, but without obtaining any
+clue. The earth was too frozen to show the footprints of the murderer,
+and all they found was the paper of a cartridge. When the attorney and
+the judge and Monsieur Gourdon, the doctor, arrived and raised the
+body to make the autopsy, it was found that the ball, which
+corresponded with the fragments of the wad, was an ammunition ball,
+evidently from a military musket; and no such musket existed in the
+district of Blangy. The judge and Monsieur Soudry the attorney, who
+came that evening to the chateau, thought it best to collect all the
+facts and await events. The same opinion was expressed by the sergeant
+and the lieutenant of the gendarmerie.
+
+"It is impossible that it can be anything but a planned attack on the
+part of the peasants," said the sergeant; "but there are two
+districts, Conches and Blangy, in each of which there are five or six
+persons capable of being concerned in the murder. The one that I
+suspect most, Tonsard, passed the night carousing in the Grand-I-Vert;
+but your assistant, general, the miller Langlume, was there, and he
+says that Tonsard did not leave the tavern. They were all so drunk
+they could not stand; they took the bride home at half-past one; and
+the return of the horse proves that Michaud was murdered between
+eleven o'clock and midnight. At a quarter past ten Groison saw the
+whole company assembled at table, and Monsieur Michaud passed there on
+his way to Soulanges, which he reached at eleven. His horse reared
+between the two pavilions on the mail-road; but he may have been shot
+before reaching Blangy and yet have stayed in the saddle for some
+little time. We should have to issue warrants for at least twenty
+persons and arrest them; but I know these peasants, and so do these
+gentlemen; you might keep them a year in prison and you would get
+nothing out of them but denials. What could you do with all those who
+were at Tonsard's?"
+
+They sent for Langlume, the miller, and the assistant of General
+Montcornet as mayor; he related what had taken place in the tavern,
+and gave the names of all present; none had gone out except for a
+minute or two into the courtyard. He had left the room for a moment
+with Tonsard about eleven o'clock; they had spoken of the moon and the
+weather, and heard nothing. At two o'clock the whole party had taken
+the bride and bridegroom to their own house.
+
+The general arranged with the sergeant, the lieutenant, and the civil
+authorities to send to Paris for the cleverest detective in the
+service of the police, who should come to the chateau as a workman,
+and behave so ill as to be dismissed; he should then take to drinking
+and frequent the Grand-I-Vert and remain in the neighborhood in the
+character of an ill-wisher to the general. The best plan they could
+follow was to watch and wait for a momentary revelation, and then make
+the most of it.
+
+"If I have to spend twenty thousand francs I'll discover the murderer
+of my poor Michaud," the general was never weary of saying.
+
+He went off with that idea in his head, and returned from Paris in the
+month of January with one of the shrewdest satellites of the chief of
+the detective police, who was brought down ostensibly to do some work
+to the interior of the chateau. The man was discovered poaching. He
+was arrested, and turned off, and soon after--early in February--the
+general rejoined his wife in Paris.
+
+
+
+                             CHAPTER X
+
+                  THE TRIUMPH OF THE VANQUISHED
+
+One evening in the month of May, when the fine weather had come and
+the Parisians had returned to Les Aigues, Monsieur de Troisville,--who
+had been persuaded to accompany his daughter,--Blondet, the Abbe
+Brossette, the general, and the sub-prefect of Ville-aux-Fayes, who
+was on a visit to the chateau, were all playing either whist or chess.
+It was about half-past eleven o'clock when Joseph entered and told his
+master that the worthless poaching workman who had been dismissed
+wanted to see him,--something about a bill which he said the general
+still owed him. "He is very drunk," added Joseph.
+
+"Very good, I'll go and speak to him."
+
+The general went out upon the lawn to some distance from the house.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said the detective, "nothing will ever be got out
+of these people. All that I have been able to gather is that if you
+continue to stay in this place and try to make the peasants renounce
+the pilfering habits which Mademoiselle Laguerre allowed them to
+acquire, they will shoot you as well as your bailiff. There is no use
+in my staying here; for they distrust me even more than they do the
+keepers."
+
+The count paid his spy, who left the place the next day, and his
+departure justified the suspicions entertained about him by the
+accomplices in the death of Michaud.
+
+When the general returned to the salon there were such signs of
+emotion upon his face that his wife asked him, anxiously, what news he
+had just heard.
+
+"Dear wife," he said, "I don't want to frighten you, and yet it is
+right you should know that Michaud's death was intended as a warning
+for us to leave this part of the country."
+
+"If I were in your place," said Monsieur de Troisville, "I would not
+leave it. I myself have had just such difficulties in Normandy, only
+under another form; I persisted in my course, and now everything goes
+well."
+
+"Monsieur le marquis," said the sub-prefect, "Normandy and Burgundy
+are two very different regions. The grape heats the blood far more
+than the apple. We know much less of law and legal proceedings; we
+live among the woods; the large industries are unknown among us; we
+are still savages. If I might give my advice to Monsieur le comte it
+would be to sell this estate and put the money in the Funds; he would
+double his income and have no anxieties. If he likes living in the
+country he could buy a chateau near Paris with a park as beautiful as
+that of Les Aigues, surrounded by walls, where no one can annoy him,
+and where he can let all his farms and receive the money in good
+bank-bills, and have no law suits from one year's end to another. He
+could come and go in three or four hours, and Monsieur Blondet and
+Monsieur le marquis would not be so often away from you, Madame la
+comtesse."
+
+"I, retreat before the peasantry when I did not recoil before the
+Danube!" cried the general.
+
+"Yes, but what became of your cuirassiers?" asked Blondet.
+
+"Such a fine estate!"
+
+"It will sell to-day for over two millions."
+
+"The chateau alone must have cost that," remarked Monsieur de
+Troisville.
+
+"One of the best properties in a circumference of sixty miles," said
+the sub-prefect; "but you can find a better near Paris."
+
+"How much income does one get from two millions?" asked the countess.
+
+"Now-a-days, about eighty thousand francs," replied Blondet.
+
+"Les Aigues does not bring in, all told, more than thirty thousand,"
+said the countess; "and lately you have been at such immense expenses,
+--you have surrounded the woods this year with ditches."
+
+"You could get," added Blondet, "a royal chateau for four hundred
+thousand francs near Paris. In these days people buy the follies of
+others."
+
+"I thought you cared for Les Aigues!" said the count to his wife.
+
+"Don't you feel that I care a thousand times more for your life?" she
+replied. "Besides, ever since the death of my poor Olympe and
+Michaud's murder the country is odious to me; all the faces I meet
+seem to wear a treacherous or threatening expression."
+
+The next evening the sub-prefect, having ended his visit at the
+chateau, was welcomed in the salon of Monsieur Gaubertin at
+Ville-aux-Fayes in these words:--
+
+"Well, Monsieur des Lupeaulx, so you have returned from Les Aigues?"
+
+"Yes," answered the sub-prefect with a little air of triumph and a
+look of tender regard at Mademoiselle Elise, "and I am very much
+afraid to say we may lose the general; he talks of selling his
+property--"
+
+"Monsieur Gaubertin, I speak for my pavilion. I can on longer endure
+the noise, the dust of Ville-aux-Fayes; like a poor imprisoned bird I
+gasp for the air of the fields, the woodland breezes," said Madame
+Isaure, in a lackadaisical voice, with her eyes half-closed and her
+head bending to her left shoulder as she played carelessly with the
+long curls of her blond hair.
+
+"Pray be prudent, madame!" said her husband in a low voice; "your
+indiscretions will not help me to buy the pavilion." Then, turning to
+the sub-prefect, he added, "Haven't they yet discovered the men who
+were concerned in the murder of the bailiff?"
+
+"It seems not," replied the sub-prefect.
+
+"That will injure the sale of Les Aigues," said Gaubertin to the
+company generally, "I know very well that I would not buy the place.
+The peasantry over there are such a bad set of people; even in the
+days of Mademoiselle Laguerre I had trouble with them, and God knows
+she let them do as they liked."
+
+At the end of the month of May the general still gave no sign that he
+intended to sell Les Aigues; in fact, he was undecided. One night,
+about ten o'clock, he was returning from the forest through one of the
+six avenues that led to the pavilion of the Rendezvous. He dismissed
+the keeper who accompanied him, as he was then so near the chateau. At
+a turn of the road a man armed with a gun came from behind a bush.
+
+"General," he said, "this is the third time I have had you at the end
+of my barrel, and the third time that I give you your life."
+
+"Why do you want to kill me, Bonnebault?" said the general, without
+showing the least emotion.
+
+"Faith, if I don't, somebody else will; but I, you see, I like the men
+who served the Emperor, and I can't make up my mind to shoot you like
+a partridge. Don't question me, for I'll tell you nothing; but you've
+got enemies, powerful enemies, cleverer than you, and they'll end by
+crushing you. I am to have a thousand crowns if I kill you, and then I
+can marry Marie Tonsard. Well, give me enough to buy a few acres of
+land and a bit of a cottage, and I'll keep on saying, as I have done,
+that I've found no chances. That will give you time to sell your
+property and get away; but make haste. I'm an honest lad still, scamp
+as I am; but another fellow won't spare you."
+
+"If I give you what you ask, will you tell me who offered you those
+three thousand francs?" said the general.
+
+"I don't know myself; and the person who is urging me to do the thing
+is some one I love too well to tell of. Besides, even if you did know
+it was Marie Tonsard, that wouldn't help you; Marie Tonsard would be
+as silent as that wall, and I should deny every word I've said."
+
+"Come and see me to-morrow," said the general.
+
+"Enough," replied Bonnebault; "and if they begin to say I'm too
+dilatory, I'll let you know in time."
+
+A week after that singular conversation the whole arrondissement,
+indeed the whole department, was covered with posters, advertising the
+sale of Les Aigues at the office of Maitre Corbineau, the notary of
+Soulanges. All the lots were knocked down to Rigou, and the price paid
+amounted to two millions five hundred thousand francs. The next day
+Rigou had the names changed; Monsieur Gaubertin took the woods, Rigou
+and Soudry the vineyards and the farms. The chateau and the park were
+sold over again in small lots among the sons of the soil, the
+peasantry,--excepting the pavilion, its dependencies, and fifty
+surrounding acres, which Monsieur Gaubertin retained as a gift to his
+poetic and sentimental spouse.
+
+              *     *     *     *     *
+
+Many years after these events, during the year 1837, one of the most
+remarkable political writers of the day, Emile Blondet, reached the
+last stages of a poverty which he had so far hidden beneath an outward
+appearance of ease and elegance. He was thinking of taking some
+desperate step, realizing, as he did, that his writings, his mind, his
+knowledge, his ability for the direction of affairs, had made him
+nothing better than a mere functionary, mechanically serving the ends
+of others; seeing that every avenue was closed to him and all places
+taken; feeling that he had reached middle-life without fame and
+without fortune; that fools and middle-class men of no training had
+taken the places of the courtiers and incapables of the Restoration,
+and that the government was reconstituted such as it was before 1830.
+One evening, when he had come very near committing suicide (a folly he
+had so often laughed at), while his mind travelled back over his
+miserable existence calumniated and worn down with toil far more than
+with the dissipations charged against him, the noble and beautiful
+face of a woman rose before his eyes, like a statue rising pure and
+unbroken amid the saddest ruins. Just then the porter brought him a
+letter sealed with black from the Comtesse de Montcornet, telling him
+of the death of her husband, who had again taken service in the army
+and commanded a division. The count had left her his property, and she
+had no children. The letter, though dignified, showed Blondet very
+plainly that the woman of forty whom he had loved in his youth offered
+him a friendly hand and a large fortune.
+
+A few days ago the marriage of the Comtesse de Montcornet with
+Monsieur Blondet, appointed prefect in one of the departments, was
+celebrated in Paris. On their way to take possession of the
+prefecture, they followed the road which led past what had formerly
+been Les Aigues. They stopped the carriage near the spot where the two
+pavilions had once stood, wishing to see the places so full of tender
+memories for each. The country was no longer recognizable. The
+mysterious woods, the park avenues, all were cleared away; the
+landscape looked like a tailor's pattern-card. The sons of the soil
+had taken possession of the earth as victors and conquerors. It was
+cut up into a thousand little lots, and the population had tripled
+between Conches and Blangy. The levelling and cultivation of the noble
+park, once so carefully tended, so delightful in its beauty, threw
+into isolated relief the pavilion of the Rendezvous, now the Villa
+Buen-Retiro of Madame Isaure Gaubertin; it was the only building left
+standing, and it commanded the whole landscape, or as we might better
+call it, the stretch of cornfields which now constituted the
+landscape. The building seemed magnified into a chateau, so miserable
+were the little houses which the peasants had built around it.
+
+"This is progress!" cried Emile. "It is a page out of Jean-Jacques'
+'Social Compact'! and I--I am harnessed to the social machine that
+works it! Good God! what will the kings be soon? More than that, what
+will the nations themselves be fifty years hence under this state of
+things?"
+
+"But you love me; you are beside me. I think the present delightful.
+What do I care for such a distant future?" said his wife.
+
+"Oh yes! by your side, hurrah for the present!" cried the lover,
+gayly, "and the devil take the future."
+
+Then he signed to the coachman, and as the horses sprang forward along
+the road, the wedded pair returned to the enjoyment of their
+honeymoon.
+
+
+
+1845.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Note: Sons of the Soil is also known as The Peasantry and is referred
+to by that title when mentioned in other addendums.
+
+Blondet, Emile
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+
+Blondet, Virginie
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Member for Arcis
+  A Daughter of Eve
+
+Bourlac, Bernard-Jean-Baptiste-Macloud, Baron de
+  The Seamy Side of History
+
+Brossette, Abbe
+  Beatrix
+
+Carigliano, Duchesse de
+  At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Casteran, De
+  The Chouans
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Beatrix
+
+Laguerre, Mademoiselle
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+
+La Roche-Hugon, Martial de
+  Domestic Peace
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Member for Arcis
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Lupin, Amaury
+  A Start in Life
+
+Marest, Georges
+  A Start in Life
+
+Minorets, The
+  The Government Clerks
+
+Montcornet, Marechal, Comte de
+  Domestic Peace
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  A Man of Business
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Navarreins, Duc de
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Colonel Chabert
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Thirteen
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Country Parson
+  The Magic Skin
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Ronquerolles, Marquis de
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  Ursule Mirouet
+  A Woman of Thirty
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Thirteen
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Scherbelloff, Princesse (or Scherbellof or Sherbelloff)
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+
+Soulanges, Comte Leon de
+  Domestic Peace
+
+Soulanges, Comtesse Hortense de
+  Domestic Peace
+  The Thirteen
+
+Steingel
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+
+Troisville, Guibelin, Vicomte de
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  The Chouans
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sons of the Soil, by Honore de Balzac
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diff --git a/old/old/200510041417.zip b/old/old/200510041417.zip
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diff --git a/old/old/ssoil10.txt b/old/old/ssoil10.txt
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@@ -0,0 +1,13100 @@
+Project Gutenberg Etext of Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac
+#29 in our series
+
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check
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+Sons of the Soil
+
+by Honore de Balzac
+
+Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+August, 1998  [Etext #1417]
+
+
+Project Gutenberg Etext of Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac
+******This file should be named ssoil10.txt or ssoil10.zip******
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, ssoil11.txt.
+VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, ssoil10a.txt.
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+Etext prepared by John Bickers, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz
+and Dagny, dagnyj@hotmail.com
+
+
+
+
+
+SONS OF THE SOIL
+
+BY
+
+HONORE DE BALZAC
+
+
+
+Translated By
+Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+
+
+DEDICATION
+
+  To Monsieur P. S. B. Gavault.
+
+  Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote these words at the beginning of his
+  Nouvelle Heloise: "I have seen the morals of my time and I publish
+  these letters." May I not say to you, in imitation of that great
+  writer, "I have studied the march of my epoch and I publish this
+  work"?
+
+  The object of this particular study--startling in its truth so
+  long as society makes philanthropy a principle instead of
+  regarding it as an accident--is to bring to sight the leading
+  characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who
+  seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is
+  only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the
+  sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate
+  the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have
+  risen, and cried by every pen, "Arise, working-men!" just as
+  formerly they cried, "Arise!" to the "tiers etat." None of these
+  Erostrates, however, have dared to face the country solitudes and
+  study the unceasing conspiracy of those whom we term weak against
+  those others who fancy themselves strong,--that of the peasant
+  against the proprietor. It is necessary to enlighten not only the
+  legislator of to-day but him of to-morrow. In the midst of the
+  present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers
+  blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to exhibit the peasant who
+  renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land
+  to be a thing that is, and that is not.
+
+  You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which
+  undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides
+  an acre into a hundred fragments,--ever spurred on to his banquet
+  by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary
+  and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the
+  Revolution, will some day absorb the middle classes, just as the
+  middle classes have destroyed the nobility. Lifted above the law
+  by its own insignificance, this Robespierre, with one head and
+  twenty million arms, is at work perpetually; crouching in country
+  districts, intrenched in municipal councils, under arms in the
+  national guard of every canton in France,--one result of the year
+  1830, which failed to remember that Napoleon preferred the chances
+  of defeat to the danger of arming the masses.
+
+  If during the last eight years I have again and again given up the
+  writing of this book (the most important of those I have
+  undertaken to write), and as often returned to it, it was, as you
+  and other friends can well imagine, because my courage shrank from
+  the many difficulties, the many essential details of a drama so
+  doubly dreadful and so cruelly bloody. Among the reasons which
+  render me now almost, it may be thought, foolhardy, I count the
+  desire to finish a work long designed to be to you a proof of my
+  deep and lasting gratitude for a friendship that has ever been
+  among my greatest consolations in misfortune.
+
+De Balzac.
+
+
+
+
+SONS OF THE SOIL
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+Whoso land hath, contention hath.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE CHATEAU
+
+Les Aigues, August 6, 1823.
+
+To Monsieur Nathan,
+
+My dear Nathan,--You, who provide the public with such delightful
+dreams through the magic of your imagination, are now to follow me
+while I make you dream a dream of truth. You shall then tell me
+whether the present century is likely to bequeath such dreams to the
+Nathans and the Blondets of the year 1923; you shall estimate the
+distance at which we now are from the days when the Florines of the
+eighteenth century found, on awaking, a chateau like Les Aigues in the
+terms of their bargain.
+
+My dear fellow, if you receive this letter in the morning, let your
+mind travel, as you lie in bed, fifty leagues or thereabouts from
+Paris, along the great mail road which leads to the confines of
+Burgundy, and behold two small lodges built of red brick, joined, or
+separated, by a rail painted green. It was there that the diligence
+deposited your friend and correspondent.
+
+On either side of this double pavilion grows a quick-set hedge, from
+which the brambles straggle like stray locks of hair. Here and there a
+tree shoots boldly up; flowers bloom on the slopes of the wayside
+ditch, bathing their feet in its green and sluggish water. The hedge
+at both ends meets and joins two strips of woodland, and the double
+meadow thus inclosed is doubtless the result of a clearing.
+
+These dusty and deserted lodges give entrance to a magnificent avenue
+of centennial elms, whose umbrageous heads lean toward each other and
+form a long and most majestic arbor. The grass grows in this avenue,
+and only a few wheel-tracks can be seen along its double width of way.
+The great age of the trees, the breadth of the avenue, the venerable
+construction of the lodges, the brown tints of their stone courses,
+all bespeak an approach to some half-regal residence.
+
+Before reaching this enclosure from the height of an eminence such as
+we Frenchmen rather conceitedly call a mountain, at the foot of which
+lies the village of Conches (the last post-house), I had seen the long
+valley of Aigues, at the farther end of which the mail road turns to
+follow a straight line into the little sub-prefecture of La Ville-aux-
+Fayes, over which, as you know, the nephew of our friend des Lupeaulx
+lords it. Tall forests lying on the horizon, along vast slopes which
+skirt a river, command this rich valley, which is framed in the far
+distance by the mountains of a lesser Switzerland, called the Morvan.
+These forests belong to Les Aigues, and to the Marquis de Ronquerolles
+and the Comte de Soulanges, whose castles and parks and villages, seen
+in the distance from these heights, give the scene a strong
+resemblance to the imaginary landscapes of Velvet Breughel.
+
+If these details do not remind you of all the castles in the air you
+have desired to possess in France you are not worthy to receive the
+present narrative of an astounded Parisian. At last I have seen a
+landscape where art is blended with nature in such a way that neither
+of them spoils the other; the art is natural, and the nature artistic.
+I have found the oasis that you and I have dreamed of when reading
+novels,--nature luxuriant and adorned, rolling lines that are not
+confused, something wild withal, unkempt, mysterious, not common. Jump
+that green railing and come on!
+
+When I tried to look up the avenue, which the sun never penetrates
+except when it rises or when it sets, striping the road like a zebra
+with its oblique rays, my view was obstructed by an outline of rising
+ground; after that is passed, the long avenue is obstructed by a
+copse, within which the roads meet at a cross-ways, in the centre of
+which stands a stone obelisk, for all the world like an eternal
+exclamation mark. From the crevices between the foundation stones of
+this erection, which is topped by a spiked ball (what an idea!), hang
+flowering plants, blue or yellow according to the season. Les Aigues
+must certainly have been built by a woman, or for a woman; no man
+would have had such dainty ideas; the architect no doubt had his cue.
+
+Passing through the little wood placed there as sentinel, I came upon
+a charming declivity, at the foot of which foamed and gurgled a little
+brook, which I crossed on a culvert of mossy stones, superb in color,
+the prettiest of all the mosaics which time manufactures. The avenue
+continues by the brookside up a gentle rise. In the distance, the
+first tableau is now seen,--a mill and its dam, a causeway and trees,
+linen laid out to dry, the thatched cottage of the miller, his
+fishing-nets, and the tank where the fish are kept,--not to speak of
+the miller's boy, who was already watching me. No matter where you are
+in the country, however solitary you may think yourself, you are
+certain to be the focus of the two eyes of a country bumpkin; a
+laborer rests on his hoe, a vine-dresser straightens his bent back, a
+little goat-girl, or shepherdess, or milkmaid climbs a willow to stare
+at you.
+
+Presently the avenue merges into an alley of acacias, which leads to
+an iron railing made in the days when iron-workers fashioned those
+slender filagrees which are not unlike the copies set us by a writing-
+master. On either side of the railing is a ha-ha, the edges of which
+bristle with angry spikes,--regular porcupines in metal. The railing
+is closed at both ends by two porter's-lodges, like those of the
+palace at Versailles, and the gateway is surmounted by colossal vases.
+The gold of the arabesques is ruddy, for rust has added its tints, but
+this entrance, called "the gate of the Avenue," which plainly shows
+the hand of the Great Dauphin (to whom, indeed, Les Aigues owes it),
+seems to me none the less beautiful for that. At the end of each ha-ha
+the walls of the park, built of rough-hewn stone, begin. These stones,
+set in a mortar made of reddish earth, display their variegated
+colors, the warm yellows of the silex, the white of the lime
+carbonates, the russet browns of the sandstone, in many a fantastic
+shape. As you first enter it, the park is gloomy, the walls are hidden
+by creeping plants and by trees that for fifty years have heard no
+sound of axe. One might think it a virgin forest, made primeval again
+through some phenomenon granted exclusively to forests. The trunks of
+the trees are swathed with lichen which hangs from one to another.
+Mistletoe, with its viscid leaves, droops from every fork of the
+branches where moisture settles. I have found gigantic ivies, wild
+arabesques which flourish only at fifty leagues from Paris, here where
+land does not cost enough to make one sparing of it. The landscape on
+such free lines covers a great deal of ground. Nothing is smoothed
+off; rakes are unknown, ruts and ditches are full of water, frogs are
+tranquilly delivered of their tadpoles, the woodland flowers bloom,
+and the heather is as beautiful as that I have seen on your mantle-
+shelf in January in the elegant beau-pot sent by Florine. This mystery
+is intoxicating, it inspires vague desires. The forest odors, beloved
+of souls that are epicures of poesy, who delight in the tiny mosses,
+the noxious fungi, the moist mould, the willows, the balsams, the wild
+thyme, the green waters of a pond, the golden star of the yellow
+water-lily,--the breath of all such vigorous propagations came to my
+nostrils and filled me with a single thought; was it their soul? I
+seemed to see a rose-tinted gown floating along the winding alley.
+
+The path ended abruptly in another copse, where birches and poplars
+and all the quivering trees palpitated,--an intelligent family with
+graceful branches and elegant bearing, the trees of a love as free! It
+was from this point, my dear fellow, that I saw a pond covered with
+the white water-lily and other plants with broad flat leaves and
+narrow slender ones, on which lay a boat painted white and black, as
+light as a nut-shell and dainty as the wherry of a Seine boatman.
+Beyond rose the chateau, built in 1560, of fine red brick, with stone
+courses and copings, and window-frames in which the sashes were of
+small leaded panes (O Versailles!). The stone is hewn in diamond
+points, but hollowed, as in the Ducal Palace at Venice on the facade
+toward the Bridge of Sighs. There are no regular lines about the
+castle except in the centre building, from which projects a stately
+portico with double flights of curving steps, and round balusters
+slender at their base and broadening at the middle. The main building
+is surrounded by clock-towers and sundry modern turrets, with
+galleries and vases more or less Greek. No harmony there, my dear
+Nathan! These heterogeneous erections are wrapped, so to speak, by
+various evergreen trees whose branches shed their brown needles upon
+the roofs, nourishing the lichen and giving tone to the cracks and
+crevices where the eye delights to wander. Here you see the Italian
+pine, the stone pine, with its red bark and its majestic parasol; here
+a cedar two hundred years old, weeping willows, a Norway spruce, and a
+beech which overtops them all; and there, in front of the main tower,
+some very singular shrubs,--a yew trimmed in a way that recalls some
+long-decayed garden of old France, and magnolias with hortensias at
+their feet. In short, the place is the Invalides of the heroes of
+horticulture, once the fashion and now forgotten, like all other
+heroes.
+
+A chimney, with curious copings, which was sending forth great volumes
+of smoke, assured me that this delightful scene was not an opera
+setting. A kitchen reveals human beings. Now imagine ME, Blondet, who
+shiver as if in the polar regions at Saint-Cloud, in the midst of this
+glowing Burgundian climate. The sun sends down its warmest rays, the
+king-fisher watches on the shores of the pond, the cricket chirps, the
+grain-pods burst, the poppy drops its morphia in glutinous tears, and
+all are clearly defined on the dark-blue ether. Above the ruddy soil
+of the terraces flames that joyous natural punch which intoxicates the
+insects and the flowers and dazzles our eyes and browns our faces. The
+grape is beading, its tendrils fall in a veil of threads whose
+delicacy puts to shame the lace-makers. Beside the house blue
+larkspur, nasturtium, and sweet-peas are blooming. From a distance
+orange-trees and tuberoses scent the air. After the poetic exhalations
+of the woods (a gradual preparation) came the delectable pastilles of
+this botanic seraglio.
+
+Standing on the portico, like the queen of flowers, behold a woman
+robed in white, with hair unpowdered, holding a parasol lined with
+white silk, but herself whiter than the silk, whiter than the lilies
+at her feet, whiter than the starry jasmine that climbed the
+balustrade,--a woman, a Frenchwoman born in Russia, who said as I
+approached her, "I had almost given you up." She had seen me as I left
+the copse. With what perfection do all women, even the most guileless,
+understand the arrangement of a scenic effect? The movements of the
+servants, who were preparing to serve breakfast, showed me that the
+meal had been delayed until after the arrival of the diligence. She
+had not ventured to come to meet me.
+
+Is this not our dream,--the dream of all lovers of the beautiful,
+under whatsoever form it comes; the seraphic beauty that Luini put
+into his Marriage of the Virgin, that noble fresco at Sarono; the
+beauty that Rubens grasped in the tumult of his "Battle of the
+Thermodon"; the beauty that five centuries have elaborated in the
+cathedrals of Seville and Milan; the beauty of the Saracens at
+Granada, the beauty of Louis XIV. at Versailles, the beauty of the
+Alps, and that of this Limagne in which I stand?
+
+Belonging to the estate, about which there is nothing too princely,
+nor yet too financial, where prince and farmer-general have both lived
+(which fact serves to explain it), are four thousand acres of
+woodland, a park of some nine hundred acres, the mill, three leased
+farms, another immense farm at Conches, and vineyards,--the whole
+producing a revenue of about seventy thousand francs a year. Now you
+know Les Aigues, my dear fellow; where I have been expected for the
+last two weeks, and where I am at this moment, in the chintz-lined
+chamber assigned to dearest friends.
+
+Above the park, towards Conches, a dozen little brooks, clear, limpid
+streams coming from the Morvan, fall into the pond, after adorning
+with their silvery ribbons the valleys of the park and the magnificent
+gardens around the chateau. The name of the place, Les Aigues, comes
+from these charming streams of water; the estate was originally called
+in the old title-deeds "Les Aigues-Vives" to distinguish it from
+"Aigues-Mortes"; but the word "Vives" has now been dropped. The pond
+empties into the stream, which follows the course of the avenue,
+through a wide and straight canal bordered on both sides and along its
+whole length by weeping willows. This canal, thus arched, produces a
+delightful effect. Gliding through it, seated on a thwart of the
+little boat, one could fancy one's self in the nave of some great
+cathedral, the choir being formed of the main building of the house
+seen at the end of it. When the setting sun casts its orange tones
+mingled with amber upon the casements of the chateau, the effect is
+that of painted windows. At the other end of the canal we see Blangy,
+the county-town, containing about sixty houses, and the village
+church, which is nothing more than a tumble-down building with a
+wooden clock-tower which appears to hold up a roof of broken tiles.
+One comfortable house and the parsonage are distinguishable; but the
+township is a large one,--about two hundred scattered houses in all,
+those of the village forming as it were the capital. The roads are
+lined with fruit-trees, and numerous little gardens are strewn here
+and there,--true country gardens with everything in them; flowers,
+onions, cabbages and grapevines, currants, and a great deal of manure.
+The village has a primitive air; it is rustic, and has that decorative
+simplicity which we artists are forever seeking. In the far distance
+is the little town of Soulanges overhanging a vast sheet of water,
+like the buildings on the lake of Thune.
+
+When you stroll in the park, which has four gates, each superb in
+style, you feel that our mythological Arcadias are flat and stale.
+Arcadia is in Burgundy, not in Greece; Arcadia is at Les Aigues and
+nowhere else. A river, made by scores of brooklets, crosses the park
+at its lower level with a serpentine movement; giving a dewy freshness
+and tranquillity to the scene,--an air of solitude, which reminds one
+of a convent of Carthusians, and all the more because, on an
+artificial island in the river, is a hermitage in ruins, the interior
+elegance of which is worthy of the luxurious financier who constructed
+it. Les Aigues, my dear Nathan, once belonged to that Bouret who spent
+two millions to receive Louis XV. on a single occasion under his roof.
+How many ardent passions, how many distinguished minds, how many
+fortunate circumstances have contributed to make this beautiful place
+what it is! A mistress of Henri IV. rebuilt the chateau where it now
+stands. The favorite of the Great Dauphin, Mademoiselle Choin (to whom
+Les Aigues was given), added a number of farms to it. Bouret furnished
+the house with all the elegancies of Parisian homes for an Opera
+celebrity; and to him Les Aigues owes the restoration of its ground
+floor in the style Louis XV.
+
+I have often stood rapt in admiration at the beauty of the dining-
+room. The eye is first attracted to the ceiling, painted in fresco in
+the Italian manner, where lightsome arabesques are frolicking. Female
+forms, in stucco ending in foliage, support at regular distances
+corbeils of fruit, from which spring the garlands of the ceiling.
+Charming paintings, the work of unknown artists, fill the panels
+between the female figures, representing the luxuries of the table,--
+boar's-heads, salmon, rare shell-fish, and all edible things,--which
+fantastically suggest men and women and children, and rival the
+whimsical imagination of the Chinese,--the people who best understand,
+to my thinking at least, the art of decoration. The mistress of the
+house finds a bell-wire beneath her feet to summon servants, who enter
+only when required, disturbing no interviews and overhearing no
+secrets. The panels above the doorways represent gay scenes; all the
+embrasures, both of doors and windows, are in marble mosaics. The room
+is heated from below. Every window looks forth on some delightful
+view.
+
+This room communicates with a bath-room on one side and on the other
+with a boudoir which opens into the salon. The bath-room is lined with
+Sevres tiles, painted in monochrome, the floor is mosaic, and the bath
+marble. An alcove, hidden by a picture painted on copper, which turns
+on a pivot, contains a couch in gilt wood of the truest Pompadour. The
+ceiling is lapis-lazuli starred with gold. The tiles are painted from
+designs by Boucher. Bath, table and love are therefore closely united.
+
+After the salon, which, I should tell you, my dear fellow, exhibits
+the magnificence of the Louis XIV. manner, you enter a fine billiard-
+room unrivalled so far as I know in Paris itself. The entrance to this
+suite of ground-floor apartments is through a semi-circular
+antechamber, at the lower end of which is a fairy-like staircase,
+lighted from above, which leads to other parts of the house, all built
+at various epochs--and to think that they chopped off the heads of the
+wealthy in 1793! Good heavens! why can't people understand that the
+marvels of art are impossible in a land where there are no great
+fortunes, no secure, luxurious lives? If the Left insists on killing
+kings why not leave us a few little princelings with money in their
+pockets?
+
+At the present moment these accumulated treasures belong to a charming
+woman with an artistic soul, who is not content with merely restoring
+them magnificently, but who keeps the place up with loving care. Sham
+philosophers, studying themselves while they profess to be studying
+humanity, call these glorious things extravagance. They grovel before
+cotton prints and the tasteless designs of modern industry, as if we
+were greater and happier in these days than in those of Henri IV.,
+Louis XIV., and Louis XVI., monarchs who have all left the stamp of
+their reigns upon Les Aigues. What palace, what royal castle, what
+mansions, what noble works of art, what gold brocaded stuffs are
+sacred now? The petticoats of our grandmothers go to cover the chairs
+in these degenerate days. Selfish and thieving interlopers that we
+are, we pull down everything and plant cabbages where marvels once
+were rife. Only yesterday the plough levelled Persan, that magnificent
+domain which gave a title to one of the most opulent families of the
+old parliament; hammers have demolished Montmorency, which cost an
+Italian follower of Napoleon untold sums; Val, the creation of
+Regnault de Saint-Jean d'Angely, Cassan, built by a mistress of the
+Prince de Conti; in all, four royal houses have disappeared in the
+valley of the Oise alone. We are getting a Roman campagna around Paris
+in advance of the days when a tempest shall blow from the north and
+overturn our plaster palaces and our pasteboard decorations.
+
+Now see, my dear fellow, to what the habit of bombasticising in
+newspapers brings you to. Here am I writing a downright article. Does
+the mind have its ruts, like a road? I stop; for I rob the mail, and I
+rob myself, and you may be yawning--to be continued in our next; I
+hear the second bell, which summons me to one of those abundant
+breakfasts the fashion of which has long passed away, in the dining-
+rooms of Paris, be it understood.
+
+Here's the history of my Arcadia. In 1815, there died at Les Aigues
+one of the famous wantons of the last century,--a singer, forgotten of
+the guillotine and the nobility, after preying upon exchequers, upon
+literature, upon aristocracy, and all but reaching the scaffold;
+forgotten, like so many fascinating old women who expiate their golden
+youth in country solitudes, and replace their lost loves by another,--
+man by Nature. Such women live with the flowers, with the woodland
+scents, with the sky, with the sunshine, with all that sings and skips
+and shines and sprouts,--the birds, the squirrels, the flowers, the
+grass; they know nothing about these things, they cannot explain them,
+but they love them; they love them so well that they forget dukes,
+marshals, rivalries, financiers, follies, luxuries, their paste jewels
+and their real diamonds, their heeled slippers and their rouge,--all,
+for the sweetness of country life.
+
+I have gathered, my dear fellow, much precious information about the
+old age of Mademoiselle Laguerre; for, to tell you the truth, the
+after life of such women as Florine, Mariette, Suzanne de Val Noble,
+and Tullia has made me, every now and then, extremely inquisitive, as
+though I were a child inquiring what had become of the old moons.
+
+In 1790 Mademoiselle Laguerre, alarmed at the turn of public affairs,
+came to settle at Les Aigues, bought and given to her by Bouret, who
+passed several summers with her at the chateau. Terrified at the fate
+of Madame du Barry, she buried her diamonds. At that time she was only
+fifty-three years of age, and according to her lady's-maid, afterwards
+married to a gendarme named Soudry, "Madame was more beautiful than
+ever." My dear Nathan, Nature has no doubt her private reasons for
+treating women of this sort like spoiled children; excesses, instead
+of killing them, fatten them, preserve them, renew their youth. Under
+a lymphatic appearance they have nerves which maintain their
+marvellous physique; they actually preserve their beauty for reasons
+which would make a virtuous woman haggard. No, upon my word, Nature is
+not moral!
+
+Mademoiselle Laguerre lived an irreproachable life at Les Aigues, one
+might even call it a saintly one, after her famous adventure,--you
+remember it? One evening in a paroxysm of despairing love, she fled
+from the opera-house in her stage dress, rushed into the country, and
+passed the night weeping by the wayside. (Ah! how they have
+calumniated the love of Louis XV.'s time!) She was so unused to see
+the sunrise, that she hailed it with one of her finest songs. Her
+attitude, quite as much as her tinsel, drew the peasants about her;
+amazed at her gestures, her voice, her beauty, they took her for an
+angel, and dropped on their knees around her. If Voltaire had not
+existed we might have thought it a new miracle. I don't know if God
+gave her much credit for her tardy virtue, for love after all must be
+a sickening thing to a woman as weary of it as a wanton of the old
+Opera. Mademoiselle Laguerre was born in 1740, and her hey-day was in
+1760, when Monsieur (I forget his name) was called the "ministre de la
+guerre," on account of his liaison with her. She abandoned that name,
+which was quite unknown down here, and called herself Madame des
+Aigues, as if to merge her identity in the estate, which she delighted
+to improve with a taste that was profoundly artistic. When Bonaparte
+became First Consul, she increased her property by the purchase of
+church lands, for which she used the proceeds of her diamonds. As an
+Opera divinity never knows how to take care of her money, she
+intrusted the management of the estate to a steward, occupying herself
+with her flowers and fruits and with the beautifying of the park.
+
+After Mademoiselle was dead and buried at Blangy, the notary of
+Soulanges--that little town which lies between Ville-aux-Fayes and
+Blangy, the capital of the township--made an elaborate inventory, and
+sought out the heirs of the singer, who never knew she had any. Eleven
+families of poor laborers living near Amiens, and sleeping in cotton
+sheets, awoke one fine morning in golden ones. The property was sold
+at auction. Les Aigues was bought by Montcornet, who had laid by
+enough during his campaigns in Spain and Pomerania to make the
+purchase, which cost about eleven hundred thousand francs, including
+the furniture. The general, no doubt, felt the influence of these
+luxurious apartments; and I was arguing with the countess only
+yesterday that her marriage was a direct result of the purchase of Les
+Aigues.
+
+To rightly understand the countess, my dear Nathan, you must know that
+the general is a violent man, red as fire, five feet nine inches tall,
+round as a tower, with a thick neck and the shoulders of a blacksmith,
+which must have amply filled his cuirass. Montcornet commanded the
+cuirassiers at the battle of Essling (called by the Austrians Gross-
+Aspern), and came near perishing when that noble corps was driven back
+on the Danube. He managed to cross the river astride a log of wood.
+The cuirassiers, finding the bridge down, took the glorious
+resolution, at Montcornet's command, to turn and resist the entire
+Austrian army, which carried off on the morrow over thirty wagon-loads
+of cuirasses. The Germans invented a name for their enemies on this
+occasion which means "men of iron."[*] Montcornet has the outer man of
+a hero of antiquity. His arms are stout and vigorous, his chest deep
+and broad; his head has a leonine aspect, his voice is of those that
+can order a charge in the thick of battle; but he has nothing more
+than the courage of a daring man; he lacks mind and breadth of view.
+Like other generals to whom military common-sense, the natural
+boldness of those who spend their lives in danger, and the habit of
+command gives an appearance of superiority, Montcornet has an imposing
+effect when you first meet him; he seems a Titan, but he contains a
+dwarf, like the pasteboard giant who saluted Queen Elizabeth at the
+gates of Kenilworth. Choleric though kind, and full of imperial
+hauteur, he has the caustic tongue of a soldier, and is quick at
+repartee, but quicker still with a blow. He may have been superb on a
+battle-field; in a household he is simply intolerable. He knows no
+love but barrack love,--the love which those clever myth-makers, the
+ancients, placed under the patronage of Eros, son of Mars and Venus.
+Those delightful chroniclers of the old religions provided themselves
+with a dozen different Loves. Study the fathers and the attributes of
+these Loves, and you will discover a complete social nomenclature,--
+and yet we fancy that we originate things! When the world turns upside
+down like an hour-glass, when the seas become continents, Frenchmen
+will find canons, steamboats, newspapers, and maps wrapped up in
+seaweed at the bottom of what is now our ocean.
+
+[*] I do not, on principle, like foot-notes, and this is the first I
+have ever allowed myself. Its historical interest must be my
+excuse; it will prove, moreover, that descriptions of battles
+should be something more than the dry particulars of technical
+writers, who for the last three thousand years have told us about
+left and right wings and centres being broken or driven in, but
+never a word about the soldier himself, his sufferings, and his
+heroism. The conscientious care with which I prepared myself to
+write the "Scenes from Military Life," led me to many a battle-
+field once wet with the blood of France and her enemies. Among
+them I went to Wagram. When I reached the shores of the Danube,
+opposite Lobau, I noticed on the bank, which is covered with turf,
+certain undulations that reminded me of the furrows in a field of
+lucern. I asked the reason of it, thinking I should hear of some
+new method of agriculture: "There sleep the cavalry of the
+imperial guard," said the peasant who served us as a guide; "those
+are their graves you see there." The words made me shudder. Prince
+Frederic Schwartzenburg, who translated them, added that the man
+had himself driven one of the wagons laden with cuirasses. By one
+of the strange chances of war our guide had served a breakfast to
+Napoleon on the morning of the battle of Wagram. Though poor, he
+had kept the double napoleon which the Emperor gave him for his
+milk and his eggs. The curate of Gross-Aspern took us to the
+famous cemetery where French and Austrians struggled together
+knee-deep in blood, with a courage and obstinacy glorious to each.
+There, while explaining that a marble tablet (to which our
+attention had been attracted, and on which were inscribed the
+names of the owner of Gross-Aspern, who had been killed on the
+third day) was the sole compensation ever given to the family, he
+said, in a tone of deep sadness: "It was a time of great misery,
+and of great hopes; but now are the days of forgetfulness." The
+saying seemed to me sublime in its simplicity; but when I came to
+reflect upon the matter, I felt there was some justification for
+the apparent ingratitude of the House of Austria. Neither nations
+nor kings are wealthy enough to reward all the devotions to which
+these tragic struggles give rise. Let those who serve a cause with
+a secret expectation of recompense, set a price upon their blood
+and become mercenaries. Those who wield either sword or pen for
+their country's good ought to think of nothing but of DOING THEIR
+BEST, as our fathers used to say, and expect nothing, not even
+glory, except as a happy accident.
+
+It was in rushing to retake this famous cemetery for the third
+time that Massena, wounded and carried in the box of a cabriolet,
+made this splendid harangue to his soldiers: "What! you rascally
+curs, who have only five sous a day while I have forty thousand,
+do you let me go ahead of you?" All the world knows the order
+which the Emperor sent to his lieutenant by M. de Sainte-Croix,
+who swam the Danube three times: "Die or retake the village; it is
+a question of saving the army; the bridges are destroyed."
+
+The Author.
+
+
+Now, I must tell you that the Comtesse de Montcornet is a fragile,
+timid, delicate little woman. What do you think of such a marriage as
+that? To those who know society such things are common enough; a well-
+assorted marriage is the exception. Nevertheless, I have come to see
+how it is that this slender little creature handles her bobbins in a
+way to lead this heavy, solid, stolid general precisely as he himself
+used to lead his cuirassiers.
+
+If Montcornet begins to bluster before his Virginie, Madame lays a
+finger on her lips and he is silent. He smokes his pipes and his
+cigars in a kiosk fifty feet from the chateau, and airs himself before
+he returns to the house. Proud of his subjection, he turns to her,
+like a bear drunk on grapes, and says, when anything is proposed, "If
+Madame approves." When he comes to his wife's room, with that heavy
+step which makes the tiles creak as though they were boards, and she,
+not wanting him, calls out: "Don't come in!" he performs a military
+volte-face and says humbly: "You will let me know when I can see you?"
+--in the very tones with which he shouted to his cuirassiers on the
+banks of the Danube: "Men, we must die, and die well, since there's
+nothing else we can do!" I have heard him say, speaking of his wife,
+"Not only do I love her, but I venerate her." When he flies into a
+passion which defies all restraint and bursts all bonds, the little
+woman retires into her own room and leaves him to shout. But four or
+five hours later she will say: "Don't get into a passion, my dear, you
+might break a blood-vessel; and besides, you hurt me." Then the lion
+of Essling retreats out of sight to wipe his eyes. Sometimes he comes
+into the salon when she and I are talking, and if she says: "Don't
+disturb us, he is reading to me," he leaves us without a word.
+
+It is only strong men, choleric and powerful, thunder-bolts of war,
+diplomats with olympian heads, or men of genius, who can show this
+utter confidence, this generous devotion to weakness, this constant
+protection, this love without jealousy, this easy good humor with a
+woman. Good heavens! I place the science of the countess's management
+of her husband as far above the peevish, arid virtues as the satin of
+a causeuse is superior to the Utrecht velvet of a dirty bourgeois
+sofa.
+
+My dear fellow, I have spent six days in this delightful country-
+house, and I never tire of admiring the beauties of the park,
+surrounded by forests where pretty wood-paths lead beside the brooks.
+Nature and its silence, these tranquil pleasures, this placid life to
+which she woos me,--all attract. Ah! here is true literature; no fault
+of style among the meadows. Happiness forgets all things here,--even
+the Debats! It has rained all the morning; while the countess slept
+and Montcornet tramped over his domain, I have compelled myself to
+keep my rash, imprudent promise to write to you.
+
+Until now, though I was born at Alencon, of an old judge and a
+prefect, so they say, and though I know something of agriculture, I
+supposed the tale of estates bringing in four or five thousand francs
+a month to be a fable. Money, to me, meant a couple of dreadful
+things,--work and a publisher, journalism and politics. When shall we
+poor fellows come upon a land where gold springs up with the grass?
+That is what I desire for you and for me and the rest of us in the
+name of the theatre, and of the press, and of book-making! Amen!
+
+Will Florine be jealous of the late Mademoiselle Laguerre? Our modern
+Bourets have no French nobles now to show them how to live; they hire
+one opera-box among three of them; they subscribe for their pleasures;
+they no longer cut down magnificently bound quartos to match the
+octavos in their library; in fact, they scarcely buy even stitched
+paper books. What is to become of us?
+
+
+Adieu; continue to care for
+Your Blondet.
+
+
+If this letter, dashed off by the idlest pen of the century, had not
+by some lucky chance been preserved, it would have been almost
+impossible to describe Les Aigues; and without this description the
+history of the horrible events that occurred there would certainly be
+less interesting.
+
+After that remark some persons will expect to see the flashing of the
+cuirass of the former colonel of the guard, and the raging of his
+anger as he falls like a waterspout upon his little wife; so that the
+end of this present history may be like the end of all modern dramas,
+--a tragedy of the bed-chamber. Perhaps the fatal scene will take
+place in that charming room with the blue monochromes, where beautiful
+ideal birds are painted on the ceilings and the shutters, where
+Chinese monsters laugh with open jaws on the mantle-shelf, and
+dragons, green and gold, twist their tails in curious convolutions
+around rich vases, and Japanese fantasy embroiders its designs of many
+colors; where sofas and reclining-chairs and consoles and what-nots
+invite to that contemplative idleness which forbids all action.
+
+No; the drama here to be developed is not one of private life; it
+concerns things higher, or lower. Expect no scenes of passion; the
+truth of this history is only too dramatic. And remember, the
+historian should never forget that his mission is to do justice to
+all; the poor and the prosperous are equals before his pen; to him the
+peasant appears in the grandeur of his misery, and the rich in the
+pettiness of his folly. Moreover, the rich man has passions, the
+peasant only wants. The peasant is therefore doubly poor; and if,
+politically, his aggressions must be pitilessly repressed, to the eyes
+of humanity and religion he is sacred.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A BUCOLIC OVERLOOKED BY VIRGIL
+
+When a Parisian drops into the country he is cut off from all his
+usual habits, and soon feels the dragging hours, no matter how
+attentive his friends may be to him. Therefore, because it is so
+impossible to prolong in a tete-a-tete conversations that are soon
+exhausted, the master and mistress of a country-house are apt to say,
+calmly, "You will be terribly bored here." It is true that to
+understand the delights of country life one must have something to do,
+some interests in it; one must know the nature of the work to be done,
+and the alternating harmony of toil and pleasure,--eternal symbol of
+human life.
+
+When a Parisian has recovered his powers of sleeping, shaken off the
+fatigues of his journey, and accustomed himself to country habits, the
+hardest period of the day (if he wears thin boots and is neither a
+sportsman nor an agriculturalist) is the early morning. Between the
+hours of waking and breakfasting, the women of the family are sleeping
+or dressing, and therefore unapproachable; the master of the house is
+out and about on his own affairs; a Parisian is therefore compelled to
+be alone from eight to eleven o'clock, the hour chosen in all country-
+houses for breakfast. Now, having got what amusement he can out of
+carefully dressing himself, he has soon exhausted that resource. Then,
+perhaps, he has brought with him some work, which he finds it
+impossible to do, and which goes back untouched, after he sees the
+difficulties of doing it, into his valise; a writer is then obliged to
+wander about the park and gape at nothing or count the big trees. The
+easier the life, the more irksome such occupations are,--unless,
+indeed, one belongs to the sect of shaking quakers or to the honorable
+guild of carpenters or taxidermists. If one really had, like the
+owners of estates, to live in the country, it would be well to supply
+one's self with a geological, mineralogical, entomological, or
+botanical hobby; but a sensible man doesn't give himself a vice merely
+to kill time for a fortnight. The noblest estate, and the finest
+chateaux soon pall on those who possess nothing but the sight of them.
+The beauties of nature seem rather squalid compared to the
+representation of them at the opera. Paris, by retrospection, shines
+from all its facets. Unless some particular interest attaches us, as
+it did in Blondet's case, to scenes honored by the steps and lighted
+by the eyes of a certain person, one would envy the birds their wings
+and long to get back to the endless, exciting scenes of Paris and its
+harrowing strifes.
+
+The long letter of the young journalist must make most intelligent
+minds suppose that he had reached, morally and physically, that
+particular phase of satisfied passions and comfortable happiness which
+certain winged creatures fed in Strasbourg so perfectly represent
+when, with their heads sunk behind their protruding gizzards, they
+neither see nor wish to see the most appetizing food. So, when the
+formidable letter was finished, the writer felt the need of getting
+away from the gardens of Armida and doing something to enliven the
+deadly void of the morning hours; for the hours between breakfast and
+dinner belonged to the mistress of the house, who knew very well how
+to make them pass quickly. To keep, as Madame de Montcornet did, a man
+of talent in the country without ever seeing on his face the false
+smile of satiety, or detecting the yawn of a weariness that cannot be
+concealed, is a great triumph for a woman. The affection which is
+equal to such a test certainly ought to be eternal. It is to be
+wondered at that women do not oftener employ it to judge of their
+lovers; a fool, an egoist, or a petty nature could never stand it.
+Philip the Second himself, the Alexander of dissimulation, would have
+told his secrets if condemned to a month's tete-a-tete in the country.
+Perhaps this is why kings seek to live in perpetual motion, and allow
+no one to see them more than fifteen minutes at a time.
+
+Notwithstanding that he had received the delicate attentions of one of
+the most charming women in Paris, Emile Blondet was able to feel once
+more the long forgotten delights of a truant schoolboy; and on the
+morning of the day after his letter was written he had himself called
+by Francois, the head valet, who was specially appointed to wait on
+him, for the purpose of exploring the valley of the Avonne.
+
+The Avonne is a little river which, being swollen above Conches by
+numerous rivulets, some of which rise in Les Aigues, falls at Ville-
+aux-Fayes into one of the large affluents of the Seine. The
+geographical position of the Avonne, navigable for over twelve miles,
+had, ever since Jean Bouvet invented rafts, given full money value to
+the forests of Les Aigues, Soulanges, and Ronquerolles, standing on
+the crest of the hills between which this charming river flows. The
+park of Les Aigues covers the greater part of the valley, between the
+river (bordered on both sides by the forest called des Aigues) and the
+royal mail road, defined by a line of old elms in the distance along
+the slopes of the Avonne mountains, which are in fact the foot-hills
+of that magnificent ampitheatre called the Morvan.
+
+However vulgar the comparison may be, the park, lying thus at the
+bottom of the valley, is like an enormous fish with its head at
+Conches and its tail in the village of Blangy; for it widens in the
+middle to nearly three hundred acres, while towards Conches it counts
+less than fifty, and sixty at Blangy. The position of this estate,
+between three villages, and only three miles from the little town of
+Soulanges, from which the descent is rapid, may perhaps have led to
+the strife and caused the excesses which are the chief interest
+attaching to the place. If, when seen from the mail road or from the
+uplands beyond Ville-aux-Fayes, the paradise of Les Aigues induces
+mere passing travellers to commit the mortal sin of envy, why should
+the rich burghers of Soulanges and Ville-aux-Fayes who had it before
+their eyes and admired it every day of their lives, have been more
+virtuous?
+
+This last topographical detail was needed to explain the site, also
+the use of the four gates by which alone the park of Les Aigues was
+entered; for it was completely surrounded by walls, except where
+nature had provided a fine view, and at such points sunk fences or ha-
+has had been placed. The four gates, called the gate of Conches, the
+gate of Avonne, the gate of Blangy, and the gate of the Avenue, showed
+the styles of the different periods at which they were constructed so
+admirably that a brief description, in the interest of archaeologists,
+will presently be given, as brief as the one Blondet has already
+written about the gate of the Avenue.
+
+After eight days of strolling about with the countess, the illustrious
+editor of the "Journal des Debats" knew by heart the Chinese kiosk,
+the bridges, the isles, the hermitage, the dairy, the ruined temple,
+the Babylonian ice-house, and all the other delusions invented by
+landscape architects which some nine hundred acres of land can be made
+to serve. He now wished to find the sources of the Avonne, which the
+general and the countess daily extolled in the evening, making plans
+to visit them which were daily forgotten the next morning. Above Les
+Aigues the Avonne really had the appearance of an alpine torrent.
+Sometimes it hollowed a bed among the rocks, sometimes it went
+underground; on this side the brooks came down in cascades, there they
+flowed like the Loire on sandy shallows where rafts could not pass on
+account of the shifting channels. Blondet took a short cut through the
+labyrinths of the park to reach the gate of Conches. This gate demands
+a few words, which give, moreover, certain historical details about
+the property.
+
+The original founder of Les Aigues was a younger son of the Soulanges
+family, enriched by marriage, whose chief ambition was to make his
+elder brother jealous,--a sentiment, by the bye, to which we owe the
+fairy-land of Isola Bella in the Lago Maggiore. In the middle ages the
+castle of Les Aigues stood on the banks of the Avonne. Of this old
+building nothing remains but the gateway, which has a porch like the
+entrance to a fortified town, flanked by two round towers with conical
+roofs. Above the arch of the porch are heavy stone courses, now draped
+with vegetation, showing three large windows with cross-bar sashes. A
+winding stairway in one of the towers leads to two chambers, and a
+kitchen occupies the other tower. The roof of the porch, of pointed
+shape like all old timber-work, is noticeable for two weathercocks
+perched at each end of a ridge-pole ornamented with fantastic iron-
+work. Many an important place cannot boast of so fine a town hall. On
+the outside of this gateway, the keystone of the arch still bears the
+arms of Soulanges, preserved by the hardness of the stone on which the
+chisel of the artist carved them, as follows: Azure, on a pale,
+argent, three pilgrim's staff's sable; a fess bronchant, gules,
+charged with four grosses patee, fitched, or; with the heraldic form
+of a shield awarded to younger sons. Blondet deciphered the motto, "Je
+soule agir,"--one of those puns that crusaders delighted to make upon
+their names, and which brings to mind a fine political maxim, which,
+as we shall see later, was unfortunately forgotten by Montcornet. The
+gate, which was opened for Blondet by a very pretty girl, was of time-
+worn wood clamped with iron. The keeper, wakened by the creaking of
+the hinges, put his nose out of the window and showed himself in his
+night-shirt.
+
+"So our keepers sleep till this time of day!" thought the Parisian,
+who thought himself very knowing in rural customs.
+
+After a walk of about quarter of an hour, he reached the sources of
+the river above Conches, where his ravished eyes beheld one of those
+landscapes that ought to be described, like the history of France, in
+a thousand volumes or in only one. We must here content ourselves with
+two paragraphs.
+
+A projecting rock, covered with dwarf trees and abraded at its base by
+the Avonne, to which circumstance it owes a slight resemblance to an
+enormous turtle lying across the river, forms an arch through which
+the eye takes in a little sheet of water, clear as a mirror, where the
+stream seems to sleep until it reaches in the distance a series of
+cascades falling among huge rocks, where little weeping willows with
+elastic motion sway back and forth to the flow of waters.
+
+Beyond these cascades is the hillside, rising sheer, like a Rhine rock
+clothed with moss and heather, gullied like it, again, by sharp ridges
+of schist and mica sending down, here and there, white foaming
+rivulets to which a little meadow, always watered and always green,
+serves as a cup; farther on, beyond the picturesque chaos and in
+contrast to this wild, solitary nature, the gardens of Conches are
+seen, with the village roofs and the clock-tower and the outlying
+fields.
+
+There are the two paragraphs, but the rising sun, the purity of the
+air, the dewy sheen, the melody of woods and waters--imagine them!
+
+"Almost as charming as at the Opera," thought Blondet, making his way
+along the banks of the unnavigable portion of the Avonne, whose
+caprices contrast with the straight and deep and silent stream of the
+lower river, flowing between the tall trees of the forest of Les
+Aigues.
+
+Blondet did not proceed far on his morning walk, for he was presently
+brought to a stand-still by the sight of a peasant,--one of those who,
+in this drama, are supernumeraries so essential to its action that it
+may be doubted whether they are not in fact its leading actors.
+
+When the clever journalist reached a group of rocks where the main
+stream is imprisoned, as it were, between two portals, he saw a man
+standing so motionless as to excite his curiosity, while the clothes
+and general air of this living statue greatly puzzled him.
+
+The humble personage before him was a living presentment of the old
+men dear to Charlet's pencil; resembling the troopers of that Homer of
+soldiery in a strong frame able to endure hardship, and his immortal
+skirmishers in a fiery, crimson, knotted face, showing small capacity
+for submission. A coarse felt hat, the brim of which was held to the
+crown by stitches, protected a nearly bald head from the weather;
+below it fell a quantity of white hair which a painter would gladly
+have paid four francs an hour to copy,--a dazzling mass of snow, worn
+like that in all the classical representations of Deity. It was easy
+to guess from the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing the
+lines of the mouth, that the toothless old fellow was more given to
+the bottle than the trencher. His thin white beard gave a threatening
+expression to his profile by the stiffness of its short bristles. The
+eyes, too small for his enormous face, and sloping like those of a
+pig, betrayed cunning and also laziness; but at this particular moment
+they were gleaming with the intent look he cast upon the river. The
+sole garments of this curious figure were an old blouse, formerly
+blue, and trousers of the coarse burlap used in Paris to wrap bales.
+All city people would have shuddered at the sight of his broken
+sabots, without even a wisp of straw to stop the cracks; and it is
+very certain that the blouse and the trousers had no money value at
+all except to a paper-maker.
+
+As Blondet examined this rural Diogenes, he admitted the possibility
+of a type of peasantry he had seen in old tapestries, old pictures,
+old sculptures, and which, up to this time, had seemed to him
+imaginary. He resolved for the future not to utterly condemn the
+school of ugliness, perceiving a possibility that in man beauty may be
+but the flattering exception, a chimera in which the race struggles to
+believe.
+
+"What can be the ideas, the morals, the habits, of such a being? What
+is he thinking of?" thought Blondet, seized with curiosity. "Is he my
+fellow-creature? We have nothing in common but shape, and even
+that!--"
+
+He noticed in the old man's limbs the peculiar rigidity of the tissues
+of persons who live in the open air, accustomed to the inclemencies of
+the weather and to the endurance of heat and cold,--hardened to
+everything, in short,--which makes their leathern skin almost a hide,
+and their nerves an apparatus against physical pain almost as powerful
+as that of the Russians or the Arabs.
+
+"Here's one of Cooper's Red-skins," thought Blondet; "one needn't go
+to America to study savages."
+
+Though the Parisian was less than ten paces off, the old man did not
+turn his head, but kept looking at the opposite bank with a fixity
+which the fakirs of India give to their vitrified eyes and their
+stiffened joints. Compelled by the power of a species of magnetism,
+more contagious than people have any idea of, Blondet ended by gazing
+at the water himself.
+
+"Well, my good man, what do you see there?" he asked, after the lapse
+of a quarter of an hour, during which time he saw nothing to justify
+this intent contemplation.
+
+"Hush!" whispered the old man, with a sign to Blondet not to ruffle
+the air with his voice; "You will frighten it--"
+
+"What?"
+
+"An otter, my good gentleman. If it hears us it'll go quick under
+water. I'm certain it jumped there; see! see! there, where the water
+bubbles! Ha! it sees a fish, it is after that! But my boy will grab it
+as it comes back. The otter, don't you know, is very rare; it is
+scientific game, and good eating, too. I get ten francs for every one
+I carry to Les Aigues, for the lady fasts Fridays, and to-morrow is
+Friday. Years agone the deceased madame used to pay me twenty francs,
+and gave me the skin to boot! Mouche," he called, in a low voice,
+"watch it!"
+
+Blondet now perceived on the other side of the river two bright eyes,
+like those of a cat, beneath a tuft of alders; then he saw the tanned
+forehead and tangled hair of a boy about ten years of age, who was
+lying on his stomach and making signs towards the otter to let his
+master know he kept it well in sight. Blondet, completely mastered by
+the eagerness of the old man and boy, allowed the demon of the chase
+to get the better of him,--that demon with the double claws of hope
+and curiosity, who carries you whithersoever he will.
+
+"The hat-makers buy the skin," continued the old man; "it's so soft,
+so handsome! They cover caps with it."
+
+"Do you really think so, my old man?" said Blondet, smiling.
+
+"Well truly, my good gentleman, you ought to know more than I, though
+I am seventy years old," replied the old fellow, very humbly and
+respectfully, falling into the attitude of a giver of holy water;
+"perhaps you can tell me why conductors and wine-merchants are so fond
+of it?"
+
+Blondet, a master of irony, already on his guard from the word
+"scientific," recollected the Marechal de Richelieu and began to
+suspect some jest on the part of the old man; but he was reassured by
+his artless attitude and the perfectly stupid expression of his face.
+
+"In my young days we had lots of otters," whispered the old fellow;
+"but they've hunted 'em so that if we see the tail of one in seven
+years it is as much as ever we do. And the sub-prefect at Ville-aux-
+Fayes,--doesn't monsieur know him? though he be a Parisian, he's a
+fine young man like you, and he loves curiosities,--so, as I was
+saying, hearing of my talent for catching otters, for I know 'em as
+you know your alphabet, he says to me like this: 'Pere Fourchon,' says
+he, "when you find an otter bring it to me, and I'll pay you well; and
+if it's spotted white on the back,' says he, 'I'll give you thirty
+francs.' That's just what he did say to me as true as I believe in God
+the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And there's a learned man at
+Soulanges, Monsieur Gourdon, our doctor, who is making, so they tell
+me, a collection of natural history which hasn't its mate at Dijon
+even; indeed he is first among the learned men in these parts, and
+he'll pay me a fine price, too; he stuffs men and beasts. Now my boy
+there stands me out that that otter has got the white spots. 'If
+that's so,' says I to him, 'then the good God wishes well to us this
+morning!' Ha! didn't you see the water bubble? yes, there it is! there
+it is! Though it lives in a kind of a burrow, it sometimes stays whole
+days under water. Ha, there! it heard you, my good gentleman; it's on
+its guard now; for there's not a more suspicious animal on earth; it's
+worse than a woman."
+
+"So you call women suspicious, do you?" said Blondet.
+
+"Faith, monsieur, if you come from Paris you ought to know about that
+better than I. But you'd have done better for me if you had stayed in
+your bed and slept all the morning; don't you see that wake there?
+that's where she's gone under. Get up, Mouche! the otter heard
+monsieur talking, and now she's scary enough to keep us at her heels
+till midnight. Come, let's be off! and good-bye to our thirty francs!"
+
+Mouche got up reluctantly; he looked at the spot where the water
+bubbled, pointed to it with his finger and seemed unable to give up
+all hope. The child, with curly hair and a brown face, like the angels
+in a fifteenth-century picture, seemed to be in breeches, for his
+trousers ended at the knee in a ragged fringe of brambles and dead
+leaves. This necessary garment was fastened upon him by cords of
+tarred oakum in guise of braces. A shirt of the same burlap which made
+the old man's trousers, thickened, however, by many darns, open in
+front showed a sun-burnt little breast. In short, the attire of the
+being called Mouche was even more startlingly simple than that of Pere
+Fourchon.
+
+"What a good-natured set of people they are here," thought Blondet;
+"if a man frightened away the game of the people of the suburbs of
+Paris, how their tongues would maul him!"
+
+As he had never seen an otter, even in a museum, he was delighted with
+this episode of his early walk. "Come," said he, quite touched when
+the old man walked away without asking him for a compensation, "you
+say you are a famous otter catcher. If you are sure there is an otter
+down there--"
+
+From the other side of the water Mouche pointed his finger to certain
+air-bubbles coming up from the bottom of the Avonne and bursting on
+its surface.
+
+"It has come back!" said Pere Fourchon; "don't you see it breathe, the
+beggar? How do you suppose they manage to breathe at the bottom of the
+water? Ah, the creature's so clever it laughs at science."
+
+"Well," said Blondet, who supposed the last word was a jest of the
+peasantry in general rather than of this peasant in particular, "wait
+and catch the otter."
+
+"And what are we to do about our day's work, Mouche and I?"
+
+"What is your day worth?"
+
+"For the pair of us, my apprentice and me?--Five francs," said the old
+man, looking Blondet in the eye with a hesitation which betrayed an
+enormous overcharge.
+
+The journalist took ten francs from his pocket, saying, "There's ten,
+and I'll give you ten more for the otter."
+
+"And it won't cost you dear if there's white on its back; for the sub-
+prefect told me there wasn't one o' them museums that had the like;
+but he knows everything, our sub-prefect,--no fool he! If I hunt the
+otter, he, M'sieur des Lupeaulx, hunts Mademoiselle Gaubertin, who has
+a fine white "dot" on her back. Come now, my good gentleman, if I may
+make so bold, plunge into the middle of the Avonne and get to that
+stone down there. If we head the otter off, it will come down stream;
+for just see their slyness, the beggars! they always go above their
+burrow to feed, for, once full of fish, they know they can easily
+drift down, the sly things! Ha! if I'd been trained in their school I
+should be living now on an income; but I was a long time finding out
+that you must go up stream very early in the morning if you want to
+bag the game before others. Well, somebody threw a spell over me when
+I was born. However, we three together ought to be slyer than the
+otter."
+
+"How so, my old necromancer?"
+
+"Why, bless you! we are as stupid as the beasts, and so we come to
+understand the beasts. Now, see, this is what we'll do. When the otter
+wants to get home Mouche and I'll frighten it here, and you'll
+frighten it over there; frightened by us and frightened by you it will
+jump on the bank, and when it takes to earth, it is lost! It can't
+run; it has web feet for swimming. Ho, ho! it will make you laugh,
+such floundering! you don't know whether you are fishing or hunting!
+The general up at Les Aigues, I have known him to stay here three days
+running, he was so bent on getting an otter."
+
+Blondet, armed with a branch cut for him by the old man, who requested
+him to whip the water with it when he called to him, planted himself
+in the middle of the river by jumping from stone to stone.
+
+"There, that will do, my good gentleman."
+
+Blondet stood where he was told without remarking the lapse of time,
+for every now and then the old fellow made him a sign as much as to
+say that all was going well; and besides, nothing makes time go so
+fast as the expectation that quick action is to succeed the perfect
+stillness of watching.
+
+"Pere Fourchon," whispered the boy, finding himself alone with the old
+man, "there's REALLY an otter!"
+
+"Do you see it?"
+
+"There, see there!"
+
+The old fellow was dumb-founded at beholding under water the reddish-
+brown fur of an actual otter.
+
+"It's coming my way!" said the child.
+
+"Hit him a sharp blow on the head and jump into the water and hold him
+fast down, but don't let him go!"
+
+Mouche dove into the water like a frightened frog.
+
+"Come, come, my good gentleman," cried Pere Fourchon to Blondet,
+jumping into the water and leaving his sabots on the bank, "frighten
+him! frighten him! Don't you see him? he is swimming fast your way!"
+
+The old man dashed toward Blondet through the water, calling out with
+the gravity that country people retain in the midst of their greatest
+excitements:--
+
+"Don't you see him, there, along the rocks?"
+
+Blondet, placed by direction of the old fellow in such a way that the
+sun was in his eyes, thrashed the water with much satisfaction to
+himself.
+
+"Go on, go on!" cried Pere Fourchon; "on the rock side; the burrow is
+there, to your left!"
+
+Carried away by excitement and by his long waiting, Blondet slipped
+from the stones into the water.
+
+"Ha! brave you are, my good gentleman! Twenty good Gods! I see him
+between your legs! you'll have him!-- Ah! there! he's gone--he's
+gone!" cried the old man, in despair.
+
+Then, in the fury of the chase, the old fellow plunged into the
+deepest part of the stream in front of Blondet.
+
+"It's your fault we've lost him!" he cried, as Blondet gave him a hand
+to pull him out, dripping like a triton, and a vanquished triton. "The
+rascal, I see him, under those rocks! He has let go his fish,"
+continued Fourchon, pointing to something that floated on the surface.
+"We'll have that at any rate; it's a tench, a real tench."
+
+Just then a groom in livery on horseback and leading another horse by
+the bridle galloped up the road toward Conches.
+
+"See! there's the chateau people sending after you," said the old man.
+"If you want to cross back again I'll give you a hand. I don't mind
+about getting wet; it saves washing!"
+
+"How about rheumatism?"
+
+"Rheumatism! don't you see the sun has browned our legs, Mouche and
+me, like tobacco-pipes. Here, lean on me, my good gentleman--you're
+from Paris; you don't know, though you DO know so much, how to walk on
+our rocks. If you stay here long enough, you'll learn a deal that's
+written in the book o' nature,--you who write, so they tell me, in the
+newspapers."
+
+Blondet had reached the bank before Charles, the groom, perceived him.
+
+"Ah, monsieur!" he cried; "you don't know how anxious Madame has been
+since she heard you had gone through the gate of Conches; she was
+afraid you were drowned. They have rung the great bell three times,
+and Monsieur le cure is hunting for you in the park."
+
+"What time is it, Charles?"
+
+"A quarter to twelve."
+
+"Help me to mount."
+
+"Ha!" exclaimed the groom, noticing the water that dripped from
+Blondet's boots and trousers, "has monsieur been taken in by Pere
+Fourchon's otter?"
+
+The words enlightened the journalist.
+
+"Don't say a word about it, Charles," he cried, "and I'll make it all
+right with you."
+
+"Oh, as for that!" answered the man, "Monsieur le comte himself has
+been taken in by that otter. Whenever a visitor comes to Les Aigues,
+Pere Fourchon sets himself on the watch, and if the gentleman goes to
+see the sources of the Avonne he sells him the otter; he plays the
+trick so well that Monsieur le comte has been here three times and
+paid him for six days' work, just to stare at the water!"
+
+"Heavens!" thought Blondet. "And I imagined I had seen the greatest
+comedians of the present day!--Potier, the younger Baptiste, Michot,
+and Monrose. What are they compared to that old beggar?"
+
+"He is very knowing at the business, Pere Fourchon is," continued
+Charles; "and he has another string to his bow, besides. He calls
+himself a rope-maker, and has a walk under the park wall by the gate
+of Blangy. If you merely touch his rope he'll entangle you so cleverly
+that you will want to turn the wheel and make a bit of it yourself;
+and for that you would have to pay a fee for apprenticeship. Madame
+herself was taken in, and gave him twenty francs. Ah! he is the king
+of tricks, that old fellow!"
+
+The groom's gossip set Blondet thinking of the extreme craftiness and
+wiliness of the French peasant, of which he had heard a great deal
+from his father, a judge at Alencon. Then the satirical meaning hidden
+beneath Pere Fourchon's apparent guilelessness came back to him, and
+he owned himself "gulled" by the Burgundian beggar.
+
+"You would never believe, monsieur," said Charles, as they reached the
+portico at Les Aigues, "how much one is forced to distrust everybody
+and everything in the country,--especially here, where the general is
+not much liked--"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"That's more than I know," said Charles, with the stupid air servants
+assume to shield themselves when they wish not to answer their
+superiors, which nevertheless gave Blondet a good deal to think of.
+
+"Here you are, truant!" cried the general, coming out on the terrace
+when he heard the horses. "Here he is; don't be uneasy!" he called
+back to his wife, whose little footfalls were heard behind him. "Now
+the Abbe Brossette is missing. Go and find him, Charles," he said to
+the groom.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE TAVERN
+
+The gate of Blangy, built by Bouret, was formed of two wide pilasters
+of projecting rough-hewn stone; each surmounted by a dog sitting on
+his haunches and holding an escutcheon between his fore paws. The
+proximity of a small house where the steward lived dispensed with the
+necessity for a lodge. Between the two pilasters, a sumptuous iron
+gate, like those made in Buffon's time for the Jardin des Plantes,
+opened on a short paved way which led to the country road (formerly
+kept in order by Les Aigues and the Soulanges family) which unites
+Conches, Cerneux, Blangy, and Soulanges to Ville-aux-Fayes, like a
+wreath, for the whole road is lined with flowering hedges and little
+houses covered with roses and honey-suckle and other climbing plants.
+
+There, along a pretty wall which extends as far as a terrace from
+which the land of Les Aigues falls rapidly to the valley till it meets
+that of Soulanges, are the rotten posts, the old wheel, and the forked
+stakes which constituted the manufactory of the village rope-maker.
+
+Soon after midday, while Blondet was seating himself at table opposite
+the Abbe Brossette and receiving the tender expostulations of the
+countess, Pere Fourchon and Mouche arrived at this establishment. From
+that vantage-ground Pere Fourchon, under pretence of rope-making,
+could watch Les Aigues and see every one who went in and out. Nothing
+escaped him, the opening of the blinds, tete-a-tete loiterings, or the
+least little incidents of country life, were spied upon by the old
+fellow, who had set up this business within the last three years,--a
+trifling circumstance which neither the masters, nor the servants, nor
+the keepers of Les Aigues had as yet remarked upon.
+
+"Go round to the house by the gate of the Avonne while I put away the
+tackle," said Pere Fourchon to his attendant, "and when you have
+blabbed about the thing, they'll no doubt send after me to the Grand-
+I-Vert, where I am going for a drop of drink,--for it makes one
+thirsty enough to wade in the water that way. If you do just as I tell
+you, you'll hook a good breakfast out of them; try to meet the
+countess, and give a slap at me, and that will put it into her head to
+come and preach morality or something! There's lots of good wine to
+get out of it."
+
+After these last instructions, which the sly look in Mouche's face
+rendered quite superfluous, the old peasant, hugging the otter under
+his arm, disappeared along the country road.
+
+Half-way between the gate and the village there stood, at the time
+when Emile Blondet stayed at Les Aigues, one of those houses which are
+never seen but in parts of France where stone is scarce. Bits of
+bricks picked up anywhere, cobblestones set like diamonds in the clay
+mud, formed very solid walls, though worn in places; the roof was
+supported by stout branches and covered with rushes and straw, while
+the clumsy shutters and the broken door--in short, everything about
+the cottage was the product of lucky finds, or of gifts obtained by
+begging.
+
+The peasant has an instinct for his habitation like that of an animal
+for its nest or its burrow, and this instinct was very marked in all
+the arrangements of this cottage. In the first place, the door and the
+window looked to the north. The house, placed on a little rise in the
+stoniest angle of a vineyard, was certainly healthful. It was reached
+by three steps, carefully made with stakes and planks filled in with
+broken stone and gravel, so that the water ran off rapidly; and as the
+rain seldom comes from the northward in Burgundy, no dampness could
+rot the foundations, slight as they were. Below the steps and along
+the path ran a rustic paling, hidden beneath a hedge of hawthorn and
+sweet-brier. An arbor, with a few clumsy tables and wooden benches,
+filled the space between the cottage and the road, and invited the
+passers-by to rest themselves. At the upper end of the bank by the
+house roses grew, and wall-flowers, violets, and other flowers that
+cost nothing. Jessamine and honey-suckle had fastened their tendrils
+on the roof, mossy already, though the building was far from old.
+
+To the right of the house, the owner had built a stable for two cows.
+In front of this erection of old boards, a sunken piece of ground
+served as a yard where, in a corner, was a huge manure-heap. On the
+other side of the house and the arbor stood a thatched shed, supported
+on trunks of trees, under which the various outdoor properties of the
+peasantry were put away,--the utensils of the vine-dressers, their
+empty casks, logs of wood piled about a mound which contained the
+oven, the mouth of which opened, as was usual in the houses of the
+peasantry, under the mantle-piece of the chimney in the kitchen.
+
+About an acre of land adjoined the house, inclosed by an evergreen
+hedge and planted with grape-vines; tended as peasants tend them,--
+that is to say, well-manured, and dug round, and layered so that they
+usually set their fruit before the vines of the large proprietors in a
+circuit of ten miles round. A few trees, almond, plum, and apricot,
+showed their slim heads here and there in this enclosure. Between the
+rows of vines potatoes and beans were planted. In addition to all
+this, on the side towards the village and beyond the yard was a bit of
+damp low ground, favorable for the growth of cabbages and onions
+(favorite vegetables of the working-classes), which was closed by a
+wooden gate, through which the cows were driven, trampling the path
+into mud and covering it with dung.
+
+The house, which had two rooms on the ground-floor, opened upon the
+vineyard. On this side an outer stairway, roofed with thatch and
+resting against the wall of the house, led up to the garret, which was
+lighted by one round window. Under this rustic stairway opened a
+cellar built of Burgundy brick, containing several casks of wine.
+
+Though the kitchen utensils of the peasantry are usually only two,
+namely, a frying-pan and an iron pot, with which they manage to do all
+their cooking, exceptions to this rule, in the shape of two enormous
+saucepans hanging beneath the mantle-shelf and above a small portable
+stove, were to be seen in this cottage. In spite, however, of this
+indication of luxury, the furniture was in keeping with the external
+appearance of the place. A jar held water, the spoons were of wood or
+pewter, the dishes, of red clay without and white within, were scaling
+off and had been mended with pewter rivets; the heavy table and chairs
+were of pine wood, and for flooring there was nothing better than the
+hardened earth. Every fifth year the walls received a coat of white-
+wash and so did the narrow beams of the ceiling, from which hung
+bacon, strings of onions, bundles of tallow candles, and the bags in
+which a peasant keeps his seeds; near the bread-box stood an old-
+fashioned wardrobe in walnut, where the scanty household linen, and
+the one change of garments together with the holiday attire of the
+entire family were kept.
+
+Above the mantel of the chimney gleamed a poacher's old gun, not worth
+five francs,--the wood scorched, the barrel to all appearances never
+cleaned. An observer might reflect that the protection of a hovel with
+only a latch, and an outer gate that was only a paling and never
+closed, needed no better weapon; but still the wonder was to what use
+it was put. In the first place, though the wood was of the commonest
+kind, the barrel was carefully selected, and came from a valuable gun,
+given in all probability to a game-keeper. Moreover, the owner of this
+weapon never missed his aim; there was between him and his gun the
+same intimate acquaintance that there is between a workman and his
+tool. If the muzzle must be raised or lowered the merest fraction in
+its aim, because it carries just an atom above or below the range, the
+poacher knows it; he obeys the rule and never misses. An officer of
+artillery would have found the essential parts of this weapon in good
+condition notwithstanding its uncleanly appearance. In all that the
+peasant appropriates to his use, in all that serves him, he displays
+just the amount of force that is needed, neither more nor less; he
+attends to the essential and to nothing beyond. External perfection he
+has no conception of. An unerring judge of the necessary in all
+things, he thoroughly understands degrees of strength, and knows very
+well when working for an employer how to give the least possible for
+the most he can get. This contemptible-looking gun will be found to
+play a serious part in the life of the family inhabiting this cottage,
+and you will presently learn how and why.
+
+Have you now taken in all the many details of this hovel, planted
+about five hundred feet away from the pretty gate of Les Aigues? Do
+you see it crouching there, like a beggar beside a palace? Well, its
+roof covered with velvet mosses, its clacking hens, its grunting pig,
+its straying heifer, all its rural graces have a horrible meaning.
+
+Fastened to a pole, which was stuck in the ground beside the entrance
+through the fence, was a withered bunch of three pine branches and
+some old oak-leaves tied together with a rag. Above the door of the
+house a roving artist had painted, probably in return for his
+breakfast, a huge capital "I" in green on a white ground two feet
+square; and for the benefit of those who could read, this witty joke
+in twelve letters: "Au Grand-I-Vert" (hiver). On the left of the door
+was a vulgar sign bearing, in colored letters, "Good March beer," and
+the picture of a foaming pot of the same, with a woman, in a dress
+excessively low-necked, on one side, and an hussar on the other,--both
+coarsely colored. Consequently, in spite of the blooming flowers and
+the fresh country air, this cottage exhaled the same strong and
+nauseous odor of wine and food which assails you in Paris as you pass
+the door of the cheap cook-shops of the faubourg.
+
+Now you know the surroundings. Behold the inhabitants and hear their
+history, which contains more than one lesson for philanthropists.
+
+The proprietor of the Grand-I-Vert, named Francois Tonsard, commends
+himself to the attention of philosophers by the manner in which he had
+solved the problem of an idle life and a busy life, so as to make the
+idleness profitable, and occupation nil.
+
+A jack-of-all-trades, he knew how to cultivate the ground, but for
+himself only. For others, he dug ditches, gathered fagots, barked the
+trees, or cut them down. In all such work the employer is at the mercy
+of the workman. Tonsard owned his plot of ground to the generosity of
+Mademoiselle Laguerre. In his early youth he had worked by the day for
+the gardener at Les Aigues; and he really had not his equal in
+trimming the shrubbery-trees, the hedges, the horn-beams, and the
+horse-chestnuts. His very name shows hereditary talent. In remote
+country-places privileges exist which are obtained and preserved with
+as much care as the merchants of a city display in getting theirs.
+Mademoiselle Laguerre was one day walking in the garden, when she
+overheard Tonsard, then a strapping fellow, say, "All I need to live
+on, and live happily, is an acre of land." The kind creature,
+accustomed to make others happy, gave him the acre of vineyard near
+the gate of Blangy, in return for one hundred days' work (a delicate
+regard for his feelings which was little understood), and allowed him
+to stay at Les Aigues, where he lived with her servants, who thought
+him one of the best fellows in Burgundy.
+
+Poor Tonsard (that is what everybody called him) worked about thirty
+days out of the hundred that he owed; the rest of the time he idled
+about, talking and laughing with Mademoiselle's women, particularly
+with Mademoiselle Cochet, the lady's maid, though she was ugly, like
+all confidential maids of handsome actresses. Laughing with
+Mademoiselle Cochet signified so many things that Soudry, the
+fortunate gendarme mentioned in Blondet's letter, still looked askance
+at Tonsard after the lapse of nearly twenty-five years. The walnut
+wardrobe, the bedstead with the tester and curtains, and the ornaments
+about the bedroom were doubtless the result of the said laughter.
+
+Once in possession of his care, Tonsard replied to the first person
+who happened to mention that Mademoiselle Laguerre had given it to
+him, "I've bought it deuced hard, and paid well for it. Do rich folks
+ever give us anything? Are one hundred days' work nothing? It has cost
+me three hundred francs, and the land is all stones." But that speech
+never got beyond the regions of his own class.
+
+Tonsard built his house himself, picking up the materials here and
+there as he could,--getting a day's work out of this one and that one,
+gleaning in the rubbish that was thrown away, often asking for things
+and always obtaining them. A discarded door cut in two for convenience
+in carrying away became the door of the stable; the window was the
+sash of a green-house. In short, the rubbish of the chateau, served to
+build the fatal cottage.
+
+Saved from the draft by Gaubertin, the steward of Les Aigues, whose
+father was prosecuting-attorney of the department, and who, moreover,
+could refuse nothing to Mademoiselle Cochet, Tonsard married as soon
+as his house was finished and his vines had begun to bear. A well-
+grown fellow of twenty-three, in everybody's good graces at Les
+Aigues, on whom Mademoiselle had bestowed an acre of her land, and who
+appeared to be a good worker, he had the art to ring the praises of
+his negative merits, and so obtained the daughter of a farmer on the
+Ronquerolles estate, which lies beyond the forest of Les Aigues.
+
+This farmer held the lease of half a farm, which was going to ruin in
+his hands for want of a helpmate. A widower, and inconsolable for the
+loss of his wife, he tried to drown his troubles, like the English, in
+wine, and then, when he had put the poor deceased out of his mind, he
+found himself married, so the village maliciously declared, to a woman
+named Boisson. From being a farmer he became once more a laborer, but
+an idle and drunken laborer, quarrelsome and vindictive, capable of
+any ill-deed, like most of his class when they fall from a well-to-do
+state of life into poverty. This man, whose practical information and
+knowledge of reading and writing placed him far above his fellow-
+workmen, while his vices kept him at the level of pauperism, you have
+already seen on the banks of the Avonne, measuring his cleverness with
+that of one of the cleverest men in Paris, in a bucolic overlooked by
+Virgil.
+
+Pere Fourchon, formerly a schoolmaster at Blangy, lost that place
+through misconduct and his singular ideas as to public education. He
+helped the children to make paper boats with their alphabets much
+oftener than he taught them how to spell; he scolded them in so
+remarkable a manner for pilfering fruit that his lectures might really
+have passed for lessons on the best way of scaling the walls. From
+teacher he became a postman. In this capacity, which serves as a
+refuge to many an old soldier, Pere Fourchon was daily reprimanded.
+Sometimes he forgot the letters in a tavern, at other times he kept
+them in his pocket. When he was drunk he left those for one village in
+another village; when he was sober he read them. Consequently, he was
+soon dismissed. No longer able to serve the State, Pere Fourchon ended
+by becoming a manufacturer. In the country a poor man can always get
+something to do, and make at least a pretence of gaining an honest
+livelihood. At sixty-eight years of age the old man started his rope-
+walk, a manufactory which requires the very smallest capital. The
+workshop is, as we have seen, any convenient wall; the machinery costs
+about ten francs. The apprentice slept, like his master, in a hay-
+loft, and lived on whatever he could pick up. The rapacity of the law
+in the matter of doors and windows expires "sub dio." The tow to make
+the first rope can be borrowed. But the principal revenue of Pere
+Fourchon and his satellite Mouche, the natural son of one of his
+natural daughters, came from the otters; and then there were
+breakfasts and dinners given them by peasants who could neither read
+nor write, and were glad to use the old fellow's talents when they had
+a bill to make out, or a letter to dispatch. Besides all this, he knew
+how to play the clarionet, and he went about with his friend
+Vermichel, the miller of Soulanges, to village weddings and the grand
+balls given at the Tivoli of Soulanges.
+
+Vermichel's name was Michel Vert, but the transposition was so
+generally used that Brunet, the clerk of the municipal court of
+Soulanges, was in the habit of writing Michel-Jean-Jerome Vert, called
+Vermichel, practitioner. Vermichel, a famous violin in the Burgundian
+regiment of former days, had procured for Pere Fourchon, in
+recognition of certain services, a situation as practitioner, which in
+remote country-places usually devolves on those who are able to sign
+their name. Pere Fourchon therefore added to his other avocations that
+of witness, or practitioner of legal papers, whenever the Sieur Brunet
+came to draw them in the districts of Cerneux, Conches, and Blangy.
+Vermichel and Fourchon, allied by a friendship of twenty years'
+tippling, might really be considered a business firm.
+
+Mouche and Fourchon, bound together by vice as Mentor and Telemachus
+by virtue, travelled like the latter, in search of their father,
+"panis angelorum,"--the only Latin words which the old fellow's memory
+had retained. They went about scraping up the pickings of the Grand-I-
+Vert, and those of the adjacent chateaux; for between them, in their
+busiest and most prosperous years, they had never contrived to make as
+much as three hundred and sixty fathoms of rope. In the first place,
+no dealer within a radius of fifty miles would have trusted his tow to
+either Mouche or Fourchon. The old man, surpassing the miracles of
+modern chemistry, knew too well how to resolve the tow into the all-
+benignant juice of the grape. Moreover, his triple functions of public
+writer for three townships, legal practitioner for one, and clarionet-
+player at large, hindered, so he said, the development of his
+business.
+
+Thus it happened that Tonsard was disappointed from the start in the
+hope he had indulged of increasing his comfort by an increase of
+property in marriage. The idle son-in-law had chanced, by a very
+common accident, on an idler father-in-law. Matters went all the worse
+because Tonsard's wife, gifted with a sort of rustic beauty, being
+tall and well-made, was not fond of work in the open air. Tonsard
+blamed his wife for her father's short-comings, and ill-treated her,
+with the customary revenge of the common people, whose minds take in
+only an effect and rarely look back to causes.
+
+Finding her fetters heavy, the woman lightened them. She used
+Tonsard's vices to get the better of him. Loving comfort and good
+eating herself, she encouraged his idleness and gluttony. In the first
+place, she managed to procure the good-will of the servants of the
+chateau, and Tonsard, in view of the results, made no complaint as to
+the means. He cared very little what his wife did, so long as she did
+all he wanted of her. That is the secret agreement of many a
+household. Madame Tonsard established the wine-shop of the Grand-I-
+Vert, her first customers being the servants of Les Aigues and the
+keepers and huntsmen.
+
+Gaubertin, formerly steward to Mademoiselle Laguerre, one of La
+Tonsard's chief patrons, gave her several puncheons of excellent wine
+to attract custom. The effect of these gifts (continued as long as
+Gaubertin remained a bachelor) and the fame of her rather lawless
+beauty commended this beauty to the Don Juans of the valley, and
+filled the wine-shop of the Grand-I-Vert. Being a lover of good
+eating, La Tonsard was naturally an excellent cook; and though her
+talents were only exercised on the common dishes of the country,
+jugged hare, game sauce, stewed fish and omelets, she was considered
+in all the country round to be an admirable cook of the sort of food
+which is eaten at a counter and spiced in a way to excite a desire for
+drink. By the end of two years, she had managed to rule Tonsard, and
+turn him to evil courses, which, indeed, he asked no better than to
+indulge in.
+
+The rascal was continually poaching, and with nothing to fear from it.
+The intimacies of his wife with Gaubertin and the keepers and the
+rural authorities, together with the laxity of the times, secured him
+impunity. As soon as his children were large enough he made them
+serviceable to his comfort, caring no more for their morality than for
+that of his wife. He had two sons and two daughters. Tonsard, who
+lived, as did his wife, from hand to mouth, might have come to an end
+of this easy life if he had not maintained a sort of martial law over
+his family, which compelled them to work for the preservation of it.
+When he had brought up his children, at the cost of those from whom
+his wife was able to extort gifts, the following charter and budget
+were the law at the Grand-I-Vert.
+
+Tonsard's old mother and his two daughters, Catherine and Marie, went
+into the woods at certain seasons twice a-day, and came back laden
+with fagots which overhung the crutch of their poles at least two feet
+beyond their heads. Though dried sticks were placed on the outside of
+the heap, the inside was made of live wood cut from young trees. In
+plain words, Tonsard helped himself to his winter's fuel in the woods
+of Les Aigues. Besides this, father and sons were constantly poaching.
+From September to March, hares, rabbits, partridges, deer, in short,
+all the game that was not eaten at the chateau, was sold at Blangy and
+at Soulanges, where Tonsard's two daughters peddled milk in the early
+mornings,--coming back with the news of the day, in return for the
+gossip they carried about Les Aigues, and Cerneux, and Conches. In the
+months when the three Tonsards were unable to hunt with a gun, they
+set traps. If the traps caught more game than they could eat, La
+Tonsard made pies of it and sent them to Ville-aux-Fayes. In harvest-
+time seven Tonsards--the old mother, the two sons (until they were
+seventeen years of age), the two daughters, together with old Fourchon
+and Mouche--gleaned, and generally brought in about sixteen bushels a
+day of all grains, rye, barley, wheat, all good to grind.
+
+The two cows, led to the roadside by the youngest girl, always managed
+to stray into the meadows of Les Aigues; but as, if it ever chanced
+that some too flagrant trespass compelled the keepers to take notice
+of it, the children were either whipped or deprived of a coveted
+dainty, they had acquired such extraordinary aptitude in hearing the
+enemy's footfall that the bailiff or the park-keeper of Les Aigues was
+very seldom able to detect them. Besides, the relations of those
+estimable functionaries with Tonsard and his wife tied a bandage over
+their eyes. The cows, held by long ropes, obeyed a mere twitch or a
+special low call back to the roadside, knowing very well that, the
+danger once past, they could finish their browsing in the next field.
+Old mother Tonsard, who was getting more and more infirm, succeeded
+Mouche in his duties, after Fourchon, under pretence of caring for his
+natural grandson's education, kept him to himself; while Marie and
+Catherine made hay in the woods. These girls knew the exact spots
+where the fine forest-grass abounded, and there they cut and spread
+and cocked and garnered it, supplying two thirds, at least, of the
+winter fodder, and leading the cows on all fine days to sheltered
+nooks where they could still find pasture. In certain parts of the
+valley of Les Aigues, as in all places protected by a chain of
+mountains, in Piedmont and in Lombardy for instance, there are spots
+where the grass keeps green all the year. Such fields, called in Italy
+"marciti," are of great value; though in France they are often in
+danger of being injured by snow and ice. This phenomenon is due, no
+doubt, to some favorable exposure, and to the infiltration of water
+which keeps the ground at a warmer temperature.
+
+The calves were sold for about eighty francs. The milk, deducting the
+time when the cows calved or went dry, brought in about one hundred
+and sixty francs a year besides supplying the wants of the family.
+Tonsard himself managed to earn another hundred and sixty by doing odd
+jobs of one kind or another.
+
+The sale of food and wine in the tavern, after all costs were paid,
+returned a profit of about three hundred francs, for the great
+drinking-bouts happened only at certain times and in certain seasons;
+and as the topers who indulged in them gave Tonsard and his wife due
+notice, the latter bought in the neighboring town the exact quantity
+of provisions needed and no more. The wine produced by Tonsard's
+vineyard was sold in ordinary years for twenty francs a cask to a
+wine-dealer at Soulanges with whom Tonsard was intimate. In very
+prolific years he got as much as twelve casks from his vines; but
+eight was the average; and Tonsard kept half for his own traffic. In
+all wine-growing districts the gleaning of the large vineyards gives a
+good perquisite, and out of it the Tonsard family usually managed to
+obtain three casks more. But being, as we have seen, sheltered and
+protected by the keepers, they showed no conscience in their
+proceedings,--entering vineyards before the harvesters were out of
+them, just as they swarmed into the wheat-fields before the sheaves
+were made. So, the seven or eight casks of wine, as much gleaned as
+harvested, were sold for a good price. However, out of these various
+proceeds the Grand-I-Vert was mulcted in a good sum for the personal
+consumption of Tonsard and his wife, who wanted the best of everything
+to eat, and better wine than they sold,--which they obtained from
+their friend at Soulanges in payment for their own. In short, the
+money scraped together by this family amounted to about nine hundred
+francs, for they fattened two pigs a year, one for themselves and the
+other to sell.
+
+The idlers and scapegraces and also the laborers took a fancy to the
+tavern of the Grand-I-Vert, partly because of La Tonsard's merits, and
+partly on account of the hail-fellow-well-met relation existing
+between this family and the lower classes of the valley. The two
+daughters, both remarkably handsome, followed the example of their
+mother as to morals. Moreover, the long established fame of the Grand-
+I-Vert, dating from 1795, made it a venerable spot in the eyes of the
+common people. From Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes, workmen came there to
+meet and make their bargains and hear the news collected by the
+Tonsard women and by Mouche and old Fourchon, or supplied by Vermichel
+and Brunet, that renowned official, when he came to the tavern in
+search of his practitioner. There the price of hay and of wine was
+settled; also that of a day's work and of piece-work. Tonsard, a
+sovereign judge in such matters, gave his advice and opinion while
+drinking with his guests. Soulanges, according to a saying in these
+parts, was a town for society and amusement only, while Blangy was a
+business borough; crushed, however, by the great commercial centre of
+Ville-aux-Fayes, which had become in the last twenty-five years the
+capital of this flourishing valley. The cattle and grain market was
+held at Blangy, in the public square, and the prices there obtained
+served as a tariff for the whole arrondissement.
+
+By staying in the house and doing no out-door work, La Tonsard
+continued fresh and fair and dimpled, in comparison with the women who
+worked in the fields and faded as rapidly as the flowers, becoming old
+and haggard before they were thirty. She liked to be well-dressed. In
+point of fact, she was only clean, but in a village cleanliness is a
+luxury. The daughters, better dressed than their means warranted,
+followed their mother's example. Beneath their outer garment, which
+was relatively handsome, they wore linen much finer than that of the
+richest peasant women. On fete-days they appeared in dresses that were
+really pretty, obtained, Heaven knows how! For one thing, the men-
+servants at Les Aigues sold to them, at prices that were easily paid,
+the cast-off clothing of the lady's-maids, which, after sweeping the
+streets of Paris and being made over to fit Marie and Catherine,
+appeared triumphantly in the precincts of the Grand-I-Vert. These
+girls, bohemians of the valley, received not one penny in money from
+their parents, who gave them food only, and the wretched pallets on
+which they slept with their grandmother in the barn, where their
+brothers also slept, curled up in the hay like animals. Neither father
+nor mother paid any heed to this propinquity.
+
+The iron age and the age of gold are more alike than we think for. In
+the one nothing aroused vigilance; in the other, everything rouses it;
+the result to society is, perhaps, very much the same. The presence of
+old Mother Tonsard, which was more a necessity than a precaution, was
+simply one immorality the more. And thus it was that the Abbe
+Brossette, after studying the morals of his parishioners, made this
+pregnant remark to his bishop:--
+
+"Monseigneur, when I observe the stress that the peasantry lay on
+their poverty, I realize how they fear to lose that excuse for their
+immorality."
+
+Though everybody knew that the family had no principles and no
+scruples, nothing was ever said against the morals of the Grand-I-
+Vert. At the beginning of this book it is necessary to explain, once
+for all, to persons accustomed to the decencies of middle-class life,
+that the peasants have no decency in their domestic habits and
+customs. They make no appeal to morality when their daughters are
+seduced, unless the seducer is rich and timid. Children, until the
+State takes possession of them, are used either as capital or as
+instruments of convenience. Self-interest has become, specially since
+1789, the sole motive of the masses; they never ask if an action is
+legal or immoral, but only if it is profitable. Morality, which is not
+to be confounded with religion, begins only at a certain competence,--
+just as one sees, in a higher sphere, how delicacy blossoms in the
+soul when fortune decorates the furniture. A positively moral and
+upright man is rare among the peasantry. Do you ask why? Among the
+many reasons that may be given for this state of things, the principal
+one is this: Through the nature of their social functions, the
+peasants live a purely material life which approximates to that of
+savages, and their constant union with nature tends to foster it. When
+toil exhausts the body it takes from the mind its purifying action,
+especially among the ignorant. The Abbe Brossette was right in saying
+that the state policy of the peasant is his poverty.
+
+Meddling in everybody's interests, Tonsard heard everybody's
+complaints, and often instigated frauds to benefit the needy. His
+wife, a kindly appearing woman, had a good word for evil-doers, and
+never withheld either approval or personal help from her customers in
+anything they undertook against the rich. This inn, a nest of vipers,
+brisk and venomous, seething and active, was a hot-bed for the hatred
+of the peasants and the workingmen against the masters and the
+wealthy.
+
+The prosperous life of the Tonsards was, therefore, an evil example.
+Others asked themselves why they should not take their wood, as the
+Tonsards did, from the forest; why not pasture their cows and have
+game to eat and to sell as well as they; why not harvest without
+sowing the grapes and the grain. Accordingly, the pilfering thefts
+which thin the woods and tithe the ploughed lands and meadows and
+vineyards became habitual in this valley, and soon existed as a right
+throughout the districts of Blangy, Conches, and Cerneux, all adjacent
+to the domain of Les Aigues. This sore, for certain reasons which will
+be given in due time, did far greater injury to Les Aigues than to the
+estates of Ronquerolles or Soulanges. You must not, however, fancy
+that Tonsard, his wife and children, and his old mother ever
+deliberately said to themselves, "We will live by theft, and commit it
+as cleverly as we can." Such habits grow slowly. To the dried sticks
+they added, in the first instance, a single bit of good wood; then,
+emboldened by habit and a carefully prepared immunity (necessary to
+plans which this history will unfold), they ended at last in cutting
+"their wood," and stealing almost their entire livelihood. Pasturage
+for the cows and the abuses of gleaning were established as customs
+little by little. When the Tonsards and the do-nothings of the valley
+had tasted the sweets of these four rights (thus captured by rural
+paupers, and amounting to actual robbery) we can easily imagine they
+would never give them up unless compelled by a power greater than
+their own audacity.
+
+At the time when this history begins Tonsard, then about fifty years
+of age, tall and strong, rather stout than thin, with curly black
+hair, skin highly colored and marbled like a brick with purple
+blotches, yellow whites to the eyes, large ears with broad flaps, a
+muscular frame, encased, however, in flabby flesh, a retreating
+forehead, and a hanging lip,--Tonsard, such as you see him, hid his
+real character under an external stupidity, lightened at times by a
+show of experience, which seemed all the more intelligent because he
+had acquired in the company of his father-in-law a sort of bantering
+talk, much affected by old Fourchon and Vermichel. His nose, flattened
+at the end as if the finger of God intended to mark him, gave him a
+voice which came from his palate, like that of all persons disfigured
+by a disease which thickens the nasal passages, through which the air
+then passes with difficulty. His upper teeth overlapped each other,
+and this defect (which Lavater calls terrible) was all the more
+apparent because they were as white as those of a dog. But for a
+certain lawless and slothful good humor, and the free-and-easy ways of
+a rustic tippler, the man would have alarmed the least observing of
+spectators.
+
+If the portraits of Tonsard, his inn, and his father-in-law take a
+prominent place in this history, it is because that place belongs to
+him and to the inn and to the family. In the first place, their
+existence, so minutely described, is the type of a hundred other
+households in the valley of Les Aigues. Secondly, Tonsard, without
+being other than the instrument of deep and active hatreds, had an
+immense influence on the struggle that was about to take place, being
+the friend and counsellor of all the complainants of the lower
+classes. His inn, as we shall presently see, was the rendezvous for
+the aggressors; in fact, he became their chief, partly on account of
+the fear he inspired throughout the valley--less, however, by his
+actual deeds than by those that were constantly expected of him. The
+threat of this man was as much dreaded as the thing threatened, so
+that he never had occasion to execute it.
+
+Every revolt, open or concealed, has its banner. The banner of the
+marauders, the drunkards, the idlers, the sluggards of the valley des
+Aigues was the terrible tavern of the Grand-I-Vert. Its frequenters
+found amusement there,--as rare and much-desired a thing in the
+country as in a city. Moreover, there was no other inn along the
+country-road for over twelve miles, a distance which conveyances (even
+when laden) could easily do in three hours; so that those who went
+from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes always stopped at the Grand-I-Vert, if
+only to refresh themselves. The miller of Les Aigues, who was also
+assistant-mayor, and his men came there. The grooms and valets of the
+general were not averse to Tonsard's wine, rendered attractive by
+Tonsard's daughters; so the Grand-I-Vert held subterraneous
+communication with the chateau through the servants, and knew
+immediately everything that they knew. It is impossible either by
+benefits or through their own self-interests, to break up the
+perpetual understanding that exists between the servants of a
+household and the people from whom they come. Domestic service is of
+the masses, and to the masses it will ever remain attached. This fatal
+comradeship explains the reticence of the last words of Charles the
+groom, as he and Blondet reached the portico of the chateau.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ANOTHER IDYLL
+
+"Ha! by my pipe, papa!" exclaimed Tonsard, seeing his father-in-law as
+the old man entered and supposing him in quest of food, "your stomach
+is lively this morning! We haven't anything to give you. How about
+that rope,--the rope, you know, you were to make for us? It is amazing
+how much you make over night and how little there is made in the
+morning! You ought long ago to have twisted the one that is to twist
+you out of existence; you are getting too costly for us."
+
+The wit of a peasant or laborer is very Attic; it consists in speaking
+out his mind and giving it a grotesque expression. We find the same
+thing in a drawing-room. Delicacy of wit takes the place of
+picturesque vulgarity, and that is really all the difference there is.
+
+"That's enough for the father-in-law!" said the old man. "Talk
+business; I want a bottle of the best."
+
+So saying, Fourchon rapped a five-franc piece that gleamed in his hand
+on the old table at which he was seated,--which, with its coating of
+grease, its scorched black marks, its wine stains, and its gashes, was
+singular to behold. At the sound of coin Marie Tonsard, as trig as a
+sloop about to start on a cruise, glanced at her grandfather with a
+covetous look that shot from her eyes like a spark. La Tonsard came
+out of her bedroom, attracted by the music of metal.
+
+"You are always rough to my poor father," she said to her husband,
+"and yet he has earned a deal of money this year; God grant he came by
+it honestly. Let me see that," she added, springing at the coin and
+snatching it from Fourchon's fingers.
+
+"Marie," said Tonsard, gravely, "above the board you'll find some
+bottled wine. Go and get a bottle."
+
+Wine is of only one quality in the country, but it is sold as of two
+kinds,--cask wine and bottled wine.
+
+"Where did you get this, papa" demanded La Tonsard, slipping the coin
+into her pocket.
+
+"Philippine! you'll come to a bad end," said the old man, shaking his
+head but not attempting to recover his money. Doubtless he had long
+realized the futility of a struggle between his daughter, his terrible
+son-in-law, and himself.
+
+"Another bottle of wine for which you get five francs out of me," he
+added, in a peevish tone. "But it shall be the last. I shall give my
+custom to the Cafe de la Paix."
+
+"Hold your tongue, papa!" remarked his fair and fat daughter, who bore
+some resemblance to a Roman matron. "You need a shirt, and a pair of
+clean trousers, and a hat; and I want to see you with a waistcoat.
+That's what I take the money for."
+
+"I have told you again and again that such things would ruin me," said
+the old man. "People would think me rich and stop giving me anything."
+
+The bottle brought by Marie put an end to the loquacity of the old
+man, who was not without that trait, characteristic of those whose
+tongues are ready to tell out everything, and who shrink from no
+expression of their thought, no matter how atrocious it may be.
+
+"Then you don't want to tell where you filched that money?" said
+Tonsard. "We might go and get more where that came from,--the rest of
+us."
+
+He was making a snare, and as he finished it the ferocious innkeeper
+happened to glance at his father-in-law's trousers, and there he spied
+a raised round spot which clearly defined a second five-franc piece.
+
+"Having become a capitalist I drink your health," said Pere Fourchon.
+
+"If you choose to be a capitalist you can be," said Tonsard; "you have
+the means, you have! But the devil has bored a hole in the back of
+your head through which everything runs out."
+
+"Hey! I only played the otter trick on that young fellow they have got
+at Les Aigues. He's from Paris. That's all there is to it."
+
+"If crowds of people would come to see the sources of the Avonne,
+you'd be rich, Grandpa Fourchon," said Marie.
+
+"Yes," he said, drinking the last glassful the bottle contained, "and
+I've played the sham otter so long, the live otters have got angry,
+and one of them came right between my legs to-day; Mouche caught it,
+and I am to get twenty francs for it."
+
+"I'll bet your otter is made of tow," said Tonsard, looking slyly at
+his father-in-law.
+
+"If you will give me a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, and some list
+braces, so as not to disgrace Vermichel on the music stand at Tivoli
+(for old Socquard is always scolding about my clothes), I'll let you
+keep that money, my daughter; your idea is a good one. I can squeeze
+that rich young fellow at Les Aigues; may be he'll take to otters."
+
+"Go and get another bottle," said Tonsard to his daughter. "If your
+father really had an otter, he would show it to us," he added,
+speaking to his wife and trying to touch up Fourchon.
+
+"I'm too afraid it would get into your frying-pan," said the old man,
+winking one of his little green eyes at his daughter. "Philippine has
+already hooked my five-franc piece; and how many more haven't you
+bagged under pretence of clothing me and feeding me? and now you say
+that my stomach is too lively, and that I go half-naked."
+
+"You sold your last clothes to drink boiled wine at the Cafe de la
+Paix, papa," said his daughter, "though Vermichel tried to prevent
+it."
+
+"Vermichel! the man I treated! Vermichel is incapable of betraying my
+friendship. It must have been that lump of old lard on two legs that
+he is not ashamed to call his wife!"
+
+"He or she," replied Tonsard, "or Bonnebault."
+
+"If it was Bonnebault," cried Fourchon, "he who is one of the pillars
+of the place, I'll--I'll--Enough!"
+
+"You old sot, what has all that got to do with having sold your
+clothes? You sold them because you did sell them; you're of age!" said
+Tonsard, slapping the old man's knee. "Come, do honor to my drink and
+redden up your throat! The father of Mam Tonsard has a right to do so;
+and isn't that better than spending your silver at Socquard's?"
+
+"What a shame it is that you have been fifteen years playing for
+people to dance at Tivoli and you have never yet found out how
+Socquard cooks his wine,--you who are so shrewd!" said his daughter;
+"and yet you know very well that if we had the secret we should soon
+get as rich as Rigou."
+
+Throughout the Morvan, and in that region of Burgundy which lies at
+its feet on the side toward Paris, this boiled wine with which Mam
+Tonsard reproached her father is a rather costly beverage which plays
+a great part in the life of the peasantry, and is made by all grocers
+and wine-dealers, and wherever a drinking-shop exists. This precious
+liquor, made of choice wine, sugar, and cinnamon and other spices, is
+preferable to all those disguises or mixtures of brandy called
+ratafia, one-hundred-and-seven, brave man's cordial, black currant
+wine, vespetro, spirit-of-sun, etc. Boiled wine is found throughout
+France and Switzerland. Among the Jura, and in the wild districts
+trodden only by a few special tourists, the innkeepers call it, on the
+word of commercial travellers, the wine of Syracuse. Excellent it is,
+however, and their guests, hungry as hounds after ascending the
+surrounding peaks, very gladly pay three and four francs a bottle for
+it. In the homes of the Morvan and in Burgundy the least illness or
+the slightest agitation of the nerves is an excuse for boiled wine.
+Before and after childbirth the women take it with the addition of
+burnt sugar. Boiled wine has soaked up the property of many a peasant,
+and more than once the seductive liquid has been the cause of marital
+chastisement.
+
+"Ha! there's no chance of grabbing that secret," replied Fourchon,
+"Socquard always locks himself in when he boils his wine; he never
+told how he does it to his late wife. He sends to Paris for his
+materials."
+
+"Don't plague your father," cried Tonsard; "doesn't he know? well,
+then, he doesn't know! People can't know everything!"
+
+Fourchon grew very uneasy on seeing how his son-in-law's countenance
+softened as well as his words.
+
+"What do you want to rob me of now?" he asked, candidly.
+
+"I?" said Tonsard, "I take none but my legitimate dues; if I get
+anything from you it is in payment of your daughter's portion, which
+you promised me and never paid."
+
+Fourchon, reassured by the harshness of this remark, dropped his head
+on his breast as though vanquished and convinced.
+
+"Look at that pretty snare," resumed Tonsard, coming up to his father-
+in-law and laying the trap upon his knee. "Some of these days they'll
+want game at Les Aigues, and we shall sell them their own, or there
+will be no good God for the poor folks."
+
+"A fine piece of work," said the old man, examining the mischievous
+machine.
+
+"It is very well to pick up the sous now, papa," said Mam Tonsard,
+"but you know we are to have our share in the cake of Les Aigues."
+
+"Oh, what chatterers women are!" cried Tonsard. "If I am hanged it
+won't be for a shot from my gun, but for the gabble of your tongue."
+
+"And do you really suppose that Les Aigues will be cut up and sold in
+lots for your pitiful benefit?" asked Fourchon. "Pshaw! haven't you
+discovered in the last thirty years that old Rigou has been sucking
+the marrow out of your bones that the middle-class folks are worse
+than the lords? Mark my words, when that affair happens, my children,
+the Soudrys, the Gaubertins, the Rigous, will make you kick your heels
+in the air. 'I've the good tobacco, it never shall be thine,' that's
+the national air of the rich man, hey? The peasant will always be the
+peasant. Don't you see (but you never did understand anything of
+politics!) that government puts such heavy taxes on wine only to
+hinder our profits and keep us poor? The middle classes and the
+government, they are all one. What would become of them if everybody
+was rich? Could they till their fields? Would they gather the harvest?
+No, they WANT the poor! I was rich for ten years and I know what I
+thought of paupers."
+
+"Must hunt with them, though," replied Tonsard, "because they mean to
+cut up the great estates; after that's done, we can turn against them.
+If I'd been Courtecuisse, whom that scoundrel Rigou is ruining, I'd
+have long ago paid his bill with other balls than the poor fellow
+gives him."
+
+"Right enough, too," replied Fourchon. "As Pere Niseron says (and he
+stayed republican long after everybody else), 'The people are tough;
+they don't die; they have time before them.'"
+
+Fourchon fell into a sort of reverie; Tonsard profited by his
+inattention to take back the trap, and as he took it up he cut a slip
+below the coin in his father-in-law's pocket at the moment when the
+old man raised his glass to his lips; then he set his foot on the
+five-franc piece as it dropped on the earthen floor just where it was
+always kept damp by the heel-taps which the customers flung from their
+glasses. Though quickly and lightly done, the old man might, perhaps,
+have felt the theft, if Vermichel had not happened to appear at that
+moment.
+
+"Tonsard, do you know where you father is?" called that functionary
+from the foot of the steps.
+
+Vermichel's shout, the theft of the money, and the emptying of old
+Fourchon's glass, were simultaneous.
+
+"Present, captain!" cried Fourchon, holding out a hand to Vermichel to
+help him up the steps.
+
+Of all Burgundian figures, Vermichel would have seemed to you the most
+Burgundian. The practitioner was not red, he was scarlet. His face,
+like certain tropical portions of the globe, was fissured, here and
+there, with small extinct volcanoes, defined by flat and greenish
+patches which Fourchon called, not unpoetically, the "flowers of
+wine." This fiery face, the features of which were swelled out of
+shape by continual drunkenness, looked cyclopic; for it was lighted on
+the right side by a gleaming eye, and darkened on the other by a
+yellow patch over the left orb. Red hair, always tousled, and a beard
+like that of Judas, made Vermichel as formidable in appearance as he
+was meek in reality. His prominent nose looked like an interrogation-
+mark, to which the wide-slit mouth seemed to be always answering, even
+when it did not open. Vermichel, a short man, wore hob-nail shoes,
+bottle-green velveteen trousers, an old waistcoat patched with diverse
+stuffs which seemed to have been originally made of a counterpane, a
+jacket of coarse blue cloth and a gray hat with a broad brim. All this
+luxury, required by the town of Soulanges where Vermichel fulfilled
+the combined functions of porter at the town-hall, drummer, jailer,
+musician, and practitioner, was taken care of by Madame Vermichel, an
+alarming antagonist of Rabelaisian philosophy. This virago with
+moustachios, about one yard in width and one hundred and twenty
+kilograms in weight (but very active), ruled Vermichel with a rod of
+iron. Thrashed by her when drunk, he allowed her to thrash him still
+when sober; which caused Pere Fourchon to say, with a sniff at
+Vermichel's clothes, "It is the livery of a slave."
+
+"Talk of the sun and you'll see its beams," cried Fourchon, repeating
+a well-worn allusion to the rutilant face of Vermichel, which really
+did resemble those copper suns painted on tavern signs in the
+provinces. "Has Mam Vermichel spied too much dust on your back, that
+you're running away from your four-fifths,--for I can't call her your
+better half, that woman! What brings you here at this hour, drum-
+major?"
+
+"Politics, always politics," replied Vermichel, who seemed accustomed
+to such pleasantries.
+
+"Ah! business is bad in Blangy, and there'll be notes to protest, and
+writs to issue," remarked Pere Fourchon, filling a glass for his
+friend.
+
+"That APE of ours is right behind me," replied Vermichel, with a
+backward gesture.
+
+In workmen's slang "ape" meant master. The word belonged to the
+dictionary of the worthy pair.
+
+"What's Monsieur Brunet coming bothering about here?" asked Tonsard.
+
+"Hey, by the powers, you folks!" said Vermichel, "you've brought him
+in for the last three years more than you are worth. Ha! that master
+at Les Aigues, he has his eye upon you; he'll punch you in the ribs;
+he's after you, the Shopman! Brunet says, if there were three such
+landlords in the valley his fortune would be made."
+
+"What new harm are they going to do to the poor?" asked Marie.
+
+"A pretty wise thing for themselves," replied Vermichel. "Faith!
+you'll have to give in, in the end. How can you help it? They've got
+the power. For the last two years haven't they had three foresters and
+a horse-patrol, all as active as ants, and a field-keeper who is a
+terror? Besides, the gendarmerie is ready to do their dirty work at
+any time. They'll crush you--"
+
+"Bah!" said Tonsard, "we are too flat. That which can't be crushed
+isn't the trees, it's ground."
+
+"Don't you trust to that," said Fourchon to his son-in-law; "you own
+property."
+
+"Those rich folks must love you," continued Vermichel, "for they think
+of nothing else from morning till night! They are saying to themselves
+now like this: 'Their cattle eat up our pastures; we'll seize their
+cattle; they can't eat grass themselves.' You've all been condemned,
+the warrants are out, and they have told our ape to take your cows. We
+are to begin this morning at Conches by seizing old mother
+Bonnebault's cow and Godin's cow and Mitant's cow."
+
+The moment the name of Bonnebault was mentioned, Marie, who was in
+love with the old woman's grandson, sprang into the vineyard with a
+nod to her father and mother. She slipped like an eel through a break
+in the hedge, and was off on the way to Conches with the speed of a
+hunted hare.
+
+"They'll do so much," remarked Tonsard, tranquilly, "that they'll get
+their bones broken; and that will be a pity, for their mothers can't
+make them any new ones."
+
+"Well, perhaps so," said old Fourchon, "but see here, Vermichel, I
+can't go with you for an hour or more, for I have important business
+at the chateau."
+
+"More important than serving three warrants at five sous each? 'You
+shouldn't spit into the vintage,' as Father Noah says."
+
+"I tell you, Vermichel, that my business requires me to go to the
+chateau des Aigues," repeated the old man, with an air of laughable
+self-importance.
+
+"And anyhow," said Mam Tonsard, "my father had better keep out of the
+way. Do you really mean to find the cows?"
+
+"Monsieur Brunet, who is a very good fellow, would much rather find
+nothing but their dung," answered Vermichel. "A man who is obliged to
+be out and about day and night had better be careful."
+
+"If he is, he has good reason to be," said Tonsard, sententiously.
+
+"So," continued Vermichel, "he said to Monsieur Michaud, 'I'll go as
+soon as the court is up.' If he had wanted to find the cows he'd have
+gone at seven o'clock in the morning. But that didn't suit Michaud,
+and Brunet has had to be off. You can't take in Michaud, he's a
+trained hound! Ha, the brigand!"
+
+"Ought to have stayed in the army, a swaggerer like that," said
+Tonsard; "he is only fit to deal with enemies. I wish he would come
+and ask me my name. He may call himself a veteran of the young guard,
+but I know very well that if I measured spurs with him, I'd keep my
+feathers up longest."
+
+"Look here!" said Mam Tonsard to Vermichel, "when are the notices for
+the ball at Soulanges coming out? Here it is the eighth of August."
+
+"I took them yesterday to Monsieur Bournier at Ville-aux-Fayes, to be
+printed," replied Vermichel; "they do talk of fireworks on the lake."
+
+"What crowds of people we shall have!" cried Fourchon.
+
+"Profits for Socquard!" said Tonsard, spitefully.
+
+"If it doesn't rain," said his wife, by way of comfort.
+
+At this moment the trot of a horse coming from the direction of
+Soulanges was heard, and five minutes later the sheriff's officer
+fastened his horse to a post placed for the purpose near the wicket
+gate through which the cows were driven. Then he showed his head at
+the door of the Grand-I-Vert.
+
+"Come, my boys, let's lose no time," he said, pretending to be in a
+hurry.
+
+"Hey!" said Vermichel. "Here's a refractory, Monsieur Brunet; Pere
+Fourchon wants to drop off."
+
+"He has had too many drops already," said the sheriff; "but the law in
+this case does not require that he shall be sober."
+
+"Please excuse me, Monsieur Brunet," said Fourchon, "I am expected at
+Les Aigues on business; they are in treaty for an otter."
+
+Brunet, a withered little man dressed from head to foot in black
+cloth, with a bilious skin, a furtive eye, curly hair, lips tight-
+drawn, pinched nose, anxious expression, and gruff in speech,
+exhibited the phenomenon of a character and bearing in perfect harmony
+with his profession. He was so well-informed as to the law, or, to
+speak more correctly, the quibbles of the law, that he had come to be
+both the terror and the counsellor of the whole canton. He was not
+without a certain popularity among the peasantry, from whom he usually
+took his pay in kind. The compound of his active and negative
+qualities and his knowledge of how to manage matters got him the
+custom of the canton, to the exclusion of his coadjutor Plissoud,
+about whom we shall have something to say later. This chance
+combination of a sheriff's officer who does everything and a sheriff's
+officer who does nothing is not at all uncommon in the country justice
+courts.
+
+"So matters are getting warm, are they?" said Tonsard to little
+Brunet.
+
+"What can you expect? you pilfer the man too much, and he's going to
+protect himself," replied the officer. "It will be a bad business for
+you in the end; government will interfere."
+
+"Then we, poor unfortunates, must give up the ghost!" said Mam
+Tonsard, offering him a glass of brandy on a saucer.
+
+"The unfortunate may all die, yet they'll never be lacking in the
+land," said Fourchon, sententiously.
+
+"You do great damage to the woods," retorted the sheriff.
+
+"Now don't believe that, Monsieur Brunet," said Mam Tonsard; "they
+make such a fuss about a few miserable fagots!"
+
+"We didn't crush the rich low enough during the Revolution, that's
+what's the trouble," said Tonsard.
+
+Just then a horrible, and quite incomprehensible noise was heard. It
+seemed to be a rush of hurried feet, accompanied with a rattle of
+arms, half-drowned by the rustling of leaves, the dragging of
+branches, and the sound of still more hasty feet. Two voices, as
+different as the two footsteps, were venting noisy exclamations.
+Everybody inside the inn guessed at once that a man was pursuing a
+woman; but why? The uncertainty did not last long.
+
+"It is mother!" said Tonsard, jumping up; "I know her shriek."
+
+Then suddenly, rushing up the broken steps of the Grand-I-Vert by a
+last effort that can be made only by the sinews of smugglers, old
+Mother Tonsard fell flat on the floor in the middle of the room. The
+immense mass of wood she carried on her head made a terrible noise as
+it crashed against the top of the door and then upon the ground. Every
+one had jumped out of the way. The table, the bottles, the chairs were
+knocked over and scattered. The noise was as great as if the cottage
+itself had come tumbling down.
+
+"I'm dead! The scoundrel has killed me!"
+
+The words and the flight of the old woman were explained by the
+apparition on the threshold of a keeper, dressed in green livery,
+wearing a hat edged with silver cord, a sabre at his side, a leathern
+shoulder-belt bearing the arms of Montcornet charged with those of the
+Troisvilles, the regulation red waistcoat, and buckskin gaiters which
+came above the knee.
+
+After a moment's hesitation the keeper said, looking at Brunet and
+Vermichel, "Here are witnesses."
+
+"Witnesses of what?" said Tonsard.
+
+"That woman has a ten-year-old oak, cut into logs, inside those
+fagots; it is a regular crime!"
+
+The moment the word "witness" was uttered Vermichel thought best to
+breathe the fresh air of the vineyard.
+
+"Of what? witnesses of what?" cried Tonsard, standing in front of the
+keeper while his wife helped up the old woman. "Do you mean to show
+your claws, Vatel? Accuse persons and arrest them on the highway,
+brigand,--that's your domain; but get out of here! A man's house is
+his castle."
+
+"I caught her in the act, and your mother must come with me."
+
+"Arrest my mother in my house? You have no right to do it. My house is
+inviolable,--all the world knows that, at least. Have you got a
+warrant from Monsieur Guerbet, the magistrate? Ha! you must have the
+law behind you before you come in here. You are not the law, though
+you have sworn an oath to starve us to death, you miserable forest-
+gauger, you!"
+
+The fury of the keeper waxed so hot that he was on the point of
+seizing hold of the wood, when the old woman, a frightful bit of black
+parchment endowed with motion, the like of which can be seen only in
+David's picture of "The Sabines," screamed at him, "Don't touch it, or
+I'll fly at your eyes!"
+
+"Well, then, undo that pile in presence of Monsieur Brunet," said the
+keeper.
+
+Though the sheriff's officer had assumed the indifference that the
+routine of business does really give to officials of his class, he
+threw a glance at Tonsard and his wife which said plainly, "A bad
+business!" Old Fourchon looked at his daughter, and slyly pointed at a
+pile of ashes in the chimney. Mam Tonsard, who understood in a moment
+from that significant gesture both the danger of her mother-in-law and
+the advice of her father, seized a handful of ashes and flung them in
+the keeper's eyes. Vatel roared with pain; Tonsard pushed him roughly
+upon the broken door-steps where the blinded man stumbled and fell,
+and then rolled nearly down to the gate, dropping his gun on the way.
+In an instant the load of sticks was unfastened, and the oak logs
+pulled out and hidden with a rapidity no words can describe. Brunet,
+anxious not to witness this manoeuvre, which he readily foresaw,
+rushed after the keeper to help him up; then he placed him on the bank
+and wet his handkerchief in water to wash the eyes of the poor fellow,
+who, in spite of his agony, was trying to reach the brook.
+
+"You are in the wrong, Vatel," said Brunet; "you have no right to
+enter houses, don't you see?"
+
+The old woman, a little hump-backed creature, stood on the sill of the
+door, with her hands on her hips, darting flashes from her eyes and
+curses from her foaming lips shrill enough to be heard at Blangy.
+
+"Ha! the villain, 'twas well done! May hell get you! To suspect me of
+cutting trees!--ME, the most honest woman in the village. To hunt me
+like vermin! I'd like to see you lose your cursed eyes, for then we'd
+have peace. You are birds of ill-omen, the whole of you; you invent
+shameful stories to stir up strife between your master and us."
+
+The keeper allowed the sheriff to bathe his eyes and all the while the
+latter kept telling him that he was legally wrong.
+
+"The old thief! she has tired us out," said Vatel at last. "She has
+been at work in the woods all night."
+
+As the whole family had taken an active hand in hiding the live wood
+and putting things straight in the cottage, Tonsard presently appeared
+at the door with an insolent air. "Vatel, my man, if you ever again
+dare to force your way into my domain, my gun shall answer you," he
+said. "To-day you have had the ashes; the next time you shall have the
+fire. You don't know your own business. That's enough. Now if you feel
+hot after this affair take some wine, I offer it to you; and you may
+come in and see that my old mother's bundle of fagots hadn't a scrap
+of live wood in it; it is every bit brushwood."
+
+"Scoundrel!" said the keeper to the sheriff, in a low voice, more
+enraged by this speech than by the smart of his eyes.
+
+Just then Charles, the groom, appeared at the gate of the Grand-I-
+Vert.
+
+"What is the matter, Vatel?" he said.
+
+"Ah!" said the keeper, wiping his eyes, which he had plunged wide open
+into the rivulet to give them a final cleansing. "I have some debtors
+in there that I'll cause to rue the day they saw the light."
+
+"If you take it that way, Monsieur Vatel," said Tonsard, coldly, "you
+will find we don't want for courage in Burgundy."
+
+Vatel departed. Not feeling much curiosity to know what the trouble
+was, Charles went up the steps and looked into the house.
+
+"Come to the chateau, you and your otter,--if you really have one," he
+said to Pere Fourchon.
+
+The old man rose hurriedly and followed him.
+
+"Well, where is it,--that otter of yours?" said Charles, smiling
+doubtfully.
+
+"This way," said the old fellow, going toward the Thune.
+
+The name is that of a brook formed by the overflow of the mill-race
+and of certain springs in the park of Les Aigues. It runs by the side
+of the county road as far as the lakelet of Soulanges, which it
+crosses, and then falls into the Avonne, after feeding the mills and
+ponds on the Soulanges estate.
+
+"Here it is; I hid it in the brook, with a stone around its neck."
+
+As he stooped and rose again the old man missed the coin out of his
+pocket, where metal was so uncommon that he was likely to notice its
+presence or its absence immediately.
+
+"Ah, the sharks!" he cried. "If I hunt otters they hunt fathers-in-
+law! They get out of me all I earn, and tell me it is for my good! If
+it were not for my poor Mouche, who is the comfort of my old age, I'd
+drown myself. Children! they are the ruin of their fathers. You
+haven't married, have you, Monsieur Charles? Then don't; never get
+married, and then you can't reproach yourself for spreading bad blood.
+I, who expected to buy my tow with that money, and there it is
+filched, stolen! That monsieur up at Les Aigues, a fine young fellow,
+gave me ten francs; ha! well! it'll put up the price of my otter now."
+
+Charles distrusted the old man so profoundly that he took his
+grievances (this time very sincere) for the preliminary of what he
+called, in servant's slang, "varnish," and he made the great mistake
+of letting his opinion appear in a satirical grin, which the spiteful
+old fellow detected.
+
+"Come, come! Pere Fourchon, now behave yourself; you are going to see
+Madame," said Charles, noticing how the rubies flashed on the nose and
+cheeks of the old drunkard.
+
+"I know how to attend to business, Charles; and the proof is that if
+you will get me out of the kitchen the remains of the breakfast and a
+bottle or two of Spanish wine, I'll tell you something which will save
+you from a 'foul.'"
+
+"Tell me, and Francois shall get Monsieur's own order to give you a
+glass of wine," said the groom.
+
+"Promise?"
+
+"I promise."
+
+"Well then, I know you meet my granddaughter Catherine under the
+bridge of the Avonne. Godain is in love with her; he saw you, and he
+is fool enough to be jealous,--I say fool, for a peasant oughtn't to
+have feelings which belong only to rich folks. If you go to the ball
+of Soulanges at Tivoli and dance with her, you'll dance higher than
+you'll like. Godain is rich and dangerous; he is capable of breaking
+your arm without your getting a chance to arrest him."
+
+"That would be too dear; Catherine is a fine girl, but she is not
+worth all that," replied Charles. "Why should Godain be so angry?
+others are not."
+
+"He loves her enough to marry her."
+
+"If he does, he'll beat her," said Charles.
+
+"I don't know about that," said the old man. "She takes after her
+mother, against whom Tonsard never raised a finger,--he's too afraid
+she'll be off, hot foot. A woman who knows how to hold her own is
+mighty useful. Besides, if it came to fisticuffs with Catherine,
+Godain, though he's pretty strong, wouldn't give the last blow."
+
+"Well, thank you, Pere Fourchon; here's forty sous to drink my health
+in case I can't get you the sherry."
+
+Pere Fourchon turned his head aside as he pocketed the money lest
+Charles should see the expression of amusement and sarcasm which he
+was unable to repress.
+
+"Catherine," he resumed, "is a proud minx; she likes sherry. You had
+better tell her to go and get it at Les Aigues."
+
+Charles looked at Pere Fourchon with naive admiration, not suspecting
+the eager interest the general's enemies took in slipping one more spy
+into the chateau.
+
+"The general ought to feel happy now," continued Fourchon; "the
+peasants are all quiet. What does he say? Is he satisfied with
+Sibilet?"
+
+"It is only Monsieur Michaud who finds fault with Sibilet. They say
+he'll get him sent away."
+
+"Professional jealousy!" exclaimed Fourchon. "I'll bet you would like
+to get rid of Francois and take his place."
+
+"Hang it! he has twelve hundred francs wages," said Charles; "but they
+can't send him off,--he knows the general's secrets."
+
+"Just as Madame Michaud knows the countess's," remarked Fourchon,
+watching the other carefully. "Look here, my boy, do you know whether
+Monsieur and Madame have separate rooms?"
+
+"Of course; if they didn't, Monsieur wouldn't be so fond of Madame."
+
+"Is that all you know?" said Fourchon.
+
+As they were now before the kitchen windows nothing more was said.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ENEMIES FACE TO FACE
+
+While breakfast was in progress at the chateau, Francois, the head
+footman, whispered to Blondet, but loud enough for the general to
+overhear him,--
+
+"Monsieur, Pere Fourchon's boy is here; he says they have caught the
+otter, and wants to know if you would like it, or whether they shall
+take it to the sub-prefect at Ville-aux-Fayes."
+
+Emile Blondet, though himself a past-master of hoaxing, could not keep
+his cheeks from blushing like those of a virgin who hears an
+indecorous story of which she knows the meaning.
+
+"Ha! ha! so you have hunted the otter this morning with Pere
+Fourchon?" cried the general, with a roar of laughter.
+
+"What is it?" asked the countess, uneasy at her husband's laugh.
+
+"When a man of wit and intelligence is taken in by old Fourchon,"
+continued the general, "a retired cuirassier need not blush for having
+hunted that otter; which bears an enormous resemblance to the third
+posthorse we are made to pay for and never see." With that he went off
+into further explosions of laughter, in the midst of which he
+contrived to say: "I am not surprised you had to change your boots--
+and your trousers; I have no doubt you have been wading! The joke
+didn't go as far as that with me,--I stayed on the bank; but then, you
+know, you are so much more intelligent than I--"
+
+"But you forget," interrupted Madame de Montcornet, "that I do not
+know what you are talking of."
+
+At these words, said with some pique, the general grew serious, and
+Blondet told the story of his fishing for the otter.
+
+"But if they really have an otter," said the countess, "those poor
+people are not to blame."
+
+"Oh, but it is ten years since an otter has been seen about here,"
+said the pitiless general.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said Francois, "the boy swears by all that's
+sacred that he has got one."
+
+"If they have one I'll buy it," said the general.
+
+"I don't suppose," remarked the Abbe Brossette, "that God has
+condemned Les Aigues to never have otters."
+
+"Ah, Monsieur le cure!" cried Blondet, "if you bring the Almighty
+against me--"
+
+"But what is all this? Who is here?" said the countess, hastily.
+
+"Mouche, madame,--the boy who goes about with old Fourchon," said the
+footman.
+
+"Bring him in--that is, if Madame will allow it?" said the general;
+"he may amuse you."
+
+Mouche presently appeared, in his usual state of comparative nudity.
+Beholding this personification of poverty in the middle of this
+luxurious dining-room, the cost of one panel of which would have been
+a fortune to the bare-legged, bare-breasted, and bare-headed child, it
+was impossible not to be moved by an impulse of charity. The boy's
+eyes, like blazing coals, gazed first at the luxuries of the room, and
+then at those on the table.
+
+"Have you no mother?" asked Madame de Montcornet, unable otherwise to
+explain the child's nakedness.
+
+"No, ma'am; m'ma died of grief for losing p'pa, who went to the army
+in 1812 without marrying her with papers, and got frozen, saving your
+presence. But I've my Grandpa Fourchon, who is a good man,--though he
+does beat me bad sometimes."
+
+"How is it, my dear, that such wretched people can be found on your
+estate?" said the countess, looking at the general.
+
+"Madame la comtesse," said the abbe, "in this district we have none
+but voluntary paupers. Monsieur le comte does all he can; but we have
+to do with a class of persons who are without religion and who have
+but one idea, that of living at your expense."
+
+"But, my dear abbe," said Blondet, "you are here to improve their
+morals."
+
+"Monsieur," replied the abbe, "my bishop sent me here as if on a
+mission to savages; but, as I had the honor of telling him, the
+savages of France cannot be reached. They make it a law unto
+themselves not to listen to us; whereas the church does get some hold
+on the savages of America."
+
+"M'sieur le cure, they do help me a bit now," remarked Mouche; "but if
+I went to your church they WOULDN'T, and the other folks would make
+game of my breeches."
+
+"Religion ought to begin by giving him trousers, my dear abbe," said
+Blondet. "In your foreign missions don't you begin by coaxing the
+savages?"
+
+"He would soon sell them," answered the abbe, in a low tone; "besides,
+my salary does not enable me to begin on that line."
+
+"Monsieur le cure is right," said the general, looking at Mouche.
+
+The policy of the little scamp was to appear not to hear what they
+were saying when it was against himself.
+
+"The boy is intelligent enough to know good from evil," continued the
+count, "and he is old enough to work; yet he thinks of nothing but how
+to commit evil without being found out. All the keepers know him. He
+is very well aware that the master of an estate may witness a trespass
+on his property and yet have no right to arrest the trespasser. I have
+known him keep his cows boldly in my meadows, though he knew I saw
+him; but now, ever since I have been mayor, he runs away fast enough."
+
+"Oh, that is very wrong," said the countess; "you should not take
+other people's things, my little man."
+
+"Madame, we must eat. My grandpa gives me more slaps than food, and
+they don't fill my stomach, slaps don't. When the cows come in I milk
+'em just a little and I live on that. Monseigneur isn't so poor but
+what he'll let me drink a drop o' milk the cows get from his grass?"
+
+"Perhaps he hasn't eaten anything to-day," said the countess, touched
+by his misery. "Give him some bread and the rest of that chicken; let
+him have his breakfast," she added, looking at the footman. "Where do
+you sleep, my child?"
+
+"Anywhere, madame; under the stars in summer, and wherever they'll let
+us in winter."
+
+"How old are you?"
+
+"Twelve."
+
+"There is still time to bring him up to better ways," said the
+countess to her husband.
+
+"He will make a good soldier," said the general, gruffly; "he is well
+toughened. I went through that kind of thing myself, and here I am."
+
+"Excuse me, general, I don't belong to nobody," said the boy. "I can't
+be drafted. My poor mother wasn't married, and I was born in a field.
+I'm a son of the 'airth,' as grandpa says. M'ma saved me from the
+army, that she did! My name ain't no more Mouche than nothing at all.
+Grandpa keeps telling me all my advantages. I'm not on the register,
+and when I'm old enough to be drafted I can go all over France and
+they can't take me."
+
+"Are you fond of your grandfather?" said the countess, trying to look
+into the child's heart.
+
+"My! doesn't he box my ears when he feels like it! but then, after
+all, he's such fun; he's such good company! He says he pays himself
+that way for having taught me to read and write."
+
+"Can you read?" asked the count.
+
+"Yah, I should think so, Monsieur le comte, and fine writing too--just
+as true as we've got that otter."
+
+"Read that," said the count, giving him a newspaper.
+
+"The Qu-o-ti-dienne," read Mouche, hesitating only three times.
+
+Every one, even the abbe, laughed.
+
+"Why do you make me read that newspaper?" cried Mouche, angrily. "My
+grandpa says it is made up to please the rich, and everybody knows
+later just what's in it."
+
+"The child is right, general," said Blondet; "and he makes me long to
+see my hoaxing friend again."
+
+Mouche understood perfectly that he was posing for the amusement of
+the company; the pupil of Pere Fourchon was worthy of his master, and
+he forthwith began to cry.
+
+"How can you tease a child with bare feet?" said the countess.
+
+"And who thinks it quite natural that his grandfather should recoup
+himself for his education by boxing his ears," said Blondet.
+
+"Tell me, my poor little fellow, have you really caught an otter?"
+
+"Yes, madame; as true as that you are the prettiest lady I have seen,
+or ever shall see," said the child, wiping his eyes.
+
+"Then show me the otter," said the general.
+
+"Oh M'sieur le comte, my grandpa has hidden it; but it was kicking
+still when we were at work at the rope-walk. Send for my grandpa,
+please; he wants to sell it to you himself."
+
+"Take him into the kitchen," said the countess to Francois, "and give
+him his breakfast, and send Charles to fetch Pere Fourchon. Find some
+shoes, and a pair of trousers and a waistcoat for the poor child;
+those who come here naked must go away clothed."
+
+"May God bless you, my beautiful lady," said Mouche, departing.
+"M'sieur le cure may feel quite sure that I'll keep the things and
+wear 'em fete-days, because you give 'em to me."
+
+Emile and Madame Montcornet looked at each other with some surprise,
+and seemed to say to the abbe, "The boy is not a fool!"
+
+"It is quite true, madame," said the abbe after the child had gone,
+"that we cannot reckon with Poverty. I believe it has hidden excuses
+of which God alone can judge,--physical excuses, often congenital;
+moral excuses, born in the character, produced by an order of things
+that are often the result of qualities which, unhappily for society,
+have no vent. Deeds of heroism performed upon the battle-field ought
+to teach us that the worst scoundrels may become heroes. But here in
+this place you are living under exceptional circumstances; and if your
+benevolence is not controlled by reflection and judgment you run the
+risk of supporting your enemies."
+
+"Our enemies?" exclaimed the countess.
+
+"Cruel enemies," said the general, gravely.
+
+"Pere Fourchon and his son-in-law Tonsard," said the abbe, "are the
+strength and the intelligence of the lower classes of this valley, who
+consult them on all occasions. The Machiavelism of these people is
+beyond belief. Ten peasants meeting in a tavern are the small change
+of great political questions."
+
+Just then Francois announced Monsieur Sibilet.
+
+"He is my minister of finance," said the general, smiling; "ask him
+in. He will explain to you the gravity of the situation," he added,
+looking at his wife and Blondet.
+
+"Because he has reasons of his own for not concealing it," said the
+cure, in a low tone.
+
+Blondet then beheld a personage of whom he had heard much ever since
+his arrival, and whom he desired to know, the land-steward of Les
+Aigues. He saw a man of medium height, about thirty years of age, with
+a sulky look and a discontented face, on which a smile sat ill.
+Beneath an anxious brow a pair of greenish eyes evaded the eyes of
+others, and so disguised their thought. Sibilet was dressed in a brown
+surtout coat, black trousers and waistcoat, and wore his hair long and
+flat to the head, which gave him a clerical look. His trousers barely
+concealed that he was knock-kneed. Though his pallid complexion and
+flabby flesh gave the impression of an unhealthy constitution, Sibilet
+was really robust. The tones of his voice, which were a little thick,
+harmonized with this unflattering exterior.
+
+Blondet gave a hasty look at the abbe, and the glance with which the
+young priest answered it showed the journalist that his own suspicions
+about the steward were certainties to the curate.
+
+"Did you not tell me, my dear Sibilet," said the general, "that you
+estimate the value of what the peasants steal from us at a quarter of
+the whole revenue?"
+
+"Much more than that, Monsieur le comte," replied the steward. "The
+poor about here get more from your property than the State exacts in
+taxes. A little scamp like Mouche can glean his two bushels a day. Old
+women, whom you would really think at their last gasp, become at the
+harvest and vintage times as active and healthy as girls. You can
+witness that phenomenon very soon," said Sibilet, addressing Blondet,
+"for the harvest, which was put back by the rains in July will begin
+next week, when they cut the rye. The gleaners must have a certificate
+of pauperism from the mayor of the district, and no district should
+allow any one to glean except the paupers; but the districts of one
+canton do glean in those of another without certificate. If we have
+sixty real paupers in our district, there are at least forty others
+who could support themselves if they were not so idle. Even persons
+who have a business leave it to glean in the fields and in the
+vineyards. All these people, taken together, gather in this
+neighborhood something like three hundred bushels a day; the harvest
+lasts two weeks, and that makes four thousand five hundred bushels in
+this district alone. The gleaning takes more from an estate than the
+taxes. As to the abuse of pasturage, it robs us of fully one-sixth the
+produce of the meadows; and as to that of the woods, it is
+incalculable,--they have actually come to cutting down six-year-old
+trees. The loss to you, Monsieur le comte, amounts to fully twenty-odd
+thousand francs a year."
+
+"Do you hear that, madame?" said the general to his wife.
+
+"Is it not exaggerated?" asked Madame de Montcornet.
+
+"No, madame, unfortunately not," said the abbe. "Poor Niseron, that
+old fellow with the white head, who combines the functions of bell-
+ringer, beadle, grave-digger, sexton, and clerk, in defiance of his
+republican opinions,--I mean the grandfather of the little Genevieve
+whom you placed with Madame Michaud--"
+
+"La Pechina," said Sibilet, interrupting the abbe.
+
+"Pechina!" said the countess, "whom do you mean?"
+
+"Madame la comtesse, when you met little Genevieve on the road in a
+miserable condition, you cried out in Italian, 'Piccina!' The word
+became a nickname, and is now corrupted all through the district into
+Pechina," said the abbe. "The poor girl comes to church with Madame
+Michaud and Madame Sibilet."
+
+"And she is none the better for it," said Sibilet, "for the others
+ill-treat her on account of her religion."
+
+"Well, that poor old man of seventy gleans, honestly, about a bushel
+and a half a day," continued the priest; "but his natural uprightness
+prevents him from selling his gleanings as others do,--he keeps them
+for his own consumption. Monsieur Langlume, your miller, grinds his
+flour gratis at my request, and my servant bakes his bread with mine."
+
+"I had quite forgotten my little protegee," said the countess,
+troubled at Sibilet's remark. "Your arrival," she added to Blondet,
+"has quite turned my head. But after breakfast I will take you to the
+gate of the Avonne and show you the living image of those women whom
+the painters of the fifteenth century delighted to perpetuate."
+
+The sound of Pere Fourchon's broken sabots was now heard; after
+depositing them in the antechamber, he was brought to the door of the
+dining-room by Francois. At a sign from the countess, Francois allowed
+him to pass in, followed by Mouche with his mouth full and carrying
+the otter, hanging by a string tied to its yellow paws, webbed like
+those of a palmiped. He cast upon his four superiors sitting at table,
+and also upon Sibilet, that look of mingled distrust and servility
+which serves as a veil to the thoughts of the peasantry; then he
+brandished his amphibian with a triumphant air.
+
+"Here it is!" he cried, addressing Blondet.
+
+"My otter!" returned the Parisian, "and well paid for."
+
+"Oh, my dear gentleman," replied Pere Fourchon, "yours got away; she
+is now in her burrow, and she won't come out, for she's a female,--
+this is a male; Mouche saw him coming just as you went away. As true
+as you live, as true as that Monsieur le comte covered himself and his
+cuirassiers with glory at Waterloo, the otter is mine, just as much as
+Les Aigues belongs to Monseigneur the general. But the otter is YOURS
+for twenty francs; if not I'll take it to the sub-prefect. If Monsieur
+Gourdon thinks it too dear, then I'll give you the preference; that's
+only fair, as we hunted together this morning!"
+
+"Twenty francs!" said Blondet. "In good French you can't call that
+GIVING the preference."
+
+"Hey, my dear gentleman," cried the old fellow. "Perhaps I don't know
+French, and I'll ask it in good Burgundian; as long as I get the
+money, I don't care, I'll talk Latin: 'latinus, latina, latinum'!
+Besides, twenty francs is what you promised me this morning. My
+children have already stolen the silver you gave me; I wept about it,
+coming along,--ask Charles if I didn't. Not that I'd arrest 'em for
+the value of ten francs and have 'em up before the judge, no! But just
+as soon as I earn a few pennies, they make me drink and get 'em out of
+me. Ah! it is hard, hard to be reduced to go and get my wine
+elsewhere. But just see what children are these days! That's what we
+got by the Revolution; it is all for the children now-a-days, and
+parents are suppressed. I'm bringing up Mouche on another tack; he
+loves me, the little scamp,"--giving his grandson a poke.
+
+"It seems to me you are making him a little thief, like all the rest,"
+said Sibilet; "he never lies down at night without some sin on his
+conscience."
+
+"Ha! Monsieur Sibilet, his conscience is as clean as yours any day!
+Poor child! what can he steal? A little grass! that's better than
+throttling a man! He don't know mathematics like you, nor subtraction,
+nor addition, nor multiplication,--you are very unjust to us, that you
+are! You call us a nest of brigands, but you are the cause of the
+misunderstandings between our good landlord here, who is a worthy man,
+and the rest of us, who are all worthy men,--there ain't an honester
+part of the country than this. Come, what do you mean? do I own
+property? don't I go half-naked, and Mouche too? Fine sheets we slept
+in, washed by the dew every morning! and unless you want the air we
+breathe and the sunshine we drink, I should like to know what we have
+that you can take away from us! The rich folks rob as they sit in
+their chimney-corners,--and more profitably, too, than by picking up a
+few sticks in the woods. I don't see no game-keepers or patrols after
+Monsieur Gaubertin, who came here as naked as a worm and is now worth
+his millions. It's easy said, 'Robbers!' Here's fifteen years that old
+Guerbet, the tax-gatherer at Soulanges, carries his money along the
+roads by the dead of night, and nobody ever took a farthing from him;
+is that like a land of robbers? has robbery made us rich? Show me
+which of us two, your class or mine, live the idlest lives and have
+the most to live on without earning it."
+
+"If you were to work," said the abbe, "you would have property. God
+blesses labor."
+
+"I don't want to contradict you, M'sieur l'abbe, for you are wiser
+than I, and perhaps you'll know how to explain something that puzzles
+me. Now see, here I am, ain't I?--that drunken, lazy, idle, good-for-
+nothing old Fourchon, who had an education and was a farmer, and got
+down in the mud and never got up again,--well, what difference is
+there between me and that honest and worthy old Niseron, seventy years
+old (and that's my age) who has dug the soil for sixty years and got
+up every day before it was light to go to his work, and has made
+himself an iron body and a fine soul? Well, isn't he as bad off as I
+am? His little granddaughter, Pechina, is at service with Madame
+Michaud, whereas my little Mouche is as free as air. So that poor good
+man gets rewarded for his virtues in exactly the same way that I get
+punished for my vices. He don't know what a glass of good wine is,
+he's as sober as an apostle, he buries the dead, and I--I play for the
+living to dance. He is always in a peck o' troubles, while I slip
+along in a devil-may-care way. We have come along about even in life;
+we've got the same snow on our heads, the same funds in our pockets,
+and I supply him with rope to ring his bell. He's a republican and I'm
+not even a publican,--that's all the difference as far as I can see. A
+peasant may do good or do evil (according to your ideas) and he'll go
+out of the world just as he came into it, in rags; while you wear the
+fine clothes."
+
+No one interrupted Pere Fourchon, who seemed to owe his eloquence to
+his potations. At first Sibilet tried to cut him short, but desisted
+at a sign from Blondet. The abbe, the general, and the countess, all
+understood from the expression of the writer's eye that he wanted to
+study the question of pauperism from life, and perhaps take his
+revenge on Pere Fourchon.
+
+"What sort of education are you giving Mouche?" asked Blondet. "Do you
+expect to make him any better than your daughters?"
+
+"Does he ever speak to him of God?" said the priest.
+
+"Oh, no, no! Monsieur le cure, I don't tell him to fear God, but men.
+God is good; he has promised us poor folks, so you say, the kingdom of
+heaven, because the rich people keep the earth to themselves. I tell
+him: 'Mouche! fear the prison, and keep out of it,--for that's the way
+to the scaffold. Don't steal anything, make people give it to you.
+Theft leads to murder, and murder brings down the justice of men. The
+razor of justice,--THAT'S what you've got to fear; it lets the rich
+sleep easy and keeps the poor awake. Learn to read. Education will
+teach you ways to grab money under cover of the law, like that fine
+Monsieur Gaubertin; why, you can even be a land-steward like Monsieur
+Sibilet here, who gets his rations out of Monsieur le comte. The thing
+to do is to keep well with the rich, and pick up the crumbs that fall
+from their tables.' That's what I call giving him a good, solid
+education; and you'll always find the little rascal on the side of the
+law,--he'll be a good citizen and take care of me."
+
+"What do you mean to make of him?" asked Blondet.
+
+"A servant, to begin with," returned Fourchon, "because then he'll see
+his masters close by, and learn something; he'll complete his
+education, I'll warrant you. Good example will be a fortune to him,
+with the law on his side like the rest of you. If M'sieur le comte
+would only take him in his stables and let him learn to groom the
+horses, the boy will be mighty pleased, for though I've taught him to
+fear men, he don't fear animals."
+
+"You are a clever fellow, Pere Fourchon," said Blondet; "you know what
+you are talking about, and there's sense in what you say."
+
+"Oh, sense? no; I left my sense at the Grand-I-Vert when I lost those
+silver pieces."
+
+"How is it that a man of your capacity should have dropped so low? As
+things are now, a peasant can only blame himself for his poverty; he
+is a free man, and he can become a rich one. It is not as it used to
+be. If a peasant lays by his money, he can always buy a bit of land
+and become his own master."
+
+"I've seen the olden time and I've seen the new, my dear wise
+gentleman," said Fourchon; "the sign over the door has changed, that's
+true, but the wine is the same,--to-day is the younger brother of
+yesterday, that's all. Put that in your newspaper! Are we poor folks
+free? We still belong to the same parish, and its lord is always
+there,--I call him Toil. The hoe, our sole property, has never left
+our hands. Let it be the old lords or the present taxes which take the
+best of our earnings, the fact remains that we sweat our lives out in
+toil."
+
+"But you could undertake a business, and try to make your fortune,"
+said Blondet.
+
+"Try to make my fortune! And where shall I try? If I wish to leave my
+own province, I must get a passport, and that costs forty sous. Here's
+forty years that I've never had a slut of a forty-sous piece jingling
+against another in my pocket. If you want to travel you need as many
+crowns as there are villages, and there are mighty few Fourchons who
+have enough to get to six of 'em. It is only the draft that gives us a
+chance to get away. And what good does the army do us? The colonels
+live by the solider, just as the rich folks live by the peasant; and
+out of every hundred of 'em you won't find more than one of our breed.
+It is just as it is the world over, one rolling in riches, for a
+hundred down in the mud. Why are we in the mud? Ask God and the
+usurers. The best we can do is to stay in our own parts, where we are
+penned like sheep by the force of circumstances, as our fathers were
+by the rule of the lords. As for me, what do I care what shackles they
+are that keep me here? let it be the law of public necessity or the
+tyranny of the old lords, it is all the same; we are condemned to dig
+the soil forever. There, where we are born, there we dig it, that
+earth! and spade it, and manure it, and delve in it, for you who are
+born rich just as we are born poor. The masses will always be what
+they are, and stay what they are. The number of us who manage to rise
+is nothing like the number of you who topple down! We know that well
+enough, if we have no education! You mustn't be after us with your
+sheriff all the time,--not if you're wise. We let you alone, and you
+must let us alone. If not, and things get worse, you'll have to feed
+us in your prisons, where we'd be much better off than in our homes.
+You want to remain our masters, and we shall always be enemies, just
+as we were thirty years ago. You have everything, we have nothing; you
+can't expect we should ever be friends."
+
+"That's what I call a declaration of war," said the general.
+
+"Monseigneur," retorted Fourchon, "when Les Aigues belonged to that
+poor Madame (God keep her soul and forgive her the sins of her youth!)
+we were happy. SHE let us get our food from the fields and our fuel
+from the forest; and was she any the poorer for it? And you, who are
+at least as rich as she, you hunt us like wild beasts, neither more
+nor less, and drag the poor before the courts. Well, evil will come of
+it! you'll be the cause of some great calamity. Haven't I just seen
+your keeper, that shuffling Vatel, half kill a poor old woman for a
+stick of wood? It is such fellows as that who make you an enemy to the
+poor; and the talk is very bitter against you. They curse you every
+bit as hard as they used to bless the late Madame. The curse of the
+poor, monseigneur, is a seed that grows,--grows taller than your tall
+oaks, and oak-wood builds the scaffold. Nobody here tells you the
+truth; and here it is, yes, the truth! I expect to die before long,
+and I risk very little in telling it to you, the TRUTH! I, who play
+for the peasants to dance at the great fetes at Soulanges, I heed what
+the people say. Well, they're all against you; and they'll make it
+impossible for you to stay here. If that damned Michaud of yours
+doesn't change, they'll force you to change him. There! that
+information AND the otter are worth twenty francs, and more too."
+
+As the old fellow uttered the last words a man's step was heard, and
+the individual just threatened by Fourchon entered unannounced. It was
+easy to see from the glance he threw at the old man that the threat
+had reached his ears, and all Fourchon's insolence sank in a moment.
+The look produced precisely the same effect upon him that the eye of a
+policeman produces on a thief. Fourchon knew he was wrong, and that
+Michaud might very well accuse him of saying these things merely to
+terrify the inhabitants of Les Aigues.
+
+"This is the minister of war," said the general to Blondet, nodding at
+Michaud.
+
+"Pardon me, madame, for having entered without asking if you were
+willing to receive me," said the newcomer to the countess; "but I have
+urgent reasons for speaking to the general at once."
+
+Michaud, as he said this, took notice of Sibilet, whose expression of
+keen delight in Fourchon's daring words was not seen by the four
+persons seated at the table, because they were so preoccupied by the
+old man; whereas Michaud, who for secret reasons watched Sibilet
+constantly, was struck with his air and manner.
+
+"He has earned his twenty francs, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet;
+"the otter is fully worth it."
+
+"Give him twenty francs," said the general to the footman.
+
+"Do you mean to take my otter away from me?" said Blondet to the
+general.
+
+"I shall have it stuffed," replied the latter.
+
+"Ah! but that good gentleman said I might keep the skin," cried
+Fourchon.
+
+"Well, then," exclaimed the countess, hastily, "you shall have five
+francs more for the skin; but go away now."
+
+The powerful odor emitted by the pair made the dining-room so horribly
+offensive that Madame de Montcornet, whose senses were very delicate,
+would have been forced to leave the room if Fourchon and Mouche had
+remained. To this circumstance the old man was indebted for his
+twenty-five francs. He left the room with a timid glance at Michaud,
+making him an interminable series of bows.
+
+"What I was saying to monseigneur, Monsieur Michaud," he added, "was
+really for your good."
+
+"Or for that of those who pay you," replied Michaud, with a searching
+look.
+
+"When you have served the coffee, leave the room," said the general to
+the servants, "and see that the doors are shut."
+
+Blondet, who had not yet seen the bailiff of Les Aigues, was
+conscious, as he now saw him, of a totally different impression from
+that conveyed by Sibilet. Just as the steward inspired distrust and
+repulsion, so Michaud commanded respect and confidence. The first
+attraction of his presence was a happy face, of a fine oval, pure in
+outline, in which the nose bore part,--a regularity which is lacking
+in the majority of French faces. Though the features were correct in
+drawing, they were not without expression, due, perhaps, to the
+harmonious coloring of the warm brown and ochre tints, indicative of
+physical health and strength. The clear brown eyes, which were bright
+and piercing, kept no reserves in the expression of his thought; they
+looked straight into the eyes of others. The broad white forehead was
+thrown still further into relief by his abundant black hair. Honesty,
+decision, and a saintly serenity were the animating points of this
+noble face, where a few deep lines upon the brow were the result of
+the man's military career. Doubt and suspicion could there be read the
+moment they had entered his mind. His figure, like that of all men
+selected for the elite of the cavalry service, though shapely and
+elegant, was vigorously built. Michaud, who wore moustachios,
+whiskers, and a chin beard, recalled that martial type of face which a
+deluge of patriotic paintings and engravings came very near to making
+ridiculous. This type had the defect of being common in the French
+army; perhaps the continuance of the same emotions, the same camp
+sufferings from which none were exempt, neither high nor low, and more
+especially the same efforts of officers and men upon the battle-
+fields, may have contributed to produce this uniformity of
+countenance. Michaud, who was dressed in dark blue cloth, still wore
+the black satin stock and high boots of a soldier, which increased the
+slight stiffness and rigidity of his bearing. The shoulders sloped,
+the chest expanded, as though the man were still under arms. The red
+ribbon of the Legion of honor was in his buttonhole. In short, to give
+a last touch in one word about the moral qualities beneath this purely
+physical presentment, it may be said that while the steward, from the
+time he first entered upon his functions, never failed to call his
+master "Monsieur le comte," Michaud never addressed him otherwise than
+as "General."
+
+Blondet exchanged another look with the Abbe Brossette, which meant,
+"What a contrast!" as he signed to him to observe the two men. Then,
+as if to know whether the character and mind and speech of the bailiff
+harmonized with his form and countenance, he turned to Michaud and
+said:--
+
+"I was out early this morning, and found your under-keepers still
+sleeping."
+
+"At what hour?" said the late soldier, anxiously.
+
+"Half-past seven."
+
+Michaud gave a half-roguish glance at the general.
+
+"By what gate did monsieur leave the park?" he asked.
+
+"By the gate of Conches. The keeper, in his night-shirt, looked at me
+through the window," replied Blondet.
+
+"Gaillard had probably just gone to bed," answered Michaud. "You said
+you were out early, and I thought you meant day-break. If my man were
+at home at that time, he must have been ill; but at half-past seven he
+was sure to be in bed. We are up all night," added Michaud, after a
+slight pause, replying to a surprised look on the countess's face,
+"but our watchfulness is often wasted. You have just given twenty-five
+francs to a man who, not an hour ago, was quietly helping to hide the
+traces of a robbery committed upon you this very morning. I came to
+speak to you about it, general, when you have finished breakfast; for
+something will have to be done."
+
+"You are always for maintaining the right, my dear Michaud, and
+'summum jus, summum injuria.' If you are not more tolerant, you will
+get into trouble, so Sibilet here tells me. I wish you could have
+heard Pere Fourchon just now; the wine he had been drinking made him
+speak out."
+
+"He frightened me," said the countess.
+
+"He said nothing I did not know long ago," replied the general.
+
+"Oh! the rascal wasn't drunk; he was playing a part; for whose benefit
+I leave you to guess. Perhaps you know?" returned Michaud, fixing an
+eye on Sibilet which caused the latter to turn red.
+
+"O rus!" cried Blondet, with another look at the abbe.
+
+"But these poor creatures suffer," said the countess, "and there is a
+great deal of truth in what old Fourchon has just screamed at us,--for
+I cannot call it speaking."
+
+"Madame," replied Michaud, "do you suppose that for fourteen years the
+soldiers of the Emperor slept on a bed of roses? My general is a
+count, he is a grand officer of the Legion of honor, he has had
+perquisites and endowments given to him; am I jealous of him, I who
+fought as he did? Do I wish to cheat him of his glory, to steal his
+perquisites, to deny him the honor due to his rank? The peasant should
+obey as the soldier obeys; he should feel the loyalty of a soldier,
+his respect for acquired rights, and strive to become an officer
+himself, honorably, by labor and not by theft. The sabre and the
+plough are twins; though the soldier has something more than the
+peasant,--he has death hanging over him at any minute."
+
+"I want to say that from the pulpit," cried the abbe.
+
+"Tolerant!" continued the keeper, replying to the general's remark
+about Sibilet, "I would tolerate a loss of ten per cent upon the gross
+returns of Les Aigues; but as things are now thirty per cent is what
+you lose, general; and, if Monsieur Sibilet's accounts show it, I
+don't understand his tolerance, for he benevolently gives up a
+thousand or twelve hundred francs a year."
+
+"My dear Monsieur Michaud," replied Sibilet, in a snappish tone, "I
+have told Monsieur le comte that I would rather lose twelve hundred
+francs a year than my life. Think of it seriously; I have warned you
+often enough."
+
+"Life!" exclaimed the countess; "you can't mean that anybody's life is
+in danger?"
+
+"Don't let us argue about state affairs here," said the general,
+laughing. "All this, my dear, merely means that Sibilet, in his
+capacity of financier, is timid and cowardly, while the minister of
+war is brave and, like his general, fears nothing."
+
+"Call me prudent, Monsieur le comte," interposed Sibilet.
+
+"Well, well!" cried Blondet, laughing, "so here we are, like Cooper's
+heroes in the forests of America, in the midst of sieges and savages."
+
+"Come, gentlemen, it is your business to govern without letting me
+hear the wheels of the administration," said Madame de Montcornet.
+
+"Ah! madame," said the cure, "but it may be right that you should know
+the toil from which those pretty caps you wear are derived."
+
+"Well, then, I can go without them," replied the countess, laughing.
+"I will be very respectful to a twenty-franc piece, and grow as
+miserly as the country people themselves. Come, my dear abbe, give me
+your arm. Leave the general with his two ministers, and let us go to
+the gate of the Avonne to see Madame Michaud, for I have not had time
+since my arrival to pay her a visit, and I want to inquire about my
+little protegee."
+
+And the pretty woman, already forgetting the rags and tatters of
+Mouche and Fourchon, and their eyes full of hatred, and Sibilet's
+warnings, went to have herself made ready for the walk.
+
+The abbe and Blondet obeyed the behest of the mistress of the house
+and followed her from the dining-room, waiting till she was ready on
+the terrace before the chateau.
+
+"What do you think of all this?" said Blondet to the abbe.
+
+"I am a pariah; they dog me as they would a common enemy. I am forced
+to keep my eyes and ears perpetually open to escape the traps they are
+constantly laying to get me out of the place," replied the abbe. "I am
+even doubtful, between ourselves, as to whether they will not shoot
+me."
+
+"Why do you stay?" said Blondet.
+
+"We can't desert God's cause any more than that of an emperor,"
+replied the priest, with a simplicity that affected Blondet. He took
+the abbe's hand and shook it cordially.
+
+"You see how it is, therefore, that I know very little of the plots
+that are going on," continued the abbe. "Still, I know enough to feel
+sure that the general is under what in Artois and in Belgium is called
+an 'evil grudge.'"
+
+A few words are here necessary about the curate of Blangy.
+
+This priest, the fourth son of a worthy middle-class family of Autun,
+was an intelligent man carrying his head high in his collar. Small and
+slight, he redeemed his rather puny appearance by the precise and
+carefully dressed air that belongs to Burgundians. He accepted the
+second-rate post of Blangy out of pure devotion, for his religious
+convictions were joined to political opinions that were equally
+strong. There was something of the priest of the olden time about him;
+he held to the Church and to the clergy passionately; saw the bearings
+of things, and no selfishness marred his one ambition, which was TO
+SERVE. That was his motto,--to serve the Church and the monarchy
+wherever it was most threatened; to serve in the lowest rank like a
+soldier who feels that he is destined, sooner or later, to attain
+command through courage and the resolve to do his duty. He made no
+compromises with his vows of chastity, and poverty, and obedience; he
+fulfilled them, as he did the other duties of his position, with that
+simplicity and cheerful good-humor which are the sure indications of
+an honest heart, constrained to do right by natural impulses as much
+as by the power and consistency of religious convictions.
+
+The priest had seen at first sight Blondet's attachment to the
+countess; he saw that between a Troisville and a monarchical
+journalist he could safely show himself to be a man of broad
+intelligence, because his calling was certain to be respected. He
+usually came to the chateau very evening to make the fourth at a game
+of whist. The journalist, able to recognize the abbe's real merits,
+showed him so much deference that the pair grew into sympathy with
+each other; as usually happens when men of intelligence meet their
+equals, or, if you prefer it, the ears that are able to hear them.
+Swords are fond of their scabbards.
+
+"But to what do you attribute this state of things, Monsieur l'abbe,
+you who are able, through your disinterestedness, to look over the
+heads of things?"
+
+"I shall not talk platitudes after such a flattering speech as that,"
+said the abbe, smiling. "What is going on in this valley is spreading
+more or less throughout France; it is the outcome of the hopes which
+the upheaval of 1789 caused to infiltrate, if I may use that
+expression, the minds of the peasantry, the sons of the soil. The
+Revolution affected certain localities more than others. This side of
+Burgundy, nearest to Paris, is one of those places where the
+revolutionary ideas spread like the overrunning of the Franks by the
+Gauls. Historically, the peasants are still on the morrow of the
+Jacquerie; that defeat is burnt in upon their brain. They have long
+forgotten the facts which have now passed into the condition of an
+instinctive idea. That idea is bred in the peasant blood, just as the
+idea of superiority was once bred in noble blood. The revolution of
+1789 was the retaliation of the vanquished. The peasants then set foot
+in possession of the soil which the feudal law had denied them for
+over twelve hundred years. Hence their desire for land, which they now
+cut up among themselves until actually they divide a furrow into two
+parts; which, by the bye, often hinders or prevents the collection of
+taxes, for the value of such fractions of property is not sufficient
+to pay the legal costs of recovering them."
+
+"Very true, for the obstinacy of the small owners--their
+aggressiveness, if you choose--on this point is so great that in at
+least one thousand cantons of the three thousand of French territory,
+it is impossible for a rich man to buy an inch of land from a
+peasant," said Blondet, interrupting the abbe. "The peasants who are
+willing to divide up their scraps of land among themselves would not
+sell a fraction on any condition or at any price to the middle
+classes. The more money the rich man offers, the more the vague
+uneasiness of the peasant increases. Legal dispossession alone is able
+to bring the landed property of the peasant into the market. Many
+persons have noticed this fact without being able to find a reason for
+it."
+
+"This is the reason," said the abbe, rightly believing that a pause
+with Blondet was equivalent to a question: "twelve centuries have done
+nothing for a caste whom the historic spectacle of civilization has
+never yet diverted from its one predominating thought,--a caste which
+still wears proudly the broad-brimmed hat of its masters, ever since
+an abandoned fashion placed it upon their heads. That all-pervading
+thought, the roots of which are in the bowels of the people, and which
+attached them so vehemently to Napoleon (who was personally less to
+them than he thought he was) and which explains the miracle of his
+return in 1815,--that desire for land is the sole motive power of the
+peasant's being. In the eyes of the masses Napoleon, ever one with
+them through his million of soldiers, is still the king born of the
+Revolution; the man who gave them possession of the soil and sold to
+them the national domains. His anointing was saturated with that
+idea."
+
+"An idea to which 1814 dealt a blow, an idea which monarchy should
+hold sacred," said Blondet, quickly; "for the people may some day find
+on the steps of the throne a prince whose father bequeathed to him the
+head of Louis XVI. as an heirloom."
+
+"Here is madame; don't say any more," said the abbe, in a low voice.
+"Fourchon has frightened her; and it is very desirable to keep her
+here in the interests of religion and of the throne, and, indeed, in
+those of the people themselves."
+
+Michaud, the bailiff of Les Aigues, had come to the chateau in
+consequence of the assault on Vatel's eyes. But before we relate the
+consultation which then and there took place, the chain of events
+requires a succinct account of the circumstances under which the
+general purchased Les Aigues, the serious causes which led to the
+appointment of Sibilet as steward of that magnificent property, and
+the reasons why Michaud was made bailiff, with all the other
+antecedents to which were due the tension of the minds of all, and the
+fears expressed by Sibilet.
+
+This rapid summary will have the merit of introducing some of the
+principal actors in this drama, and of exhibiting their individual
+interests; we shall thus be enabled to show the dangers which
+surrounded the General comte de Montcornet at the moment when this
+history opens.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+A TALE OF THIEVES
+
+When Mademoiselle Laguerre first visited her estate, in 1791, she took
+as steward the son of the ex-bailiff of Soulanges, named Gaubertin.
+The little town of Soulanges, at present nothing more than the chief
+town of a canton, was once the capital of a considerable county, in
+the days when the House of Burgundy made war upon France. Ville-aux-
+Fayes, now the seat of the sub-prefecture, then a mere fief, was a
+dependency of Soulanges, like Les Aigues, Ronquerolles, Cerneux,
+Conches, and a score of other parishes. The Soulanges have remained
+counts, whereas the Ronquerolles are now marquises by the will of that
+power, called the Court, which made the son of Captain du Plessis duke
+over the heads of the first families of the Conquest. All of which
+serves to prove that towns, like families, are variable in their
+destiny.
+
+Gaubertin, a young man without property of any kind, succeeded a
+steward enriched by a management of thirty years, who preferred to
+become a partner in the famous firm of Minoret rather than continue to
+administer Les Aigues. In his own interests he introduced into his
+place as land-steward Francois Gaubertin, his accountant for five
+years, whom he now relied on to cover his retreat, and who, out of
+gratitude for his instructions, promised to obtain for him a release
+in full of all claims from Madame Laguerre, who by this time was
+terrified at the Revolution. Gaubertin's father, the attorney-general
+of the department, henceforth protected the timid woman. This
+provincial Fouquier-Tinville raised a false alarm of danger in the
+mind of the opera-divinity on the ground of her former relations to
+the aristocracy, so as to give his son the equally false credit of
+saving her life; on the strength of which Gaubertin the younger
+obtained very easily the release of his predecessor. Mademoiselle
+Laguerre then made Francois Gaubertin her prime minister, as much
+through policy as from gratitude. The late steward had not spoiled
+her. He sent her, every year, about thirty thousand francs, though Les
+Aigues brought in at that time at least forty thousand. The
+unsuspecting opera-singer was therefore much delighted when the new
+steward Gaubertin promised her thirty-six thousand.
+
+To explain the present fortune of the land-steward of Les Aigues
+before the judgment-seat of probability, it is necessary to state its
+beginnings. Pushed by his father's influence, he became mayor of
+Blangy. Thus he was able, contrary to law, to make the debtors pay in
+coin, by "terrorizing" (a phrase of the day) such of them as might, in
+his opinion, be subjected to the crushing demands of the Republic. He
+himself paid the citizens in assignats as long as the system of paper
+money lasted,--a system which, if it did not make the nation
+prosperous, at least made the fortunes of private individuals. From
+1793 to 1795, that is, for three years, Francois Gaubertin wrung one
+hundred and fifty thousand francs out of Les Aigues, with which he
+speculated on the stock-market in Paris. With her purse full of
+assignats Mademoiselle was actually obliged to obtain ready money from
+her diamonds, now useless to her. She gave them to Gaubertin, who sold
+them, and faithfully returned to her their full price. This proof of
+honesty touched her heart; henceforth she believed in Gaubertin as she
+did in Piccini.
+
+In 1796, at the time of his marriage with the citoyenne Isaure
+Mouchon, daughter of an old "conventional," a friend of his father,
+Gaubertin possessed about three hundred and fifty thousand francs in
+money. As the Directory seemed to him likely to last, he determined,
+before marrying, to have the accounts of his five years' stewardship
+ratified by Mademoiselle, under pretext of a new departure.
+
+"I am to be the head of a family," he said to her; "you know the
+reputation of land-stewards; my father-in-law is a republican of Roman
+austerity, and a man of influence as well; I want to prove to him that
+I am as upright as he."
+
+Mademoiselle Laguerre accepted his accounts at once in very flattering
+terms.
+
+In those earlier days the steward had endeavored, in order to win the
+confidence of Madame des Aigues (as Mademoiselle was then called) to
+repress the depredations of the peasantry; fearing, and not without
+reason, that the revenues would suffer too severely, and that his
+private bonus from the buyers of the timber would sensibly diminish.
+But in those days the sovereign people felt the soil was their own
+everywhere; Madame was afraid of the surrounding kings and told her
+Richelieu that the first desire of her soul was to die in peace. The
+revenues of the late singer were so far in excess of her expenses that
+she allowed all the worst, and, as it proved, fatal precedents to be
+established. To avoid a lawsuit, she allowed the neighbors to encroach
+upon her land. Knowing that the park walls were sufficient protection,
+she did not fear any interruption of her personal comfort, and cared
+for nothing but her peaceful existence, true philosopher that she was!
+A few thousand a year more or less, the indemnities exacted by the
+wood-merchants for the damages committed by the peasants,--what were
+they to a careless and extravagant Opera-girl, who had gained her
+hundred thousand francs a year at the cost of pleasure only, and who
+had just submitted, without a word of remonstrance, to a reduction of
+two thirds of an income of sixty thousand francs?
+
+"Dear me!" she said, in the easy tone of the wantons of the old time,
+"people must live, even if they are republicans."
+
+The terrible Mademoiselle Cochet, her maid and female vizier, had
+tried to enlighten her mistress when she saw the ascendency Gaubertin
+was obtaining over one whom he began by calling "Madame" in defiance
+of the revolutionary laws about equality; but Gaubertin, in his turn,
+enlightened Mademoiselle Cochet by showing her a so-called
+denunciation sent to his father, the prosecuting attorney, in which
+she was vehemently accused of corresponding with Pitt and Coburg. From
+that time forward the two powers went on shares--shares a la
+Montgomery. Cochet praised Gaubertin to Madame, and Gaubertin praised
+Cochet. The waiting-maid had already made her own bed, and knew she
+was down for sixty thousand francs in the will. Madame could not do
+without Cochet, to whom she was accustomed. The woman knew the secrets
+of dear mistress's toilet; she alone could put dear mistress to sleep
+at night with her gossip, and get her up in the morning with her
+flattery; to the day of dear mistress's death the maid never could see
+the slightest change in her, and when dear mistress lay in her coffin,
+she doubtless thought she had never seen her looking so well.
+
+The annual pickings of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet, their wages
+and perquisites, became so large that the most affectionate relative
+could not possibly have been more devoted than they to their kindly
+mistress. There is really no describing how a swindler cossets his
+dupe. A mother is not so tender nor so solicitous for a beloved
+daughter as the practitioner of tartuferie for his milch cow. What
+brilliant success attends the performance of Tartufe behind the closed
+doors of a home! It is worth more than friendship. Moliere died too
+soon; he would otherwise have shown us the misery of Orgon, wearied by
+his family, harassed by his children, regretting the blandishments of
+Tartufe, and thinking to himself, "Ah, those were the good times!"
+
+During the last eight years of her life the mistress of Les Aigues
+received only thirty thousand francs of the fifty thousand really
+yielded by the estate. Gaubertin had reached the same administrative
+results as his predecessor, though farm rents and territorial products
+were notably increased between 1791 and 1815,--not to speak of
+Madame's continual purchases. But Gaubertin's fixed idea of acquiring
+Les Aigues at the old lady's death led him to depreciate the value of
+the magnificent estate in the matter of its ostensible revenues.
+Mademoiselle Cochet, a sharer in the scheme, was also to share the
+profits. As the ex-divinity in her declining years received an income
+of twenty thousand francs from the Funds called consolidated (how
+readily the tongue of politics can jest!), and with difficulty spent
+the said sum yearly, she was much surprised at the annual purchases
+made by her steward to use up the accumulating revenues, remembering
+how in former times she had always drawn them in advance. The result
+of having few wants in her old age seemed, to her mind, a proof of the
+honesty and uprightness of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet.
+
+"Two pearls!" she said to the persons who came to see her.
+
+Gaubertin kept his accounts with apparent honesty. He entered all
+rentals duly. Everything that could strike the feeble mind of the late
+singer, so far as arithmetic went, was clear and precise. The steward
+took his commission on all disbursements,--on the costs of working the
+estate, on rentals made, on suits brought, on work done, on repairs of
+every kind,--details which Madame never dreamed of verifying, and for
+which he sometimes charged twice over by collusion with the
+contractors, whose silence was bought by permission to charge the
+highest prices. These methods of dealing conciliated public opinion in
+favor of Gaubertin, while Madame's praise was on every lip; for
+besides the payments she disbursed for work, she gave away large sums
+of money in alms.
+
+"May God preserve her, the dear lady!" was heard on all sides.
+
+The truth was, everybody got something out of her, either indirectly
+or as a downright gift. In reprisals, as it were, of her youth the old
+actress was pillaged; so discreetly pillaged, however, that those who
+throve upon her kept their depredations within certain limits lest
+even her eyes might be opened and she should sell Les Aigues and
+return to Paris.
+
+This system of "pickings" was, alas! the cause of Paul-Louis Carter's
+assassination; he committed the mistake of advertising the sale of his
+estate and allowing it to be known that he should take away his wife,
+on whom a number of the Tonsards of Lorraine were battening. Fearing
+to lose Madame des Aigues, the marauders on the estate forbore to cut
+the young trees, unless pushed to extremities by finding no branches
+within reach of shears fastened to long poles. In the interests of
+robbery, they did as little harm as they could; although, during the
+last years of Madame's life, the habit of cutting wood became more and
+more barefaced. On certain clear nights not less than two hundred
+bundles were taken. As to the gleaning of fields and vineyards, Les
+Aigues lost, as Sibilet had pointed out, not less than one quarter of
+its products.
+
+Madame des Aigues had forbidden Cochet to marry during her lifetime,
+with the selfishness often shown in all countries by a mistress to a
+maid; which is not more irrational than the mania for keeping
+possession, until our last gasp, of property that is utterly useless
+to our material comfort, at the risk of being poisoned by impatient
+heirs. Twenty days after the old lady's burial Mademoiselle Cochet
+married the brigadier of the gendarmerie of Soulanges, named Soudry, a
+handsome man, forty-two years of age, who, ever since 1800 (in which
+year the gendarmerie was formed) had come every day to Les Aigues to
+see the waiting-maid, and dined with her at least three times a week
+at the Gaubertins'.
+
+During Madame's lifetime dinner was served to her and to her company
+by themselves. Neither Cochet nor Gaubertin, in spite of their great
+familiarity with the mistress, was ever admitted to her table; the
+leading lady of the Academie Royale retained, to her last hour, her
+sense of etiquette, her style of dress, her rouge and her heeled
+slippers, her carriage, her servants, and the majesty of her
+deportment. A divinity at the Opera, a divinity within her range of
+Parisian social life, she continued a divinity in the country
+solitudes, where her memory is still worshipped, and still holds its
+own against that of the old monarchy in the minds of the "best
+society" of Soulanges.
+
+Soudry, who had paid his addresses to Mademoiselle Cochet from the
+time he first came into the neighborhood, owned the finest house in
+Soulanges, an income of six thousand francs, and the prospect of a
+retiring pension whenever he should quit the service. As soon as
+Cochet became Madame Soudry she was treated with great consideration
+in the town. Though she kept the strictest secrecy as to the amount of
+her savings,--which were intrusted, like those of Gaubertin, to the
+commissary of wine-merchants of the department in Paris, a certain
+Leclercq, a native of Soulanges, to whom Gaubertin supplied funds as
+sleeping partner in his business,--public opinion credited the former
+waiting-maid with one of the largest fortunes in the little town of
+twelve hundred inhabitants.
+
+To the great astonishment of every one, Monsieur and Madame Soudry
+acknowledged as legitimate, in their marriage contract, a natural son
+of the gendarme, to whom, in future, Madame Soudry's fortune was to
+descend. At the time when this son was legally supplied with a mother,
+he had just ended his law studies in Paris and was about to enter into
+practice, with the intention of fitting himself for the magistracy.
+
+It is scarcely necessary to remark that a mutual understanding of
+twenty years had produced the closest intimacy between the families of
+Gaubertin and Soudry. Both reciprocally declared themselves, to the
+end of their days, "urbi et orbi," to be the most upright and
+honorable persons in all France. Such community of interests, based on
+the mutual knowledge of the secret spots on the white garment of
+conscience, is one of the ties least recognized and hardest to untie
+in this low world. You who read this social drama, have you never felt
+a conviction as to two persons which has led you to say to yourself,
+in order to explain the continuance of a faithful devotion which made
+your own egotism blush, "They must surely have committed some crime
+together"?
+
+After an administration of twenty-five years, Gaubertin, the land-
+steward, found himself in possession of six hundred thousand francs in
+money, and Cochet had accumulated nearly two hundred and fifty
+thousand. The rapid and constant turning over and over of their funds
+in the hands of Leclercq and Company (on the quai Bethume, Ile Saint
+Louis, rivals of the famous house of Grandet) was a great assistance
+to the fortunes of all parties. On the death of Mademoiselle Laguerre,
+Jenny, the steward's eldest daughter was asked in marriage by
+Leclercq. Gaubertin expected at that time to become owner of Les
+Aigues by means of a plot laid in the private office of Lupin, the
+notary, whom the steward had set up and maintained in business within
+the last twelve years.
+
+Lupin, a son of the former steward of the estate of Soulanges, had
+lent himself to various slight peculations,--investments at fifty per
+cent below par, notices published surreptitiously, and all the other
+manoeuvres, unhappily common in the provinces, to wrap a mantle, as
+the saying is, over the clandestine manipulations of property. Lately
+a company has been formed in Paris, so they say, to levy contributions
+upon such plotters under a threat of outbidding them. But in 1816
+France was not, as it is now, lighted by a flaming publicity; the
+accomplices might safely count on dividing Les Aigues among them, that
+is, between Cochet, the notary, and Gaubertin, the latter of whom
+reserved to himself, "in petto," the intention of buying the others
+out for a sum down, as soon as the property fairly stood in his own
+name. The lawyer employed by the notary to manage the sale of the
+estate was under personal obligations to Gaubertin, so that he favored
+the spoliation of the heirs, unless any of the eleven farmers of
+Picardy should take it into their heads to think they were cheated,
+and inquire into the real value of the property.
+
+Just as those interested expected to find their fortunes made, a
+lawyer came from Paris on the evening before the final settlement, and
+employed a notary at Ville-aux-Fayes, who happened to be one of his
+former clerks, to buy the estate of Les Aigues, which he did for
+eleven hundred thousand francs. None of the conspirators dared outbid
+an offer of eleven hundred thousand francs. Gaubertin suspected some
+treachery on Soudry's part, and Soudry and Lupin thought they were
+tricked by Gaubertin. But a statement on the part of the purchasing
+agent, the notary of Ville-aux-Fayes, disabused them of these
+suspicions. The latter, though suspecting the plan formed by
+Gaubertin, Lupin, and Soudry, refrained from informing the lawyer in
+Paris, for the reason that if the new owners indiscreetly repeated his
+words, he would have too many enemies at his heels to be able to stay
+where he was. This reticence, peculiar to provincials, was in this
+particular case amply justified by succeeding events. If the dwellers
+in the provinces are dissemblers, they are forced to be so; their
+excuse lies in the danger expressed in the old proverb, "We must howl
+with the wolves," a meaning which underlies the character of
+Phillinte.
+
+When General Montcornet took possession of Les Aigues, Gaubertin was
+no longer rich enough to give up his place. In order to marry his
+daughter to a rich banker he was obliged to give her a dowry of two
+hundred thousand francs; he had to pay thirty thousand for his son's
+practice; and all that remained of his accumulations was three hundred
+and seventy thousand, out of which he would be forced, sooner or
+later, to pay the dowry of his remaining daughter, Elise, for whom he
+hoped to arrange a marriage at least as good as that of her sister.
+The steward determined to study the general, in order to find out if
+he could disgust him with the place,--hoping still to be able to carry
+out his defeated plan in his own interests.
+
+With the peculiar instinct which characterizes those who make their
+fortunes by craft, Gaubertin believed in a resemblance of nature
+(which was not improbable) between an old soldier and an Opera-singer.
+An actress, and a general of the Empire,--surely they would have the
+same extravagant habits, the same careless prodigality? To the one as
+to the other, riches came capriciously and by lucky chances. If some
+soldiers are wily and astute and clever politicians, they are
+exceptions; a soldier is, usually, especially an accomplished cavalry
+officer like Montcornet, guileless, confident, a novice in business,
+and little fitted to understand details in the management of an
+estate. Gaubertin flattered himself that he could catch and hold the
+general with the same net in which Mademoiselle Laguerre had finished
+her days. But it so happened that the Emperor had once, intentionally,
+allowed Montcornet to play the same game in Pomerania that Gaubertin
+was playing at Les Aigues; consequently, the general fully understood
+a system of plundering.
+
+In planting cabbages, to use the expression of the first Duc de Biron,
+the old cuirassier sought to divert his mind, by occupation, from
+dwelling on his fall. Though he had yielded his "corps d'armee" to the
+Bourbons, that duty (performed by other generals and termed the
+disbanding of the army of the Loire) could not atone for the crime of
+having followed the man of the Hundred-Days to his last battle-field.
+In presence of the allied army it was impossible for the peer of 1815
+to remain in the service, still less at the Luxembourg. Accordingly,
+Montcornet betook himself to the country by advice of a dismissed
+marshal, to plunder Nature herself. The general was not deficient in
+the special cunning of an old military fox; and after he had spent a
+few days in examining his new property, he saw that Gaubertin was a
+steward of the old system,--a swindler, such as the dukes and marshals
+of the Empire, those mushrooms bred from the common earth, were well
+acquainted with.
+
+The wily general, soon aware of Gaubertin's great experience in rural
+administration, felt it was politic to keep well with him until he had
+himself learned the secrets of it; accordingly, he passed himself off
+as another Mademoiselle Laguerre, a course which lulled the steward
+into false security. This apparent simple-mindedness lasted all the
+time it took the general to learn the strength and weakness of Les
+Aigues, to master the details of its revenues and the manner of
+collecting them, and to ascertain how and where the robberies
+occurred, together with the betterments and economies which ought to
+be undertaken. Then, one fine morning, having caught Gaubertin with
+his hand in the bag, as the saying is, the general flew into one of
+those rages peculiar to the imperial conquerors of many lands. In
+doing so he committed a capital blunder,--one that would have ruined
+the whole life of a man of less wealth and less consistency than
+himself, and from which came the evils, both small and great, with
+which the present history teems. Brought up in the imperial school,
+accustomed to deal with men as a dictator, and full of contempt for
+"civilians," Montcornet did not trouble himself to wear gloves when it
+came to putting a rascal of a land-steward out of doors. Civil life
+and its precautions were things unknown to the soldier already
+embittered by his loss of rank. He humiliated Gaubertin ruthlessly,
+though the latter drew the harsh treatment upon himself by a cynical
+reply which roused Montcornet's anger.
+
+"You are living off my land," said the general, with jesting severity.
+
+"Do you think I can live off the sky?" returned Gaubertin, with a
+sneer.
+
+"Out of my sight, blackguard! I dismiss you!" cried the general,
+striking him with his whip,--blows which the steward always denied
+having received, for they were given behind closed doors.
+
+"I shall not go without my release in full," said Gaubertin, coldly,
+keeping at a distance from the enraged soldier.
+
+"We will see what is thought of you in a police court," replied
+Montcornet, shrugging his shoulders.
+
+Hearing the threat, Gaubertin looked at the general and smiled. The
+smile had the effect of relaxing Montcornet's arms as though the
+sinews had been cut. We must explain that smile.
+
+For the last two years, Gaubertin's brother-in-law, a man named
+Gendrin, long a justice of the municipal court of Ville-aux-Fayes, had
+become the president of that court through the influence of the Comte
+de Soulanges. The latter was made peer of France in 1814, and remained
+faithful to the Bourbons during the Hundred-Days, therefore the Keeper
+of the Seals readily granted an appointment at his request. This
+relationship gave Gaubertin a certain importance in the country. The
+president of the court of a little town is, relatively, a greater
+personage than the president of one of the royal courts of a great
+city, who has various equals, such as generals, bishops, and prefects;
+whereas the judge of the court of a small town has none,--the
+attorney-general and the sub-prefect being removable at will. Young
+Soudry, a companion of Gaubertin's son in Paris as well as at Les
+Aigues, had just been appointed assistant attorney in the capital of
+the department. Before the elder Soudry, a quartermaster in the
+artillery, became a brigadier of gendarmes, he had been wounded in a
+skirmish while defending Monsieur de Soulanges, then adjutant-general.
+At the time of the creation of the gendarmerie, the Comte de
+Soulanges, who by that time had become a colonel, asked for a brigade
+for his former protector, and later still he solicited the post we
+have named for the younger Soudry. Besides all these influences, the
+marriage of Mademoiselle Gaubertin with a wealthy banker of the quai
+Bethume made the unjust steward feel that he was far stronger in the
+community than a lieutenant-general driven into retirement.
+
+If this history provided no other instruction that that offered by the
+quarrel between the general and his steward, it would still be useful
+to many persons as a lesson for their conduct in life. He who reads
+Machiavelli profitably, knows that human prudence consists in never
+threatening; in doing but not saying; in promoting the retreat of an
+enemy and never stepping, as the saying is, on the tail of the
+serpent; and in avoiding, as one would murder, the infliction of a
+blow to the self-love of any one lower than one's self. An injury done
+to a person's interest, no matter how great it may be at the time, is
+forgiven or explained in the long run; but self-love, vanity, never
+ceases to bleed from a wound given, and never forgives it. The moral
+being is actually more sensitive, more living as it were, than the
+physical being. The heart and the blood are less impressible than the
+nerves. In short, our inward being rules us, no matter what we do. You
+may reconcile two families who have half-killed each other, as in
+Brittany and in La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more
+reconcile the calumniators and the calumniated than you can the
+spoilers and the despoiled. It is only in epic poems that men curse
+each other before they kill. The savage, and the peasant who is much
+like a savage, seldom speak unless to deceive an enemy. Ever since
+1789 France has been trying to make man believe, against all evidence,
+that they are equal. To say to a man, "You are a swindler," may be
+taken as a joke; but to catch him in the act and prove it to him with
+a cane on his back, to threaten him with a police-court and not follow
+up the threat, is to remind him of the inequality of conditions. If
+the masses will not brook any species of superiority, is it likely
+that a swindler will forgive that of an honest man?
+
+Montcornet might have dismissed his steward under pretext of paying
+off a military obligation by putting some old soldier in his place;
+Gaubertin and the general would have understood the matter, and the
+latter, by sparing the steward's self-love would have given him a
+chance to withdraw quietly. Gaubertin, in that case, would have left
+his late employer in peace, and possibly he might have taken himself
+and his savings to Paris for investment. But being, as he was,
+ignominiously dismissed, the man conceived against his late master one
+of those bitter hatreds which are literally a part of existence in
+provincial life, the persistency, duration, and plots of which would
+astonish diplomatists who are trained to let nothing astonish them. A
+burning desire for vengeance led him to settle at Ville-aux-Fayes, and
+to take a position where he could injure Montcornet and stir up
+sufficient enmity against to force him to sell Les Aigues.
+
+The general was deceived by appearances; for Gaubertin's external
+behavior was not of a nature to warn or to alarm him. The late steward
+followed his old custom of pretending, not exactly poverty, but
+limited means. For years he had talked of his wife and three children,
+and the heavy expenses of a large family. Mademoiselle Laguerre, to
+whom he had declared himself too poor to educate his son in Paris,
+paid the costs herself, and allowed her dear godson (for she was
+Claude Gaubertin's sponsor) two thousand francs a year.
+
+The day after the quarrel, Gaubertin came, with a keeper named
+Courtecuisse, and demanded with much insolence his release in full of
+all claims, showing the general the one he had obtained from his late
+mistress in such flattering terms, and asking, ironically, that a
+search should be made for the property, real and otherwise, which he
+was supposed to have stolen. If he had received fees from the wood-
+merchants on their purchases and from the farmers on their leases,
+Mademoiselle Laguerre, he said, had always allowed it; not only did
+she gain by the bargains he made, but everything went on smoothly
+without troubling her. The country-people would have died, he
+remarked, for Mademoiselle, whereas the general was laying up for
+himself a store of difficulties.
+
+Gaubertin--and this trait is frequently to be seen in the majority of
+those professions in which the property of others can be taken by
+means not foreseen by the Code--considered himself a perfectly honest
+man. In the first place, he had so long had possession of the money
+extorted from Mademoiselle Laguerre's farmers through fear, and paid
+in assignats, that he regarded it as legitimately acquired. It was a
+mere matter of exchange. He thought that in the end he should have
+quite as much risk with coin as with paper. Besides, legally,
+Mademoiselle had no right to receive any payment except in assignats.
+"Legally" is a fine, robust adverb, which bolsters up many a fortune!
+Moreover, he reflected that ever since great estates and land-agents
+had existed, that is, ever since the origin of society, the said
+agents had set up, for their own use, an argument such as we find our
+cooks using in this present day. Here it is, in its simplicity:--
+
+"If my mistress," says the cook, "went to market herself, she would
+have to pay more for her provisions than I charge her; she is the
+gainer, and the profits I make do more good in my hands than in those
+of the dealers."
+
+"If Mademoiselle," thought Gaubertin, "were to manage Les Aigues
+herself, she would never get thirty thousand francs a year out of it;
+the peasants, the dealers, the workmen would rob her of the rest. It
+is much better that I should have it, and so enable her to live in
+peace."
+
+The Catholic religion, and it alone, is able to prevent these
+capitulations of conscience. But, ever since 1789 religion has no
+influence on two thirds of the French people. The peasants, whose
+minds are keen and whose poverty drives them to imitation, had
+reached, specially in the valley of Les Aigues, a frightful state of
+demoralization. They went to mass on Sundays, but only at the outside
+of the church, where it was their custom to meet and transact business
+and make their weekly bargains.
+
+We can now estimate the extent of the evil done by the careless
+indifference of the great singer to the management of her property.
+Mademoiselle Laguerre betrayed, through mere selfishness, the
+interests of those who owned property, who are held in perpetual
+hatred by those who own none. Since 1792 the land-owners of Paris have
+become of necessity a combined body. If, alas, the feudal families,
+less numerous than the middle-class families, did not perceive the
+necessity of combining in 1400 under Louis XI., nor in 1600 under
+Richelieu, can we expect that in this nineteenth century of progress
+the middle classes will prove to be more permanently and solidly
+combined that the old nobility? An oligarchy of a hundred thousand
+rich men presents all the dangers of a democracy with none of its
+advantages. The principle of "every man for himself and for his own,"
+the selfishness of individual interests, will kill the oligarchical
+selfishness so necessary to the existence of modern society, and which
+England has practised with such success for the last three centuries.
+Whatever may be said or done, land-owners will never understand the
+necessity of the sort of internal discipline which made the Church
+such an admirable model of government, until, too late, they find
+themselves in danger from one another. The audacity with which
+communism, that living and acting logic of democracy, attacks society
+from the moral side, shows plainly that the Samson of to-day, grown
+prudent, is undermining the foundations of the cellar, instead of
+shaking the pillars of the hall.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+CERTAIN LOST SOCIAL SPECIES
+
+The estate of Les Aigues could not do without a steward; for the
+general had no intention of renouncing his winter pleasures in Paris,
+where he owned a fine house in the rue Neuve-des-Mathurines. He
+therefore looked about for a successor to Gaubertin; but it is very
+certain that his search was not as eager as that of Gaubertin himself,
+who was seeking for the right person to put in his way.
+
+Of all confidential positions there is none that requires more trained
+knowledge of its kind, or more activity, than that of land-steward to
+a great estate. The difficulty of finding the right man is only fully
+known to those wealthy landlords whose property lies beyond a certain
+circle around Paris, beginning at a distance of about one hundred and
+fifty miles. At that point agricultural productions for the markets of
+Paris, which warrant rentals on long leases (collected often by other
+tenants who are rich themselves), cease to be cultivated. The farmers
+who raise them drive to the city in their own cabriolets to pay their
+rents in good bank-bills, unless they send the money through their
+agents in the markets. For this reason, the farms of the Seine-et-
+Oise, Seine-et-Marne, the Oise, the Eure-et-Loir, the Lower Seine, and
+the Loiret are so desirable that capital cannot always be invested
+there at one and a half per cent. Compared to the returns on estates
+in Holland, England, and Belgium, this result is enormous. But at one
+hundred miles from Paris an estate requires such variety of working,
+its products are so different in kind, that it becomes a business,
+with all the risks attendant on manufacturing. The wealthy owner is
+really a merchant, forced to look for a market for his products, like
+the owner of ironworks or cotton factories. He does not even escape
+competition; the peasant, the small proprietor, is at his heels with
+an avidity which leads to transactions to which well-bred persons
+cannot condescend.
+
+A land-steward must understand surveying, the customs of the locality,
+the methods of sale and of labor, together with a little quibbling in
+the interests of those he serves; he must also understand book-keeping
+and commercial matters, and be in perfect health, with a liking for
+active life and horse exercise. His duty being to represent his master
+and to be always in communication with him, the steward ought not to
+be a man of the people. As the salary of his office seldom exceeds
+three thousand francs, the problem seems insoluble. How is it possible
+to obtain so many qualifications for such a very moderate price,--in a
+region, moreover, where the men who are provided with them are
+admissible to all other employments? Bring down a stranger to fill the
+place, and you will pay dear for the experience he must acquire. Train
+a young man on the spot, and you are more than likely to get a thorn
+of ingratitude in your side. It therefore becomes necessary to choose
+between incompetent honesty, which injures your property through its
+blindness and inertia, and the cleverness which looks out for itself.
+Hence the social nomenclature and natural history of land-stewards as
+defined by a great Polish noble.
+
+"There are," he said, "two kinds of stewards: he who thinks only of
+himself, and he who thinks of himself and of us; happy the land-owner
+who lays his hands on the latter! As for the steward who would think
+only of us, he is not to be met with."
+
+Elsewhere can be found a steward who thought of this master's
+interests as well as of his own. ("Un Debut dans la vie," "Scenes de
+la vie privee.") Gaubertin is the steward who thinks of himself only.
+To represent the third figure of the problem would be to hold up to
+public admiration a very unlikely personage, yet one that was not
+unknown to the old nobility, though he has, alas! disappeared with
+them. (See "Le Cabinet des Antiques," "Scenes de la vie de province.")
+Through the endless subdivision of fortunes aristocratic habits and
+customs are inevitably changed. If there be not now in France twenty
+great fortunes managed by intendants, in fifty years from now there
+will not be a hundred estates in the hands of stewards, unless a great
+change is made in the law. Every land-owner will be brought by that
+time to look after his own interests.
+
+This transformation, already begun, suggested the following answer of
+a clever woman when asked why, since 1830, she stayed in Paris during
+the summer. "Because," she said, "I do not care to visit chateaux
+which are now turned into farms." What is to be the future of this
+question, getting daily more and more imperative,--that of man to man,
+the poor man and the rich man? This book is written to throw some
+light upon that terrible social question.
+
+It is easy to understand the perplexities which assailed the general
+after he had dismissed Gaubertin. While saying to himself, vaguely,
+like other persons free to do or not to do a thing, "I'll dismiss that
+scamp"; he had overlooked the risk and forgotten the explosion of his
+boiling anger,--the anger of a choleric fire-eater at the moment when
+a flagrant imposition forced him to raise the lids of his wilfully
+blind eyes.
+
+Montcornet, a land-owner for the first time and a denizen of Paris,
+had not provided himself with a steward before coming to Les Aigues;
+but after studying the neighborhood carefully he saw it was
+indispensable to a man like himself to have an intermediary to manage
+so many persons of low degree.
+
+Gaubertin, who discovered during the excitement of the scene (which
+lasted more than two hours) the difficulties in which the general
+would soon be involved, jumped on his pony after leaving the room
+where the quarrel took place, and galloped to Soulanges to consult the
+Soudrys. At his first words, "The general and I have parted; whom can
+we put in my place without his suspecting it?" the Soudrys understood
+their friend's wishes. Do not forget that Soudry, for the last
+seventeen years chief of police of the canton, was doubly shrewd
+through his wife, an adept in the particular wiliness of a waiting-
+maid of an Opera divinity.
+
+"We may go far," said Madame Soudry, "before we find any one to suit
+the place as well as our poor Sibilet."
+
+"Made to order!" exclaimed Gaubertin, still scarlet with
+mortification. "Lupin," he added, turning to the notary, who was
+present, "go to Ville-aux-Fayes and whisper it to Marechal, in case
+that big fire-eater asks his advice."
+
+Marechal was the lawyer whom his former patron, when buying Les Aigues
+for the general, had recommended to Monsieur de Montcornet as legal
+adviser.
+
+Sibilet, eldest son of the clerk of the court at Ville-aux-Fayes, a
+notary's clerk, without a penny of his own, and twenty-five years old,
+had fallen in love with the daughter of the chief-magistrate of
+Soulanges. The latter, named Sarcus, had a salary of fifteen hundred
+francs, and was married to a woman without fortune, the eldest sister
+of Monsieur Vermut, the apothecary of Soulanges. Though an only
+daughter, Mademoiselle Sarcus, whose beauty was her only dowry, could
+scarcely have lived on the salary paid to a notary's clerk in the
+provinces. Young Sibilet, a relative of Gaubertin, by a connection
+rather difficult to trace through family ramifications which make
+members of the middle classes in all the smaller towns cousins to each
+other, owed a modest position in a government office to the assistance
+of his father and Gaubertin. The unlucky fellow had the terrible
+happiness of being the father of two children in three years. His own
+father, blessed with five, was unable to assist him. His wife's father
+owned nothing beside his house at Soulanges and an income of two
+thousand francs. Madame Sibilet the younger spent most of her time at
+her father's home with her two children, where Adolphe Sibilet, whose
+official duty obliged him to travel through the department, came to
+see her from time to time.
+
+Gaubertin's exclamation, though easy to understand from this summary
+of young Sibilet's life, needs a few more explanatory details.
+
+Adolphe Sibilet, supremely unlucky, as we have shown by the foregoing
+sketch of him, was one of those men who cannot reach the heart of a
+woman except by way of the altar and the mayor's office. Endowed with
+the suppleness of a steel-spring, he yielded to pressure, certain to
+revert to his first thought. This treacherous habit is prompted by
+cowardice; but the business training which Sibilet underwent in the
+office of a provincial notary had taught him the art of concealing
+this defect under a gruff manner which simulated a strength he did not
+possess. Many false natures mask their hollowness in this way; be
+rough with them in return and the effect produced is that of a balloon
+collapsed by a prick. Such was Sibilet. But as most men are not
+observers, and as among observers three fourths observe only after a
+thing has taken place, Adolphe Sibilet's grumbling manner was
+considered the result of an honest frankness, of a capacity much
+praised by his master, and of a stubborn uprightness which no
+temptation could shake. Some men are as much benefited by their
+defects as others by their good qualities.
+
+Adeline Sarcus, a pretty young woman, brought up by a mother (who died
+three years before her marriage) as well as a mother can educate an
+only daughter in a remote country town, was in love with the handsome
+son of Lupin, the Soulanges notary. At the first signs of this
+romance, old Lupin, who intended to marry his son to Mademoiselle
+Elise Gaubertin, lost no time in sending young Amaury Lupin to Paris,
+to the care of his friend and correspondent Crottat, the notary,
+where, under pretext of drawing deeds and contracts, Amaury committed
+a variety of foolish acts, and made debts, being led thereto by a
+certain Georges Marest, a clerk in the same office, but a rich young
+man, who revealed to him the mysteries of Parisian life. By the time
+Lupin the elder went to Paris to bring back his son, Adeline Sarcus
+had become Madame Sibilet. In fact, when the adoring Adolphe offered
+himself, her father, the old magistrate, prompted by young Lupin's
+father, hastened the marriage, to which Adeline yielded in sheer
+despair.
+
+The situation of clerk in a government registration office is not a
+career. It is, like other such places which admit of no rise, one of
+the many holes of the government sieve. Those who start in life in
+these holes (the topographical, the professorial, the highway-and-
+canal departments) are apt to discover, invariably too late, that
+cleverer men then they, seated beside them, are fed, as the Opposition
+writers say, on the sweat of the people, every time the sieve dips
+down into the taxation-pot by means of a machine called the budget.
+Adolphe, working early and late and earning little, soon found out the
+barren depths of his hole; and his thoughts busied themselves, as he
+trotted from township to township, spending his salary in shoe-leather
+and costs of travelling, with how to find a permanent and more
+profitable place.
+
+No one can imagine, unless he happens to squint and to have two
+legitimate children, what ambitions three years of misery and love had
+developed in this young man, who squinted both in mind and vision, and
+whose happiness halted, as it were, on one leg. The chief cause of
+secret evil deeds and hidden meanness is, perhaps, an incompleted
+happiness. Man can better bear a state of hopeless misery than those
+terrible alternations of love and sunshine with continual rain. If the
+body contracts disease, the mind contracts the leprosy of envy. In
+petty minds that leprosy becomes a base and brutal cupidity, both
+insolent and shrinking; in cultivated minds it fosters anti-social
+doctrines, which serve a man as footholds by which to rise above his
+superiors. May we not dignify with the title of proverb the pregnant
+saying, "Tell me what thou hast, and I will tell thee of what thou art
+thinking"?
+
+Though Adolphe loved his wife, his hourly thought was: "I have made a
+mistake; I have three balls and chains, but I have only two legs. I
+ought to have made my fortune before I married. I could have found an
+Adeline any day; but Adeline stands in the way of my getting a fortune
+now."
+
+Adolphe had been to see his relation Gaubertin three times in three
+years. A few words exchanged between them let Gaubertin see the muck
+of a soul ready to ferment under the hot temptations of legal robbery.
+He warily sounded a nature that could be warped to the exigencies of
+any plan, provided it was profitable. At each of the three visits
+Sibilet grumbled at his fate.
+
+"Employ me, cousin," he said; "take me as a clerk and make me your
+successor. You shall see how I work. I am capable of overthrowing
+mountains to give my Adeline, I won't say luxury, but a modest
+competence. You made Monsieur Leclercq's fortune; why won't you put me
+in a bank in Paris?"
+
+"Some day, later on, I'll find you a place," Gaubertin would say;
+"meantime make friends and acquaintance; such things help."
+
+Under these circumstances the letter which Madame Soudry hastily
+dispatched brought Sibilet to Soulanges through a region of castles in
+the air. His father-in-law, Sarcus, whom the Soudrys advised to take
+steps in the interest of his daughter, had gone in the morning to see
+the general and to propose Adolphe for the vacant post. By advice of
+Madame Soudry, who was the oracle of the little town, the worthy man
+had taken his daughter with him; and the sight of her had had a
+favorable effect upon the Comte de Montcornet.
+
+"I shall not decide," he answered, "without thoroughly informing
+myself about all applicants; but I will not look elsewhere until I
+have examined whether or not your son-in-law possesses the
+requirements for the place." Then, turning to Madame Sibilet he added,
+"The satisfaction of settling so charming a person at Les Aigues--"
+
+"The mother of two children, general," said Adeline, adroitly, to
+evade the gallantry of the old cuirassier.
+
+All the general's inquiries were cleverly anticipated by the Soudrys,
+Gaubertin, and Lupin, who quietly obtained for their candidate the
+influence of the leading lawyers in the capital of the department,
+where a royal court held sessions,--such as Counsellor Gendrin, a
+distant relative of the judge at Ville-aux-Fayes; Baron Bourlac,
+attorney-general; and another counsellor named Sarcus, a cousin thrice
+removed of the candidate. The verdict of every one to whom the general
+applies was favorable to the poor clerk,--"so interesting," as they
+called him. His marriage had made Sibilet as irreproachable as a novel
+of Miss Edgeworth's, and presented him, moreover, in the light of a
+disinterested man.
+
+The time which the dismissed steward remained at Les Aigues until his
+successor could be appointed was employed in creating troubles and
+annoyances for his late master; one of the little scenes which he thus
+played off will give an idea of several others.
+
+The morning of his final departure he contrived to meet, as it were
+accidentally, Courtecuisse, the only keeper then employed at Les
+Aigues, the great extent of which really needed at least three.
+
+"Well, Monsieur Gaubertin," said Courtecuisse, "so you have had
+trouble with the count?"
+
+"Who told you that?" answered Gaubertin. "Well, yes; the general
+expected to order us about as he did his cavalry; he didn't know
+Burgundians. The count is not satisfied with my services, and as I am
+not satisfied with his ways, we have dismissed each other, almost with
+fisticuffs, for he raged like a whirlwind. Take care of yourself,
+Courtecuisse! Ah! my dear fellow, I expected to give you a better
+master."
+
+"I know that," said the keeper, "and I'd have served you well. Hang
+it, when friends have known each other for twenty years, you know! You
+put me here in the days of the poor dear sainted Madame. Ah, what a
+good woman she was! none like her now! The place has lost a mother."
+
+"Look here, Courtecuisse, if you are willing, you might help us to a
+fine stroke."
+
+"Then you are going to stay here? I heard you were off to Paris."
+
+"No; I shall wait to see how things turn out; meantime I shall do
+business at Ville-aux-Fayes. The general doesn't know what he is
+dealing with in these parts; he'll make himself hated, don't you see?
+I shall wait for what turns up. Do your work here gently; he'll tell
+you to manage the people with a high hand, for he begins to see where
+his crops and his woods are running to; but you'll not be such a fool
+as to let the country-folk maul you, and perhaps worse, for the sake
+of his timber."
+
+"But he would send me away, dear Monsieur Gaubertin, he would get rid
+of me! and you know how happy I am living there at the gate of the
+Avonne."
+
+"The general will soon get sick of the whole place," replied
+Gaubertin; "you wouldn't be long out even if he did happen to send you
+away. Besides, you know those woods," he added, waving his hand at the
+landscape; "I am stronger there than the masters."
+
+This conversation took place in an open field.
+
+"Those 'Arminac' Parisian fellows ought to stay in their own mud,"
+said the keeper.
+
+Ever since the quarrels of the fifteenth century the word 'Arminac'
+(Armagnacs, Parisians, enemies of the Dukes of Burgundy) has continued
+to be an insulting term along the borders of Upper Burgundy, where it
+is differently corrupted according to locality.
+
+"He'll go back to it when beaten," said Gaubertin, "and we'll plough
+up the park; for it is robbing the people to allow a man to keep nine
+hundred acres of the best land in the valley for his own pleasure."
+
+"Four hundred families could get their living from it," said
+Courtecuisse.
+
+"If you want two acres for yourself you must help us to drive that cur
+out," remarked Gaubertin.
+
+At the very moment that Gaubertin was fulminating this sentence of
+excommunication, the worthy Sarcus was presenting his son-in-law
+Sibilet to the Comte de Montcornet. They had come with Adeline and the
+children in a wicker carryall, lent by Sarcus's clerk, a Monsieur
+Gourdon, brother of the Soulanges doctor, who was richer than the
+magistrate himself. The general, pleased with the candor and dignity
+of the justice of the peace, and with the graceful bearing of Adeline
+(both giving pledges in good faith, for they were totally ignorant of
+the plans of Gaubertin), at once granted all requests and gave such
+advantages to the family of the new land-steward as to make the
+position equal to that of a sub-prefect of the first class.
+
+A lodge, built by Bouret as an object in the landscape and also as a
+home for the steward, an elegant little building, the architecture of
+which was sufficiently shown in the description of the gate of Blangy,
+was promised to the Sibilets for their residence. The general also
+conceded the horse which Mademoiselle Laguerre had provided for
+Gaubertin, in consideration of the size of the estate and the distance
+he had to go to the markets where the business of the property was
+transacted. He allowed two hundred bushels of wheat, three hogsheads
+of wine, wood in sufficient quantity, oats and barley in abundance,
+and three per cent on all receipts of income. Where the latter in
+Mademoiselle Laguerre's time had amounted to forty thousand francs,
+the general now, in 1818, in view of the purchases of land which
+Gaubertin had made for her, expected to receive at least sixty
+thousand. The new land-steward might therefore receive before long
+some two thousand francs in money. Lodged, fed, warmed, relieved of
+taxes, the costs of a horse and a poultry-yard defrayed for him, and
+allowed to plant a kitchen-garden, with no questions asked as to the
+day's work of the gardener, certainly such advantages represented much
+more than another two thousand francs; for a man who was earning a
+miserable salary of twelve hundred francs in a government office to
+step into the stewardship of Les Aigues was a change from poverty to
+opulence.
+
+"Be faithful to my interests," said the general, "and I shall have
+more to say to you. Doubtless I could get the collection of the rents
+of Conches, Blangy, and Cerneux taken away from the collection of
+those of Soulanges and given to you. In short, when you bring me in a
+clear sixty thousand a year from Les Aigues you shall be still further
+rewarded."
+
+Unfortunately, the worthy justice and his daughter, in the flush of
+their joy, told Madame Soudry the promise the general had made about
+these collections, without reflecting that the present collector of
+Soulanges, a man named Guerbet, brother of the postmaster of Conches,
+was closely allied, as we shall see later, with Gaubertin and the
+Gendrins.
+
+"It won't be so easy to do it, my dear," said Madame Soudry; "but
+don't prevent the general from making the attempt; it is wonderful how
+easily difficult things are done in Paris. I have seen the Chevalier
+Gluck at dear Madame's feet to get her to sing his music, and she did,
+--she who so adored Piccini, one of the finest men of his day; never
+did HE come into Madame's room without catching me round the waist and
+calling me a dear rogue."
+
+"Ha!" cried Soudry, when his wife reported this news, "does he think
+he is going to lead the notary by the nose, and upset everything to
+please himself and make the whole valley march in line, as he did his
+cuirassiers? These military fellows have a habit of command!--but
+let's have patience; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de
+Ronquerolles will be on our side. Poor Guerbet! he little suspects who
+is trying to pluck the best roses out of his garland!"
+
+Pere Guerbet, the collector of Soulanges, was the wit, that is to say,
+the jovial companion of the little town, and a hero in Madame Soudry's
+salon. Soudry's speech gives a fair idea of the opinion which now grew
+up against the master of Les Aigues from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes,
+and wherever else the public mind could be reached and poisoned by
+Gaubertin.
+
+The installation of Sibilet took place in the autumn of 1817. The year
+1818 went by without the general being able to set foot at Les Aigues,
+for his approaching marriage with Mademoiselle de Troisville, which
+was celebrated in January, 1819, kept him the greater part of the
+summer near Alencon, in the country-house of his prospective father-
+in-law. General Montcornet possessed, besides Les Aigues and a
+magnificent house in Paris, some sixty thousand francs a year in the
+Funds and the salary of a retired lieutenant-general. Though Napoleon
+had made him a count of the Empire and given him the following arms, a
+field quarterly, the first, azure, bordure or, three pyramids argent;
+the second, vert, three hunting horns argent; the third, gules, a
+cannon or on a gun-carriage sable, and, in chief, a crescent or; the
+fourth, or, a crown vert, with the motto (eminently of the middle
+ages!), "Sound the charge,"--Montcornet knew very well that he was the
+son of a cabinet-maker in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, though he was
+quite ready to forget it. He was eaten up with the desire to be a peer
+of France, and dreamed of his grand cordon of the Legion of honor, his
+Saint-Louis cross, and his income of one hundred and forty thousand
+francs. Bitten by the demon of aristocracy, the sight of the blue
+ribbon put him beside himself. The gallant cuirassier of Essling would
+have licked up the mud on the Pont-Royal to be invited to the house of
+a Navarreins, a Lenoncourt, a Grandlieu, a Maufrigneuse, a d'Espard, a
+Vandenesse, a Verneuil, a Herouville, or a Chaulieu.
+
+From 1818, when the impossibility of a change in favor of the
+Bonaparte family was made clear to him, Montcornet had himself
+trumpeted in the faubourg Saint-Germain by the wives of some of his
+friends, who offered his hand and heart, his mansion and his fortune
+in return for an alliance with some great family.
+
+After several attempts, the Duchesse de Carigliano found a match for
+the general in one of the three branches of the Troisville family,--
+that of the viscount in the service of Russia ever since 1789, who had
+returned to France in 1815. The viscount, poor as a younger son, had
+married a Princess Scherbellof, worth about a million, but the arrival
+of two sons and three daughters kept him poor. His family, ancient and
+formerly powerful, now consisted of the Marquis de Troisville, peer of
+France, head of the house and scutcheon, and two deputies, with
+numerous offspring, who were busy, for their part, with the budget and
+the ministries and the court, like fishes round bits of bread.
+Therefore, when Montcornet was presented by Madame de Carigliano,--the
+Napoleonic duchess, who was now a most devoted adherent of the
+Bourbons, he was favorably received. The general asked, in return for
+his fortune and tender indulgence to his wife, to be appointed to the
+Royal Guard, with the rank of marquis and peer of France; but the
+branches of the Troisville family would do no more than promise him
+their support.
+
+"You know what that means," said the duchess to her old friend, who
+complained of the vagueness of the promise. "They cannot oblige the
+king to do as they wish; they can only influence him."
+
+Montcornet made Virginie de Troisville his heir in the marriage
+settlements. Completely under the control of his wife, as Blondet's
+letter has already shown, he was still without children, but Louis
+XVIII. had received him, and given him the cordon of Saint-Louis,
+allowing him to quarter his ridiculous arms with those of the
+Troisvilles, and promising him the title of marquis as soon as he had
+deserved the peerage by his services.
+
+A few days after the audience at which this promise had been given,
+the Duc de Barry was assassinated; the Marsan clique carried the day;
+the Villele ministry came into power, and all the wires laid by the
+Troisvilles were snapped; it became necessary to find new ways of
+fastening them upon the ministry.
+
+"We must bide our time," said the Troisvilles to Montcornet, who was
+always overwhelmed with politeness in the faubourg Saint-Germain.
+
+This will explain how it was that the general did not return to Les
+Aigues until May, 1820.
+
+The ineffable happiness of the son of a shop-keeper of the faubourg
+Saint-Antoine in possessing a young, elegant, intelligent, and gentle
+wife, a Troisville, who had given him an entrance into all the salons
+of the faubourg Saint-Germain, and the delight of making her enjoy the
+pleasures of Paris, had kept him from Les Aigues and made him forget
+about Gaubertin, even to his very name. In 1820 he took the countess
+to Burgundy to show her the estate, and he accepted Sibilet's accounts
+and leases without looking closely into them; happiness never cavils.
+The countess, well pleased to find the steward's wife a charming young
+woman, made presents to her and to the children, with whom she
+occasionally amused herself. She ordered a few changes at Les Aigues,
+having sent to Paris for an architect; proposing, to the general's
+great delight, to spend six months of every year on this magnificent
+estate. Montcornet's savings were soon spent on the architectural work
+and the exquisite new furniture sent from Paris. Les Aigues thus
+received the last touch which made it a choice example of all the
+diverse elegancies of four centuries.
+
+In 1821 the general was almost peremptorily urged by Sibilet to be at
+Les Aigues before the month of May. Important matters had to be
+decided. A lease of nine years, to the amount of thirty thousand
+francs, granted by Gaubertin in 1812 to a wood-merchant, fell in on
+the 15th of May of the current year. Sibilet, anxious to prove his
+rectitude, was unwilling to be responsible for the renewal of the
+lease. "You know, Monsieur le comte," he wrote, "that I do not choose
+to profit by such matters." The wood-merchant claimed an indemnity,
+extorted from Madame Laguerre, through her hatred of litigation, and
+shared by him with Gaubertin. This indemnity was based on the injury
+done to the woods by the peasants, who treated the forest of Les
+Aigues as if they had a right to cut the timber. Messrs. Gravelot
+Brothers, wood-merchants in Paris, refused to pay their last quarter
+dues, offering to prove by an expert that the woods were reduced one-
+fifth in value, through, they said, the injurious precedent
+established by Madame Laguerre.
+
+"I have already," wrote Sibilet, "sued these men in the courts at
+Ville-aux-Fayes, for they have taken legal residence there, on account
+of this lease, with my old employer, Maitre Corbinet. I fear we shall
+lose the suit."
+
+"It is a question of income, my dear," said the general, showing the
+letter to his wife. "Will you go down to Les Aigues a little earlier
+this year than last?"
+
+"Go yourself, and I will follow you when the weather is warmer," said
+the countess, not sorry to remain in Paris alone.
+
+The general, who knew very well the canker that was eating into his
+revenues, departed without his wife, resolved to take vigorous
+measures. In so doing he reckoned, as we shall see, without his
+Gaubertin.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE GREAT REVOLUTIONS OF A LITTLE VALLEY
+
+"Well, Maitre Sibilet," said the general to his steward, the morning
+after his arrival, giving him a familiar title which showed how much
+he appreciated his services, "so we are, to use a ministerial phrase,
+at a crisis?"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, following the general.
+
+The fortunate possessor of Les Aigues was walking up and down in front
+of the steward's house, along a little terrace where Madame Sibilet
+grew flowers, at the end of which was a wide stretch of meadow-land
+watered by the canal which Blondet has described. From this point the
+chateau of Les Aigues was seen in the distance, and in like manner the
+profile, as it were, of the steward's lodge was seen from Les Aigues.
+
+"But," resumed the general, "what's the difficulty? If I do lose the
+suit against the Gravelots, a money wound is not mortal, and I'll have
+the leasing of my forest so well advertised that there will be
+competition, and I shall sell the timber at its true value."
+
+"Business is not done in that way, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet.
+"Suppose you get no lessees, what will you do?"
+
+"Cut the timber myself and sell it--"
+
+"You, a wood merchant?" said Sibilet. "Well, without looking at
+matters here, how would it be in Paris? You would have to hire a wood-
+yard, pay for a license and the taxes, also for the right of
+navigation, and duties, and the costs of unloading; besides the salary
+of a trustworthy agent--"
+
+"Yes, it is impracticable," said the general hastily, alarmed at the
+prospect. "But why can't I find persons to lease the right of cutting
+timber as before?"
+
+"Monsieur le comte has enemies."
+
+"Who are they?"
+
+"Well, in the first place, Monsieur Gaubertin."
+
+"Do you mean the scoundrel whose place you took?"
+
+"Not so loud, Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, showing fear; "I beg
+of you, not so loud,--my cook might hear us."
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that I am not to speak on my own estate of a
+villain who robbed me?" cried the general.
+
+"For the sake of your own peace and comfort, come further away,
+Monsieur le comte. Monsieur Gaubertin is mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes."
+
+"Ha! I congratulate Ville-aux-Fayes. Thunder! what a nobly governed
+town!--"
+
+"Do me the honor to listen, Monsieur le comte, and to believe that I
+am talking of serious matters which may affect your future life in
+this place."
+
+"I am listening; let us sit down on this bench here."
+
+"Monsieur le comte, when you dismissed Gaubertin, he had to find some
+employment, for he was not rich--"
+
+"Not rich! when he stole twenty thousand francs a year from this
+estate?"
+
+"Monsieur le comte, I don't pretend to excuse him," replied Sibilet.
+"I want to see Les Aigues prosperous, if it were only to prove
+Gaubertin's dishonest; but we ought not to abuse him openly for he is
+one of the most dangerous scoundrels to be found in all Burgundy, and
+he is now in a position to injure you."
+
+"In what way?" asked the general, sobering down.
+
+"Gaubertin has control of nearly one third of the supplies sent to
+Paris. As general agent of the timber business, he orders all the work
+of the forests,--the felling, chopping, floating, and sending to
+market. Being in close relations with the workmen, he is the arbiter
+of prices. It has taken him three years to create this position, but
+he holds it now like a fortress. He is essential to all dealers, never
+favoring one more than another; he regulates the whole business in
+their interests, and their affairs are better and more cheaply looked
+after by him than they were in the old time by separate agents for
+each firm. For instance, he has so completely put a stop to
+competition that he has absolute control of the auction sales; the
+crown and the State are both dependent on him. Their timber is sold
+under the hammer and falls invariably to Gaubertin's dealers; in fact,
+no others attempt now to bid against them. Last year Monsieur
+Mariotte, of Auxerre, urged by the commissioner of domains, did
+attempt to compete with Gaubertin. At first, Gaubertin let him buy the
+standing wood at the usual prices; but when it came to cutting it, the
+Avonnais workmen asked such enormous prices that Monsieur Mariotte was
+obliged to bring laborers from Auxerre, whom the Ville-aux-Fayes
+workmen attacked and drove away. The head of the coalition, and the
+ringleader of the brawl were brought before the police court, and the
+suits cost Monsieur Mariotte a great deal of money; for, besides the
+odium of having convicted and punished poor men, he was forced to pay
+all costs, because the losing side had not a farthing to do it with. A
+suit against laboring men is sure to result in hatred to those who
+live among them. Let me warn you of this; for if you follow the course
+you propose, you will have to fight against the poor of this district
+at least. But that's not all. Counting it over, Monsieur Mariotte, a
+worthy man, found he was the loser by his original lease. Forced to
+pay ready money, he was nevertheless obliged to sell on time;
+Gaubertin delivered his timber at long credits for the purpose of
+ruining his competitor. He undersold him by at least five per cent,
+and the end of it is that poor Mariotte's credit is badly shaken.
+Gaubertin is now pressing and harassing the poor man so that he is
+driven, they tell me, to leave not only Auxerre, but even Burgundy
+itself; and he is right. In this way land-owners have long been
+sacrificed to dealers who now set the market-prices, just as the
+furniture-dealers in Paris dictate values to appraisers. But Gaubertin
+saves the owners so much trouble and worry that they are really
+gainers."
+
+"How so?" asked the general.
+
+"In the first place, because the less complicated a business is, the
+greater the profits to the owners," answered Sibilet. "Besides which,
+their income is more secure; and in all matters of rural improvement
+and development that is the main thing, as you will find out. Then,
+too, Monsieur Gaubertin is the friend and patron of working-men; he
+pays them well and keeps them always at work; therefore, though their
+families live on the estates, the woods leased to dealers and
+belonging to the land-owners who trust the care of their property to
+Gaubertin (such as MM. de Soulanges and de Ronquerolles) are not
+devastated. The dead wood is gathered up, but that is all--"
+
+"That rascal Gaubertin has lost no time!" cried the general.
+
+"He is a bold man," said Sibilet. "He really is, as he calls himself,
+the steward of the best half of the department, instead of being
+merely the steward of Les Aigues. He makes a little out of everybody,
+and that little on every two millions brings him in forty to fifty
+thousand francs a year. He says himself, 'The fires on the Parisian
+hearths pay it all.' He is your enemy, Monsieur le comte. My advice to
+you is to capitulate and be reconciled with him. He is intimate, as
+you know, with Soudry, the head of the gendarmerie at Soulanges; with
+Monsieur Rigou, our mayor at Blangy; the patrols are under his
+influence; therefore you will find it impossible to repress the
+pilferings which are eating into your estate. During the last two
+years your woods have been devastated. Consequently the Gravelots are
+more than likely to win their suit. They say, very truly: 'According
+to the terms of the lease, the care of the woods is left to the owner;
+he does not protect them, and we are injured; the owner is bound to
+pay us damages.' That's fair enough; but it doesn't follow that they
+should win their case."
+
+"We must be ready to defend this suit at all costs," said the general,
+"and then we shall have no more of them."
+
+"You shall gratify Gaubertin," remarked Sibilet.
+
+"How so?"
+
+"Suing the Gravelots is the same as a hand to hand fight with
+Gaubertin, who is their agent," answered Sibilet. "He asks nothing
+better than such a suit. He declares, so I hear, that he will bring
+you if necessary before the Court of Appeals."
+
+"The rascal! the--"
+
+"If you attempt to work your own woods," continued Sibilet, turning
+the knife in the wound, "you will find yourself at the mercy of
+workmen who will force you to pay rich men's prices instead of market-
+prices. In short, they'll put you, as they did that poor Mariotte, in
+a position where you must sell at a loss. If you then try to lease the
+woods you will get no tenants, for you cannot expect that any one
+should take risks for himself which Mariotte only took for the crown
+and the State. Suppose a man talks of his losses to the government!
+The government is a gentleman who is, like your obedient servant when
+he was in its employ, a worthy man with a frayed overcoat, who reads
+the newspapers at a desk. Let his salary be twelve hundred or twelve
+thousand francs, his disposition is the same, it is not a whit softer.
+Talk of reductions and releases from the public treasury represented
+by the said gentleman! He'll only pooh-pooh you as he mends his pen.
+No, the law is the wrong road for you, Monsieur le comte."
+
+"Then what's to be done?" cried the general, his blood boiling as he
+tramped up and down before the bench.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, abruptly, "what I say to you is not
+for my own interests, certainly; but I advise you to sell Les Aigues
+and leave the neighborhood."
+
+On hearing these words the general sprang back as if a cannon-ball had
+struck him; then he looked at Sibilet with a shrewd, diplomatic eye.
+
+"A general of the Imperial Guard running away from the rascals, when
+Madame la comtesse likes Les Aigues!" he said. "No, I'll sooner box
+Gaubertin's ears on the market-place of Ville-aux-Fayes, and force him
+to fight me that I may shoot him like a dog."
+
+"Monsieur le comte, Gaubertin is not such a fool as to let himself be
+brought into collision with you. Besides, you could not openly insult
+the mayor of so important a place as Ville-aux-Fayes."
+
+"I'll have him turned out; the Troisvilles can do that for me; it is a
+question of income."
+
+"You won't succeed, Monsieur le comte; Gaubertin's arms are long; you
+will get yourself into difficulties from which you cannot escape."
+
+"Let us think of the present," interrupted the general. "About that
+suit?"
+
+"That, Monsieur le comte, I can manage to win for you," replied
+Sibilet, with a knowing glance.
+
+"Bravo, Sibilet!" said the general, shaking his steward's hand; "how
+are you going to do it?"
+
+"You will win it on a writ of error," replied Sibilet. "In my opinion
+the Gravelots have the right of it. But it is not enough to be in the
+right, they must also be in order as to legal forms, and that they
+have neglected. The Gravelots ought to have summoned you to have the
+woods better watched. They can't ask for indemnity, at the close of a
+lease, for damages which they know have been going on for nine years;
+there is a clause in the lease as to this, on which we can file a bill
+of exceptions. You will lose the suit at Ville-aux-Fayes, possibly in
+the upper court as well, but we will carry it to Paris and you will
+win at the Court of Appeals. The costs will be heavy and the expenses
+ruinous. You will have to spend from twelve to fifteen thousand francs
+merely to win the suit,--but you will win it, if you care to. The suit
+will only increase the enmity of the Gravelots, for the expenses will
+be even heavier on them. You will be their bugbear; you will be called
+litigious and calumniated in every way; still, you can win--"
+
+"Then, what's to be done?" repeated the general, on whom Sibilet's
+arguments were beginning to produce the effect of a violent poison.
+
+Just then the remembrance of the blows he had given Gaubertin with his
+cane crossed his mind, and made him wish he had bestowed them on
+himself. His flushed face was enough to show Sibilet the irritation
+that he felt.
+
+"You ask me what can be done, Monsieur le comte? Why, only one thing,
+compromise; but of course you can't negotiate that yourself. I must be
+thought to cheat you! We, poor devils, whose only fortune and comfort
+is in our good name, it is hard on us to even seem to do a
+questionable thing. We are always judged by appearances. Gaubertin
+himself saved Mademoiselle Laguerre's life during the Revolution, but
+it seemed to others that he was robbing her. She rewarded him in her
+will with a diamond worth ten thousand francs, which Madame Gaubertin
+now wears on her head."
+
+The general gave Sibilet another glance still more diplomatic than the
+first; but the steward seemed to take no notice of the challenge it
+expressed.
+
+"If I were to appear dishonest, Monsieur Gaubertin would be so
+overjoyed that I could instantly obtain his help," continued Sibilet.
+"He would listen with all his ears if I said to him: 'Suppose I were
+to extort twenty thousand francs from Monsieur le comte for Messrs.
+Gravelot, on condition that they shared them with me?' If your
+adversaries consented to that, Monsieur le comte, I should return you
+ten thousand francs; you lose only the other ten, you save
+appearances, and the suit is quashed."
+
+"You are a fine fellow, Sibilet," said the general, taking his hand
+and shaking it. "If you can manage the future as well as you do the
+present, I'll call you the prince of stewards."
+
+"As to the future," said Sibilet, "you won't die of hunger if no
+timber is cut for two or three years. Let us begin by putting proper
+keepers in the woods. Between now and then things will flow as the
+water does in the Avonne. Gaubertin may die, or get rich enough to
+retire from business; at any rate, you will have sufficient time to
+find him a competitor. The cake is too rich not to be shared. Look for
+another Gaubertin to oppose the original."
+
+"Sibilet," said the old soldier, delighted with this variety of
+solutions. "I'll give you three thousand francs if you'll settle the
+matter as you propose. For the rest, we'll think about it."
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, "first and foremost have the forest
+properly watched. See for yourself the condition in which the
+peasantry have put it during your two years' absence. What could I do?
+I am steward; I am not a bailiff. To guard Les Aigues properly you
+need a mounted patrol and three keepers."
+
+"I certainly shall have the estate properly guarded. So it is to be
+war, is it? Very good, then we shall make war. That doesn't frighten
+me," said Montcornet, rubbing his hands.
+
+"A war of francs," said Sibilet; "and you may find that more difficult
+than the other kind; men can be killed but you can't kill self-
+interest. You will fight your enemy on the battle-field where all
+landlords are compelled to fight,--I mean cash results. It is not
+enough to produce, you must sell; and in order to sell, you must be on
+good terms with everybody."
+
+"I shall have the country people on my side."
+
+"By what means?"
+
+"By doing good among them."
+
+"Doing good to the valley peasants! to the petty shopkeepers of
+Soulanges!" exclaimed Sibilet, squinting horribly, by reason of the
+irony which flamed brighter in one eye than in the other. "Monsieur le
+comte doesn't know what he undertakes. Our Lord Jesus Christ would die
+again upon the cross in this valley! If you wish an easy life, follow
+the example of the late Mademoiselle Laguerre; let yourself be robbed,
+or else make people afraid of you. Women, children, and the masses are
+all governed by fear. That was the great secret of the Convention, and
+of the Emperor, too."
+
+"Good heavens! is this the forest of Bondy?" cried the general.
+
+"My dear," said Sibilet's wife, appearing at this moment, "your
+breakfast is ready. Pray excuse him, Monsieur le comte; he has eaten
+nothing since morning for he was obliged to go to Ronquerolles to
+deliver some barley."
+
+"Go, go, Sibilet," said the general.
+
+The next morning the count rose early, before daylight, and went to
+the gate of the Avonne, intending to talk with the one forester whom
+he employed and find out what the man's sentiments really were.
+
+Some seven or eight hundred acres of the forest of Les Aigues lie
+along the banks of the Avonne; and to preserve the majestic beauty of
+the river the large trees that border it have been left untouched for
+a distance of three leagues on both sides in an almost straight line.
+The mistress of Henri IV., to whom Les Aigues formerly belonged, was
+as fond of hunting as the king himself. In 1593 she ordered a bridge
+to be built of a single arch with shelving roadway by which to ride
+from the lower side of the forest to a much larger portion of it,
+purchased by her, which lay upon the slopes of the hills. The gate of
+the Avonne was built as a place of meeting for the huntsmen; and we
+know the magnificence bestowed by the architects of that day upon all
+buildings intended for the delight of the crown and the nobility. Six
+avenues branched away from it, their place of meeting forming a half-
+moon. In the centre of the semi-circular space stood an obelisk
+surmounted by a round shield, formerly gilded, bearing on one side the
+arms of Navarre and on the other those of the Countess de Moret.
+Another half-moon, on the side toward the river, communicated with the
+first by a straight avenue, at the opposite end of which the steep
+rise of the Venetian-shaped bridge could be seen. Between two elegant
+iron railings of the same character as that of the magnificent railing
+which formerly surrounded the garden of the Place Royale in Paris, now
+so unfortunately destroyed, stood a brick pavilion, with stone courses
+hewn in facets like those of the chateau, with a very pointed roof and
+window-casings of stone cut in the same manner. This old style, which
+gave the building a regal air, is suitable only to prisons when used
+in cities; but standing in the heart of forests it derives from its
+surroundings a splendor of its own. A group of trees formed a screen,
+behind which the kennels, an old falconry, a pheasantry, and the
+quarters of the huntsmen were falling into ruins, after being in their
+day the wonder and admiration of Burgundy.
+
+In 1595, the royal hunting-parties set forth from this magnificent
+pavilion, preceded by those fine dogs so dear to Rubens and to Paul
+Veronese; the huntsmen mounted on high-steeping steeds with stout and
+blue-white satiny haunches, seen no longer except in Wouverman's
+amazing work, followed by footmen in livery; the scene enlivened by
+whippers-in, wearing the high top-boots with facings and the yellow
+leathern breeches which have come down to the present day on the
+canvas of Van der Meulen. The obelisk was erected in commemoration of
+the visit of the Bearnais, and his hunt with the beautiful Comtesse de
+Moret; the date is given below the arms of Navarre. That jealous
+woman, whose son was afterwards legitimatized, would not allow the
+arms of France to figure on the obelisk, regarding them as a rebuke.
+
+At the time of which we write, when the general's eyes rested on this
+splendid ruin, moss had gathered for centuries on the four faces of
+the roof; the hewn-stone courses, mangled by time, seemed to cry with
+yawning mouths against the profanation; disjointed leaden settings let
+fall their octagonal panes, so that the windows seemed blind of an eye
+here and there. Yellow wallflowers bloomed about the copings; ivy slid
+its white rootlets into every crevice.
+
+All things bespoke a shameful want of care,--the seal set by mere
+life-possessors on the ancient glories that they possess. Two windows
+on the first floor were stuffed with hay. Through another, on the
+ground-floor, was seen a room filled with tools and logs of wood;
+while a cow pushed her muzzle through a fourth, proving that
+Courtecuisse, to avoid having to walk from the pavilion to the
+pheasantry, had turned the large hall of the central building into a
+stable,--a hall with panelled ceiling, and in the centre of each panel
+the arms of all the various possessors of Les Aigues!
+
+Black and dirty palings disgraced the approach to the pavilion, making
+square inclosures with plank roofs for pigs, ducks, and hens, the
+manure of which was taken away every six months. A few ragged garments
+were hung to dry on the brambles which boldly grew unchecked here and
+there. As the general came along the avenue from the bridge, Madame
+Courtecuisse was scouring a saucepan in which she had just made her
+coffee. The forester, sitting on a chair in the sun, considered his
+wife as a savage considers his. When he heard a horse's hoofs he
+turned round, saw the count, and seemed taken aback.
+
+"Well, Courtecuisse, my man," said the general, "I'm not surprised
+that the peasants cut my woods before Messrs. Gravelot can do so. So
+you consider your place a sinecure?"
+
+"Indeed, Monsieur le comte, I have watched the woods so many nights
+that I'm ill from it. I've got a chill, and I suffer such pain this
+morning that my wife has just made me a poultice in that saucepan."
+
+"My good fellow," said the count, "I don't know of any pain that a
+coffee poultice cures except that of hunger. Listen to me, you rascal!
+I rode through my forest yesterday, and then through those of Monsieur
+de Soulanges and Monsieur de Ronquerolles. Theirs are carefully
+watched and preserved, while mine is in a shameful state."
+
+"Ah, monsieur! but they are the old lords of the neighborhood;
+everybody respects their property. How can you expect me to fight
+against six districts? I care for my life more than for your woods. A
+man who would undertake to watch your woods as they ought to be
+watched would get a ball in his head for wages in some dark corner of
+the forest--"
+
+"Coward!" cried the general, trying to control the anger the man's
+insolent reply provoked in him. "Last night was as clear as day, yet
+it cost me three hundred francs in actual robbery and over a thousand
+in future damages. You will leave my service unless you do better. All
+wrong-doing deserves some mercy; therefore these are my conditions:
+You may have the fines, and I will pay you three francs for every
+indictment you bring against these depredators. If I don't get what I
+expect, you know what you have to expect, and no pension either.
+Whereas, if you serve me faithfully and contrive to stop these
+depredations, I'll give you an annuity of three hundred francs for
+life. You can think it over. Here are six ways," continued the count,
+pointing to the branching roads; "there's only one for you to take,--
+as for me also, who am not afraid of balls; try and find the right
+one."
+
+Courtecuisse, a small man about forty-six years of age, with a full-
+moon face, found his greatest happiness in doing nothing. He expected
+to live and die in that pavilion, now considered by him HIS pavilion.
+His two cows were pastured in the forest, from which he got his wood;
+and he spent his time in looking after his garden instead of after the
+delinquents. Such neglect of duty suited Gaubertin, and Courtecuisse
+knew it did. The keeper chased only those depredators who were the
+objects of his personal dislike,--young women who would not yield to
+his wishes, or persons against whom he held a grudge; though for some
+time past he had really felt no dislikes, for every one yielded to him
+on account of his easy-going ways with them.
+
+Courtecuisse had a place always kept for him at the table of the
+Grand-I-Vert; the wood-pickers feared him no longer; indeed, his wife
+and he received many gifts in kind from them; his wood was brought in;
+his vineyard dug; in short, all delinquents at whom he blinked did him
+service.
+
+Counting on Gaubertin for the future, and feeling sure of two acres
+whenever Les Aigues should be brought to the hammer, he was roughly
+awakened by the curt speech of the general, who, after four quiescent
+years, was now revealing his true character,--that of a bourgeois rich
+man who was determined to be no longer deceived. Courtecuisse took his
+cap, his game-bag, and his gun, put on his gaiters and his belt (which
+bore the very recent arms of Montcornet), and started for Ville-aux-
+Fayes, with the careless, indifferent air and manner under which
+country-people often conceal very deep reflections, while he gazed at
+the woods and whistled to the dogs to follow him.
+
+"What! you complain of the Shopman when he proposes to make your
+fortune?" said Gaubertin. "Doesn't the fool offer to give you three
+francs for every arrest you make, and the fines to boot? Have an
+understanding with your friends and you can bring as many indictments
+as you please,--hundreds if you like! With one thousand francs you can
+buy La Bachelerie from Rigou, become a property owner, live in your
+own house, and work for yourself, or rather, make others work for you,
+and take your ease. Only--now listen to me--you must manage to arrest
+only such as haven't a penny in the world. You can't shear sheep
+unless the wool is on their backs. Take the Shopman's offer and leave
+him to collect the costs,--if he wants them; tastes differ. Didn't old
+Mariotte prefer losses to profits, in spite of my advice?"
+
+Courtecuisse, filled with admiration for these words of wisdom,
+returned home burning with the desire to be a land-owner and a
+bourgeois like the rest.
+
+When the general reached Les Aigues he related his expedition to
+Sibilet.
+
+"Monsieur le comte did very right," said the steward, rubbing his
+hands; "but he must not stop short half-way. The field-keeper of the
+district who allows the country-people to prey upon the meadows and
+rob the harvests ought to be changed. Monsieur le comte should have
+himself chosen mayor, and appoint one of his old soldiers, who would
+have the courage to carry out his orders, in place of Vaudoyer. A
+great land-owner should be master in his own district. Just see what
+difficulties we have with the present mayor!"
+
+The mayor of the district of Blangy, formerly a Benedictine, named
+Rigou, had married, in the first year of the Republic, the servant-
+woman of the late priest of Blangy. In spite of the repugnance which a
+married monk excited at the Prefecture, he had continued to be mayor
+after 1815, for the reason that there was no-one else at Blangy who
+was capable of filling the post. But in 1817, when the bishop sent the
+Abbe Brossette to the parish of Blangy (which had then been vacant
+over twenty-five years), a violent opposition not unnaturally broke
+out between the old apostate and the young ecclesiastic, whose
+character is already known to us. The war which was then and there
+declared between the mayor's office and the parsonage increased the
+popularity of the magistrate, who had hitherto been more or less
+despised. Rigou, whom the peasants had disliked for usurious dealings,
+now suddenly represented their political and financial interests,
+supposed to be threatened by the Restoration, and more especially by
+the clergy.
+
+A copy of the "Constitutionnel," that great organ of liberalism, after
+making the rounds of the Cafe de la Paix, came back to Rigou on the
+seventh day,--the subscription, standing in the name of old Socquard
+the keeper of the coffee-house, being shared by twenty persons. Rigou
+passed the paper on to Langlume the miller, who, in turn, gave it in
+shreds to any one who knew how to read. The "Paris items," and the
+anti-religion jokes of the liberal sheet formed the public opinion of
+the valley des Aigues. Rigou, like the VENERABLE Abbe Gregoire, became
+a hero. For him, as for certain Parisian bankers, politics spread a
+mantle of popularity over his shameful dishonesty.
+
+At this particular time the perjured monk, like Francois Keller the
+great orator, was looked upon as a defender of the rights of the
+people,--he who, not so very long before, dared not walk in the fields
+after dark, lest he should stumble into pitfalls where he would seem
+to have been killed by accident! Persecute a man politically and you
+not only magnify him, but you redeem his past and make it innocent.
+The liberal party was a great worker of miracles in this respect. Its
+dangerous journal, which had the wit to make itself as commonplace, as
+calumniating, as credulous, and as sillily perfidious as every
+audience made up the general masses, did in all probability as much
+injury to private interests as it did to those of the Church.
+
+Rigou flattered himself that he should find in a Bonapartist general
+now laid on the shelf, in a son of the people raised from nothing by
+the Revolution, a sound enemy to the Bourbons and the priests. But the
+general, bearing in mind his private ambitions, so arranged matters as
+to evade the visit of Monsieur and Madame Rigou when he first came to
+Les Aigues.
+
+When you have become better acquainted with the terrible character of
+Rigou, the lynx of the valley, you will understand the full extent of
+the second capital blunder which the general's aristocratic ambitions
+led him to commit, and which the countess made all the greater by an
+offence which will be described in the further history of Rigou.
+
+If Montcornet had courted the mayor's good-will, if he had sought his
+friendship, perhaps the influence of the renegade might have
+neutralized that of Gaubertin. Far from that, three suits were now
+pending in the courts of Ville-aux-Fayes between the general and the
+ex-monk. Until the present time the general had been so absorbed in
+his personal interests and in his marriage that he had never
+remembered Rigou, but when Sibilet advised him to get himself made
+mayor in Rigou's place, he took post-horses and went to see the
+prefect.
+
+The prefect, Comte Martial de la Roche-Hugon, had been a friend of the
+general since 1804; and it was a word from him said to Montcornet in a
+conversation in Paris, which brought about the purchase of Les Aigues.
+Comte Martial, a prefect under Napoleon, remained a prefect under the
+Bourbons, and courted the bishop to retain his place. Now it happened
+that Monseigneur had several times requested him to get rid of Rigou.
+Martial, to whom the condition of the district was perfectly well
+known, was delighted with the general's request; so that in less than
+a month the Comte de Montcornet was mayor of Blangy.
+
+By one of those accidents which come about naturally, the general met,
+while at the prefecture where his friend put him up, a non-
+commissioned officer of the ex-Imperial guard, who had been cheated
+out of his retiring pension. The general had already, under other
+circumstances, done a service to the brave cavalryman, whose name was
+Groison; the man, remembering it, now told him his troubles, admitting
+that he was penniless. The general promised to get him his pension,
+and proposed that he should take the place of field-keeper to the
+district of Blangy, as a way of paying off his score of gratitude by
+devotion to the new mayor's interests. The appointments of master and
+man were made simultaneously, and the general gave, as may be
+supposed, very firm instructions to his subordinate.
+
+Vaudoyer, the displaced keeper, a peasant on the Ronquerolles estate,
+was only fit, like most field-keepers, to stalk about, and gossip, and
+let himself be petted by the poor of the district, who asked nothing
+better than to corrupt at subaltern authority,--the advanced guard, as
+it were, of the land-owners. He knew Soudry, the brigadier at
+Soulanges, for brigadiers of gendarmerie, performing functions that
+are semi-judicial in drawing up criminal indictments, have much to do
+with the rural keepers, who are, in fact, their natural spies. Soudry,
+being appealed to, sent Vaudoyer to Gaubertin, who received his old
+acquaintance very cordially, and invited him to drink while listening
+to the recital of his troubles.
+
+"My dear friend," said the mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes, who could talk to
+every man in his own language, "what has happened to you is likely to
+happen to us all. The nobles are back upon us. The men to whom the
+Emperor gave titles make common cause with the old nobility. They all
+want to crush the people, re-establish their former rights and take
+our property from us. But we are Burgundians; we must resist, and
+drive those Arminacs back to Paris. Return to Blangy; you shall be
+agent for Monsieur Polissard, the wood-merchant, who is contractor for
+the forest of Ronquerolles. Don't be uneasy, my lad; I'll find you
+enough to do for the whole of the coming year. But remember one thing;
+the wood is for ourselves! Not a single depredation, or the thing is
+at an end. Send all interlopers to Les Aigues. If there's brush or
+fagots to sell make people buy ours; don't let them buy of Les Aigues.
+You'll get back to your place as field-keeper before long; this thing
+can't last. The general will get sick of living among thieves. Did you
+know that that Shopman called me a thief, me!--son of the stanchest
+and most incorruptible of republicans; me!--the son in law of Mouchon,
+that famous representative of the people, who died without leaving me
+enough to bury him?"
+
+The general raised the salary of the new field-keeper to three hundred
+francs; and built a town-hall, in which he gave him a residence. Then
+he married him to a daughter of one of his tenant-farmers, who had
+lately died, leaving her an orphan with three acres of vineyard.
+Groison attached himself to the general as a dog to his master. This
+legitimate fidelity was admitted by the whole community. The keeper
+was feared and respected, but like the captain of a vessel whose
+ship's company hate him; the peasantry shunned him as they would a
+leper. Met either in silence or with sarcasms veiled under a show of
+good-humor, the new keeper was a sentinel watched by other sentinels.
+He could do nothing against such numbers. The delinquents took delight
+in plotting depredations which it was impossible for him to prove, and
+the old soldier grew furious at his helplessness. Groison found the
+excitement of a war of factions in his duties, and all the pleasures
+of the chase,--a chase after petty delinquents. Trained in real war to
+a loyalty which consists in part of playing a fair game, this enemy of
+traitors came at last to hate these people, so treacherous in their
+conspiracies, and so clever in their thefts that they mortified his
+self-esteem. He soon observed that the depredations were committed
+only at Les Aigues; all the other estates were respected. At first he
+despised a peasantry ungrateful enough to pillage a general of the
+Empire, an essentially kind and generous man; presently, however, he
+added hatred to contempt. But multiply himself as he would, he could
+not be everywhere, and the enemy pillaged everywhere that he was not.
+Groison made the general understand that it was necessary to organize
+the defence on a war footing, and proved to him the insufficiency of
+his own devoted efforts and the evil disposition of the inhabitants of
+the valley.
+
+"There is something behind it all, general," he said; "these people
+are so bold they fear nothing; they seem to rely on the favor of the
+good God."
+
+"We shall see," replied the count.
+
+Fatal word! The verb "to see" has no future tense for politicians.
+
+At the moment, Montcornet was considering another difficulty, which
+seemed to him more pressing. he needed an alter ego to do his work in
+the mayor's office during the months he lived in Paris. Obliged to
+find some man who knew how to read and write for the position of
+assistant mayor, he knew of none and could hear of none throughout the
+district but Langlume, the tenant of his own flour-mill. The choice
+was disastrous. Not only were the interests of mayor and miller
+diametrically opposed, but Langlume had long hatched swindling
+projects with Rigou, who lent him money to carry on his business, or
+to acquire property. The miller had bought the right to the hay of
+certain fields for his horses, and Sibilet could not sell it except to
+him. The hay of all the fields in the district was sold at better
+prices than that of Les Aigues, though the yield of the latter was the
+best.
+
+Langlume, then, became the provisional mayor; but in France the
+provisional is eternal,--though Frenchmen are suspected of loving
+change. Acting by Rigou's advice, he played a part of great devotion
+to the general; and he was still assistant-mayor at the moment when,
+by the omnipotence of the historian, this drama begins.
+
+In the absence of the mayor, Rigou, necessarily a member of the
+district council, reigned supreme, and brought forward resolutions all
+injuriously affecting the general. At one time he caused money to be
+spent for purposes that were profitable to the peasants only,--the
+greater part of the expenses falling upon Les Aigues, which, by reason
+of its great extent, paid two thirds of the taxes; at other times the
+council refused, under his influence, certain useful and necessary
+allowances, such as an increase in salary for the abbe, repairs or
+improvements to the parsonage, or "wages" to the school-master.
+
+"If the peasants once know how to read and write, what will become of
+us?" said Langlume, naively, to the general, to excuse this anti-
+liberal action taken against a brother of the Christian Doctrine whom
+the Abbe Brossette wished to establish as a public school-master in
+Blangy.
+
+The general, delighted with his old Groison, returned to Paris and
+immediately looked about him for other old soldiers of the late
+imperial guard, with whom to organize the defence of Les Aigues on a
+formidable footing. By dint of searching out and questioning his
+friends and many officers on half-pay, he unearthed Michaud, a former
+quartermaster at headquarters of the cuirassiers of the guard; one of
+those men whom troopers call "hard-to-cook," a nickname derived from
+the mess kitchen where refractory beans are not uncommon. Michaud
+picked out from among his friends and acquaintances, three other men
+fit to be his helpers, and able to guard the estate without fear and
+without reproach.
+
+The first, named Steingel, a pure-blooded Alsacian, was a natural son
+of the general of that name, who fell in one of Bonaparte's first
+victories with the army of Italy. Tall and strong, he belonged to the
+class of soldiers accustomed, like the Russians, to obey, passively
+and absolutely. Nothing hindered him in the performance of his duty;
+he would have collared an emperor or a pope if such were his orders.
+He ignored danger. Perfectly fearless, he had never received the
+smallest scratch during his sixteen years' campaigning. He slept in
+the open air or in his bed with stoical indifference. At any increased
+labor or discomfort, he merely remarked, "It seems to be the order of
+the day."
+
+The second man, Vatel, son of the regiment, corporal of voltigeurs,
+gay as a lark, rather free and easy with the fair sex, brave to
+foolhardiness, was capable of shooting a comrade with a laugh if
+ordered to execute him. With no future before him and not knowing how
+to employ himself, the prospect of finding an amusing little war in
+the functions of keeper, attracted him; and as the grand army and the
+Emperor had hitherto stood him in place of a religion, so now he swore
+to serve the brave Montcornet against and through all and everything.
+His nature was of that essentially wrangling quality to which a life
+without enemies seems dull and objectless,--the nature, in short, of a
+litigant, or a policeman. If it had not been for the presence of the
+sheriff's officer, he would have seized Tonsard and the bundle of wood
+at the Grand-I-Vert, snapping his fingers at the law on the
+inviolability of a man's domicile.
+
+The third man, Gaillard, also an old soldier, risen to the rank of
+sub-lieutenant, and covered with wounds, belonged to the class of
+mechanical soldiers. The fate of the Emperor never left his mind and
+he became indifferent to everything else. With the care of a natural
+daughter on his hands, he accepted the place that was now offered to
+him as a means of subsistence, taking it as he would have taken
+service in a regiment.
+
+When the general reached Les Aigues, whither he had gone in advance of
+his troopers, intending to send away Courtecuisse, he was amazed at
+discovering the impudent audacity with which the keeper had fulfilled
+his commands. There is a method of obeying which makes the obedience
+of the servant a cutting sarcasm on the master's order. But all things
+in this world can be reduced to absurdity, and Courtecuisse in this
+instance went beyond its limits.
+
+One hundred and twenty-six indictments against depredators (most of
+whom were in collusion with Courtecuisse) and sworn to before the
+justice court of Soulanges, had resulted in sixty-nine commitments for
+trial, in virtue of which Brunet, the sheriff's officer, delighted at
+such a windfall of fees, had rigorously enforced the warrants in such
+a way as to bring about what is called, in legal language, a
+declaration of insolvency; a condition of pauperism where the law
+becomes of course powerless. By this declaration the sheriff proves
+that the defendant possesses no property of any kind, and is therefore
+a pauper. Where there is absolutely nothing, the creditor, like the
+king, loses his right to sue. The paupers in this case, carefully
+selected by Courtecuisse, were scattered through five neighboring
+districts, whither Brunet betook himself duly attended by his
+satellites, Vermichel and Fourchon, to serve the writs. Later he
+transmitted the papers to Sibilet with a bill of costs for five
+thousand francs, requesting him to obtain the further orders of
+Monsieur le comte de Montcornet.
+
+Just as Sibilet, armed with these papers, was calmly explaining to the
+count the result of the rash orders he had given to Courtecuisse, and
+witnessing, as calmly, a burst of the most violent anger a general of
+the French cavalry was ever known to indulge in, Courtecuisse entered
+to pay his respects to his master and to bring his own account of
+eleven hundred francs, the sum to which his promised commission now
+amounted. The natural man took the bit in his teeth and ran off with
+the general, who totally forgot his coronet and his field rank; he was
+a trooper once more, vomiting curses of which he probably was ashamed
+when he thought of them later.
+
+"Ha! eleven hundred francs!" he shouted, "eleven hundred slaps in your
+face! eleven hundred kicks!--Do you think I can't see straight through
+your lies? Out of my sight, or I'll strike you flat!"
+
+At the mere look of the general's purple face and before that warrior
+could get out the last words, Courtecuisse was off like a swallow.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said Sibilet, gently, "you are wrong."
+
+"Wrong! I, wrong?"
+
+"Yes, Monsieur le comte, take care, you will have trouble with that
+rascal; he will sue you."
+
+"What do I care for that? Tell the scoundrel to leave the place
+instantly! See that he takes nothing of mine, and pay him his wages."
+
+Four hours later the whole country-side was gossiping about this
+scene. The general, they said, had assaulted the unfortunate
+Courtecuisse, and refused to pay his wages and two thousand francs
+besides, which he owed him. Extraordinary stories went the rounds, and
+the master of Les Aigues was declared insane. The next day Brunet, who
+had served all the warrants for the general, now brought him on behalf
+of Courtecuisse a summon to appear before the police court. The lion
+was stung by gnats; but his misery was only just beginning.
+
+The installation of a keeper is not done without a few formalities; he
+must, for instance, file an oath in the civil court. Some days
+therefore elapsed before the three keepers really entered upon their
+functions. Though the general had written to Michaud to bring his wife
+without waiting until the lodge at the gate of the Avonne was ready
+for them, the future head-keeper, or rather bailiff, was detained in
+Paris by his marriage and his wife's family, and did not reach Les
+Aigues until a fortnight later. During those two weeks, and during the
+time still further required for certain formalities which were carried
+out with very ill grace by the authorities at Ville-aux-Fayes, the
+forest of Les Aigues was shamefully devastated by the peasantry, who
+took advantage of the fact that there was practically no watch over
+it.
+
+The appearance of three keepers handsomely dressed in green cloth, the
+Emperor's color, with faces denoting firmness, and each of them well-
+made, active, and capable of spending their nights in the woods, was a
+great event in the valley, from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes.
+
+Throughout the district Groison was the only man who welcomed these
+veterans. Delighted to be thus reinforced, he let fall a few threats
+against thieves, who before long, he said, would be watched so closely
+that they could do no damage. Thus the usual proclamation of all great
+commanders was not lacking to the present war; in this case it was
+said aloud and also whispered in secret.
+
+Sibilet called the general's attention to the fact that the
+gendarmerie of Soulanges, and especially its brigadier, Soudry, were
+thoroughly and hypocritically hostile to Les Aigues. He made him see
+the importance of substituting another brigade, which might show a
+better spirit.
+
+"With a good brigadier and a company of gendarmes devoted to your
+interests, you could manage the country," he said to him.
+
+The general went to the Prefecture and obtained from the general in
+command of the division the retirement of Soudry and the substitution
+of a man named Viallet, an excellent gendarme at headquarters, who was
+much praised by his general and the prefect. The company of gendarmes
+at Soulanges were dispersed to other places in the department by the
+colonel of the gendarmerie, an old friend of Montcornet, and chosen
+men were put in their places with secret orders to keep watch over the
+estate of the Comte de Montcornet, and prevent all future attempts to
+injure it; they were also particularly enjoined not to allow
+themselves to be gained over by the inhabitants of Soulanges.
+
+This last revolutionary measure, carried out with such rapidity that
+there was no possibility of countermining it created much astonishment
+in Soulanges and in Ville-aux-Fayes. Soudry, who felt himself
+dismissed, complained bitterly, and Gaubertin managed to get him
+appointed mayor, which put the gendarmerie under his orders. An outcry
+was made about tyranny. Montcornet became an object of general hatred.
+Not only were five or six lives radically changed by him, but many
+personal vanities were wounded. The peasants, taking their cue from
+words dropped by the small tradesmen of Ville-aux-Fayes and Soulanges,
+and by Rigou, Langlume, Guerbet, and the postmaster at Conches,
+thought they were on the eve of losing what they called their rights.
+
+The general stopped the suit brought by Courtecuisse by paying him all
+he demanded. The man then purchased, nominally for two thousand
+francs, a little property surrounded on all sides but one by the
+estate of Les Aigues,--a sort of cover into which the game escaped.
+Rigou, the owner, had never been willing to part with La Bachelerie,
+as it was called, to the possessors of the estate, but he now took
+malicious pleasure in selling it, at fifty per cent discount, to
+Courtecuisse; which made the ex-keeper one of Rigou's numerous
+henchmen, for all he actually paid for the property was one thousand
+francs.
+
+The three keepers, with Michaud the bailiff, and Groison the field-
+keeper of Blangy, led henceforth the life of guerrillas. Living night
+and day in the forest, they soon acquired that deep knowledge of
+woodland things which becomes a science among foresters, saving them
+much loss of time; they studied the tracks of animals, the species of
+the trees, and their habits of growth, training their ears to every
+sound and to every murmur of the woods. Still further, they observed
+faces, watched and understood the different families in the various
+villages of the district, and knew the individuals in each family,
+their habits, characters, and means of living,--a far more difficult
+matter than most persons suppose. When the peasants who obtained their
+living from Les Aigues saw these well-planned measures of defence,
+they met them with dumb resistance or sneering submission.
+
+From the first, Michaud and Sibilet mutually disliked each other. The
+frank and loyal soldier, with the sense of honor of a subaltern of the
+young "garde," hated the servile brutality and the discontented spirit
+of the steward. He soon took note of the objections with which Sibilet
+opposed all measures that were really judicious, and the reasons he
+gave for those that were questionable. Instead of calming the general,
+Sibilet, as the reader has already seen, constantly excited him and
+drove him to harsh measures, all the while trying to daunt him by
+drawing his attention to countless annoyances, petty vexations, and
+ever-recurring and unconquerable difficulties. Without suspecting the
+role of spy and exasperator undertaken by Sibilet (who secretly
+intended to eventually make choice in his own interests between
+Gaubertin and the general) Michaud felt that the steward's nature was
+bad and grasping, and he was unable to explain to himself its apparent
+honesty. The enmity which separated the two functionaries was
+satisfactory to the general. Michaud's hatred led him to watch the
+steward, though he would not have condescended to play the part of spy
+if the general had not required it. Sibilet fawned upon the bailiff
+and flattered him, without being able to get anything from him beyond
+an extreme politeness which the loyal soldier established between them
+as a barrier.
+
+Now, all preliminary details having been made known, the reader will
+understand the conduct of the general's enemies and the meaning of the
+conversation which he had with what he called his two ministers, after
+Madame de Montcornet, the abbe, and Blondet left the breakfast-table.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+CONCERNING THE MEDIOCRACY
+
+"Well, Michaud, what's the news?" asked the general as soon as his
+wife had left the room.
+
+"General, if you will permit me to say so, it would be better not to
+talk over matters in this room. Walls have ears, and I should like to
+be certain that what we say reaches none but our own."
+
+"Very good," said the general, "then let us walk towards the steward's
+lodge by the path through the fields; no one can overhear us there."
+
+A few moments later the general, with Michaud and Sibilet, was
+crossing the meadows, while Madame de Montcornet, with the abbe and
+Blondet, was on her way to the gate of the Avonne.
+
+Michaud related the scene that had just taken place at the Grand-I-
+Vert.
+
+"Vatel did wrong," said Sibilet.
+
+"They made that plain to him at once," replied Michaud, "by blinding
+him; but that's nothing. General, you remember the plan we agreed
+upon,--to seize the cattle of those depredators against whom judgment
+was given? Well, we can't do it. Brunet, like his colleague Plissoud,
+is not loyal in his support. They both warn the delinquents when they
+are about to make a seizure. Vermichel, Brunet's assistant, went to
+the Grand-I-Vert this morning, ostensibly after Pere Fourchon; and
+Marie Tonsard, who is intimate with Bonnebault, ran off at once to
+give the alarm at Conches. The depredations have begun again."
+
+"A strong show of authority is becoming daily more and more
+necessary," said Sibilet.
+
+"What did I tell you?" cried the general. "We must demand the
+enforcement of the judgment of the court, which carried with it
+imprisonment; we must arrest for debt all those who do not pay the
+damages I have won and the costs of the suits."
+
+"These fellows imagine the law is powerless, and tell each other that
+you dare not arrest them," said Sibilet. "They think they frighten
+you! They have confederates at Ville-aux-Fayes; for even the
+prosecuting attorney seems to have ignored the verdicts against them."
+
+"I think," said Michaud, seeing that the general looked thoughtful,
+"that if you are willing to spend a good deal of money you can still
+protect the property."
+
+"It is better to spend money than to act harshly," remarked Sibilet.
+
+"What is your plan?" asked the general of his bailiff.
+
+"It is very simple," said Michaud. "Inclose the whole forest with
+walls, like those of the park, and you will be safe; the slightest
+depredation then becomes a criminal offence and is taken to the
+assizes."
+
+"At a franc and a half the square foot for the material only, Monsieur
+le comte would find his wall would cost him a third of the whole value
+of Les Aigues," said Sibilet, with a laugh.
+
+"Well, well," said Montcornet, "I shall go and see the attorney-
+general at once."
+
+"The attorney-general," remarked Sibilet, gently, "may perhaps share
+the opinion of his subordinate; for the negligence shown by the latter
+is probably the result of an agreement between them."
+
+"Then I wish to know it!" cried Montcornet. "If I have to get the
+whole of them turned out, judges, civil authorities, and the attorney-
+general to boot, I'll do it; I'll go the Keeper of the Seals, or to
+the king himself."
+
+At a vehement sign made by Michaud the general stopped short and said
+to Sibilet, as he turned to retrace his steps, "Good day, my dear
+fellow,"--words which the steward understood.
+
+"Does Monsieur le comte intend, as mayor, to enforce the necessary
+measures to repress the abuse of gleaning?" he said, respectfully.
+"The harvest is coming on, and if we are to publish the statutes about
+certificates of pauperism and the prevention of paupers from other
+districts gleaning our land, there is no time to be lost."
+
+"Do it at once, and arrange with Groison," said the count. "With such
+a class of people," he added, "we must follow out the law."
+
+So, without a moment's reflection, Montcornet gave in to a measure
+that Sibilet had been proposing to him for more than a fortnight, to
+which he had hitherto refused to consent; but now, in the violence of
+anger caused by Vatel's mishap, he instantly adopted it as the right
+thing to do.
+
+When Sibilet was at some distance the general said in a low voice to
+his bailiff:--
+
+"Well, my dear Michaud, what is it; why did you make me that sign?"
+
+"You have an enemy within the walls, general, yet you tell him plans
+which you ought not to confide even to the secret police."
+
+"I share your suspicions, my dear friend," replied Montcornet, "but I
+don't intend to commit the same fault twice over. I shall not part
+with another steward till I'm sure of a better. I am waiting to get
+rid of Sibilet, till you understand the business of steward well
+enough to take his place, and till Vatel is fit to succeed you. And
+yet, I have no ground of complaint against Sibilet. He is honest and
+punctual in all his dealings; he hasn't kept back a hundred francs in
+all these five years. He has a perfectly detestable nature, and that's
+all one can say against him. If it were otherwise, what would be his
+plan in acting as he does?"
+
+"General," said Michaud, gravely, "I will find out, for undoubtedly he
+has one; and if you would only allow it, a good bribe to that old
+scoundrel Fourchon will enable me to get at the truth; though after
+what he said just now I suspect the old fellow of having more secrets
+than one in his pouch. That swindling old cordwainer told me himself
+they want to drive you from Les Aigues. And let me tell you, for you
+ought to know it, that from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes there is not a
+peasant, a petty tradesman, a farmer, a tavern-keeper who isn't laying
+by his money to buy a bit of the estate. Fourchon confided to me that
+Tonsard has already put in his claim. The idea that you can be forced
+to sell Les Aigues has gone from end to end of the valley like an
+infection in the air. It may be that the steward's present house, with
+some adjoining land, will be the price paid for Sibilet's spying.
+Nothing is ever said among us that is not immediately known at Ville-
+aux-Fayes. Sibilet is a relative of your enemy Gaubertin. What you
+have just said about the attorney-general and the others will probably
+be reported before you have reached the Prefecture. You don't know
+what the inhabitants of this district are."
+
+"Don't I know them? I know they are the scum of the earth! Do you
+suppose I am going to yield to such blackguards?" cried the general.
+"Good heavens, I'd rather burn Les Aigues myself!"
+
+"No need to burn it; let us adopt a line of conduct which will baffle
+the schemes of these Lilliputians. Judging by threats, general, they
+are resolved on war to the knife against you; and therefore since you
+mention incendiarism, let me beg of you to insure all your buildings,
+and all your farmhouses."
+
+"Michaud, do you know whom they mean by 'Shopman'? Yesterday, as I was
+riding along by the Thune, I heard some little rascals cry out, 'The
+Shopman! here's the Shopman!' and then they ran away."
+
+"Ask Sibilet; the answer is in his line, he likes to make you angry,"
+said Michaud, with a pained look. "But--if you will have an answer--
+well, that's a nickname these brigands have given you, general."
+
+"What does it mean?"
+
+"It means, general--well, it refers to your father."
+
+"Ha! the curs!" cried the count, turning livid. "Yes, Michaud, my
+father was a shopkeeper, an upholsterer; the countess doesn't know it.
+Oh! that I should ever--well! after all, I have waltzed with queens
+and empresses. I'll tell her this very night," he cried, after a
+pause.
+
+"They also call you a coward," continued Michaud.
+
+"Ha!"
+
+"They ask how you managed to save yourself at Essling when nearly all
+your comrades perished."
+
+The accusation brought a smile to the general's lips. "Michaud, I
+shall go at once to the Prefecture!" he cried, with a sort of fury,
+"if it is only to get the policies of insurance you ask for. Let
+Madame la comtesse know that I have gone. Ha, ha! they want war, do
+they? Well, they shall have it; I'll take my pleasure in thwarting
+them,--every one of them, those bourgeois of Soulanges, and their
+peasantry! We are in the enemy's country, therefore prudence! Tell the
+foresters to keep within the limits of the law. Poor Vatel, take care
+of him. The countess is inclined to be timid; she must know nothing of
+all this; otherwise I could never get her to come back here."
+
+Neither the general nor Michaud understood their real peril. Michaud
+had been too short a time in this Burgundian valley to realize the
+enemy's power, though he saw its action. The general, for his part,
+believed in the supremacy of the law.
+
+The law, such as the legislature of these days manufactures it, has
+not the virtue we attribute to it. It strikes unequally; it is so
+modified in many of its modes of application that it virtually refutes
+its own principles. This fact may be noted more or less distinctly
+throughout all ages. Is there any historian ignorant enough to assert
+that the decrees of the most vigilant of powers were ever enforced
+throughout France?--for instance, that the requisitions of the
+Convention for men, commodities, and money were obeyed in Provence, in
+the depths of Normandy, on the borders of Brittany, as they were at
+the great centres of social life? What philosopher dares deny that a
+head falls to-day in such or such department, while in a neighboring
+department another head stays on its shoulders though guilty of a
+crime identically the same, and often more horrible? We ask for
+equality in life, and inequality reigns in law and in the death
+penalty!
+
+When the population of a town falls below a certain figure the
+administrative system is no longer the same. There are perhaps a
+hundred cities in France where the laws are vigorously enforced, and
+there the intelligence of the citizens rises to the conception of the
+problem of public welfare and future security which the law seeks to
+solve; but throughout the rest of France nothing is comprehended
+beyond immediate gratification; people rebel against all that lessens
+it. Therefore in nearly one half of France we find a power of inertia
+which defeats all legal action, both municipal and governmental. This
+resistance, be it understood, does not affect the essential things of
+public polity. The collection of taxes, recruiting, punishment of
+great crimes, as a general thing do systematically go on; but outside
+of such recognized necessities, all legislative decrees which affect
+customs, morals, private interests, and certain abuses, are a dead
+letter, owing to the sullen opposition of the people. At the very
+moment when this book is going to press, this dumb resistance, which
+opposed Louis XIV. in Brittany, may still be seen and felt. See the
+unfortunate results of the game-laws, to which we are now sacrificing
+yearly the lives of some twenty or thirty men for the sake of
+preserving a few animals.
+
+In France the law is, to at least twenty million of inhabitants,
+nothing more than a bit of white paper posted on the doors of the
+church and the town-hall. That gives rise to the term "papers," which
+Mouche used to express legality. Many mayors of cantons (not to speak
+of the district mayors) put up their bundles of seeds and herbs with
+the printed statutes. As for the district mayors, the number of those
+who do not know how to read and write is really alarming, and the
+manner in which the civil records are kept is even more so. The danger
+of this state of things, well-known to the governing powers, is
+doubtless diminishing; but what centralization (against which every
+one declaims, as it is the fashion in France to declaim against all
+things good and useful and strong),--what centralization cannot touch,
+the Power against which it will forever fling itself in vain, is that
+which the general was now about to attack, and which we shall take
+leave to call the Mediocracy.
+
+A great outcry was made against the tyranny of the nobles; in these
+days the cry is against that of capitalists, against abuses of power,
+which may be merely the inevitable galling of the social yoke, called
+Compact by Rousseau, Constitution by some, Charter by others; Czar
+here, King there, Parliament in Great Britain; while in France the
+general levelling begun in 1789 and continued in 1830 has paved the
+way for the juggling dominion of the middle classes, and delivered the
+nation into their hands without escape. The portrayal of one fact
+alone, unfortunately only too common in these days, namely, the
+subjection of a canton, a little town, a sub-prefecture, to the will
+of a family clique,--in short, the power acquired by Gaubertin,--will
+show this social danger better than all dogmatic statements put
+together. Many oppressed communities will recognize the truth of this
+picture; many persons secretly and silently crushed by this tyranny
+will find in these words an obituary, as it were, which may half
+console them for their hidden woes.
+
+At the very moment when the general imagined himself to be renewing a
+warfare in which there had really been no truce, his former steward
+had just completed the last meshes of the net-work in which he now
+held the whole arrondissement of Ville-aux-Fayes. To avoid too many
+explanations it is necessary to state, once for all, succinctly, the
+genealogical ramifications by means of which Gaubertin wound himself
+about the country, as a boa-constrictor winds around a tree,--with
+such art that a passing traveller thinks he beholds some natural
+effect of the tropical vegetation.
+
+In 1793 there were three brothers of the name of Mouchon in the valley
+of the Avonne. After 1793 they changed the name of the valley to that
+of the Valley des Aigues, out of hatred to the old nobility.
+
+The eldest brother, steward of the property of the Ronquerolles
+family, was elected deputy of the department to the Convention. Like
+his friend, Gaubertin's father, the prosecutor of those days, who
+saved the Soulanges family, he saved the property and the lives of the
+Ronquerolles. He had two daughters; one married to Gendrin, the
+lawyer, the other to Gaubertin. He died in 1804.
+
+The second, through the influence of his elder brother, was made
+postmaster at Conches. His only child was a daughter, married to a
+rich farmer named Guerbet. He died in 1817.
+
+The last of the Mouchons, who was a priest, and the curate of Ville-
+aux-Fayes before the Revolution, was again a priest after the re-
+establishment of Catholic worship, and again the curate of the same
+little town. He was not willing to take the oath, and was hidden for a
+long time in the hermitage of Les Aigues, under the protection of the
+Gaubertins, father and son. Now about sixty-seven years of age, he was
+treated with universal respect and affection, owing to the harmony of
+his nature with that of the inhabitants. Parsimonious to the verge of
+avarice, he was thought to be rich, and the credit of being so
+increased the respect that was shown to him. Monseigneur the bishop
+paid the greatest attention to the Abbe Mouchon, who was always spoken
+of as the venerable curate of Ville-aux-Fayes; and the fact that he
+had several times refused to go and live in a splendid parsonage
+attached to the Prefecture, where Monseigneur wished to settle him,
+made him dearer still to his people.
+
+Gaubertin, now mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes, received steady support from
+his brother-in-law Gendrin, who was judge of the municipal court.
+Gaubertin the younger, the solicitor who had the most practice before
+this court and much repute in the arrondissement, was already thinking
+of selling his practice after five years' exercise of it. He wanted to
+succeed his Uncle Gendrin as counsellor whenever the latter should
+retire from the profession. Gendrin's only son was commissioner of
+mortgages.
+
+Soudry's son, who for the last two years had been prosecuting-attorney
+at the prefecture, was Gaubertin's henchman. The clever Madame Soudry
+had secured the future of her husband's son by marrying him to Rigou's
+only daughter. The united fortunes of the Soudrys and the ex-monk,
+which would come eventually to the attorney, made that young man one
+of the most important personages of the department.
+
+The sub-prefect of Ville-aux-Fayes, Monsieur des Lupeaulx, nephew of
+the general-secretary of one of the most important ministries in
+Paris, was the prospective husband of Mademoiselle Elise Gaubertin,
+the mayor's youngest daughter, whose dowry, like that of her elder
+sister, was two hundred thousand francs, not to speak of
+"expectations." This functionary showed much sense, though not aware
+of it, in falling in love with Mademoiselle Elise when he first
+arrived at Ville-aux-Fayes, in 1819. If it had not been for his social
+position, which made him "eligible," he would long ago have been
+forced to ask for his exchange. But Gaubertin in marrying him to his
+daughter thought much more of the uncle, the general-secretary, than
+of the nephew; and in return, the uncle, for the sake of his nephew,
+gave all his influence to Gaubertin.
+
+Thus the Church, the magistracy both removable and irremovable, the
+municipality, and the prefecture, the four feet of power, walked as
+the mayor pleased. Let us now see how that functionary strengthened
+himself in the spheres above and below that in which he worked.
+
+The department to which Ville-aux-Fayes belongs is one the number of
+whose population gives it the right to elect six deputies. Ever since
+the creation of the Left Centre of the Chamber, the arrondissement of
+Ville-aux-Fayes had sent a deputy named Leclercq, formerly banking
+agent of the wine department of the custom-house, a son-in-law of
+Gaubertin, and now a governor of the Bank of France. The number of
+electors which this rich valley sent to the electoral college was
+sufficient to insure, if only through private dealing, the constant
+appointment of Monsieur de Ronquerolles, the patron of the Mouchon
+family. The voters of Ville-aux-Fayes lent their support to the
+prefect, on condition that the Marquis de Ronquerolles was maintained
+in the college. Thus Gaubertin, who was the first to broach the idea
+of this arrangement, was favorably received at the Prefecture, which
+he often, in return, saved from petty annoyances. The prefect always
+selected three firm ministerialists, and two deputies of the Left
+Centre. The latter, one of them being the Marquis de Ronquerolles,
+brother-in-law of the Comte de Serisy, and the other a governor of the
+Bank of France, gave little or no alarm to the cabinet, and the
+elections in this department were rated excellent at the ministry of
+the interior.
+
+The Comte de Soulanges, peer of France, selected to be the next
+marshal, and faithful to the Bourbons, knew that his forests and other
+property were all well-managed by the notary Lupin, and well-watched
+by Soudry. He was a patron of Gendrin's, having obtained his
+appointment as judge partly by the help of Monsieur de Ronquerolles.
+
+Messieurs Leclercq and de Ronquerolles sat in the Left Centre, but
+nearer to the left than to the centre,--a political position which
+offers great advantages to those who regard their political conscience
+as a garment.
+
+The brother of Monsieur Leclercq had obtained the situation of
+collector at Ville-aux-Fayes, and Leclercq himself, Gaubertin's son-
+in-law, had lately bought a fine estate beyond the valley of the
+Avonne, which brought him in a rental of thirty thousand francs, with
+park and chateau and a controlling influence in its own canton.
+
+Thus, in the upper regions of the State, in both Chambers, and in the
+chief ministerial department, Gaubertin could rely on an influence
+that was powerful and also active, and which he was careful not to
+weary with unimportant requests.
+
+The counsellor Gendrin, appointed judge by the Chamber, was the
+leading spirit of the Supreme Court; for the chief justice, one of the
+three ministerial deputies, left the management of it to Gendrin
+during half the year. The counsel for the Prefecture, a cousin of
+Sarcus, called "Sarcus the rich," was the right-hand man of the
+prefect, himself a deputy. Even without the family reasons which
+allied Gaubertin and young des Lupeaulx, a brother of Madame Sarcus
+would still have been desirable as sub-prefect to the arrondissement
+of Ville-aux-Fayes. Madame Sarcus, the counsellor's wife, was a Vallat
+of Soulanges, a family connected with the Gaubertins, and she was said
+to have "distinguished" the notary Lupin in her youth. Though she was
+now forty-five years old, with a son in the school of engineers, Lupin
+never went to the Prefecture without paying his respects and dining
+with her.
+
+The nephew of Guerbet, the postmaster, whose father was, as we have
+seen, collector of Soulanges, held the important situation of
+examining judge in the municipal court of Ville-aux-Fayes. The third
+judge, son of Corbinet, the notary, belonged body and soul to the all-
+powerful mayor; and, finally, young Vigor, son of the lieutenant of
+the gendarmerie, was the substitute judge.
+
+Sibilet's father, sheriff of the court, had married his sister to
+Monsieur Vigor the lieutenant, and that individual, father of six
+children, was cousin of the father of Gaubertin through his wife, a
+Gaubertin-Vallat. Eighteen months previously the united efforts of the
+two deputies, Monsieur de Soulanges and Gaubertin, had created the
+place of commissary of police for the sheriff's second son.
+
+Sibilet's eldest daughter married Monsieur Herve, a school-master,
+whose school was transformed into a college as a result of this
+marriage, so that for the past year Soulanges had rejoiced in the
+presence of a professor.
+
+The sheriff's youngest son was employed on the government domains,
+with the promise of succeeding the clerk of registrations so soon as
+that officer had completed the term of service which enabled him to
+retire on a pension.
+
+The youngest Sibilet girl, now sixteen years old, was betrothed to
+Corbinet, brother of the notary. And an old maid, Mademoiselle
+Gaubertin-Vallat, sister of Madame Sibilet, the sheriff's wife, held
+the office for the sale of stamped paper.
+
+Thus, wherever we turn in Ville-aux-Fayes we meet some member of the
+invisible coalition, whose avowed chief, recognized as such by every
+one, great and small, was the mayor of the town, the general agent for
+the entire timber business, Gaubertin!
+
+If we turn to the other end of the valley of the Avonne we shall see
+that Gaubertin ruled at Soulanges through the Soudrys, through Lupin
+the assistant mayor and steward of the Soulanges estate, who was
+necessarily in constant communication with the Comte de Soulanges,
+through Sarcus, justice of the peace, through Guerbet, the collector,
+through Gourdon, the doctor, who had married a Gendrin-Vatebled. He
+governed Blangy through Rigou, Conches through the post-master, the
+despotic ruler of his own district.
+
+Gaubertin's influence was so great and powerful that even the
+investments and the savings of Rigou, Soudry, Gendrin, Guerbet, Lupin,
+even Sarcus the rich himself, were managed by his advice. The town of
+Ville-aux-Fayes believed implicitly in its mayor. Gaubertin's ability
+was not less extolled than his honesty and his kindness; he was the
+servant of his relatives and constituents (always with an eye to a
+return of benefits), and the whole municipality adored him. The town
+never ceased to blame Monsieur Mariotte, of Auxerre, for having
+opposed and thwarted that worthy Monsieur Gaubertin.
+
+Not aware of their strength, no occasion for displaying it having
+arisen, the bourgeoisie of Ville-aux-Fayes contented themselves with
+boasting that no strangers intermeddled in their affairs and they
+believed themselves excellent citizens and faithful public servants.
+Nothing, however, escaped their despotic rule, which in itself was not
+perceived, the result being considered a triumph of the locality.
+
+The only stranger in this family community was the government engineer
+in the highway department; and his dismissal in favor of the son of
+Sarcus the rich was now being pressed, with a fair chance that this
+one weak thread in the net would soon be strengthened. And yet this
+powerful league, which monopolized all duties both public and private,
+sucked the resources of the region, and fastened on power like limpets
+to a ship, escaped all notice so completely that General Montcornet
+had no suspicion of it. The prefect boasted of the prosperity of
+Ville-aux-Fayes and its arrondissement; even the minister of the
+interior was heard to remark: "There's a model sub-prefecture, which
+runs on wheels; we should be lucky indeed if all were like it." Family
+designs were so involved with local interests that here, as in many
+other little towns and even prefectures, a functionary who did not
+belong to the place would have been forced to resign within a year.
+
+When this despotic middle-class cousinry seizes a victim, he is so
+carefully gagged and bound that complaint is impossible; he is smeared
+with slime and wax like a snail in a beehive. This invisible,
+imperceptible tyranny is upheld by powerful reasons,--such as the wish
+to be surrounded by their own family, to keep property in their own
+hands, the mutual help they ought to lend each other, the guarantees
+given to the administration by the fact that their agent is under the
+eyes of his fellow-citizens and neighbors. What does all this lead to?
+To the fact that local interests supersede all questions of public
+interest; the centralized will of Paris is frequently overthrown in
+the provinces, the truth of things is disguised, and country
+communities snap their fingers at government. In short, after the main
+public necessities have been attended to, it will be seen that the
+laws, instead of acting upon the masses, receive their impulse from
+them; the populations adapt the law to themselves and not themselves
+to the law.
+
+Whoever has travelled in the south or west of France, or in Alsace, in
+any other way than from inn to inn to see buildings and landscapes,
+will surely admit the truth of these remarks. The results of middle-
+class nepotism may be, at present, merely isolated evils; but the
+tendency of existing laws is to increase them. This low-level
+despotism can and will cause great disasters, and the events of the
+drama about to be played in the valley of Les Aigues will prove it.
+
+The monarchical and imperial systems, more rashly overthrown than
+people realize, remedied these abuses by means of certain consecrated
+lives, by classifications and categories and by those particular
+counterpoises since so absurdly defined as "privileges." There are no
+privileges now, when every human being is free to climb the greased
+pole of power. But surely it would be safer to allow open and avowed
+privileges than those which are underhand, based on trickery,
+subversive of what should be public spirit, and continuing the work of
+despotism to a lower and baser level than heretofore. May we not have
+overthrown noble tyrants devoted to their country's good, to create
+the tyranny of selfish interests? Shall power lurk in secret places,
+instead of radiating from its natural source? This is worth thinking
+about. The spirit of local sectionalism, such as we have now depicted,
+will soon be seen to invade the Chamber.
+
+Montcornet's friend, the late prefect, Comte de la Roche-Hugon, had
+lost his position just before the last arrival of the general at Les
+Aigues. This dismissal drove him into the ranks of the Liberal
+opposition, where he became one of the chorus of the Left, a position
+he soon after abandoned for an embassy. His successor, luckily for
+Montcornet, was a son-in-law of the Marquis de Troisville, uncle of
+the countess, the Comte de Casteran. He welcomed Montcornet as a
+relation and begged him to continue his intimacy at the Prefecture.
+After listening to the general's complaints the Comte de Casteran
+invited the bishop, the attorney-general, the colonel of the
+gendarmerie, counsellor Sarcus, and the general commanding the
+division to meet him the next day at breakfast.
+
+The attorney-general, Baron Bourlac (so famous in the Chanterie and
+Rifael suits), was one of those men well-known to all governments, who
+attach themselves to power, no matter in whose hands it is, and who
+make themselves invaluable by such devotion. Having owed his elevation
+in the first place to his fanaticism for the Emperor, he now owed the
+retention of his official rank to his inflexible character and the
+conscientiousness with which he fulfilled his duties. He who once
+implacably prosecuted the remnant of the Chouans now prosecuted the
+Bonapartists as implacably. But years and turmoils had somewhat
+subdued his energy and he had now become, like other old devils
+incarnate, perfectly charming in manner and ways.
+
+The general explained his position and the fears of his bailiff, and
+spoke of the necessity of making an example and enforcing the rights
+of property.
+
+The high functionaries listened gravely, making, however, no reply
+beyond mere platitudes, such as, "Undoubtedly, the laws must be
+upheld"; "Your cause is that of all land-owners"; "We will consider
+it; but, situated as we are, prudence is very necessary"; "A monarchy
+could certainly do more for the people than the people would do for
+itself, even if it were, as in 1793, the sovereign people"; "The
+masses suffer, and we are bound to do as much for them as for
+ourselves."
+
+The relentless attorney-general expressed such kindly and benevolent
+views respecting the condition of the lower classes that our future
+Utopians, had they heard him, might have thought that the higher grade
+of government officials were already aware of the difficulties of that
+problem which modern society will be forced to solve.
+
+It may be well to say here that at this period of the Restoration,
+various bloody encounters had taken place in remote parts of the
+kingdom, caused by this very question of the pillage of woods, and the
+marauding rights which the peasants were everywhere arrogating to
+themselves. Neither the government nor the court liked these
+outbreaks, nor the shedding of blood which resulted from repression.
+Though they felt the necessity of rigorous measures, they nevertheless
+treated as blunderers the officials who were compelled to employ them,
+and dismissed them on the first pretence. The prefects were therefore
+anxious to shuffle out of such difficulties whenever possible.
+
+At the very beginning of the conversation Sarcus (the rich) had made a
+sign to the prefect and the attorney-general which Montcornet did not
+see, but which set the tone of the discussion. The attorney-general
+was well aware of the state of mind of the inhabitants of the valley
+des Aigues through his subordinate, Soudry the young attorney.
+
+"I foresee a terrible struggle," the latter had said to him. "They
+mean to kill the gendarmes; my spies tell me so. It will be very hard
+to convict them for it. The instant the jury feel they are incurring
+the hatred of the friends of the twenty or thirty prisoners, they will
+not sustain us,--we could not get them to convict for death, nor even
+for the galleys. Possibly by prosecuting in person you might get a few
+years' imprisonment for the actual murderers. Better shut our eyes
+than open them, if by opening them we bring on a collision which costs
+bloodshed and several thousand francs to the State,--not to speak of
+the cost of keeping the guilty in prison. It is too high a price to
+pay for a victory which will only reveal our judicial weakness to the
+eyes of all."
+
+Montcornet, who was wholly without suspicion of the strength and
+influence of the Mediocracy in his happy valley, did not even mention
+Gaubertin, whose hand kept these embers of opposition always alive,
+though smouldering. After breakfast the attorney-general took
+Montcornet by the arm and led him to the Prefect's study. When the
+general left that room after their conference, he wrote to his wife
+that he was starting for Paris and should be absent a week. We shall
+see, after the execution of certain measures suggested by Baron
+Bourlac, the attorney-general, whether the secret advice he gave to
+Montcornet was wise, and whether in conforming to it the count and Les
+Aigues were enabled to escape the "Evil grudge."
+
+Some minds, eager for mere amusement, will complain that these various
+explanations are far too long; but we once more call attention to the
+fact that the historian of the manners, customs, and morals of his
+time must obey a law far more stringent than that imposed on the
+historian of mere facts. He must show the probability of everything,
+even the truth; whereas, in the domain of history, properly so-called,
+the impossible must be accepted for the sole reason that it did
+happen. The vicissitudes of social or private life are brought about
+by a crowd of little causes derived from a thousand conditions. The
+man of science is forced to clear away the avalanche under which whole
+villages lie buried, to show you the pebbles brought down from the
+summit which alone can determine the formation of the mountain. If the
+historian of human life were simply telling you of a suicide, five
+hundred of which occur yearly in Paris, the melodrama is so
+commonplace that brief reasons and explanations are all that need be
+given; but how shall he make you see that the self-destruction of an
+estate could happen in these days when property is reckoned of more
+value than life? "De re vestra agitur," said a maker of fables; this
+tale concerns the affairs and interests of all those, no matter who
+they be, who possess anything.
+
+Remember that this coalition of a whole canton and of a little town
+against a general, who, in spite of his rash courage, had escaped the
+dangers of actual war, is going on in other districts against other
+men who seek only to do what is right by those districts. It is a
+coalition which to-day threatens every man, the man of genius, the
+statesman, the modern agriculturalist,--in short, all innovators.
+
+This last explanation not only gives a true presentation of the
+personages of this drama, and a serious meaning even to its petty
+details, but it also throws a vivid light upon the scene where so many
+social interests are now marshalling.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE SADNESS OF A HAPPY WOMAN
+
+At the moment when the general was getting into his caleche to go to
+the Prefecture, the countess and the two gentlemen reached the gate of
+the Avonne, where, for the last eighteen months, Michaud and his wife
+Olympe had made their home.
+
+Whose remembered the pavilion in the state in which we lately
+described it would have supposed it had been rebuilt. The bricks
+fallen or broken by time, and the cement lacking to their edges, were
+replaced; the slate roof had been cleaned, and the effect of the white
+balustrade against its bluish background restored the gay character of
+the architecture. The approaches to the building, formerly choked up
+and sandy, were now cared for by the man whose duty it was to keep the
+park roadways in order. The poultry-yard, stables, and cow-shed,
+relegated to the buildings near the pheasantry and hidden by clumps of
+trees, instead of afflicting the eye with their foul details, now
+blended those soft murmurs and cooings and the sound of flapping
+wings, which are among the most delightful accompaniments of Nature's
+eternal harmony, with the peculiar rustling sounds of the forest. The
+whole scene possessed the double charm of a natural, untouched forest
+and the elegance of an English park. The surroundings of the pavilion,
+in keeping with its own exterior, presented a certain noble,
+dignified, and cordial effect; while the hand of a young and happy
+woman gave to its interior a very different look from what it wore
+under the coarse neglect of Courtecuisse.
+
+Just now the rich season of the year was putting forth its natural
+splendors. The perfume of the flowerbeds blended with the wild odor of
+the woods; and the meadows near by, where the grass had been lately
+cut, sent up the fragrance of new-mown hay.
+
+When the countess and her guests reached the end of one of the winding
+paths which led to the pavilion, they saw Madame Michaud, sitting in
+the open air before the door, employed in making a baby's garment. The
+young woman thus placed, thus employed, added the human charm that was
+needed to complete the scene,--a charm so touching in its actuality
+that painters have committed the error of endeavoring to convey it in
+their pictures. Such artists forget that the SOUL of a landscape, if
+they represent it truly, is so grand that the human element is crushed
+by it; whereas such a scene added to Nature limits her to the
+proportions of the personality, like a frame to which the mind of the
+spectator confines it. When Poussin, the Raffaelle of France, made a
+landscape accessory to his Shepherds of Arcadia he perceived plainly
+enough that man becomes diminutive and abject when Nature is made the
+principal feature on a canvas. In that picture August is in its glory,
+the harvest is ready, all simple and strong human interests are
+represented. There we find realized in nature the dream of many men
+whose uncertain life of mingled good and evil harshly mixed makes them
+long for peace and rest.
+
+Let us now relate, in few words, the romance of this home. Justin
+Michaud did not reply very cordially to the advances made to him by
+the illustrious colonel of cuirassiers when first offered the
+situation of bailiff at Les Aigues. He was then thinking of re-
+entering the service. But while the negotiations, which naturally took
+him to the Hotel Montcornet, were going on, he met the countess's head
+waiting-maid. This young girl, who was entrusted to Madame de
+Montcornet by her parents, worthy farmers in the neighborhood of
+Alencon, had hopes of a little fortune, some twenty or thirty thousand
+francs, when the heirs were all of age. Like other farmers who marry
+young, and whose own parents are still living, the father and mother
+of the girl, being pinched for immediate means, placed her with the
+young countess. Madame de Montcornet had her taught to sew and to make
+dresses, arranged that she should take her meals alone, and was
+rewarded for the care she bestowed on Olympe Charel by one of those
+unconditional attachments which are so precious to Parisians.
+
+Olympe Charel, a pretty Norman girl, rather stout, with fair hair of a
+golden tint, an animated face lighted by intelligent eyes, and
+distinguished by a finely curved thoroughbred nose, with a maidenly
+air in spite of a certain swaying Spanish manner of carrying herself,
+possessed all the points that a young girl born just above the level
+of the masses is likely to acquire from whatever close companionship a
+mistress is willing to allow her. Always suitably dressed, with modest
+bearing and manner, and able to express herself well, Michaud was soon
+in love with her,--all the more when he found that his sweetheart's
+dowry would one day be considerable. The obstacles came from the
+countess, who could not bear to part with so invaluable a maid; but
+when Montcornet explained to her the affairs at Les Aigues, she gave
+way, and the marriage was no longer delayed, except to obtain the
+consent of the parents, which, of course, was quickly given.
+
+Michaud, like his general, looked upon his wife as a superior being,
+to whom he owed military obedience without a single reservation. He
+found in the peace of his home and his busy life out-of-doors the
+elements of a happiness soldiers long for when they give up their
+profession,--enough work to keep his body healthy, enough fatigue to
+let him know the charms of rest. In spite of his well-known
+intrepidity, Michaud had never been seriously wounded, and he had none
+of those physical pains which often sour the temper of veterans. Like
+all really strong men, his temper was even; his wife, therefore, loved
+him utterly. From the time they took up their abode in the pavilion,
+this happy home was the scene of a long honey-moon in harmony with
+Nature and with the art whose creations surrounded them,--a
+circumstance rare indeed! The things about us are seldom in keeping
+with the condition of our souls!
+
+The picture was so pretty that the countess stopped short and pointed
+it out to Blondet and the abbe; for they could see Madame Michaud from
+where they stood, without her seeing them.
+
+"I always come this way when I walk in the park," said the countess,
+softly. "I delight in looking at the pavilion and its two turtle-
+doves, as much as I delight in a fine view."
+
+She leaned significantly on Blondet's arm, as if to make him share
+sentiments too delicate for words but which all women feel.
+
+"I wish I were a gate-keeper at Les Aigues," said Blondet, smiling.
+"Why! what troubles you?" he added, noticing an expression of sadness
+on the countess's face.
+
+"Nothing," she replied.
+
+Women are always hiding some important thought when they say,
+hypocritically, "It is nothing."
+
+"A woman may be the victim of ideas which would seem very flimsy to
+you," she added, "but which, to us, are terrible. As for me, I envy
+Olympe's lot."
+
+"God hears you," said the abbe, smiling as though to soften the
+sternness of his remark.
+
+Madame de Montcornet grew seriously uneasy when she noticed an
+expression of fear and anxiety in Olympe's face and attitude. By the
+way a woman draws out her needle or sets her stitches another woman
+understands her thoughts. In fact, though wearing a rose-colored
+dress, with her hair carefully braided about her head, the bailiff's
+wife was thinking of matters that were out of keeping with her pretty
+dress, the glorious day, and the work her hands were engaged on. Her
+beautiful brow, and the glance she turned sometimes on the ground at
+her feet, sometimes on the foliage around, evidently seeing nothing,
+betrayed some deep anxiety,--all the more unconsciously because she
+supposed herself alone.
+
+"Just as I was envying her! What can have saddened her?" whispered the
+countess to the abbe.
+
+"Madame," he replied in the same tone, "tell me why man is often
+seized with vague and unaccountable presentiments of evil in the very
+midst of some perfect happiness?"
+
+"Abbe!" said Blondet, smiling, "you talk like a bishop. Napoleon said,
+'Nothing is stolen, all is bought!'"
+
+"Such a maxim, uttered by those imperial lips, takes the proportions
+of society itself," replied the priest.
+
+"Well, Olympe, my dear girl, what is the matter?" said the countess
+going up to her former maid. "You seem sad and thoughtful; is it a
+lover's quarrel?"
+
+Madame Michaud's face, as she rose, changed completely.
+
+"My dear," said Emile Blondet, in a fatherly tone, "I should like to
+know what clouds that brow of yours, in this pavilion where you are
+almost as well lodged as the Comte d'Artois at the Tuileries. It is
+like a nest of nightingales in a grove! And what a husband we have!--
+the bravest fellow of the young garde, and a handsome one, who loves
+us to distraction! If I had known the advantages Montcornet has given
+you here I should have left my diatribing business and made myself a
+bailiff."
+
+"It is not the place for a man of your talent, monsieur," replied
+Olympe, smiling at Blondet as an old acquaintance.
+
+"But what troubles you, dear?" said the countess.
+
+"Madame, I'm afraid--"
+
+"Afraid! of what?" said the countess, eagerly; for the word reminded
+her of Mouche and Fourchon.
+
+"Afraid of the wolves, is that it?" said Emile, making Madame Michaud
+a sign, which she did not understand.
+
+"No, monsieur,--afraid of the peasants. I was born in Le Perche, where
+of course there are some bad people, but I had no idea how wicked
+people could be until I came here. I try not to meddle in Michaud's
+affairs, but I do know that he distrusts the peasants so much that he
+goes armed, even in broad daylight, when he enters the forest. He
+warns his men to be always on the alert. Every now and then things
+happen about here that bode no good. The other day I was walking along
+the wall, near the source of that little sandy rivulet which comes
+from the forest and enters the park through a culvert about five
+hundred feet from here,--you know it, madame? it is called Silver
+Spring, because of the star-flowers Bouret is said to have sown there.
+Well, I overheard the talk of two women who were washing their linen
+just where the path to Conches crosses the brook; they did not know I
+was there. Our house can be seen from that point, and one old woman
+pointed it out to the other, saying: 'See what a lot of money they
+have spent on the man who turned out Courtecuisse.' 'They ought to pay
+a man well when they set him to harass poor people as that man does,'
+answered the other. 'Well, it won't be for long,' said the first one;
+'the thing is going to end soon. We have a right to our wood. The late
+Madame allowed us to take it. That's thirty years ago, so the right is
+ours.' 'We'll see what we shall see next winter,' replied the second.
+'My man has sworn the great oath that all the gendarmerie in the world
+sha'n't keep us from getting our wood; he says he means to get it
+himself, and if the worst happens so much the worse for them!' 'Good
+God!' cried the other; 'we can't die of cold, and we must bake bread
+to eat! They want for nothing, THOSE OTHERS! the wife of that
+scoundrel of a Michaud will be taken care of, I warrant you!' And
+then, Madame, they said such horrible things of me and of you and of
+Monsieur le comte; and they finally declared that the farms would all
+be burned, and then the chateau."
+
+"Bah!" said Emile, "idle talk! They have been robbing the general, and
+they will not be allowed to rob him any longer. These people are
+furious, that's the whole of it. You must remember that the law and
+the government are always strongest everywhere, even in Burgundy. In
+case of an outbreak the general could bring a regiment of cavalry
+here, if necessary."
+
+The abbe made a sign to Madame Michaud from behind the countess,
+telling her to say no more about her fears, which were doubtless the
+effect of that second sight which true passion bestows. The soul,
+dwelling exclusively on one only being, grasps in the end the moral
+elements that surround it, and sees in them the makings of the future.
+The woman who loves feels the same presentiments that later illuminate
+her motherhood. Hence a certain melancholy, a certain inexplicable
+sadness which surprises men, who are one and all distracted from any
+such concentration of their souls by the cares of life and the
+continual necessity for action. All true love becomes to a woman an
+active contemplation, which is more or less lucid, more or less
+profound, according to her nature.
+
+"Come, my dear, show your home to Monsieur Emile," said the countess,
+whose mind was so pre-occupied that she forgot La Pechina, who was the
+ostensible object of her visit.
+
+The interior of the restored pavilion was in keeping with its
+exterior. On the ground-floor the old divisions had been replaced, and
+the architect, sent from Paris with his own workmen (a cause of bitter
+complaint in the neighborhood against the master of Les Aigues), had
+made four rooms out of the space. First, an ante-chamber, at the
+farther end of which was a winding wooden staircase, behind which came
+the kitchen; on either side of the antechamber was a dining-room and a
+parlor panelled in oak now nearly black, with armorial bearings in the
+divisions of the ceilings. The architect chosen by Madame de
+Montcornet for the restoration of Les Aigues had taken care to put the
+furniture of this room in keeping with its original decoration.
+
+At the time of which we write fashion had not yet given an exaggerated
+value to the relics of past ages. The carved settee, the high-backed
+chairs covered with tapestry, the consoles, the clocks, the tall
+embroidery frames, the tables, the lustres, hidden away in the second-
+hand shops of Auxerre and Ville-aux-Fayes were fifty per-cent cheaper
+than the modern, ready-made furniture of the faubourg Saint Antoine.
+The architect had therefore bought two or three cartloads of well-
+chosen old things, which, added to a few others discarded at the
+chateau, made the little salon of the gate of the Avonne an artistic
+creation. As to the dining-room, he painted it in browns and hung it
+with what was called a Scotch paper, and Madame Michaud added white
+cambric curtains with green borders at the windows, mahogany chairs
+covered with green cloth, two large buffets and a table, also in
+mahogany. This room, ornamented with engravings of military scenes,
+was heated by a porcelain stove, on each side of which were sporting-
+guns suspended on the walls. These adornments, which cost but little,
+were talked of throughout the whole valley as the last extreme of
+oriental luxury. Singular to say, they, more than anything else,
+excited the envy of Gaubertin, and whenever he thought of his fixed
+determination to bring Les Aigues to the hammer and cut it in pieces,
+he reserved for himself, "in petto," this beautiful pavilion.
+
+On the next floor three chambers sufficed for the household. At the
+windows were muslin curtains which reminded a Parisian of the
+particular taste and fancy of bourgeois requirements. Left to herself
+in the decoration of these rooms, Madame Michaud had chosen satin
+papers; on the mantel-shelf of her bedroom--which was furnished in
+that vulgar style of mahogany and Utrecht velvet which is seen
+everywhere, with its high-backed bed and canopy to which embroidered
+muslin curtains are fastened--stood an alabaster clock between two
+candelabra covered with gauze and flanked by two vases filled with
+artificial flowers protected by glass shades, a conjugal gift of the
+former cavalry sergeant. Above, under the roof, the bedrooms of the
+cook, the man-of-all-work, and La Pechina had benefited by the recent
+restoration.
+
+"Olympe, my dear, you did not tell me all," said the countess,
+entering Madame Michaud's bedroom, and leaving Emile and the abbe on
+the stairway, whence they descended when they heard her shut the door.
+
+Madame Michaud, to whom the abbe had contrived to whisper a word, was
+now anxious to say no more about her fears, which were really greater
+than she had intimated, and she therefore began to talk of a matter
+which reminded the countess of the object of her visit.
+
+"I love Michaud, madame, as you know. Well, how would you like to
+have, in your own house, a rival always beside you?"
+
+"A rival?"
+
+"Yes, madame; that swarthy girl you gave me to take care of loves
+Michaud without knowing it, poor thing! The child's conduct, long a
+mystery to me, has been cleared up in my mind for some days."
+
+"Why, she is only thirteen years old!"
+
+"I know that, madame. But you will admit that a woman who is three
+months pregnant and means to nurse her child herself may have some
+fears; but as I did not want to speak of this before those gentlemen,
+I talked a great deal of nonsense when you questioned me," said the
+generous creature, adroitly.
+
+Madame Michaud was not really afraid of Genevieve Niseron, but for the
+last three days she was in mortal terror of some disaster from the
+peasantry.
+
+"How did you discover this?" said the countess.
+
+"From everything and from nothing," replied Olympe. "The poor little
+thing moves with the slowness of a tortoise when she is obliged to
+obey me, but she runs like a lizard when Justin asks for anything, she
+trembles like a leaf at the sound of his voice; and her face is that
+of a saint ascending to heaven when she looks at him. But she knows
+nothing about love; she has no idea that she loves him."
+
+"Poor child!" said the countess with a smile and tone that were full
+of naivete.
+
+"And so," continued Madame Michaud, answering with a smile the smile
+of her late mistress, "Genevieve is gloomy when Justin is out of the
+house; if I ask her what she is thinking of she replies that she is
+afraid of Monsieur Rigou, or some such nonsense. She thinks people
+envy her, though she is as black as the inside of a chimney. When
+Justin is patrolling the woods at night the child is as anxious as I
+am. If I open my window to listen for the trot of his horse, I see a
+light in her room, which shows me that La Pechina (as they call here)
+is watching and waiting too. She never goes to bed, any more than I
+do, till he comes in."
+
+"Thirteen!" exclaimed the countess; "unfortunate child!"
+
+"Unfortunate? no. This passion will save her."
+
+"From what?" asked Madame de Montcornet.
+
+"From the fate which overtakes nearly all the girls of her age in
+these parts. Since I have taught her cleanliness she is much less ugly
+than she was; in fact, there is something odd and wild about her which
+attracts men. She is so changed that you would hardly recognize her.
+The son of that infamous innkeeper of the Grand-I-Vert, Nicolas, the
+worst fellow in the whole district, wants her; he hunts her like game.
+Though I can't believe that Monsieur Rigou, who changes his servant-
+girls every year or two is persecuting such a little fright, it is
+quite certain that Nicolas Tonsard is. Justin told me so. It would be
+a dreadful fate, for the people of this valley actually live like
+beasts; but Justin and our two servants and I watch her carefully.
+Therefore don't be uneasy, madame; she never goes out alone except in
+broad daylight, and then only as far as the gate of Conches. If by
+chance she fell into an ambush, her feeling for Justin would give her
+strength and wit to escape; for all women who have a preference in
+their hearts can resist a man they hate."
+
+"It was about her that I came," said the countess, "and I little
+thought my visit could be so useful to you. That child, you know,
+can't remain thirteen; and she will probably grow better-looking."
+
+"Oh, madame," replied Olympe, smiling, "I am quite sure of Justin.
+What a man! what a heart!-- If you only knew what a depth of gratitude
+he feels for his general, to whom, he says, he owes his happiness. He
+is only too devoted; he would risk his life for him here, as he would
+on the field of battle, and he forgets sometimes that he will one day
+be father of a family."
+
+"Ah! I once regretted losing you," said the countess, with a glance
+that made Olympe blush; "but I regret it no longer, for I see you
+happy. What a sublime and noble thing is married love!" she added,
+speaking out the thought she had not dared express before the abbe.
+
+Virginie de Troisville dropped into a revery, and Madame Michaud kept
+silence.
+
+"Well, at least the girl is honest, is she not?" said the countess, as
+if waking from a dream.
+
+"As honest as I am myself, madame."
+
+"Discreet?"
+
+"As the grave."
+
+"Grateful?"
+
+"Ah! madame; she has moments of humility and gentleness towards me
+which seem to show an angelic nature. She will kiss my hands and say
+the most upsetting things. 'Can we die of love?' she asked me
+yesterday. 'Why do you ask me that?' I said. 'I want to know if love
+is a disease.'"
+
+"Did she really say that?"
+
+"If I could remember her exact words I would tell you a great deal
+more," replied Olympe; "she appears to know much more than I do."
+
+"Do you think, my dear, that she could take your place in my service.
+I can't do without an Olympe," said the countess, smiling in a rather
+sad way.
+
+"Not yet, madame,--she is too young; but in two years' time, yes. If
+it becomes necessary that she should go away from here I will let you
+know. She ought to be educated, and she knows nothing of the world.
+Her grandfather, Pere Niseron, is a man who would let his throat be
+cut sooner than tell a lie; he would die of hunger in a baker's shop;
+he has the strength of his opinions, and the girl was brought up to
+all such principles. La Pechina would consider herself your equal; for
+the old man has made her, as he says, a republican,--just as Pere
+Fourchon has made Mouche a bohemian. As for me, I laugh at such ideas,
+but you might be displeased. She would revere you as her benefactress,
+but never as her superior. It can't be otherwise; she is wild and free
+like the swallows--her mother's blood counts for a good deal in what
+she is."
+
+"Who was her mother?"
+
+"Doesn't madame know the story?" said Olympe. "Well, the son of the
+old sexton at Blangy, a splendid fellow, so the people about here tell
+me, was drafted at the great conscription. In 1809 young Niseron was
+still only an artilleryman, in a corps d'armee stationed in Illyria
+and Dalmatia when it received sudden orders to advance through Hungary
+and cut off the retreat of the Austrian army in case the Emperor won
+the battle of Wagram. Michaud told me all about Dalmatia, for he was
+there. Niseron, being so handsome a man, captivated a Montenegrin girl
+of Zahara among the mountains, who was not averse to the French
+garrison. This lost her the good-will of her compatriots, and life in
+her own town became impossible after the departure of the French. Zena
+Kropoli, called in derision the Frenchwoman, followed the artillery,
+and came to France after the peace. Auguste Niseron asked permission
+to marry her; but the poor woman died at Vincennes in January, 1810,
+after giving birth to a daughter, our Genevieve. The papers necessary
+to make the marriage legal arrived a few days later. Auguste Niseron
+then wrote to his father to come and take the child, with a wetnurse
+he had got from its own country; and it was lucky he did, for he was
+killed soon after by the bursting of a shell at Montereau. Registered
+by the name of Genevieve and baptized at Soulanges, the little
+Dalmatian was taken under the protection of Mademoiselle Laguerre, who
+was touched by her story. It seems as if it were the destiny of the
+child to be taken care of by the owners of Les Aigues! Pere Niseron
+obtained its clothes, and now and then some help in money from
+Mademoiselle."
+
+The countess and Olympe were just then standing before a window from
+which they could see Michaud approaching the abbe and Blondet, who
+were walking up and down the wide, semi-circular gravelled space which
+repeated on the park side of the pavilion the exterior half-moon; they
+were conversing earnestly.
+
+"Where is she?" said the countess; "you make me anxious to see her."
+
+"She is gone to carry milk to Mademoiselle Gaillard at the gate of
+Conches; she will soon be back, for it is more than an hour since she
+started."
+
+"Well, I'll go and meet her with those gentlemen," said Madame de
+Montcornet, going downstairs.
+
+Just as the countess opened her parasol, Michaud came up and told her
+that the general had left her a widow for probably two days.
+
+"Monsieur Michaud," said the countess, eagerly, "don't deceive me,
+there is something serious going on. Your wife is frightened, and if
+there are many persons like Pere Fourchon, this part of the country
+will be uninhabitable--"
+
+"If it were so, madame," answered Michaud, laughing, "we should not be
+in the land of the living, for nothing would be easier than to make
+away with us. The peasant's grumble, that is all. But as to passing
+from growls to blows, from pilfering to crime, they care too much for
+life and the free air of the fields. Olympe has been saying something
+that frightened you, but you know she is in state to be frightened at
+nothing," he added, drawing his wife's hand under his arm and pressing
+it to warn her to say no more.
+
+"Cornevin! Juliette!" cried Madame Michaud, who soon saw the head of
+her old cook at the window. "I am going for a little walk; take care
+of the premises."
+
+Two enormous dogs, who began to bark, proved that the effectiveness of
+the garrison at the gate of the Avonne was not to be despised. Hearing
+the dogs, Cornevin, an old Percheron, Olympe's foster-father, came
+from behind the trees, showing a head such as no other region than La
+Perche can manufacture. Cornevin was undoubtedly a Chouan in 1794 and
+1799.
+
+The whole party accompanied the countess along that one of the six
+forest avenues which led directly to the gate of Conches, crossing the
+Silver-spring rivulet. Madame de Montcornet walked in front with
+Blondet. The abbe and Michaud and his wife talked in a low voice of
+the revelation that had just been made to the countess of the state of
+the country.
+
+"Perhaps it is providential," said the abbe; "for if madame is
+willing, we might, perhaps, by dint of benefits and constant
+consideration of their wants, change the hearts of these people."
+
+At about six hundred feet from the pavilion and below the brooke, the
+countess caught sight of a broken red jug and some spilt milk.
+
+"Something has happened to the poor child!" she cried, calling to
+Michaud and his wife, who were returning to the pavilion.
+
+"A misfortune like Perrette's," said Blondet, laughing.
+
+"No; the poor child has been surprised and pursued, for the jug was
+thrown outside the path," said the abbe, examining the ground.
+
+"Yes, that is certainly La Pechina's step," said Michaud; "the print
+of the feet, which have turned, you see, quickly, shows sudden terror.
+The child must have darted in the direction of the pavilion, trying to
+get back there."
+
+Every one followed the traces which the bailiff pointed out as he
+walked along examining them. Presently he stopped in the middle of the
+path about a hundred feet from the broken jug, where the girl's foot-
+prints ceased.
+
+"Here," he said, "she turned towards the Avonne; perhaps she was
+headed off from the direction of the pavilion."
+
+"But she has been gone more than an hour," cried Madame Michaud.
+
+Alarm was in all faces. The abbe ran towards the pavilion, examining
+the state of the road, while Michaud, impelled by the same thought,
+went up the path towards Conches.
+
+"Good God! she fell here," said Michaud, returning from a place where
+the footsteps stopped near the brook, to that where they had turned in
+the road, and pointing to the ground, he added, "See!"
+
+The marks were plainly seen of a body lying at full length on the
+sandy path.
+
+"The footprints which have entered the wood are those of some one who
+wore knitted soles," said the abbe.
+
+"A woman, then," said the countess.
+
+"Down there, by the broken pitcher, are the footsteps of a man," added
+Michaud.
+
+"I don't see traces of any other foot," said the abbe, who was
+tracking into the wood the prints of the woman's feet.
+
+"She must have been lifted and carried into the wood," cried Michaud.
+
+"That can't be, if it is really a woman's foot," said Blondet.
+
+"It must be some trick of that wretch, Nicolas," said Michaud. "He has
+been watching La Pechina for some time. Only this morning I stood two
+hours under the bridge of the Avonne to see what he was about. A woman
+may have helped him."
+
+"It is dreadful!" said the countess.
+
+"They call it amusing themselves," added the priest, in a sad and
+grieved tone.
+
+"Oh! La Pechina would never let them keep her," said the bailiff; "she
+is quite able to swim across the river. I shall look along the banks.
+Go home, my dear Olympe; and you gentlemen and madame, please to
+follow the avenue towards Conches."
+
+"What a country!" exclaimed the countess.
+
+"There are scoundrels everywhere," replied Blondet.
+
+"Is it true, Monsieur l'abbe," asked Madame de Montcornet, "that I
+saved the poor child from the clutches of Rigou?"
+
+"Every young girl over fiften years of age whom you may protect at the
+chateau is saved from that monster," said the abbe. "In trying to get
+possession of La Pechina from her earliest years, the apostate sought
+to satisfy both his lust and his vengeance. When I took Pere Niseron
+as sexton I told him what Rigou's intentions were. That is one of the
+causes of the late mayor's rancor against me; his hatred grew out of
+it. Pere Niseron said to him solemnly that he would kill him if any
+harm came to Genevieve, and he made him responsible for all attempts
+upon the poor child's honor. I can't help thinking that this pursuit
+of Nicolas is the result of some infernal collusion with Rigou, who
+thinks he can do as he likes with these people."
+
+"Doesn't he fear the law?"
+
+"In the first place, he is father-in-law of the prosecuting-attorney,"
+said the abbe, pausing to listen. "And then," he resumed, "you have no
+conception of the utter indifference of the rural police to what is
+done around them. So long as the peasants do not burn the farm-houses
+and buildings, commit no murders, poison no one, and pay their taxes,
+they let them do as they like; and as these people are not restrained
+by any religious principle, horrible things happen every day. On the
+other side of the Avonne helpless old men are afraid to stay in their
+own homes, for they are allowed nothing to eat; they wander out into
+the fields as far as their tottering legs can bear them, knowing well
+that if they take to their beds they will die for want of food.
+Monsieur Sarcus, the magistrate, tells me that if they arrested and
+tried all criminals, the costs would ruin the municipality."
+
+"Then he at least sees how things are?" said Blondet.
+
+"Monseigneur thoroughly understands the condition of the valley, and
+especially the state of this district," continued the abbe. "Religion
+alone can cure such evils; the law seems to me powerless, modified as
+it is now--"
+
+The words were interrupted by loud cries from the woods, and the
+countess, preceded by Emile and the abbe, sprang bravely into the
+brushwood in the direction of the sounds.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE OARISTYS, EIGHTEENTH ECLOGUE OF THEOCRITUS;
+LITTLE ADMIRED ON THE POLICE CALENDAR
+
+The sagacity of a savage, which Michaud's new occupation had developed
+among his faculties, joined to an acquaintance with the passions and
+interests of Blangy, enabled him partially to understand a third idyll
+in the Greek style, which poor villagers like Tonsard, and middle-aged
+rich men like Rigou, translate FREELY--to use the classic word--in the
+depths of their country solitudes.
+
+Nicolas, Tonsard's second son, had drawn an unlucky number at a recent
+conscription. Two years earlier his elder brother had been pronounced,
+through the influence of Soudry, Gaubertin, and Sarcus the rich, unfit
+for military service, on account of a pretended weakness in the
+muscles of the right arm; but as Jean-Louis had since wielded
+instruments of husbandry with remarkable force and skill, a good deal
+of talk on the subject had gone through the district. Soudry, Rigou,
+and Gaubertin, who were the special protectors of the family, had
+warned Tonsard that he must not expect to save Nicolas, who was tall
+and vigorous, from being recruited if he drew a fatal number.
+Nevertheless Gaubertin and Rigou were so well aware of the importance
+of conciliating bold men able and willing to do mischief, if properly
+directed against Les Aigues, that Rigou held out certain hopes of
+safety to Tonsard and his son. The late monk was occasionally visited
+by Catherine Tonsard who was very devoted to her brother Nicolas; on
+one such occasion Rigou advised her to appeal to the general and the
+countess.
+
+"They may be glad to do you this service to cajole you; in that case,
+it is just so much gained from the enemy," he said. "If the Shopman
+refuses, then we shall see what we shall see."
+
+Rigou foresaw that the general's refusal would pass as one wrong the
+more done by the land-owner to the peasantry, and would bind Tonsard
+by an additional motive of gratitude to the coalition, in case the
+crafty mind of the innkeeper could suggest to him some plausible way
+of liberating Nicolas.
+
+Nicolas, who was soon to appear before the examining board, had little
+hope of the general's intervention because of the harm done to Les
+Aigues by all the members of the Tonsard family. His passion, or to
+speak more correctly, his caprice and obstinate pursuit of La Pechina,
+were so aggravated by the prospect of his immediate departure, which
+left him no time to seduce her, that he resolved on attempting
+violence. The child's contempt for her prosecutor, plainly shown,
+excited the Lovelace of the Grand-I-Vert to a hatred whose fury was
+equalled only by his desires. For the last three days he had been
+watching La Pechina, and the poor child knew she was watched. Between
+Nicolas and his prey the same sort of understanding existed which
+there is between the hunter and the game. When the girl was at some
+little distance from the pavilion she saw Nicolas in one of the paths
+which ran parallel to the walls of the park, leading to the bridge of
+the Avonne. She could easily have escaped the man's pursuit had she
+appealed to her grandfather; but all young girls, even the most
+unsophisticated, have a strange fear, possibly instinctive, of
+trusting to their natural protectors under the like circumstances.
+
+Genevieve had heard Pere Niseron take an oath to kill any man, no
+matter who he was, who should dare to TOUCH (that was his word) his
+granddaughter. The old man thought the child amply protected by the
+halo of white hair and honor which a spotless life of three-score
+years and ten had laid upon his brow. The vision of bloody scenes
+terrifies the imagination of young girls so that they need not dive to
+the bottom of their hearts for other numerous and inquisitive reasons
+which seal their lips.
+
+When La Pechina started with the milk which Madame Michaud had sent to
+the daughter of Gaillard, the keeper of the gate of Conches, whose cow
+had just calved, she looked about her cautiously, like a cat when it
+ventures out onto the street. She saw no signs of Nicolas; she
+listened to the silence, as the poet says, and hearing nothing, she
+concluded that the rascal had gone to his day's work. The peasants
+were just beginning to cut the rye; for they were in the habit of
+getting in their own harvests first, so as to benefit by the best
+strength of the mowers. But Nicolas was not a man to mind losing a
+day's work,--especially now that he expected to leave the country
+after the fair at Soulanges and begin, as the country people say, the
+new life of a soldier.
+
+When La Pechina, with the jug on her head, was about half-way, Nicolas
+slid like a wild-cat down the trunk of an elm, among the branches of
+which he was hiding, and fell like a thunderbolt in front of the girl,
+who flung away her pitcher and trusted to her fleet legs to regain the
+pavilion. But a hundred feet farther on, Catherine Tonsard, who was on
+the watch, rushed out of the wood and knocked so violently against the
+flying girl that she was thrown down. The violence of the fall made
+her unconscious. Catherine picked her up and carried her into the
+woods to the middle of a tiny meadow where the Silver-spring brook
+bubbled up.
+
+Catherine Tonsard was tall and strong, and in every respect the type
+of woman whom painters and sculptors take, as the Republic did in
+former days, for their figures of Liberty. She charmed the young men
+of the valley of the Avonne with her voluminous bosom, her muscular
+legs, and a waist as robust as it was flexible; with her plump arms,
+her eyes that could flash and sparkle, and her jaunty air; with the
+masses of hair twisted in coils around her head, her masculine
+forehead and her red lips curling with that same ferocious smile which
+Eugene Delacroix and David (of Angers) caught and represented so
+admirably. True image of the People, this fiery and swarthy creature
+seemed to emit revolt through her piercing yellow eyes, blazing with
+the insolence of a soldier. She inherited from her father so violent a
+nature that the whole family, except Tonsard, and all who frequented
+the tavern feared her.
+
+"Well, how are you now?" she said to La Pechina as the latter
+recovered consciousness.
+
+Catherine had placed her victim on a little mound beside the brook and
+was bringing her to her senses with dashes of cold water. "Where am
+I?" said the child, opening her beautiful black eyes through which a
+sun-ray seemed to glide.
+
+"Ah!" said Catherine, "if it hadn't been for me you'd have been
+killed."
+
+"Thank you," said the girl, still bewildered; "what happened to me?"
+
+"You stumbled over a root and fell flat in the road over there, as if
+shot. Ha! how you did run!"
+
+"It was your brother who made me," said La Pechina, remembering
+Nicolas.
+
+"My brother? I did not see him," said Catherine. "What did he do to
+you, poor fellow, that should make you fly as if he were a wolf? Isn't
+he handsomer than your Monsieur Michaud?"
+
+"Oh!" said the girl, contemptuously.
+
+"See here, little one; you are laying up a crop of evils for yourself
+by loving those who persecute us. Why don't you keep to our side?"
+
+"Why don't you come to church; and why do you steal things night and
+day?" asked the child.
+
+"So you let those people talk you over!" sneered Catherine. "They love
+us, don't they?--just as they love their food which they get out of
+us, and they want new dishes every day. Did you ever know one of them
+to marry a peasant-girl? Not they! Does Sarcus the rich let his son
+marry that handsome Gatienne Giboulard? Not he, though she is the
+daughter of a rich upholsterer. You have never been at the Tivoli ball
+at Soulanges in Socquard's tavern; you had better come. You'll see 'em
+all there, these bourgeois fellows, and you'll find they are not worth
+the money we shall get out of them when we've pulled them down. Come
+to the fair this year!"
+
+"They say it's fine, that Soulanges fair!" cried La Pechina,
+artlessly.
+
+"I'll tell you what it is in two words," said Catherine. "If you are
+handsome, you are well ogled. What is the good of being as pretty as
+you are if you are not admired by the men? Ha! when I heard one of
+them say for the first time, 'What a fine sprig of a girl!' all my
+blood was on fire. It was at Socquard's, in the middle of a dance; my
+grandfather, Fourchon, who was playing the clarionet, heard it and
+laughed. Tivoli seemed to me as grand and fine as heaven itself. It's
+lighted up, my dear, with glass lamps, and you'll think you are in
+paradise. All the gentlemen of Soulanges and Auxerre and Ville-aux-
+Fayes will be there. Ever since that first night I've loved the place
+where those words rang in my ears like military music. It's worthy
+giving your eternity to hear such words said of you by a man you
+love."
+
+"Yes, perhaps," replied La Pechina, thoughtfully.
+
+"Then come, and get the praise of men; you're sure of it!" cried
+Catherine. "Ha! you'll have a fine chance, handsome as you are, to
+pick up good luck. There's the son of Monsieur Lupin, Amaury, he might
+marry you. But that's not all; if you only knew what comforts you can
+find there against vexation and worry. Why, Socquard's boiled wine
+will make you forget every trouble you ever had. Fancy! it can make
+you dream, and feel as light as a bird. Didn't you ever drink boiled
+wine? Then you don't know what life is."
+
+The privilege enjoyed by older persons to wet their throats with
+boiled wine excites the curiosity of the children of the peasantry
+over twelve years of age to such a degree that Genevieve had once put
+her lips to a glass of boiled wine ordered by the doctor for her
+grandfather when ill. The taste had left a sort of magic influence in
+the memory of the poor child, which may explain the interest with
+which she listened, and on which the evil-minded Catherine counted to
+carry out a plan already half-successful. No doubt she was trying to
+bring her victim, giddy from the fall, to the moral intoxication so
+dangerous to young women living in the wilds of nature, whose
+imagination, deprived of other nourishment, is all the more ardent
+when the occasion comes to exercise it. Boiled wine, which Catherine
+had held in reserve, was to end the matter by intoxicating the victim.
+
+"What do they put into it?" asked La Pechina.
+
+"All sorts of things," replied Catherine, glancing back to see if her
+brother were coming; "in the first place, those what d' ye call 'ems
+that come from India, cinnamon, and herbs that change you by magic,--
+you fancy you have everything you wish for; boiled wine makes you
+happy! you can snap your fingers at all your troubles!"
+
+"I should be afraid to drink boiled wine at a dance," said La Pechina.
+
+"Afraid of what?" asked Catherine. "There's not the slightest danger.
+Think what lots of people there will be. All the bourgeois will be
+looking at us! Ah! it is one of those days that make up for all our
+misery. See it and die,--for it's enough to satisfy any one."
+
+"If Monsieur and Madame Michaud would only take me!" cried La Pechina,
+her eyes blazing.
+
+"Ask your grandfather Niseron; you have not given him up, poor dear
+man, and he'd be pleased to see you admired like a little queen. Why
+do you like those Arminacs the Michauds better than your grandfather
+and the Burgundians. It's bad to neglect your own people. Besides, why
+should the Michauds object if your grandfather takes you to the fair?
+Oh! if you knew what it is to reign over a man and put him beside
+himself, and say to him, as I say to Godain, 'Go there!' and he goes,
+'Do that!' and he does it! You've got it in you, little one, to turn
+the head of a bourgeois like that son of Monsieur Lupin. Monsieur
+Amaury took a fancy to my sister Marie because she is fair and because
+he is half-afraid of me; but he'd adore you, for ever since those
+people at the pavilion have spruced you up a bit you've got the airs
+of an empress."
+
+Adroitly leading the innocent heart to forget Nicolas and so put it
+off its guard, Catherine distilled into the girl the insidious nectar
+of compliments. Unawares, she touched a secret wound. La Pechina,
+without being other than a poor peasant girl, was a specimen of
+alarming precocity, like many another creature doomed to die as
+prematurely as it blooms. Strange product of Burgundian and
+Montenegrin blood, conceived and born amid the toils of war, the girl
+was doubtless in many ways the result of her congenital circumstances.
+Thin, slender, brown as a tobacco leaf, and short in stature, she
+nevertheless possessed extraordinary strength,--a strength unseen by
+the eyes of peasants, to whom the mysteries of the nervous system are
+unknown. Nerves are not admitted into the medical rural mind.
+
+At thirteen years of age Genevieve had completed her growth, though
+she was hardly as tall as an ordinary girl of her age. Did her face
+owe its topaz skin, so dark and yet so brilliant, dark in tone and
+brilliant in the quality of its tissue, giving a look of age to the
+childish face, to her Montenegrin origin, or to the ardent sun of
+Burgundy? Medical science may dismiss the inquiry. The premature old
+age on the surface of the face was counterbalanced by the glow, the
+fire, the wealth of light which made the eyes two stars. Like all eyes
+which fill with sunlight and need, perhaps, some sheltering screen,
+the eyelids were fringed with lashes of extraordinary length. The
+hair, of a bluish black, long and fine and abundant, crowned a brow
+moulded like that of the Farnese Juno. That magnificent diadem of
+hair, those grand Armenian eyes, that celestial brow eclipsed the rest
+of the face. The nose, though pure in form as it left the brow, and
+graceful in curve, ended in flattened and flaring nostrils. Anger
+increased this effect at times, and then the face wore an absolutely
+furious expression. All the lower part of the face, like the lower
+part of the nose, seemed unfinished, as if the clay in the hands of
+the divine sculptor had proved insufficient. Between the lower lip and
+the chin the space was so short that any one taking La Pechina by the
+chin would have rubbed the lip; but the teeth prevented all notice of
+this defect. One might almost believe those little bones had souls, so
+brilliant were they, so polished, so transparent, so exquisitely
+shaped, disclosed as they were by too wide a mouth, curved in lines
+that bore resemblance to the fantastic shapes of coral. The shells of
+the ears were so transparent to the light that in the sunshine they
+were rose-colored. The complexion, though sun-burned, showed a
+marvellous delicacy in the texture of the skin. If, as Buffon
+declared, love lies in touch, the softness of the girl's skin must
+have had the penetrating and inciting influence of the fragrance of
+daturas. The chest and indeed the whole body was alarmingly thin; but
+the feet and hands, of alluring delicacy, showed remarkable nervous
+power, and a vigorous organism.
+
+This mixture of diabolical imperfections and divine beauties,
+harmonious in spite of discords, for they blended in a species of
+savage dignity, also this triumph of a powerful soul over a feeble
+body, as written in those eyes, made the child, when once seen,
+unforgettable. Nature had wished to make that frail young being a
+woman; the circumstances of her conception moulded her with the face
+and body of a boy. A poet observing the strange creature would have
+declared her native clime to be Arabia the Blest; she belonged to the
+Afrite and Genii of Arabian tales. Her face told no lies. She had the
+soul of that glance of fire, the intellect of those lips made
+brilliant by the bewitching teeth, the thought enshrined within that
+glorious brow, the passion of those nostrils ready at all moments to
+snort flame. Therefore love, such as we imagine it on burning sands,
+in lonely deserts, filled that heart of twenty in the breast of a
+child, doomed, like the snowy heights of Montenegro, to wear no
+flowers of the spring.
+
+Observers ought now to understand how it was that La Pechina, from
+whom passion issued by every pore, awakened in perverted natures the
+feelings deadened by abuse; just as water fills the mouth at sight of
+those twisted, blotched, and speckled fruits which gourmands know by
+experience, and beneath whose skin nature has put the rarest flavors
+and perfumes. Why did Nicolas, that vulgar laborer, pursue this being
+who was worthy of a poet, while the eyes of the country-folk pitied
+her as a sickly deformity? Why did Rigou, the old man, feel the
+passion of a young one for this girl? Which of the two men was young,
+and which was old? Was the young peasant as blase as the old usurer?
+Why did these two extremes of life meet in one common and devilish
+caprice? Does the vigor that draws to its close resemble the vigor
+that is only dawning? The moral perversities of men are gulfs guarded
+by sphinxes; they begin and end in questions to which there is no
+answer.
+
+The exclamation, formerly quoted, of the countess, "Piccina!" when she
+first saw Genevieve by the roadside, open-mouthed at sight of the
+carriage and the elegantly dressed woman within it, will be
+understood. This girl, almost a dwarf, of Montenegrin vigor, loved the
+handsome, noble bailiff, as children of her age love, when they do
+love, that is to say, with childlike passion, with the strength of
+youth, with the devotion which in truly virgin souls gives birth to
+divinest poesy. Catherine had just swept her coarse hands across the
+sensitive strings of that choice harp, strung to the breaking-point.
+To dance before Michaud, to shine at the Soulanges ball and inscribe
+herself on the memory of that adored master! What glorious thoughts!
+To fling them into that volcanic head was like casting live coals upon
+straw dried in the August sun.
+
+"No, Catherine," replied La Pechina, "I am ugly and puny; my lot is to
+sit in a corner and never to be married, but live alone in the world."
+
+"Men like weaklings," said Catherine. "You see me, don't you?" she
+added, showing her handsome, strong arms. "I please Godain, who is a
+poor stick; I please that little Charles, the count's groom; but
+Lupin's son is afraid of me. I tell you it is the small kind of men
+who love me, and who say when they see me go by at Ville-aux-Fayes and
+at Soulanges, 'Ha! what a fine girl!' Now YOU, that's another thing;
+you'll please the fine men."
+
+"Ah! Catherine, if it were true--that!" cried the bewitched child.
+
+"It is true, it is so true that Nicolas, the handsomest man in the
+canton, is mad about you; he dreams of you, he is losing his mind; and
+yet all the other girls are in love with him. He is a fine lad! If
+you'll put on a white dress and yellow ribbons, and come to Socquard's
+for the midsummer ball, you'll be the handsomest girl there, and all
+the fine people from Ville-aux-Fayes will see you. Come, won't you?--
+See here, I've been cutting grass for the cows, and I brought some
+boiled wine in my gourd; Socquard gave it me this morning," she added
+quickly, seeing the half-delirious expression in La Pechina's eyes
+which women understand so well. "We'll share it together, and you'll
+fancy the men are in love with you."
+
+During this conversation Nicolas, choosing the grassy spots to step
+on, had noiselessly slipped behind the trunk of an old oak near which
+his sister had seated La Pechina. Catherine, who had now and then cast
+her eyes behind her, saw her brother as she turned to get the boiled
+wine.
+
+"Here, take some," she said, offering it.
+
+"It burns me!" cried Genevieve, giving back the gourd, after taking
+two or three swallows from it.
+
+"Silly child!" replied Catherine; "see here!" and she emptied the
+rustic bottle without taking breath. "See how it slips down; it goes
+like a sunbeam into the stomach."
+
+"But I ought to be carrying the milk to Mademoiselle Gaillard," cried
+Genevieve; "and it is all spilt! Nicolas frightened me so!"
+
+"Don't you like Nicolas?"
+
+"No," answered Genevieve. "Why does he persecute me? He can get plenty
+other girls, who are willing."
+
+"But if he likes you better than all the other girls in the valley--"
+
+"So much the worse for him."
+
+"I see you don't know him," answered Catherine, as she seized the girl
+rapidly by the waist and flung her on the grass, holding her down in
+that position with her strong arms. At this moment Nicolas appeared.
+Seeing her odious persecutor, the child screamed with all her might,
+and drove him five feet away with a violent kick in the stomach; then
+she twisted herself like an acrobat, with a dexterity for which
+Catherine was not prepared, and rose to run away. Catherine, still on
+the ground, caught her by one foot and threw her headlong on her face.
+This frightful fall stopped the brave child's cries for a moment.
+Nicolas attempted, furiously, to seize his victim, but she, though
+giddy from the wine and the fall, caught him by the throat in a grip
+of iron.
+
+"Help! she's strangling me, Catherine," cried Nicolas, in a stifled
+voice.
+
+La Pechina uttered piercing screams, which Catherine tried to choke by
+putting her hands over the girl's mouth, but she bit them and drew
+blood. It was at this moment that Blondet, the countess, and the abbe
+appeared at the edge of the wood.
+
+"Here are those Aigues people!" exclaimed Catherine, helping Genevieve
+to rise.
+
+"Do you want to live?" hissed Nicolas in the child's ear.
+
+"What then?" she asked.
+
+"Tell them we were all playing, and I'll forgive you," said Nicolas,
+in a threatening voice.
+
+"Little wretch, mind you say it!" repeated Catherine, whose glance was
+more terrifying than her brother's murderous threat.
+
+"Yes, I will, if you let me alone," replied the child. "But anyhow I
+will never go out again without my scissors."
+
+"You are to hold your tongue, or I'll drown you in the Avonne," said
+Catherine, ferociously.
+
+"You are monsters," cried the abbe, coming up; "you ought to be
+arrested and taken to the assizes."
+
+"Ha! and pray what do you do in your drawing-rooms?" said Nicolas,
+looking full at the countess and Blondet. "You play and amuse
+yourselves, don't you? Well, so do we, in the fields which are ours.
+We can't always work; we must play sometimes,--ask my sister and La
+Pechina."
+
+"How do you fight if you call that playing?" cried Blondet.
+
+Nicolas gave him a murderous look.
+
+"Speak!" said Catherine, gripping La Pechina by the forearm and
+leaving a blue bracelet on the flesh. "Were not we amusing ourselves?"
+
+"Yes, madame, we were amusing ourselves," said the child, exhausted by
+her display of strength, and now breaking down as though she were
+about to faint.
+
+"You hear what she says, madame," said Catherine, boldly, giving the
+countess one of those looks which women give each other like dagger
+thrusts.
+
+She took her brother's arm, and the pair walked off, not mistaking the
+opinion they left behind them in the minds of the three persons who
+had interrupted the scene. Nicolas twice looked back, and twice
+encountered Blondet's gaze. The journalist continued to watch the tall
+scoundrel, who was broad in the shoulders, healthy and vigorous in
+complexion, with black hair curling tightly, and whose rather soft
+face showed upon its lips and around the mouth certain lines which
+reveal the peculiar cruelty that characterizes sluggards and
+voluptaries. Catherine swung her petticoat, striped blue and white,
+with an air of insolent coquetry.
+
+"Cain and his wife!" said Blondet to the abbe.
+
+"You are nearer the truth than you know," replied the priest.
+
+"Ah! Monsieur le cure, what will they do to me?" said La Pechina, when
+the brother and sister were out of sight.
+
+The countess, as white as her handkerchief, was so overcome that she
+heard neither Blondet nor the abbe nor La Pechina.
+
+"It is enough to drive one from this terrestrial paradise," she said
+at last. "But the first thing of all is to save that child from their
+claws."
+
+"You are right," said Blondet in a low voice. "That child is a poem, a
+living poem."
+
+Just then the Montenegrin girl was in a state where soul and body
+smoke, as it were, after the conflagration of an anger which has
+driven all forces, physical and intellectual, to their utmost tension.
+It is an unspeakable and supreme splendor, which reveals itself only
+under the pressure of some frenzy, be it resistance or victory, love
+or martyrdom. She had left home in a dress with alternate lines of
+brown and yellow, and a collarette which she pleated herself by rising
+before daylight; and she had not yet noticed the condition of her gown
+soiled by her struggle on the grass, and her collar torn in
+Catherine's grasp. Feeling her hair hanging loose, she looked about
+her for a comb. At this moment Michaud, also attracted by the screams,
+came upon the scene. Seeing her god, La Pechina recovered her full
+strength. "Monsieur Michaud," she cried, "he did not even touch me!"
+
+The cry, the look, the action of the girl were an eloquent commentary,
+and told more to Blondet and the abbe than Madame Michaud had told the
+countess about the passion of that strange nature for the bailiff, who
+was utterly unconscious of it.
+
+"The scoundrel!" cried Michaud.
+
+Then, with an involuntary and impotent gesture, such as mad men and
+wise men can both be forced into giving, he shook his fist in the
+direction in which he had caught sight of Nicolas disappearing with
+his sister.
+
+"Then you were not playing?" said the abbe with a searching look at La
+Pechina.
+
+"Don't fret her," interposed the countess; "let us return to the
+pavilion."
+
+Genevieve, though quite exhausted, found strength under Michaud's eyes
+to walk. The countess followed the bailiff through one of the by-paths
+known to keepers and poachers where only two can go abreast, and which
+led to the gate of the Avonne.
+
+"Michaud," said the countess when they reached the depth of the wood,
+"We must find some way of ridding the neighborhood of such vile
+people; that child is actually in danger of death."
+
+"In the first place," replied Michaud, "Genevieve shall not leave the
+pavilion. My wife will be glad to take the nephew of Vatel, who has
+the care of the park roads, into the house. With Gounod (that is his
+name) and old Cornevin, my wife's foster-father, always at hand, La
+Pechina need never go out without a protector."
+
+"I will tell Monsieur to make up this extra expense to you," said the
+countess. "But this does not rid us of that Nicolas. How can we manage
+that?"
+
+"The means are easy and right at hand," answered Michaud. "Nicolas is
+to appear very soon before the court of appeals on the draft. The
+general, instead of asking for his release, as the Tonsards expect,
+has only to advise his being sent to the army--"
+
+"If necessary, I will go myself," said the countess, "and see my
+cousin, de Casteran, the prefect. But until then, I tremble for that
+child--"
+
+The words were said at the end of the path close to the open space by
+the bridge. As they reached the edge of the bank the countess gave a
+cry; Michaud advanced to help her, thinking she had struck her foot
+against a stone; but he shuddered at the sight that met his eyes.
+
+Marie Tonsard and Bonnebault, seated below the bank, seemed to be
+conversing, but were no doubt hiding there to hear what passed.
+Evidently they had left the wood as the party advanced towards them.
+
+Bonnebault, a tall, wiry fellow, had lately returned to Conches after
+six years' service in the cavalry, with a permanent discharge due to
+his evil conduct,--his example being likely to ruin better men. He
+wore moustachios and a small chin-tuft; a peculiarity which, joined to
+his military carriage, made him the reigning fancy of all the girls in
+the valley. His hair, in common with that of other soldiers, was cut
+very short behind, but he frizzed it on the top of his head, brushing
+up the ends with a dandy air; on it his foraging cap was jauntily
+tilted to one side. Compared to the peasants, who were mostly in rags,
+like Mouche and Fourchon, he seemed gorgeous in his linen trousers,
+boots, and short waistcoat. These articles, bought at the time of his
+liberation, were, it is true, somewhat the worse for a life in the
+fields; but this village cock-of-the-walk had others in reserve for
+balls and holidays. He lived, it must be said, on the gifts of his
+female friends, which, liberal as they were, hardly sufficed for the
+libations, the dissipations, and the squanderings of all kinds which
+resulted from his intimacy with the Cafe de la Paix.
+
+Cowardice is like courage; of both there are various kinds. Bonnebault
+would have fought like a brave soldier, but he was weak in presence of
+his vices and his desires. Lazy as a lizard, that is to say, active
+only when it suited him, without the slightest decency, arrogant and
+base, able for much but neglectful of all, the sole pleasure of this
+"breaker of hearts and plates," to use a barrack term, was to do evil
+or inflict damage. Such a nature does as much harm in rural
+communities as it does in a regiment. Bonnebault, like Tonsard and
+like Fourchon, desired to live well and do nothing; and he had his
+plans laid. Making the most of his gallant appearance with increasing
+success, and of his talents for billiards with alternate loss and
+gain, he flattered himself that the day would come when he could marry
+Mademoiselle Aglae Socquard, only daughter of the proprietor of the
+Cafe de la Paix, a resort which was to Soulanges what, relatively
+speaking, Ranelagh is to the Bois de Boulogne. To get into the
+business of tavern-keeping, to manage the public balls, what a fine
+career for the marshal's baton of a ne'er-do-well! These morals, this
+life, this nature, were so plainly stamped upon the face of the low-
+lived profligate that the countess was betrayed into an exclamation
+when she beheld the pair, for they gave her the sensation of beholding
+snakes.
+
+Marie, desperately in love with Bonnebault, would have robbed for his
+benefit. Those moustachios, the swaggering gait of a trooper, the
+fellow's smart clothes, all went to her heart as the manners and
+charms of a de Marsay touch that of a pretty Parisian. Each social
+sphere has its own standard of distinction. The jealous Marie rebuffed
+Amaury Lupin, the other dandy of the little town, her mind being made
+up to become Madame Bonnebault.
+
+"Hey! you there, hi! come on!" cried Nicolas and Catherine from afar,
+catching sight of Marie and Bonnebault.
+
+The sharp call echoed through the woods like the cry of savages.
+
+Seeing the pair at his feet, Michaud shuddered and deeply repented
+having spoken. If Bonnebault and Marie Tonsard had overheard the
+conversation, nothing but harm could come of it. This event,
+insignificant as it seems, was destined, in the irritated state of
+feeling then existing between Les Aigues and the peasantry, to have a
+decisive influence on the fate of all,--just as victory or defeat in
+battle sometimes depends upon a brook which shepherds jump while
+cannon are unable to pass it.
+
+Gallantly bowing to the countess, Bonnebault passed Marie's arm
+through his own with a conquering air and took himself off
+triumphantly.
+
+"The King of Hearts of the valley," muttered Michaud to the countess.
+"A dangerous man. When he loses twenty francs at billiards he would
+murder Rigou to get them back. He loves a crime as he does a
+pleasure."
+
+"I have seen enough for to-day; take me home, gentlemen," murmured the
+countess, putting her hand on Emile's arm.
+
+She bowed sadly to Madame Michaud, after watching La Pechina safely
+back to the pavilion. Olympe's depression was transferred to her
+mistress.
+
+"Ah, madame," said the abbe, as they continued their way, "can it be
+that the difficulty of doing good is about to deter you? For the last
+five years I have slept on a pallet in a parsonage which has no
+furniture; I say mass in a church without believers; I preach to no
+hearers; I minister without fees or salary; I live on the six hundred
+francs the law allows me, asking nothing of my bishop, and I give the
+third of that in charity. Still, I am not hopeless. If you knew what
+my winters are in this place you would understand the strength of
+those words,--I am not hopeless. I keep myself warm with the belief
+that we can save this valley and bring it back to God. No matter for
+ourselves, madame; think of the future! If it is our duty to say to
+the poor, 'Learn how to be poor; that is, how to work, to endure, to
+strive,' it is equally our duty to say to the rich, 'Learn your duty
+as prosperous men,'--that is to say, 'Be wise, be intelligent in your
+benevolence; pious and virtuous in the place to which God has called
+you.' Ah! madame, you are only the steward of Him who grants you
+wealth; if you do not obey His behests you will never transmit to your
+children the prosperity He gives you. You will rob your posterity. If
+you follow in the steps of that poor singer's selfishness, which
+caused the evils that now terrify us, you will bring back the
+scaffolds on which your fathers died for the faults of their fathers.
+To do good humbly, in obscurity, in country solitudes, as Rigou now
+does evil,--ah! that indeed is prayer in action and dear to God. If in
+every district three souls only would work for good, France, our
+country, might be saved from the abyss that yawns; into which we are
+rushing headlong, through spiritual indifference to all that is not
+our own self-interest. Change! you must change your morals, change
+your ethics, and that will change your laws."
+
+Though deeply moved as she listened to this grand utterance of true
+catholic charity, the countess answered in the fatal words, "We will
+consider it,"--words of the rich, which contain that promise to the
+ear which saves their purses and enables them to stand with arms
+crossed in presence of all disaster, under pretext that they were
+powerless.
+
+Hearing those words, the abbe bowed to Madame de Montcornet and turned
+off into a path which led him direct to the gate of Blangy.
+
+"Belshazzar's feast is the everlasting symbol of the dying days of a
+caste, of an oligarchy, of a power!" he thought as he walked away. "My
+God! if it be Thy will to loose the poor like a torrent to reform
+society, I know, I comprehend, why it is that Thou hast abandoned the
+wealthy to their blindness!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+SHOWETH HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE'S PARLIAMENT
+
+Old Mother Tonsard's screams brought a number of people from Blangy to
+know what was happening at the Grand-I-Vert, the distance from the
+village to the inn not being greater than that from the inn to the
+gate of Blangy. One of these inquiring visitors was old Niseron, La
+Pechina's grandfather, who was on his way, after ringing the second
+Angelus, to dig the vine-rows in his last little bit of ground.
+
+Bent by toil, with pallid face and silvery hair, the old vinedresser,
+now the sole representative of civic virtue in the community, had
+been, during the Revolution, president of the Jacobin club at Ville-
+aux-Fayes, and a juror in the revolutionary tribunal of the district.
+Jean-Francois Niseron, carved out of the wood that the apostles were
+made of, was of the type of Saint Peter; whom painters and sculptors
+have united in representing with the square brow of the people, the
+thick, naturally curling hair of the laborer, the muscles of the man
+of toil, the complexion of a fisherman; with the large nose, the
+shrewd, half-mocking lips that scoff at fate, the neck and shoulders
+of the strong man who cuts his wood to cook his dinner while the
+doctrinaires of his opinions talk.
+
+Such, at forty years of age on the breaking out of the Revolution, was
+this man, strong as iron, pure as gold. Advocate of the people, he
+believed in a republic through the very roll of that name, more
+formidable in sound perhaps than in reality. He believed in the
+republic of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the brotherhood of man, in the
+exchange of noble sentiments, in the proclamation of virtue, in the
+choice of merit without intrigue,--in short, in all that the narrow
+limits of one arrondissement like Sparta made possible, and which the
+vast proportions of an empire make chimerical. He signed his beliefs
+with his blood,--his only son went to war; he did more, he signed them
+with the prosperity of his life,--last sacrifice of self. Nephew and
+sole heir of the curate of Blangy, the then all-powerful tribune might
+have enforced his rights and recovered the property left by the priest
+to his pretty servant-girl, Arsene; but he respected his uncle's
+wishes and accepted poverty, which came upon him as rapidly as the
+fall of his cherished republic came upon France.
+
+Never a farthing's worth, never so much as the branch of a tree
+belonging to another passed into the hands of this notable republican,
+who would have made the republic acceptable to the world if he and
+such as he could have guided it. He refused to buy the national
+domains; he denied the right of the Republic to confiscate property.
+In reply to all demands of the committee of public safety he asserted
+that the virtue of citizens would do for their sacred country what low
+political intriguers did for money. This patriot of antiquity publicly
+reproved Gaubertin's father for his secret treachery, his underhand
+bargaining, his malversations. He reprimanded the virtuous Mouchon,
+that representative of the people whose virtue was nothing more nor
+less than incapacity,--as it is with so many other legislators who,
+gorged with the greatest political resources that any nation ever
+gave, armed with the whole force of a people, are still unable to
+bring forth from them the grandeur which Richelieu wrung for France
+out of the weakness of a king. Consequently, citizen Niseron became a
+living reproach to the people about him. They endeavored to put him
+out of sight and mind with the reproachful remark, "Nothing satisfies
+that man."
+
+The patriot peasant returned to his cot at Blangy and watched the
+destruction, one by one, of his illusions; he saw his republic come to
+an end at the heels of an emperor, while he himself fell into utter
+poverty, to which Rigou stealthily managed to reduce him. And why?
+Because Niseron had never been willing to accept anything from him.
+Reiterated refusals showed the ex-priest in what profound contempt the
+nephew of the curate held him; and now that icy scorn was revenged by
+the terrible threat as to his little granddaughter, about which the
+Abbe Brossette spoke to the countess.
+
+The old man had composed in his own mind a history of the French
+republic, filled with the glorious features which gave immortality to
+that heroic period to the exclusion of all else. The infamous deeds,
+the massacres, the spoliations, his virtuous soul ignored; he admired,
+with a single mind, the devotedness of the people, the "Vengeur," the
+gifts to the nation, the uprising of the country to defend its
+frontier; and he still pursued his dream that he might sleep in peace.
+
+The Revolution produced many poets like old Niseron, who sang their
+poems in the country solitudes, in the army, openly or secretly, by
+deeds buried beneath the whirlwind of that storm, just as the wounded
+left behind to die in the great wars of the empire cried out, "Long
+live the Emperor!" This sublimity of soul belongs especially to
+France. The Abbe Brossette respected the convictions of the old man,
+who became simply but deeply attached to the priest from hearing him
+say, "The true republic is in the Gospel." The stanch republican
+carried the cross, and wore the sexton's robe, half-red, half-black,
+and was grave and dignified in church,--supporting himself by the
+triple functions with which he was invested by the abbe, who was able
+to give the fine old man, not, to be sure, enough to live on, but
+enough to keep him from dying of hunger.
+
+Niseron, the Aristides of Blangy, spoke little, like all noble dupes
+who wrap themselves in the mantle of resignation; but he was never
+silent against evil, and the peasants feared him as thieves fear the
+police. He seldom came more than six times a year to the Grand-I-Vert,
+though he was always warmly welcomed there. The old man cursed the
+want of charity of the rich,--their selfishness disgusted him; and
+through this fiber of his mind he seemed to the peasants to belong to
+them; they were in the habit of saying, "Pere Niseron doesn't like the
+rich; he's one of us."
+
+The civic crown won by this noble life throughout the valley lay in
+these words: "That good old Niseron! there's not a more honest man."
+Often taken as umpire in certain kinds of disputes, he embodied the
+meaning of that archaic term,--the village elder. Always extremely
+clean, though threadbare, he wore breeches, coarse woollen stockings,
+hob-nailed shoes, the distinctively French coat with large buttons and
+the broad-brimmed felt hat to which all old peasants cling; but for
+daily wear he kept a blue jacket so patched and darned that it looked
+like a bit of tapestry. The pride of a man who feels he is free, and
+knows he is worthy of freedom, gave to his countenance and his whole
+bearing a SOMETHING that was inexpressibly noble; you would have felt
+he wore a robe, not rags.
+
+"Hey! what's happening so unusual?" he said, "I heard the noise down
+here from the belfry."
+
+They told him of Vatel's attack on the old woman, talking all at once
+after the fashion of country-people.
+
+"If she didn't cut the tree, Vatel was wrong; but if she did cut it,
+you have done two bad actions," said Pere Niseron.
+
+"Take some wine," said Tonsard, offering a full glass to the old man.
+
+"Shall we start?" said Vermichel to the sheriff's officer.
+
+"Yes," replied Brunet, "we must do without Pere Fourchon and take the
+assistant at Conches. Go on before me; I have a paper to carry to the
+chateau. Rigou has gained his second suit, and I've got to deliver the
+verdict."
+
+So saying, Monsieur Brunet, all the livelier for a couple of glasses
+of brandy, mounted his gray mare after saying good-bye to Pere
+Niseron; for the whole valley were desirous in their hearts of the
+good man's esteem.
+
+No science, not even that of statistics, can explain the rapidity with
+which news flies in the country, nor how it spreads over those
+ignorant and untaught regions which are, in France, a standing
+reproach to the government and to capitalists. Contemporaneous history
+can show that a famous banker, after driving post-horses to death
+between Waterloo and Paris (everybody knows why--he gained what the
+Emperor had lost, a commission!) carried the fatal news only three
+hours in advance of rumor. So, not an hour after the encounter between
+old mother Tonsard and Vatel, a number of the customers of the Grand-
+I-Vert assembled there to hear the tale.
+
+The first to come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have
+recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose
+wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen. Aged, and thin,
+and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned.
+"He tried to climb higher than the ladder," was what his neighbors
+said when others pitied him and blamed Rigou. "He wanted to be a
+bourgeois himself."
+
+In fact, Courtecuisse did intend to pass for a bourgeois in buying the
+Bachelerie, and he even boasted of it; though his wife went about the
+roads gathering up the horse-droppings. She and Courtecuisse got up
+before daylight, dug their garden, which was richly manured, and
+obtained several yearly crops from it, without being able to do more
+than pay the interest due to Rigou for the rest of the purchase-money.
+Their daughter, who was living at service in Auxerre, sent them her
+wages; but in spite of all their efforts, in spite of this help, the
+last day for the final payment was approaching, and not a penny in
+hand with which to meet it. Madame Courtecuisse, who in former times
+occasionally allowed herself a bottle of boiled wine or a bit of roast
+meat, now drank nothing but water. Courtecuisse was afraid to go to
+the Grand-I-Vert lest he should have to leave three sous behind him.
+Deprived of power, he had lost his privilege of free drinks, and he
+bitterly complained, like all other fools, of man's ingratitude. In
+short, he found, according to the experience of all peasants bitten
+with the demon of proprietorship, that toil had increased and food
+decreased.
+
+"Courtecuisse has done too much to the property," the people said,
+secretly envying his position. "He ought to have waited till he had
+paid the money down and was master before he put up those fruit
+palings."
+
+With the help of his wife he had managed to manure and cultivate the
+three acres of land sold to him by Rigou, together with the garden
+adjoining the house, which was beginning to be productive; and he was
+in danger of being turned out of it all. Clothed in rags like
+Fourchon, poor Courtecuisse, who lately wore the boots and gaiters of
+a huntsman, now thrust his feet into sabots and accused "the rich" of
+Les Aigues of having caused his destitution. These wearing anxieties
+had given to the fat little man and his once smiling and rosy face a
+gloomy and dazed expression, as though he were ill from the effects of
+poison or with some chronic malady.
+
+"What's the matter with you, Monsieur Courtecuisse; is your tongue
+tied?" asked Tonsard, as the man continued silent after he had told
+him about the battle which had just taken place.
+
+"No, no!" cried Madame Tonsard; "he needn't complain of the midwife
+who cut his string,--she made a good job of it."
+
+"It is enough to make a man dumb, thinking from morning till night of
+some way to escape Rigou," said the premature old man, gloomily.
+
+"Bah!" said old Mother Tonsard, "you've got a pretty daughter,
+seventeen years old. If she's a good girl you can easily manage
+matters with that old jail bird--"
+
+"We sent her to Auxerre two years ago to Madame Mariotte the elder, to
+keep her out of harm's way; I'd rather die than--"
+
+"What a fool you are!" said Tonsard, "look at my girls,--are they any
+the worse? He who dares to say they are not as virtuous as marble
+images will have to do with my gun."
+
+"It'll be hard to have to come to that," said Courtecuisse, shaking
+his head. "I'd rather earn the money by shooting one of those
+Arminacs."
+
+"Well, I call it better for a girl to save a father than to wrap up
+her virtue and let it mildew," retorted the innkeeper.
+
+Tonsard felt a sharp tap on his shoulder, delivered by Pere Niseron.
+
+"That is not a right thing to say!" cried the old man. "A father is
+the guardian of the honor of his family. It is by behaving as you do
+that scorn and contempt are brought upon us; it is because of such
+conduct that the People are accused of being unfit for liberty. The
+People should set an example of civic virtue and honor to the rich.
+You all sell yourselves to Rigou for gold; and if you don't sell him
+your daughters, at any rate you sell him your honor,--and it's wrong."
+
+"Just see what a position Courtecuisse is in," said Tonsard.
+
+"See what a position I am in," replied Pere Niseron; "but I sleep in
+peace; there are no thorns in my pillow."
+
+"Let him talk, Tonsard," whispered his wife, "you know they're just
+HIS NOTIONS, poor dear man."
+
+Bonnebault and Marie, Catherine and her brother came in at this moment
+in a state of exasperation, which had begun with Nicolas's failure,
+and was raised to the highest pitch by Michaud's advice to the
+countess about Bonnebault. As Nicolas entered the tavern he was
+uttering frightful threats against the Michaud family and Les Aigues.
+
+"The harvest's coming; well, I vow I'll not go before I've lighted my
+pipe at their wheat-stacks," he cried, striking his fist on the table
+as he sat down.
+
+"Mustn't yelp like that before people," said Godain, showing him Pere
+Niseron.
+
+"If the old fellow tells, I'll wring his neck," said Catherine. "He's
+had his day, that old peddler of foolish reasons! They call him
+virtuous; it's his temperament that keeps him so, that's all."
+
+Strange and noteworthy sight!--that of those lifted heads, that group
+of persons gathered in the reeking hovel, while old Mother Tonsard
+stood sentinel at the door as security for the secret words of the
+drinkers.
+
+Of all those faces, that of Godain, Catherine's suitor, was perhaps
+the most alarming, though the least pronounced. Godain,--a miser
+without money,--the cruelest of misers, for he who seeks money surely
+takes precedence of him who hoards it, one turning his eagerness
+within himself, the other looking outside with terrible intentness,--
+Godain represented the type of the majority of peasant faces.
+
+He was a journeyman, small in frame, and saved from the draft by not
+attaining the required military height; naturally lean and made more
+so by hard work and the enforced sobriety under which reluctant
+workers like Courtecuisse succumb. His face was no bigger than a man's
+fist, and was lighted by a pair of yellow eyes with greenish strips
+and brown spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was
+mingled with a concupiscence which had no heat,--for desire, once at
+the boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as
+that of a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled
+among his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. Godain never
+perspired, he reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like
+claws, nervous, never still, seemed to be made of old wood. Though
+scarcely twenty-seven years of age, white lines were beginning to show
+in his rusty black hair. He wore a blouse, through the breast opening
+of which could be seen a shirt of coarse linen, so black that he must
+have worn it a month and washed it himself in the Thune. His sabots
+were mended with old iron. The original stuff of his trousers was
+unrecognizable from the darns and the infinite number of patches. On
+his head was a horrible cap, evidently cast off and picked up in the
+doorway of some bourgeois house in Ville-aux-Fayes.
+
+Clear-sighted enough to estimate the elements of good fortune that
+centred in Catherine Tonsard, his ambition was to succeed her father
+at the Grand-I-Vert. He made use of all his craftiness and all his
+actual powers to capture her; he promised her wealth, he also promised
+her the license her mother had enjoyed; besides this, he offered his
+prospective father-in-law an enormous rental, five hundred francs a
+year, for his inn, until he could buy him out, trusting to an
+agreement he had made with Monsieur Brunet to pay these costs by notes
+on stamped paper. By trade a journeyman tool-maker, this gnome worked
+for the wheelwrights when work was plentiful, but he also hired
+himself out for any extra labor which was well paid. Though he
+possessed, unknown to the whole neighborhood, eighteen hundred francs
+now in Gaubertin's hands, he lived like a beggar, slept in a barn, and
+gleaned at the harvests. He wore Gaubertin's receipt for his money
+sewn into the waist-belt of his trousers,--having it renewed every
+year with its own added interest and the amount of his savings.
+
+"Hey! what do I care," cried Nicolas, replying to Godain's prudent
+advice not to talk before Niseron. "If I'm doomed to be a soldier I'd
+rather the sawdust of the basket sucked up my blood than have it
+dribbled out drop by drop in the battles. I'll deliver this country of
+at least one of those Arminacs that the devil has launched upon us."
+
+And he related what he called Michaud's plot against him, which Marie
+and Bonnebault had overheard.
+
+"Where do you expect France to find soldiers?" said the white-haired
+old man, rising and standing before Nicolas during the silence which
+followed the utterance of this threat.
+
+"We serve our time and come home again," remarked Bonnebault, twirling
+his moustache.
+
+Observing that all the worst characters of the neighborhood were
+collecting, Pere Niseron shook his head and left the tavern, after
+offering a farthing to Madame Tonsard in payment for his glass of
+wine. When the worthy man had gone down the steps a movement of relief
+and satisfaction passed through the assembled drinkers which would
+have told whoever watched them that each man in that company felt he
+was rid of the living image of his own conscience.
+
+"Well, what do you say to all that, hey, Courtecuisse?" asked
+Vaudoyer, who had just come in, and to whom Tonsard had related
+Vatel's attempt.
+
+Courtecuisse clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and set
+his glass on the table.
+
+"Vatel put himself in the wrong," he said. "If I were Mother Tonsard,
+I'd give myself a few wounds and go to bed and say I was ill, and have
+that Shopman and his keeper up before the assizes and get twenty
+crowns damages. Monsieur Sarcus would give them."
+
+"In any case the Shopman would give them to stop the talk it would
+make," said Godain.
+
+Vaudoyer, the former field-keeper, a man five feet six inches tall,
+with a face pitted with the small-pox and furrowed like a nut-cracker,
+kept silence with a hesitating air.
+
+"Well, you old ninny, does that ruffle you?" asked Tonsard, attracted
+by the idea of damages. "If they had broken twenty crowns' worth of my
+mother's bones we could turn it into good account; we might make a
+fine fuss for three hundred francs; Monsieur Gourdon would go to Les
+Aigues and tell them that the mother had got a broken hip--"
+
+"And break it, too," interrupted Madame Tonsard; "they do that in
+Paris."
+
+"It would cost too much," remarked Godain.
+
+"I have been too long among the people who rule us to believe that
+matters will go as you want them," said Vaudoyer at last, remembering
+his past official intercourse with the courts and the gendarmerie. "If
+it were at Soulanges, now, it might be done; Monsieur Soudry
+represents the government there, and he doesn't wish well to the
+Shopman; but if you attack the Shopman and Vatel they'll defend
+themselves viciously; they'll say, 'The woman was to blame; she had a
+tree, otherwise she would have let her bundle be examined on the
+highroad; she wouldn't have run away; if an accident happened to her
+it was through her own fault.' No, you can't trust to that plan."
+
+"The Shopman didn't resist when I sued him," said Courtecuisse; "he
+paid me at once."
+
+"I'll go to Soulanges, if you like," said Bonnebault, "and consult
+Monsieur Gourdon, the clerk of the court, and you shall know to-night
+if THERE'S MONEY IN IT."
+
+"You are only making an excuse to be after that big goose of a girl,
+Socquard's daughter," said Marie Tonsard, giving Bonnebault a slap on
+the shoulder that made his lungs hum.
+
+Just then a verse of an old Burgundian Christmas carol was heard:--
+
+  "One fine moment of his life
+  Was at the wedding feast;
+  He changed the water into wine,--
+  Madeira of the best."
+
+Every one recognized the vinous voice of old Fourchon, to whom the
+verse must have been peculiarly agreeable; Mouche accompanied in his
+treble tones.
+
+"Ha! they're full!" cried old Mother Tonsard to her daughter-in-law;
+"your father is as red as a grid-iron, and that chip o' the block as
+pink as vine-shoot."
+
+"Your healths!" cried the old man, "and a fine lot of scoundrels you
+are! All hail!" he said to his granddaughter, whom he spied kissing
+Bonnebault, "hail, Marie, full of vice! Satan is with three; cursed
+art thou among women, etcetera. All hail, the company present! you are
+done for, every one of you! you may just say good-bye to your sheaves.
+I being news. I always told you the rich would crush us; well now, the
+Shopman is going to have the law of you! Ha! see what it is to
+struggle against those bourgeois fellows, who have made so many laws
+since they got into power that they've a law to enforce every trick
+they play--"
+
+A violent hiccough gave a sudden turn to the ideas of the
+distinguished orator.
+
+"If Vermichel were only here I'd blow in his gullet, and he'd get an
+idea of sherry wine. Hey! what a wine it is! If I wasn't a Burgundian
+I'd be a Spaniard! It's God's own wine! the pope says mass with it--
+Hey! I'm young again! Say, Courtecuisse! if your wife were only here
+we'd be young together. Don't tell me! Spanish wine is worth a dozen
+of boiled wine. Let's have a revolution if it's only to empty the
+cellars!"
+
+"But what's your news, papa?" said Tonsard.
+
+"There'll be no harvest for you; the Shopman has given orders to stop
+the gleaning."
+
+"Stop the gleaning!" cried the whole tavern, with one voice, in which
+the shrill tones of the four women predominated.
+
+"Yes," said Mouche, "he is going to issue an order, and Groison is to
+take it round, and post it up all over the canton. No one is to glean
+except those who have pauper certificates."
+
+"And what's more," said Fourchon, "the folks from the other districts
+won't be allowed here at all."
+
+"What's that?" cried Bonnebault, "do you mean to tell me that neither
+my grandmother nor I, nor your mother, Godain, can come here and
+glean? Here's tomfoolery for you; a pretty show of authority! Why, the
+fellow is a devil let loose from hell,--that scoundrel of a mayor!"
+
+"Shall you glean whether or no, Godain?" said Tonsard to the
+journeyman wheelwright, who was saying a few words to Catherine.
+
+"I? I've no property; I'm a pauper," he replied; "I shall ask for a
+certificate."
+
+"What did they give my father for his otter, bibi?" said Madame
+Tonsard to Mouche.
+
+Though nearly at his last gasp from an over-taxed digestion and two
+bottles of wine, Mouche, sitting on Madame Tonsard's lap, laid his
+head on his aunt's neck and whispered slyly in her ear:--
+
+"I don't know, but he has got gold. If you'll feed me high for a
+month, perhaps I can find out his hiding-place; he has one, I know
+that."
+
+"Father's got gold!" whispered La Tonsard to her husband, whose voice
+was loudest in the uproar of the excited discussion, in which all
+present took part.
+
+"Hush! here's Groison," cried the old sentinel.
+
+Perfect silence reigned in the tavern. When Groison had got to a safe
+distance, Mother Tonsard made a sign, and the discussion began again
+on the question as to whether they should persist in gleaning, as
+before, without a certificate.
+
+"You'll have to give in," said Pere Fourchon; "for the Shopman has
+gone to see the prefect and get troops to enforce the order. They'll
+shoot you like dogs,--and that's what we are!" cried the old man,
+trying to conquer the thickening of his speech produced by his
+potations of sherry.
+
+This fresh announcement, absurd as it was, made all the drinkers
+thoughtful; they really believed the government capable of
+slaughtering them without pity.
+
+"I remember just such troubles near Toulouse, when I was stationed
+there," said Bonnebault. "We were marched out, and the peasants were
+cut and slashed and arrested. Everybody laughed to see them try to
+resist cavalry. Ten were sent to the galleys, and eleven put in
+prison; the whole thing was crushed. Hey! what? why, soldiers are
+soldiers, and you are nothing but civilian beggars; they've a right,
+they think, to sabre peasants, the devil take you!"
+
+"Well, well," said Tonsard, "what is there in all that to frighten you
+like kids? What can they get out of my mother and daughters? Put 'em
+in prison? well, then they must feed them; and the Shopman can't
+imprison the whole country. Besides, prisoners are better fed at the
+king's expense than they are at their own; and they're kept warmer,
+too."
+
+"You are a pack of fools!" roared Fourchon. "Better gnaw at the
+bourgeois than attack him in front; otherwise, you'll get your backs
+broke. If you like the galleys, so be it,--that's another thing! You
+don't work as hard there as you do in the fields, true enough; but you
+don't have your liberty."
+
+"Perhaps it would be well," said Vaudoyer, who was among the more
+valiant in counsel, "if some of us risked our skins to deliver the
+neighborhood of that Languedoc fellow who has planted himself at the
+gate of the Avonne."
+
+"Do Michaud's business for him?" said Nicolas; "I'm good for that."
+
+"Things are not ripe for it," said old Fourchon. "We should risk too
+much, my children. The best way is to make ourselves look miserable
+and cry famine; then the Shopman and his wife will want to help us,
+and you'll get more out of them that way than you will by gleaning."
+
+"You are all blind moles," shouted Tonsard, "let 'em pick a quarrel
+with their law and their troops, they can't put the whole country in
+irons, and we've plenty of friends at Ville-aux-Fayes and among the
+old lords who'll sustain us."
+
+"That's true," said Courtecuisse; "none of the other land-owners
+complain, it is only the Shopman; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur
+de Ronquerolles and others, they are satisfied. When I think that if
+that cuirassier had only had the courage to let himself be killed like
+the rest I should still be happy at the gate of the Avonne, and that
+it was he that turned my life topsy-turvy, it just puts me beside
+myself."
+
+"They won't call out the troops for a Shopman who has set every one in
+the district against him," said Godain. "The fault's his own; he tried
+to ride over everybody here, and upset everything; and the government
+will just say to him, 'Hush up.'"
+
+"The government never says anything else; it can't, poor government!"
+said Fourchon, seized with a sudden tenderness for the government.
+"Yes, I pity it, that good government; it is very unlucky,--it hasn't
+a penny, like us; but that's very stupid of a government that makes
+the money itself, very stupid! Ah! if I were the government--"
+
+"But," cried Courtecuisse, "they tell me in Ville-aux-Fayes that
+Monsieur de Ronquerolles talked about our rights in the Assembly."
+
+"That's in Monsieur Rigou's newspaper," said Vaudoyer, who in his
+capacity of ex-field-keeper knew how to read and write; "I read it--"
+
+In spite of his vinous tenderness, old Fourchon, like many of the
+lower classes whose faculties are stimulated by drunkenness, was
+following, with an intelligent eye and a keen ear, this curious
+discussion which a variety of asides rendered still more curious.
+Suddenly, he stood up in the middle of the room.
+
+"Listen to the old one, he's drunk!" said Tonsard, "and when he is, he
+is twice as full of deviltry; he has his own and that of the wine--"
+
+"Spanish wine, and that trebles it!" cried Fourchon, laughing like a
+satyr. "My sons, don't butt your head straight at the thing,--you're
+too weak; go at it sideways. Lay low, play dead; the little woman is
+scared. I tell you, the thing'll come to an end before long; she'll
+leave the place, and if she does the Shopman will follow her, for
+she's his passion. That's your plan. Only, to make 'em go faster, my
+advice is to get rid of their counsellor, their support, our spy, our
+ape--"
+
+"Who's that?"
+
+"The damned abbe, of course," said Tonsard; "that hunter after sins,
+who thinks the host is food enough for us."
+
+"That's true," cried Vaudoyer; "we were happy enough till he came. We
+ought to get rid of that eater of the good God,--he's the real enemy."
+
+"Finikin," added Fourchon, using a nickname which the abbe owed to his
+prim and rather puny appearance, "might be led into temptation and
+fall into the power of some sly girl, for he fasts so much. Then if we
+could catch him in the act and drum him up with a good charivari, the
+bishop would be obliged to send him elsewhere. It would please old
+Rigou devilish well. Now if your daughter, Courtecuisse, would leave
+Auxerre--she's a pretty girl, and if she'd take to piety, she might
+save us all. Hey! ran tan plan!--"
+
+"Why don't YOU do it?" said Godain to Catherine, in a low voice;
+"there'd be scuttles full of money to hush up the talk; and for the
+time being you'd be mistress here--"
+
+"Shall we glean, or shall we not glean? that's the point," said
+Bonnebault. "I don't care two straws for your abbe, not I; I belong to
+Conches, where we haven't a black-coat to poke up our consciences."
+
+"Look here," said Vaudoyer, "we had better go and ask Rigou, who knows
+the law, whether the Shopman can forbid gleaning, and he'll tell us if
+we've got the right of it. If the Shopman has the law on his side,
+well, then we must do as the old one says,--see about taking things
+sideways."
+
+"Blood will be spilt," said Nicolas, darkly, as he rose after drinking
+a whole bottle of wine, which Catherine drew for him in order to keep
+him silent. "If you'd only listen to me you'd down Michaud; but you
+are miserable weaklings,--nothing but poor trash!"
+
+"I'm not," said Bonnebault. "If you are all safe friends who'll keep
+your tongues between your teeth, I'll aim at the Shopman-- Hey! how
+I'd like to put a plum through his bottle; wouldn't it avenge me on
+those cursed officers?"
+
+"Tut! tut!" cried Jean-Louis Tonsard, who was supposed to be, more or
+less, Gaubertin's son, and who had just entered the tavern. This
+fellow, who was courting Rigou's pretty servant-girl, had succeeded
+his nominal father as clipper of hedges and shrubberies and other
+Tonsardial occupations. Going about among the well-to-do houses, he
+talked with masters and servants and picked up ideas which made him
+the man of the world of the family, the shrewd head. We shall
+presently see that in making love to Rigou's servant-girl, Jean-Louis
+deserved his reputation for shrewdness.
+
+"Well, what have you to say, prophet?" said the innkeeper to his son.
+
+"I say that you are playing into the hands of the rich folk," replied
+Jean-Louis. "Frighten the Aigues people to maintain your rights if you
+choose; but if you drive them out of the place and make them sell the
+estate, you are doing just what the bourgeois of the valley want, and
+it's against your own interest. If you help the bourgeois to divide
+the great estates among them, where's the national domain to be bought
+for nothing at the next Revolution? Wait till then, and you'll get
+your land without paying for it, as Rigou got his; whereas if you go
+and thrust this estate into the jaws of the rich folk of the valley,
+the rich folk will dribble it back to you impoverished and at twice
+the price they paid for it. You are working for their interests, I
+tell you; so does everybody who works for Rigou,--look at
+Courtecuisse."
+
+The policy contained in this allocution was too deep for the drunken
+heads of those present, who were all, except Courtecuisse, laying by
+their money to buy a slice of the Aigues cake. So they let Jean-Louis
+harangue, and continued, as in the Chamber of Deputies, their private
+confabs with one another.
+
+"Yes, that's so; you'll be Rigou's cats-paw!" cried Fourchon, who
+alone understood his grandson.
+
+Just then Langlume, the miller of Les Aigues, passed the tavern.
+Madame Tonsard hailed him.
+
+"Is it true," she said, "that gleaning is to be forbidden?"
+
+Langlume, a jovial white man, white with flour and dressed in grayish-
+white clothes, came up the steps and looked in. Instantly all the
+peasants became as sober as judges.
+
+"Well, my children, I am forced to answer yes, and no. None but the
+poor are to glean; but the measures they are going to take will turn
+out to your advantage."
+
+"How so?" asked Godain.
+
+"Why, they can prevent any but paupers from gleaning here," said the
+miller, winking in true Norman fashion; "but that doesn't prevent you
+from gleaning elsewhere,--unless all the mayors do as the Blangy mayor
+is doing."
+
+"Then it is true," said Tonsard, in a threatening voice.
+
+"As for me," said Bonnebault, putting his foraging-cap over one ear
+and making his hazel stick whiz in the air, "I'm off to Conches to
+warn the friends."
+
+And the Lovelace of the valley departed, whistling the tune of the
+martial song,--
+
+  "You who know the hussars of the Guard,
+  Don't you know the trombone of the regiment?"
+
+"I say, Marie! he's going a queer way to get to Conches, that friend
+of yours," cried old Mother Tonsard to her granddaughter.
+
+"He's after Aglae!" said Marie, who made one bound to the door. "I'll
+have to thrash her once for all, that baggage!" she cried, viciously.
+
+"Come, Vaudoyer," said Tonsard, "go and see Rigou, and then we shall
+know what to do; he's our oracle, and his spittle doesn't cost
+anything."
+
+"Another folly!" said Jean-Louis, in a low voice, "Rigou betrays
+everybody; Annette tells me so; she says he's more dangerous when he
+listens to you than other folks are when they bluster."
+
+"I advise you to be cautious," said Langlume. "The general has gone to
+the prefecture about your misdeeds, and Sibilet tells me he has sworn
+an oath to go to Paris and see the Chancellor of France and the King
+himself, and the whole pack of them if necessary, to get the better of
+his peasantry."
+
+"His peasantry!" shouted every one.
+
+"Ha, ha! so we don't belong to ourselves any longer?"
+
+As Tonsard asked the question, Vaudoyer left the house to see Rigou.
+
+Langlume, who had already gone out, turned on the door-step, and
+answered:--
+
+"Crowd of do-nothings! are you so rich that you think you are your own
+masters?"
+
+Though said with a laugh, the meaning contained in those words was
+understood by all present, as horses understand the cut of a whip.
+
+"Ran tan plan! masters indeed!" shouted old Fourchon. "I say, my lad,"
+he added to Nicolas, "after your performance this morning it's not my
+clarionet that you'll get between your thumb and four fingers!"
+
+"Don't plague him, or he'll make you throw up your wine by a punch in
+the stomach," said Catherine, roughly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY USURER
+
+Strategically, Rigou's position at Blangy was that of a picket
+sentinel. He watched Les Aigues, and watched it well. The police have
+no spies comparable to those that serve hatred.
+
+When the general first came to Les Aigues Rigou apparently formed some
+plans about him which Montcornet's marriage with a Troisville put an
+end to; he seemed to have wished to patronize the new land-owner. In
+fact his intentions were so patent that Gaubertin thought best to let
+him into the secrets of the coalition against Les Aigues. Before
+accepting any part in the affair, Rigou determined, as he said, to put
+the general between two stools.
+
+One day, after the countess was fairly installed, a little wicker
+carriage painted green entered the grand courtyard of the chateau. The
+mayor, who was flanked by his mayoress, got out and came round to the
+portico on the garden side. As he did so Rigou saw Madame le comtesse
+at a window. She, however, devoted to the bishop and to religion and
+to the Abbe Brossette, sent word by Francois that "Madame was out."
+
+This act of incivility, worthy of a woman born in Russia, turned the
+face of the ex-Benedictine yellow. If the countess had seen the man
+whom the abbe told her was "a soul in hell who plunged into iniquity
+as into a bath in his efforts to cool himself," if she had seen his
+face then she might have refrained from exciting the cold, deliberate
+hatred felt by the liberals against the royalists, increased as it was
+in country-places by the jealousies of neighborhood, where the
+recollections of wounded vanity are kept constantly alive.
+
+A few details about this man and his morals will not only throw light
+on his share of the plot, called "the great affair" by his two
+associates, but it will have the merit of picturing an extremely
+curious type of man,--one of those rural existences which are peculiar
+to France, and which no writer has hitherto sought to depict. Nothing
+about this man is without significance,--neither his house, nor his
+manner of blowing the fire, nor his ways of eating; his habits,
+morals, and opinions will vividly illustrate the history of the
+valley. This renegade serves to show the utility of democracy; he is
+at once its theory and its practice, its alpha and its omega, in
+short, its "summum."
+
+Perhaps you will remember certain masters of avarice pictured in
+former scenes of this comedy of human life: in the first place the
+provincial minister, Pere Grandet of Saumur, miserly as a tiger is
+cruel; next Gobseck, the usurer, that Jesuit of gold, delighting only
+in its power, and relishing the tears of the unfortunate because gold
+produced them; then Baron Nucingen, lifting base and fraudulent money
+transactions to the level of State policy. Then, too, you may remember
+that portrait of domestic parsimony, old Hochon of Issoudun, and that
+other miser in behalf of family interests, little la Baudraye of
+Sancerre. Well, human emotions--above all, those of avarice--take on
+so many and diverse shades in the diverse centres of social existence
+that there still remains upon the stage of our comedy another miser to
+be studied, namely, Rigou,--Rigou, the miser-egoist; full of
+tenderness for his own gratifications, cold and hard to others; the
+ecclesiastical miser; the monk still a monk so far as he can squeeze
+the juice of the fruit called good-living, and becoming secular only
+to put a paw upon the public money. In the first place, let us explain
+the continual pleasure that he took in sleeping under his own roof.
+
+Blangy--by that we mean the sixty houses described by Blondet in his
+letter to Nathan--stands on a rise of land to the left of the Thune.
+As all the houses are surrounded by gardens, the village is a very
+pretty one. Some houses are built on the banks of the stream. At the
+upper end of the long rise stands the church, formerly flanked by a
+parsonage, its apse surrounded, as in many other villages, by a
+graveyard. The sacrilegious old Rigou had bought the parsonage, which
+was originally built by an excellent Catholic, Mademoiselle Choin, on
+land which she had bought for the purpose. A terraced garden, from
+which the eye looked down upon Blangy, Cerneux, and Soulanges standing
+between the two great seignorial parks, separated the late parsonage
+from the church. On its opposite side lay a meadow, bought by the last
+curate of the parish not long before his death, which the distrustful
+Rigou had since surrounded with a wall.
+
+The ex-monk and mayor having refused to sell back the parsonage for
+its original purpose, the parish was obliged to buy a house belonging
+to a peasant, which adjoined the church. It was necessary to spend
+five thousand francs to repair and enlarge it and to enclose it in a
+little garden, one wall of which was that of the sacristy, so that
+communication between the parsonage and the church was still as close
+as it ever was.
+
+These two houses, built on a line with the church, and seeming to
+belong to it by their gardens, faced a piece of open ground planted by
+trees, which might be called the square of Blangy,--all the more
+because the count had lately built, directly opposite to the new
+parsonage, a communal building intended for the mayor's office, the
+home of the field-keeper, and the quarters of that school of the
+Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, for which the Abbe Brossette had
+hitherto begged in vain. Thus, not only were the houses of the ex-monk
+and the young priest connected and yet separated by the church, but
+they were in a position to watch each other. Indeed, the whole village
+spied upon the abbe. The main street, which began at the Thune, crept
+tortuously up the hill to the church. Vineyards, the cottages of the
+peasantry, and a small grove crowned the heights.
+
+Rigou's house, the handsomest in the village, was built of the large
+rubble-stone peculiar to Burgundy, imbedded in yellow mortar smoothed
+by the trowel, which produced an uneven surface, still further broken
+here and there by projecting points of the stone, which was mostly
+black. A band of cement, in which no stones were allowed to show,
+surrounded each window with a sort of frame, where time had made some
+slight, capricious cracks, such as appear on plastered ceilings. The
+outer blinds, of a clumsy pattern, were noticeable for their color,
+which was dragon-green. A few mosses grew among the slates of the
+roof. The type is that of Burgundian homesteads; the traveller will
+see thousands like it when visiting this part of France.
+
+A double door opened upon a passage, half-way down which was the well
+of the staircase. By the entrance was the door of a large room with
+three windows looking out upon the square. The kitchen, built behind
+and beneath the staircase, was lighted from the courtyard, which was
+neatly paved with cobble-stones and entered by a porte-cochere. Such
+was the ground-floor. The first floor contained three bedrooms, above
+them a small attic chamber.
+
+A wood-shed, a coach-house, and a stable adjoined the kitchen, and
+formed two sides of a square around the courtyard. Above these rather
+flimsy buildings were lofts containing hay and grain, a fruit-room,
+and one servant's-chamber.
+
+A poultry-yard, the stable, and a pigsty faced the house across the
+courtyard.
+
+The garden, about an acre in size and enclosed by walls, was a true
+priest's garden; that is, it was full of wall-fruit and fruit-trees,
+grape-arbors, gravel-paths, closely trimmed box-trees, and square
+vegetable patches, made rich with the manure from the stable.
+
+Within, the large room, panelled in wainscot, was hung with old
+tapestry. The walnut furniture, brown with age and covered with stuffs
+embroidered in needle-work, was in keeping with the wainscot and with
+the ceiling, which was also panelled. The latter had three projecting
+beams, but these were painted, and between them the space was
+plastered. The mantel, also in walnut, surmounted by a mirror in the
+most grotesque frame, had no other ornament than two brass eggs
+standing on a marble base, each of which opened in the middle; the
+upper half when turned over showed a socket for a candle. These
+candlesticks for two lights, festooned with chains (an invention of
+the reign of Louis XV.), were becoming rare. On a green and gold
+bracket fastened to the wall opposite to the window was a common but
+excellent clock. The curtains, which squeaked upon their rods, were at
+least fifty years old; their material, of cotton in a square pattern
+like that of mattresses, alternately pink and white, came from the
+Indies. A sideboard and dinner-table completed the equipment of the
+room, which was kept with extreme nicety.
+
+At the corner of the fireplace was an immense sofa, Rigou's especial
+seat. In the angle, above a little "bonheur du jour," which served him
+as a desk, and hanging to a common screw, was a pair of bellows, the
+origin of Rigou's fortune.
+
+From this succinct description, in style like that of an auction sale,
+it will be easy to imagine that the bedrooms of Monsieur and Madame
+Rigou were limited to mere necessaries; yet it would be a mistake to
+suppose that such parsimony affected the essential excellence of those
+necessaries. For instance, the most fastidious of women would have
+slept well in Rigou's bed, with fine linen sheets, excellent
+mattresses, made luxurious by a feather-bed (doubtless bought for some
+abbe by a pious female parishioner) and protected from draughts by
+thick curtains. All the rest of Rigou's belongings were made
+comfortable for his use, as we shall see.
+
+In the first place, he had reduced his wife, who could neither read,
+write, nor cipher, to absolute obedience. After having ruled her
+deceased master, the poor creature was now the servant of her husband;
+she cooked and did the washing, with very little help from a pretty
+girl named Annette, who was nineteen years old and as much a slave to
+Rigou as her mistress, and whose wages were thirty francs a year.
+
+Tall, thin, and withered, Madame Rigou, a woman with a yellow face red
+about the cheek-bones, her head always wrapped in a colored
+handkerchief, and wearing the same dress all the year round, did not
+leave the house for two hours in a month's time, but kept herself in
+exercise by doing the hard work of a devoted servant. The keenest
+observer could not have found a trace of the fine figure, the Rubens
+coloring, the splendid lines, the superb teeth, the virginal eyes
+which first drew the attention of the Abbe Niseron to the young girl.
+The birth of her only daughter, Madame Soudry, Jr., had blighted her
+complexion, decayed her teeth, dimmed her eyes, and even caused the
+dropping of their lashes. It almost seemed as if the finger of God had
+fallen upon the wife of the priest. Like all well-to-do country house-
+wives, she liked to see her closets full of silk gowns, made and
+unmade, and jewels and laces which did her no good and only excited
+the sin of envy and a desire for her death in the minds of all the
+young women who served Rigou. She was one of those beings, half-woman,
+half-animal, who are born to live by instinct. This ex-beautiful
+Arsene was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe
+Niseron would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circumstance
+which prompted it, and which we give here for the edification of the
+vast tribe of expectant heirs.
+
+Madame Niseron, the wife of the old republican sexton, always paid the
+greatest attention to her husband's uncle, the priest of Blangy; the
+forty or fifty thousand francs soon to be inherited from the old man
+of seventy would put the family of his only nephew into a condition of
+affluence which she impatiently awaited, for besides her only son (the
+father of La Pechina) Madame Niseron had a charming little daughter,
+lively and innocent,--one of those beings that seem perfected only
+because they are to die, which she did at the age of fourteen from
+"pale color," the popular name for chlorosis among the peasantry. The
+darling of the parsonage, where the child fluttered about her great
+uncle the abbe as she did in her home, bringing clouds and sunshine
+with her, she grew to love Mademoiselle Arsene, the pretty servant
+whom the old abbe engaged in 1789. Arsene was the niece of his
+housekeeper, whose place the girl took by request of the latter on her
+deathbed.
+
+In 1791, just about the time that the Abbe Niseron offered his house
+as an asylum to Rigou and his brother Jean, the little girl played one
+of her mischievous but innocent tricks. She was playing with Arsene
+and some other children at a game which consists in hiding an object
+which the rest seek, and crying out, "You burn!" or "You freeze!"
+according as the searchers approach or leave the hidden article.
+Little Genevieve took it into her head to hide the bellows in Arsene's
+bed. The bellows could not be found, and the game came to an end;
+Genevieve was taken home by her mother and forgot to put the bellows
+back on the nail. Arsene and her aunt searched more than a week for
+them; then they stopped searching and managed to do without them, the
+old abbe blowing his fire with an air-cane made in the days when air-
+canes were the fashion,--a fashion which was no doubt introduced by
+some courtier of the reign of Henri III. At last, about a month before
+her death, the housekeeper, after a dinner at which the Abbe Mouchon,
+the Niseron family, and the curate of Soulanges were present, returned
+to her jeremiades about the loss of the bellows.
+
+"Why! they've been these two weeks in Arsene's bed!" cried the little
+one, with a peal of laughter. "Great lazy thing! if she had taken the
+trouble to make her bed she would have found them."
+
+As it was 1791 everybody laughed; but a dead silence succeeded the
+laugh.
+
+"There is nothing laughable in that," said the housekeeper; "since I
+have been ill Arsene sleeps in my room."
+
+In spite of this explanation the Abbe Niseron looked thunderbolts at
+Madame Niseron and his nephew, thinking they were plotting mischief
+against him. The housekeeper died. Rigou contrived to work up the
+abbe's resentment to such a pitch that he made a will disinheriting
+Jean-Francois Niseron in favor of Arsene Pichard.
+
+In 1823 Rigou, perhaps out of a sense of gratitude, still blew the
+fire with an air-cane, and left the bellows hanging to the screw.
+
+Madame Niseron, idolizing her daughter, did not long survive her.
+Mother and child died in 1794. The old abbe, too, was dead, and
+citizen Rigou took charge of Arsene's affairs by marrying her. A
+former convert in the monastery, attached to Rigou as a dog is to his
+master, became the groom, gardener, herdsman, valet, and steward of
+the sensual Harpagon. Arsene Rigou, the daughter, married in 1821
+without dowry to the prosecuting-attorney, inheriting something of her
+mother's rather vulgar beauty, together with the crafty mind of her
+father.
+
+Now about sixty-seven years of age, Rigou had never been ill in his
+life, and nothing seemed able to lessen his aggressively good health.
+Tall, lean, with brown circles round his eyes, the lids of which were
+nearly black, any one who saw him of a morning, when as he dressed he
+exposed the wrinkled, red, and granulated skin of his neck, would have
+compared him to a condor,--all the more because his long nose, sharp
+at the tip, increased the likeness by its sanguineous color. His head,
+partly bald, would have frightened phrenologists by the shape of its
+skull, which was like an ass's backbone, an indication of despotic
+will. His grayish eyes, half-covered by filmy, red-veined lids, were
+predestined to aid hypocrisy. Two scanty locks of hair of an undecided
+color overhung the large ears, which were long and without rim, a sure
+sign of cruelty, but cruelty of the moral nature only, unless where it
+means actual insanity. The mouth, very broad, with thin lips,
+indicated a sturdy eater and a determined drinker by the drop of its
+corners, which turned downward like two commas, from which drooled
+gravy when he ate and saliva when he talked. Heliogabalus must have
+been like this.
+
+His dress, which never varied, consisted of a long blue surtout with a
+military collar, a black cravat, with waistcoat and trousers of black
+cloth. His shoes, very thick soled, had iron nails outside, and inside
+woollen linings knit by his wife in the winter evenings. Annette and
+her mistress also knit the master's stockings. Rigou's name was
+Gregoire.
+
+Though this sketch gives some idea of the man's character, no one can
+imagine the point to which, in his private and unthwarted life, the
+ex-Benedictine had pushed the science of selfishness, good living, and
+sensuality. In the first place, he dined alone, waited upon by his
+wife and Annette, who themselves dined with Jean in the kitchen, while
+the master digested his meal and disposed of his wine as he read "the
+news."
+
+In the country the special names of journals are never mentioned; they
+are all called by the general name of "the news."
+
+Rigou's dinner, like his breakfast and supper, was always of choice
+delicacies, cooked with the art which distinguishes a priest's
+housekeeper from all other cooks. Madame Rigou made the butter herself
+twice a week. Cream was a concomitant of many sauces. The vegetables
+came at a jump, as it were, from their frames to the saucepan.
+Parisians, who are accustomed to eat the fruits of the earth after
+they have had a second ripening in the sun of a city, infected by the
+air of the streets, fermenting in close shops, and watered from time
+to time by the market-women to give them a deceitful freshness, have
+little idea of the exquisite flavors of really fresh produce, to which
+nature has lent fugitive but powerful charms when eaten as it were
+alive.
+
+The butcher of Soulanges brought his best meat under fear of losing
+Rigou's custom. The poultry, raised on the premises, was of the finest
+quality.
+
+This system of secret pampering embraced everything in which Rigou was
+personally concerned. Though the slippers of the knowing Thelemist
+were of stout leather they were lined with lamb's wool. Though his
+coat was of rough cloth it did not touch his skin, for his shirt,
+washed and ironed at home, was of the finest Frisian linen. His wife,
+Annette, and Jean drank the common wine of the country, the wine he
+reserved from his own vineyards; but in his private cellar, as well
+stocked as the cellars of Belgium, the finest vintages of Burgundy
+rubbed sides with those of Bordeaux, Champagne, Roussillon, not to
+speak of Spanish and Rhine wines, all bought ten years in advance of
+use and bottled by Brother Jean. The liqueurs in that cellar were
+those of the Isles, and came originally from Madame Amphoux. Rigou had
+laid in a supply to last him the rest of his days, at the national
+sale of a chateau in Burgundy.
+
+The ex-monk ate and drank like Louis XIV. (one of the greatest
+consumers of food and drink ever known), which reveals the costs of a
+life that was more than voluptuous. Careful and very shrewd in
+managing his secret prodigalities, he disputed all purchases as only
+churchmen can dispute. Instead of taking infinite precautions against
+being cheated, the sly monk kept patterns and samples, had the
+agreements reduced to writing, and warned those who forwarded his
+wines or his provisions that if they fell short of the mark in any way
+he should refuse to accept their consignments.
+
+Jean, who had charge of the fruit-room, was trained to keep fresh the
+finest fruits grown in the department; so that Rigou ate pears and
+apples and sometimes grapes, at Easter.
+
+No prophet regarded as a God was ever more blindly obeyed than was
+Rigou in his own home. A mere motion of his black eyelashes could
+plunge his wife, Annette, and Jean into the deepest anxiety. He held
+his three slaves by the multiplicity of their many duties, which were
+like a chain in his hands. These poor creatures were under the
+perpetual yoke of some ordered duty, with an eye always on them; but
+they had come to take a sort of pleasure in accomplishing these tasks,
+and did not suffer under them. All three had the comfort and well-
+being of that one man before their minds as the sole end and object of
+all their thoughts.
+
+Annette was (since 1795) the tenth pretty girl in Rigou's service, and
+he expected to go down to his grave with relays of such servants.
+Brought to him at sixteen, she would be sent away at nineteen. All
+these girls, carefully chosen at Auxerre, Clamecy, or in the Morvan,
+were enticed by the promise of future prosperity; but Madame Rigou
+persisted in living. So at the end of every three years some quarrel,
+usually brought about by the insolence of the servant to the poor
+mistress, caused their dismissal.
+
+Annette, who was a picture of delicate beauty, ingenuous and
+sparkling, deserved to be a duchess. Rigou knew nothing of the love
+affair between her and Jean-Louis Tonsard, which proves that he had
+let himself be fooled by the girl,--the only one of his many servants
+whose ambition had taught her to flatter the lynx as the only way to
+blind him.
+
+This uncrowned Louis XV. did not keep himself wholly to his pretty
+Annette. Being the mortgagee of lands bought by peasants who were
+unable to pay for them, he kept a harem in the valley, from Soulanges
+to five miles beyond Conches on the road to La Brie, without making
+other payments than "extension of time," for those fugitive pleasures
+which eat into the fortunes of so many old men.
+
+This luxurious life, a life like that of Bouret, cost Rigou almost
+nothing. Thanks to his white slaves, he could cut and mow down and
+gather in his wood, hay, and grain. To the peasant manual labor is a
+small matter, especially if it serves to postpone the payment of
+interest due. And so Rigou, while requiring little premiums on each
+month's delay, squeezed a great deal of manual labor out of his
+debtors,--positive drudgery, to which they submitted thinking they
+gave little because nothing left their pockets. Rigou sometimes
+obtained in this way more than the principal of a debt.
+
+Deep as a monk, silent as a Benedictine in the throes of writing
+history, sly as a priest, deceitful as all misers, carefully keeping
+within the limits of the law, the man might have been Tiberius in
+Rome, Richelieu under Louis XIII., or Fouche, had the ambition seized
+him to go to the Convention; but, instead of all that, Rigou had the
+common sense to remain a Lucullus without ostentation, in other words,
+a parsimonious voluptuary. To occupy his mind he indulged a hatred
+manufactured out of the whole cloth. He harassed the Comte de
+Montcornet. He worked the peasants like puppets by hidden wires, the
+handling of which amused him as though it were a game of chess where
+the pawns were alive, the knights caracoled, the bishops, like
+Fourchon, gabbled, the feudal castles shone in the sun, and the queen
+maliciously checkmated the king. Every day, when he got out of bed and
+saw from his window the proud towers of Les Aigues, the chimneys of
+the pavilions, and the noble gates, he said to himself: "They shall
+fall! I'll dry up the brooks, I'll chop down the woods." But he had
+two victims in mind, a chief one and a lesser one. Though he meditated
+the dismemberment of the chateau, the apostate also intended to make
+an end of the Abbe Brossette by pin-pricks.
+
+To complete the portrait of the ex-priest it will suffice to add that
+he went to mass regretting that his wife still lived, and expressed
+the desire to be reconciled with the Church as soon as he became a
+widower. He bowed deferentially to the Abbe Brossette whenever he met
+him, and spoke to him courteously and without heat. As a general thing
+all men who belong to the Church, or who have come out of it, have the
+patience of insects; they owe this to the obligation they have been
+under, ecclesiastically, to preserve decorum,--a training which has
+been lacking for the last twenty years to the vast majority of the
+French nation, even those who think themselves well-bred. All the
+monks which the Revolution brought out of their monasteries and forced
+into business, public or private, showed in their coldness and reserve
+the great advantage which ecclesiastical discipline gives to the sons
+of the Church, even those who desert her.
+
+Gaubertin had understood Rigou from the days when the Abbe Niseron
+made his will and the ex-monk married the heiress; he fathomed the
+craft hidden behind the jaundiced face of that accomplished hypocrite;
+and he made himself the man's fellow-worshipper before the altar of
+the Golden Calf. When the banking-house of Leclercq was first started
+he advised Rigou to put fifty thousand francs into it, guaranteeing
+their security himself. Rigou was all the more desirable as an
+investor, or sleeping partner, because he drew no interest but allowed
+his capital to accumulate. At the period of which we write it amounted
+to over a hundred thousand francs, although in 1816 he had taken out
+one hundred and eighty thousand for investment in the Public Funds,
+from which he derived an income of seventeen thousand francs. Lupin
+the notary had cognizance of at least one hundred thousand francs
+which Rigou had lent on small mortgages upon good estates. Ostensibly,
+Rigou derived about fourteen thousand francs a year from landed
+property actually owned by him. But as to his amassed hoard, it was
+represented by an "x" which no rule of equations could evolve, just as
+the devil alone knew the secret schemes he plotted with Langlume.
+
+This dangerous usurer, who proposed to live a score of years longer,
+had established fixed rules to work upon. He lent nothing to a peasant
+who bought less than seven acres, and who could not pay one-half of
+the purchase-money down. Rigou well understood the defects of the law
+of dispossession when applied to small holdings, and the danger both
+to the Public Treasury and to land-owners of the minute parcelling out
+of the soil. How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of
+vines when he owns only five? The bird's-eye view of self-interest is
+always twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative
+body. What a lesson for a nation! Law will ever emanate from one
+brain, that of a man of genius, and not from the nine hundred
+legislative heads, which, great as they may be in themselves, are
+belittled and lost in a crowd. Rigou's law contains the essential
+element which has yet to be found and introduced into public law to
+put an end to the absurd spectacle of landed property reduced to
+halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths,--as in the district of
+Argenteuil, where there are thirty thousand plots of land.
+
+Such operations as those Rigou was concerned in require extensive
+collusion, like those we have seen existing in this arrondissement.
+Lupin, the notary, whom Rigou employed to draw at least one third of
+the deeds annually entrusted to his notarial office, was devoted to
+him. This shark could thus include in the mortgage note (signed always
+in presence of the wife, when the borrower was married) the amount of
+the illegal interest. The peasant, delighted to feel he had to pay
+only his five per cent interest annually, always imagined he should be
+able to meet the payment by working doubly hard or by improving the
+land and getting double returns upon it.
+
+Hence the deceitful hopes excited by what imbecile economists call
+"small farming,"--a political blunder to which we owe such mistakes as
+sending French money to Germany to buy horses which our own land had
+ceased to breed; a blunder which before long will reduce the raising
+of cattle until meat will be unattainable not only by the people, but
+by the lower middle classes (see "Le Cure de Village.")
+
+So, not a little sweat bedewed men's brows between Conches and Ville-
+aux-Fayes to Rigou's profit, all being willing to give it; whereas the
+labor dearly paid for by the general, the only man who did spend money
+in the district, brought him curses and hatred, which were showered
+upon him simply because he was rich. How could such facts be
+understood unless we had previously taken that rapid glance at the
+Mediocracy. Fourchon was right; the middle classes now held the
+position of the former lords. The small land-owners, of whom
+Courtecuisse is a type, were tenants in mortmain of a Tiberius in the
+valley of the Avonne, just as, in Paris, traders without money are the
+peasantry of the banking system.
+
+Soudry followed Rigou's example from Soulanges to a distance of
+fifteen miles beyond Ville-aux-Fayes. These two usurers shared the
+district between them.
+
+Gaubertin, whose rapacity was in a higher sphere, not only did not
+compete against that of his associates, but he prevented all other
+capital in Ville-aux-Fayes from being employed in the same fruitful
+manner. It is easy to imagine what immense influence this triumvirate
+--Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin--wielded in election periods over
+electors whose fortunes depended on their good-will.
+
+Hate, intelligence, and means at command, such were the three sides of
+the terrible triangle which describes the general's closest enemy, the
+spy ever watching Les Aigues,--a shark having constant dealings with
+sixty to eighty small land-owners, relations or connections of the
+peasantry, who feared him as such men always fear their creditor.
+
+Rigou was in his way another Tonsard. The one throve on thefts from
+nature, the other waxed fat on legal plunder. Both liked to live well.
+It was the same nature in two species,--the one natural, the other
+whetted by his training in a cloister.
+
+It was about four o'clock when Vaudoyer left the tavern of the Grand-
+I-Vert to consult the former mayor. Rigou was at dinner. Finding the
+front door locked, Vaudoyer looked above the window blinds and called
+out:--
+
+"Monsieur Rigou, it is I,--Vaudoyer."
+
+Jean came round from the porte-cochere and said to Vaudoyer:--
+
+"Come into the garden; Monsieur has company."
+
+The company was Sibilet, who, under pretext of discussing the verdict
+Brunet had just handed in, was talking to Rigou of quite other
+matters. He had found the usurer finishing his dessert. On a square
+dinner-table covered with a dazzling white cloth--for, regardless of
+his wife and Annette who did the washing, Rigou exacted clean table-
+linen every day--the steward noted strawberries, apricots, peaches,
+figs, and almonds, all the fruits of the season in profusion, served
+in white porcelain dishes on vine-leaves as daintily as at Les Aigues.
+
+Seeing Sibilet, Rigou told him to run the bolts of the inside double-
+doors, which were added to the other doors as much to stifle sounds as
+to keep out the cold air, and asked him what pressing business brought
+him there in broad daylight when it was so much safer to confer
+together at night.
+
+"The Shopman talks of going to Paris to see the Keeper of the Seals;
+he is capable of doing you a great deal of harm; he may ask for the
+dismissal of your son-in-law, and the removal of the judges at Ville-
+aux-Fayes, especially after reading the verdict just rendered in your
+favor. He has turned at bay; he is shrewd, and he has an adviser in
+that abbe, who is quite able to tilt with you and Gaubertin. Priests
+are powerful. Monseigneur the bishop thinks a great deal of the Abbe
+Brossette. Madame la comtesse talks of going herself to her cousin the
+prefect, the Comte de Casteran, about Nicolas. Michaud begins to see
+into our game."
+
+"You are frightened," said Rigou, softly, casting a look on Sibilet
+which suspicion made less impassive than usual, and which was
+therefore terrific. "You are debating whether it would not be better
+on the whole to side with the Comte de Montcornet."
+
+"I don't see where I am to get the four thousand francs I save
+honestly and invest every year, after you have cut up and sold Les
+Aigues," said Sibilet, shortly. "Monsieur Gaubertin has made me many
+fine promises; but the crisis is coming on; there will be fighting,
+surely. Promising before victory and keeping a promise after it are
+two very different things."
+
+"I will talk to him about it," replied Rigou, imperturbably. "Meantime
+this is what I should say to you if I were in his place: 'For the last
+five years you have taken Monsieur Rigou four thousand francs a year,
+and that worthy man gives you seven and a half per cent; which makes
+your property in his hands at this moment over twenty-seven thousand
+francs, as you have not drawn the interest. But there exists a private
+signed agreement between you and Rigou, and the Shopman will dismiss
+his steward whenever the Abbe Brossette lays that document before his
+eyes; the abbe will be able to do so after receiving an anonymous
+letter which will inform him of your double-dealing. You would
+therefore do better for yourself by keeping well with us instead of
+clamoring for your pay in advance,--all the more because Monsieur
+Rigou, who is not legally bound to give you seven and a half per cent
+and the interest on your interest, will make you in court a legal
+tender of your twenty thousand francs, and you will not be able to
+touch that money until your suit, prolonged by legal trickery, shall
+be decided by the court at Ville-aux-Fayes. But if you act wisely you
+will find that when Monsieur Rigou gets possession of your pavilion at
+Les Aigues, you will have very nearly thirty thousand francs in his
+hands and thirty thousand more which the said Rigou may entrust to
+you,--which will be all the more advantageous to you then because the
+peasantry will have flung them themselves upon the estate of Les
+Aigues, divided into small lots like the poverty of the world.' That's
+what Monsieur Gaubertin might say to you. As for me, I have nothing to
+say, for it is none of my business. Gaubertin and I have our own
+quarrel with that son of the people who is ashamed of his own father,
+and we follow our own course. If my friend Gaubertin feels the need of
+using you, I don't; I need no one, for everybody is at my command. As
+to the Keeper of the Seals, that functionary is often changed; whereas
+we--WE are always here, and can bide our time."
+
+"Well, I've warned you," returned Sibilet, feeling like a donkey under
+a pack-saddle.
+
+"Warned me of what?" said Rigou, artfully.
+
+"Of what the Shopman is going to do," answered the steward, humbly.
+"He started for the Prefecture in a rage."
+
+"Let him go! If the Montcornets and their kind didn't use wheels, what
+would become of the carriage-makers?"
+
+"I shall bring you three thousand francs to-night," said Sibilet, "but
+you ought to make over some of your maturing mortgages to me,--say,
+one or two that would secure to me good lots of land."
+
+"Well, there's that of Courtecuisse. I myself want to be easy on him
+because he is the best shot in the canton; but if I make over his
+mortgage to you, you will seem to be harassing him on the Shopman's
+account, and that will be killing two birds with one stone; when
+Courtecuisse finds himself a beggar, like Fourchon, he'll be capable
+of anything. Courtecuisse has ruined himself on the Bachelerie; he has
+cultivated all the land, and trained fruit on the walls. The little
+property is now worth four thousand francs, and the count will gladly
+pay you that to get possession of the three acres that jut right into
+his land. If Courtecuisse were not such an idle hound he could have
+paid his interest with the game he might have killed there."
+
+"Well, transfer the mortgage to me, and I'll make my butter out of it;
+the count shall buy the three acres, and I shall get the house and
+garden for nothing."
+
+"What are you going to give me out of it?"
+
+"Good heavens! you'd milk an ox!" exclaimed Sibilet,--"when I have
+just done you such a service, too. I have at last got the Shopman to
+enforce the laws about gleaning--"
+
+"Have you, my dear fellow?" said Rigou, who a few days earlier had
+suggested this means of exasperating the peasantry to Sibilet, telling
+him to advise the general to try it. "Then we've got him; he's lost!
+But it isn't enough to hold him with one string; we must wind it round
+and round him like a roll of tobacco. Slip the bolts of the door, my
+lad; tell my wife to bring my coffee and the liqueurs, and tell Jean
+to harness up. I'm off to Soulanges; will see you to-night!--Ah!
+Vaudoyer, good afternoon," said the late mayor as his former field-
+keeper entered the room. "What's the news?"
+
+Vaudoyer related the talk which had just taken place at the tavern,
+and asked Rigou's opinion as to the legality of the rules which the
+general thought of enforcing.
+
+"He has the law with him," said Rigou, curtly. "We have a hard
+landlord; the Abbe Brossette is a malignant priest; he advises all
+such measures because you don't go to mass, you miserable unbelievers.
+I go; there's a God, I tell you. You peasants will have to bear
+everything, for the Shopman will always get the better of you--"
+
+"We shall glean," said Vaudoyer, in that determined tone which
+characterizes Burgundians.
+
+"Without a certificate of pauperism?" asked the usurer. "They say the
+Shopman has gone to the Prefecture to ask for troops so as to force
+you to keep the law."
+
+"We shall glean as we have always gleaned," repeated Vaudoyer.
+
+"Well, glean then! Monsieur Sarcus will decide whether you have the
+right to," said Rigou, seeming to promise the help of the justice of
+the peace.
+
+"We shall glean, and we shall do it in force, or Burgundy won't be
+Burgundy any longer," said Vaudoyer. "If the gendarmes have sabres we
+have scythes, and we'll see what comes of it!"
+
+At half-past four o'clock the great green gate of the former parsonage
+turned on its hinges, and the bay horse, led by Jean, was brought
+round to the front door. Madame Rigou and Annette came out on the
+steps and looked at the little wicker carriage, painted green, with a
+leathern hood, where their lord and master was comfortably seated on
+good cushions.
+
+"Don't be late home, monsieur," said Annette, with a little pout.
+
+The village folk, already informed of the measures the general
+proposed to take, were at their doors or standing in the main street
+as Rigou drove by, believing that he was going to Soulanges in their
+defence.
+
+"Well, Madame Courtecuisse, so our mayor is on his way to protect us,"
+remarked an old woman as she knitted; the question of depredating in
+the forest was of great interest to her, for her husband sold the
+stolen wood at Soulanges.
+
+"Ah! the good man, his heart bleeds to see the way we are treated; he
+is as unhappy as we are about it," replied the poor woman, who
+trembled at the very name of her husband's creditor, and praised him
+out of fear.
+
+"And he himself, too,--they've shamefully ill-used him! Good-day,
+Monsieur Rigou," said the old knitter to the usurer, who bowed to her
+and to his debtor's wife.
+
+As Rigou crossed the Thune, fordable at all seasons, Tonsard came out
+of the tavern and met him on the high-road.
+
+"Well, Pere Rigou," he said, "so the Shopman means to make dogs of
+us?"
+
+"We'll see about that," said the usurer, whipping up his horse.
+
+"He'll protect us," said Tonsard, turning to a group of women and
+children who were near him.
+
+"Rigou is thinking as much about you as a cook thinks of the gudgeons
+he is frying in his pan," called out Fourchon.
+
+"Take the clapper out of your throat when you are drunk," said Mouche,
+pulling his grandfather by the blouse, and tumbling him down on a bank
+under a poplar tree. "If that hound of a mayor heard you say that,
+he'd never buy any more of your tales."
+
+The truth was that Rigou was hurrying to Soulanges in consequence of
+the warning given him by the steward of Les Aigues, which, in his
+heart, he regarded as threatening the secret coalition of the valley.
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE LEADING SOCIETY OF SOULANGES
+
+About six kilometres (speaking legally) from Blangy, and at the same
+distance from Ville-aux-Fayes, on an elevation radiating from the long
+hillside at the foot of which flows the Avonne, stands the little town
+of Soulanges, surnamed La Jolie, with, perhaps, more right to that
+title than Mantes.
+
+At the foot of the hill, the Thune broadens over a clay bottom to a
+space of some seventy acres, at the end of which the Soulanges mills,
+placed on numerous little islets, present as graceful a group of
+buildings as any landscape architect could devise. After watering the
+park of Soulanges, where it feeds various other streams and artificial
+lakes, the Thune falls into the Avonne through a fine broad channel.
+
+The chateau of Soulanges, rebuilt under Louis XIV. from designs of
+Jules Mansart, and one of the finest in Burgundy, stands facing the
+town; so that Soulanges and its chateau mutually present to each other
+a charming and even elegant vista. The main road winds between the
+town and the pond, called by the country people, rather pompously, the
+lake of Soulanges.
+
+The little town is one of those natural compositions which are
+extremely rare in France, where PRETTINESS of its own kind is
+absolutely wanting. Here you would indeed find, as Blondet said in his
+letter, the charm of Switzerland, the prettiness of the environs of
+Neuf-chatel; while the bright vineyards which encircle Soulanges
+complete the resemblance,--leaving out, be it said, the Alps and the
+Jura. The streets, placed one above another on the slope of the hill,
+have but few houses; for each house stands in its own garden, which
+produces a mass of greenery rarely seen in a town. The roofs, red or
+blue, rising among flower-gardens, trees, and trellised terraces,
+present an harmonious variety of aspects.
+
+The church, an old Middle-Age structure, built of stone, thanks to the
+munificence of the lords of Soulanges, who reserved for themselves
+first a chapel near the chancel, then a crypt as their necropolis,
+has, by way of portal, an immense arcade, like that of the church at
+Lonjumeau, and is bordered by flower-beds adorned with statues, and
+flanked on either side by columns with niches, which terminate in
+spires. This portal, often seen in churches of the same period when
+chance has saved them from the ravages of Calvinism, is surmounted by
+a triglyph, above which stands a statue of the Virgin holding the
+infant Jesus. The sides of the structure are externally of five
+arches, defined by stone ribs and lighted by windows with small panes.
+The apse rests on arched abutments that are worthy of a cathedral. The
+clock-tower, placed in a transept of the cross, is square and
+surmounted by a belfry. The church can be seen from a great distance,
+for it stands at the top of the great square, at the lower end of
+which the high-road passes through the town.
+
+This square, large for the size of the town, is surrounded by very
+original buildings, all of different epochs. Many, half-wood, half-
+brick, with their timbers faced with slate, date back to the Middle
+Ages. Others, of stone, with balconies, show the form of gable so dear
+to our ancestors, which belongs to the twelfth century. Several charm
+the eye with those old projecting beams, carved with grotesque faces,
+which form the roof of a sort of shed, and recall the days when the
+middle classes were exclusively commercial. The finest house among
+them was that of the chief magistrate of former days,--a house with a
+sculptured front on a line with the church, to which it forms a fine
+accompaniment. Sold as national property, it was bought in by the
+commune, which turned it into a town-hall and court-house, where
+Monsieur Sarcus had presided ever since the establishment of municipal
+judges.
+
+This slight sketch will give an idea of the square of Soulanges,
+adorned in the centre with a charming fountain brought from Italy in
+1520 by the Marechal de Soulanges, which was not unworthy of a great
+capital. An unfailing jet of water, coming from a spring higher up the
+hill, was shed by four Cupids in white marble, bearing shells in their
+arms and baskets of grapes upon their heads.
+
+Literary travellers who may pass this way (should any such follow
+Emile Blondet) might imagine the spot to have inspired Moliere and the
+Spanish drama, which held its footing so long on French boards,
+showing that comedy is native to warm countries where so much of life
+is passed in the public streets. The square of Soulanges is all the
+more a reminder of that classic stage because the two principal
+streets, opening just on a line with the fountain, afford the exit and
+entrances so necessary for the dramatic masters and valets whose
+business it is either to meet or to avoid each other. At the corner of
+one of these streets, called the rue de la Fontaine, shone the
+notarial escutcheon of Maitre Lupin. The houses of Messieurs Sarcus,
+Guerbet the collector, Brunet, Gourdon, clerk of the court, and that
+of his brother the doctor, also that of old Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled,
+the keeper of the forests and streams,--all these houses, kept with
+extreme neatness by their owners, who held firmly to the flattering
+surname of their native town, stand in the neighborhood of the square
+and form the aristocratic quarter of Soulanges.
+
+The house of Madame Soudry--for the powerful individuality of
+Mademoiselle Laguerre's former waiting-maid took the lead of her
+husband in the community--was modern, having been built by a rich
+wine-merchant, born in Soulanges, who, after making his money in
+Paris, returned there in 1793 to buy wheat for his native town. He was
+slain as an "accapareur," a monopolist, by the populace, instigated by
+a mason, the uncle of Godain, with whom he had had some quarrel about
+the building of his ambitious house. The settlement of his estate,
+sharply contested by collateral heirs, dragged slowly along until, in
+1798, Soudry, who had then returned to Soulanges, was able to buy the
+wine-merchant's palace for three thousand francs in specie. He then
+let it, in the first instance, to the government for the headquarters
+of the gendarmerie. In 1811 Mademoiselle Cochet, whom Soudry consulted
+about all his affairs, strongly objected to the renewal of the lease,
+making the house uninhabitable, she declared, with barracks. The town
+of Soulanges, assisted by the department, then erected a building for
+the gendarmerie in a street running at right angles from the town-
+hall. Thereupon Soudry cleaned up his house and restored its primitive
+lustre, not a little dimmed by the stabling of horses and the
+occupancy of gendarmes.
+
+The house, only one story high, with projecting windows in the roof,
+has a view on three sides; one to the square, another to a lake, the
+third to a garden. The fourth side looks on a courtyard which
+separates the Soudrys from the adjoining house occupied by a grocer
+named Wattebled, a man of the SECOND-CLASS society of Soulanges,
+father of the beautiful Madame Plissoud, of whom we shall presently
+have occasion to speak.
+
+All little towns have a renowned beauty, just as they have a Socquard
+and a Cafe de la Paix.
+
+It will be apparent to every one that the frontage of the Soudry
+mansion on the lake must have a terraced garden confined by a stone
+balustrade which overlooks both the lake and the main road. A flight
+of steps leads down from the terrace to the road, and on it an orange-
+tree, a pomegranate, a myrtle, and other ornamental shrubs are placed,
+necessitating a greenhouse. On the side toward the square the house is
+entered from a portico raised several steps above the level of the
+street. According to the custom of small towns the gate of the
+courtyard, used only for the service of the house or for any unusual
+arrival, was seldom opened. Visitors, who mostly came on foot, entered
+by the portico.
+
+The style of the Hotel Soudry is plain. The courses are indicated by
+projecting lines; the windows are framed by mouldings alternately
+broad and slender, like those of the Gabriel and Perronnet pavilion in
+the place Louis XV. These ornaments in so small a town give a certain
+solid and monumental air to the building which has become celebrated.
+
+Opposite to this house, in another angle of the square stands the
+famous Cafe de la Paix, the characteristics of which, together with
+the fascinations of its Tivoli, will require, somewhat later, a less
+succinct description than that we have given of the Soudry mansion.
+
+Rigou very seldom came to Soulanges; everybody was in the habit of
+going to him,--Lupin and Gaubertin, Soudry and Gendrin,--so much were
+they afraid of him. But we shall presently understand why any educated
+man, such as the ex-Benedictine, would have done as Rigou did, and
+kept away from the little town, after reading the following sketch of
+the personages who composed what was called in those parts "the
+leading society of Soulanges."
+
+Of its principal figures, the most original, as you have already
+suspected, was that of Madame Soudry, whose personality, to be duly
+rendered, needs a minute and careful brush.
+
+Madame Soudry, respectfully imitating Mademoiselle Laguerre, began by
+allowing herself a "mere touch of rouge"; but this delicate tint had
+changed through force of habit to those vermilion patches
+picturesquely described by our ancestors as "carriage-wheels." The
+wrinkles growing deeper and deeper, it occurred to the ex-lady's-maid
+to fill them up with paint. Her forehead becoming unduly yellow, and
+the temples too shiny, she "laid on" a little white, and renewed the
+veins of her youth with a tracery of blue. All this color gave an
+exaggerated liveliness to her eyes which were already tricksy enough,
+so that the mask of her face would seem to a stranger even more than
+fantastic, though her friends and acquaintances, accustomed to this
+fictitious brilliancy, actually declared her handsome.
+
+This ungainly creature, always decolletee, showed a bosom and a pair
+of shoulders that were whitened and polished by the same process
+employed upon her face; happily, for the sake of exhibiting her
+magnificent laces, she partially veiled the charms of these chemical
+products. She always wore the body of her dress stiffened with
+whalebone and made in a long point and garnished with knots of ribbon,
+even on the point! Her petticoats gave forth a creaking noise,--so
+much did the silk and the furbelows abound.
+
+This attire, which deserves the name of apparel (a word that before
+long will be inexplicable), was, on the evening in question, of costly
+brocade,--for Madame Soudry possessed over a hundred dresses, each
+richer than the others, the remains of Mademoiselle Laguerre's
+enormous and splendid wardrobe, made over to fit Madame Soudry in the
+last fashion of the year 1808. Her blond wig, frizzed and powdered,
+sustained a superb cap with knots of cherry satin ribbon matching
+those on her dress. If you will kindly imagine beneath this ultra-
+coquettish cap the face of a monkey of extreme ugliness, on which a
+flat nose, fleshless as that of Death, is separated by a strong hairy
+line from a mouth filled with false teeth, whence issue sounds like
+the confused clacking of hunting-horns, you will have some difficulty
+in understanding why the leading society of Soulanges (all the town,
+in fact) thought this quasi-queen a beauty,--unless, indeed, you
+remember the succinct statement recently made "ex professo," by one of
+the cleverest women of our time, on the art of making her sex
+beautiful by surrounding accessories.
+
+As to accessories, in the first place, Madame Soudry was surrounded by
+the magnificent gifts accumulated by her late mistress, which the ex-
+Benedictine called "fructus belli." Then she made the most of her
+ugliness by exaggerating it, and by assuming that indescribable air
+and manner which belongs only to Parisian women, the secret of which
+is known even to the most vulgar among them,--who are always more or
+less mimics. She laced tight, wore an enormous bustle, also diamond
+earrings, and her fingers were covered with rings. At the top of her
+corsage, between two mounds of flesh well plastered with pearl-white,
+shone a beetle made of topaz with a diamond head, the gift of dear
+mistress,--a jewel renowned throughout the department. Like the late
+dear mistress, she wore short sleeves and bare arms, and flirted an
+ivory fan, painted by Boucher with two little rose-diamonds in the
+handle.
+
+When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true
+eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of
+which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe. When she walked
+about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar,
+might have thought her one of Watteau's dames.
+
+In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined
+with silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots
+of the good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of
+lilies upheld by Cupids--in this salon, filled with furniture in
+gilded wood of the "pied de biche" pattern, it is not impossible to
+understand why the people of Soulanges called the mistress of the
+house, "The beautiful Madame Soulanges." The mansion had actually
+become the civic pride of this capital of a canton.
+
+If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the
+queen as surely believed in herself. By a phenomenon not in the least
+rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all
+moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their
+marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end
+of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the
+mayoress, that she not only did not remember her past, but she
+actually believed herself a well-bred woman. She had studied the airs
+and graces, the dulcet tones, the gestures, the ways of her mistress,
+so long that when she found herself in the midst of an opulence of her
+own she was able to practice the natural insolence of it. She knew her
+eighteenth century, and the tales of its great lords and all their
+belongings, by heart. This back-stairs erudition gave to her
+conversation a flavor of "oeil-de-boeuf"; her soubrette gossip passed
+muster for courtly wit. Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say
+so, tinsel; but to savages paste diamonds are as good as real ones.
+
+The woman found herself courted and worshipped by the society in which
+she lived, just as her mistress had been worshipped in former days.
+She gave weekly dinners, with coffee and liqueurs to those who came in
+after the dessert. No female head could have resisted the exhilarating
+force of such continual adulation. In winter the warm salon, always
+well-lighted with wax candles, was well-filled with the richest people
+of Soulanges, who paid for the good liqueurs and the fine wines which
+came from dear mistress's cellars, with flatteries to their hostess.
+These visitors and their wives had a life-interest, as it were, in
+this luxury; which was to them a saving of lights and fuel. Thus it
+came to pass that in a circuit of fifteen miles and even as far as
+Ville-aux-Fayes, every voice was ready to declare: "Madame Soudry does
+the honors admirably. She keeps open house; every one enjoys her
+salon; she knows how to carry herself and her fortune; she always says
+the witty thing, she makes you laugh. And what splendid silver! There
+is not another house like it short of Paris--"
+
+The silver had been given to Mademoiselle Laguerre by Bouret. It was a
+magnificent service made by the famous Germain, and Madame Soudry had
+literally stolen it. At Mademoiselle Laguerre's death she merely took
+it into her own room, and the heirs, who knew nothing of the value of
+their inheritance, never claimed it.
+
+For some time past the twelve or fifteen personages who composed the
+leading society of Soulanges spoke of Madame Soudry as the INTIMATE
+FRIEND of Mademoiselle Laguerre, recoiling at the term "waiting-
+woman," and making believe that she had sacrificed herself to the
+singer as her friend and companion.
+
+Strange yet true! all these illusions became realities, and spread
+even to the actual regions of the heart; Madame Soudry reigned
+supreme, in a way, over her husband.
+
+The gendarme, required to love a woman ten years older than himself
+who kept the management of her fortune in her own hands, behaved to
+her in the spirit of the ideas she had ended by adopting about her
+beauty. But sometimes, when persons envied him or talked to him of his
+happiness, he wished they were in his place, for, to hide his
+peccadilloes, he was forced to take as many precautions as the husband
+of a young and adoring wife; and it was not until very recently that
+he had been able to introduce into the family a pretty servant-girl.
+
+This portrait of the Queen of Soulanges may seem a little grotesque,
+but many specimens of the same kind could be found in the provinces at
+that period,--some more or less noble in blood, others belonging to
+the higher banking-circles, like the widow of a receiver-general in
+Touraine who still puts slices of veal upon her cheeks. This portrait,
+drawn from nature, would be incomplete without the diamonds in which
+it is set; without the surrounding courtiers, a sketch of whom is
+necessary, if only to explain how formidable such Lilliputians are,
+and who are the makers of public opinion in remote little towns. Let
+no one mistake me, however; there are many localities which, like
+Soulanges, are neither hamlets, villages, nor little towns, which
+have, nevertheless, the characteristics of all. The inhabitants are
+very different from those of the large and busy and vicious provincial
+cities. Country life influences the manners and morals of the smaller
+places, and this mixture of tints will be found to produce some truly
+original characters.
+
+The most important personage after Madame Soudry was Lupin, the
+notary. Though forty-five springs had bloomed for Lupin, he was still
+fresh and rosy, thanks to the plumpness which fills out the skin of
+sedentary persons; and he still sang ballads. Also, he retained the
+elegant evening dress of society warblers. He looked almost Parisian
+in his carefully-varnished boots, his sulphur-yellow waistcoats, his
+tight-fitting coats, his handsome silk cravats, his fashionable
+trousers. His hair was curled by the barber of Soulanges (the gossip
+of the town), and he maintained the attitude of a man "a bonne
+fortunes" by his liaison with Madame Sarcus, wife of Sarcus the rich,
+who was to his life, without too close a comparison, what the
+campaigns of Italy were to Napoleon. He alone of the leading society
+of Soulanges went to Paris, where he was received by the Soulanges
+family. It was enough to hear him talk to imagine the supremacy he
+wielded in his capacity as dandy and judge of elegance. He passed
+judgment on all things by the use of three terms: "out of date,"
+"antiquated," "superannuated."[*] A man, a woman, or a piece of
+furniture might be "out of date"; next, by a greater degree of
+imperfection, "antiquated"; but as to the last term, it was the
+superlative of contempt. The first might be remedied, the second was
+hopeless, but the third,--oh, better far never to have left the void
+of nothingness! As to praise, a single word sufficed him, doubly and
+trebly uttered: "Charming!" was the positive of his admiration.
+"Charming, charming!" made you feel you were safe; but after
+"Charming, charming, charming!" the ladder might be discarded, for the
+heaven of perfection was attained.
+
+
+[*] "Croute," "crouton," and "croute-au-pot," untranslatable, and
+without equivalent in English. A "croute" is the slang term for a
+man behind the age.--Tr.
+
+
+The tabellion,--he called himself "tabellion," petty notary, and
+keeper of notes (making fun of his calling in order to seem above it),
+--the tabellion was on terms of spoken gallantry with Madame Soudry,
+who had a weakness for Lupin, though he was blond and wore spectacles.
+Hitherto the late Cochet had loved none but dark men, with moustachios
+and hairy hands, of the Alcides type. But she made an exception in
+favor of Lupin on account of his elegance, and, moreover, because she
+thought her glory at Soulanges was not complete without an adorer;
+but, to Soudry's despair, the queen's adorers never carried their
+adoration so far as to threaten his rights.
+
+Lupin had married an heiress in wooden shoes and blue woollen
+stockings, the only daughter of a salt-dealer, who made his money
+during the Revolution,--a period when contraband salt-traders made
+enormous profits by reason of the reaction that set in against the
+gabelle. He prudently left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he
+called her, was supported under his absence by a platonic passion for
+a handsome clerk who had no other means than his salary,--a young man
+named Bonnac, belonging to the second-class society, where he played
+the same role that his master, the notary, played in the first.
+
+Madame Lupin, a woman without any education whatever, appeared on
+great occasions only, under the form of an enormous Burgundian barrel
+dressed in velvet and surmounted by a little head sunken in shoulders
+of a questionable color. No efforts could retain her waist-belt in its
+natural place. "Bebelle" candidly admitted that prudence forbade her
+wearing corsets. The imagination of a poet or, better still, that of
+an inventor, could not have found on Bebelle's back the slightest
+trace of that seductive sinuosity which the vertebrae of all women who
+are women usually produce. Bebelle, round as a tortoise, belonged to
+the genus of invertebrate females. This alarming development of
+cellular tissue no doubt reassured Lupin on the subject of the
+platonic passion of his fat wife, whom he boldly called Bebelle
+without raising a laugh.
+
+"Your wife, what is she?" said Sarcus the rich, one day, when unable
+to digest the fatal word "superannuated," applied to a piece of
+furniture he had just bought at a bargain.
+
+"My wife is not like yours," replied Lupin; "she is not defined as
+yet."
+
+Beneath his rosy exterior the notary possessed a subtle mind, and he
+had the sense to say nothing about his property, which was fully as
+large as that of Rigou.
+
+Monsieur Lupin's son, Amaury, was a great trouble to his father. An
+only son, and one of the Don Juans of the valley, he utterly refused
+to follow the paternal profession. He took advantage of his position
+as only son to bleed the strong-box cruelly, without, however,
+exhausting the patience of his father, who would say after every
+escapade, "Well, I was like that in my young days." Amaury never came
+to Madame Soudry's; he said she bored him; for, with a recollection of
+her early days, she attempted to "educate" him, as she called it,
+whereas he much preferred the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de
+la Paix. He frequented the worst company of Soulanges, even down to
+Bonnebault. He continued sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry
+remarked, and replied to all his father's remonstrances with one
+perpetual request: "Send me back to Paris, for I am bored to death
+here."
+
+Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was
+semi-conjugal. His known passion, in spite of his former liaison with
+Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the municipal
+court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer,
+who reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the
+first. Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the
+under-world of Soulanges on account of his wife's conduct, which it
+was said he authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of
+the leading society.
+
+If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon,
+the doctor, was its man of science. The town said of him, "We have
+here in our midst a scientific man of the first order." Madame Soudry
+(who believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini
+and Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera)
+persuaded society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his
+fortune by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting
+that the doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.
+
+Monsieur Gourdon merely repeated the ideas of Cuvier and Buffon, which
+might not have enabled him to pose as a scientist before the Soulanges
+world; but besides this he was making a collection of shells, and he
+possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds. He lived upon
+the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the
+town of Soulanges. After this was known he was considered throughout
+the department as a great naturalist and the successor of Buffon. Like
+a certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan
+propriety he copied, without possessing either his money or his
+shrewdness, Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the
+famous collection, consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which
+had died on their way to Soulanges), all the rodents of the
+department, mice and field-mice and dormice, rats, muskrats, and
+moles, etc.; all the interesting birds ever shot in Burgundy, and an
+Alpine eagle caught in the Jura. Gourdon also possessed a collection
+of lepidoptera,--a word which led society to hope for monstrosities,
+and to say, when it saw them, "Why, they are only butterflies!"
+Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil shells, mostly the
+collections of his friends which they bequeathed to him, and all the
+minerals of Burgundy and the Jura.
+
+These treasures, laid out on shelves with glass doors (the drawers
+beneath containing the insects), occupied the whole of the first floor
+of the doctor's house, and produced a certain effect through the
+oddity of the names on the tickets, the magic effect of the colors,
+and the gathering together of so many things which no one pays the
+slightest attention to when seen in nature, though much admired under
+glass. Society took a regular day to go and look at Monsieur Gourdon's
+collection.
+
+"I have," he said to all inquirers, "five hundred ornithological
+objects, two hundred mammifers, five thousand insects, three thousand
+shells, and seven thousand specimens of minerals."
+
+"What patience you have had!" said the ladies.
+
+"One must do something for one's country," replied the collector.
+
+He drew an enormous profit from his carcasses by the mere repetition
+of the words, "I have bequeathed everything to the town by my will."
+Visitors lauded his philanthropy; the authorities talked of devoting
+the second floor of the town hall to the "Gourdon Museum," after the
+collector's death.
+
+"I rely upon the gratitude of my fellow-citizens to attach my name to
+the gift," he replied; "for I dare not hope they would place a marble
+bust of me--"
+
+"It would be the very least we could do for you," they rejoined; "are
+you not the glory of our town?"
+
+Thus the man actually came to consider himself one of the celebrities
+of Burgundy. The surest incomes are not from consols after all; those
+our vanity obtains for us have better security. This man of science
+was, to employ Lupin's superlatives, happy! happy!! happy!!!
+
+Gourdon, the clerk of the court, brother of the doctor, was a pitiful
+little creature, whose features all gathered about his nose, so that
+the nose seemed the point of departure for the forehead, the cheeks,
+and the mouth, all of which were connected with it just as the ravines
+of a mountain begin at the summit. This pinched little man was thought
+to be one of the greatest poets in Burgundy,--a Piron, it was the
+fashion to say. The dual merits of the two brothers gave rise to the
+remark: "We have the brothers Gourdon at Soulanges--two very
+distinguished men; men who could hold their own in Paris."
+
+Devoted to the game of cup-and-ball, the clerk of the court became
+possessed by another mania,--that of composing an ode in honor of an
+amusement which amounted to a passion in the eighteenth century.
+Manias among mediocrats often run in couples. Gourdon junior gave
+birth to his poem during the reign of Napoleon. That fact is
+sufficient to show the sound and healthy school of poesy to which he
+belonged; Luce de Lancival, Parny, Saint-Lambert, Rouche, Vigee,
+Andrieux, Berchoux were his heroes. Delille was his god, until the day
+when the leading society of Soulanges raised the question as to
+whether Gourdon were not superior to Delille; after which the clerk of
+the court always called his competitor "Monsieur l'Abbe Delille," with
+exaggerated politeness.
+
+The poems manufactured between 1780 and 1814 were all of one pattern,
+and the one which Gourdon composed upon the Cup-and-Ball will give an
+idea of them. They required a certain knack or proficiency in the art.
+"The Chorister" is the Saturn of this abortive generation of jocular
+poems, all in four cantos or thereabouts, for it was generally
+admitted that six would wear the subject threadbare.
+
+Gourdon's poem entitled "Ode to the Cup-and-Ball" obeyed the poetic
+rules which governed these works, rules that were invariable in their
+application. Each poem contained in the first canto a description of
+the "object sung," preceded (as in the case of Gourdon) by a species
+of invocation, of which the following is a model:--
+
+  I sing the good game that belongeth to all,
+  The game, be it known, of the Cup and the Ball;
+  Dear to little and great, to the fools and the wise;
+  Charming game! where the cure of all tedium lies;
+  When we toss up the ball on the point of a stick
+  Palamedus himself might have envied the trick;
+  O Muse of the Loves and the Laughs and the Games,
+  Come down and assist me, for, true to your aims,
+  I have ruled off this paper in syllable squares.
+  Come, help me--
+
+After explaining the game and describing the handsomest cup-and-balls
+recorded in history, after relating what fabulous custom it had
+formerly brought to the Singe-Vert and to all dealers in toys and
+turned ivories, and finally, after proving that the game attained to
+the dignity of statics, Gourdon ended the first canto with the
+following conclusion, which will remind the erudite reader of all the
+conclusions of the first cantos of all these poems:--
+
+  'Tis thus that the arts and the sciences, too,
+  Find wisdom in things that seemed silly to you.
+
+The second canto, invariably employed to depict the manner of using
+"the object," explaining how to exhibit it in society and before
+women, and the benefit to be derived therefrom, will be readily
+conceived by the friends of this virtuous literature from the
+following quotation, which depicts the player going through his
+performance under the eyes of his chosen lady:--
+
+  Now look at the player who sits in your midst,
+  On that ivory ball how his sharp eye is fixt;
+  He waits and he watches with keenest attention,
+  Its least little movement in all its precision;
+  The ball its parabola thrice has gone round,
+  At the end of the string to which it is bound.
+  Up it goes! but the player his triumph has missed,
+  For the disc has come down on his maladroit wrist;
+  But little he cares for the sting of the ball,
+  A smile from his mistress consoles for it all.
+
+It was this delineation, worthy of Virgil, which first raised a doubt
+as to Delille's superiority over Gourdon. The word "disc," contested
+by the opinionated Brunet, gave matter for discussions which lasted
+eleven months; in fact, until Gourdon the scientist, one evening when
+all present were on the point of getting seriously angry, annihilated
+the anti-discers by observing:--
+
+"The moon, called a DISC by poets, is undoubtedly a ball."
+
+"How do you know that?" retorted Brunet. "We have never seen but one
+side."
+
+The third canto told the regulation story,--in this instance, the
+famous anecdote of the cup-and-ball which all the world knows by
+heart, concerning a celebrated minister of Louis XVI. According to the
+sacred formula delivered by the "Debats" from 1810 to 1814, in praise
+of these glorious words, Gourdon's ode "borrowed fresh charms from
+poesy to embellish the tale."
+
+The fourth canto summed up the whole, and concluded with these daring
+words,--not published, be it remarked, from 1810 to 1814; in fact,
+they did not see the light till 1824, after Napoleon's death.
+
+  'Twas thus that I sang in the time of alarms.
+  Oh, if kings would consent to bear no other arms,
+  And people enjoyed what was best for them all,
+  The sweet little game of the Cup and the Ball,
+  Our Burgundy then might be free of all fear,
+  And return to the good days of Saturn and Rhea.
+
+These fine verses were published in a first and only edition from the
+press of Bournier, printer of Ville-aux-Fayes. One hundred
+subscribers, in the sum of three francs, guaranteed the dangerous
+precedent of immortality to the poem,--a liberality that was all the
+greater because these hundred persons had heard the poem from
+beginning to end a hundred times over.
+
+Madame Soudry had lately suppressed the cup-and-ball, which usually
+lay on a pier-table in the salon and for the last seven years had
+given rise to endless quotations, for she finally discovered in the
+toy a rival to her own attractions.
+
+As to the author, who boasted of future poems in his desk, it is
+enough to quote the terms in which he mentioned to the leading society
+of Soulanges a rival candidate for literary honors.
+
+"Have you heard a curious piece of news?" he had said, two years
+earlier. "There is another poet in Burgundy! Yes," he added, remarking
+the astonishment on all faces, "he comes from Macon. But you could
+never imagine the subjects he takes up,--a perfect jumble, absolutely
+unintelligible,--lakes, stars, waves, billows! not a single
+philosophical image, not even a didactic effort! he is ignorant of the
+very meaning of poetry. He calls the sky by its name. He says 'moon,'
+bluntly, instead of naming it 'the planet of night.' That's what the
+desire to be thought original brings men to," added Gourdon,
+mournfully. "Poor young man! A Burgundian, and sing such stuff as
+that!--the pity of it! If he had only consulted me, I would have
+pointed out to him the noblest of all themes, wine,--a poem to be
+called the Baccheide; for which, alas! I now feel myself too old."
+
+This great poet is still ignorant of his finest triumph (though he
+owes it to the fact of being a Burgundian), namely, that of living in
+the town of Soulanges, so rounded and perfected within itself that it
+knows nothing of the modern Pleiades, not even their names.
+
+A hundred Gourdons made poetry under the Empire, and yet they tell us
+it was a period that neglected literature! Examine the "Journal de la
+Libraire" and you will find poems on the game of draughts, on
+backgammon, on tricks with cards, on geography, typography, comedy,
+etc.,--not to mention the vaunted masterpieces of Delille on Piety,
+Imagination, Conversation; and those of Berchoux on Gastromania and
+Dansomania, etc. Who can foresee the chances and changes of taste, the
+caprices of fashion, the transformations of the human mind? The
+generations as they pass along sweep out of sight the last fragments
+of the idols they found on their path and set up other gods,--to be
+overthrown like the rest.
+
+Sarcus, a handsome little man with a dapple-gray head, devoted himself
+in turn to Themis and to Flora,--in other words, to legislation and a
+greenhouse. For the last twelve years he had been meditating a book on
+the History of the Institution of Justices of the Peace, "whose
+political and judiciary role," he said, "had already passed through
+several phases, all derived from the Code of Brumaire, year IV.; and
+to-day that institution, so precious to the nation, had lost its power
+because the salaries were not in keeping with the importance of its
+functions, which ought to be performed by irremovable officials."
+Rated in the community as an able man, Sarcus was the accepted
+statesman of Madame Soudry's salon; you can readily imagine that he
+was the leading bore. They said he talked like a book. Gaubertin
+prophesied he would receive the cross of the Legion of honor, but not
+until the day when, as Leclercq's successor, he should take his seat
+on the benches of the Left Centre.
+
+Guerbet, the collector, a man of parts, a heavy, fat, individual with
+a buttery face, a toupet on his bald spot, gold earrings, which were
+always in difficulty with his shirt-collar, had the hobby of pomology.
+Proud of possessing the finest fruit-garden in the arrondissement, he
+gathered his first crops a month later than those of Paris; his hot-
+beds supplied him with pine-apples, nectarines, and peas, out of
+season. He brought bunches of strawberries to Madame Soudry with pride
+when the fruit could be bought for ten sous a basket in Paris.
+
+Soulanges possessed a pharmaceutist named Vermut, a chemist, who was
+more of a chemist than Sarcus was a statesman, or Lupin a singer, or
+Gourdon the elder a scientist, or his brother a poet. Nevertheless,
+the leading society of Soulanges did not take much notice of Vermut,
+and the second-class society took none at all. The instinct of the
+first may have led them to perceive the real superiority of this
+thinker, who said little but smiled at their absurdities so
+satirically that they first doubted his capacity and then whispered
+tales against it; as for the other class they took no notice of him
+one way or the other.
+
+Vermut was the butt of Madame Soudry's salon. No society is complete
+without a victim,--without an object to pity, ridicule, despise, and
+protect. Vermut, full of his scientific problems, often came with his
+cravat untied, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his little green surtout
+spotted.
+
+The little man, gifted with the patience of a chemist, could not enjoy
+(that is the term employed in the provinces to express the abolition
+of domestic rule) Madame Vermut,--a charming woman, a lively woman,
+capital company (for she could lose forty sous at cards and say
+nothing), a woman who railed at her husband, annoyed him with
+epigrams, and declared him to be an imbecile unable to distil anything
+but dulness. Madame Vermut was one of those women who in the society
+of a small town are the life and soul of amusement and who set things
+going. She supplied the salt of her little world, kitchen-salt, it is
+true; her jokes were somewhat broad, but society forgave them; though
+she was capable of saying to the cure Taupin, a man of seventy years
+of age, with white hair, "Hold your tongue, my lad."
+
+The miller of Soulanges, possessing an income of fifty thousand
+francs, had an only daughter whom Lupin desired for his son Amaury,
+since he had lost the hope of marrying him to Gaubertin's daughter.
+This miller, a Sarcus-Taupin, was the Nucingen of the little town. He
+was supposed to be thrice a millionaire; but he never transacted
+business with others, and thought only of grinding his wheat and
+keeping a monopoly of it; his most noticeable point was a total
+absence of politeness and good manners.
+
+The elder Guerbet, brother of the post-master at Conches, possessed an
+income of ten thousand francs, besides his salary as collector. The
+Gourdons were rich; the doctor had married the only daughter of old
+Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled, keeper of the forests and streams, whom the
+family were now EXPECTING TO DIE, while the poet had married the niece
+and sole heiress of the Abbe Taupin, the curate of Soulanges, a stout
+priest who lived in his cure like a rat in his cheese.
+
+This clever ecclesiastic, devoted to the leading society, kind and
+obliging to the second, apostolic to the poor and unfortunate, made
+himself beloved by the whole town. He was cousin of the miller and
+cousin of the Sarcuses, and belonged therefore to the neighborhood and
+to its mediocracy. He always dined out and saved expenses; he went to
+weddings but came away before the ball; he paid the costs of public
+worship, saying, "It is my business." And the parish let him do it,
+with the remark, "We have an excellent priest." The bishop, who knew
+the Soulanges people and was not at all misled as to the true value of
+the abbe, was glad enough to keep in such a town a man who made
+religion acceptable, and who knew how to fill his church and preach to
+sleepy heads.
+
+It is unnecessary to remark that not only each of these worthy
+burghers possessed some one of the special qualifications which are
+necessary to existence in the provinces, but also that each cultivated
+his field in the domain of vanity without a rival. Pere Guerbet
+understood finance, Soudry might have been minister of war; if Cuvier
+had passed that way incognito, the leading society of Soulanges would
+have proved to him that he knew nothing in comparison with Monsieur
+Gourdon the doctor. "Adolphe Nourrit with his thread of a voice,"
+remarked the notary with patronizing indulgence, "was scarcely worthy
+to accompany the nightingale of Soulanges." As to the author of the
+"Cup-and-Ball" (which was then being printed at Bournier's), society
+was satisfied that a poet of his force could not be met with in Paris,
+for Delille was now dead.
+
+This provincial bourgeoisie, so comfortably satisfied with itself,
+took the lead through the various superiorities of its members.
+Therefore the imagination of those who ever resided, even for a short
+time, in a little town of this kind can conceive the air of profound
+satisfaction upon the faces of these people, who believed themselves
+the solar plexus of France, all of them armed with incredible
+dexterity and shrewdness to do mischief,--all, in their wisdom,
+declaring that the hero of Essling was a coward, Madame de Montcornet
+a manoeuvring Parisian, and the Abbe Brossette an ambitious little
+priest.
+
+If Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin had lived at Ville-aux-Fayes, they
+would have quarrelled; their various pretensions would have clashed;
+but fate ordained that the Lucullus of Blangy felt too strongly the
+need of solitude, in which to wallow at his ease in usury and
+sensuality, to live anywhere but at Blangy; that Madame Soudry had
+sense enough to see that she could reign nowhere else except at
+Soulanges; and that Ville-aux-Fayes was Gaubertin's place of business.
+Those who enjoy studying social nature will admit that General
+Montcornet was pursued by special ill-luck in this accidental
+separation of his dangerous enemies, who thus accomplished the
+evolutions of their individual power and vanity at such distances from
+each other that neither star interfered with the orbit of the other,--
+a fact which doubled and trebled their powers of mischief.
+
+Nevertheless, though all these worthy bourgeois, proud of their
+accomplishments, considered their society as far superior in
+attractions to that of Ville-aux-Fayes, and repeated with comic
+pomposity the local dictum, "Soulanges is a town of society and social
+pleasures," it must not be supposed that Ville-aux-Fayes accepted this
+supremacy. The Gaubertin salon ridiculed ("in petto") the salon
+Soudry. By the manner in which Gaubertin remarked, "We are a financial
+community, engaged in actual business; we have the folly to fatigue
+ourselves in making fortunes," it was easy to perceive a latent
+antagonism between the earth and the moon. The moon believed herself
+useful to the earth, and the earth governed the moon. Earth and moon,
+however, lived in the closest intimacy. At the carnival the leading
+society of Soulanges went in a body to four balls given by Gaubertin,
+Gendrin, Leclercq, and Soudry, junior. Every Sunday the latter, his
+wife, Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoiselle Elise Gaubertin dined with
+the Soudrys at Soulanges. When the sub-prefect was invited, and when
+the postmaster of Conches arrived to take pot-luck, Soulanges enjoyed
+the sight of four official equipages drawn up at the door of the
+Soudry mansion.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE CONSPIRATORS IN THE QUEEN'S SALON
+
+Reaching Soulanges about half-past five o'clock, Rigou was sure of
+finding the usual party assembled at the Soudrys'. There, as
+everywhere else in town, the dinner-hour was three o'clock, according
+to the custom of the last century. From five to nine the notables of
+Soulanges met in Madame Soudry's salon to exchange the news, make
+their political speeches, comment upon the private lives of every one
+in the valley, and talk about Les Aigues, which latter topic kept the
+conversation going for at least an hour every day. It was everybody's
+business to learn at least something of what was going on, and also to
+pay their court to the mistress of the house.
+
+After this preliminary talk they played at boston, the only game the
+queen understood. When the fat old Guerbet had mimicked Madame Isaure,
+Gaubertin's wife, laughed at her languishing airs, imitated her thin
+voice, her pinched mouth, and her juvenile ways; when the Abbe Taupin
+had related one of the tales of his repertory; when Lupin had told of
+some event at Ville-aux-Fayes, and Madame Soudry had been deluged with
+compliments ad nauseum, the company would say: "We have had a charming
+game of boston."
+
+Too self-indulgent to be at the trouble of driving over to the
+Soudrys' merely to hear the vapid talk of its visitors and to see a
+Parisian monkey in the guise of an old woman, Rigou, far superior in
+intelligence and education to this petty society, never made his
+appearance unless business brought him over to meet the notary. He
+excused himself from visiting on the ground of his occupations, his
+habits, and his health, which latter did not allow him, he said, to
+return at night along a road which led by the foggy banks of the
+Thune.
+
+The tall, stiff usurer always had an imposing effect upon Madame
+Soudry's company, who instinctively recognized in his nature the
+cruelty of the tiger with steel claws, the craft of a savage, the
+wisdom of one born in a cloister and ripened by the sun of gold,--a
+man to whom Gaubertin had never yet been willing to fully commit
+himself.
+
+The moment the little green carriole and the bay horse passed the Cafe
+de la Paix, Urbain, Soudry's man-servant, who was seated on a bench
+under the dining-room windows, and was gossipping with the tavern-
+keeper, shades his eyes with his hand to see who was coming.
+
+"It's Pere Rigou," he said. "I must go round and open the door. Take
+his horse, Socquard." And Urbain, a former trooper, who could not get
+into the gendarmerie and had therefore taken service with Soudry, went
+round the house to open the gates of the courtyard.
+
+Socquard, a famous personage throughout the valley, was treated, as
+you see, with very little ceremony by the valet. But so it is with
+many illustrious people who are so kind as to walk and to sneeze and
+to sleep and to eat precisely like common mortals.
+
+Socquard, born a Hercules, could carry a weight of eleven hundred
+pounds; a blow of his fist applied on a man's back would break the
+vertebral column in two; he could bend an iron bar, or hold back a
+carriage drawn by one horse. A Milo of Crotona in the valley, his fame
+had spread throughout the department, where all sorts of foolish
+stories were current about him, as about all celebrities. It was told
+how he had once carried a poor woman and her donkey and her basket on
+his back to market; how he had been known to eat a whole ox and drink
+the fourth of a hogshead of wine in one day, etc. Gentle as a
+marriageable girl, Socquard, who was a stout, short man, with a placid
+face, broad shoulders, and a deep chest, where his lungs played like
+the bellows of a forge, possessed a flute-like voice, the limpid tones
+of which surprised all those who heard them for the first time.
+
+Like Tonsard, whose renown released him from the necessity of giving
+proofs of his ferocity, in fact, like all other men who are backed by
+public opinion of one kind or another, Socquard never displayed his
+extraordinary muscular force unless asked to do so by friends. He now
+took the horse as the usurer drew up at the steps of the portico.
+
+"Are you all well at home, Monsieur Rigou?" said the illustrious
+innkeeper.
+
+"Pretty well, my good friend," replied Rigou. "Do Plissoud and
+Bonnebault and Viollet and Amaury still continue good customers?"
+
+This question, uttered in a tone of good-natured interest, was by no
+means one of those empty speeches which superiors are apt to bestow
+upon inferiors. In his leisure moments Rigou thought over the smallest
+details of "the affair," and Fourchon had already warned him that
+there was something suspicious in the intimacy between Plissoud,
+Bonnebault, and the brigadier, Viollet.
+
+Bonnebault, in payment of a few francs lost at cards, might very
+likely tell the secrets he heard at Tonsard's to Viollet; or he might
+let them out over his punch without realizing the importance of such
+gossip. But as the information of the old otter man might be
+instigated by thirst, Rigou paid no attention except so far as it
+concerned Plissoud, whose situation was likely to inspire him with a
+desire to counteract the coalition against Les Aigues, if only to get
+his paws greased by one or the other of the two parties.
+
+Plissoud combined with his duties of under-sheriff other occupations
+which were poorly remunerated, that of agent of insurance (a new form
+of enterprise just beginning to show itself in France), agent, also,
+of a society providing against the chances of recruitment. His
+insufficient pay and a love of billiards and boiled wine made his
+future doubtful. Like Fourchon, he cultivated the art of doing
+nothing, and expected his fortune through some lucky but problematic
+chance. He hated the leading society, but he had measured its power.
+He alone knew the middle-class coalition organized by Gaubertin to its
+depths; and he continued to sneer at the rich men of Soulanges and
+Ville-aux-Fayes, as if he alone represented the opposition. Without
+money and not respected, he did not seem a person to be feared
+professionally, and so Brunet, glad to have a despised competitor,
+protected him and helped him along, to prevent him selling his
+business to some eager young man, like Bonnac for instance, who might
+force him, Brunet, to divide the patronage of the canton between them.
+
+"Thanks to those fellows, we keep the ball a-rolling," said Socquard.
+"But folks are trying to imitate my boiled wine."
+
+"Sue them," said Rigou, sententiously.
+
+"That would lead too far," replied the innkeeper.
+
+"Do your clients get on well together?"
+
+"Tolerably, yes; sometimes they'll have a row, but that's only natural
+for players."
+
+All heads were at the window of the Soudry salon which looked to the
+square. Recognizing the father of his daughter-in-law, Soudry came to
+the portico to receive him.
+
+"Well, comrade," said the mayor of Soulanges, "is Annette ill, that
+you give us your company of an evening?"
+
+Through an old habit acquired in the gendarmerie Soudry always went
+direct to the point.
+
+"No,-- There's trouble brewing," replied Rigou, touching his right
+fore-finger to the hand which Soudry held out to him. "I came to talk
+about it, for it concerns our children in a way--"
+
+Soudry, a handsome man dressed in blue, as though he were still a
+gendarme, with a black collar, and spurs at his heels, took Rigou by
+the arm and led him up to his imposing better-half. The glass door to
+the terrace was open, and the guests were walking about enjoying the
+summer evening, which brought out the full beauty of the glorious
+landscape which we have already described.
+
+"It is a long time since we have seen you, my dear Rigou," said Madame
+Soudry, taking the arm of the ex-Benedictine and leading him out upon
+the terrace.
+
+"My digestion is so troublesome!" he replied; "see! my color is almost
+as high as yours."
+
+Rigou's appearance on the terrace was the sign for an explosion of
+jovial greetings on the part of the assembled company.
+
+"And how may the lord of Blangy be?" said little Sarcus, justice of
+the peace.
+
+"Lord!" replied Rigou, bitterly, "I am not even cock of my own village
+now."
+
+"The hens don't say so, scamp!" exclaimed Madame Soudry, tapping her
+fan on his arm.
+
+"All well, my dear master?" said the notary, bowing to his chief
+client.
+
+"Pretty well," replied Rigou, again putting his fore-finger into his
+interlocutor's hand.
+
+This gesture, by which Rigou kept down the process of hand-shaking to
+the coldest and stiffest of demonstrations would have revealed the
+whole man to any observer who did not already know him.
+
+"Let us find a corner where we can talk quietly," said the ex-monk,
+looking at Lupin and at Madame Soudry.
+
+"Let us return to the salon," replied the queen.
+
+"What has the Shopman done now?" asked Soudry, sitting down beside his
+wife and putting his arm about her waist.
+
+Madame Soudry, like other old women, forgave a great deal in return
+for such public marks of tenderness.
+
+"Why," said Rigou, in a low voice, to set an example of caution, "he
+has gone to the Prefecture to demand the enforcement of the penalties;
+he wants the help of the authorities."
+
+"Then he's lost," said Lupin, rubbing his hands; "the peasants will
+fight."
+
+"Fight!" cried Soudry, "that depends. If the prefect and the general,
+who are friends, send a squadron of cavalry the peasants can't fight.
+They might at a pinch get the better of the gendarmes, but as for
+resisting a charge of cavalry!--"
+
+"Sibilet heard him say something much more dangerous than that," said
+Rigou; "and that's what brings me here."
+
+"Oh, my poor Sophie!" cried Madame Soudry, sentimentally, alluding to
+her FRIEND, Mademoiselle Laguerre, "into what hands Les Aigues has
+fallen! This is what we have gained by the Revolution!--a parcel of
+swaggering epaulets! We might have foreseen that whenever the bottle
+was turned upside down the dregs would spoil the wine!"
+
+"He means to go to Paris and cabal with the Keeper of the Seals and
+others to get the whole judiciary changed down here," said Rigou.
+
+"Ha!" cried Lupin, "then he sees his danger."
+
+"If they appoint my son-in-law attorney-general we can't help
+ourselves; the general will get him replaced by some Parisian devoted
+to his interests," continued Rigou. "If he gets a place in Paris for
+Gendrin and makes Guerbet chief-justice of the court at Auxerre, he'll
+knock down our skittles! The gendarmerie is on his side now, and if he
+gets the courts as well, and keeps such advisers as the abbe and
+Michaud we sha'n't dance at the wedding; he'll play us some scurvy
+trick or other."
+
+"How is it that in all these five years you have never managed to get
+rid of that abbe?" said Lupin.
+
+"You don't know him; he's as suspicious as a blackbird," replied
+Rigou. "He is not a man at all, that priest; he doesn't care for
+women; I can't find out that he has any passion; there's no point at
+which one can attack him. The general lays himself open by his temper.
+A man with a vice is the servant of his enemies if they know how to
+pull its string. There are no strong men but those who lead their
+vices instead of being led by them. The peasants are all right; their
+hatred against the abbe keeps up; but we can do nothing as yet. He's
+like Michaud, in his way; such men are too good for this world,--God
+ought to call them to himself."
+
+"It would be a good plan to find some pretty servant-girl to scrub his
+staircase," remarked Madame Soudry. The words caused Rigou to give the
+little jump with which crafty natures recognize the craft of others.
+
+"The Shopman has another vice," he said; "he loves his wife; we might
+get hold of him that way."
+
+"We ought to find out how far she really influences him," said Madame
+Soudry.
+
+"There's the rub!" said Lupin.
+
+"As for you, Lupin," said Rigou, in a tone of authority, "be off to
+the Prefecture and see the beautiful Madame Sarcus at once! You must
+get her to tell you all the Shopman says and does at the Prefecture."
+
+"Then I shall have to stay all night," replied Lupin.
+
+"So much the better for Sarcus the rich; he'll be the gainer," said
+Rigou. "She is not yet out of date, Madame Sarcus--"
+
+"Oh! Monsieur Rigou," said Madame Soudry, in a mincing tone, "are
+women ever out of date?"
+
+"You may be right about Madame Sarcus; she doesn't paint before the
+glass," retorted Rigou, who was always disgusted by the exhibition of
+the Cochet's ancient charms.
+
+Madame Soudry, who thought she used only a "suspicion" of rouge, did
+not perceive the sarcasm and hastened to say:--
+
+"Is it possible that women paint?"
+
+"Now, Lupin," said Rigou, without replying to this naivete, "go over
+to Gaubertin's to-morrow morning. Tell him that my fellow-mayor and I"
+(striking Soudry on the thigh) "will break bread with him at breakfast
+somewhere about midday. Tell him everything, so that we may all have
+thought it over before we meet, for now's the time to make an end of
+that damned Shopman. As I drove over here I came to the conclusion it
+would be best to get up a quarrel between the courts and him, so that
+the Keeper of the Seals would be wary of making the changes he may ask
+in their members."
+
+"Bravo for the son of the Church!" cried Lupin, slapping Rigou on the
+shoulder.
+
+Madame Soudry was here struck by an idea which could come only to a
+former waiting-maid of an Opera divinity.
+
+"If," she said, "one could only get the Shopman to the fete at
+Soulanges, and throw some fine girl in his way who would turn his
+head, we could easily set his wife against him by letting her know
+that the son of an upholsterer has gone back to the style of his early
+loves."
+
+"Ah, my beauty!" said Soudry, "you have more sense in your head than
+the Prefecture of police in Paris."
+
+"That's an idea which proves that Madame reigns by mind as well as by
+beauty," said Lupin, who was rewarded by a grimace which the leading
+society of Soulanges were in the habit of accepting without protest
+for a smile.
+
+"One might do better still," said Rigou, after some thought; "if we
+could only turn it into a downright scandal."
+
+"Complaint and indictment! affair in the police court!" cried Lupin.
+"Oh! that would be grand!"
+
+"Glorious!" said Soudry, candidly. "What happiness to see the Comte de
+Montcornet, grand cross of the Legion of honor, commander of the Order
+of Saint Louis, and lieutenant-general, accused of having attempted,
+in a public resort, the virtue--just think of it!"
+
+"He loves his wife too well," said Lupin, reflectively. "He couldn't
+be got to that."
+
+"That's no obstacle," remarked Rigou; "but I don't know a single girl
+in the whole arrondissement who is capable of making a sinner of a
+saint. I have been looking out for one for the abbe."
+
+"What do you say to that handsome Gatienne Giboulard, of Auxerre, whom
+Sarcus, junior, is mad after?" asked Lupin.
+
+"That's the only one," answered Rigou, "but she is not suitable; she
+thinks she has only to be seen to be admired; she's not complying
+enough; we want a witch and a sly-boots, too. Never mind, the right
+one will turn up sooner or later."
+
+"Yes," said Lupin, "the more pretty girls he sees the greater the
+chances are."
+
+"But perhaps you can't get the Shopman to the fair," said the ex-
+gendarme. "And if he does come, will he go to the Tivoli ball?"
+
+"The reason that has always kept him away from the fair doesn't exist
+this year, my love," said Madame Soudry.
+
+"What reason, dearest?" asked Soudry.
+
+"The Shopman wanted to marry Mademoiselle de Soulanges," said the
+notary. "The family replied that she was too young, and that mortified
+him. That is why Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de Montcornet, two
+old friends who both served in the Imperial Guard, are so cool to each
+other that they never speak. The Shopman doesn't want to meet the
+Soulanges at the fair; but this year the family are not coming."
+
+Usually the Soulanges party stayed at the chateau from July to
+October, but the general was then in command of the artillery in
+Spain, under the Duc d'Angouleme, and the countess had accompanied
+him. At the siege of Cadiz the Comte de Soulanges obtained, as every
+one knows, the marshal's baton, which he kept till 1826.
+
+"Very true," cried Lupin. "Well, it is for you, papa," he added,
+addressing Rigou, "to manoeuvre the matter so that we can get him to
+the fair; once there, we ought to be able to entrap him."
+
+The fair of Soulanges, which takes place on the 15th of August, is one
+of the features of the town, and carries the palm over all other fairs
+in a circuit of sixty miles, even those of the capital of the
+department. Ville-aux-Fayes has no fair, for its fete-day, the Saint-
+Sylvestre, happens in winter.
+
+From the 12th to the 15th of August all sorts of merchants abounded at
+Soulanges, and set up their booths in two parallel lines, two rows of
+the well-known gray linen huts, which gave a lively appearance to the
+usually deserted streets. The two weeks of the fair brought in a sort
+of harvest to the little town, for the festival has the authority and
+prestige of tradition. The peasants, as old Fourchon said, flocked in
+from the districts to which labor bound them for the rest of the year.
+The wonderful show on the counters of the improvised shops, the
+collection of all sorts of merchandise, the coveted objects of the
+wants or the vanities of these sons of the soil, who have no other
+shows or exhibitions to enjoy exercise a periodical seduction over the
+minds of all, especially the women and children. So, after the first
+of August the authorities posted advertisements signed by Soudry,
+throughout the whole arrondissement, offering protection to merchants,
+jugglers, mountebanks, prodigies of all kinds, and stating how long
+the fair would last, and what would be its principal attractions.
+
+On these posters, about which it will be remembered Madame Tonsard
+inquired of Vermichel, there was always, on the last line, the
+following announcement:
+
+"Tivoli will be illuminated with colored-glass lamps."
+
+The town had adopted as the place for public a dance-ground created by
+Socquard out of a stony garden (stony, like the rest of the hill on
+which Soulanges is built, where the gardens are of made land), and
+called by him a Tivoli. This character of the soil explains the
+peculiar flavor of the Soulanges wine,--a white wine, dry and
+spirituous, very like Madeira or the Vouvray wine, or Johannisberger,
+--three vintages which resemble one another.
+
+The powerful effect produced by the Socquard ball upon the
+imaginations of the whole country-side made the inhabitants thereof
+very proud of their Tivoli. Such as had ventured as far as Paris
+declared that the Parisian Tivoli was superior to that of Soulanges
+only in size. Gaubertin boldly declared that, for his part, he
+preferred the Socquard ball to the Parisian ball.
+
+"Well, we'll think it all over," continued Rigou. "That Parisian
+fellow, the editor of a newspaper, will soon get tired of his present
+amusement and be glad of a change; perhaps we could through the
+servants give him the idea of coming to the fair, and he'd bring the
+others; I'll consider it. Sibilet might--although, to be sure, his
+influence is devilishly decreased of late--but he might get the
+general to think he could curry popularity by coming."
+
+"Find out if the beautiful countess keeps the general at arm's
+length," said Lupin; "that's the point if you want him to fall into
+the farce at Tivoli."
+
+"That little woman," cried Madame Soudry, "is too much of a Parisian
+not to know how to run with the hare and hold with the hounds."
+
+"Fourchon has got his granddaughter Catherine on good terms, he tells
+me, with Charles, the Shopman's groom. That gives us one ear more in
+Les Aigues--Are you sure of the Abbe Taupin," he added, as the priest
+entered the room from the terrace.
+
+"We hold him and the Abbe Mouchon, too, just as I hold Soudry," said
+the queen, stroking her husband's chin; "you are not unhappy, dearest,
+are you?" she said to Soudry.
+
+"If I can plan a scandal against that Tartufe of a Brossette we can
+win," said Rigou, in a low voice. "But I am not sure if the local
+spirit can succeed against the Church spirit. You don't realize what
+that is. I, myself, who am no fool, I can't say what I'll do when I
+fall ill. I believe I shall try to be reconciled with the Church."
+
+"Suffer me to hope it," said the Abbe Taupin, for whose benefit Rigou
+had raised his voice on the last words.
+
+"Alas! the wrong I did in marrying prevents it," replied Rigou. "I
+cannot kill off Madame Rigou."
+
+"Meantime, let us think of Les Aigues," said Madame Soudry.
+
+"Yes," said the ex-monk. "Do you know, I begin to think that our
+associate at Ville-aux-Fayes may be cleverer than the rest of us. I
+fancy that Gaubertin wants Les Aigues for himself, and that he means
+to trick us in the end."
+
+"But Les Aigues will not belong to any one of us; it will have to come
+down, from roof to cellar," said Soudry.
+
+"I shouldn't be surprised if there were treasure buried in those
+cellars," observed Rigou, cleverly.
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"Well, in the wars of the olden time the great lords, who were often
+besieged and surprised, did bury their gold until they should be able
+to recover it; and you know that the Marquis de Soulanges-Hautemer (in
+whom the younger branch came to an end) was one of the victims of the
+Biron conspiracy. The Comtesse de Moret received the property from
+Henri IV. when it was confiscated."
+
+"See what it is to know the history of France!" said Soudry. "You are
+right. It is time to come to an understanding with Gaubertin."
+
+"If he shirks," said Rigou, "we must smoke him out."
+
+"He is rich enough now," said Lupin, "to be an honest man."
+
+"I'll answer for him as I would for myself," said Madame Soudry; "he's
+the most loyal man in the kingdom."
+
+"We all believe in his loyalty," said Rigou, "but nevertheless nothing
+should be neglected, even among friends-- By the bye, I think there is
+some one in Soulanges who is hindering matters."
+
+"Who's that?" asked Soudry.
+
+"Plissoud," replied Rigou.
+
+"Plissoud!" exclaimed Soudry. "Poor fool! Brunet holds him by the
+halter, and his wife by the gullet; ask Lupin."
+
+"What can he do?" said Lupin.
+
+"He means to warn Montcornet," replied Rigou, "and get his influence
+and a place--"
+
+"It wouldn't bring him more than his wife earns for him at Soulanges,"
+said Madame Soudry.
+
+"He tells everything to his wife when he is drunk," remarked Lupin.
+"We shall know it all in good time."
+
+"The beautiful Madame Plissoud has no secrets from you," said Rigou;
+"we may be easy about that."
+
+"Besides, she's as stupid as she is beautiful," said Madame Soudry. "I
+wouldn't change with her; for if I were a man I'd prefer an ugly woman
+who has some mind, to a beauty who can't say two words."
+
+"Ah!" said the notary, biting his lips, "but she can make others say
+three."
+
+"Puppy!" cried Rigou, as he made for the door.
+
+"Well, then," said Soudry, following him to the portico, "to-morrow,
+early."
+
+"I'll come and fetch you-- Ha! Lupin," he said to the notary, who came
+out with him to order his horse, "try to make sure that Madame Sarcus
+hears all the Shopman says and does against us at the Prefecture."
+
+"If she doesn't hear it, who will?" replied Lupin.
+
+"Excuse me," said Rigou, smiling blandly, "but there are such a lot of
+ninnies in there that I forgot there was one clever man."
+
+"The wonder is that I don't grow rusty among them," replied Lupin,
+naively.
+
+"Is it true that Soudry has hired a pretty servant?"
+
+"Yes," replied Lupin; "for the last week our worthy mayor has set the
+charms of his wife in full relief by comparing her with a little
+peasant-girl about the age of an old ox; and we can't yet imagine how
+he settles it with Madame Soudry, for, would you believe it, he has
+the audacity to go to bed early."
+
+"I'll find out to-morrow," said the village Sardanapalus, trying to
+smile.
+
+The two plotters shook hands as they parted.
+
+Rigou, who did not like to be on the road after dark for,
+notwithstanding his present popularity, he was cautious, called to his
+horse, "Get up, Citizen,"--a joke this son of 1793 was fond of letting
+fly at the Revolution. Popular revolutions have no more bitter enemies
+than those they have trained themselves.
+
+"Pere Rigou's visits are pretty short," said Gourdon the poet to
+Madame Soudry.
+
+"They are pleasant, if they are short," she answered.
+
+"Like his own life," said the doctor; "his abuse of pleasures will cut
+that short."
+
+"So much the better," remarked Soudry, "my son will step into the
+property."
+
+"Did he bring you any news about Les Aigues?" asked the Abbe Taupin.
+
+"Yes, my dear abbe," said Madame Soudry. "Those people are the scourge
+of the neighborhood. I can't comprehend how it is that Madame de
+Montcornet, who is certainly a well-bred woman, doesn't understand
+their interests better."
+
+"And yet she has a model before her eyes," said the abbe.
+
+"Who is that?" asked Madame Soudry, smirking.
+
+"The Soulanges."
+
+"Ah, yes!" replied the queen after a pause.
+
+"Here I am!" cried Madame Vermut, coming into the room; "and without
+my re-active,--for Vermut is so inactive in all that concerns me that
+I can't call him an active of any kind."
+
+"What the devil is that cursed old Rigou doing there?" said Soudry to
+Guerbet, as they saw the green chaise stop before the gate of the
+Tivoli. "He is one of those tiger-cats whose every step has an
+object."
+
+"You may well say cursed," replied the fat little collector.
+
+"He has gone into the Cafe de la Paix," remarked Gourdon, the doctor.
+
+"And there's some trouble there," added Gourdon the poet; "I can hear
+them yelping from here."
+
+"That cafe," said the abbe, "is like the temple of Janus; it was
+called the Cafe de la Guerre under the Empire, and then it was peace
+itself; the most respectable of the bourgeoisie met there for
+conversation--"
+
+"Conversation!" interrupted the justice of the peace. "What kind of
+conversation was it which produced all the little Bourniers?"
+
+"--but ever since it has been called, in honor of the Bourbons, the
+Cafe de la Paix, fights take place there every day," said Abbe Taupin,
+finishing the sentence which the magistrate had taken the liberty of
+interrupting.
+
+This idea of the abbe was, like the quotations from "The Cup-and-
+Ball," of frequent recurrence.
+
+"Do you mean that Burgundy will always be the land of fisticuffs?"
+asked Pere Guerbet.
+
+"That's not ill said," remarked the abbe; "not at all; in fact it's
+almost an exact history of our country."
+
+"I don't know anything about the history of France," blurted Soudry;
+"and before I try to learn it, it is more important to me to know why
+old Rigou has gone into the Cafe de la Paix with Socquard."
+
+"Oh!" returned the abbe, "wherever he goes and wherever he stays, you
+may be quite certain it is for no charitable purpose."
+
+"That man gives me goose-flesh whenever I see him," said Madame
+Vermut.
+
+"He is so much to be feared," remarked the doctor, "that if he had a
+spite against me I should have no peace till he was dead and buried;
+he would get out of his coffin to do you an ill-turn."
+
+"If any one can force the Shopman to come to the fair, and manage to
+catch him in a trap, it'll be Rigou," said Soudry to his wife, in a
+low tone.
+
+"Especially," she replied, in a loud one, "if Gaubertin and you, my
+love, help him."
+
+"There! didn't I tell you so?" cried Guerbet, poking the justice of
+the peace. "I knew he would find some pretty girl at Socquard's,--
+there he is, putting her into his carriage."
+
+"You are quite wrong, gentlemen," said Madame Soudry; "Monsieur Rigou
+is thinking of nothing but the great affair; and if I'm not mistaken,
+that girl is only Tonsard's daughter."
+
+"He is like the chemist who lays in a stock of vipers," said old
+Guerbet.
+
+"One would think you were intimate with Monsieur Vermut to hear you
+talk," said the doctor, pointing to the little apothecary, who was
+then crossing the square.
+
+"Poor fellow!" said the poet, who was suspected of occasionally
+sharpening his wit with Madame Vermut; "just look at that waddle of
+his! and they say he is learned!"
+
+"Without him," said the justice of the peace, "we should be hard put
+to it about post-mortems; he found poison in poor Pigeron's stomach so
+cleverly that the chemists of Paris testified in the court at Auxerre
+that they couldn't have done better--"
+
+"He didn't find anything at all," said Soudry; "but, as President
+Gendrin says, it is a good thing to let people suppose that poison
+will always be found--"
+
+"Madame Pigeron was very wise to leave Auxerre," said Madame Vermut;
+"she was silly and wicked both. As if it were necessary to have
+recourse to drugs to annul a husband! Are not there other ways quite
+as sure, but innocent, to rid ourselves of that incumbrance? I would
+like to have a man dare to question my conduct! The worthy Monsieur
+Vermut doesn't hamper me in the least,--but he has never been ill yet.
+As for Madame de Montcornet, just see how she walks about the woods
+and the hermitage with that journalist whom she brought from Paris at
+her own expense, and how she pets him under the very eyes of the
+general!"
+
+"At her own expense!" cried Madame Soudry. "Are you sure? If we could
+only get proof of it, what a fine subject for an anonymous letter to
+the general!"
+
+"The general!" cried Madame Vermut, "he won't interfere with things;
+he plays his part."
+
+"What part, my dear?" asked Madame Soudry.
+
+"Oh! the paternal part."
+
+"If poor little Pigeron had had the wisdom to play it, instead of
+harassing his wife, he'd be alive now," said the poet.
+
+Madame Soudry leaned over to her neighbor, Monsieur Guerbet, and made
+one of those apish grimaces which she had inherited from dear
+mistress, together with her silver, by right of conquest, and twisting
+her face into a series of them she made him look at Madame Vermut, who
+was coquetting with the author of "The Cup-and-Ball."
+
+"What shocking style that woman has! what talk, what manners!" she
+said. "I really don't think I can admit her any longer into OUR
+SOCIETY,--especially," she added, "when Monsieur Gourdon, the poet, is
+present."
+
+"There's social morality!" said the abbe, who had heard and observed
+all without saying a word.
+
+After this epigram, or rather, this satire on the company, so true and
+so concise that it hit every one, the usual game of boston was
+proposed.
+
+Is not this a picture of life as it is at all stages of what we agree
+to call society? Change the style, and you will find that nothing more
+and nothing less is said in the gilded salons of Paris.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE CAFE DE LA PAIX
+
+It was about seven o'clock when Rigou drove by the Cafe de la Paix.
+The setting sun, slanting its beams across the little town, was
+diffusing its ruddy tints, and the clear mirror of the lake contrasted
+with the flashing of the resplendent window-panes, which originated
+the strangest and most improbable colors.
+
+The deep schemer, who had grown pensive as he revolved his plots, let
+his horse proceed so slowly that in passing the Cafe de la Paix he
+heard his own name banded about in one of those noisy disputes which,
+according to the Abbe Taupin, made the name of the establishment a
+gain-saying of its customary condition.
+
+For a clear understanding of the following scene we must explain the
+topography of this region of plenty and of misrule, which began with
+the cafe on the square, and ended on the country road with the famous
+Tivoli where the conspirators proposed to entrap the general. The
+ground-floor of the cafe, which stood at the angle of the square and
+the road, and was built in the style of Rigou's house, had three
+windows on the road and two on the square, the latter being separated
+by a glass door through which the house was entered. The cafe had,
+moreover, a double door which opened on a side alley that separated it
+from the neighboring house (that of Vallet the Soulanges mercer),
+which led to an inside courtyard.
+
+The house, which was painted wholly in yellow, except the blinds,
+which were green, is one of the few houses in the little town which
+has two stories and an attic. And this is why: Before the astonishing
+rise in the prosperity of Ville-aux-Fayes the first floor of this
+house, which had four chambers, each containing a bed and the meagre
+furniture thought necessary to justify the term "furnished lodgings,"
+was let to strangers who were obliged to come to Soulanges on matters
+connected with the courts, or to visitors who did not sleep at the
+chateau; but for the last twenty-five years these rooms had had no
+other occupants than the mountebanks, the merchants, the vendors of
+quack medicines who came to the fair, or else commercial travellers.
+During the fair-time they were let for four francs a day; and brought
+Socquard about two hundred and fifty francs, not to speak of the
+profits on the consumption of food which the guests took in his cafe.
+
+The front of the house on the square was adorned with painted signs;
+on the spaces that separated the windows from the glass door billiard-
+cues were represented, lovingly tied together with ribbons, and above
+these bows were depicted smoking bowls of punch, the bowls being in
+the form of Greek vases. The words "Cafe de la Paix" were over the
+door, brilliantly painted in yellow on a green ground, at each end of
+which rose pyramids of tricolored billiard-balls. The window-sashes,
+painted green, had small panes of the commonest glass.
+
+A dozen arbor-vitae, which ought to be called cafe-trees, stood to the
+left and right in pots, and presented their usual pretensions and
+sickly appearance. Awnings, with which shopkeepers of the large cities
+protect their windows from the head of the sun, were as yet an unknown
+luxury in Soulanges. The beneficent liquids in the bottles which stood
+on boards just behind the window-panes went through a periodic
+cooking. When the sun concentrated its rays through the lenticular
+knobs in the glass it boiled the Madeira, the syrups, the liqueurs,
+the preserved plums, and the cherry-brandy set out for show; for the
+heat was so great that Aglae, her father, and the waiter were forced
+to sit outside on benches poorly shaded by the wilted shrubs,--which
+Mademoiselle kept alive with water that was almost hot. All three,
+father, daughter, and servant, might be seen at certain hours of the
+day stretched out there, fast asleep, like domestic animals.
+
+In 1804, the period when "Paul and Virginia" was the rage, the inside
+of the cafe was hung with a paper which represented the chief scenes
+of that romance. There could be seen Negroes gathering the coffee-
+crop, though coffee was seldom seen in the establishment, not twenty
+cups of that beverage being served in the month. Colonial products
+were of so little account in the consumption of the place that if a
+stranger had asked for a cup of chocolate Socquard would have been
+hard put to it to serve him. Still, he would have done so with a
+nauseous brown broth made from tablets in which there were more flour,
+crushed almonds, and brown sugar than pure sugar and cacao,
+concoctions which were sold at two sous a cake by village grocers, and
+manufactured for the purpose of ruining the sale of the Spanish
+commodity.
+
+As for coffee, Pere Socquard simply boiled it in a utensil known to
+all such households as the "big brown pot"; he let the dregs (that
+were half chicory) settle, and served the decoction, with a coolness
+worthy of a Parisian waiter, in a china cup which, if flung to the
+ground, would not have cracked.
+
+At this period the sacred respect felt for sugar under the Emperor was
+not yet dispelled in the town of Soulanges, and Aglae Socquard boldly
+served three bits of it of the size of hazel-nuts to a foreign
+merchant who had rashly asked for the literary beverage.
+
+The wall decoration of the cafe, relieved by mirrors in gilt frames
+and brackets on which the hats were hung, had not been changed since
+the days when all Soulanges came to admire the romantic paper, also a
+counter painted like mahogany with a Saint-Anne marble top, on which
+shone vessels of plated metal and lamps with double-burners, which
+were, rumor said, given to the beautiful Madame Socquard by Gaubertin.
+A sticky coating of dirt covered everything, like that found on old
+pictures put away and long forgotten in a garret. The tables painted
+to resemble marble, the benches covered in red Utrecht velvet, the
+hanging glass lamp full of oil, which fed two lights, fastened by a
+chain to the ceiling and adorned with glass pendants, were the
+beginning of the celebrity of the then Cafe de la Guerre.
+
+There, from 1802 to 1804, all the bourgeois of Soulanges played at
+dominoes and a game of cards called "brelan," drank tiny glasses of
+liqueur or boiled wine, and ate brandied fruits and biscuits; for the
+dearness of colonial products had banished coffee, sugar, and
+chocolate. Punch was a great luxury; so was "bavaroise." These
+infusions were made with a sugary substance resembling molasses, the
+name of which is now lost, but which, at the time, made the fortune of
+its inventor.
+
+These succinct details will recall to the memory of all travellers
+many others that are analogous; and those persons who have never left
+Paris can imagine the ceiling blackened with smoke and the mirrors
+specked with millions of spots, showing in what freedom and
+independence the whole order of diptera lived in the Cafe de la Paix.
+
+The beautiful Madame Socquard, whose gallant adventures surpassed
+those of the mistress of the Grand-I-Vert, sat there, enthroned,
+dressed in the last fashion. She affected the style of a sultana, and
+wore a turban. Sultanas, under the Empire, enjoyed a vogue equal to
+that of the "angel" of to-day. The whole valley took pattern from the
+turbans, the poke-bonnets, the fur caps, the Chinese head-gear of the
+handsome Socquard, to whose luxury the big-wigs of Soulanges
+contributed. With a waist beneath her arm-pits, after the fashion of
+our mothers, who were proud of their imperial graces, Junie (she was
+named Junie!) made the fortune of the house of Socquard. Her husband
+owed to her the ownership of a vineyard, of the house they lived in,
+and also the Tivoli. The father of Monsieur Lupin was said to have
+committed some follies for the handsome Madame Socquard; and
+Gaubertin, who had taken her from him, certainly owed him the little
+Bournier.
+
+These details, together with the deep mystery with which Socquard
+manufactured his boiled wine, are sufficient to explain why his name
+and that of the Cafe de la Paix were popular; but there were other
+reasons for their renown. Nothing better than wine could be got at
+Tonsard's and the other taverns in the valley; from Conches to Ville-
+aux-Fayes, in a circumference of twenty miles, the Cafe Socquard was
+the only place where the guests could play billiards and drink the
+punch so admirably concocted by the proprietor. There alone could be
+found a display of foreign wines, fine liqueurs, and brandied fruits.
+Its name resounded daily throughout the valley, accompanied by ideas
+of superfine sensual pleasures such as men whose stomachs are more
+sensitive than their hearts dream about. To all these causes of
+popularity was added that of being an integral part of the great
+festival of Soulanges. The Cafe de la Paix was to the town, in a
+superior degree, what the tavern of the Grand-I-Vert was to the
+peasantry,--a centre of venom; it was the point of contact and
+transmission between the gossip of Ville-aux-Fayes and that of the
+valley. The Grand-I-Vert supplied the milk and the Cafe de la Paix the
+cream, and Tonsard's two daughters were in daily communication between
+the two.
+
+To Socquard's mind the square of Soulanges was merely an appendage to
+his cafe. Hercules went from door to door, talking with this one and
+that one, and wearing in summer no other garment than a pair of
+trousers and a half-buttoned waistcoat. If any one entered the tavern,
+the people with whom he gossiped warned him, and he slowly and
+reluctantly returned.
+
+Rigou stopped his horse, and getting out of the chaise, fastened the
+bridle to one of the posts near the gate of the Tivoli. Then he made a
+pretext to listen to what was going on without being noticed, and
+placed himself between two windows through one of which he could, by
+advancing his head, see the persons in the room, watch their gestures,
+and catch the louder tones which came through the glass of the windows
+and which the quiet of the street enabled him to hear.
+
+"If I were to tell old Rigou that your brother Nicolas is after La
+Pechina," cried an angry voice, "and that he waylays her, he'd rip the
+entrails out of every one of you,--pack of scoundrels that you are at
+the Grand-I-Vert!"
+
+"If you play me such a trick as that, Aglae," said the shrill voice of
+Marie Tonsard, "you sha'n't tell anything more except to the worms in
+your coffin. Don't meddle with my brother's business or with mine and
+Bonnebault's either."
+
+Marie, instigated by her grandmother, had, as we see, followed
+Bonnebault; she had watched him through the very window where Rigou
+was now standing, and had seen him displaying his graces and paying
+compliments so agreeable to Mademoiselle Socquard that she was forced
+to smile upon him. That smile had brought about the scene in the midst
+of which the revelation that interested Rigou came out.
+
+"Well, well, Pere Rigou, what are you doing here?" said Socquard,
+slapping the usurer on the shoulder; he was coming from a barn at the
+end of the garden, where he kept various contrivances for the public
+games, such as weighing-machines, merry-go-rounds, see-saws, all in
+readiness for the Tivoli when opened. Socquard stepped noiselessly,
+for he was wearing a pair of those yellow leather-slippers which cost
+so little by the gross that they have an enormous sale in the
+provinces.
+
+"If you have any fresh lemons, I'd like a glass of lemonade," said
+Rigou; "it is a warm evening."
+
+"Who is making that racket?" said Socquard, looking through the window
+and seeing his daughter and Marie Tonsard.
+
+"They are quarrelling for Bonnebault," said Rigou, sardonically.
+
+The anger of the father was at once controlled by the interest of the
+tavern-keeper. The tavern-keeper judged it prudent to listen outside,
+as Rigou was doing; the father was inclined to enter and declare that
+Bonnebault, possessed of admirable qualities in the eyes of a tavern-
+keeper, had none at all as son-in-law to one of the notables of
+Soulanges. And yet Pere Socquard had received but few offers for his
+daughter. At twenty-two Aglae already rivalled in size and weight
+Madame Vermichel, whose agility seemed phenomenal. Sitting behind a
+counter increased the adipose tendency which she derived from her
+father.
+
+"What devil is it that gets into girls?" said Socquard to Rigou.
+
+"Ha!" replied the ex-Benedictine, "of all the devils, that's the one
+the Church has most to do with."
+
+Just then Bonnebault came out of the billiard-room with a cue in his
+hand, and struck Marie sharply, saying:--
+
+"You've made me miss my stroke; but I'll not miss you, and I'll give
+it to you till you muffle that clapper of yours."
+
+Socquard and Rigou, who now thought it wise to interfere, entered the
+cafe by the front door, raising such a crowd of flies that the light
+from the windows was obscured; the sound was like that of the distant
+practising of a drum-corps. After their first excitement was over, the
+big flies with the bluish bellies, accompanied by the stinging little
+ones, returned to their quarters in the windows, where on three tiers
+of planks, the paint of which was indistinguishable under the fly-
+specks, were rows of viscous bottles ranged like soldiers.
+
+Marie was crying. To be struck before a rival by the man she loves is
+one of those humiliations that no woman can endure, no matter what her
+place on the social ladder may be; and the lower that place is, the
+more violent is the expression of her wrath. The Tonsard girl took no
+notice of Rigou or of Socquard; she flung herself on a bench, in
+gloomy and sullen silence, which the ex-monk carefully watched.
+
+"Get a fresh lemon, Aglae," said Pere Socquard, "and go and rinse that
+glass yourself."
+
+"You did right to send her away," whispered Rigou, "or she might have
+been hurt"; and he glanced significantly at the hand with which Marie
+grasped a stool she had caught up to throw at Aglae's head.
+
+"Now, Marie," said Socquard, standing before her, "people don't come
+here to fling stools; if you were to break one of my mirrors, the milk
+of your cows wouldn't pay for the damage."
+
+"Pere Socquard, your daughter is a reptile; I'm worth a dozen of her,
+I'd have you know. If you don't want Bonnebault for a son-in-law, it
+is high time for you to tell him to go and play billiards somewhere
+else; he's losing a hundred sous every minute."
+
+In the middle of this flux of words, screamed rather than said,
+Socquard took Marie round the waist and flung her out of the door, in
+spite of her cries and resistance. It was none too soon; for
+Bonnebault rushed out of the billiard-room, his eyes blazing.
+
+"It sha'n't end so!" cried Marie Tonsard.
+
+"Begone!" shouted Bonnebault, whom Viollet held back round the body
+lest he should do the girl some hurt. "Go to the devil, or I will
+never speak to you or look at you again!"
+
+"You!" said Marie, flinging him a furious glance. "Give me back my
+money, and I'll leave you to Mademoiselle Socquard if she is rich
+enough to keep you."
+
+Thereupon Marie, frightened when she saw that even Socquard-Alcides
+could scarcely hold Bonnebault, who sprang after her like a tiger,
+took to flight along the road.
+
+Rigou followed, and told her to get into his carriole to escape
+Bonnebault, whose shouts reached the hotel Soudry; then, after hiding
+Marie under the leather curtains, he came back to the cafe to drink
+his lemonade and examine the group it now contained, composed of
+Plissoud, Amaury, Viollet, and the waiter, who were all trying to
+pacify Bonnebault.
+
+"Come, hussar, it's your turn to play," said Amaury, a small, fair
+young man, with a dull eye.
+
+"Besides, she's taken herself off," said Viollet.
+
+If any one ever betrayed astonishment it was Plissoud when he beheld
+the usurer of Blangy sitting at one of the tables, and more occupied
+in watching him, Plissoud, than in noticing the quarrel that was going
+on. In spite of himself, the sheriff allowed his face to show the
+species of bewilderment which a man feels at an unexpected meeting
+with a person whom he hates and is plotting against, and he speedily
+withdrew into the billiard-room.
+
+"Adieu, Pere Socquard," said Rigou.
+
+"I'll get your carriage," said the innkeeper; "take your time."
+
+"How shall I find out what those fellows have been saying over their
+pool?" Rigou was asking himself, when he happened to see the waiter's
+face in the mirror beside him.
+
+The waiter was a jack at all trades; he cultivated Socquard's vines,
+swept out the cafe and the billiard-room, kept the garden in order,
+and watered the Tivoli, all for fifty francs a year. He was always
+without a jacket, except on grand occasions; usually his sole garments
+were a pair of blue linen trousers, heavy shoes, and a striped velvet
+waistcoat, over which he wore an apron of homespun linen when at work
+in the cafe or billiard-room. This apron, with strings, was the badge
+of his functions. The fellow had been hired by Socquard at the last
+annual fair; for in this valley, as throughout Burgundy, servants are
+hired in the market-place by the year, exactly as one buys horses.
+
+"What's your name?" said Rigou.
+
+"Michel, at your service," replied the waiter.
+
+"Doesn't old Fourchon come here sometimes?"
+
+"Two or three times a week, with Monsieur Vermichel, who gives me a
+couple of sous to warn him if his wife's after them."
+
+"He's a fine old fellow, Pere Fourchon; knows a great deal and is full
+of good sense," said Rigou, paying for his lemonade and leaving the
+evil-smelling place when he saw Pere Socquard leading his horse round.
+
+Just as he was about to get into the carriage, Rigou noticed the
+chemist crossing the square and hailed him with a "Ho, there, Monsieur
+Vermut!" Recognizing the rich man, Vermut hurried up. Rigou joined
+him, and said in a low voice:--
+
+"Are there any drugs that can eat into the tissue of the skin so as to
+produce a real disease, like a whitlow on the finger, for instance?"
+
+"If Monsieur Gourdon would help, yes," answered the little chemist.
+
+"Vermut, not a word of all this, or you and I will quarrel; but speak
+of the matter to Monsieur Gourdon, and tell him to come and see me the
+day after to-morrow. I may be able to procure him the delicate
+operation of cutting off a forefinger."
+
+Then, leaving the little man thoroughly bewildered, Rigou got into the
+carriole beside Marie Tonsard.
+
+"Well, you little viper," he said, taking her by the arm when he had
+fastened the reins to a hook in front of the leathern apron which
+closed the carriole and the horse had started on a trot, "do you think
+you can keep Bonnebault by giving way to such violence? If you were a
+wise girl you would promote his marriage with that hogshead of
+stupidity and take your revenge afterwards."
+
+Marie could not help smiling as she answered:--
+
+"Ah, how bad you are! you are the master of us all in wickedness."
+
+"Listen to me, Marie; I like the peasants, but it won't do for any one
+of you to come between my teeth and a mouthful of game. Your brother
+Nicolas, as Aglae said, is after La Pechina. That must not be; I
+protect her, that girl. She is to be my heiress for thirty thousand
+francs, and I intend to marry her well. I know that Nicolas, helped by
+your sister Catherine, came near killing the little thing this
+morning. You are to see your brother and sister at once, and say to
+them: 'If you let La Pechina alone, Pere Rigou will save Nicolas from
+the conscription.'"
+
+"You are the devil incarnate!" cried Marie. "They do say you've signed
+a compact with him. Is that true?"
+
+"Yes," replied Rigou, gravely.
+
+"I heard it, but I didn't believe it."
+
+"He has guaranteed that no attacks aimed at me shall hurt me; that I
+shall never be robbed; that I shall live a hundred years and succeed
+in everything I undertake, and be as young to the day of my death as a
+two-year old cockerel--"
+
+"Well, if that's so," said Marie, "it must be DEVILISHLY easy for you
+to save my brother from the conscription--"
+
+"If he chooses, that's to say. He'll have to lose a finger," returned
+Rigou. "I'll tell him how."
+
+"Look out, you are taking the upper road!" exclaimed Marie.
+
+"I never go by the lower at night," said the ex-monk.
+
+"On account of the cross?" said Marie, naively.
+
+"That's it, sly-boots," replied her diabolical companion.
+
+They had reached a spot where the high-road cuts through a slight
+elevation of ground, making on each side of it a rather steep slope,
+such as we often see on the mail-roads of France. At the end of this
+little gorge, which is about a hundred feet long, the roads to
+Ronquerolles and to Cerneux meet and form an open space, in the centre
+of which stands a cross. From either slope a man could aim at a victim
+and kill him at close quarters, with all the more ease because the
+little hill is covered with vines, and the evil-doer could lie in
+ambush among the briers and brambles that overgrow them. We can
+readily imagine why the usurer did not take that road after dark. The
+Thune flows round the little hill; and the place is called the Close
+of the Cross. No spot was ever more adapted for revenge or murder, for
+the road to Ronquerolles continues to the bridge over the Avonne in
+front of the pavilion of the Rendezvous, while that to Cerneux leads
+off above the mail-road; so that between the four roads,--to Les
+Aigues, Ville-aux-Fayes, Ronquerolles, and Cerneux,--a murderer could
+choose his line of retreat and leave his pursuers in uncertainty.
+
+"I shall drop you at the entrance of the village," said Rigou when
+they neared the first houses of Blangy.
+
+"Because you are afraid of Annette, old coward!" cried Marie. "When
+are you going to send her away? you have had her now three years. What
+amuses me is that your old woman still lives; the good God knows how
+to revenge himself."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE TRIUMVIRATE OF VILLE-AUX-FAYES
+
+The cautious usurer compelled his wife and Jean to go to bed and to
+rise by daylight; assuring them that the house would never be attacked
+if he sat up till midnight, and he never himself rose till late. Not
+only had he thus secured himself from interruption between seven at
+night and five the next morning but he had accustomed his wife and
+Jean to respect his morning sleep and that of Hagar, whose room was
+directly behind his.
+
+So, on the following morning, about half past six, Madame Rigou, who
+herself took care of the poultry-yard with some assistance from Jean,
+knocked timidly at her husband's door.
+
+"Monsieur Rigou," she said, "you told me to wake you."
+
+The tones of that voice, the attitude of the woman, her frightened air
+as she obeyed an order the execution of which might be ill-received,
+showed the utter self-abnegation in which the poor creature lived, and
+the affection she still bore to her petty tyrant.
+
+"Very good," replied Rigou.
+
+"Shall I wake Annette?" she asked.
+
+"No, let her sleep; she has been up half the night," he replied,
+gravely.
+
+The man was always grave, even when he allowed himself to jest.
+Annette had in fact opened the door secretly to Sibilet, Fourchon, and
+Catherine Tonsard, who all came at different hours between eleven and
+two o'clock.
+
+Ten minutes later Rigou, dressed with more care than usual, came
+downstairs and greeted his wife with a "Good-morning, my old woman,"
+which made her happier than if counts had knelt at her feet.
+
+"Jean," he said to the ex-lay-brother, "don't leave the house; if any
+one robs me it will be worse for you than for me."
+
+By thus mingling mildness and severity, hopes and rebuffs, the clever
+egoist kept his three slaves faithful and close at his heels, like
+dogs.
+
+Taking the upper-road, so-called, to avoid the Close of the Cross,
+Rigou reached the square of Soulanges about eight o'clock.
+
+Just as he was fastening his rein to the post nearest the little door
+with three steps, a blind opened and Soudry showed his face, pitted
+with the small-pox, which the expression of his small black eyes
+rendered crafty.
+
+"Let's begin by taking a crust here before we start," he said; "we
+sha'n't get breakfast at Ville-aux-Fayes before one o'clock."
+
+Then he softly called a servant-girl, as young and pretty as Annette,
+who came down noiselessly, and received his order for ham and bread;
+after which he went himself to the cellar and fetched some wine.
+
+Rigou contemplated for the hundredth time the well-known dining-room,
+floored in oak, with stuccoed ceiling and cornice, its high wainscot
+and handsome cupboards finely painted, its porcelain stone and
+magnificent tall clock,--all the property of Mademoiselle Laguerre.
+The chair-backs were in the form of lyres, painted white and highly
+varnished; the seats were of green morocco with gilt nails. A massive
+mahogany table was covered with green oilcloth, with large squares of
+a deeper shade of green, and a plain border of the lighter. The floor,
+laid in Hungarian point, was carefully waxed by Urbain and showed the
+care which ex-waiting-women know how to exact out of their servants.
+
+"Bah! it cost too much," thought Rigou for the hundredth time. "I can
+eat as good a dinner in my room as here, and I have the income of the
+money this useless splendor would have wasted. Where is Madame
+Soudry?" he asked, as the mayor returned armed with a venerable
+bottle.
+
+"Asleep."
+
+"And you no longer disturb her slumbers?" said Rigou.
+
+The ex-gendarme winked with a knowing air, and pointed to the ham
+which Jeannette, the pretty maid, was just bringing in.
+
+"That will pick you up, a pretty bit like that," he said. "It was
+cured in the house; we cut into it only yesterday."
+
+"Where did you find her?" said the ex-Benedictine in Soudry's ear.
+
+"She is like the ham," replied the ex-gendarme, winking again; "I have
+had her only a week."
+
+Jeannette, still in her night-cap, with a short petticoat and her bare
+feet in slippers, had slipped on a bodice made with straps over the
+arms in true peasant fashion, over which she had crossed a neckerchief
+which did not entirely hide her fresh and youthful attractions, which
+were at least as appetizing as the ham she carried. Short and plump,
+with bare arms mottled red, ending in large, dimpled hands with short
+but well-made fingers, she was a picture of health. The face was that
+of a true Burgundian,--ruddy, but white about the temples, throat, and
+ears; the hair was chestnut; the corners of the eyes turned up towards
+the top of the ears; the nostrils were wide, the mouth sensual, and a
+little down lay along the cheeks; all this, together with a jaunty
+expression, tempered however by a deceitfully modest attitude, made
+her the model of a roguish servant-girl.
+
+"On my honor, Jeannette is as good as the ham," said Rigou. "If I
+hadn't an Annette I should want a Jeannette."
+
+"One is as good as the other," said the ex-gendarme, "for your Annette
+is fair and delicate. How is Madame Rigou,--is she asleep?" added
+Soudry, roughly, to let Rigou see he understood his joke.
+
+"She wakes with the cock, but she goes to roost with the hens,"
+replied Rigou. "As for me, I sit up and read the 'Constitutionnel.' My
+wife lets me sleep at night and in the morning too; she wouldn't come
+into my room for all the world."
+
+"It's just the other way here," replied Jeanette. "Madame sits up with
+the company playing cards; sometimes there are sixteen of them in the
+salon; Monsieur goes to bed at eight o'clock, and we get up at
+daylight--"
+
+"You think that's different," said Rigou, "but it comes to the same
+thing in the end. Well, my dear, you come to me and I'll send Annette
+here, and that will be the same thing and different too."
+
+"Old scamp, you'll make her ashamed," said Soudry.
+
+"Ha! gendarme; you want your field to yourself! Well, we all get our
+happiness where we can find it."
+
+Jeanette, by her master's order, disappeared to lay out his clothes.
+
+"You must have promised to marry her when your wife dies," said Rigou.
+
+"At your age and mine," replied Soudry, "there's no other way."
+
+"With girls of any ambition it would be one way to become a widower,"
+added Rigou; "especially if Madame Soudry found fault with Jeannette
+for her way of scrubbing the staircase."
+
+The remark made the two husbands pensive. When Jeannette returned and
+announced that all was ready, Soudry said to her, "Come and help me!"
+--a precaution which made the ex-monk smile.
+
+"There's a difference, indeed!" said he. "As for me, I'd leave you
+alone with Annette, my good friend."
+
+A quarter of an hour later Soudry, in his best clothes, got into the
+wicker carriage, and the two friends drove round the lake of Soulanges
+to Ville-aux-Fayes.
+
+"Look at it!" said Rigou, as they reached an eminence from which the
+chateau of Soulanges could be seen in profile.
+
+The old revolutionary put into the tone of his words all the hatred
+which the rural middle classes feel to the great chateaux and the
+great estates.
+
+"Yes, but I hope it will never be destroyed as long as I live," said
+Soudry. "The Comte de Soulanges was my general; he did me kindness; he
+got my pension, and he allows Lupin to manage the estate. After Lupin
+some of us will have it, and as long as the Soulanges family exists
+they and their property will be respected. Such folks are large-
+minded; they let every one make his profit, and they find it pays."
+
+"Yes, but the Comte de Soulanges has three children, who, at his
+death, may not agree," replied Rigou. "The husband of his daughter and
+his sons may go to law, and end by selling the lead and iron mines to
+manufacturers, from whom we shall manage to get them back."
+
+The chateau just then showed up in profile, as if to defy the ex-monk.
+
+"Ah! look at it; in those days they built well," cried Soudry. "But
+just now Monsieur le Comte is economizing, so as to make Soulanges the
+entailed estate of his peerage."
+
+"My dear friend," said Rigou, "entailed estates won't exist much
+longer."
+
+When the topic of public matters was exhausted, the worthy pair began
+to discuss the merits of their pretty maids in terms too Burgundian to
+be printed here. That inexhaustible subject carried them so far that
+before they knew it they saw the capital of the arrondissement over
+which Gaubertin reigned, and which we hope excites enough curiosity in
+the reader's mind to justify a short digression.
+
+The name of Ville-aux-Fayes, singular as it is, is explained as the
+corruption of the words (in low Latin) "Villa in Fago,"--the manor of
+the woods. This name indicates that a forest once covered the delta
+formed by the Avonne before it joins its confluent the Yonne. Some
+Frank doubtless built a fortress on the hill which slopes gently to
+the long plain. The savage conqueror separated his vantage-ground from
+the delta by a wide and deep moat and made the position a formidable
+one, essentially seignorial, convenient for enforcing tolls across the
+bridges and for protecting his rights of profit on all grains ground
+in the mills.
+
+That is the history of the beginning of Ville-aux-Fayes. Wherever
+feudal or ecclesiastical dominion established there we find gathered
+together interests, inhabitants, and, later, towns when the localities
+were in a position to maintain them and to found and develop great
+industries. The method of floating timber discovered by Jean Rouvet in
+1549, which required certain convenient stations to intercept it, was
+the making of Ville-aux-Fayes, which, up to that time, had been,
+compared to Soulanges, a mere village. Ville-aux-Fayes became a
+storage place for timber, which covered the shores of the two rivers
+for a distance of over thirty miles. The work of taking out of the
+water, computing the lost logs, and making the rafts which the Yonne
+carried down to the Seine, brought together a large concourse of
+workmen. Such a population increased consumption and encouraged trade.
+Thus Ville-aux-Fayes, which had but six hundred inhabitants at the end
+of the seventeenth century, had two thousand in 1790, and Gaubertin
+had now raised the number to four thousand, by the following means.
+
+When the legislative assembly decreed the new laying out of territory,
+Ville-aux-Fayes, which was situated where, geographically, a sub-
+prefecture was needed, was chosen instead of Soulanges as chief town
+or capital of the arrondissement. The increased population of Paris,
+by increasing the demand for and the value of wood as fuel,
+necessarily increased the commerce of Ville-aux-Fayes. Gaubertin had
+founded his fortune, after losing his stewardship, on this growing
+business, estimating the effect of peace on the population of Paris,
+which did actually increase by over one-third between 1815 and 1825.
+
+The shape of Ville-aux-Fayes followed the conformation of the ground.
+Each side of the promontory was lined with wharves. The dam to stop
+the timber from floating further down was just below a hill covered by
+the forest of Soulanges. Between the dam and the town lay a suburb.
+The lower town, covering the greater part of the delta, came down to
+the shores of the lake of the Avonne.
+
+Above the lower town some five hundred houses with gardens, standing
+on the heights, were grouped round three sides of the promontory, and
+enjoyed the varied scene of the diamond waters of the lake, the rafts
+in construction along its edge, and the piles of wood upon the shores.
+The waters, laden with timber from the river and the rapids which fed
+the mill-races and the sluices of a few manufactories, presented an
+animated scene, all the more charming because inclosed in the greenery
+of forests, while the long valley of Les Aigues offered a glorious
+contrast to the dark foil of the heights above the town itself.
+
+Gaubertin had built himself a house on the level of the delta,
+intending to make a place which should improve the locality and render
+the lower town as desirable as the upper. It was a modern house built
+of stone, with a balcony of iron railings, outside blinds, painted
+windows, and no ornament but a line of fret-work under the eaves, a
+slate roof, one story in height with a garret, a fine courtyard, and
+behind it an English garden bathed by the waters of the Avonne. The
+elegance of the place compelled the department to build a fine edifice
+nearly opposite to it for the sub-prefecture, provisionally lodged in
+a mere kennel. The town itself also built a town-hall. The law-courts
+had lately been installed in a new edifice; so that Ville-aux-Fayes
+owed to the active influence of its present mayor a number of really
+imposing public buildings. The gendarmerie had also built barracks
+which completed the square formed by the marketplace.
+
+These changes, on which the inhabitants prided themselves, were due to
+the impetus given by Gaubertin, who within a day or two had received
+the cross of the Legion of honor, in anticipation of the coming
+birthday of the king. In a town so situated and so modern there was of
+course, neither aristocracy nor nobility. Consequently, the rich
+merchants of Ville-aux-Fayes, proud of their own independence,
+willingly espoused the cause of the peasantry against a count of the
+Empire who had taken sides with the Restoration. To them the
+oppressors were the oppressed. The spirit of this commercial town was
+so well known to the government that they send there as sub-prefect a
+man with a conciliatory temper, a pupil of his uncle, the well-known
+des Lupeaulx, one of those men, accustomed to compromise, who are
+familiar with the difficulties and necessities of administration, but
+whom puritan politicians, doing infinitely worse things, call corrupt.
+
+The interior of Gaubertin's house was decorated with the unmeaning
+commonplaces of modern luxury. Rich papers with gold borders, bronze
+chandeliers, mahogany furniture of a new pattern, astral lamps, round
+tables with marble tops, white china with gilt lines for dessert, red
+morocco chairs and mezzo-tint engravings in the dining-room, and blue
+cashmere furniture in the salon,--all details of a chilling and
+perfectly unmeaning character, but which to the eyes of Ville-aux-
+Fayes seemed the last efforts of Sardanapalian luxury. Madame
+Gaubertin played the role of elegance with great effect; she assumed
+little airs and was lackadaisical at forty-five years of age, as
+though certain of the homage of her court.
+
+We ask those who really know France, if these houses--those of Rigou,
+Soudry, and Gaubertin--are not a perfect presentation of the village,
+the little town, and the seat of a sub-prefecture?
+
+Without being a man of mind, or a man of talent, Gaubertin had the
+appearance of being both. He owed the accuracy of his perception and
+his consummate art to an extreme keenness after gain. He desired
+wealth, not for his wife, not for his children, not for himself, not
+for his family, not for the reputation that money gives; after the
+gratification of his revenge (the hope of which kept him alive) he
+loved the touch of money, like Nucingen, who, it was said, kept
+fingering the gold in his pockets. The rush of business was
+Gaubertin's wine; and though he had his belly full of it, he had all
+the eagerness of one who was empty. As with valets of the drama,
+intrigues, tricks to play, mischief to organize, deceptions,
+commercial over-reachings, accounts to render and receive, disputes,
+and quarrels of self-interest, exhilarated him, kept his blood in
+circulation, and his bile flowing. He went and came on foot, on
+horseback, in a carriage, by water; he was at all auctions and timber
+sales in Paris, thinking of everything, keeping hundreds of wires in
+his hands and never getting them tangled.
+
+Quick, decided in his movements as in his ideas, short and squat in
+figure, with a thin nose, a fiery eye, an ear on the "qui vive," there
+was something of the hunting-dog about him. His brown face, very round
+and sunburned, from which the tanned ears stood out predominantly,--
+for he always wore a cap,--was in keeping with that character. His
+nose turned up; his tightly-closed lips could never have opened to say
+a kindly thing. His bushy whiskers formed a pair of black and shiny
+tufts beneath the highly-colored cheek-bones, and were lost in his
+cravat. Hair that was pepper-and-salt in color and frizzled naturally
+in stages like those of a judge's wig, seeming scorched by the fury of
+the fire which heated his brown skull and gleamed in his gray eyes
+surrounded by circular wrinkles (no doubt from a habit of always
+blinking when he looked across the country in full sunlight),
+completed the characteristics of his physiognomy. His lean and
+vigorous hands were hairy, knobbed, and claw-like, like those of men
+who do their share of labor. His personality was agreeable to those
+with whom he had to do, for he wrapped it in a misleading gayety; he
+knew how to talk a great deal without saying a word of what he meant
+to keep unsaid. He wrote little, so as to deny anything that escaped
+him which might prove unfavorable in its after effects upon his
+interests. His books and papers were kept by a cashier,--an honest
+man, whom men of Gaubertin's stamp always seek to get hold of, and
+whom they make, in their own selfish interests, their first dupe.
+
+When Rigou's little green chaise appeared, towards twelve o'clock, in
+the broad avenue which skirts the river, Gaubertin, in cap, boots, and
+jacket, was returning from the wharves. He hastened his steps,--
+feeling very sure that Rigou's object in coming over could only be
+"the great affair."
+
+"Good morning, gendarme; good morning, paunch of gall and wisdom," he
+said, giving a little slap to the stomachs of his two visitors. "We
+have business to talk over, and, faith! we'll do it glass in hand;
+that's the true way to take things."
+
+"If you do your business that way, you ought to be fatter than you
+are," said Rigou.
+
+"I work too hard; I'm not like you two, confined to the house and
+bewitched there, like old dotards. Well, well, after all that's the
+best way; you can do your business comfortably in an arm-chair, with
+your back to the fire and your belly at table; custom goes to you, I
+have to go after it. But now, come in, come in! the house is yours for
+the time you stay."
+
+A servant, in blue livery edged with scarlet, took the horse by the
+bridle and led him into the courtyard, where were the offices and the
+stable.
+
+Gaubertin left his guests to walk about the garden for a moment, while
+he went to give his orders and arrange about the breakfast.
+
+"Well, my wolves," he said, as he returned, rubbing his hands, "the
+gendarmerie of Soulanges were seen this morning at daybreak, marching
+towards Conches; no doubt they mean to arrest the peasants for
+depredations; ha, ha! things are getting warm, warm! By this time," he
+added, looking at his watch, "those fellows may have been arrested."
+
+"Probably," said Rigou.
+
+"Well, what do you all say over there? Has anything been decided?"
+
+"What is there to decide?" asked Rigou. "We have no part in it," he
+added, looking at Soudry.
+
+"How do you mean nothing to decide? If Les Aigues is sold as the
+result of our coalition, who is to gain five or six hundred thousand
+francs out of it? Do you expect me to, all alone? No, my inside is not
+strong enough to split up two millions, with three children to
+establish, and a wife who hasn't the first idea about the value of
+money; no, I must have associates. Here's the gendarme, he has plenty
+of funds all ready. I know he doesn't hold a single mortgage that
+isn't ready to mature; he only lends now on notes at sight of which I
+endorse. I'll go into this thing by the amount of eight hundred
+thousand francs; my son, the judge, two hundred thousand; and I count
+on the gendarme for two hundred thousand more; now, how much will you
+put in, skull-cap?"
+
+"All the rest," replied Rigou, stiffly.
+
+"The devil! well, I wish I had my hand where your heart is!" exclaimed
+Gaubertin. "Now what are you going to do?"
+
+"Whatever you do; tell your plan."
+
+"My plan," said Gaubertin, "is to take double, and sell half to the
+Conches, and Cerneux, and Blangy folks who want to buy. Soudry has his
+clients, and you yours, and I, mine. That's not the difficulty. The
+thing is, how are we going to arrange among ourselves? How shall we
+divide up the great lots?"
+
+"Nothing easier," said Rigou. "We'll each take what we like best. I,
+for one, shall stand in nobody's way; I'll take the woods in common
+with Soudry and my son-in-law; the timber has been so injured that you
+won't care for it now, and you may have all the rest. Faith, it is
+worth the money you'll put into it!"
+
+"Will you sign that agreement?" said Soudry.
+
+"A written agreement is worth nothing," replied Gaubertin. "Besides,
+you know I am playing above board; I have perfect confidence in
+Rigou, and he shall be the purchaser."
+
+"That will satisfy me," said Rigou.
+
+"I will make only one condition," added Gaubertin. "I must have the
+pavilion of the Rendezvous, with all its appurtenances, and fifty
+acres of the surrounding land. I shall make it my country-house, and
+it shall be near my woods. Madame Gaubertin--Madame Isaure, for that's
+what she wants people to call her--says she shall make it her villa."
+
+"I'm willing," said Rigou.
+
+"Well, now, between ourselves," continued Gaubertin, after looking
+about him on all sides and making sure that no one could overhear him,
+"do you think they are capable of striking a blow?"
+
+"Such as?" asked Rigou, who never allowed himself to understand a
+hint.
+
+"Well, if the worst of the band, the best shot, sent a ball whistling
+round the ears of the count--just to frighten him?"
+
+"He's a man to rush at an assailant and collar him."
+
+"Michaud, then."
+
+"Michaud would do nothing at the moment, but he'd watch and spy till
+he found out the man and those who instigated him."
+
+"You are right," said Gaubertin; "those peasants must make a riot and
+a few must be sent to the galleys. Well, so much the better for us;
+the authorities will catch the worst, whom we shall want to get rid of
+after they've done the work. There are those blackguards, the Tonsards
+and Bonnebault--"
+
+"Tonsard is ready for mischief," said Soudry, "I know that; and we'll
+work him up by Vaudoyer and Courtecuisse."
+
+"I'll answer for Courtecuisse," said Rigou.
+
+"And I hold Vaudoyer in the hollow of my hand."
+
+"Be cautious!" said Rigou; "before everything else be cautious."
+
+"Now, papa skull-cap, do you mean to tell me that there's any harm in
+speaking of things as they are? Is it we who are indicting and
+arresting, or gleaning or depredating? If Monsieur le comte knows what
+he's about and leases the woods to the receiver-general it is all up
+with our schemes,--'Farewell baskets, the vintage is o'er'; in that
+case you will lose more than I. What we say here is between ourselves
+and for ourselves; for I certainly wouldn't say a word to Vaudoyer
+that I couldn't repeat to God and man. But it is not forbidden, I
+suppose, to profit by any events that may take place. The peasantry of
+this canton are hot-headed; the general's exactions, his severity,
+Michaud's persecutions, and those of his keepers have exasperated
+them; to-day things have come to a crisis and I'll bet there's a
+rumpus going on now with the gendarmerie. And so, let's go and
+breakfast."
+
+Madame Gaubertin came into the garden just then. She was a rather fair
+woman with long curls, called English, hanging down her cheeks, who
+played the style of sentimental virtue, pretended never to have known
+love, talked platonics to all the men about her, and kept the
+prosecuting-attorney at her beck and call. She was given to caps with
+large bows, but preferred to wear only her hair. She danced, and at
+forty-five years of age had the mincing manner of a girl; her feet,
+however, were large and her hands frightful. She wished to be called
+Isaure, because among her other oddities and absurdities she had the
+taste to repudiate the name of Gaubertin as vulgar. Her eyes were
+light and her hair of an undecided color, something like dirty
+nankeen. Such as she was, she was taken as a model by a number of
+young ladies, who stabbed the skies with their glances, and posed as
+angels.
+
+"Well, gentlemen," she said, bowing, "I have some strange news for
+you. The gendarmerie have returned."
+
+"Did they make any prisoners?"
+
+"None; the general, it seems, had previously obtained the pardon of
+the depredators. It was given in honor of this happy anniversary of
+the king's restoration to France."
+
+The three associates looked at each other.
+
+"He is cleverer than I thought for, that big cuirassier!" said
+Gaubertin. "Well, come to breakfast. After all, the game is not lost,
+only postponed; it is your affair now, Rigou."
+
+Soudry and Rigou drove back disappointed, not being able as yet to
+plan any other catastrophe to serve their ends and relying, as
+Gaubertin advised, on what might turn up. Like certain Jacobins at the
+outset of the Revolution who were furious with Louis XVI.'s
+conciliations, and who provoked severe measures at court in the hope
+of producing anarchy, which to them meant fortune and power, the
+formidable enemies of General Montcornet staked their present hopes on
+the severity which Michaud and his keepers were likely to employ
+against future depredators. Gaubertin promised them his assistance,
+without explaining who were his co-operators, for he did not wish them
+to know about his relations with Sibilet. Nothing can equal the
+prudence of a man of Gaubertin's stamp, unless it be that of an ex-
+gendarme or an unfrocked priest. This plot could not have been brought
+to a successful issue,--a successfully evil issue,--unless by three
+such men as these, steeped in hatred and self-interest.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+VICTORY WITHOUT A FIGHT
+
+Madame Michaud's fears were the effect of that second sight which
+comes of true passion. Exclusively absorbed by one only being, the
+soul finally grasps the whole moral world which surrounds that being;
+it sees clearly. A woman when she loves feels the same presentiments
+which disquiet her later when a mother.
+
+While the poor young woman listened to the confused voices coming from
+afar across an unknown space, a scene was really happening in the
+tavern of the Grand-I-Vert which threatened her husband's life.
+
+About five o'clock that morning early risers had seen the gendarmerie
+of Soulanges on its way to Conches. The news circulated rapidly; and
+those whom it chiefly interested were much surprised to learn from
+others, who lived on high ground, that a detachment commanded by the
+lieutenant of Ville-aux-Fayes had marched through the forest of Les
+Aigues. As it was a Monday, there were already good reasons why the
+peasants should be at the tavern; but it was also the eve of the
+anniversary of the restoration of the Bourbons, and though the
+frequenters of Tonsard's den had no need of that "august cause" (as
+they said in those days) to explain their presence at the Grand-I-
+Vert, they did not fail to make the most of it if the mere shadow of
+an official functionary appeared.
+
+Vaudoyer, Courtecuisse, Tonsard and his family, Godain, and an old
+vine-dresser named Laroche, were there early in the morning. The
+latter was a man who scratched a living from day to day; he was one of
+the delinquents collected in Blangy under the sort of subscription
+invented by Sibilet and Courtecuisse to disgust the general by the
+results of his indictments. Blangy had supplied three men, twelve
+women, also eight girls and five boys for whom parent were answerable,
+all of whom were in a condition of pauperism; but they were the only
+ones who could be found that were so. The year 1823 had been a very
+profitable one to the peasantry, and 1826 as likely, through the
+enormous quantity of wine yielded, to bring them in a good deal of
+money; add to this the works at Les Aigues, undertaken by the general,
+which had put a great deal more in circulation throughout the three
+districts which bordered on the estate. It had therefore been quite
+difficult to find in Blangy, Conches, and Cerneux, one hundred and
+twenty indigent persons against whom to bring the suits; and in order
+to do so, they had taken old women, mothers, and grandmothers of those
+who owned property but who possessed nothing of their own, like
+Tonsard's mother. Laroche, an old laborer, possessed absolutely
+nothing; he was not, like Tonsard, hot-blooded and vicious,--his
+motive power was a cold, dull hatred; he toiled in silence with a
+sullen face; work was intolerable to him, but he had to work to live;
+his features were hard and their expression repulsive. Though sixty
+years old, he was still strong, except that his back was bent; he saw
+no future before him, no spot that he could call his own, and he
+envied those who possessed the land; for this reason he had no pity on
+the forests of Les Aigues, and took pleasure in despoiling them
+uselessly.
+
+"Will they be allowed to put us in prison?" he was saying. "After
+Conches they'll come to Blangy. I'm an old offender, and I shall get
+three months."
+
+"What can we do against the gendarmerie, old drunkard?" said Vaudoyer.
+
+"Why! cut the legs of their horses with our scythes. That'll bring
+them down; their muskets are not loaded, and when they find us ten to
+one against them they'll decamp. If the three villages all rose and
+killed two or three gendarmes, they couldn't guillotine the whole of
+us. They'd have to give way, as they did on the other side of
+Burgundy, where they sent a regiment. Bah! that regiment came back
+again, and the peasants cut the woods just as much as they ever did."
+
+"If we kill," said Vaudoyer; "it is better to kill one man; the
+question is, how to do it without danger and frighten those Arminacs
+so that they'll be driven out of the place."
+
+"Which one shall we kill?" asked Laroche.
+
+"Michaud," said Courtecuisse. "Vaudoyer is right, he's perfectly
+right. You'll see that when a keeper is sent to the shades there won't
+be one of them willing to stay even in broad daylight to watch us. Now
+they're there night and day,--demons!"
+
+"Wherever one goes," said old Mother Tonsard,--who was seventy-eight
+years old, and presented a parchment face honey-combed with the small-
+pox, lighted by a pair of green eyes, and framed with dirty-white
+hair, which escaped in strands from a red handkerchief,--"wherever one
+goes, there they are! they stop us, they open our bundles, and if
+there's a single branch, a single twig of a miserable hazel, they
+seize the whole bundle, and they say they'll arrest us. Ha, the
+villains! there's no deceiving them; if they suspect you, you've got
+to undo the bundle. Dogs! all three are not worth a farthing! Yes,
+kill 'em, and it won't ruin France, I tell you."
+
+"Little Vatel is not so bad," said Madame Tonsard.
+
+"He!" said Laroche, "he does his business, like the others; when
+there's a joke going he'll joke with you, but you are none the better
+with him for that. He's worse than the rest,--heartless to poor folks,
+like Michaud himself."
+
+"Michaud has got a pretty wife, though," said Nicolas Tonsard.
+
+"She's with young," said the old woman; "and if this thing goes on
+there'll be a queer kind of baptism for the little one when she
+calves."
+
+"Oh! those Arminacs!" cried Marie Tonsard; "there's no laughing with
+them; and if you did, they'd threaten to arrest you."
+
+"You've tried your hand at cajoling them, have you?" said
+Courtecuisse.
+
+"You may bet on that."
+
+"Well," said Tonsard with a determined air, "they are men like other
+men, and they can be got rid of."
+
+"But I tell you," said Marie, continuing her topic, "they won't be
+cajoled; I don't know what's the matter with them; that bully at the
+pavilion, he's married, but Vatel, Gaillard, and Steingel are not;
+they've not a woman belonging to them; indeed, there's not a woman in
+the place who would marry them."
+
+"Well, we shall see how things go at the harvest and the vintage,"
+said Tonsard.
+
+"They can't stop the gleaning," said the old woman.
+
+"I don't know that," remarked Madame Tonsard. "Groison said that the
+mayor was going to publish a notice that no one should glean without a
+certificate of pauperism; and who's to give that certificate? Himself,
+of course. He won't give many, I tell you! And they say he is going to
+issue an order that no one shall enter the fields till the carts are
+all loaded."
+
+"Why, the fellow's a pestilence!" cried Tonsard, beside himself with
+rage.
+
+"I heard that only yesterday," said Madame Tonsard. "I offered Groison
+a glass of brandy to get something out of him."
+
+"Groison! there's another lucky fellow!" said Vaudoyer, "they've built
+him a house and given him a good wife, and he's got an income and
+clothes fit for a king. There was I, field-keeper for twenty years,
+and all I got was the rheumatism."
+
+"Yes, he's very lucky," said Godain, "he owns property--"
+
+"And we go without, like the fools that we are," said Vaudoyer. "Come,
+let's be off and find out what's going on at Conches; they are not so
+patient over there as we are."
+
+"Come on," said Laroche, who was none too steady on his legs. "If I
+don't exterminate one of two of those fellows may I lose my name."
+
+"You!" said Tonsard, "you'd let them put the whole district in prison;
+but I--if they dare to touch my old mother, there's my gun and it
+never misses."
+
+"Well," said Laroche to Vaudoyer, "I tell you that if they make a
+single prisoner at Conches one gendarme shall fall."
+
+"He has said it, old Laroche!" cried Courtecuisse.
+
+"He has said it," remarked Vaudoyer, "but he hasn't done it, and he
+won't do it. What good would it do to get yourself guillotined for
+some gendarme or other? No, if you kill, I say, kill Michaud."
+
+During this scene Catherine Tonsard stood sentinel at the door to warn
+the drinkers to keep silent if any one passed. In spite of their half-
+drunken legs they sprang rather than walked out of the tavern, and
+their bellicose temper started them at a good pace on the road to
+Conches, which led for over a mile along the park wall of Les Aigues.
+
+Conches was a true Burgundian village, with one street, which was
+crossed by the main road. The houses were built either of brick or of
+cobblestones, and were squalid in aspect. Following the mail-road from
+Ville-aux-Fayes, the village was seen from the rear and there it
+presented rather a picturesque effect. Between the road and the
+Ronquerolles woods, which continued those of Les Aigues and crowned
+the heights, flowed a little river, and several houses, rather
+prettily grouped, enlivened the scene. The church and the parsonage
+stood alone and were seen from the park of Les Aigues, which came
+nearly up to them. In front of the church was a square bordered by
+trees, where the conspirators of the Grand-I-Vert saw the gendarmerie
+and hastened their already hasty steps. Just then three men on
+horseback rode rapidly out of the park of Les Aigues and the peasants
+at once recognized the general, his groom, and Michaud the bailiff,
+who came at a gallop into the square. Tonsard and his party arrived a
+minute or two after them. The delinquents, men and women, had made no
+resistance, and were standing between five of the Soulanges gendarmes
+and fifteen of those from Ville-aux-Fayes. The whole village had
+assembled. The fathers, mothers, and children of the prisoners were
+going and coming and bringing them what they might want in prison. It
+was a curious scene, that of a population one and all exasperated, but
+nearly all silent, as though they had made up their minds to a course
+of action. The old women and the young ones alone spoke. The children,
+boys and girls, were perched on piles of wood and heaps of stones to
+get a better sight of what was happening.
+
+"They have chosen their time, those hussars of the guillotine," said
+one old woman; "they are making a fete of it."
+
+"Are you going to let 'em carry of your man like that? How shall you
+manage to live for three months?--the best of the year, too, when he
+could earn so much."
+
+"It's they who rob us," replied the woman, looking at the gendarmes
+with a threatening air.
+
+"What do you mean by that, old woman?" said the sergeant. "If you
+insult us it won't take long to settle you."
+
+"I meant nothing," said the old woman, in a humble and piteous tone.
+
+"I heard you say something just now you may have cause to repent of."
+
+"Come, come, be calm, all of you," said the mayor of Conches, who was
+also the postmaster. "What the devil is the use of talking? These men,
+as you know very well, are under orders and must obey."
+
+"That's true; it's the owner of Les Aigues who persecutes us-- But
+patience!"
+
+Just then the general rode into the square and his arrival caused a
+few groans which did not trouble him in the least. He rode straight up
+to the lieutenant in command, and after saying a few words gave him a
+paper; the officer then turned to his men and said: "Release your
+prisoners; the general has obtained their pardon."
+
+General Montcornet was then speaking to the mayor; after a few
+moments' conversation in a low tone, the latter, addressing the
+delinquents, who expected to sleep in prison and were a good deal
+surprised to find themselves free, said to them:--
+
+"My friends, thank Monsieur le comte. You owe your release to him. He
+went to Paris and obtained your pardon in honor of the anniversary of
+the king's restoration. I hope that in future you will conduct
+yourself properly to a man who has behaved so well to you, and that
+you will in future respect his property. Long live the King!"
+
+The peasants shouted "Long live the King!" with enthusiasm, to avoid
+shouting, "Hurrah for the Comte de Montcornet!"
+
+The scene was a bit of policy arranged between the general, the
+prefect, and the attorney-general; for they were all anxious, while
+showing enough firmness to keep the local authorities up to their duty
+and awe the country-people, to be as gentle as possible, fully
+realizing as they did the difficulties of the question. In fact, if
+resistance had occurred, the government would have been in a tight
+place. As Laroche truly said, they could not guillotine or even
+convict a whole community.
+
+The general invited the mayor of Conches, the lieutenant, and the
+sergeant to breakfast. The conspirators of the Grand-I-Vert adjourned
+to the tavern of Conches, where the delinquents spent in drink the
+money their relations had given them to take to prison, sharing it
+with the Blangy people, who were naturally part of the wedding,--the
+word "wedding" being applied indiscriminately in Burgundy to all such
+rejoicings. To drink, quarrel, fight, eat and go home drunk and sick,
+--that is a wedding to these peasants.
+
+The general, who had come by the park, took his guests back through
+the forest that they might see for themselves the injury done to the
+timber, and so judge of the importance of the question.
+
+Just as Rigou and Soudry were on their way back to Blangy, the count
+and countess, Emile Blondet, the lieutenant of gendarmerie, the
+sergeant, and the mayor of Conches were finishing their breakfast in
+the splendid dining-room where Bouret's luxury had left the delightful
+traces already described by Blondet in his letter to Nathan.
+
+"It would be a terrible pity to abandon this beautiful home," said the
+lieutenant, who had never before been at Les Aigues, and who was
+glancing over a glass of champagne at the circling nymphs that
+supported the ceiling.
+
+"We intend to defend it to the death," said Blondet.
+
+"If I say that," continued the lieutenant, looking at his sergeant as
+if to enjoin silence, "it is because the general's enemies are not
+only among the peasantry--"
+
+The worthy man was quite moved by the excellence of the breakfast, the
+magnificence of the silver service, the imperial luxury that
+surrounded him, and Blondet's clever talk excited him as much as the
+champagne he had imbibed.
+
+"Enemies! have I enemies?" said the general, surprised.
+
+"He, so kind!" added the countess.
+
+"But you are on bad terms with our mayor, Monsieur Gaubertin," said
+the lieutenant. "It would be wise, for the sake of the future, to be
+reconciled with him."
+
+"With him!" cried the count. "Then you don't know that he was my
+former steward, and a swindler!"
+
+"A swindler no longer," said the lieutenant, "for he is mayor of
+Ville-aux-Fayes."
+
+"Ha, ha!" laughed Blondet, "the lieutenant's wit is keen; evidently a
+mayor is essentially an honest man."
+
+The lieutenant, convinced by the count's words that it was useless to
+attempt to enlighten him, said no more on that subject, and the
+conversation changed.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE FOREST AND THE HARVEST
+
+The scene at Conches had, apparently, a good effect on the peasantry;
+on the other hand, the count's faithful keepers were more than ever
+watchful that only dead wood should be gathered in the forest of Les
+Aigues. But for the last twenty years the woods had been so thoroughly
+cleared out that very little else than live wood was now there; and
+this the peasantry set about killing, in preparation for winter, by a
+simple process, the results of which could only be discovered in the
+course of time. Tonsard's mother went daily into the forest; the
+keepers saw her enter; knew where she would come out; watched for her
+and made her open her bundle, where, to be sure, were only fallen
+branches, dried chips, and broken and withered twigs. The old woman
+would whine and complain at the distance she had to go at her age to
+gather such a miserable bunch of fagots. But she did not tell that she
+had been in the thickest part of the wood and had removed the earth at
+the base of certain young trees, round which she had then cut off a
+ring of bark, replacing the earth, moss, and dead leaves just as they
+were before she touched them. It was impossible that any one could
+discover this annular incision, made, not like a cut, but more like
+the ripping or gnawing of animals or those destructive insects called
+in different regions borers, or turks, or white worms, which are the
+first stage of cockchafers. These destructive pests are fond of the
+bark of trees; they get between the bark and the sap-wood and eat
+their way round. If the tree is large enough for the insect to pass
+into its second state (of larvae, in which it remains dormant until
+its second metamorphose) before it has gone round the trunk, the tree
+lives, because so long as even a small bit of the sap-wood remains
+covered by the bark, the tree will still grow and recover itself. To
+realize to what a degree entomology affects agriculture, horticulture,
+and all earth products, we must know that naturalists like Latreille,
+the Comte Dejean, Klugg of Berlin, Gene of Turin, etc., find that the
+vast majority of all known insects live at the sacrifice of
+vegetation; that the coleoptera (a catalogue of which has lately been
+published by Monsieur Dejean) have twenty-seven thousand species, and
+that, in spite of the most earnest research on the part of
+entomologists of all countries, there is an enormous number of species
+of whom they cannot trace the triple transformations which belong to
+all insects; that there is, in short, not only a special insect to
+every plant, but that all terrestrial products, however much they may
+be manipulated by human industry, have their particular parasite. Thus
+flax, after covering the human body and hanging the human being, after
+roaming the world on the back of an army, becomes writing-paper; and
+those who write or who read are familiar with the habits and morals of
+an insect called the "paper-louse," an insect of really marvellous
+celerity and behavior; it undergoes its mysterious transformations in
+a ream of white paper which you have carefully put away; you see it
+gliding and frisking along in its shining robe, that looks like
+isinglass or mica,--truly a little fish of another element.
+
+The borer is the despair of the land-owner; he works underground; no
+Sicilian vespers for him until he becomes a cockchafer! If the
+populations only realized with what untold disasters they are
+threatened in case they let the cockchafers and the caterpillars get
+the upper hand, they would pay more attention than they do to
+municipal regulations.
+
+Holland came near perishing; its dikes were undermined by the teredo,
+and science is unable to discover the insect from which that mollusk
+derives, just as science still remains ignorant of the metamorphoses
+of the cochineal. The ergot, or spur, of rye is apparently a
+population of insects where the genius of science has been able, so
+far, to discover only one slight movement. Thus, while awaiting the
+harvest and gleaning, fifty old women imitated the borer at the feet
+of five or six hundred trees which were fated to become skeletons and
+to put forth no more leaves in the spring. They were carefully chosen
+in the least accessible places, so that the surrounding branches
+concealed them.
+
+Who conveyed the secret information by which this was done? No one.
+Courtecuisse happened to complain in Tonsard's tavern of having found
+a tree wilting in his garden; it seemed he said, to have a disease,
+and he suspected a borer; for he, Courtecuisse, knew what borers were,
+and if they once circled a tree just below the ground, the tree died.
+Thereupon he explained the process. The old women at once set to work
+at the same destruction, with the mystery and cleverness of gnomes;
+and their efforts were doubled by the rules now enforced by the mayor
+of Blangy and necessarily followed by the mayors of the adjoining
+districts.
+
+The great land-owners of the department applauded General de
+Montcornet's course; and the prefect in his private drawing-room
+declared that if, instead of living in Paris, other land-owners would
+come and live on their estates and follow such a course together, a
+solution of the difficulty could be obtained; for certain measures,
+added the prefect, ought to be taken, and taken in concert, modified
+by benefactions and by an enlightened philanthropy, such as every one
+could see actuated in General Montcornet.
+
+The general and his wife, assisted by the abbe, tried the effects of
+such benevolence. They studied the subject, and endeavored to show by
+incontestable results to those who pillaged them that more money could
+be made by legitimate toil. They supplied flax and paid for the
+spinning; the countess had the thread woven into linen suitable for
+towels, aprons, and coarse napkins for kitchen use, and for
+underclothing for the very poor. The general began improvements which
+needed many laborers, and he employed none but those in the adjoining
+districts. Sibilet was in charge of the works and the Abbe Brossette
+gave the countess lists of the most needy, and often brought them to
+her himself. Madame de Montcornet attended to these matters personally
+in the great antechamber which opened upon the portico. It was a
+beautiful waiting-room, floored with squares of white and red marble,
+warmed by a porcelain stove, and furnished with benches covered with
+red plush.
+
+It was there that one morning, just before harvest, old Mother Tonsard
+brought her granddaughter Catherine, who had to make, she said, a
+dreadful confession,--dreadful for the honor of a poor but honest
+family. While the old woman addressed the countess Catherine stood in
+an attitude of conscious guilt. Then she related on her own account
+the unfortunate "situation" in which she was placed, which she had
+confided to none but her grandmother; for her mother, she knew, would
+turn her out, and her father, an honorable man, might kill her. If she
+only had a thousand francs she could be married to a poor laborer
+named Godain, who KNEW ALL, and who loved her like a brother; he could
+buy a poor bit of ground and build a cottage if she had that sum. It
+was very touching. The countess promised the money; resolving to
+devote the price of some fancy to this marriage. The happy marriages
+of Michaud and Groison encouraged her. Besides, such a wedding would
+be a good example to the people of the neighborhood and stimulate to
+virtuous conduct. The marriage of Catherine Tonsard and Godain was
+accordingly arranged by means of the countess's thousand francs.
+
+Another time a horrible old woman, Mother Bonnebault, who lived in a
+hut between the gate of Conches and the village, brought back a great
+bundle of skeins of linen thread.
+
+"Madame la comtesse has done wonders," said the abbe, full of hope as
+to the moral progress of his savages. "That old woman did immense
+damage to your woods, but now she has no time for it; she stays at
+home and spins from morning till night; her time is all taken up and
+well paid for."
+
+Peace reigned everywhere. Groison made very satisfactory reports;
+depredations seemed to have ceased, and it is even possible that the
+state of the neighborhood and the feeling of the inhabitants might
+really have changed if it had not been for the revengeful eagerness of
+Gaubertin, the cabals of the leading society of Soulanges, and the
+intrigues of Rigou, who one and all, with "the affair" in view, blew
+the embers of hatred and crime in the hearts of the peasantry of the
+valley des Aigues.
+
+The keepers still complained of finding a great many branches cut with
+shears in the deeper parts of the wood and left to dry, evidently as a
+provision for winter. They watched for the delinquents without ever
+being able to catch them. The count, assisted by Groison, had given
+certificates of pauperism to only thirty or forty of the real poor of
+the district; but the other two mayors had been less strict. The more
+clement the count showed himself in the affair at Conches the more
+determined he was to enforce the laws about gleaning, which had now
+degenerated into theft. He did not interfere with the management of
+three of his farms which were leased to tenants, nor with those whose
+tenants worked for his profit, of which he had a number; but he
+managed six farms himself, each of about two hundred acres, and he now
+published a notice that it was forbidden, under pain of being arrested
+and made to pay the fine imposed by the courts, to enter those fields
+before the crop was carried away. The order concerned only his own
+immediate property. Rigou, who knew the country well, had let his
+farm-lands in portions and on short leases to men who knew how to get
+in their own crops, and who paid him in grain; therefore gleaning did
+not affect him. The other proprietors were peasants, and no nefarious
+gleaning was attempted on their land.
+
+When the harvest began the count went himself to Michaud to see how
+things were going on. Groison, who advised him to do this, was to be
+present himself at the gleaning of each particular field. The
+inhabitants of cities can have no idea what gleaning is to the
+inhabitants of the country; the passion of these sons of the soil for
+it seems inexplicable; there are women who will give up well-paid
+employments to glean. The wheat they pick up seems to them sweeter
+than any other; and the provision they thus make for their chief and
+most substantial food has to them an extraordinary attraction. Mothers
+take their babes and their little girls and boys; the feeblest old men
+drag themselves into the wheat-fields; and even those who own property
+are paupers for the nonce. All gleaners appear in rags.
+
+The count and Michaud were present on horseback when the first
+tattered batch entered the first fields from which the wheat had been
+carried. It was ten o'clock in the morning. August had been a hot
+month, the sky was cloudless, blue as a periwinkle; the earth was
+baked, the wheat flamed, the harvestmen worked with their faces
+scorched by the reflection of the sun-rays on the hard and arid earth.
+All were silent, their shirts wet with perspiration; while from time
+to time, they slaked their thirst with water from round, earthenware
+jugs, furnished with two handles and a mouth-piece stoppered with a
+willow stick.
+
+At the father end of the stubble-field stood the carts which contained
+the sheaves, and near them a group of at least a hundred beings who
+far exceeded the hideous conceptions of Murillo and Teniers, the
+boldest painters of such scenes, or of Callot, that poet of the
+fantastic in poverty. The pictured bronze legs, the bare heads, the
+ragged garments so curiously faded, so damp with grease, so darned and
+spotted and discolored, in short, the painters' ideal of the material
+of abject poverty was far surpassed by this scene; while the
+expression on those faces, greedy, anxious, doltish, idiotic, savage,
+showed the everlasting advantage which nature possesses over art by
+its comparison with the immortal compositions of those princes of
+color. There were old women with necks like turkeys, and hairless,
+scarlet eyelids, who stretched their heads forward like setters before
+a partridge; there were children, silent as soldiers under arms,
+little girls who stamped like animals waiting for their food; the
+natures of childhood and old age were crushed beneath the fierceness
+of a savage greed,--greed for the property of others now their own by
+long abuse. All eyes were savage, all gestures menacing; but every one
+kept silence in presence of the count, the field-keeper, and the
+bailiff. At this moment all classes were represented,--the great land-
+owners, the farmers, the working men, the paupers; the social question
+was defined to the eye; hunger had convoked the actors in the scene.
+The sun threw into relief the hard and hollow features of those faces;
+it burned the bare feet dusty with the soil; children were present
+with no clothing but a torn blouse, their blond hair tangled with
+straw and chips; some women brought their babes just able to walk, and
+left them rolling in the furrows.
+
+The gloomy scene was harrowing to the old soldier, whose heart was
+kind, and he said to Michaud: "It pains me to see it. One must know
+the importance of these measures to be able to insist upon them."
+
+"If every land-owner followed your example, lived on his property, and
+did the good that you and yours are doing, general, there would be, I
+won't say no poor, for they are always with us, but no poor man who
+could not live by his labor."
+
+"The mayors of Conches, Cerneux, and Soulanges have sent us all their
+paupers," said Groison, who had now looked at the certificates; "they
+had no right to do so."
+
+"No, but our people will go to their districts," said the general.
+"For the time being we have done enough by preventing the gleaning
+before the sheaves were taken away; we had better go step by step," he
+added, turning to leave the field.
+
+"Did you hear him?" said Mother Tonsard to the old Bonnebault woman,
+for the general's last words were said in a rather louder tone than
+the rest, and reached the ears of the two old women who were posted in
+the road which led beside the field.
+
+"Yes, yes! we haven't got to the end yet,--a tooth to-day and to-
+morrow an ear; if they could find a sauce for our livers they'd eat
+'em as they do a calf's!" said old Bonnebault, whose threatening face
+was turned in profile to the general as he passed her, though in the
+twinkling of an eye she changed its expression to one of hypocritical
+softness and submission as she hastened to make him a profound
+curtsey.
+
+"So you are gleaning, are you, though my wife helps you to earn so
+much money?"
+
+"Hey! my dear gentleman, may God preserve you in good health! but,
+don't you see, my grandson squanders all I earn, and I'm forced to
+scratch up a little wheat to get bread in the winter,--yes, yes, I
+glean just a bit; it all helps."
+
+The gleaning proved of little profit to the gleaners. The farmers and
+tenant-farmers, finding themselves backed up, took care that their
+wheat was well reaped, and superintended the making of the sheaves and
+their safe removal, so that little or none of the pillage of former
+years could take place.
+
+Accustomed to get a good proportion of wheat in their gleaning, the
+false as well as the true poor, forgetting the count's pardon at
+Conches, now felt a deep but silent anger against him, which was
+aggravated by the Tonsards, Courtecuisse, Bonnebault, Laroche,
+Vaudoyer, Godain, and their adherents. Matters went worse still after
+the vintage; for the gathering of the refuse grape was not allowed
+until Sibilet had examined the vines with extreme care. This last
+restriction exasperated these sons of the soil to the highest pitch;
+but when so great a social distance separates the angered class from
+the threatened class, words and threats are lost; nothing comes to the
+surface or is perceived but facts; meantime the malcontents work
+underground like moles.
+
+The fair of Soulanges took place as usual quite peacefully, except for
+certain jarrings between the leading society and the second-class
+society of Soulanges, brought about by the despotism of the queen, who
+could not tolerate the empire founded and established over the heart
+of the brilliant Lupin by the beautiful Euphemie Plissoud, for she
+herself laid permanent claim to his fickle fervors.
+
+The count and countess did not appear at the fair nor at the Tivoli
+fete; and that, again, was counted a wrong by the Soudrys, the
+Gaubertins, and their adherents; it was pride, it was disdain, said
+the Soudry salon. During this time the countess was filling the void
+caused by Emile's return to Paris with the immense interest and
+pleasure all fine souls take in the good they are doing, or think they
+do; and the count, for his part, applied himself no less zealously to
+changes and ameliorations in the management of his estate, which he
+expected and believed would modify and benefit the condition of the
+people and hence their characters. Madame de Montcornet, assisted by
+the advice and experience of the Abbe Brossette, came, little by
+little, to have a thorough and statistical knowledge of all the poor
+families of the district, their respective condition, their wants,
+their means of subsistence, and the sort of help she must give to each
+to obtain work so as not to make them lazy or idle.
+
+The countess had placed Genevieve Niseron, La Pechina, in a convent at
+Auxerre, under pretext of having her taught to sew that she might
+employ her in her own house, but really to save her from the shameful
+attempts of Nicolas Tonsard, whom Rigou had managed to save from the
+conscription. The countess also believed that a religious education,
+the cloister, and monastic supervision, would subdue the ardent
+passions of the precocious little girl, whose Montenegrin blood seemed
+to her like a threatening flame which might one day set fire to the
+domestic happiness of her faithful Olympe.
+
+So all was at peace at the chateau des Aigues. The count, misled by
+Sibilet, reassured by Michaud, congratulated himself on his firmness,
+and thanked his wife for having contributed by her benevolence to the
+immense comfort of their tranquillity. The question of the sale of his
+timber was laid aside till he should go to Paris and arrange with the
+dealers. He had not the slightest notion of how to do business, and he
+was in total ignorance of the power wielded by Gaubertin over the
+current of the Yonne,--the main line of conveyance which supplied the
+timber of the Paris market.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE GREYHOUND
+
+Towards the middle of September Emile Blondet, who had gone to Paris
+to publish a book, returned to refresh himself at Les Aigues and to
+think over the work he was planning for the winter. At Les Aigues, the
+loving and sincere qualities which succeed adolescence in a young
+man's soul reappeared in the used-up journalist.
+
+"What a fine soul!" was the comment of the count and the countess when
+they spoke of him.
+
+Men who are accustomed to move among the abysses of social nature, to
+understand all and to repress nothing, make themselves an oasis in the
+heart, where they forget their perversities and those of others; they
+become within that narrow and sacred circle,--saints; there, they
+possess the delicacy of women, they give themselves up to a momentary
+realization of their ideal, they become angelic for some one being who
+adores them, and they are not playing comedy; they join their soul to
+innocence, so to speak; they feel the need to brush off the mud, to
+heal their sores, to bathe their wounds. At Les Aigues Emile Blondet
+was without bitterness, without sarcasm, almost without wit; he made
+no epigrams, he was gentle as a lamb, and platonically tender.
+
+"He is such a good young fellow that I miss him terribly when he is
+not here," said the general. "I do wish he could make a fortune and
+not lead that Paris life of his."
+
+Never did the glorious landscape and park of Les Aigues seem as
+luxuriantly beautiful as it did just then. The first autumn days were
+beginning, when the earth, languid from her procreations and delivered
+of her products, exhales the delightful odors of vegetation. At this
+time the woods, especially, are delicious; they begin to take the
+russet warmth of Sienna earth, and the green-bronze tones which form
+the lovely tapestry beneath which they hide from the cold of winter.
+
+Nature, having shown herself in springtime jaunty and joyous as a
+brunette glowing with hope, becomes in autumn sad and gentle as a
+blonde full of pensive memories; the turf yellows, the last flowers
+unfold their pale corollas, the white-eyed daisies are fewer in the
+grass, only their crimson calices are seen. Yellows abound; the shady
+places are lighter for lack of leafage, but darker in tone; the sun,
+already oblique, slides its furtive orange rays athwart them, leaving
+long luminous traces which rapidly disappear, like the train of a
+woman's gown as she bids adieu.
+
+On the morning of the second day after his arrival, Emile was at a
+window of his bedroom, which opened upon a terrace with a balustrade
+from which a noble view could be seen. This balcony ran the whole
+length of the apartments of the countess, on the side of the chateau
+towards the forests and the Blangy landscape. The pond, which would
+have been called a lake were Les Aigues nearer Paris, was partly in
+view, so was the long canal; the Silver-spring, coming from across the
+pavilion of the Rendezvous, crossed the lawn with its sheeny ribbon,
+reflecting the yellow sand.
+
+Beyond the park, between the village and the walls, lay the cultivated
+parts of Blangy,--meadows where the cows were grazing, small
+properties surrounded by hedges, filled with fruit of all kinds, nut
+and apple trees. By way of frame, the heights on which the noble
+forest-trees were ranged, tier above tier, closed in the scene. The
+countess had come out in her slippers to look at the flowers in her
+balcony, which were sending up their morning fragrance; she wore a
+cambric dressing-gown, beneath which the rosy tints of her white
+shoulders could be seen; a coquettish little cap was placed in a
+bewitching manner on her hair, which escaped it recklessly; her little
+feet showed their warm flesh color through the transparent stockings;
+the cambric gown, unconfined at the waist, floated open as the breeze
+took it, and showed an embroidered petticoat.
+
+"Oh! are you there?" she said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What are you looking at?"
+
+"A pretty question! You have torn me from the contemplation of Nature.
+Tell me, countess, will you go for a walk in the woods this morning
+before breakfast?"
+
+"What an idea! You know I have a horror of walking."
+
+"We will only walk a little way; I'll drive you in the tilbury and
+take Joseph to hold the horses. You have never once set foot in your
+forest; and I have just noticed something very curious, a phenomenon;
+there are spots where the tree-tops are the color of Florentine
+bronze, the leaves are dried--"
+
+"Well, I'll dress."
+
+"Oh, if you do, we can't get off for two hours. Take a shawl, put on a
+bonnet, and boots; that's all you want. I shall tell them to harness."
+
+"You always make me do what you want; I'll be ready in a minute."
+
+"General," said Blondet, waking the count, who grumbled and turned
+over, like a man who wants his morning sleep. "We are going for a
+drive; won't you come?"
+
+A quarter of an hour later the tilbury was slowly rolling along the
+park avenue, followed by a liveried groom on horseback.
+
+The morning was a September morning. The dark blue of the sky burst
+forth here and there from the gray of the clouds, which seemed the sky
+itself, the ether seeming to be the accessory; long lines of
+ultramarine lay upon the horizon, but in strata, which alternated with
+other lines like sand-bars; these tones changed and grew green at the
+level of the forests. The earth beneath this overhanging mantle was
+moistly warm, like a woman when she rises; it exhaled sweet, luscious
+odors, which yet were wild, not civilized,--the scent of cultivation
+was added to the scents of the woods. Just then the Angelus was
+ringing at Blangy, and the sounds of the bell, mingling with the wild
+concert of the forest, gave harmony to the silence. Here and there
+were rising vapors, white, diaphanous.
+
+Seeing these lovely preparations of Nature, the fancy had seized
+Olympe Michaud to accompany her husband, who had to give an order to a
+keeper whose house was not far off. The Soulanges doctor advised her
+to walk as long as she could do so without fatigue; she was afraid of
+the midday heat and went out only in the early morning or evening.
+Michaud now took her with him, and they were followed by the dog he
+loved best,--a handsome greyhound, mouse-colored with white spots,
+greedy, like all greyhounds, and as full of vices as most animals who
+know they are loved and petted.
+
+So, then the tilbury reached the pavilion of the Rendezvous, the
+countess, who stopped to ask how Madame Michaud felt, was told she had
+gone into the forest with her husband.
+
+"Such weather inspires everybody," said Blondet, turning his horse at
+hazard into one of the six avenues of the forest; "Joseph, you know
+the woods, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, monsieur."
+
+And away they went. The avenue they took happened to be one of the
+most delightful in the forest; it soon turned and grew narrower, and
+presently became a winding way, on which the sunshine flickered
+through rifts in the leafy roof, and where the breeze brought odors of
+lavender, and thyme, and the wild mint, and that of falling leaves,
+which sighed as they fell. Dew-drops on the trees and on the grass
+were scattered like seeds by the passing of the light carriage; the
+occupants as they rolled along caught glimpses of the mysterious
+visions of the woods,--those cool depths, where the verdure is moist
+and dark, where the light softens as it fades; those white-birch
+glades o'ertopped by some centennial tree, the Hercules of the forest;
+those glorious assemblages of knotted, mossy trunks, whitened and
+furrowed, and the banks of delicate wild plants and fragile flowers
+which grow between a woodland road and the forest. The brooks sang.
+Truly there is a nameless pleasure in driving a woman along the ups
+and downs of a slippery way carpeted with moss, where she pretends to
+be afraid or really is so, and you are conscious that she is drawing
+closer to you, letting you feel, voluntarily or involuntarily, the
+cool moisture of her arm, the weight of her round, white shoulder,
+though she merely smiles when told that she hinders you in driving.
+The horse seems to know the secret of these interruptions, and he
+looks about him from right to left.
+
+It was a new sight to the countess; this nature so vigorous in its
+effects, so little seen and yet so grand, threw her into a languid
+revery; she leaned back in the tilbury and yielded herself up to the
+pleasure of being there with Emile; her eyes were charmed, her heart
+spoke, she answered to the inward voice that harmonized with hers. He,
+too, glanced at her furtively; he enjoyed that dreamy meditation,
+while the ribbons of the bonnet floated on the morning breeze with the
+silky curls of the golden hair. In consequence of going they knew not
+where, they presently came to a locked gate, of which they had not the
+key. Joseph was called up, but neither had he a key.
+
+"Never mind, let us walk; Joseph can take care of the tilbury; we
+shall easily find it again."
+
+Emile and the countess plunged into the forest, and soon reached a
+small interior cleared space, such as is often met with in the woods.
+Twenty years earlier the charcoal-burners had made it their kiln, and
+the place still remained open, quite a large circumference having been
+burned over. But during those twenty years Nature had made herself a
+garden of flowers, a blooming "parterre" for her own enjoyment, just
+as an artist gives himself the delight of painting a picture for his
+own happiness. The enchanting spot was surrounded by fine trees, whose
+tops hung over like vast fringes and made a dais above this flowery
+couch where slept the goddess. The charcoal-burners had followed a
+path to a pond, always full of water. The path is there still; it
+invites you to step into it by a turn full of mystery; then suddenly
+it stops short and you come upon a bank where a thousand roots run
+down to the water and make a sort of canvas in the air. This hidden
+pond has a narrow grassy edge, where a few willows and poplars lend
+their fickle shade to a bank of turf which some lazy or pensive
+charcoal-burner must have made for his enjoyment. The frogs hop about,
+the teal bathe in the pond, the water-fowl come and go, a hare starts;
+you are the master of this delicious bath, decorated with iris and
+bulrushes. Above your head the trees take many attitudes; here the
+trunks twine down like boa-constrictors, there the beeches stand erect
+as a Greek column. The snails and the slugs move peacefully about. A
+tench shows its gills, a squirrel looks at you; and at last, after
+Emile and the countess, tired with her walk, were seated, a bird, but
+I know not what bird it was, sang its autumn song, its farewell song,
+to which the other songsters listened,--a song welcome to love, and
+heard by every organ of the being.
+
+"What silence!" said the countess, with emotion and in a whisper, as
+if not to trouble this deep peace.
+
+They looked at the green patches on the water,--worlds where life was
+organizing; they pointed to the lizard playing in the sun and escaping
+at their approach,--behavior which has won him the title of "the
+friend of man." "Proving, too, how well he knows him," said Emile.
+They watched the frogs, who, less distrustful, returned to the surface
+of the pond, winking their carbuncle eyes as they sat upon the water-
+cresses. The sweet and simple poetry of Nature permeated these two
+souls surfeited with the conventional things of life, and filled them
+with contemplative emotion. Suddenly Blondet shuddered. Turning to the
+countess he said,--
+
+"Did you hear that?"
+
+"What?" she asked.
+
+"A curious noise."
+
+"Ah, you literary men who live in your studies and know nothing of the
+country! that is only a woodpecker tapping a tree. I dare say you
+don't even know the most curious fact in the history of that bird. As
+soon as he has given his tap, and he gives millions to pierce an oak,
+he flies behind the tree to see if he is yet through it; and he does
+this every instant."
+
+"The noise I heard, dear instructress of natural history, was not a
+noise made by an animal; there was evidence of mind in it, and that
+proclaims a man."
+
+The countess was seized with panic, and she darted back through the
+wild flower-garden, seeking the path by which to leave the forest.
+
+"What is the matter?" cried Blondet, rushing after her.
+
+"I thought I saw eyes," she said, when they regained the path through
+which they had reached the charcoal-burner's open.
+
+Just then they heard the low death-rattle of a creature whose throat
+was suddenly cut, and the countess, with her fears redoubled, fled so
+quickly that Blondet could scarcely follow her. She ran like a will-
+o'-the-wisp, and did not listen to Blondet who called to her, "You are
+mistaken." On she ran, and Emile with her, till they suddenly came
+upon Michaud and his wife, who were walking along arm-in-arm. Emile
+was panting and the countess out of breath, and it was some time
+before they could speak; then they explained. Michaud joined Blondet
+in laughing at the countess's terror; then the bailiff showed the two
+wanderers the way to find the tilbury. When they reached the gate
+Madame Michaud called, "Prince!"
+
+"Prince! Prince!" called the bailiff; then he whistled,--but no
+greyhound.
+
+Emile mentioned the curious noise that began their adventure.
+
+"My wife heard that noise," said Michaud, "and I laughed at her."
+
+"They have killed Prince!" exclaimed the countess. "I am sure of it;
+they killed him by cutting his throat at one blow. What I heard was
+the groan of a dying animal."
+
+"The devil!" cried Michaud; "the matter must be cleared up."
+
+Emile and the bailiff left the two ladies with Joseph and the horses,
+and returned to the wild garden of the open. They went down the bank
+to the pond; looked everywhere along the slope, but found no clue.
+Blondet jumped back first, and as he did so he saw, in a thicket which
+stood on higher ground, one of those trees he had noticed in the
+morning with withered heads. He showed it to Michaud, and proposed to
+go to it. The two sprang forward in a straight line across the forest,
+avoiding the trunks and going round the matted tangles of brier and
+holly until they found the tree.
+
+"It is a fine elm," said Michaud, "but there's a worm in it,--a worm
+which gnaws round the bark close to the roots."
+
+He stopped and took up a bit of the bark, saying: "See how they work."
+
+"You have a great many worms in this forest," said Blondet.
+
+Just then Michaud noticed a red spot; a moment more and he saw the
+head of his greyhound. He sighed.
+
+"The scoundrels!" he said. "Madame was right."
+
+Michaud and Blondet examined the body and found, just as the countess
+had said, that some one had cut the greyhound's throat. To prevent his
+barking he had been decoyed with a bit of meat, which was still
+between his tongue and his palate.
+
+"Poor brute; he died of self-indulgence."
+
+"Like all princes," said Blondet.
+
+"Some one, whoever it is, has just gone, fearing that we might catch
+him or her," said Michaud. "A serious offence has been committed. But
+for all that, I see no branches about and no lopped trees."
+
+Blondet and the bailiff began a cautious search, looking at each spot
+where they set their feet before setting them. Presently Blondet
+pointed to a tree beneath which the grass was flattened down and two
+hollows made.
+
+"Some one knelt there, and it must have been a woman, for a man would
+not have left such a quantity of flattened grass around the impression
+of his two knees; yes, see! that is the outline of a petticoat."
+
+The bailiff, after examining the base of the tree, found the beginning
+of a hole beneath the bark; but he did not find the worm with the
+tough skin, shiny and squamous, covered with brown specks, ending in a
+tail not unlike that of a cockchafer, and having also the latter's
+head, antennae, and the two vigorous hooks or shears with which the
+creature cuts into the wood.
+
+"My dear fellow," said Blondet, "now I understand the enormous number
+of DEAD trees that I noticed this morning from the terrace of the
+chateau, and which brought me here to find out the cause of the
+phenomenon. Worms are at work; but they are no other than your
+peasants."
+
+The bailiff gave vent to an oath and rushed off, followed by Blondet,
+to rejoin the countess, whom he requested to take his wife home with
+her. Then he jumped on Joseph's horse, leaving the man to return on
+foot, and disappeared with great rapidity to cut off the retreat of
+the woman who had killed his dog, hoping to catch her with the bloody
+bill-hook in her hand and the tool used to make the incisions in the
+bark of the tree.
+
+"Let us go and tell the general at once, before he breakfasts," cried
+the countess; "he might die of anger."
+
+"I'll prepare him," said Blondet.
+
+"They have killed the dog," said Olympe, in tears.
+
+"You loved the poor greyhound, dear, enough to weep for him?" said the
+countess.
+
+"I think of Prince as a warning; I fear some danger to my husband."
+
+"How they have ruined this beautiful morning for us," said the
+countess, with an adorable little pout.
+
+"How they have ruined the country," said Olympe, gravely.
+
+They met the general near the chateau.
+
+"Where have you been?" he asked.
+
+"You shall know in a minute," said Blondet, mysteriously, as he helped
+the countess and Madame Michaud to alight. A moment more and the two
+gentlemen were alone on the terrace of the apartments.
+
+"You have plenty of moral strength, general; you won't put yourself in
+a passion, will you?"
+
+"No," said the general; "but come to the point or I shall think you
+are making fun of me."
+
+"Do you see those trees with dead leaves?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you see those others that are wilting?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, every one of them has been killed by the peasants you think you
+have won over by your benefits."
+
+And Blondet related the events of the morning.
+
+The general was so pale that Blondet was frightened.
+
+"Come, curse, swear, be furious! your self-control may hurt you more
+than anger!"
+
+"I'll go and smoke," said the general, turning toward the kiosk.
+
+During breakfast Michaud came in; he had found no one. Sibilet, whom
+the count had sent for, came also.
+
+"Monsieur Sibilet, and you, Monsieur Michaud, are to make it known,
+cautiously, that I will pay a thousand francs to whoever will arrest
+IN THE ACT the person or persons who are killing my trees; they must
+also discover the instrument with which the work is done, and where it
+was bought. I have settled upon a plan."
+
+"Those people never betray one another," said Sibilet, "if the crime
+done is for their benefit and premeditated. There is no denying that
+this diabolical business has been planned, carefully planned and
+contrived."
+
+"Yes, but a thousand francs means a couple of acres of land."
+
+"We can try," said Sibilet; "fifteen hundred francs might buy you a
+traitor, especially if you promise secrecy."
+
+"Very good; but let us act as if we suspected nothing, I especially;
+if not, we shall be the victims of some collusion; one has to be as
+wary with these brigands as with the enemy in war."
+
+"But the enemy is here," said Blondet.
+
+Sibilet threw him the furtive glance of a man who understood the
+meaning of the words, and then he withdrew.
+
+"I don't like your Sibilet," said Blondet, when he had seen the
+steward leave the house. "That man is playing false."
+
+"Up to this time he has done nothing I could complain of," said the
+general.
+
+Blondet went off to write letters. He had lost the careless gayety of
+his first arrival, and was now uneasy and preoccupied; but he had no
+vague presentiments like those of Madame Michaud; he was, rather, in
+full expectation of certain foreseen misfortunes. He said to himself,
+"This affair will come to some bad end; and if the general does not
+take decisive action and will not abandon a battle-field where he is
+overwhelmed by numbers there must be a catastrophe; and who knows who
+will come out safe and sound,--perhaps neither he nor his wife. Good
+God! that adorable little creature! so devoted, so perfect! how can he
+expose her thus! He thinks he loves her! Well, I'll share their
+danger, and if I can't save them I'll suffer with them."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+RURAL VIRTUE
+
+That night Marie Tonsard was stationed on the road to Soulanges,
+sitting on the rail of a culvert waiting for Bonnebault, who had spent
+the day, as usual, at the Cafe de la Paix. She heard him coming at
+some distance, and his step told her that he was drunk, and she knew
+also that he had lost money, for he always sang if he won.
+
+"Is that you, Bonnebault?"
+
+"Yes, my girl."
+
+"What's the matter?"
+
+"I owe twenty-five francs, and they may wring my neck twenty-five
+times before I can pay them."
+
+"Well, I know how you can get five hundred," she said in his ear.
+
+"Oh! by killing a man; but I prefer to live."
+
+"Hold your tongue. Vaudoyer will give us five hundred francs if you
+will let him catch your mother at a tree."
+
+"I'd rather kill a man than sell my mother. There's your old
+grandmother; why don't you sell her?"
+
+"If I tried to, my father would get angry and stop the trick."
+
+"That's true. Well, anyhow, my mother sha'n't go to prison, poor old
+thing! She cooks my food and keeps me in clothes, I'm sure I don't
+know how. Go to prison,--and through me! I shouldn't have any bowels
+within me; no, no! And for fear any one else should sell her, I'll
+tell her this very night not to kill any more trees."
+
+"Well, my father may say and do what he likes, but I shall tell him
+there are five hundred francs to be had, and perhaps he'll ask my
+grandmother if she'll earn them. They'll never put an old woman
+seventy-eight years of age in prison,--though, to be sure, she'd be
+better off there than in her garret."
+
+"Five hundred francs! well, yes; I'll speak to my mother," said
+Bonnebault, "and if it suits her to give 'em to me, I'll let her have
+part to take to prison. She could knit, and amuse herself; and she'd
+be well fed and lodged, and have less trouble than she has at Conches.
+Well, to-morrow, my girl, I'll see you about it; I haven't time to
+stop now."
+
+The next morning at daybreak Bonnebault and his old mother knocked at
+the door of the Grand-I-Vert. Mother Tonsard was the only person up.
+
+"Marie!" called Bonnebault, "that matter is settled."
+
+"You mean about the trees?" said Mother Tonsard; "yes, it is all
+settled; I've taken it."
+
+"Nonsense!" cried Mother Bonnebault, "my son has got the promise of an
+acre of land from Monsieur Rigou--"
+
+The two old women squabbled as to which of them should be sold by her
+children. The noise of the quarrel woke up the household. Tonsard and
+Bonnebault took sides for their respective mothers.
+
+"Pull straws," suggested Tonsard's wife.
+
+The short straw gave it in favor of the tavern.
+
+Three days later, in the forest of Ville-aux-Fayes at daybreak, the
+gendarmes arrested old Mother Tonsard caught "in flagrante delicto" by
+the bailiff, his assistants, and the field-keeper, with a rusty file
+which served to tear the tree, and a chisel, used by the delinquent to
+scoop round the bark just as the insect bores its way. The indictment
+stated that sixty trees thus destroyed were found within a radius of
+five hundred feet. The old woman was sent to Auxerre, the case coming
+under the jurisdiction of the assize-court.
+
+Michaud could not refrain from saying when he discovered Mother
+Tonsard at the foot of the tree: "These are the persons on whom the
+general and Madame la comtesse have showered benefits! Faith, if
+Madame would only listen to me, she wouldn't give that dowry to the
+Tonsard girl, who is more worthless than her grandmother."
+
+The old woman raised her gray eyes and darted a venomous look at
+Michaud. When the count learned who the guilty person was, he forbade
+his wife to give the money to Catherine Tonsard.
+
+"Monsieur le comte is perfectly right," said Sibilet. "I know that
+Godain bought that land three days before Catherine came to speak to
+Madame. She is quite capable, that girl, of pretending she is with
+child, to get the money; very likely Godain has had nothing to do with
+it."
+
+"What a community!" said Blondet; "the scoundrels of Paris are saints
+by comparison."
+
+"Ah, monsieur," said Sibilet, "self-interest makes people guilty of
+horrors everywhere. Do you know who betrayed the old woman?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Her granddaughter Marie; she was jealous of her sister's marriage,
+and to get the money for her own--"
+
+"It is awful!" said the count. "Why! they'd murder!"
+
+"Oh yes," said Sibilet, "for a very small sum. They care so little for
+life, those people; they hate to have to work all their lives. Ah
+monsieur, queer things happen in country places, as queer as those of
+Paris,--but you will never believe it."
+
+"Let us be kind and benevolent," said the countess.
+
+The evening after the arrest Bonnebault came to the tavern of the
+Grand-I-Vert, where all the Tonsard family were in great jubilation.
+"Oh yes, yes!" said he, "make the most of your rejoicing; but I've
+just heard from Vaudoyer that the countess, to punish you, withdraws
+the thousand francs promised to Godain; her husband won't let her give
+them."
+
+"It's that villain of a Michaud who has put him up to it," said
+Tonsard. "My mother heard him say he would; she told me at Ville-aux-
+Fayes where I went to carry her some money and her clothes. Well; let
+that countess keep her money! our five hundred francs shall help
+Godain buy the land; and we'll revenge ourselves for this thing. Ha!
+Michaud meddles with our private matters, does he? it will bring him
+more harm than good. What business is it of his, I'd like to know? let
+him keep to the woods! It's he who is at the bottom of all this
+trouble--he found the clue that day my mother cut the throat of his
+dog. Suppose I were to meddle in the affairs of the chateau? Suppose I
+were to tell the general that his wife is off walking in the woods
+before he is up in the morning, with a young man."
+
+"The general, the general!" sneered Courtecuisse; "they can do what
+they like with him. But it's Michaud who stirs him up, the mischief-
+maker! a fellow who don't know his business; in my day, things went
+differently."
+
+"Ah!" said Tonsard, "those were the good days for all of us--weren't
+they, Vaudoyer?"
+
+"Yes," said the latter, "and the fact is that if Michaud were got rid
+of we should be left in peace."
+
+"Enough said," replied Tonsard. "We'll talk of this later--by
+moonlight--in the open field."
+
+Towards the end of October the countess returned to Paris, leaving the
+general at Les Aigues. He was not to rejoin her till some time later,
+but she did not wish to lose the first night of the Italian Opera, and
+moreover she was lonely and bored; she missed Emile, who was recalled
+by his avocations, for he had helped her to pass the hours when the
+general was scouring the country or attending to business.
+
+November was a true winter month, gray and gloomy, a mixture of snow
+and rain, frost and thaw. The trial of Mother Tonsard had required
+witnesses at Auxerre, and Michaud had given his testimony. Monsieur
+Rigou had interested himself for the old woman, and employed a lawyer
+on her behalf who relied in his defence on the absence of
+disinterested witnesses; but the testimony of Michaud and his
+assistants and the field-keeper was found to outweigh this objection.
+Tonsard's mother was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and the
+lawyer said to her son:--
+
+"It was Michaud's testimony which got her that."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE CATASTROPHE
+
+One Saturday evening, Courtecuisse, Bonnebault, Godain, Tonsard, his
+daughters, wife, and Pere Fourchon, also Vaudoyer and several
+mechanics were supping at the tavern. The moon was at half-full, the
+first snow had melted, and frost had just stiffened the ground so that
+a man's step left no traces. They were eating a stew of hare caught in
+a trap; all were drinking and laughing. It was the day after the
+wedding of Catherine and Godain, and the wedded pair were to be
+conducted to their new home, which was not far from that of
+Courtecuisse; for when Rigou sold an acre of land it was sure to be
+isolated and close to the woods. Courtecuisse and Vaudoyer had brought
+their guns to accompany the bride. The neighborhood was otherwise fast
+asleep; not a light was to be seen; none but the wedding party were
+awake, but they made noise enough. In the midst of it the old
+Bonnebault woman entered, and every one looked at her.
+
+"I think she is going to lie-in," she whispered in Tonsard's ear. "HE
+has saddled his horse and is going for the doctor at Soulanges."
+
+"Sit down," said Tonsard, giving her his place at the table, and going
+himself to lie on a bench.
+
+Just then the gallop of a horse passing rapidly along the road was
+heard. Tonsard, Courtecuisse, and Vaudoyer went out hurriedly, and saw
+Michaud on his way to the village.
+
+"He knows what he's about," said Courtecuisse; "he came down by the
+terrace and he means to go by Blangy and the road,--it's the safest
+way."
+
+"Yes," said Tonsard, "but he will bring the doctor back with him."
+
+"He won't find him," said Courtecuisse, "the doctor has been sent for
+to Conches for the postmistress."
+
+"Then he'll go from Soulanges to Conches by the mail-road; that's
+shortest."
+
+"And safest too, for us," said Courtecuisse, "there's a fine moon, and
+there are no keepers on the roads as there are in the woods; one can
+hear much farther; and down there, by the pavilions, behind the
+hedges, just where they join the little wood, one can aim at a man
+from behind, like a rabbit, at five hundred feet."
+
+"It will be half-past eleven before he comes past there," said
+Tonsard, "it will take him half an hour to go to Soulanges and as much
+more to get back,--but look here! suppose Monsieur Gourdon were on the
+road?"
+
+"Don't trouble about that," said Courtecuisse, "I'll stand ten minutes
+away from you to the right on the road towards Blangy, and Vaudoyer
+will be ten minutes away on your left towards Conches; if anything
+comes along, the mail, or the gendarmes, or whatever it is, we'll fire
+a shot into the ground,--a muffled sound, you'll know it."
+
+"But suppose I miss him?" said Tonsard.
+
+"He's right," said Courtecuisse, "I'm the best shot; Vaudoyer, I'll go
+with you; Bonnebault may watch in my place; he can give a cry; that's
+easier heard and less suspicious."
+
+All three returned to the tavern and the wedding festivities went on;
+but about eleven o'clock Vaudoyer, Courtecuisse, Tonsard, and
+Bonnebault went out, carrying their guns, though none of the women
+took any notice of them. They came back in about three-quarters of an
+hour, and sat drinking till past one o'clock. Tonsard's girls and
+their mother and the old Bonnebault woman had plied the miller, the
+mechanics, and the two peasants, as well as Fourchon, with so much
+drink that they were all on the ground and snoring when the four men
+left the tavern; on their return, the sleepers were shaken and roused,
+and every one seemed to them, as before, in his place.
+
+While this orgy was going on Michaud's household was in a scene of
+mortal anxiety. Olympe had felt false pains, and her husband, thinking
+she was about to be delivered, rode off instantly in haste for the
+doctor. But the poor woman's pains ceased as soon as she realized that
+Michaud was gone; for her mind was so preoccupied by the danger her
+husband ran at that hour of the night, in a lawless region filled with
+determined foes, that the anguish of her soul was powerful enough to
+deaden and momentarily subdue those of the body. In vain her servant-
+woman declared her fears were imaginary; she seemed not to comprehend
+a word that was said to her, and sat by the fire in her bed-chamber
+listening to every sound. In her terror, which increased every moment,
+she had the man wakened, meaning to give him some order which still
+she did not give. At last, the poor woman wandered up and down, coming
+and going in feverish agitation; she looked out of all the windows and
+opened them in spite of the cold; then she went downstairs and opened
+the door into the courtyard, looking out and listening. "Nothing!
+nothing!" she said. Then she went up again in despair. About a quarter
+past twelve, she cried out: "Here he is! I hear the horse!" Again she
+went down, followed by the man who went to open the iron gate of the
+courtyard. "It is strange," she said, "that he should return by the
+Conches woods!"
+
+As she spoke she stood still, horrorstruck, motionless, voiceless. The
+man shared her terror, for, in the furious gallop of the horse, the
+clang of the empty stirrups, the neigh of the frightened animal, there
+was something, they scarcely knew what, of unspeakable warning. Soon,
+too soon for the unhappy wife, the horse reached the gate, panting and
+sweating, but alone; he had broken the bridle, no doubt by entangling
+it. Olympe gazed with haggard eyes at the servant as he opened the
+gate; she saw the horse, and then, without a word, she ran to the
+chateau like a madwoman; when she reached it she fell to the ground
+beneath the general's windows crying out: "Monsieur, they have
+murdered him!"
+
+The cry was so terrible it awoke the count; he rang violently,
+bringing the whole household to their feet; and the groans of Madame
+Michaud, who as she lay on the ground, gave birth to a child that died
+in being born, brought the general and all the servants about her.
+They raised the poor dying woman, who expired, saying to the general:
+"They have murdered him!"
+
+"Joseph!" cried the count to his valet, "go for the doctor; there may
+yet be time to save her. No, better bring the curate; the poor woman
+is dead, and her child too. My God! my God! how thankful I am that my
+wife is not here. And you," he said to the gardener, "go and find out
+what has happened."
+
+"I can tell you," said the pavilion servant, coming up, "Monsieur
+Michaud's horse has come back alone, the reins broke, his legs bloody;
+and there's a spot of blood on the saddle."
+
+"What can be done at this time of night?" cried the count. "Call up
+Groison, send for the keepers, saddle the horses; we'll beat the
+country."
+
+By daybreak, eight persons--the count, Groison, the three keepers, and
+two gendarmes sent from Soulanges with their sergeant--searched the
+country. It was not till the middle of the morning that they found the
+body of the bailiff in a copse between the mail-road and the smaller
+road leading to Ville-aux-Fayes, at the end of the park of Les Aigues,
+not far from Conches. Two gendarmes started, one to Ville-aux-Fayes
+for the prosecuting attorney, the other to Soulanges for the justice
+of the peace. Meantime the general, assisted by the sergeant, noted
+down the facts. They found on the road, just above the two pavilions,
+the print of the stamping of the horse's feet as he roared, and the
+traces of his frightened gallop from there to the first opening in the
+woods above the hedge. The horse, no longer guided, turned into the
+wood-path. Michaud's hat was found there. The animal evidently took
+the nearest way to reach his stable. The bailiff had a ball though his
+back which broke the spine.
+
+Groison and the sergeant studied the ground around the spot where the
+horse reared (which might be called, in judicial language, the theatre
+of the crime) with remarkable sagacity, but without obtaining any
+clue. The earth was too frozen to show the footprints of the murderer,
+and all they found was the paper of a cartridge. When the attorney and
+the judge and Monsieur Gourdon, the doctor, arrived and raised the
+body to make the autopsy, it was found that the ball, which
+corresponded with the fragments of the wad, was an ammunition ball,
+evidently from a military musket; and no such musket existed in the
+district of Blangy. The judge and Monsieur Soudry the attorney, who
+came that evening to the chateau, thought it best to collect all the
+facts and await events. The same opinion was expressed by the sergeant
+and the lieutenant of the gendarmerie.
+
+"It is impossible that it can be anything but a planned attack on the
+part of the peasants," said the sergeant; "but there are two
+districts, Conches and Blangy, in each of which there are five or six
+persons capable of being concerned in the murder. The one that I
+suspect most, Tonsard, passed the night carousing in the Grand-I-Vert;
+but your assistant, general, the miller Langlume, was there, and he
+says that Tonsard did not leave the tavern. They were all so drunk
+they could not stand; they took the bride home at half-past one; and
+the return of the horse proves that Michaud was murdered between
+eleven o'clock and midnight. At a quarter past ten Groison saw the
+whole company assembled at table, and Monsieur Michaud passed there on
+his way to Soulanges, which he reached at eleven. His horse reared
+between the two pavilions on the mail-road; but he may have been shot
+before reaching Blangy and yet have stayed in the saddle for some
+little time. We should have to issue warrants for at least twenty
+persons and arrest them; but I know these peasants, and so do these
+gentlemen; you might keep them a year in prison and you would get
+nothing out of them but denials. What could you do with all those who
+were at Tonsard's?"
+
+They sent for Langlume, the miller, and the assistant of General
+Montcornet as mayor; he related what had taken place in the tavern,
+and gave the names of all present; none had gone out except for a
+minute or two into the courtyard. He had left the room for a moment
+with Tonsard about eleven o'clock; they had spoken of the moon and the
+weather, and heard nothing. At two o'clock the whole party had taken
+the bride and bridegroom to their own house.
+
+The general arranged with the sergeant, the lieutenant, and the civil
+authorities to send to Paris for the cleverest detective in the
+service of the police, who should come to the chateau as a workman,
+and behave so ill as to be dismissed; he should then take to drinking
+and frequent the Grand-I-Vert and remain in the neighborhood in the
+character of an ill-wisher to the general. The best plan they could
+follow was to watch and wait for a momentary revelation, and then make
+the most of it.
+
+"If I have to spend twenty thousand francs I'll discover the murderer
+of my poor Michaud," the general was never weary of saying.
+
+He went off with that idea in his head, and returned from Paris in the
+month of January with one of the shrewdest satellites of the chief of
+the detective police, who was brought down ostensibly to do some work
+to the interior of the chateau. The man was discovered poaching. He
+was arrested, and turned off, and soon after--early in February--the
+general rejoined his wife in Paris.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE TRIUMPH OF THE VANQUISHED
+
+One evening in the month of May, when the fine weather had come and
+the Parisians had returned to Les Aigues, Monsieur de Troisville,--who
+had been persuaded to accompany his daughter,--Blondet, the Abbe
+Brossette, the general, and the sub-prefect of Ville-aux-Fayes, who
+was on a visit to the chateau, were all playing either whist or chess.
+It was about half-past eleven o'clock when Joseph entered and told his
+master that the worthless poaching workman who had been dismissed
+wanted to see him,--something about a bill which he said the general
+still owed him. "He is very drunk," added Joseph.
+
+"Very good, I'll go and speak to him."
+
+The general went out upon the lawn to some distance from the house.
+
+"Monsieur le comte," said the detective, "nothing will ever be got out
+of these people. All that I have been able to gather is that if you
+continue to stay in this place and try to make the peasants renounce
+the pilfering habits which Mademoiselle Laguerre allowed them to
+acquire, they will shoot you as well as your bailiff. There is no use
+in my staying here; for they distrust me even more than they do the
+keepers."
+
+The count paid his spy, who left the place the next day, and his
+departure justified the suspicions entertained about him by the
+accomplices in the death of Michaud.
+
+When the general returned to the salon there were such signs of
+emotion upon his face that his wife asked him, anxiously, what news he
+had just heard.
+
+"Dear wife," he said, "I don't want to frighten you, and yet it is
+right you should know that Michaud's death was intended as a warning
+for us to leave this part of the country."
+
+"If I were in your place," said Monsieur de Troisville, "I would not
+leave it. I myself have had just such difficulties in Normandy, only
+under another form; I persisted in my course, and now everything goes
+well."
+
+"Monsieur le marquis," said the sub-prefect, "Normandy and Burgundy
+are two very different regions. The grape heats the blood far more
+than the apple. We know much less of law and legal proceedings; we
+live among the woods; the large industries are unknown among us; we
+are still savages. If I might give my advice to Monsieur le comte it
+would be to sell this estate and put the money in the Funds; he would
+double his income and have no anxieties. If he likes living in the
+country he could buy a chateau near Paris with a park as beautiful as
+that of Les Aigues, surrounded by walls, where no one can annoy him,
+and where he can let all his farms and receive the money in good bank-
+bills, and have no law suits from one year's end to another. He could
+come and go in three or four hours, and Monsieur Blondet and Monsieur
+le marquis would not be so often away from you, Madame la comtesse."
+
+"I, retreat before the peasantry when I did not recoil before the
+Danube!" cried the general.
+
+"Yes, but what became of your cuirassiers?" asked Blondet.
+
+"Such a fine estate!"
+
+"It will sell to-day for over two millions."
+
+"The chateau alone must have cost that," remarked Monsieur de
+Troisville.
+
+"One of the best properties in a circumference of sixty miles," said
+the sub-prefect; "but you can find a better near Paris."
+
+"How much income does one get from two millions?" asked the countess.
+
+"Now-a-days, about eighty thousand francs," replied Blondet.
+
+"Les Aigues does not bring in, all told, more than thirty thousand,"
+said the countess; "and lately you have been at such immense expenses,
+--you have surrounded the woods this year with ditches."
+
+"You could get," added Blondet, "a royal chateau for four hundred
+thousand francs near Paris. In these days people buy the follies of
+others."
+
+"I thought you cared for Les Aigues!" said the count to his wife.
+
+"Don't you feel that I care a thousand times more for your life?" she
+replied. "Besides, ever since the death of my poor Olympe and
+Michaud's murder the country is odious to me; all the faces I meet
+seem to wear a treacherous or threatening expression."
+
+The next evening the sub-prefect, having ended his visit at the
+chateau, was welcomed in the salon of Monsieur Gaubertin at Ville-aux-
+Fayes in these words:--
+
+"Well, Monsieur des Lupeaulx, so you have returned from Les Aigues?"
+
+"Yes," answered the sub-prefect with a little air of triumph and a
+look of tender regard at Mademoiselle Elise, "and I am very much
+afraid to say we may lose the general; he talks of selling his
+property--"
+
+"Monsieur Gaubertin, I speak for my pavilion. I can on longer endure
+the noise, the dust of Ville-aux-Fayes; like a poor imprisoned bird I
+gasp for the air of the fields, the woodland breezes," said Madame
+Isaure, in a lackadaisical voice, with her eyes half-closed and her
+head bending to her left shoulder as she played carelessly with the
+long curls of her blond hair.
+
+"Pray be prudent, madame!" said her husband in a low voice; "your
+indiscretions will not help me to buy the pavilion." Then, turning to
+the sub-prefect, he added, "Haven't they yet discovered the men who
+were concerned in the murder of the bailiff?"
+
+"It seems not," replied the sub-prefect.
+
+"That will injure the sale of Les Aigues," said Gaubertin to the
+company generally, "I know very well that I would not buy the place.
+The peasantry over there are such a bad set of people; even in the
+days of Mademoiselle Laguerre I had trouble with them, and God knows
+she let them do as they liked."
+
+At the end of the month of May the general still gave no sign that he
+intended to sell Les Aigues; in fact, he was undecided. One night,
+about ten o'clock, he was returning from the forest through one of the
+six avenues that led to the pavilion of the Rendezvous. He dismissed
+the keeper who accompanied him, as he was then so near the chateau. At
+a turn of the road a man armed with a gun came from behind a bush.
+
+"General," he said, "this is the third time I have had you at the end
+of my barrel, and the third time that I give you your life."
+
+"Why do you want to kill me, Bonnebault?" said the general, without
+showing the least emotion.
+
+"Faith, if I don't, somebody else will; but I, you see, I like the men
+who served the Emperor, and I can't make up my mind to shoot you like
+a partridge. Don't question me, for I'll tell you nothing; but you've
+got enemies, powerful enemies, cleverer than you, and they'll end by
+crushing you. I am to have a thousand crowns if I kill you, and then I
+can marry Marie Tonsard. Well, give me enough to buy a few acres of
+land and a bit of a cottage, and I'll keep on saying, as I have done,
+that I've found no chances. That will give you time to sell your
+property and get away; but make haste. I'm an honest lad still, scamp
+as I am; but another fellow won't spare you."
+
+"If I give you what you ask, will you tell me who offered you those
+three thousand francs?" said the general.
+
+"I don't know myself; and the person who is urging me to do the thing
+is some one I love too well to tell of. Besides, even if you did know
+it was Marie Tonsard, that wouldn't help you; Marie Tonsard would be
+as silent as that wall, and I should deny every word I've said."
+
+"Come and see me to-morrow," said the general.
+
+"Enough," replied Bonnebault; "and if they begin to say I'm too
+dilatory, I'll let you know in time."
+
+A week after that singular conversation the whole arrondissement,
+indeed the whole department, was covered with posters, advertising the
+sale of Les Aigues at the office of Maitre Corbineau, the notary of
+Soulanges. All the lots were knocked down to Rigou, and the price paid
+amounted to two millions five hundred thousand francs. The next day
+Rigou had the names changed; Monsieur Gaubertin took the woods, Rigou
+and Soudry the vineyards and the farms. The chateau and the park were
+sold over again in small lots among the sons of the soil, the
+peasantry,--excepting the pavilion, its dependencies, and fifty
+surrounding acres, which Monsieur Gaubertin retained as a gift to his
+poetic and sentimental spouse.
+
+*
+
+Many years after these events, during the year 1837, one of the most
+remarkable political writers of the day, Emile Blondet, reached the
+last stages of a poverty which he had so far hidden beneath an outward
+appearance of ease and elegance. He was thinking of taking some
+desperate step, realizing, as he did, that his writings, his mind, his
+knowledge, his ability for the direction of affairs, had made him
+nothing better than a mere functionary, mechanically serving the ends
+of others; seeing that every avenue was closed to him and all places
+taken; feeling that he had reached middle-life without fame and
+without fortune; that fools and middle-class men of no training had
+taken the places of the courtiers and incapables of the Restoration,
+and that the government was reconstituted such as it was before 1830.
+One evening, when he had come very near committing suicide (a folly he
+had so often laughed at), while his mind travelled back over his
+miserable existence calumniated and worn down with toil far more than
+with the dissipations charged against him, the noble and beautiful
+face of a woman rose before his eyes, like a statue rising pure and
+unbroken amid the saddest ruins. Just then the porter brought him a
+letter sealed with black from the Comtesse de Montcornet, telling him
+of the death of her husband, who had again taken service in the army
+and commanded a division. The count had left her his property, and she
+had no children. The letter, though dignified, showed Blondet very
+plainly that the woman of forty whom he had loved in his youth offered
+him a friendly hand and a large fortune.
+
+A few days ago the marriage of the Comtesse de Montcornet with
+Monsieur Blondet, appointed prefect in one of the departments, was
+celebrated in Paris. On their way to take possession of the
+prefecture, they followed the road which led past what had formerly
+been Les Aigues. They stopped the carriage near the spot where the two
+pavilions had once stood, wishing to see the places so full of tender
+memories for each. The country was no longer recognizable. The
+mysterious woods, the park avenues, all were cleared away; the
+landscape looked like a tailor's pattern-card. The sons of the soil
+had taken possession of the earth as victors and conquerors. It was
+cut up into a thousand little lots, and the population had tripled
+between Conches and Blangy. The levelling and cultivation of the noble
+park, once so carefully tended, so delightful in its beauty, threw
+into isolated relief the pavilion of the Rendezvous, now the Villa
+Buen-Retiro of Madame Isaure Gaubertin; it was the only building left
+standing, and it commanded the whole landscape, or as we might better
+call it, the stretch of cornfields which now constituted the
+landscape. The building seemed magnified into a chateau, so miserable
+were the little houses which the peasants had built around it.
+
+"This is progress!" cried Emile. "It is a page out of Jean-Jacques'
+'Social Compact'! and I--I am harnessed to the social machine that
+works it! Good God! what will the kings be soon? More than that, what
+will the nations themselves be fifty years hence under this state of
+things?"
+
+"But you love me; you are beside me. I think the present delightful.
+What do I care for such a distant future?" said his wife.
+
+"Oh yes! by your side, hurrah for the present!" cried the lover,
+gayly, "and the devil take the future."
+
+Then he signed to the coachman, and as the horses sprang forward along
+the road, the wedded pair returned to the enjoyment of their
+honeymoon.
+
+1845.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Note: Sons of the Soil is also known as The Peasantry and is referred
+to by that title when mentioned in other addendums.
+
+Blondet, Emile
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  Modeste Mignon
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Firm of Nucingen
+
+Blondet, Virginie
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Member for Arcis
+  A Daughter of Eve
+
+Bourlac, Bernard-Jean-Baptiste-Macloud, Baron de
+  The Seamy Side of History
+
+Brossette, Abbe
+  Beatrix
+
+Carigliano, Duchesse de
+  At the Sign of the Cat and Racket
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Casteran, De
+  The Chouans
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Beatrix
+
+Laguerre, Mademoiselle
+  A Prince of Bohemia
+
+La Roche-Hugon, Martial de
+  Domestic Peace
+  A Daughter of Eve
+  The Member for Arcis
+  The Middle Classes
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Lupin, Amaury
+  A Start in Life
+
+Marest, Georges
+  A Start in Life
+
+Minorets, The
+  The Government Clerks
+
+Montcornet, Marechal, Comte de
+  Domestic Peace
+  Lost Illusions
+  A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  A Man of Business
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Navarreins, Duc de
+  A Bachelor's Establishment
+  Colonel Chabert
+  The Muse of the Department
+  The Thirteen
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life
+  The Country Parson
+  The Magic Skin
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+  The Secrets of a Princess
+  Cousin Betty
+
+Ronquerolles, Marquis de
+  The Imaginary Mistress
+  Ursule Mirouet
+  A Woman of Thirty
+  Another Study of Woman
+  The Thirteen
+  The Member for Arcis
+
+Scherbelloff, Princesse (or Scherbellof or Sherbelloff)
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+
+Soulanges, Comte Leon de
+  Domestic Peace
+
+Soulanges, Comtesse Hortense de
+  Domestic Peace
+  The Thirteen
+
+Steingel
+  The Gondreville Mystery
+
+Troisville, Guibelin, Vicomte de
+  The Seamy Side of History
+  The Chouans
+  Jealousies of a Country Town
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac
+
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