The Country Pjrson 
 
 Photogravure From Drawing bv W. Boucher
 
 Illustrated Sterling edition 
 
 The Country Parson 
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 The Peasantry 
 
 BY 
 HONORE de BALZAC 
 
 With Introductions by 
 
 GEORGE SAINTSBURY 
 
 BOSTON 
 DANA ESTES & COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 COPYRIGHTED 1901 
 BY 
 
 JOHN D. AVIL 
 
 A II Rights Reserved
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 INTRODUCTION - - 
 
 THE CO UNTR Y PARSON : 
 
 (Le Cur de Village) 
 
 I. VERONIQUE - 
 
 n. TASCHERON - ... 
 
 III. THE CURE OF MONTEGNAC 
 
 IV. MADAME GRASLIN AT MONTEGNAC 
 V. VERONIO.UE IS LAID IN THE TOMB 
 
 ALBERT SA VARUS 
 
 (.Albert Suvarus) 
 
 PAGE 
 ix 
 
 I 
 
 - 49 
 
 - 78 
 
 - 129 
 . 229 
 
 - 271 
 
 PART II 
 
 INTRODUCTION - 
 
 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. THE CHATEAU 
 
 (Les Pay sans) 
 BOOK I 
 
 II. A BUCOUC OVERLOOKED BY VIRGII, 
 
 III. THE TAVERN 
 
 IV. ANOTHER IDYLL - - 
 VOL. 10 I 
 
 ix 
 
 3 
 20 
 
 34 
 52 

 
 iv CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 V. THE ENEMIES FACE TO FACE - - - 68 
 
 VI. A TALE OF ROBBERS - '9 
 
 VII. OF EXTINCT SOCIAL SPECIES - - 107 
 
 VIII. THE GREAT REVOLUTIONS OF A LITTLE VALLEY 121 
 
 IX. OF MEDIOCRACY - - 146 
 
 x. A HAPPY WOMAN'S PRESENTIMENTS - - 165 
 xi. THE OARISTYS, THE EIGHTEENTH ECLOGUE OF 
 
 THEOCRITUS, LITTLE APPRECIATED IN A 
 
 COURT OF ASSIZE - l8o 
 
 XII. SHOWS HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE'S 
 
 PARLIAMENT - - 199 
 
 XIII. THE PEASANTS' MONEY-LENDER - - 217 
 
 BOOK II. 
 
 I. THE BEST SOCIETY OF SOULANGES - 239 
 
 ii. THE QUEEN'S DRAWING ROOM - 262 
 
 III. THE CAFE DE LA PAIX - - - 280 
 
 IV. THE TRIUMVIRATE OF V1LLK-AUX-FAYES - 291 
 V. HOW A VICTORY WAS WON WITHOUT A BLOW - 305 
 
 VI. THE FOREST AND THE HARVEST - 313 
 
 VII. THE GREYHOUND .... - 322 
 
 VIII. RUSTIC VIRTUES - ... 334 
 
 IX. THE CATASTROPHE - - 338 
 
 X. THE VICTORY OF THE VANQUISHED - - 344 
 
 (Translator, ELLEN MARRIAGE)
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 PERHAPS in no instance of Balzac's work is his singular fancy 
 for pulling that work about more remarkably instanced and 
 illustrated than in the case of Le Cure de Village. The 
 double date, 1837-1845, which the author attached to it, in 
 his usual conscientious manner, to indicate these revisions, 
 has a greater signification than almost anywhere else. When 
 the book, or rather its constituent parts, first appeared in the 
 Presse for 1839, having been written the winter before, not 
 only was it very different in detail, but the order of the parts 
 was altogether dissimilar. Balzac here carried out his favor- 
 ite plan a plan followed by many other authors no doubt, 
 but always, as it seems to me, of questionable wisdom that 
 of beginning in the middle and then "throwing back" with a 
 long retrospective and explanatory digression. 
 
 In this version the story of Tascheron's crime and its pun- 
 ishment came first; and it was not till after the execution 
 that the early history of Veronique (who gave her name to 
 this part as to a Suite du Cure de Village) was introduced. 
 This history ceased at the crisis of her life ; and when it was 
 taken up in a third part, called Veronique au Tombeau, only 
 the present conclusion of the book, with her confession, was 
 given. The long account of her sojourn at Montegnac, of 
 her labors there, of the episode of Farrabesche, and so forth, 
 did not appear till 1841, when the whole book, with the in- 
 versions and insertions just indicated, appeared in such a 
 changed form, that even the indefatigable M. de Lovenjoul 
 dismisses as "impossible" the idea of exhibiting a complete
 
 K INTRODUCTION 
 
 picture of the various changes made. Nor was the author 
 even yet contented; for in 1845, before establishing it in its 
 place in the Comedie, he not only, as was his wont, took out 
 the chapter-headings, leaving five divisions only, but intro- 
 duced other alterations, resulting in the present condition of 
 the book. 
 
 It is not necessary to dwell very much on the advantages 
 or disadvantages of these changes. There is no doubt that, 
 as has been said above, the trick of beginning the story in 
 the middle, and then doubling back on the start, has many 
 drawbacks. But, on the other hand, that of an introduction 
 which has apparently very little to do with anything, and 
 which has nothing whatever to do with the title of the book, 
 has others; and I do not know that in the final reconstitu- 
 tion Balzac has made Veronique's part in the matter, even 
 in her confession, as clear as it should be. It is indeed almost 
 unavoidable that twisting and turning the shape of a story 
 about, as he was wont to do, should bring the penalty of de- 
 stroying, or at least damaging, its unity. 
 
 As the book stands it may be said to consist of three parts 
 united rather by identity of the personages who act in them 
 than by exact dramatic connection. There is, to take the 
 title-part first (though it is by no means the most really 
 important or pervading) the picture of the "Cure de Village," 
 which is almost an exact, and beyond doubt a designed, pendant 
 to that of the "Medecin de Champagne." The Abbe Bonnet 
 indeed is not able to carry out economic ameliorations, as 
 Dr. Benassis is, personally, but by inducing Veronique to 
 do so he brings about the same result, and on an even larger 
 scale. His personal action (with the necessary changes for 
 his profession) is also tolerably identical, and on the whole
 
 INTRODUCTION xl 
 
 the two portraits may fairly be hung together as Balzac's 
 ideal representations of the good man in soul-curing and 
 body-curing respectively. Both are largely conditioned by 
 his eighteenth-century fancy for "playing Providence/' and 
 by his delight in extensive financial-commercial schemes. I 
 believe that in both books these schemes have been stumbling- 
 blocks, if not to all readers, yet to a good many. But the 
 beauty of the portraiture of the "Cure" is nearly, if not quite 
 equal, to that of the doctor, though the institution of celibacy 
 has prevented Balzac from giving a key to the conduct of 
 Bonnet quite as sufficient as that which he furnished for the 
 conduct of Benassis. 
 
 The second part of the book is the crime episodic as re- 
 gards the criminal, cardinal as regards other points of 
 Tascheron. Balzac was very fond of "his crimes;" and it is 
 quite worth while in connection with his handling of the 
 murder here to study the curious story of his actual interfer- 
 ence in the famous Peytel case, which also interested Thack- 
 eray so much in his Paris days. The Tascheron case itself 
 (which from a note appears to have been partly suggested 
 by some actual affair) no doubt has interests for those who like 
 such things, and the picture of the criminal in prison is very 
 striking. But we see and know so very little of Tascheron 
 himself, and even to the very last (which is long afterwards) 
 we are left so much in the dark as to his love for Veronique, 
 that the thing has an extraneous air. It is like a short story 
 foisted in. 
 
 This objection connects itself at once with a similar one 
 to the delineation of Veronique. There is nothing in her 
 conduct intrinsically impossible, or even improbable. A girl 
 of her temperament, at once, as often happens, strongly sen-
 
 xii INTRODUCTION 
 
 sual and strongly devotional, deprived of her good looks by 
 illness, thrown into the arms of a husband physically repul- 
 sive, and after a short time not troubling himself to be 
 amiable in any other way, might very well take refuge in the 
 substantial, if not ennobling, consolations offered by a good- 
 looking and amiable young fellow of the lower class. Her 
 conduct at the time of the crime (her exact complicity in 
 which is, as we have said, rather imperfectly indicated) is 
 also fairly probable, and to her repentance and amendment 
 of life no exception can be taken. But only in this last stage 
 do we really see anything of the inside of Veronique's nature ; 
 and even then we do not see it completely. The author's 
 silence on the details of the actual liaison with Tascheron 
 has its advantages, but it also has its defects. 
 
 Still, the book is one of great attraction and interest, and 
 takes, if I may judge by my own experience, a high rank for 
 enchaining power among that class of Balzac's books which 
 cannot be put exactly highest. If the changes made in it 
 by its author have to some extent dislocated it as a whole, 
 they have resulted in very high excellence for almost all the 
 parts. 
 
 Albert Savarus, with its enshrined story of "L'Ambitieux 
 par Amour" (something of an oddity for Balzac, who often 
 puts a story within a story, but less formally than this), con- 
 tains various appeals, and shows not a few of its author's 
 well-known interests in politics, in affairs, in newspapers, not 
 to mention the enumerations of dots and fortunes which 
 he never could refuse himself. The affection of Savarus for 
 the Duchesse d'Argaiolo may interest different persons differ-
 
 INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 ently. It seems to me a little fade. But the character of 
 Kosalie de Watteville is in a very different rank. Here only, 
 except, perhaps, in the case of Mademoiselle de Verneuil, 
 whose unlucky experiences had emancipated her, has Balzac 
 depicted a girl full of character, individuality, and life. It 
 was apparently necessary that Eosalie should be made not 
 wholly amiable in order to obtain this accession of wits and 
 force, and to be freed from the fatal gift of candeur, the curse 
 of the French ingenue. Her creator has also thought proper 
 to punish her further, and cruelly, at the end of the book. 
 Nevertheless, though her story may be less interesting than 
 either of theirs, it is impossible not to put her in a much 
 higher rank as a heroine than either Eugenie or Ursule, and 
 not to wish that Balzac had included the conception of her in 
 a more important structure of fiction. 
 
 Albert Savarus appeared in sixty headed chapters in the 
 Siecle for May and June 1842, and then assumed its place in 
 the Comedie. But though left there, it also formed part of 
 a two- volume issue by Souverain in 1844, in company with 
 La Muse du departement. "Kosalie" was at first named 
 "Philomene." 
 
 As something has necessarily been said already about the 
 book-history of the Cure de Village, little remains but to give 
 exact dates and places of appearance. The Presse published 
 the (original) first part in December-January 1838-39, the 
 original second (Veronique) six months later, and the third 
 (Veronique au Tombeau) in August. All had chapters and 
 chapter-titles. As a book it was in its first complete form 
 published by Souverain in 1841, and was again altered when 
 it took rank in the Comedie six years later. 
 
 a. s.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 I 
 
 VEEONIQUE 
 
 AT the lower end of Limoges, at the corner of the Rue de la 
 Vieille-Poste and the Rue de la Cite, there stood, some thirty 
 years hack, an old-fashioned shop of the kind that seems to 
 have changed in nothing since the Middle Ages. The great 
 stone paving-slabs, riven with countless cracks, were laid 
 upon the earth; the damp oozed up through them here and 
 there; while the heights and hollows of this primitive floor- 
 ing would have tripped up those who were not careful to ob- 
 serve them. Through the dust on the walls it was possible 
 to discern a sort of mosaic of timber and bricks, iron and 
 stone, a heterogeneous mass which owed its compact solidity 
 to time, and perhaps to chance. For more than two centuries 
 the huge rafters of the ceiling had bent without breaking be- 
 neath the weight of the upper stories, which were constructed 
 of wooden framework, protected from the weather by slates 
 arranged in a geometrical pattern ; altogether, it was a quaint 
 example of a burgess' house in olden times. Once there had 
 been carved figures on the wooden window-frames, but sun 
 and rain had destroyed the ornaments, and the windows 
 themselves stood all awry; some bent outwards, some bent 
 in, yet others were minded to part company, and one and all 
 carried a little soil deposited (it would be hard to say how) 
 in crannies hollowed by the rain, where a few shy creeping 
 plants and thin weeds grew to break into meagre blossom in 
 
 (1)
 
 2 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 the spring. Velvet mosses covered the roof and the window- 
 sills. 
 
 The pillar which supported the corner of the house, built 
 though it was of composite masonry, that is to say, partly of 
 stone, partly of brick and flints, was alarming to behold by 
 reason of its curvature; it looked as though it must give way 
 some day beneath the weight of the superstructure whose 
 gable projected fully six inches. For which reason the 
 Local Authorities and the Board of Works bought the house 
 and pulled it down to widen the street. The venerable corner 
 pillar had its charms for lovers of old Limoges; it carried 
 a pretty sculptured shrine and a mutilated image of the Vir- 
 gin, broken during the Kevolution. Citizens of an archa?o- 
 logical turn could discover traces of the stone sill meant to 
 hold candlesticks and to receive wax tapers and flowers and 
 votive offerings of the pious. 
 
 Within the shop a wooden staircase at the further end 
 gave access to the two floors above and to the attics in the 
 roof. The house itself, packed in between two neighboring 
 dwellings, had little depth from back to front, and no 
 light save from the windows which gave upon the street, the 
 two rooms on each floor having a window apiece, one look- 
 ing out into the Rue de la Vieille-Poste, and the other into 
 the Rue de la Cite. In the Middle Ages no artisan was bet- 
 ter housed. The old corner shop must surely have belonged 
 to some armorer or cutler, or master of some craft which 
 could be carried on in the open air, for it was impossible for 
 its inmates to see until the heavily-ironed shutters were taken 
 down and air as well as light freely admitted. There were 
 two doors (as is usually the case where a shop faces into two 
 streets), one on either side the pillar. But for the interrup- 
 tion of the white threshold stones, hollowed by the wear of 
 centuries, the whole shop front consisted of a low wall which 
 rose to elbow height. Along the top of this wall a groove had 
 been contrived, and a similar groove ran the length of the 
 beam above, which supported the weight of the house wall. 
 Into these grooves slid the heavy shutters, secured by huge
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 3 
 
 iron bolts and bars; and when the doorways had been made 
 fast in like manner, the artisan's workshop was as good as 
 a fortress. 
 
 For the first twenty years of this present century the 
 Limousins had been accustomed to see the interior filled up 
 with old iron and brass, cart-springs, tires, bells, and every 
 sort of m'etal from the demolition of houses; but the curious 
 in the debris of the old town discovered, on a closer inspec- 
 tion, the traces of a forge in the place and a long streak of 
 soot, signs which confirmed the guesses of archaeologists as to 
 the original purpose of the dwelling. On the first floor there 
 was a living room and a kitchen, two more rooms on the sec- 
 ond, and an attic in the roof, which was used as a warehouse 
 for goods more fragile than the hardware tumbled down pell- 
 mell in the shop. 
 
 The house had been first let and then sold to one Sauviat, 
 a hawker, who from 1792 till 1796 traveled in Auvergne for 
 a distance of fifty leagues round, bartering pots, plates, 
 dishes, and glasses, all the gear, in fact, needed by the 
 poorest cottagers, for old iron, brass, lead, and metal of every 
 sort and description. The Auvergnat would give a brown 
 earthen pipkin worth a couple of sous for a pound weight of 
 lead or a couple of pounds of iron, a broken spade or hoe, or 
 an old cracked saucepan; and was always judge in his own 
 cause, and gave his own weights. In three years' time Sauviat 
 took another trade in addition, and became a tinman. 
 
 In 1793 he was able to buy a chateau put up for sale by 
 the nation. This he pulled down; and doubtless repeated a 
 profitable experiment at more than one point in his sphere of 
 operations. After a while these first essays of his gave him an 
 idea ; he suggested a piece of business on a large scale to a fel- 
 low-countryman in Paris; and so it befell that the Black 
 Band, so notorious for the havoc which it wrought among 
 old buildings, was a sprout of old Sauviat's brain, the in- 
 vention of the hawker whom all Limoges had seen for seven- 
 and-twenty years in his tumbledown shop among his broken 
 bells, flails, chains, brackets, twisted leaden gutters, and
 
 4 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 heterogeneous old iron. In justice to Sauviat, it should be 
 said that he never knew how large and how notorious the as- 
 sociation became; he only profited by it to the extent of the 
 capital which he invested with the famous firm of Brezac. 
 
 At last the Auvergnat grew tired of roaming from fair to 
 fair and place to place, and settled down in Limoges, where, 
 in 1797, he had married a wife, the motherless daughter of 
 a tinman, Champagnac by name. "When the father-in-law 
 died, he bought the house in which he had, in a manner, 
 localized his trade in old iron, though for some three years 
 after his marriage he had still made his rounds, his wife ac- 
 companying him. Sauviat had completed his fiftieth year 
 when he married old Champagnac's daughter, and the bride 
 herself was certainly thirty years old at the least. Champa- 
 gnac's girl was neither pretty nor blooming. She was born in 
 Auvergne, and the dialect was a mutual attraction; she was, 
 moreover, of the heavy build which enables a woman to stand 
 the roughest work; so she went with Sauviat on his rounds, 
 carried loads of lead and iron on her back, and drove the 
 sorry carrier's van full of the pottery on which her husband 
 made usurious profits, little as his customers imagined it. 
 La Champagnac was sun-burned and high-colored. She en- 
 joyed rude health, exhibiting when she laughed a row of teeth 
 large and white as blanched almonds, and, as to physique, 
 possessed the bust and hips of a woman destined by Nature 
 to be a mother. Her prolonged spinsterhood was entirely due 
 to her father; he had not read Moliere, but he raised Harpa- 
 gon's cry of "Sans dot!" which scared suitors. The "Sans dot" 
 did not frighten Sauviat away ; he was not averse to receiving 
 the bride without a portion; in the first place, a would-be 
 bridegroom of fifty ought not to raise difficulties; and, in 
 the second, his wife saved him the expense of a servant. He 
 added nothing to the furniture of his room. On his wedding 
 day it contained a four-post bedstead hung with green serge 
 curtains and a valance with a scalloped edge; a dresser, a 
 chest of drawers, four easy-chairs, a table, and a looking-glass, 
 all bought at different times and from different places ; and till
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 5 
 
 he left the old house for good, the list remained the same. On 
 the upper shelves of the dresser stood sundry pewter plates 
 and dishes, no two of them alike. After this description of 
 the bedroom, the kitchen may be left to the reader's imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 Neither husband nor wife could read, a slight defect of 
 education which did not prevent them from reckoning money 
 to admiration, nor from carrying on one of the most prosper- 
 ous of all trades, for Sauviat never bought anything unless 
 he felt sure of making a hundred per cent on the transac- 
 tion, and dispensed with book-keeping and counting-house 
 by carrying on a ready-money business. He possessed, more- 
 over, a faculty of memory so perfect, that an article might 
 remain for five years in his shop, and at the end of the time 
 both he and his wife could recollect the price they gave for it 
 to a farthing, together with the added interest for every year 
 since the outlay. 
 
 Sauviat's wife, when she was not busy about the house, al- 
 ways sat on a rickety wooden chair in her shop door beside 
 the pillar, knitting, and watching the passers-by, keeping an 
 eye on the old iron, and selling, weighing, and delivering it 
 herself if Sauviat was out on one of his journeys. At day- 
 break you might hear the dealer in old iron taking down the 
 shutters, the dog was let loose into the street, and very soon 
 Sauviat's wife came down to help her husband to arrange 
 their wares. Against the low wall of the shop in the Sue de la 
 Cite and the Kue de la Vieille-Poste, they propped their 
 heterogeneous collection of broken gun-barrels, cart springs, 
 and harness bells, all the gimcracks, in short, which served 
 as a trade sign and gave a sufficiently poverty-stricken look 
 to a shop which in reality often contained twenty thousand 
 francs' worth of lead, steel, and bell metal. The retired 
 hawker and his wife never spoke of their money; they hid it 
 as a malefactor conceals a crime, and for a long while were 
 suspected of clipping gold louis and silver crowns. 
 
 When old Champagnac died, the Sauviats made no in- 
 ventory. They searched every corner and cranny of the old
 
 6 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 man's house with the quickness of rats, stripped it bare as 
 a corpse, and sold the tinware themselves in their own shop. 
 Once a year, when December came round, Sauviat would go 
 to Paris, traveling in a public conveyance ; from which prem- 
 ises, observers in the quarter concluded that the dealer in 
 old iron saw to his investments in Paris himself, so that he 
 might keep the amount of his money a secret. It came out 
 in after years that as a lad Sauviat had known one of the 
 most celebrated metal merchants in Paris, a fellow-country- 
 man from Auvergne, and that Sauviat's savings were in- 
 vested with the prosperous firm of Brezac, the corner-stone 
 of the famous association of the Black Band, which was 
 started, as has been said, by Sauviat's advice, and in which 
 he held shares. 
 
 Sauviat was short and stout. He had a weary-looking face 
 and an honest expression, which attracted customers, and was 
 of no little use to him in the matter of sales. The dryness 
 of his affirmations, and the perfect indifference of his manner, 
 aided his pretensions. It was not easy to guess the color of 
 the skin beneath the black metallic grime which covered his 
 curly hair and countenance seamed with the smallpox. His 
 forehead was not without a certain nobility; indeed, he re- 
 sembled the traditional type chosen by painters for Saint 
 Peter, the man of the people among the apostles, the roughest 
 among their number, and likewise the shrewdest; Sauviat 
 had the hands of an indefatigable worker, rifted by inefface- 
 able cracks, square-shaped, and coarse and large. The mus- 
 cular framework of his chest seemed indestructible. All 
 through his life he dressed like a hawker, wearing the thick 
 iron-bound shoes, the blue stockings which his wife knitted 
 for him, the leather gaiters, breeches of bottle-green vel- 
 veteen, a coat with short skirts of the same material, and a 
 flapped waistcoat, where the copper key of a silver watch 
 dangled from an iron chain, worn by constant friction, till it 
 shone like polished steel. Round his neck he wore a cotton 
 handkerchief, frayed by the constant rubbing of his beard. 
 On Sundays and holidays he appeared in a maroon overcoat
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 7 
 
 so carefully kept that he bought a new one but twice in a 
 score of years. 
 
 As for their manner of living, the convicts in the hulks 
 might be said to fare sumptuously in comparison; it was a 
 day of high festival indeed when they ate meat. Before La 
 Sauviat could bring herself to part with the money needed 
 for their daily sustenance, she rummaged through the two 
 pockets under her skirt, and never drew forth coin that was 
 not clipped or light weight, eyeing the crowns of six livres 
 and fifty sous pieces dolorously before she changed one of 
 them. The Sauviats contented themselves, for the most part, 
 with herrings, dried peas, cheese, hard-boiled eggs and salad, 
 and vegetables dressed in the cheapest way. They lived from 
 hand to mouth, laying in nothing except a bundle of garlic 
 now and again, or a rope of onions, which could not spoil, and 
 cost them a mere trifle. As for firewood, La Sauviat bought 
 the few sticks which they required in winter of the faggot- 
 sellers day by day. By seven o'clock in winter and nine in 
 summer the shutters were fastened, the master and mistress 
 in bed, and their huge dog, who picked up his living in the 
 kitchens of the quarter, on guard in the shop ; Mother Sauviat 
 did not spend three francs a year on candles. 
 
 A joy came into their sober hard-working lives ; it was a joy 
 that came in the natural order of things, and caused the only 
 outlay which they had been known to make. In May 1802, 
 La Sauviat bore a daughter. No one was called in to her as- 
 sistance, and five days later she was stirring about her house 
 again. She nursed her child herself, sitting on the chair in 
 the doorway, selling her wares as usual, with the baby at her 
 breast. Her milk cost nothing, so for two years she suckled 
 the little one, who was none the worse for it, for little 
 Veronique grew to be the prettiest child in the lower town, 
 so pretty indeed, that passers-by would stop to look at her. 
 The neighbors saw in old Sauviat traces of a tenderness 
 of which they had believed him incapable. While the wife 
 made the dinner ready he used to rock the little one in his 
 arms, crooning the refrain of some Auvergnat song; and the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 workmen as they passed sometimes saw him sitting motion- 
 less, gazing at little VSronique asleep on her mother's knee. 
 His gruff voice grew gentle for the child; he would wipe his 
 hands on his trousers before taking her up. When Veronique 
 was learning to walk, her father squatted on his heels four 
 paces away, holding out his arms to her, gleeful smiles puck- 
 ering the deep wrinkles on the harsh, stern face of bronze; 
 it seemed as if the man of iron, brass, and lead had once 
 more become flesh and blood. As he stood leaning against 
 the pillar motionless as a statue, he would start at a cry from 
 Veronique, and spring over the iron to find her, for she 
 spent her childhood in playing about among the metallic 
 spoils of old chateaux heaped up in the recesses of the shop, 
 and never hurt herself; and if she played in the street or with 
 the neighbors' children, she was never allowed out of her 
 mother's sight. 
 
 It is worth while to add that the Sauviats were eminently 
 devout. Even when the Eevolution was at its height Sauviat 
 kept Sundays and holidays punctually. Twice in those days 
 he had all but lost his head for going to hear mass said by 
 a priest who had not taken the oath to the Eepublic. He 
 found himself in prison at last, justly accused of conniving 
 at the escape of a bishop whose life he had saved ; but luckily 
 for the hawker, steel files and iron bars were old acquaint- 
 ances of his, and he made his escape. Whereupon the Court 
 finding that he failed to put in an appearance, gave judgment 
 by default, and condemned him to death ; and it may be added, 
 that as he never returned to clear himself, he finally died 
 under sentence of death. In his religious sentiments his wife 
 shared; the parsimonious rule of the household was only re- 
 laxed in the name of religion. Punctually the two paid their 
 quota for sacramental bread, and gave money for charity. 
 If the curate of Saint-E*tienne came to ask for alms, Sauviat 
 or his wife gave without fuss or hesitation what they believed 
 to be their due share towards the funds of the parish. The 
 broken Virgin on their pillar was decked with sprays of box 
 frhen Easter came round; and so long as there were flowers,
 
 When Veronique was learning to walk, her father squatted upon his 
 heels four paces away
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 9 
 
 the passers-by saw that the blue glass bouquet-holders were 
 never empty, and this especially after Veronique's birth. 
 Whenever there was a procession the Sauviats never failed to 
 drape their house with hangings and garlands, and con- 
 tributed to the erection and adornment of the altar the 
 pride of their street. 
 
 So Veromque was brought up in the Christian faith. As 
 soon as she was seven years old, she was educated by a Gray 
 Sister, an Auvergnate, to whom the Sauviats had rendered 
 some little service; for both of them were sufficiently oblig- 
 ing so long as their time or their substance was not in ques- 
 tion, and helpful after the manner of the poor, who lend 
 themselves with a certain heartiness. It was the Franciscan 
 Sister who taught Veronique to read and write ; she instructed 
 her pupil in the History of the People of God, in the Cate- 
 chism and the Old and New Testaments, and, to a certain 
 small extent, in the rules of arithmetic. That was all. The 
 good Sister thought that it would be enough, -but even this 
 was too much. 
 
 Veronique at nine years of age astonished the quarter by 
 her beauty. Every one admired a face which might one 
 day be worthy of the pencil of some impassioned seeker after 
 an ideal type. "The little Virgin," as they called her, gave 
 promise of being graceful of form and fair of face ; the thick, 
 bright hair which set off the delicate outlines of her features 
 completed her resemblance to the Madonna. Those who have 
 seen the divine child-virgin in Titian's great picture of the 
 Presentation in the Temple may know what Veronique was 
 like in these years; she had the same frank innocence of ex- 
 pression, the same look as of a wondering seraph in her eyes, 
 the same noble simplicity, the same queenly bearing. 
 
 Two years later, Veronique fell ill of the smallpox, and 
 would have died of it but for Sister Martha, who nursed her. 
 During those two months, while her life was in danger, the 
 quarter learned how tenderly the Sauviats loved their daugh- 
 ter. Sauviat attended no sales, and went nowhere. All day 
 long he stayed in the shop, or went restlessly up and down
 
 10 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 the stairs, and he and his wife sat up night after night with 
 the child. So deep was his dumb grief, that no one dared 
 to speak to him; the neighbors watched him pityingly, and 
 asked for news of Veronique of no one but Sister Martha. 
 The days came when the child's life hung by a thread, and 
 neighbors and passers-by saw, for the first and only time 
 in Sauviat's life, the slow tears rising under his 'eyelids and 
 rolling down his hollow cheeks. He never wiped them away. 
 For hours he sat like one stupefied, not daring to go upstairs 
 to the sick room, staring before him with unseeing eyes; he 
 might have been robbed, and he would not have noticed it. 
 
 Veronique's life was saved, not so her beauty. A uniform 
 tint, in which red and brown were evenly blended, overspread 
 her face; the disease left countless little scars which 
 coarsened the surface of the skin, and wrought havoc with 
 the delicate underlying tissues. Nor had her forehead es- 
 caped the ravages of the scourge; it was brown, and covered 
 with dints like the marks of hammer strokes. No combina- 
 tion is more discordant than a muddy-brown complexion and 
 fair hair; the pre-established harmony of coloring is broken. 
 Deep irregular seams in the surface had spoiled the purity 
 of her features and the delicacy of the outlines of her face; 
 the Grecian profile, the subtle curves of the chin finely 
 moulded as white porcelain, were scarcely discernible beneath 
 the coarsened skin; the disease had only spared what it was 
 powerless to injure the teeth and eyes. But Veronique did 
 not lose her grace and beauty of form, the full rounded curves 
 of her figure, nor the slenderness of her waist. At fifteen she 
 was a graceful girl, and (for the comfort of the Sauviats) 
 a good girl and devout, hard-working, industrious, always at 
 home. 
 
 After her convalescence and first communion, her father 
 and mother arranged for her the two rooms on the second 
 floor. Some glimmering notion of what is meant by comfort 
 passed through old Sauviat's mind; hard fare might do for 
 him and his wife, but now a dim idea of making compensation 
 for a loss which his daughter had not felt as yet, crossed
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON U 
 
 his brain. Veronique had lost the beauty of which these 
 two had been so proud, and thenceforward became the dearer 
 to them, and the more precious in their eyes. 
 
 So one day Sauviat came in, carrying a carpet, a chance 
 purchase, on his back, and this he himself nailed down on 
 the floor of Veronique's room. He went to a sale of furni- 
 ture at a chateau, and secured for her the red damask-cur- 
 tained bed of some great lady, and hangings and chairs and 
 easy-chnirs covered with the same stuff. Gradually he fur- 
 nished his daughter's rooms with second-hand purchases, in 
 complete ignorance of the real value of the things. He set 
 pots of mignonette on the window-sill, and brought back 
 flowers for her from his wanderings; sometimes it was a 
 rosebush, sometimes a tree-carnation, and plants of all kinds, 
 doubtless given to him by gardeners and innkeepers. If 
 Veronique had known enough of other people to draw com- 
 parisons, and to understand their manners of life and the 
 characters and the ignorance of her parents, she would have 
 known how great the affection was which showed itself in 
 these little things; but the girl gave her father and mother 
 the love that springs from an exquisite nature an instinctive 
 and unreasoning love. 
 
 Veronique must have the finest linen which her mother 
 could buy, and La Sauviat allowed her daughter to choose her 
 own dresses. Both father and mother were pleased with her 
 moderation; Veronique had no ruinous tastes. A blue silk 
 gown for holiday wear, a winter dress of coarse merino for 
 working days, and a striped cotton gown in summer; with 
 these she was content. 
 
 On Sunday she went to mass with her father and mother, 
 and walked with them after vespers along the banks of the 
 Vienne or in the neighborhood of the town. All through 
 the week she stayed in the house, busy over the tapestry-work, 
 which was sold for the benefit of the poor, or the plain sewing 
 for the hospital no life could be more simple, more innocent, 
 more exemplary than hers. She had other occupations besides 
 her sewing; she read to herself, but only such books as the
 
 12 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 curate of Saint-Etienne lent to her. (Sister Martha had 
 introduced the priest to the Sauviat family.) 
 
 For Veronique all the laws of the household economy were 
 set aside. Her mother delighted to cook dainty fare for her, 
 and made separate dishes for her daughter. Father and 
 mother might continue, as before, to eat the walnuts and 
 the hard bread, the herrings, and the dried peas fried with 
 a little salt butter; but for Veronique, nothing was fresh 
 enough nor good enough. 
 
 "Veronique must be a great expense to you/' remarked 
 the hatter who lived opposite. He estimated old Sauviat's 
 fortune at a hundred thousand francs, and had thoughts of 
 Veronique for his son. 
 
 "Yes, neighbor; yes, neighbor; yes," old Sauviat an- 
 swered, "she might ask me for ten crowns, and I should 
 let her have them, I should. She has everything she wants, 
 but she never asks for anything. She is as good and gentle 
 as a lamb !" 
 
 And, in fact, Veronique did not know the price of any- 
 thing; she had no wants; she never saw a piece of gold till 
 the day of her marriage, and had no money of her own ; her 
 mother bought and gave to her all that she wished, and even 
 for a beggar she drew upon her mother's pockets. 
 
 "Then she doesn't cost you much," commented the hatter. 
 
 "That is what you think, is it?" retorted Sauviat. "You 
 wouldn't do it on less than forty crowns a year. You should 
 see her room ! There is a hundred crowns' worth of furniture 
 in it ; but when you have only one girl, you can indulge your- 
 self ; and, after all, what little we have will all be hers some 
 day." 
 
 "Little 1 ? You must be rich, Father Sauviat. These forty 
 years you have been in a line of business where there are no 
 losses." 
 
 "Oh, they shouldn't cut my ears off for a matter of twelve 
 hundred francs," said the dealer in old iron. 
 
 From the day when Veronique lost the delicate beauty, 
 which every one had admired in her childish face, old Sauviat
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 13 
 
 had worked twice as hard as before. His business revived 
 again, and prospered so well, that he went to Paris not once, 
 but several times a year. People guessed his motives. If 
 his girl had gone off in looks, he would make up for it in 
 money, to use his own language. 
 
 When Veronique was about fifteen another change was 
 wrought in the household ways. The father and mother 
 went up to their daughter's room of an evening, and listened 
 while she read aloud to them from the Lives of the Saints, 
 or the Lettres edifiantes, or from some other book lent by 
 the curate of Saint-Etienne. The lamp was set behind a 
 glass globe full of water, and Mother Sauviat knitted indus- 
 triously, thinking in this way to pay for the oil. The neigh- 
 bors opposite could look into the room and see the two old 
 people sitting there, motionless as two carved Chinese figures, 
 listening intently, admiring their daughter with all the power 
 of an intelligence that was dim enough save in matters of 
 business or religion. Doubtless there have been girls as pure 
 as Veronique there have been none purer nor more modest. 
 Her confession surely filled the angels with wonder, and glad- 
 dened the Virgin in Heaven. She was now sixteen years old, 
 and perfectly developed; you beheld in her the woman she 
 would be. She was of medium height, neither the father 
 nor the mother was tall; but the most striking thing about 
 her figure was its lissome grace, the sinuous, gracious curves 
 which Nature herself traces so finely, which the artist strives 
 so painfully to render; the soft contours that reveal them- 
 selves to practised eyes, for in spite of folds of linen and 
 thickness of stuff, the dress is always moulded and informed 
 by the body. Simple, natural, and sincere, Veronique set 
 this physical beauty in relief by her unaffected freedom of 
 movement. She produced her "'full and entire effect," if it 
 is permissible to make use of the forcible legal phrase. She 
 had the full-fleshed arms of an Auvergnate, the red, plump 
 hands of a buxom inn-servant, and feet strongly made, but 
 shapely, and in proportion to her height. 
 
 Sometimes there was wrought in her an exquisite my&-
 
 14 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 terious change; suddenly it was revealed that in this frame 
 dwelt a woman hidden from all eyes but Love's. Perhaps 
 it was this transfiguration which awakened an admiration of 
 her beauty in the father and mother, who astonished the 
 neighbors by speaking of it as something divine. The first to 
 see it were the clergy of the cathedral and the communicants 
 at the table of the Lord. When Veronique's face was lighted 
 up by impassioned feeling and the mystical ecstasy which 
 filled her at such times is one of the strongest emotions in 
 the life of so innocent a girl it seemed as if a bright inner 
 radiance effaced the traces of the smallpox, and the pure, 
 bright face appeared once more in the first beauty of child- 
 hood. Scarcely obscured by the thin veil of tissues coarsened 
 by the disease, her face shone like some flower in dim places 
 under the sea, when the sunlight strikes down and invests it 
 with a mysterious glory. For a few brief moments Veronique 
 was transfigured, the Little Virgin appeared and disappeared 
 like a vision from Heaven. The pupils of her eyes, which 
 possessed in a high degree the power of contracting, seemed 
 at such seasons to dilate and overspread the blue of the iris, 
 which diminished till it became nothing more than a slender 
 ring; the change in the eyes, which thus grew piercing as the 
 eagle's, completing the wonderful change in the face. Was 
 it a storm of repressed and passionate longing, was it some 
 power which had its source in the depths of her nature, which 
 made those eyes dilate in broad daylight as other eyes widen 
 in shadow, darkening their heavenly blue? Whatever the 
 cause, it was impossible to look upon Veronique with indif- 
 ference as she returned to her place after having been made 
 one with God; all present beheld her in the radiance of her 
 early beauty ; at such times she would have eclipsed the fairest 
 women in her loveliness. What a charm for a jealous lover in 
 that veil of flesh which should hide his love from all other 
 eyes; a veil which the hand of Love could raise to let fall 
 again upon the rapture of wedded bliss. Veronique's lips, 
 faultless in their curves, seemed to have been painted scarlet, 
 BO richly were they colored by the pure glow of the blood.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 15 
 
 Her chin and the lower part of her face were a little full, 
 in the sense that painters give to the word, and this heaviness 
 of contour is, by the unalterable laws of physiognomy, a cer- 
 tain sign of a capacity for almost morbid violence of passion. 
 Her finely moulded but almost imperious brow was crowned 
 by a glorious diadem of thick abundant hair; the gold had 
 deepened to a chestnut tint. 
 
 From her sixteenth year till the day of her marriage 
 Veronique's demeanor was thoughtful and full of melancholy. 
 In an existence so lonely she fell, as solitary souls are 
 wont, to watching the grand spectacle of the life within, the 
 progress of her thoughts, the ever-changing phantasmagoria 
 of mental visions, the yearnings kindled by her pure life. 
 Those who passed along the Eue de la Cite on sunny days 
 had only to look up to see the Sauviats' girl sitting at her 
 window with* a bit of sewing or embroidery in her hand, 
 drawing the needle in and out with a somewhat dreamy air. 
 Her head stood out in sharp contrast against its background 
 among the flowers which gave a touch of poetry to the pro- 
 saic, cracked, brown window-sill, and the small leaded panes 
 of her casement. At times a reflected glow from the red 
 damask curtains added to the effect of the face so brightly 
 colored already; it looked like some rosy-red flower above the 
 little skyey garden, which she tended so carefully upon the 
 ledge. So the quaint old house contained something still 
 more quaint a portrait of a young girl, worthy of Mieris, 
 Van Ostade, Terburg, or Gerard Dow, framed in one of the 
 old, worn, and blackened, and almost ruinous windows which 
 Dutch artists loved to paint. If a stranger happened to 
 glance up at the second floor, and stand agape with wonder 
 at its construction, old Sauviat below would thrust out his 
 head till he could look up the face of the overhanging story. 
 He was sure to see Veronique there at the window. Then he 
 would go in again, rubbing his hands, and say to his wife 
 in the patois of Auvergne : 
 
 "Hullo, old woman, there is some one admiring your daugh- 
 ter!"
 
 16 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 In 1820 an event occurred in Veronique's simple and un- 
 eventful life. It was a little thing, which would have exer- 
 cised no influence upon another girl, but destined to effect a 
 fatal influence on Veronique's future life. On the day of a 
 suppressed Church festival, a working day for the rest of 
 the town, the Sauviats shut their shop and went first to mass 
 and then for a walk. On their way into the country they 
 passed by a bookseller's shop, and among the books displayed 
 outside Veronique saw one called Paul et Virginie. The fancy 
 took her to buy it for the sake of the engraving; her father 
 paid five francs for the fatal volume, and slipped it into the 
 vast pocket of his overcoat. 
 
 "Wouldn't it be better to show it to M. le Vicaire?" asked 
 the mother; for her any printed book was something of an 
 abracadabra, which might or might not be for evil. 
 
 "Yes, I thought I would," Veronique answered simply. 
 
 She spent that night in reading the book, one of the most 
 touching romances in the French language. The love scenes, 
 half-biblical, and worthy of the early ages of the world, 
 wrought havoc in Veronique's heart. A hand, whether dia- 
 bolical or divine, had raised for her the veil which hitherto 
 had covered nature. On the morrow the Little Virgin within 
 the beautiful girl thought her flowers fairer than on the even- 
 ing of the day before; she understood their symbolical lan- 
 guage, she gazed up at the blue sky with exaltation, causeless 
 tears rose to her eyes. 
 
 In every woman's life there comes a moment when she 
 understands her destiny, or her organization, hitherto mute, 
 speaks with authority. It is not always a man singled out 
 by an involuntary and stolen glance who reveals the possession 
 of a sixth sense, hitherto dormant ; more frequently it is some 
 sight that comes with the force of a surprise, a landscape, a 
 page of a book, some day of high pomp, some ceremony of 
 the Church ; the scent of growing flowers, the delicate bright- 
 ness of a misty morning, the intimate sweetness of divine 
 music, and something suddenly stirs in body or soul. For 
 the lonely child, a prisoner in the dark house, brought up
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 17 
 
 by parents almost as rough and simple as peasants; for the 
 girl who had never heard an improper word, whose innocent 
 mind had never received the slightest taint of evil; for the 
 angelic pupil of Sister Martha and of the good curate of 
 Saint-F^tienne, the revelation of love came through a charm- 
 ing book from the hand of genius. No peril would have 
 lurked in it for any other, but for her an obscene work would 
 have been less dangerous. Corruption is relative. There 
 are lofty and virginal natures which a single thought suffices 
 to corrupt, a thought which works the more ruin because the 
 necessity of combating it is not foreseen. 
 
 The next day Veronique showed her book to the good priest, 
 who approved the purchase of a work so widely known for 
 its childlike innocence and purity. But the heat of the tropics, 
 the beauty of the land described in Paul et Virginie, the 
 almost childish innocence of a love scarcely of this earth, 
 had wrought upon Veronique's imagination. She was capti- 
 vated by the noble and sweet personality of the author, and 
 carried away towards the cult of the Ideal, that fatal religion. 
 She dreamed of a lover, a young man like Paul, and brooded 
 over soft imaginings of that life of lovers in some fragrant 
 island. Below Limoges, and almost opposite the Faubourg 
 Saint-Martial, there is a little island in the Vienne; this, 
 in her childish fancy, Veronique called the Isle of France, 
 and filled with the fantastic creations of a young girl's 
 dreams, vague shadows endowed with the dreamer's own per- 
 fections. 
 
 She sat more than ever in the window in those days, and 
 watched the workmen as they came and went. Her parents' 
 humble position forbade her to think of any one but an 
 artisan; yet, accustomed as she doubtless was to the idea of 
 becoming a working-man's wife, she was conscious of an 
 instinctive refinement which shrank from anything rough 
 or coarse. So she began to weave for herself a romance such 
 as most girls weave in their secret hearts for themselves 
 alone. With the enthusiasm which might be expected of a 
 refined and girlish imagination, she seized on the attractive
 
 18 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 idea of ennobling one of these working-men, of raising him 
 to the level of her dreams. She made (who knows?) a Paul 
 of some young man whose face she saw in the street, simply 
 that she might attach her wild fancies to some human 
 creature, as the overcharged atmosphere of a winter day 
 deposits dew on the branches of a tree by the wayside, for 
 the frost to transform into magical crystals. How should 
 she escape a fall into the depths? for if she often seemed to 
 return to earth from far-off heights with a reflected glory 
 about her brows, yet oftener she appeared to bring with her 
 flowers gathered on the brink of a torrent-stream which she 
 had followed down into the abyss. On warm evenings she 
 asked her old father to walk out with her, and never lost 
 an opportunity of a stroll by the Vienne. She went into 
 ecstasy at every step over the beauty of the sky and land, 
 over the red glories of the sunset, or the joyous freshness 
 of dewy mornings, and the sense of these things, the poetry 
 of nature, passed into her soul. 
 
 She curled and waved the hair which she used to wear in 
 simple plaits about her head; she thought more about her 
 dress. The young, wild vine which had grown as its nature 
 prompted about the old elm-tree was transplanted and trim- 
 med and pruned, and grew upon a dainty green trellis. 
 
 One evening in December 1822, when Sauviat (now seventy 
 years old) had returned from a journey to Paris, the curate 
 dropped in, and after a few commonplaces: 
 
 "You must think of marrying your daughter, Sauviat," 
 eaid the priest. "At your age you should no longer delay the 
 fulfilment of an important duty." 
 
 "Why, has Veronique a mind to be married?" asked the 
 amazed old man. 
 
 "As you please, father," the girl answered, lowering her 
 eyes. 
 
 "We will marry her," cried portly Mother Sauviat, smiling 
 as she spoke. 
 
 "Why didn't you say something about this before I left 
 home, mother?" Sauviat asked. "I shall have to go back 
 to Paris again."
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 19 
 
 In Jerome-Baptiste Sauviat's eyes, plenty of money ap- 
 peared to be syiiQnymous with happiness. He had always 
 regarded love and marriage in their purely physical and 
 practical aspects; marriage was a means of transmitting his 
 property (he being no more) to another self; so he vowed 
 that Veronique should marry a well-to-do man. Indeed, for 
 a long while past this had become a fixed idea with him. His 
 neighbor the hatter, who was retiring from business, and 
 had an income of two thousand livres a year, had already 
 asked for Veronique for his son and successor (for Veronique 
 was spoken of in the quarter as a good girl of exemplary 
 life), and had been politely refused. Sauviat had not so 
 much as mentioned this to Veronique. 
 
 The curate was Veronique's director, and a great man 
 in the Sauviats' eyes; so the day after he had spoken of 
 Veronique's marriage as a necessity, old Sauviat shaved him- 
 self, put on his Sunday clothes, and went out. He said not 
 a word to his wife and daughter, but the women knew that 
 the old man had gone out to find a son-in-law. Sauviat went 
 to M. Graslin. 
 
 M. Graslin, a rich banker of Limoges, had left his native 
 Auvergne like Sauviat himself, without a sou in his pocket. 
 He had begun life as a porter in a banker's service, and from 
 that position had made his way, like many another capitalist, 
 partly by thrift, partly by sheer luck. A cashier at five-and- 
 twenty, and at five-and-thirty a partner in the firm of Ferret 
 & Grossetete, he at last bought out the original partners, and 
 became sole owner of the bank. His two colleagues went to 
 live in the country, leaving their capital in his hands at a low 
 rate of interest. Pierre Graslin, at the age of forty-seven, was 
 believed to possess six hundred thousand francs at the least. 
 His reputation for riches had recently increased, and the 
 whole department had applauded his free-handedness when 
 he built a house for himself in the new quarter of the Place 
 des Arbres, which adds not a little to the appearance of 
 Limoges. It was a handsome house, on the plan of alignment, 
 with a f agade like a neighboring public building ; but though
 
 20 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 the mansion had been finished for six months, Pierre Graslin 
 hesitated to furnish it. His house had cost him so dear, that 
 at the thought of living in it he drew back. Self-love, it may 
 be, had enticed him to exceed the limits he had prudent!} 
 observed all his life long ; he thought, moreover, with the plain 
 sense of a man of business, that it was only right that the 
 inside of his house should be in keeping with the programme 
 adopted with the facade. The plate and furniture and acces- 
 sories needed for the house-keeping in such a mansion would 
 cost more, according to his computations, than the actual 
 outlay on the building. So, in spite of the town gossip, the 
 broad grins of commercial circles, and the charitable surmises 
 of his neighbors, Pierre Graslin stayed where he was on the 
 damp and dirty ground-floor dwelling in the Hue Montant- 
 manigne, where his fortune had been made, and the great 
 house stood empty. People might talk, but Graslin was 
 happy in the approbation of his two old sleeping partners, 
 who praised him for displaying such uncommon strength of 
 mind. 
 
 Such a fortune and such a life as Graslin's is sure to excite 
 plentiful covetousness in a country town. During the past 
 ten years more than one proposition of marriage had been 
 skilfully insinuated. But the estate of a bachelor was emi- 
 nently suited to a man who worked from morning to night, 
 overwhelmed with business, and wearied by his daily round, 
 a man as keen after money as a sportsman after game; so 
 Graslin had fallen into none of the snares set for him by 
 ambitious mothers who coveted a brilliant position for their 
 daughters. Graslin, the Sauviat of a somewhat higher social 
 sphere, did not spend two francs a day upon himself, and 
 dressed no better than his second clerk. His whole staff 
 consisted of a couple of clerks and an office-boy, though he 
 went through an amount of business which might fairly be 
 called immense, so multitudinous were its ramifications. One 
 of the clerks saw to the correspondence, the other kept the 
 books ; and for the rest Pierre Graslin was both the soul and 
 body of his business. He chose his clerks from his family
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 21 
 
 circle; they were of his own stamp, trustworthy, intelligent, 
 and accustomed to work. As for the office-boy, he led the life 
 of a dray horse. 
 
 Graslin rose all the year round before five in the morning, 
 and was never in bed till eleven o'clock at night. His char- 
 woman, an old Auvergnate, who came in to do the housework 
 and to cook his meals, had strict orders never to exceed the 
 sum of three francs for the total daily expense of the house- 
 hold. The brown earthenware, the strong coarse tablecloths 
 and sheets, were in keeping with the manners and customs 
 of an establishment in which the porter was the man-of-all- 
 work, and the clerks made their own beds. The blackened 
 deal tables, the ragged straw-bottomed chairs with the holes 
 through the centre, the pigeon-hole writing-desks and ram- 
 shackle bedsteads, in fact, all the furniture of the counting- 
 house and the three rooms above it, would not have fetched 
 three thousand francs, even if the safe had been included, a 
 colossal solid iron structure built into the wall itself, before 
 which the porter nightly slept with a couple of dogs at his 
 feet. It had been a legacy from the old firm to the present 
 one. 
 
 Graslin was not often seen in society, where a great deal 
 was heard about him. He dined with the Eeceiver- General 
 (a business connection) two or three times a year, and he had 
 been known to take a meal at the prefecture ; for, to his own 
 intense disgust, he had been nominated a member of the 
 general council of the department. "He wasted his time 
 there," he said. Occasionally, when he had concluded a 
 bargain with a business acquaintance, he was detained to 
 lunch or dinner; and lastly, he was sometimes compelled to 
 call upon his old patrons who spent the winter in Limoges. 
 So slight was the hold which social relations had upon him, 
 that at twenty-five years of age Graslin had not so much 
 as offered a glass of water to any creature. 
 
 People used to say, "That is M. Graslin !" when he passed 
 along the street, which is to say, "There is a man who came 
 to Limoges without a farthing, and has made an immense 
 -3
 
 22 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 amount of money." The Auvergnat banker became a kind of 
 pattern and example held up by fathers of families to their 
 offspring and an epigram which more than one wife cast 
 in her husband's teeth. It is easy to imagine the motives 
 which induced this principal pivot in the financial machinery 
 of Limoges to repel the matrimonial advances rfo persever- 
 ingly made to him. The daughters of Messieurs Ferret and 
 Grossetete had been married before Graslin was in a position 
 to ask for them ; but as each of these ladies had daughters in 
 the schoolroom, people let Graslin alone at last, taking it for 
 granted that either old Ferret or Grossetete the shrewd had 
 arranged a match to be carried out some future day, when 
 Graslin should be bridegroom to one of the granddaughters. 
 
 Sauviat had watched his fellow-countryman's rise and 
 progress more closely than any one. He had known Graslin 
 ever since he came to Limoges, but their relative positions had 
 changed so much (in appearance at any rate) that the friend- 
 ship became an acquaintance, renewed only at long intervals. 
 Still, in his quality of fellow-countryman, Graslin was never 
 above having a chat with Sauviat in the Auvergne dialect 
 if the two happened to meet, and in their own language 
 they dropped the formal "you' ? for the more familiar "thee" 
 and "thou." 
 
 In 1823, when the youngest of the brothers Grossetete, 
 the Eeceiver-General of Bourges, married his daughter to the 
 youngest son of the Comte de Fontaine, Sauviat saw that the 
 Grossetetes had no mind to take Graslin into the family. 
 
 After a conference with the banker, old Sauviat returned 
 in high glee to dine in his daughter's room. 
 
 "Veronique will be Madame Graslin," he told the two 
 women. 
 
 "Madame Graslin!" cried Mother Sauviat, in amazement. 
 
 "Is it possible?" asked Veronique. She did not know Gras- 
 lin by sight, but the name produced much such an effect on 
 her imagination as the word Rothschild upon a Parisian shop- 
 girl. 
 
 "Yes. It is settled," old Sauviat continued solemnly.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 23 
 
 "Graslin will furnish his house very grandly; he will have 
 the finest carriage from Paris that money can buy for our 
 daughter, and the best pair of horses in Limousin. He will 
 buy an estate worth five hundred thousand francs for her, 
 and settle the house on her besides. In short, Veronique 
 will be the first lady in Limoges, and the richest in the de- 
 partment, and can do just as she likes with Graslin." 
 
 Veronique's boundless affection for her father and mother, 
 her bringing-up, her religious training, her utter ignorance, 
 prevented her from raising a single objection; it did not so 
 much as occur to her that she had been disposed of without 
 her own consent. The next day Sauviat set out for Paris, 
 and was away for about a week. 
 
 Pierre Graslin, as you may imagine, was no great talker; 
 he went straight to the point, and acted promptly. A thing 
 determined upon was a thing done at once. So in February 
 1822 a strange piece of news surprised Limoges like a sudden 
 thunder-clap. Graslin's great house was being handsomely 
 furnished. Heavy wagon-loads from Paris arrived daily 
 to be unpacked in the courtyard. Eumors flew about the 
 town concerning the good taste displayed in the beautiful fur- 
 niture, modern and antique. A magnificent service of plate 
 came down from Odiot's by the mail; and (actually) three 
 carriages ! a caleche, a brougham, and a cabriolet arrived 
 carefully packed in straw as if they had been jewels. 
 
 "M. Graslin is going to be married!" The words passed 
 from mouth to mouth, and in the course of a single evening 
 the news filtered through the drawing-rooms of the Limousin 
 aristocracy to the back parlors and shops in the suburbs, till 
 all Limoges in fact had heard it. But whom was he going 
 to marry? Nobody could answer the question. There was 
 a mystery in Limoges. 
 
 As soon as Sauviat came back from Paris, Graslin made 
 his first nocturnal visit, at half-past nine o'clock. Veronique 
 knew that he was coming. She wore her blue silk gown, cut 
 square at the throat, and a wide collar of cambric with a deep 
 hem. Her hair she had simply parted into two bandeaux,
 
 24 THE COUNTR1 PARSON 
 
 waved and gathered, into a Grecian knot at the back of hei 
 head. She was sitting in a tapestry-covered chair near the 
 fireside, where her mother occupied a great armchair with 
 a carved back and crimson velvet cushions, a bit of salvage 
 from some ruined chateau. A blazing fire biirned on the 
 hearth. Upon the mantel-shelf, on either side of an old 
 clock (whose value the Sauviats certainly did not know), 
 stood two old-fashioned sconces; six wax-candles in the sock- 
 ets among the brazen vine-stems shed their light on the brown 
 chamber, and on Veronique in her bloom. The old mother 
 had put on her best dress. 
 
 In the midst of the silence that reigned in the streets at 
 that silent hour, with the dimly-lit staircase as a background, 
 Graslin appeared for the first time before Veronique the 
 shy childish girl whose head was still full of sweet fancies 
 of love derived from Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's book. Gras- 
 lin was short and thin. His thick black hair stood up straight 
 on his forehead like bristles in a brush, in startling contrast 
 with a face red as a drunkard's, and covered with suppurating 
 or bleeding pustules. The eruption was neither scrofula nor 
 leprosy, it was simply a result of an overheated condition 
 of the blood; unflagging toil, anxiety, fanatical application 
 to business, late hours, a life steady and sober to the point 
 of abstemiousness, had induced a complaint which seemed 
 to be related to both diseases. In spite of partners, clerks, 
 and doctors, the banker had never brought himself to submit 
 to a regimen which might have alleviated the symptoms or 
 cured an evil, trifling at first, which was daily aggravated 
 by neglect as time went on. He wished to be rid of it, and 
 sometimes for a few days would take the baths and swallow 
 the doses prescribed; but the round of business carried him 
 away, and he forgot to take care of himself. Xow and again 
 he would talk of going away for a short holiday, and trying 
 the waters somewhere or other for a cure, but where is the 
 man in hot pursuit of millions who has been known to stop? 
 In this flushed countenance gleamed two gray eyes, the iris 
 speckled with brown dots and streaked with fine green
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 25 
 
 threads radiating from the pupil two covetous eyes, piercing 
 eyes that went to the depths of the heart, implacable eyes in 
 which you read resolution and integrity and business faculty. 
 A snub nose, thick blubber lips, a prominent rounded fore- 
 head, grinning cheek-bones, coarse ears corroded by the sour 
 humors of the blood altogether Graslin looked like an an- 
 tique satyr a satyr tricked out in a great coat, a black satin 
 waistcoat, and a white neckcloth knotted about his neck. The 
 strong muscular shoulders, which had once carried heavy 
 burdens, stooped somewhat already; the thin legs, which 
 seemed to be imperfectly jointed with the short thighs, trem- 
 bled beneath the weight of that over-developed torso. The 
 bony fingers covered with hair were like claws, as is often the 
 case with those who tell gold all day long. Two parallel lines 
 furrowed the face from the cheek-bones to the mouth, an un- 
 erring sign that here was a man whose whole soul was taken up 
 with material interests ; while the eyebrows sloped up towards 
 the temples in a manner which indicated a habit of swift 
 decision. Grim and hard though the mouth looked, there was 
 something there that suggested an underlying kindliness, real 
 good-heartedness, not called forth in a life of money-getting, 
 and choked, it may be, by cares of this world, but which 
 might revive at contact with a woman. 
 
 At sight of this apparition, something clutched cruelly at 
 Veronique's heart. Everything grew dark before her eyes. 
 She thought she cried out, but in reality she sat still, mute, 
 staring with fixed eyes. 
 
 "Veronique," said old Sauviat, "this is M. Graslin." 
 Veronique rose to her feet and bowed, then she sank down 
 into her chair again, and her eyes sought her mother. But 
 La Sauviat was smiling at the millionaire, looking so happy, 
 so very happy, that the poor child gathered courage to hide 
 her violent feeling of repulsion and the shock she had re- 
 ceived. In the midst of the conversation which followed, 
 something was said about Graslin's health. The bankei- 
 looked naively at himself in the beveled mirror framed in 
 ebony.
 
 26 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "I am not handsome, mademoiselle," he said, as he ex- 
 plained that the redness of his face was due to his busy life, 
 and told them how he had disobeyed his doctor's orders. He 
 hoped that as soon as he had a woman to look after him and 
 his household, a- wife who would take more care of him than 
 he took of himself, he should look quite a different man. 
 
 "As if anybody married a man for his looks, mate !" cried 
 the dealer in old iron, slapping his fellow-countryman on 
 the thigh. 
 
 Graslin's explanation appealed to instinctive feelings which 
 more or less fill every woman's heart. Veronique bethought 
 herself of her own face, marred by a hideous disease, and in 
 her Christian humility she thought better of her first impres- 
 sion. Just then some one whistled on the street outside, 
 Graslin went down, followed by Sauviat, who felt uneasy. 
 Both men soon returned. The porter had brought the first 
 bouquet of flowers, which had been in readiness for the occa- 
 sion. At the reappearance of the banker with this stack of 
 exotic blossoms, which he offered to his future bride, Vero- 
 nique's feelings were very different from those with which 
 she had first seen Graslin himself. The room was filled with 
 the sweet scent, for Veronique it was the realization of her 
 day-dreams of the tropics. She had never seen white camellias 
 before, had never known the scent of the Alpine cytisus, the 
 exquisite fragrance of the citronella, the jessamine of the 
 Azores, the verbena and musk-rose, and their sweetness, like 
 a melody in perfume, falling on her senses stirred a vague 
 tenderness in her heart. 
 
 Graslin left Veronique under the spell of that emotion; 
 but almost nightly after Sauviat returned home, the banker 
 waited till all Limoges was asleep, and then slunk along under 
 the walls to the house where the dealer in old iron lived. He 
 used to tap softly on the shutters, the dog did not bark, the 
 old man came down and opened the door to his fellow-coun- 
 tryinan, and Graslin would spend a couple of hours in the 
 brown ^oom where Veronique sat, and Mother Sauviat would 
 serve him up an Auvergnat supper. The uncouth lover never
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 27 
 
 came without a bouquet for Veronique, rare flowers only to 
 be procured in M. Grossetete's hothouse, M. Grossetete being 
 the only person in Limoges in the secret of the marriage. The 
 porter went after dark to fetch the bouquet, which old Grosse- 
 tete always gathered himself. 
 
 During those two months, Graslin went about fifty times to 
 the house, and never without some handsome present, rings, 
 a gold watch, a chain, a dressing-case, or the like; amazing 
 lavishness on his part, which, however, is easily explained. 
 
 Veronique would bring him almost the whole of her father's 
 fortune she would have seven hundred and fifty thousand 
 francs. The old man kept for himself an income of eight 
 thousand francs, an old investment in the Funds, made when 
 he was in imminent danger of losing his head on the scaffold. 
 In those days he had put sixty thousand francs in assignats 
 (the half of his fortune) into Government stock. It was 
 Brezac who had advised the investment, and dissuaded him 
 afterwards when he thought of selling out; it was Brezac, 
 too, who in the same emergency had been a faithful trustee 
 for the rest of his fortune the vast sum of seven hundred 
 gold louis, with which Sauviat began to speculate as scon as 
 he made good his escape from prison. In thirty years' time 
 each of those gold louis had been transmuted into a bill for a 
 thousand francs, thanks partly to the .interest on the as- 
 signats, partly to the money which fell in at the time of Cham- 
 pagnac's death, partly to trading gains in the business, and 
 to the money standing at compound interest in Brezac's con- 
 cern. Brezac had done honestly by Sauviat, as Auvergnat 
 does by Auvergnat. And so whenever Sauviat went to take 
 a look at the front of Graslin's great house : 
 
 "Veronique shall live in that palace !" he said to himself. 
 
 He knew that there was not another girl in Limousin who 
 would have seven hundred and fifty thousand francs paid 
 down on her marriage day ; beside two hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand of expectations. Graslin, the son-in-law of his choice, 
 must therefore inevitably marry Veronique. So every evening 
 Veronique received a bouquet, which daily made her little
 
 28 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 sitting-room bright with flowers, a bouquet care fully kept out 
 of sight of the neighbors. She admired the beautiful jewels, 
 the rubies, pearls, and diamonds, the bracelets, dear to all 
 daughters of Eve, and thought "herself less ugly thus adorned. 
 She saw her mother happy over this marriage, and she herself 
 had no standard of comparison; she had no idea what mar- 
 riage meant, no conception of its duties; and finally, she 
 heard the curate of Sairt-Eticnne praising Graslin to her, 
 in his solemn voice, telling her that this was an honorable 
 man with whom she would lead an honorable life. So Vero- 
 nique consented to receive M. Graslin's attentions. In a 
 lonely and monotonous life like hers, let a single person pre- 
 sent himself day by day, and before long that person will not 
 be indifferent; for either an aversion, confirmed by a deeper 
 knowledge, will turn to hate, and the visitor's presence will 
 be intolerable; or custom stales (so to speak) the sight of 
 physical defects, and then the mind begins to look for com- 
 pensations. Curiosity busies itself with the face ; from some 
 cause or other the features light up, there is some fleeting 
 gleam of beauty there ; and at last the nature, hidden beneath 
 the outward form, is discovered. In short, first impressions 
 once overcome, the force with which the one soul is attracted 
 to the other is but so much the stronger, because the discovery 
 of the true nature of the other is all its own. So love begins. 
 Herein lies the secret of the passionate love which beautiful 
 persons entertain for others who are not beautiful in appear 
 ance; affection, looking deeper than the outward form, sees 
 the form no longer, but a soul, and thenceforward knows 
 nothing else. Moreover, the beauty so necessary in a woman 
 takes in a man such a strange character, that women's 
 opinions differ as much on the subject of a man's good looks 
 as men about the beauty of a woman. 
 
 After much meditation and many struggles with herself, 
 Veronique allowed the banns to be published, and all Limoges 
 rang with the incredible news. Nobody knew the secret the 
 bride's immense dowry. If that had been bruited abroad. 
 Veronique might have chosen her husband, but perhaps even
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 29 
 
 so would have been mistaken. It was a love-match on Gras- 
 lin's side, people averred. 
 
 Upholsterers arrived from Paris to furnish the fine house. 
 The banker was going to great expense over it, and nothing 
 else was talked of in Limoges. People discussed the price 
 of the chandeliers, the gilding of the drawing-room, the 
 mythical subjects of the timepieces; and there were well- 
 informed folk who could describe the flower-stands and the 
 porcelain stoves, the luxurious novel contrivances. For in- 
 stance, there was an aviary built above the ice-house in the 
 garden of the Hotel Graslin; all Limoges marveled at the 
 rare birds in it the paroquets, and Chinese pheasants, and 
 strange water-fowl, there was no one who had not seen them. 
 
 M. and Mme. Grossetete, old people much looked up to in 
 Limoges, called several times upon the Sauviats, Graslin ac- 
 companying them. Mme. Grossetete, worthy woman, con- 
 gratulated Veronique on the fortunate marriage she was to 
 make; so the Church, the family, and the world, together 
 with every trifling circumstance, combined to bring this match 
 about. 
 
 In the month of April, formal invitations were sent to all 
 Graslin's circle of acquaintance. At eleven o'clock one fine 
 sunny morning a caleche and a brougham, drawn by Limousin 
 horses in English harness (old Grossetete had superintended 
 his colleague's stable), arrived before the poor little shop 
 where the dealer in old iron lived; and the excited quarter 
 beheld the bridegroom's sometime partners and his two clerks. 
 There was a prodigious sensation, the street was filled by the 
 crowd eager to see the Sauviats' daughter. The most cele- 
 brated hairdresser in Limoges had set the bride's crown on 
 her beautiful hair and arranged her veil of priceless Brussels 
 lace; but Veronique's dress was of simple white muslin. A 
 sufficiently imposing assembly of the most distinguished wo- 
 men of Limoges was present at the wedding in the cathedral ; 
 the Bishop himself, knowing the piety of the Sauviats, con- 
 descended to perform the marriage ceremony. People thought 
 the bride a plain-looking girl. For the first time she entered
 
 30 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 her hotel, and went from surprise to surprise. A state dinner 
 preceded the ball, to which Graslin had invited almost all 
 Limoges. The dinner given to the Bishop, the prefect, the 
 president of the court of first instance, the public prosecutor, 
 the mayor, the general, and to Graslin's sometime employers 
 and their wives, was a triumph for the bride, who, like all 
 simple and unaffected people, proved unexpectedly charming. 
 None of the married people would dance, so that Veronique 
 continued to do the honors of her house, and won the esteem 
 and good graces of most of her new acquaintances ; asking old 
 Grossetete, who had taken a great kindness for her, for infor- 
 mation about her guests, and so avoiding blunders. During 
 the evening the two retired bankers spread the news of the 
 fortune, immense for Limousin, which the parents of the 
 bride had given her. At nine o'clock the dealer in old iron 
 went home to bed, leaving his wife to preside at the ceremony 
 of undressing the bride. It was said in the town that Mme. 
 Graslin was plain but well shaped. 
 
 Old Sauviat sold his business and his house in the town, 
 and bought a cottage on the left bank of the Vienne, between 
 Limoges and Le Cluzeau, and ten minutes' walk from the 
 Faubourg Saint-Martial. Here he meant that he and his 
 wife should end their days in peace. The two old people had 
 rooms in Graslin's hotel, and dined there once or twice a 
 week with their daughter, whose walks usually took the direc- 
 tion of their house. 
 
 The retired dealer in old iron had nothing to do, and nearly 
 died of leisure. Luckily for him, his son-in-law found him 
 gome occupation. In 1823 the banker found himself with a 
 porcelain factory on his hands. He had lent large sums to the 
 manufacturers, which they were unable to repay, so he had 
 taken over the business to recoup himself. In this concern 
 he invested more capital, and by this means, and by his ex- 
 tensive business connections, made of it one of the largest 
 factories in Limoges; so that when he sold it in three years 
 after he took it over, he made a large profit on the transaction. 
 He made his father-in-law the manager of this factory, situ-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 31 
 
 ated in the very same quarter of Saint-Martial where his 
 house stood; and in spite of Sauviat's seventy-two years, he 
 had done not a little in bringing about the prosperity of a 
 business in which he grew quite young again. The plan had 
 its advantages likewise for Graslin; but for old Sauviat, who 
 threw himself heart and soul into the porcelain factory, he 
 would have been perhaps obliged to take a clerk into partner- 
 ship and lose part of the profits, which he now received in 
 full; but as it was, he could look after his own affairs in the 
 town, and feel his mind at ease as to the capital invested in the 
 porcelain works. 
 
 In 1827 Sauviat met with an accident, which ended in his 
 death. He was busy with the stock-taking, when he stumbled 
 over one of the crates in which the china was packed, grazing 
 his leg slightly. He took no care of himself, and mortification 
 set in; they talked of amputation, but he would not hear of 
 losing his leg, and so he died. His widow made over about 
 two hundred and fifty thousand francs, the amount of Sau- 
 viat's estate, to her daughter and son-in-law, Graslin under- 
 taking to pay her two hundred francs a month, an amount 
 amply sufficient for her needs. She persisted in living on 
 without a servant in the little cottage ; keeping her point with 
 the obstinacy of old age, and in spite of her daughter's en- 
 treaties; but, on the other hand, she went almost every day 
 to the Hotel Graslin, and Veronique's walks, as heretofore, 
 usually ended at her mother's house. There was a charming 
 view from the windows of the river and the little island in 
 the Vienne, which Veronique had loved in the old days, and 
 called her Isle of France. 
 
 The story of the Sauviats has been anticipated partly to 
 save interruption to the other story of the Graslins' household, 
 partly because it serves to explain some of the reasons of the 
 retired life which Veronique Graslin led. The old mother 
 foresaw how much her child might one day be made to suffer 
 through Graslin's avarice; for long she held out, and refused 
 to give up the rest -of her fortune, and only gave way when 
 Veronique insisted upon it. Veronique was incapable of im-
 
 32 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 agining circumstances in which a wife desires to have the 
 control of her property, and acted upon a generous impulse; 
 in this way she meant to thank Graslin for giving her back 
 her liberty. 
 
 The unaccustomed splendors of Graslin's marriage has been 
 totally at variance with his habits and nature. The great 
 capitalist's ideas were very narrow. Veronique had had no 
 opportunity of gauging the man with whom she must spend 
 the rest of her life. During those fifty-five evening visits 
 Graslin had shown but one side of his character the man of 
 business, the undaunted worker who planned and carried out 
 large undertakings, the capitalist who looked at public affairs 
 with a view to their probable effect on the bank rate and 
 opportunities of money-making. And, under the influence 
 of his father-in-law's million, Graslin had behaved generously 
 in those days, though even then his lavish expenditure was 
 made to gain his own ends; he was drawn into expense in the 
 springtide days of his marriage partly by the possession of the 
 great house, which he called his "Folly," the house still called 
 the Hotel Graslin in Limoges. 
 
 As he had the horses, the caleche, and brougham, it was 
 natural to make use of them to pay a round of visits on his 
 marriage, and to go to the dinner-parties and dances given 
 in honor of the bride by official dignitaries and wealthy 
 houses. Acting on the impulses which carried him out of his 
 ordinary sphere, Graslin was "at home" to callers one day in 
 the week, and sent to Paris for a cook. For about a year in- 
 deed he led the ordinary life of a man who has seventeen hun- 
 dred thousand francs of his own, and can command a capital 
 of three millions. He had come to be the most conspicuous 
 personage in Limoges. During that year he generously al- 
 lowed Mme. Graslin twenty-five twenty-franc pieces every 
 month. 
 
 Veronique on her marriage had become a person of great 
 interest to the rank and fashion of Limoges; she was a kind 
 of godsend to the idle curiosity which finds such meagre sus- 
 tenance in the provinces. Veronique, who had so suddenly
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 38 
 
 
 
 made her appearance, was a phenomenon the more closely 
 scrutinized on that account; but she always maintained the 
 simple and unaffected attitude of an onlooker who watches 
 manners and usages unknown to her, and seeks to conform 
 to them. From the first she had been pronounced to have a 
 good figure and a plain face, and now it was decided that 
 she was good-natured, but stupid. She was learning so many 
 things at once, she had so much to see and to hear, that her 
 manner and talk gave some color to this accusation. A sort 
 of torpor, moreover, had stolen over her which might well be 
 mistaken for stupidity. Marriage, that "difficult profession" 
 of wifehood, as she called it, in which the Church, the Code, 
 and her own mother bade her practise the most complete res- 
 ignation and perfect obedience, under pain of breaking all 
 laws human and divine, and bringing about irreparable evils ; 
 marriage had plunged her into a bewilderment which grew to 
 the pitch of vertigo and delirium. While she sat silent and 
 reserved, she heard her own thoughts as plainly as the voices 
 about her. For her "existence" had come to be extremely "dif- 
 ficult," to use the phrase of the dying Fontenelle, and ever 
 more increasingly, till she grew frightened, she was afraid 
 of herself. Nature recoiled from the orders of the soul; 
 the body rebelled against the wilL The poor snared creature 
 wept on the bosom of the great Mother of the sorrowful and 
 afflicted; she betook herself to the Church, she redoubled her 
 fervor, she confided to her director the temptations which 
 assailed her, she poured out her soul in prayer. Never at any 
 time in her life did she fufil her religious duties so zealously. 
 The tempest of despair which filled her when she knew that 
 she did not love her husband, flung her at the foot of the 
 altar, where divine comforting voices spoke to her of patience. 
 And she was patient and sweet, living in hope of the joys of 
 motherhood. 
 
 "Did you see Mme. Graslin this morning?" the women 
 asked among themselves. "Marriage does not agree with her; 
 she looked quite ghastly." 
 
 "Yes; but would you have given a daughter of yours to a
 
 34 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 
 
 man like M. Graslin. Of course, if you marry such a monster, 
 you suffer for it." 
 
 As soon as Graslin was fairly married, all the mothers who 
 had assiduously hunted him for the past ten years directed 
 spiteful speeches at him. Veronique grew thin, and became 
 plain in good earnest. Her eyes were heavy, her features 
 coarsened, she looked shamefaced and embarrassed, and wore 
 the dreary, chilling expression, so repellant in bigoted devo- 
 tees. A grayish tint overspread her complexion. She dragged 
 herself languidly about during the first year of her marriage, 
 usually the heyday of a woman's life. Before very long she 
 sought for distraction in books, making use of her privilege 
 as a married woman to read everything. She read Scott's 
 novels, Byron's poems, the works of Schiller and Goethe, lit- 
 erature ancient and modern. She learned to ride, to dance, 
 and draw. She made sepia drawings and sketches in water- 
 color, eager to learn every device which women use to while 
 away the tedium of solitary hours ; in short, that second edu- 
 cation which a woman nearly always undertakes for a man's 
 sake and with his guidance, she undertook alone and for her- 
 self. 
 
 In the loftiness of a nature frank and free, brought up, 
 as it were, in the desert, but fortified by religion, there was 
 a wild grandeur, cravings which found no satisfaction in the 
 provincial society in which she moved. All the books described 
 love; she looked up from her books on life, and found no 
 traces of passion there. Love lay dormant in her heart like 
 the germs which wait for the sun. Through a profound 
 melancholy, caused by constant brooding over herself, she 
 came by dim and winding ways back to the last bright 
 dreams of her girlhood. She dwelt more than once on 
 the old romantic imaginings, and became the heroine and 
 the theatre of the drama. Once again she saw the island 
 bathed in. light, full of blossom and sweet scents, and all 
 things grateful to her soul. 
 
 Not seldom her sad eyes wandered over her rooms with 
 searching curiosity; the men she saw were all like Graslin;
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 35 
 
 she watched them closely, and seemed to turn questioningly 
 from them to their wives; but on the women's faces she saw 
 no sign of her own secret trouble, and sadly and wearily she re- 
 turned to her starting-point, uneasy about herself. Her high- 
 est thoughts met with a response in the books which she read 
 of a morning, their wit pleased her; but in the evening she 
 heard nothing but commonplace thoughts, which no one at- 
 tempted to disguise by giving a witty turn to them ; the talk 
 around her was vapid and empty, or ran upon gossip and local 
 news, which had no interest for her. She wondered sometimes 
 at the warmth of discussions in which there was no question 
 of sentiment, for her the very core of life. She was often seen 
 gazing before her with fixed, wide eyes, thinking, doubtless, 
 of hours which she had spent, while still a girl ignorant of 
 life, in the room where everything had been in keeping with 
 her fancies, and now laid in ruins, like Veronique's own ex- 
 istence. She shrank in pain from the thought of being drawn 
 into the eddy of petty cares and interests like the other women 
 among whom she was forced to live ; her ill-concealed disdain 
 of the littleness of her lot, visible upon her lips and brow, 
 was taken for upstart insolence. 
 
 Mme. Graslin saw the coolness upon all faces, and felt a 
 certain bitter tone in the talk. She did not understand the 
 reason, for as yet she had not made a friend sufficiently inti- 
 mate to enlighten or counsel her. Injustice, under which 
 small natures chafe, compels loftier souls to return within 
 themselves, and induces in them a kind of humility. Vero- 
 nique blamed herself, and tried to discover where the fault 
 lay. She tried to be gracious, she was pronounced to be insin- 
 cere; she redoubled her kindliness, and was said to be a 
 hypocrite (her devotion giving color to the slander) ; she was 
 lavish of hospitality, and gave dinners and dances, and was 
 accused of pride. All Mme. Graslin's efforts were unsuccess- 
 ful. She was misjudged and repulsed by the petty querulous 
 pride of provincial coteries, where susceptibilities are always 
 upon the watch for offences; she went no more into society, 
 and lived in the strictest retirement. The love in her heart
 
 36 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 turned to the Church. The great spirit in its feeble house of 
 flesh saw in the manifold behests of Catholicism but so many 
 stones set by the brink of the precipices of life, raised there 
 by charitable hands to prop human weakness by the way. 
 So every least religious observance was practised with the 
 most punctilious care. 
 
 Upon this, the Liberal party added Mme. Graslin's name 
 to the list of bigots in the town. She was classed among the 
 Ultras, and party spirit strengthened the various grudges 
 which Veronique had innocently stored up against herself, 
 with its periodical exacerbations. But as she had nothing 
 to lose by this ostracism, she went no more into society, and 
 betook herself to her books, with the infinite resources which 
 they opened to her. She thought over her reading, she com- 
 pared methods, she increased the amount of her actual knowl- 
 edge and her power of acquiring it, and by so doing opened 
 the gateways of her mind to curiosity. 
 
 It was at this period of close and persistent study, while 
 religion supported her, that she gained a friend in M. Grosse- 
 tete, an old man whose real ability had not grown so rusty 
 in the course of a life in a country town but that contact with 
 a keen intelligence could still draw a few sparks from it. The 
 kind soul was deeply interested in Veronique, who, in return 
 for the mild warmth of the mellowed affection which age 
 alone can give, put forth all the treasures of her soul ; for 
 him the splendid powers cultivated in secret first blossomed 
 forth. 
 
 A fragment of a letter written at this time to M. Grossetete 
 will describe the mental condition of a woman who one day 
 should give proof of a firm temper and lofty nature: 
 
 "The flowers which you sent to me for the dance were very 
 lovely, yet they suggested painful thoughts. The sight of 
 that beauty, gathered by you to decorate a festival, and to 
 fade on my breast and in my hair, made me think of other 
 flowers born to die unseen in your woods, to shed sweet scent 
 that no one breathes. Then I asked myself why I was danc-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 37 
 
 ing, why I had decked myself with flowers, just as I ask God 
 why I am here in the world. You see, my friend, that in 
 everything there lurks a snare for the unhappy, just as the 
 drollest trifles bring the sick back to their own sufferings. 
 That is the worst of some troubles : they press upon us so con- 
 stantly that they shape themselves into an idea which is ever 
 present in our minds. An ever-present trouble ought surely 
 to be a hallowed thought. You love flowers for their own 
 sake; I love them as I love beautiful music. As I once told 
 you, the secret of a host of things is hidden from me. . . . 
 You, my old friend, for instance, have a passion for garden- 
 ing. When you come back to town, teach me to share in this 
 taste of yours; send me with a light footstep to my hothouse 
 to feel the interest which you take in watching your plants 
 grow. You seem to me to live and blossom with them, to 
 take a delight in them, as in something of your own creation; 
 to discover new colors, novel splendors, which come forth 
 under your eyes, the result of your labors. I feel that the 
 emptiness of my life is breaking my heart. For me, my hot- 
 house is full of pining souls. The distress which I force 
 myself to relieve saddens my very soul. I find some young 
 mother without linen for her new-born babe, some old man 
 starving, I make their troubles mine, and even when I have 
 helped them, the feelings aroused in me by the sight of misery 
 relieved are not enough to satisfy my soul. Oh ! my friend, 
 I feel that I have great powers asserting themselves in me, 
 powers of doing evil, it may be, which nothing can crush 
 powers that the hardest commandments of religion cannot 
 humble. When I go to see my mother, when I am quite alone 
 among the fields, I feel that I must cry aloud, and I cry. My 
 body is the prison in which one of the evil genii has pent 
 up some moaning creature, until the mysterious word shall 
 be uttered which shatters the cramping cell. But this com- 
 parison is not just. In my case it should be reversed. It 
 is the body which is a prisoner, if I may make use of the ex- 
 pression. Does not religion occupy my soul? And the 
 treasures gained by reading are constant food for the mind. 
 4
 
 38 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Why do I long for any change, even if it comes as suffering 
 for any break in the enervating peace of my lot? Unless 
 I find some sentiment to uphold me, some strong interest 
 to cultivate, I feel that I shall drift towards-the abyss where 
 every idea grows hazy and meaningless, where character is 
 enervated, where the springs of one's being grow slack and 
 inert, where I shall be no longer the woman Nature intended 
 me to be. That is what my cries mean. . . . But you 
 will not cease to send flowers to me because of this outcry of 
 mine? Your friendship has been so sweet and pleasant a 
 thing, that it has reconciled me with myself for several 
 months. Yes, I feel happy when I think that you sometimes 
 throw a friendly glance over the blossoming desert-place, my 
 inner self; that the wanderer, half dead after her flight on 
 the fiery steed of a dream, will meet with a kind word of 
 greeting from you on her return." 
 
 Three years after Veronique's marriage, it occurred to 
 Graslin that his wife never used the horses, and, a good 
 opportunity offering itself, he sold them. The carriages 
 were sold at the same time, the coachman was dismissed, and 
 the cook from Paris transferred to the Bishop's establishment. 
 A woman servant took his place. Graslin ceased to give his 
 wife an allowance, saying that he would pay all the bills. He 
 was the happiest man in the world when he met with no 
 opposition from the wife who had brought him a million. 
 There was not much credit, it is true, in Mme. Graslin's self- 
 denial. She knew nothing of money, she had been brought up 
 in ignorance of it as an indispensable element in life. Graslin 
 found the sums which he had given to her lying in a corner 
 of her desk; scarcely any of it had been spent. Veronique 
 gave to the poor, her trousseau had been so large that as yet 
 she had had scarcely any expenses for dress. Graslin praised 
 Veronique to all Limoges as the pattern of wives. 
 
 The splendor of the furniture gave him pangs, so he had 
 it all shrouded in covers. His wife's bedroom, boudoir, and 
 dressing-room alone escaped this dispensation, an economical
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 39 
 
 measure which economized nothing, for the wear and tear 
 to the furniture is the same, covers or no covers. 
 
 He next took up his abode on the ground floor, where the 
 counting-house and office had been established, so he began 
 his old life again, and was as keen in pursuit of gain as before. 
 The Auvergnat banker thought himself a model husband 
 because he breakfasted and dined with his wife, who carefully 
 ordered the meals for him; but he was so extremely unpunc- 
 tual, that he came in at the proper hour scarce ten times a 
 month ; and though, out of thoughtf ulness, he asked her never 
 to wait for him, Veronique always stayed to carve for him ; she 
 wanted to fulfil her wifely duties in some one visible manner. 
 His marriage had not been a matter to which the banker gave 
 much thought ; his wife represented the sum of seven hundred 
 and fifty thousand francs; he had not discovered that that 
 wife shrank from him. Gradually he had left Mme. Graslin 
 to herself, and became absorbed in business ; and when he took 
 it into his head to have a bed put for him in a room next to 
 his private office, Veronique saw that his wishes were carried 
 out at once. 
 
 So after three years of marriage this ill-assorted couple 
 went their separate ways as before, and felt glad to return to 
 them. The capitalist, owner now of eighteen hundred thou- 
 sand francs, returned to his occupation of money-making with 
 all the more zest after the brief interval. His two clerks and 
 the office-boy were somewhat better lodged and a little better 
 fed that was all the difference between the past and the pres- 
 ent. His wife had a cook and a waiting-maid (the two ser- 
 vants could not well be dispensed with), and no calls were 
 made on Graslin's purse except for strict necessaries. 
 
 And Veronique was happy in the turn things had taken; 
 she saw in the banker's satisfaction a compensation for a 
 separation for which she had never asked; it was impossible 
 that Graslin should shrink from her as she shrank from him. 
 She was half glad, half sorry of this secret divorce; she had 
 looked forward to motherhood, which should bring a new in- 
 terest into her life ; but in spite of their mutual resignation, 
 there was no child of the marriage as yet in 1828.
 
 40 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 So Mme. Graslin, envied by all Limoges, led as lonely a 
 life in her splendid home as formerly in her father's hovel; 
 but the hopes and the childish joys of inexperience were gone. 
 She lived in the ruins of her "castles in Spain," enlightened 
 by sad experience, sustained by a devout faith, busying her- 
 self for the poor of the district, whom she loaded with kind- 
 nesses. She made baby-linen for them; she gave sheets and 
 bedding to those who lay on straw ; she went everywhere with 
 her maid a good Auvergnate whom her mother found for 
 her. This girl attached herself body and soul to her mistress, 
 and became a charitable spy for her, whose mission it was to 
 find out trouble to soothe and distress to relieve. This life of 
 busy benevolence and of punctilious performance of the duties 
 enjoined by the Church was a hidden life, only known by the 
 cures of the town who directed it, for Veronique took their 
 counsel in all that she did, so that the money intended for the 
 deserving poor should not be squandered by vice. 
 
 During these years Veronique found another friendship 
 quite as precious to her and as warm as her friendship with 
 old Grossetete. She became one of the flock of the Abbe 
 Dutheil, one of the vicars-general of the diocese. This priest 
 belonged to the small minority among the French clergy who 
 lean towards concession, who would fain associate the Church 
 with the popular cause. By putting evangelical principles 
 in practice, the Church should gain her old ascendency over 
 the people, whom she could then bind to the Monarchy. But 
 the Abbe Dutheil's merits were unrecognized, and he was per- 
 secuted. Perhaps he had seen that it was hopeless to attempt 
 to enlighten the Court of Borne and the clerical party; per- 
 haps he had sacrificed his convictions at the bidding of his 
 superiors; at any rate, he dwelt within the limits of the strict- 
 est orthodoxy, 'knowing the while that the mere expression of 
 his convictions would close his way to a bishopric. A great 
 and Christian humility, blended with a lofty character, dis- 
 tinguished this eminent churchman. He had neither pride 
 nor ambition, and stayed at his post, doing his duty in the 
 midst of peril. The Liberal party in the town, who knew
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 41 
 
 nothing of his motives, quoted his opinions in support of 
 their own, and reckoned him as "a patriot," a word which 
 means "a revolutionary" for good Catholics. He was beloved 
 by those below him, who did not dare to praise his worth; 
 dreaded by his equals, who watched him narrowly; and a 
 thorn in the side of his bishop. He was not exactly perse- 
 cuted, his learning and virtues were too well known; it was 
 impossible to find fault with him freely, though he criticised 
 the blunders in policy by which the Throne and the Church 
 alternately compromised each other, and pointed out the inev- 
 itable results ; like poor Cassandra, he was reviled by his own 
 party before and after the fall which he predicted. Nothing 
 short of a Eevolution was likely to shake the Abbe Dutheil 
 from his place; he was a foundation stone in the Church, an 
 unseen block of granite on which everything else rests. His 
 utility was recognized, and he was left in his place, like 
 most of the real power of which mediocrity is jealous and 
 afraid. If, like the Abbe de Lamennais, he had taken up the 
 pen, he would probably have shared his fate ; at him, too, the 
 thunderbolts of Home would have been launched. 
 
 In person the Abbe Dutheil was commanding. Something 
 in his appearance spoke of a soul so profound that the surface 
 is always calm and smooth. His height and spare frame did 
 not mar the general effect of the outlines of his figure, which 
 vaguely recalled those forms which Spanish painters loved 
 best to paint for great monastic thinkers and dreamers 
 forms which Thorvaldsen in our own time has selected for his 
 Apostles. His face, with the long, almost austere lines in it, 
 which bore out the impression made by the straight folds of 
 his garments, possessed the same charm which the sculptors 
 of the Middle Ages discovered and recorded in the mystic 
 figures about the doorways of their churches. His grave 
 thoughts, grave words, and grave tones were all in keeping, 
 and the expression of the Abbe's personality. At the first 
 sight of the dark eyes, which austerity had surrounded with 
 hollow shadowy circles; the forehead, yellowed like old mar- 
 ble; the bony outlines of the head and hands, no one could
 
 42 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 have expected to hear any voice but his, or any teaching but 
 that which fell from his lips. It was this purely physical gran- 
 deur, in keeping with the moral grandeur of his nature, that 
 gave him a certain seeming haughtiness and aloofness, belied, 
 it is true, by his humility and his talk, yet unprepossessing 
 in the first instance. In a higher position these qualities 
 would have been advantages which would have enabled him 
 to gain a necessary ascendency over the crowd an ascendency 
 which it is quick to feel and to recognize ; but he was a subor- 
 dinate, and a man's superiors never pardon him for possessing 
 the natural insignia of power, the majesty so highly valued 
 in an older time, and often so signally lacking in modern 
 upholders of authority. 
 
 His colleague, the Abbe de Grancour, the other vicar- 
 general of the diocese, a blue-eyed stout little man with a 
 florid complexion, worked willingly enough with the Abbe 
 Dutheil, albeit their opinions were diametrically opposed ; 
 a curious phenomenon, which only a wily courtier will regard 
 as a natural thing ; but, at the same time, the Abbe de Gran- 
 cour was very careful not to commit himself in any way 
 which might cost him the favor of his bishop; the little man 
 would have sacrificed anything (even convictions) to stand 
 well in that quarter. He had a sincere belief in his colleague, 
 he recognized his ability ; in private he admitted his doctrines, 
 while he condemned them in public ; for men of his kind are 
 attracted to a powerful character, while they fear and hate 
 the superiority whose society they cultivate. "He would put 
 his arms round my neck while he condemned me," said the 
 Abbe Dutheil. The Abbe de Grancour had neither friends 
 nor enemies, and was like to die a vicar-general. He gave 
 out that he was drawn to Veronique's house by a wish to give 
 a woman so benevolent and so devout the benefit of his coun- 
 sels, and the Bishop signified his approval; but, in reality, 
 he was only too delighted to spend an evening now and then 
 in this way with the Abbe Dutheil. 
 
 From this time forward both priests became pretty con- 
 stant visitors in Veronique's house; they used to bring her
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 48 
 
 a sort of general report of any distress in the district, and 
 talk over the best means of benefiting the poor morally and 
 materially; but year by year M. Graslin drew the purse- 
 strings closer and closer; for, in spite of ingenious excuses 
 devised by his wife and Aline the maid, he suspected that all 
 the money was not required for expenses of dress and house- 
 keeping. He grew angry at last when he reckoned up the 
 amount which his wife gave away. He himself would go 
 through the bills with the cook, he went minutely into the de- 
 tails of their expenditure, and showed himself the great admin- 
 istrator that he was by demonstrating conclusively from his 
 own experience that it was possible to live in luxury on three 
 thousand francs per annum. Whereupon he compounded the 
 matter with his wife by allowing her a hundred francs a 
 month, to be duly accounted for, pluming himself on the 
 royal bounty of the grant. The garden, now handed over to 
 him, was "done up" of a Sunday by the porter, who had a 
 liking for gardening. After the gardener was dismissed, the 
 conservatory was turned to account as a warehouse, where 
 Graslin deposited the goods left with him as security for 
 small loans. The birds in the aviary above the ice-house 
 were left to starve, to save the expense of feeding them ; 
 and when at length a winter passed without a single frost, 
 he took that opportunity of declining to pay for ice any 
 longer. By the year 1828 every article of luxury was cur- 
 tailed, and parsimony reigned undisturbed in the Hotel 
 Graslin. 
 
 During the first three years after Graslin's marriage, with 
 his wife at hand to make him follow out the doctor's instruc- 
 tions, his complexion had somewhat improved; now it in- 
 flamed again, and became redder and more florid than in 
 the past. So largely, at the same time, did his business in- 
 crease, that the porter was promoted to be a clerk (as his 
 master had been before him), and another Auvergnat had to 
 be found to do the odd jobs of the Hotel Graslin. 
 
 After four years of married life the woman who had so 
 xmch wealth bad not three francs to call her own. To the
 
 44 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 niggardliness of her parents succeeded the no less niggardly 
 dispensation of her husband; and Mme. Graslin, whose 
 benevolent impulses were checked, felt the need of money for 
 the first time. 
 
 In the beginning of the year 1828 Veronique had recov- 
 ered the bloom of health which had lent such beauty to the 
 innocent girl who used to sit at the window in the old house 
 in the Eue de la Cite. She had read widely since those days ; 
 she had learned to think and to express her thoughts; the 
 habit of forming accurate judgments had lent profundity to 
 her features. The little details of social life had become 
 familiar to her, she wore a fashionable toilette with the most 
 perfect ease and grace. If chance brought her into a draw- 
 ing-room at this time, she found, not without surprise, that 
 she was received with something like respectful esteem; this 
 way of regarding her, like her reception, was due to the two 
 vicars-general and old Grossetete. The Bishop and one or 
 two influential people, hearing of Veronique's unwearying 
 benevolence, had talked about this fair life hidden from the 
 world, this violet perfumed with virtues, this blossom of un- 
 feigned piety. So, all unknown to Mme. Graslin, a revolu- 
 tion had been wrought in her favor; one of those reactions 
 so much the more lasting and sure because they are slowly 
 effected. With this right-about-face in opinion Veronique 
 became a power in the land. Her drawing-room was the re- 
 sort of the luminaries of Limoges; the practical change was 
 brought about by this means. 
 
 The young Vicomte de Granville came to the town at the 
 end of that year preceded by the ready-made reputation which 
 awaits a Parisian on his arrival in the provinces. He had 
 been appointed deputy public prosecutor to the Court of 
 Limoges. A few days after his arrival he said, in answer to 
 a sufficiently silly question, that Mme. Graslin was the 
 cleverest, most amiable, and most distinguished woman in 
 the city, and this at the prefect's "At Home," and before a 
 whole room full of people. 
 
 "And the most beautiful as well, perhaps?" suggested the 
 Receiver-General's wife.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 45 
 
 "There I do not venture to agree with you," he answered; 
 "when you are present I am unable to decide. Mme. Gras- 
 lin's beauty is not of a kind which should inspire jealousy in 
 you; she never appears in broad daylight. Mme. Graslin is 
 only beautiful for those whom she loves ; you are beautiful for 
 all eyes. If Mme. Graslin is deeply stirred, her face is trans- 
 formed by its expression. It is like a landscape, dreary in 
 winter, glorious in summer. Most people only see it in win- 
 ter; but if you watch her while she talks with her friends 
 on some literary or philosophical subject, or upon some re- 
 ligious question which interests her, her face lights up, and 
 suddenly she becomes another woman, a woman of wonder- 
 ful beauty." 
 
 This declaration, a recognition of the same beautiful trans- 
 figuration which Veronique's face underwent as she returned 
 to her place from the communion table, made a sensation in 
 Limoges, for the new substitute (destined, it was said, to be 
 Attorney-General one day) was the hero of tHe hour. In 
 every country town a man a little above the ordinary level 
 becomes for a shorter or longer time the subject of a craze, 
 a sham enthusiasm to which the idol of the moment falls a 
 victim. To these freaks of the provincial drawing-room we 
 owe the local* genius and the person who suffers from the 
 chronic complaint of unappreciated superiority. Sometimes 
 it is native talent which women discover and bring into 
 fashion, but more frequently it is some outsider ; and for once, 
 in the case of the Vicomte de Granville, the homage was paid 
 to genuine ability. 
 
 The Parisian found that Mme. Graslin was the only woman 
 with whom he could exchange ideas or carry on a sustained 
 and varied conversation; and a few months after his arrival, 
 as the charm of her talk and manner gained upon him, he 
 suggested to some of the prominent men in the town, and to 
 the Abbe Dutheil among them, that they might make their 
 party at whist of an evening in Mme. Graslin's drawing- 
 room. So Veronique was at home to her friends for five 
 nights in the week (two days she wished to keep free, she said,
 
 46 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 for her own concerns) ; and when the cleverest men in the 
 town gathered about Mme. Graslin, others were not sorry to 
 take brevet rank as wits by spending their evenings in her 
 society. Veronique received the two or three distinguished 
 military men stationed in the town or on the garrison staff. 
 The entire freedom of discussion enjoyed by her visitors, the 
 absolute discretion required of them, tacitly and by the adop- 
 tion of the manners of the best society, combined to make 
 Veronique exclusive and very slow to admit those who 
 courted the honor of her society to her circle. Other women 
 saw not without jealousy that the cleverest and pleasantest 
 men gathered round Mme. Graslin, and her power was the 
 more widely felt in Limoges because she was exclusive. The 
 four or five women whom she accepted were strangers to the 
 district, who had accompanied their husbands from Paris, 
 and looked on provincial tittle-tattle with disgust. If some 
 one chanced to call who did not belong to the inner cenacle, 
 the conversation underwent an immediate change, and with 
 one accord all present spoke of indifferent things. 
 
 So the Hotel Graslin became a sort of oasis in the desert 
 where a chosen few sought relief in each other's society from 
 the tedium of provincial life, a house where officials might 
 discuss politics and speak their minds without fear of their 
 opinions being reported, where all things worthy of mockery 
 were fair game for wit and laughter, where every one laid 
 aside his professional uniform to give his natural character 
 free play. 
 
 In the beginning of that year 1828, Mine. Graslin, whose 
 girlhood had been spent in the most complete obscurity, who 
 had been pronounced to be plain and stupid and a complete 
 nullity, was now looked upon as the most important person 
 in the town, and the most conspicuous woman in society. No 
 one called upon her in the morning, for her benevolence and 
 her punctuality in the performance of her duties of religion 
 were well known. She almost invariably went to the first 
 mass, returning in time for her husband's early breakfast. 
 He was the most unpunctual of men, but she always sat with
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 47 
 
 him, for Graslin had learned to expect this little attention 
 from his wife. As for Graslin, he never let slip an oppor- 
 tunity for praising her ; he thought her perfection. She never 
 asked him for money; he was free to pile up silver crown on 
 silver crown, and to expand his field of operations. He had 
 opened an account with the firm of Brezac; he had set sail 
 upon a commercial sea, and the horizon was gradually 
 widening out before him; his over-stimulated interest, in- 
 tent upon the great events of the green table called Specula- 
 tion, kept him perpetually in the cold frenzied intoxication 
 of the gambler. 
 
 During this happy year, and indeed until the beginning 
 of the year 1829, Mme. Graslin's friends watched a strange 
 change passing in her, under their eyes; her beauty became 
 really extraordinary, but the reasons of the change were never 
 discovered. Her eyes seemed to be bathed in a soft liquid 
 light, full of tenderness, the blue iris widened like an expand- 
 ing flower as the dark pupils contracted. Memories and 
 happy thoughts seemed to light up her brow, which grew 
 whiter, like some ridge of snow in the dawn, her features 
 seemed to regain their purity of outline in some refining 
 fire within. Her face lost the feverish brown color which 
 threatens inflammation of the liver, the malady of vigorous 
 temperaments of troubled minds and thwarted affections. 
 Her temples grew adorably fresh and youthful. Frequently 
 her friends saw glimpses of the divinely fair face which a 
 Eaphael might have painted, the face which disease had cov- 
 ered with an ugly film, such as time spreads over the canvas of 
 the great master. Her hands looked whiter, there was a deli- 
 cate fulness in the rounded curves of her shoulders, her quick 
 dainty movements displayed to the full the lissome grace of 
 her form. 
 
 The women said that she was in love with M. de Gran- 
 ville, who, for that matter, paid assiduous court to her, 
 though Veronique raised between them the barriers of a 
 pious resistance. The deputy public prosecutor professed a 
 respectful admiration for her which did nol impose upon fre-
 
 48 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 quenters of her house. Clear-sighted observers attributed to 
 a different cause this change, which made Veronique still 
 more charming to her friends. Any woman, however devout, 
 could not but feel in her inmost soul that it was sweet to be 
 so courted, to know the satisfaction of living in a congenial 
 atmosphere, the delight of exchanging ideas (so great a re- 
 lief in a tedious life), the pleasure of the society of well-read 
 and agreeable men, and of sincere friendships, which grew 
 day by day. It needed, perhaps, an observer still more pro- 
 found, more acute, or more suspicious than any of those who 
 came to the Hotel Graslin to divine the untamed greatness, 
 the strength of the woman of the people pent up in the depths 
 of Veronique's nature. Now and again they might surprise 
 her in a torpid mood, overcast by gloomy or merely pensive 
 musings, but all her friends knew that she carried many 
 troubles in her heart; that, doubtless, in the morning she 
 had been initiated into many sorrows, that she penetrated 
 into dark places where vice is appalling by reason of its un- 
 blushing front. Not seldom, indeed, the Vicomte, soon pro- 
 moted to be an avocat general, scolded her for some piece of 
 blind benevolence discovered by him in the course of his in- 
 vestigations. Justice complained that Charity had paved the 
 way to the police court. 
 
 "Do you want money for some of your poor people?" old 
 Grossetete had asked on this, as he took her hand in his. "I 
 will share the guilt of your benefactions." 
 
 "It is impossible to make everybody rich," she answered, 
 heaving a sigh. 
 
 An event occurred at the beginning of this year which was 
 to change the whole current of Veronique's inner life, as well 
 as the wonderful expression of her face, which henceforward 
 became a portrait infinitely more interesting to a painter's 
 eyes. 
 
 Graslin grew rather fidgety about his health, and to his 
 wife's great despair left his ground-floor quarters and re- 
 turned to her apartment to be tended. Soon afterwards Mme. 
 Graslin's condition became a matter of town gossip; she was
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 49 
 
 about to become a mother. Her evident sadness, mingled 
 with joy, filled her friends' thoughts ; they then divined that, 
 in spite of her virtues, she was happiest when she lived apart 
 from her husband. Perhaps she had had hopes for better things 
 since the day when the Vicomte de Granville had declined to 
 marry the richest heiress in Limousin, and still continued to 
 pay court to her. Ever since that event the profound poli- 
 ticians who exercise the censorship of sentiments, and settle 
 other people's business in the intervals of whist, had sus- 
 pected the lawyer and young Mme. Graslin of basing hopes 
 of their own on the banker's failing health hopes which were 
 brought to nothing by this unexpected development. It was 
 a time in Veronique's life when deep distress of mind was 
 added to the apprehensions of a first confinement, always 
 more perilous, it is said, when a woman is past her first youth, 
 but all through those days her friends showed themselves 
 more thoughtful for her ; there was not one of them but made 
 her feel in innumerable small ways what warmth there was 
 in these friendships of hers, and how solid they had be- 
 come. 
 
 II 
 
 TASCHERON 
 
 IT was in the same year that Limoges witnessed the terrible 
 spectacle and strange tragedy of the Tascheron case, in which 
 the young Vicomte de Granville displayed the talents which 
 procured him the appointment of public prosecutor at a later 
 day. 
 
 An old man living in a lonely house on the outskirts of 
 the Faubourg Saint-Etienne was murdered. A large orchard 
 isolates the dwelling on the side of the town, on the other 
 there is a pleasure garden, with a row of unused hothouses 
 at the bottom of it ; then follow the open fields. The bank 
 of the Vienne in this place rises up very steeply from the
 
 50 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 river, the little front garden slopes down to this embankment, 
 and is bounded by a low wall surmounted by an open fence. 
 Square stone posts are set along it at even distances, but the 
 painted wooden railings are there more by way of ornament 
 than as a protection to the property. 
 
 The old man, Pingret by name, a notorious miser, lived 
 quite alone save for a servant, a country woman whom he 
 employed in the garden. He trained his espaliers and pruned 
 his fruit-trees himself, gathering his crops and selling them 
 in the town, and excelled in growing early vegetables for the 
 market. The old man's niece and sole heiress, who had mar- 
 ried a M. des Vanneaulx, a man of small independent means, 
 and lived in Limoges, had many a time implored her uncle 
 to keep a man as a protection to the place, pointing out to 
 him that he would be able to grow more garden produce in 
 several borders planted with standard fruit-trees beneath 
 which he now sowed millet and the like ; but it was of no use, 
 the old man would not hear of it. This contradiction in a 
 miser gave rise to all sorts of conjectures in the houses where 
 the Vanneaulx spent their evenings. The most diver gent 
 opinions had more than once divided parties at boston. Some 
 knowing folk came to the conclusion that there was a treasure 
 hidden under the growing luzern. 
 
 "If I were in Mme. des Vanneaulx's place," remarked one 
 pleasant gentleman, "I would not worry my uncle, I know. 
 If somebody murders him, well and good; somebody will mur- 
 der him. I should come in for the property." 
 
 Mme. des Vanneaulx, however, thought differently. As a 
 manager at the Theatre-Italien implores the tenor who 
 "draws" a full house to be very careful to wrap up his throat, 
 and gives him his cloak when the singer has forgotten his 
 overcoat, so did Mme. des Vanneaulx try to watch over her 
 relative. She had offered little Pingret a magnificent yard- 
 dog, but the old man sent the animal back again by Jeanne 
 Malassis, his servant. 
 
 "Your uncle has no mind to have one more mouth to feed 
 up at our place," said the handmaid to Mme. des Vanneaulx.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON '51 
 
 The event proved that his niece's fears had been but too 
 well founded. Pingret was murdered one dark night in the 
 patch of luzern, whither he had gone, no doubt, to add a few 
 louis to a pot full of gold. The servant, awakened by the 
 sounds of the struggle, had the courage to go to the old man's 
 assistance, and the murderer found himself compelled to kill 
 her also, lest she should bear witness against him. This cal- 
 culation of probable risks, which nearly always prompts a man 
 guilty of one murder to add another to his account, is one un- 
 fortunate result of the capital sentence which he beholds 
 looming in the distance. 
 
 The double crime was accompanied by strange circum- 
 stances, which told as strongly for the defence as for the 
 prosecution. When the neighbors had seen nothing of Pin- 
 gret nor of the servant the whole morning; when, as they 
 came and went, they looked through the wooden railings and 
 saw that the doors and windows (contrary to wont) were still 
 barred and fastened, the thing began to be bruited abroad 
 through the Faubourg Saint-Etienne, till it reached Mme. 
 des Vanneaulx in the Eue des Cloches. Mme. des Van- 
 neaulx, whose mind always ran on horrors, sent for the 
 police, and the doors were broken open. In the four patches 
 of luzern there were four gaping holes in the earth, sur- 
 rounded by rubbish, and strewn with broken shards of the 
 pots which had been full of gold the night before. In two of 
 the holes, which had been partly filled up, they found the 
 bodies of old Pingret and Jeanne Malassis, buried in their 
 clothes ; she, poor thing, had run out barefooted in her night- 
 dress. 
 
 While the public prosecutor, the commissary, and the ex- 
 amining magistrate took down all these particulars, the un- 
 lucky des Vanneaulx collected the scraps of broken pottery, 
 put them together, and calculated the amount the jars should 
 have held. The authorities, perceiving the common-sense of 
 this proceeding, estimated the stolen treasure at a thousand 
 pieces per pot; but -vrhat was the value of those coins? Had 
 they been forty or forty-cight-franc pieces, twenty-four or
 
 52' THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 twenty francs ? Every creature in Limoges who had expecta- 
 tions felt for the des Vanneaulx in this trying situation. The 
 sight of those fragments of crockery ware which once held 
 gold gave a lively stimulus to Limousin imaginations. As 
 for little Pingret, who often came to sell his vegetables in the 
 market himself, who lived on bread and onions, and did not 
 spend three hundred francs in a year, who never did any- 
 body a good turn, nor any harm either, no one regretted him 
 in the least he had never done a pennyworth of good to the 
 Faubourg Saint-Etienne. As for Jeanne Malassis, her heroism 
 was considered to be ill-timed; the old man if he had lived 
 would have grudged her reward; altogether, her admirers 
 were few compared with the number of those who remarked, 
 "I should have slept soundly in her place, I know !" 
 
 Then the curious and the next-of-kin were made aware of 
 the inconsistencies of certain misers. The police, when they 
 came to draw up the report, could find neither pen nor ink 
 in the bare, cold, dismal, tumbledown house. The little old 
 man's horror of expense was glaringly evident, in the great 
 holes in the roof, which let in rain and snow as well as light ; 
 in the moss-covered cracks which rent the walls; in the rot- 
 ting doors ready to drop from their hinges at the least shock, 
 the unoiled paper which did duty as glass in the windows. 
 There was not a window curtain in the house, not a looking- 
 glass over the mantel-shelves ; the grates were chiefly remark- 
 able for the absence of fire-irons and the accumulation of 
 damp soot, a sort of varnish over the handful of sticks or the 
 log of wood which lay on the hearth. And as to the furniture 
 a few crippled chairs and maimed armchairs, two beds, 
 hard and attenuated (Time had adorned old Pingret's bed- 
 curtains with open-work embroidery of a bold design), one 
 or two cracked pots and riveted plates, a worm-eaten bureau, 
 where the old man used to keep his garden-seeds, household 
 linen thick with darns and patches, the furniture, in short, 
 co/isisted of a mass of rags, which had only a sort of life kept 
 in them by the spirit of their owner, and now that he was
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 53 
 
 gone, they dropped to pieces and crumbled to powder. At the 
 first touch of the brutal hands of the police officers and in- 
 furiated next-of-kin they evaporated, heaven knows how, and 
 came to nameless ruin and an indefinable end. They were not. 
 Before the terrors of a public auction they vanished away. 
 
 For a long time the greater part of the inhabitants of the 
 capital of Limousin continued to take an interest in the hard 
 case of the worthy des Vanneaulx, who had two children; 
 but as soon as justice appeared to have discovered the per- 
 petrator of the crime, this person absorbed all their atten- 
 tion, he became the hero of the day, and the des Vanneaulx 
 were relegated to the obscurity of the background. 
 
 Towards the end of the month of March, Mme. Graslin 
 had already felt the discomforts incidental to her condition, 
 which could no longer be concealed. By that time inquiries 
 were being made into the crime committed in the Faubourg 
 Saint-Etienne, but the murderer was still at large. 
 Veronique received visitors in her bedroom, whither her 
 friends came for their game of whist. A few days later 
 Mme. Graslin kept her room altogether. More than once 
 already she had been seized with the unaccountable fancies 
 commonly attributed to women with child. Her mother came 
 almost every day to see her; the two spent whole hours in each 
 other's society. 
 
 It was nine o'clock. The card-tables were neglected, every 
 one was talking about the murder and the des Vanneaulx, 
 when the Vicomte de Granville came in. 
 
 "We have caught the man who murdered old Pingret !" he 
 cried in high glee. 
 
 "And who is it ?" The question came from all sides. 
 
 "One of the workmen in a porcelain factory, a man of ex- 
 emplary conduct, and in a fair way to make his fortune. 
 He is one of your husband's old workmen," he added, turn- 
 ing to Mme. Graslin. 
 
 "Who is it?" Veronique asked faintly. 
 
 "Jean-Frangois Tascheron." 
 
 "The unfortunate man !" she exclaimed. "Yes. I remem- 
 -5
 
 54 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 ber seeing him several times. My poor father recommended 
 
 him to me as a valuable hand " 
 
 "He left the place before Sauviat died," remarked old Mme. 
 Sauviat ; 'Tie went over to the MM. Philippart to better 'him- 
 self. But is my daughter well enough to hear about this?" 
 she added, looking at Mme. Graslin, who was as white as the 
 sheets. 
 
 After that evening old Mother Sauviat left her house, and 
 in spite of her seventy years, installed herself as her daughter's 
 nurse. She did not leave Veronique's room. No matter at 
 what hour Mme. Graslin's friends called to see her, they found 
 the old mother sitting heroically at her post by the bedside, 
 busied with her eternal knitting, brooding over her Veronique 
 as in the days of the smallpox, answering for her child, and 
 sometimes denying her to visitors. The love between the 
 mother and daughter was so well known in Limoges that peo- 
 ple took the old woman's ways as a matter of course. 
 
 A few days later, when the Vicomte de Granville began to 
 give some of the details of the Tascheron case, in which the 
 whole town took an eager interest, thinking to interest the 
 invalid, La Sauviat cut him short by asking if he meant to 
 give Mme. Graslin bad dreams again, but Veronique begged 
 M. de Granville to go on, fixing her eyes on his face. So it 
 fell out that Mme. Graslin's friends heard in her house the 
 result of the preliminary examination, soon afterwards made 
 public, at first-hand from the avocat general. Here, in a con- 
 densed form, is the substance of the indictment which wag 
 being drawn up by the prosecution: 
 
 Jean-Francois Tascheron was the son of a small farmer 
 burdened with a large family, who lived in the township of 
 Montegnac. Twenty years before the perpetration of this 
 crime, whose memory still lingers in Limousin, Canton 
 Montegnac bore a notoriously bad character. It was a proverb 
 in the Criminal Court of Limoges that fifty out of every hun- 
 dred convictions came from the Montegnac district. Since
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 55 
 
 1816, two years after the arrival of the new cure, M. Bonnet, 
 Montegnac lost its old reputation, and no longer sent up its 
 contingent to the assizes. The change was generally set down 
 to M. Bonnet's influence in the commune, which had once 
 been a perfect hotbed of bad characters who gave trouble in 
 all the country round about. Jean-Frangois Tascheron's 
 crime suddenly restored Montegnac to its former unenviable 
 pre-eminence. It happened, singularly enough, that the 
 Tascherons had been almost the only family in the country- 
 side which had not departed from the old exemplary tradi- 
 tions and religious habits now fast dying out in country 
 places. In them the cure had found a moral support and 
 basis of operations, and naturally he thought a great deal of 
 them. The whole family were hard workers, remarkable for 
 their honesty and the strong affection that bound them to 
 each other; Jean-Frangois Tascheron had had none but good 
 examples set before him at home. A praiseworthy ambition 
 had brought him to Limoges. He meant to make a little for- 
 tune honestly by a handicraft, and left the township, to the 
 regret of his relations and friends, who were much attached 
 to him. 
 
 His conduct during his two years of apprenticeship was 
 admirable; apparently no irregularity in his life had fore- 
 shadowed the hideous crime for which he forfeited his life. 
 The leisure which other workmen wasted in the wineshop and 
 debauches, Tascheron spent in study. 
 
 Justice in the provinces has plenty of time on her hands, 
 but the most minute investigation threw no light whatever 
 on the secrets of this existence. The landlady of Jean- 
 Frangois' humble lodging, skilfully questioned, said that she 
 had never had such a steady young man as a lodger. He was 
 pleasant-spoken and good-tempered, almost gay, as you might 
 say. About a year ago a change seemed to come over him. 
 He would stop out all night several times a month, and often 
 for several nights at a time. She did not know whereabouts 
 in the town he spent those nights. Still, she had sometimes 
 thought, judging by the mud on his boots, that her lodger had
 
 56 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 been somewhere out in the country. He used to wear pumps, 
 too, instead of hobnailed boots, although he was going out 
 of the town, and before he went he used to shave and scent 
 himself, and put on clean clothes. 
 
 The examining magistrate carried his investigations to 
 such a length that inquiries were made in houses of ill fame 
 and among licensed prostitutes, but no one knew anything of 
 Jean-Frangois Tascheron; other inquiries made among the 
 class of factory operatives and shop-girls met with no better 
 success ; none of those whose conduct was light had any rela- 
 tions with the accused. 
 
 A crime without any motive whatever is inconceivable, 
 especially when the criminal's bent was apparently towards 
 self-improvement, while his ambitions argued higher ideals 
 and sense superior to that of other workmen. The whole 
 criminal department, like the examining magistrate, were 
 fain to find a motive for the murder in a passion for play 
 on Tascheron's part; but after minute investigation, it was 
 proved that the accused had never gambled in his life. 
 
 From the very first Jean-Franc,ois took refuge in a system 
 of denial which could not but break down in the face of cir- 
 cumstantial evidence when his case should come before a 
 jury; but his manner of defending himself suggested the in- 
 tervention of some person well acquainted with the law, or 
 gifted with no ordinary intelligence. The evidence of his 
 guilt, as in most similar cases, was at once unconvincing and 
 yet too strong to be set aside. The principal points which 
 told against Tascheron were four his absence from home 
 on the night of the murder (he would not say where he spent 
 the night, and scorned to invent an alibi) ; a shred of his 
 blouse, torn without his knowledge during the struggle with 
 the poor servant-girl, and blown by the wind into the tree 
 where it was found ; the fact that he had been seen hanging 
 about the house that evening by people in the suburb, who 
 would not have remembered this but for the crime which fol- 
 lowed; and lastly, a false key which he had made to fit the 
 lock of the garden-gate, which was entered from the fields.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 57 
 
 It had been hidden rather ingeniously in one of the holes, 
 some two feet below the surface. M. des Vanneaulx had come 
 upon it while digging to see whether by chance there might 
 be a second hoard beneath the first. The police succeeded in 
 finding the man who supplied the sceel, the vice, and the key- 
 file. This had been their first clue, it put them on Tascheron's 
 track, and finally they arrested him on the limits of the de- 
 partment in a wood where he was waiting for the diligence. 
 An hour later, and he would have been on his way to Amer- 
 ica. Moreover, in spite of the care with which the footprints 
 had been erased in the trampled earth and on the muddy 
 road, the rural policeman had found the marks of thin shoes, 
 clear and unmistakable, in the soil. Tascheron's lodgings 
 were searched, and a pair of pumps were found which ex- 
 actly corresponded with the impress, a fatal coincidence 
 which confirmed the curious observations of his landlady. 
 
 Then the criminal investigation department saw another 
 influence at work in the crime, and a second and perhaps a 
 prime mover in the case. Tascheron must have had an ac- 
 complice, if only for the reason that it was impossible for 
 one man to take away such a /weight of coin. No man, how- 
 ever strong, could carry twenty-five thousand francs in gold 
 very far. If each of the pots had held so much, he must have 
 made four journeys. Now, a singular accident determined 
 the very hour when the deed was done. Jeanne Malassis, 
 springing out of bed in terror at her master's shrieks, had 
 overturned the table on which her watch lay (the one pres- 
 ent which the miser had made her in five years). The fall 
 had broken the mainspring, and stopped the hands at two 
 o'clock. 
 
 In mid-March, the time of the murder, the sun rises be- 
 tween five and six in the morning. So on the hypothesis 
 traced out by the police and the department, it was clearly 
 impossible that Tascheron should have carried off the money 
 unaided and alone, even for a short distance, in the time. 
 The evident pains which the man had taken to erase other 
 footprints to the neglect of his own, also indicated an un- 
 known assistant.
 
 8 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Justice, driven to invent some reason for the crime, decided 
 on a frantic passion for some woman, and as she was not to 
 be found among the lower classes, forensic sagacity looked 
 higher. 
 
 Could it be some woman of the bourgeoisie who, feeling 
 sure of the discretion of a lover of so puritanical a cut, had 
 read with him the opening chapters of a romance which had 
 ended in this ugly tragedy? There were circumstances in 
 the case which almost bore out this theory. The old man 
 had been killed by blows from a spade. The murder, it 
 seemed, was the result of chance, a sudden fortuitous develop- 
 ment, and not a part of a deliberate plan. The two lovers 
 might perhaps have concerted the theft, but not the second 
 crime. Then Tascheron the lover and Pingret the miser had 
 crossed each other's paths, and in the thick darkness of night 
 two inexorable passions met on the same spot, both attracted 
 thither by gold. 
 
 Justice devised a new plan for obtaining light on these 
 dark data. Jean-Frangois had a. favorite sister; her they ar- 
 rested and examined privatety, hoping in this way to come by 
 a knowledge of the mysteries t of her brother's private life. 
 Denise Tascheron denied all knowledge of his affairs; pru- 
 dence dictating a system of negative answers which led her 
 questioners to suspect that she really knew the reasons of the 
 crime. Denise Tascheron, as a matter of fact, knew nothing 
 whatever about it, but for the rest of her days she was to be 
 under a cloud in consequence of her detention. 
 
 The accused showed a spirit very unusual in a working- 
 man. He was too clever for the cleverest "sheep of the 
 prisons" with whom he came in contact though he did not 
 discover that he had to do with a spy. The keener intelli- 
 gences among the magistracy saw in him a murderer through 
 passion, not through necessity, like the common herd of crim- 
 inals who pass by way of the petty sessions and the hulks to 
 a capital charge. He was shrewdly plied with questions put 
 with this idea; but the man's wonderful discretion left the 
 magistrates much where they were before. The romantic but
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 59 
 
 plausible theory of a passion for a woman of higher rank 
 once admitted, insidious questions were suddenly asked more 
 than once; but Jean-Frangois' discretion issued victorious 
 from all the mental tortures which the ingenuity of an ex- 
 amining magistrate could inflict. 
 
 As a final expedient, Tascheron was told that the person 
 for whom he had committed the crime had been discovered 
 and arrested ; but his face underwent no change, he contented 
 himself with the ironical retort, "I should be very glad to see 
 that person!" 
 
 When these details became known, there were plenty of 
 people who shared the magistrate's suspicions, confirmed to 
 all appearance by the behavior of the accused, who main- 
 tained the silence of a savage. An all-absorbing interest at- 
 tached to a young man who had come to be a problem. 
 Every one will understand how the public curiosity was stimu- 
 lated by the facts of the case, and how eagerly reports of the 
 examination were followed; for in spite of all the probings 
 of the police, the case for the prosecution remained on the 
 brink of a mystery, which the authorities did not dare to 
 penetrate, beset with dangers as it was. In some cases a half- 
 certainty is not enough for the magistracy. So it was hoped 
 that the buried truth would arise and come to light at the 
 great day of the Assizes, an occasion when criminals fre- 
 quently lose their heads. 
 
 It happened that M. Graslin was on the jury empaneled 
 for the occasion, and Veronique could not but hear through 
 him or through M. de Granville the whole story of a trial 
 which kept Limousin, and indeed all France, in excitement 
 for a fortnight. The behavior of the prisoner at the bar 
 justified the romances founded on the conjectures of justice 
 which were current in the town ; more than once his eyes were 
 turned searchingly on the bevy of women privileged to enjoy 
 the spectacle of a sensational drama in real life. Every time 
 that the clear impenetrable gaze was turned on the fashion- 
 able audience, it produced a flutter of consternation, so 
 greatly did every woman fear lest she might seem to inquisi-
 
 00 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 tive eyes in the Court to be the prisoner's partner in guilt. 
 
 The useless efforts of the criminal investigation department 
 were then made public, and Limoges was informed of the pre- 
 cautions taken by the accused to ensure the complete success 
 of his crime. 
 
 Some months before that fatal night, Jean-Frangois had 
 procured a passport for North America. Clearly he had 
 meant to leave France. Clearly, therefore, the woman in the 
 case must be married; for there was, of course, no object to 
 be gained by eloping with a young girl. Perhaps it was a 
 desire to maintain the fair unknown in luxury which had 
 prompted the crime ; but, on the other hand, a search through 
 the registers of the administration had discovered that no 
 passport for that country had been made out in a woman's 
 name. The police had even. investigated the registers in Paris 
 as well as those of the neighboring prefectures, but fruit- 
 lessly. 
 
 As the case proceeded, every least detail brought to light 
 revealed profound forethought on the part of a man of no 
 ordinary intelligence. While the most virtuous ladies of 
 Limousin explained the sufficiently inexplicable use of even- 
 ing shoes for a country excursion on muddy roads and heavy 
 soil, by the plea that it was necessary to spy upon old Pingret ; 
 the least coxcombically given of men were delighted to point 
 out how eminently a pair of thin pumps favored noiseless 
 movements about a house, scaling windows, and stealing along 
 corridors. 
 
 Evidently Jean-Frangois Tascheron and his mistress, a 
 young, romantic, and beautiful woman (for every one drew 
 a superb portrait of the lady) , had contemplated forgery, and 
 the words "and wife" were to be filled in after his name on 
 the passport. 
 
 Card parties were broken up during these evenings by 
 malicious conjectures and comments. People began to cast 
 about for the names of women who went to Paris during 
 March 1829; or of others who might be supposed to have 
 made preparations openly or secretly for fligM. The trial
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 61 
 
 supplied Limoges with a second Fualdes case, with an un- 
 known Mme. Manson by way of improvement on the first. 
 Never, indeed, was any country town so puzzled as Limoges 
 after the Court rose each day. People's very dreams turned 
 on the trial. Everything that transpired raised the accused 
 in their eyes ; his answers, skilfully turned over and over, ex- 
 panded and edited, supplied a theme for endless argument. 
 One of the jury asked, for instance, why Tascheron had 
 taken a passport to America, to which the prisoner replied 
 that he meant to open a porcelain factory there. In this way 
 he screened his accomplice without quitting his line of de- 
 fence, and supplied conjecture with a plausible and sufficient 
 motive for the crime in this ambition of his. 
 
 In the thick of these disputes, it was impossible that 
 Veronique's friends should not also try to account for 
 Tascheron's close reserve. One evening she seemed better 
 than usual. The doctor had prescribed exercise; and that 
 very morning Veronique, leaning on her mother's arm, had 
 walked out as far as Mme. Sauviat's cottage, and rested there 
 a while. When she came home again, she tried to sit up until 
 her husband returned, but Graslin was late, and did not come 
 back from the Court till eight o'clock; his wife waited on 
 him at dinner after her custom, and in this way could not but 
 hear the discussion between himself and his friends. 
 
 "We should have known more about this if my poor father 
 w-ere still alive," said Veronique, "or perhaps the man would 
 
 not have committed the crime But I notice that you 
 
 have all of you taken one strange notion into your heads! 
 You will have it that there is a woman at the bottom of this 
 business (as far as that goes I myself am of your opinion), 
 but why do you think that she is a married woman? Why 
 cannot he have loved some girl whose father and mother re- 
 fused to listen to him ?" 
 
 "Sooner or later a young girl might have been legitimately 
 his," returned M. de Granville. "Tascheron is not wanting in 
 patience; he would have had time to make an independence 
 honestly; he could have waited until the girl was old enough 
 to marry without her parents' consent."
 
 62 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "I did not know that such a marriage was possible," said 
 Mme. Graslin. "Then how is it that no one had the least 
 suspicion of it, here in a place where everybody knows the af- 
 fairs of everybody else, and sees all that goes on in his neigh- 
 bor's house? Two people cannot fall in love without at any 
 rate seeing each other or being seen of each other! What 
 do you lawyers think?" she continued, looking the avocat 
 general full in the eyes. 
 
 "We all think that the woman must be the wife of some 
 tradesman, a man in business." 
 
 "I am of a totally opposite opinion," said Mme. Graslin: 
 "That kind of woman has not sentiments sufficiently lofty," 
 a retort which drew all eyes upon her. Every one waited for 
 the explanation of the paradox. 
 
 "At night," she said, "when I do not sleep, or when I lie 
 in bed in the daytime, I cannot help thinking over this mys- 
 terious business, and I believe I can guess Tascheron's mo- 
 tives. These are my reasons for thinking that it is a girl, and 
 not a woman in the case. A married woman has other inter- 
 ests, if not other feelings ; she has a divided heart in her, she 
 cannot rise to the full height of the exaltation inspired by 
 a love so passionate as this. She must never have borne a 
 child if she is to conceive a love in which maternal instincts 
 are blended with those which spring from desire. It is quite 
 clear that some woman who wished to be a sustaining power 
 to him has loved this man. That unknown woman must have 
 brought to her love the genius which inspires artists and poets, 
 ay, and women also, but in another form, for it is a woman's 
 destiny to create, not things, but men. Our creations are 
 our children, our children are our pictures, our books and 
 statues. Are we not artists when we shape their lives from 
 the first? So I am sure that if she is not a girl, she is not 
 a mother; I would stake my head upon it. Lawyers should 
 have a woman's instinct to apprehend the infinite subtle 
 touches which continually escape them in so many cases. 
 
 "If I had boon your substitute,'' she continued, turning 
 to M. de Granville, "we should have discovered the guilty
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 63 
 
 woman, always supposing that she is guilty. I think, with 
 M. 1'Abbe Dutheil, that the two lovers had planned to go to 
 America, and to live there on poor Pingret's money, as they 
 had none of their own. The theft, of course, led to the mur- 
 der, the usual fatal consequence of the fear of detection and 
 death. And it would be worthy of you," she added, with a 
 suppliant glance at the young lawyer, "to withdraw the 
 charge of malice aforethought; you would save the miserable 
 man's life. He is so great in spite of his crime, that he would 
 perhaps expiate his sins by some magnificent repentance. The 
 works of repentance should be taken into account in the de- 
 liberations of justice. In these days are there no better ways 
 of atoning an offence than by the loss of a head, or by found- 
 ing, as in olden times, a Milan cathedral ?" 
 
 "Madame, your ideas are sublime," returned the lawyer; 
 "but if the averment of malice aforethought were withdrawn, 
 Tascheron would still be tried for his life; and it is a case 
 of aggravated theft, it was committed at night, the walls were 
 scaled, the premises broken into : 
 
 "Then, do you think he will be condemned?" she asked, 
 lowering her eyelids. 
 
 "I do not doubt it. The prosecution has the best of it." 
 
 A light shudder ran through Mme. Graslin. Her dress 
 rustled. "I feel cold," she said. 
 
 She took her mother's arm, and went to bed. 
 
 "She is much better to-day," said her friends. 
 
 The next morning Yeronique was at death's door. She 
 smiled at her doctor's surprise at finding her in an almost 
 dying state. 
 
 "Did I not tell you that the walk would do me no good?" 
 she asked. 
 
 Ever since the opening of the trial there had been no trace 
 of either swagger or hypocrisy in Tascheron's attitude. The 
 doctor, always with a view of diverting his patient's mind, 
 tried to explain this attitude out of which the counsel for 
 the defence made capital for his client. The counsel's
 
 64 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 cleverness, the doctor opined, had dazzled the accused, who 
 imagined that he should escape the capital sentence. Now 
 and then an expression crossed his face which spoke plainly 
 of hopes of some coming happiness greater than mere 
 acquittal or reprieve. The whole previous life of this man 
 of twenty-three was such a flat contradiction to the deeds 
 which brought it to a close that his champions put forward 
 his behavior as a conclusive argument. In fact, the clues 
 spun by the police into a stout hypothesis fit to hang a man, 
 dwindled so pitiably when woven into the romance of the 
 defence, that the prisoner's counsel fought for his client's life 
 with some prospect of success. To save him he shifted the 
 ground of the combat, and fought the battle out on the ques- 
 tion of malice aforethought. It was admitted, without preju- 
 dice, that the robbery had been planned beforehand, but 
 contended that the double murder had been the result of an 
 unexpected resistance in both cases. The issue looked doubt- 
 ful; neither side had made good its case. 
 
 When the doctor went, the avocat general came in as usual 
 to see Veronique before he went to the Court. 
 
 "I have read the counsel's speeches yesterday," she told 
 him. "To-day the other side will reply. I am so very much 
 interested in the prisoner, that I should like him to be saved. 
 Could you not forego a triumph for once in your life? Let 
 the counsel for the defence gain the day. Come, make me a 
 present of this life, and perhaps some day mine shall be 
 
 yours There is a doubt after that fine speech of Tas- 
 
 cheron's counsel ; well, then, why not " 
 
 "Your voice is quivering " said the Vicomte, almost 
 
 taken by surprise. 
 
 "Do you know why?" she asked. "My husband has just 
 pointed out a coincidence hideous for a sensitive nature like 
 mine a thing that is like to cause me my death. You will 
 give the order for his head to fall just about the time when 
 my child will be born." 
 
 "Can I reform the Code?" asked the public prosecutor. 
 
 "There, go ! You do not know how to love !" she answered, 
 and closed her eyes.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 66 
 
 She lay back on her pillow, and dismissed the lawyer with 
 an imperative gesture. 
 
 M. Graslin pleaded hard, but in vain, for an acquittal, ad- 
 vancing an argument, first suggested to him by his wife, and 
 taken up by two of his friends on the jury : "If we spare the 
 man's life, the des Vanneaulx will recover Pingret's money." 
 This irresistible argument told upon the jury, and divided 
 them seven for acquittal as against five. As they failed to 
 agree, the President and assessors were obliged to add their 
 suffrages, and they were on the side of the minority. Jean- 
 Frangois Tascheron was found guilty of murder. 
 
 When sentence was passed, Tascheron burst into a blind 
 fury, natural enough in a man full of strength and life, but 
 seldom seen in Court when it is an innocent man who is con- 
 demned. It seemed to every one who saw it that the drama 
 was not brought to an end by the sentence. So obstinate a 
 struggle (as often happens in such cases) gave rise to two 
 diametrically opposite opinions as to the guilt of the central 
 figure in it. Some saw oppressed innocence in him, others a 
 criminal justly punished. The Liberal party felt it incum- 
 bent upon them to believe in Tascheron's innocence; it was 
 not so much conviction on their part as a desire to annoy 
 those in office. 
 
 "What ?" cried they. "Is a man to be condemned because 
 his foot happens to suit the size of a footmark? Because, 
 forsooth, he was not at his lodgings at the time? (As if any 
 young fellow would not die sooner than compromise a 
 woman!) Because he borrowed tools and bought steel? 
 (for it has not been proved that he made the key). Because 
 some one finds a blue rag in a tree, where old Pingret very 
 likely put it himself to scare the sparrows, and it happens to 
 match a slit made in the blouse? Take a man's life on such 
 grounds as these! And, after all, Jean-Frangois has denied 
 every charge, and the prosecution did not produce any wit- 
 ness who had seen him commit the crime." 
 
 Then they fell to corroborating, amplifying, and para- 
 phrasing the speeches made by the prisoner's counsel and his
 
 66 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 line of defence. As for Pingret; what was Pingret? A 
 money-box which had been broken open; so said the free- 
 thinkers. 
 
 A few so-called Progressives, who did not recognize the 
 sacred laws of property (which the Saint-Simonians had al- 
 ready attacked in the abstract region of Economical Theory), 
 went further still. 
 
 "Old Pingret/' said these, "was the prime author of the 
 crime. The man was robbing his country by hoarding the 
 gold. What a lot of businesses that idle capital might have 
 fertilized ! He had thwarted industry ; he was properly pun- 
 ished." 
 
 As for the servant-girl, they were sorry for her ; and Denise, 
 who had baffled the ingenuity of the lawyers, the girl who 
 never opened her mouth at the trial without long pondering 
 over what she meant to say, excited the keenest interest. She 
 became a figure comparable, in another sense, with Jeanie 
 Deans, whom she resembled in charm of character, modesty, 
 in her religious nature and personal comeliness. So Francois 
 Tascheron still continued to excite the curiosity not merely 
 of Limoges, but of the whole department. Some romantic 
 women openly expressed their admiration of him. 
 
 "If there is a love for some woman above him at the bot- 
 tom of all this," said these ladies, "the man is certainly no 
 ordinary man. You will see that he will die bravely !" 
 
 Would he confess ? Would he keep silence. Bets were taken 
 on the question. Since that outburst of rage with which he 
 received his doom (an outburst which might have had a fatal 
 ending for several persons in court but for the intervention 
 of the police), the criminal threatened violence indiscrim- 
 inately to all and sundry who came near him, and with the 
 ferocity of a wild beast. The jailer was obliged to put him 
 in a strait-waistcoat; for if he was dangerous to others, he 
 seemed quite as likely to attempt his own life. Tascheron's 
 despair, thus restrained from all overt acts of violence, found 
 a vent in convulsive struggles which frightened the warders, 
 and in language which, in the Middle Ages, would have been 
 set down to demoniacal possession.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 61 
 
 He was so young that women were moved to pity that a 
 life so filled with an all-engrossing love should be cut off. 
 Quite recently, and as if written for the occasion, Victor 
 Hugo's sombre elegy and vain plea for the abolition of the 
 death penalty (that support of the fabric of society) had ap- 
 peared, and Le Dernier jour d'un Condamne was the order of 
 the day in all conversations. Then finally, above the boards 
 of the Assizes, set, as it were, upon a pedestal, rose the in- 
 visible mysterious figure of a woman, standing there with her 
 feet dipped in blood; condemned to suffer heart-rending 
 anguish, yet outwardly to live in unbroken household peace. 
 At her every one pointed the finger and yet, they almost 
 admired that Limousin Medea with the inscrutable brow and 
 the heart of steel in her white breast. Perhaps she dwelt in 
 the home of this one or that, and was the sister, cousin, wife, 
 or daughter of such an one. What a horror in their midst ! 
 It is in the domain of the Imagination, according to Na- 
 poleon, that the power of the Unknown is incalculably great. 
 
 As for the des Vanneaulx's hundred thousand francs, all 
 the efforts of the police had not succeeded in recovering the 
 money ; and the criminal's continued silence was a strange de- 
 feat for the prosecution. M. de Granville (in the place of 
 the public prosecutor then absent at the Chamber of Depu- 
 ties) tried the commonplace stratagem of inducing the con- 
 demned man to believe that the penalty might be commuted 
 if a full confession were made. But the lawyer had scarcely 
 showed himself before the prisoner greeted him with furious 
 yells, and epileptic contortions, and eyes ablaze with anger 
 and regret that he could not kill his enemy. Justice could 
 only hope that the Church might effect something at the last 
 moment. Again and again the des Vanneaulx applied to the 
 Abbe Pascal, the prison chaplain. The Abbe Pascal was not 
 deficient in the peculiar quality which gains a priest a hear- 
 ing from a prisoner. In the name of religion, he braved Tas- 
 cheron's transports of rage, and strove to utter a few words 
 amidst the storms that convulsed that powerful nature. But 
 the struggle between spiritual paternity and the tempest of
 
 68 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 uncontrolled passions was too much for poor Abbe Pascal j 
 he retired from it defeated and worn out. 
 
 "That is a man who has found his heaven here on earth." 
 the old priest murmured softly to himself. 
 
 Then little Mme. des Vanneaulx thought of approaching 
 the criminal herself, and took counsel of her friends. The 
 Sieur des Vanneaulx talked of compromise. Being at his wits' 
 end, he even betook himself to M. de Granville, and suggested 
 that he (M. de Granville) should intercede with the King for 
 his uncle's murderer if only, if only, the murderer would hand 
 over those hundred thousand francs to the proper persons. 
 The avocat general retorted that the King's Majesty would not 
 stoop to haggle with criminals. Then the des Vanneaulx tried 
 Tascheron's counsel, offering him twenty per cent on the 
 total amount as an inducement to recover it for them. This 
 lawyer was the one creature whom Tascheron could see with- 
 out flying into a fury; him, therefore, the next-of-kin em- 
 powered to offer ten per cent to the murderer, to be paid over 
 to the man's family. But in spite of the mutilations which 
 these beavers were prepared to make in their heritage, in 
 spite of the lawyer's eloquence, Tascheron continued obdurate. 
 Then the des Vanneaulx, waxing wroth, anathematized the 
 condemned man and called down curses upon his head. 
 
 "He is not only a murderer, he has no sense of decency !" 
 cried they, in all seriousness, ignorant though they were of 
 the famous Plaint of Fualdes. The Abbe Pascal had totally 
 failed, the application for a reversal of judgment seemed 
 likely to succeed no better, the man would go to the guillotine, 
 and then all would be lost. 
 
 "What good will our money be to him where he is going?" 
 they wailed. "A murder you can understand, but to steal a 
 thing that is of no use ! The thing is inconceivable. What 
 times we live in, to be sure, when people of quality take an in- 
 terest in such a bandit ! He does not deserve it." 
 
 "He has very little sense of honor," said Mme. des Van- 
 neaulx. 
 
 "Still, suppose that giving up the money should compro- 
 mise his sweetheart !" suggested an old maid.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 6& 
 
 "We would keep his secret," cried the Sieur des Van* 
 neaulx. 
 
 "But then you would become accessories after the fact/ 7 ob- 
 jected a lawyer. 
 
 "Oh ! the scamp !" This was the Sieur des Vannoaulx con- 
 clusion of the whole matter. 
 
 The des Vanneaulx's debates were reported with some 
 amusement to Mme. Graslin by one of her circle, a very 
 clever woman, a dreamer and idealist, for whom everything 
 must be faultless. The speaker regretted the condemned 
 man's fury; she would have had him cold, calm, and dig- 
 nified. 
 
 "Do you not see," said Veronique, "that he is thrusting 
 temptation aside and baffling their efforts ? He is deliberately 
 acting like a wild beast." 
 
 "Besides," objected a Parisienne in exile, "he is not a gen- 
 tleman, he is only a common man." 
 
 "If he had been a gentleman, it would have been all over 
 with that unknown woman long ago," Mme. Graslin an- 
 swered. 
 
 These events, twisted and tortured in drawing-rooms and 
 family circles, made to bear endless constructions, picked to 
 pieces by the most expert tongues in the town, all contributed 
 to invest the criminal with a painful interest, when, two 
 months later, the appeal for mercy was rejected by the Su- 
 preme Court. How would he bear himself in his last mo- 
 ments? He had boasted that he would make so desperate a 
 fight for his life that it was impossible that he should lose it. 
 Would he confess ? Would his conduct belie his language ? 
 Which side would win their wagers? Are you going to be 
 there ? Are you not going ? How are we to go ? As a mat- 
 ter of fact, the distance from the prison of Limoges to the 
 place of execution is very short, sparing the dreadful ordeal 
 of a long transit to the prisoner, but also limiting the number 
 of fashionable spectators. The prison is in the same building 
 as the Palais de Justice, at the corner of the Eue du Palais 
 
 and the Hue du Pont-Herisson. The Rue du Palais is the 
 6
 
 70 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 direct continuation of the short Rue de Monte-a-Regret 
 which leads to the Place d'Aine or des Arenes, where execu- 
 tions take place (hence, of course, its name). The way, as 
 has been said, is very short, consequently there are not many 
 houses along it, and but few windows. What persons of 
 fashion would care to mingle with the crowd in the square on 
 such an occasion? 
 
 But the execution expected from day to day was day after 
 day put off, to the great astonishment of the town, and for 
 the following reasons : The pious resignation of the greatest 
 scoundrels on their way to death is a triumph reserved for the 
 Church, and a spectacle which seldom fails to impress the 
 crowd. Setting the interests of Christianity totally aside 
 (although this is a principle never lost sight of by the 
 Church), the condemned man's repentance is too strong a 
 testimony to the power of religion for the clergy not to feel 
 that a failure on those conspicuous occasions is a heart- 
 breaking misfortune. This feeling was aggravated in 1829, 
 for party spirit ran high and poisoned everything, however 
 small, which had any bearing on politics. The Liberals were 
 in high glee at the prospect of a public collapse of the "priestly 
 party," an epithet invented by Montlosier, a Royalist who 
 went over to the Constitutionals and was carried by his new 
 associates further than he intended. A party, in its corporate 
 capacity, is guilty of disgraceful actions which in an in- 
 dividual would be infamous, and so it happens that when one 
 man stands out conspicuous as the expression and incarna- 
 tion of that party, in the eyes of the crowd he is apt to be- 
 come a Robespierre, a Judge Jeffreys, a Laubardemont a 
 sort of altar of expiation to which others equally guilty attach 
 ex votos in secret. 
 
 There was an understanding between the episcopal authori- 
 ties and the police authorities, and still the execution was put 
 off, partly to secure a triumph for religion, bat quite as much 
 for another reason by the aid of religion justice hoped to 
 arrive at the truth. The power of the public prosecutor, 
 however, had its limits; sooner or later the sentence must be
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 71 
 
 carried out; and the very Liberals who insisted, for the sake 
 of opposition, on Tascheron's innocence, and had tried to 
 upset the case, now began to grumble at the delay. Opposi- 
 tion, when systematic, is apt to fall into inconsistencies; for 
 the point in question is not to be in the right, but to have 
 a stone always ready to sling at authority. So towards the 
 beginning of August, the hand of authority was forced by the 
 clamor (often a chance sound echoed by empty heads) called 
 public opinion. The execution was announced. 
 
 In this extremity the Abbe Dutheil took it upon himself to 
 suggest a last resource to the bishop. One result of the suc- 
 cess of this plan will be the introduction of another actor in 
 the judicial drama, the extraordinary personage who forms 
 a connecting-link between the different groups in it; the 
 greatest of all the figures in this Scene; the guide who should 
 hereafter bring Mme. Graslin on a stage where her virtues 
 were to shine forth with the brightest lustre ; where she would 
 exhibit a great and noble charity, and act the part of a Chris- 
 tian and a ministering angel. 
 
 The Bishop's palace at Limoges stands on the hillside above 
 the Vienne. The gardens, laid out in terraces supported by 
 solidly built walls, crowned by balustrades, descend stepwise, 
 following the fall of the land to the river. The sloping ridge 
 rises high enough to give the spectator on the opposite bank 
 the impression that the Faubourg Saint-Etienne nestles at 
 the foot of the lowest terrace of the Bishop's garden. Thence, 
 as you walk in one direction, you look out across the river, 
 and in the other along its course through the broad fertile 
 landscape. When the Vienne has flowed westwards past the 
 palace gardens, it takes a. sudden turn towards Limoges, 
 skirting the Faubourg Saint-Martial in a graceful curve. A 
 little further, and beyond the suburb, it passes a charming 
 country house called the Cluzeau. You can catch a glimpse 
 of the walls from the nearest point of the nearest terrace, a 
 trick of the perspective uniting them with the church towers 
 of the suburb. Opposite the Cluzeau lies the island in the 
 river, with its indented shores, its thick growing poplars and
 
 72 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 forest-trees, trie island which Veronique in her girlhood called 
 the Isle of France. Eastwards, the low hills shut in the 
 horizon like the walls of an 'amphitheatre. 
 
 The charm of the situation and the rich simplicity of the 
 architecture of the palace mark it out among the other build- 
 ings of a town not conspicuously happy in the choice or em- 
 ployment of its building materials. The view from the gar- 
 dens, which attracts travelers in search of the picturesque, 
 had long been familiar to the Abbe Dutheil. He had brought 
 M. de Grancour with him this evening, and went down from 
 terrace to terrace, taking no heed of the sunset shedding its 
 crimson and orange and purple over the balustrades along 
 the steps, the houses on the suburb, and the waters of the 
 river. He was looking for the Bishop, who at that moment 
 sat under the vines in a corner of the furthest terrace, taking 
 his dessert, and enjoying the charms of the evening at his 
 ease. 
 
 The long shadows cast by the poplars on the island fell 
 like a bar across the river; the sunlight lit up their topmost 
 crests, yellowed somewhat already, and turned the leaves to 
 gold. The glow of the sunset, differently reflected from the 
 different masses of green, composed a glorious harmony of 
 subdued and softened color. A faint evening breeze stirring 
 in the depths of the valley ruffled the surface of the Vienne 
 into a broad sheet of golden ripples that brought out in con- 
 trast all the sober hues of the roofs in the Faubourg Saint- 
 Etienne. The church towers and house-tops of the Faubourg 
 Saint-Martial were blended in the sunlight with the vine 
 stems of the trellis. The faint hum of the country town, half 
 hidden in the re-entering curve of the river, the softness of 
 the air, all sights and sounds combined to steep the pre- 
 late in the calm recommended for the digestion by the authors 
 of every treatise on that topic. Unconsciously the Bishop 
 fixed his eyes on the right bank of the river, on a spot where 
 the lengthening shadows of the poplars in the island had 
 reached the bank by the Faubourg Saint-E*tienne, and dark- 
 ened the walls of the garden close to the scene of the double
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 73 
 
 murder of old Pingret and the servant; and just as his snug 
 felicity of the moment was troubled by the difficulties which 
 his vicars-general recalled to his recollection, the Bishop's ex- 
 pression grew inscrutable by reason of many thoughts. The 
 two subordinates attributed his absence of mind to ennui; 
 but, on the contrary., the Bishop had just discovered in the 
 sands of the Vienne the key to the puzzle, the clue which the 
 des Vanneaulx and the police were seeking in vain. 
 
 "My lord," began the Abbe de Grancour, as he came up to 
 the Bishop, "everything has failed; we shall have the sorrow 
 of seeing that unhappy Tascheron die in mortal sin. He will 
 bellow the most awful blasphemies; he will heap insults on 
 poor Abbe Pascal ; he will spit on the crucifix, and deny every- 
 thing, even hell-fire." 
 
 "He will frighten the people," said the Abbe Dutheil. "The 
 very scandal and horror of it will cover our defeat and our 
 inability to prevent it. So, as I was saying to M. de Grancour 
 as we came, may this scene drive more than one sinner back 
 to the bosom of the Church." 
 
 His words seemed to trouble the Bishop, who laid down 
 the bunch of grapes which he was stripping on the table, 
 wiped his fingers, and signed to his two vicars-general to be 
 seated. 
 
 "The Abbe Pascal has managed badly," said he at last. 
 
 "He is quite ill after the last scene with the prisoner," said 
 the Abbe de Grancour. "If he had been well enough to come, 
 we should have brought him with us to explain the difficulties 
 which put all the efforts which your lordship might command 
 out of our power." 
 
 "The condemned man begins to sing obscene songs at the 
 top of his voice when he sees one of us; the noise drowns 
 every word as soon as you try to make yourself heard," said 
 a young priest who was sitting beside the Bishop. 
 
 The young speaker leant his right elbow on the table, 
 his white hand drooped carelessly over the bunches of grapes 
 as he selected the reddest berries, with the air of being per- 
 fectly at home. He had a charming face, and seemed to b
 
 74 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 either a table-companion or a favorite with the Bishop, and 
 was in fact a favorite and the prelate's table-companion. As 
 the younger brother of the Baron de Eastignac he was con- 
 nected with the Bishop of Limoges by the ties of family re- 
 lationship and affection. Considerations of fortune had in- 
 duced the young man to enter the Church; and the Bishop, 
 aware of this, had taken his young relative as his private sec- 
 retary until such time as advancement might befall him; 
 for the Abbe Gabriel bore a name which predestined him to 
 the highest dignities of the Church. 
 
 "Then have you been to see him, my son?" asked the 
 Bishop. 
 
 "Yes, my lord. As soon as I appeared) the miserable man 
 poured out a torrent of the most disgusting language against 
 you and me; his behavior made it impossible for a priest to 
 stay with him. Will you permit me to offer you a piece of 
 advice, my lord ?" 
 
 "Let us hear the wisdom which God sometimes puts into 
 the mouth of babes," said the Bishop. 
 
 "Did He not cause Balaam's ass to speak ?" the young Abbe 
 de Eastignac retorted quickly. 
 
 "According to some commentators, the ass was not very 
 well aware of what she was saying," the Bishop answered, 
 laughing. 
 
 Both the vicars-general smiled. In the first place, it was 
 the Bishop's joke; and in the second, it glanced lightly on 
 this young Abbe, of whom all the dignitaries and ambitious 
 churchmen grouped about the Bishop were envious. 
 
 "My advice would be to beg M. de Granville to put off 
 the execution for a few days yet. If the condemned man 
 knew that he owed those days of grace to our intercession, he 
 would perhaps make some show of listening to us, and if he 
 listens " 
 
 "He will persist in his conduct when he sees what comes 
 of it," said the Bishop, interrupting his favorite. "Gentle- 
 men," he resumed after a moment's pause, "is the town 
 acquainted with these details ?"
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 75 
 
 wUl you find the house where they are not dis- 
 cussed ?" answered the Abbe de Grancour. "The condition of 
 our good Abbe Pascal since his last interview is matter of 
 common talk at this moment." 
 
 "When is Tascheron to be executed?" asked the Bishop. 
 
 "To-morrow. It is market day," replied M. de Grancour. 
 
 "Gentlemen, religion must not be vanquished," cried the 
 Bishop. "The more attention is attracted to this affair, the 
 more determined am I to secure a signal triumph. The 
 Church is passing through a difficult crisis. Miracles are 
 called for here among an industrial population, where sedi- 
 tion has spread itself and taken root far and wide ; where re- 
 ligious and monarchical doctrines are regarded with a critical 
 spirit ; where nothing is respected by a system of analysis de- 
 rived from Protestantism by the so-called Liberalism of to- 
 day, which is free to take another name to-morrow. Go to 
 M. de Granville, gentlemen, he is with us heart and soul; 
 tell him that we ask for a few days' respite. I will go to see 
 the unhappy man." 
 
 "You, my lord !" cried the Abbe de Eastignac. "Will not 
 too much be compromised if you fail? You should only go 
 when success is assured." 
 
 "If my Lord Bishop will permit me to give my opinion," 
 said the Abbe Dutheil, "I think that I can suggest a means 
 of securing the triumph of religion under these melancholy 
 circumstances." 
 
 The Bishop's response was a somewhat cool sign of as- 
 sent, which showed how low his vicar-general's credit stood 
 with him. i 
 
 "If any one has any ascendency over his rebellious soul, 
 and may bring it to God, it is M. Bonnet, the cure of the 
 village where the man was born," the Abbe Dutheil went 
 on. 
 
 "One of your proteges," remarked the Bishop. 
 
 "My lord, M. Bonnet is one of those who recommend 
 themselves by their militant virtues and evangelical labors." 
 
 This answer, so modest and simple, was received with a
 
 76 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 silence which would have disconcerted any one but the Abbe 
 Dutheil. He had alluded to merits which had been over- 
 looked, and the three who heard him chose to regard the 
 words as one of the meek sarcasms, neatly put, impossible to 
 resent, in which churchmen excel, accustomed as they are by 
 their training to say the thing they mean without transgress- 
 ing the severe rules laid down for them in the least particular. 
 But it was nothing of the kind; the Abbe never thought of 
 himself. Then 
 
 "I have heard of Saint Aristides for too long," the Bishop 
 made answer, smiling. "If I were to leave his light under 
 a bushel, it would be injustice or prejudice on my part. Your 
 Liberals cry up your M. Bonnet as if he were one of them- 
 selves ; I mean to see this rural apostle and judge for myself. 
 Go to the public prosecutor, gentlemen, and ask him in my 
 name for a respite; I will await his answer before despatch- 
 ing our well-beloved Abbe Gabriel to Montegnac to fetch the 
 holy man for us. We will put his Beatitude in the way of 
 working a miracle . . ." 
 
 The Abbe Dutheil flushed red at these words from the pre- 
 late-noble, but he chose to disregard any slight that they 
 might contain for him. Both vicars-general silently took 
 their leave, and left the Bishop alone with his young friend. 
 
 "The secrets of the confessional which we require lie buried 
 there, no doubt," said the Bishop, pointing to the shadows of 
 the poplars where they reached a lonely house half-way be- 
 tween the island and the Faubourg Saint-^'tienne. 
 
 "So I have always thought," Gabriel answered. "I am not 
 a judge, and I do not care to play the spy; but if I had been 
 the examining magistrate, I should know the name of the 
 woman who is trembling now at every sound, at every word 
 that is uttered, compelled all the while to wear a smooth, un- 
 clouded brow under pain of accompanying the condemned 
 man to his death. Yet she has nothing to fear. I havo ?ocn 
 the man he will carry the secret of his passionate love to 
 his grave." 
 
 "Crafty young man !" said the Bishop, pinching his secre-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 77 
 
 tary's ear, as he pointed out a spot between the island in the 
 river and the Faubourg Saint-Etienne, lit up by a last red 
 ray from the sunset. The young priest's eyes had been fixed 
 on it as he spoke. "Justice ought to have searched there; is 
 it not so?" 
 
 "I went to see the criminal to try the effect of my guess 
 upon him; but he is watched by spies, and if I had spoken 
 audibly, I might have compromised the woman for whom he 
 is dying." 
 
 "Let us keep silence," said the Bishop. "We are not con- 
 cerned with man's justice. One head will fall, and that is 
 enough. Besides, sooner or later, the secret will return to the 
 Church." 
 
 The perspicacity of the priest, fostered by the habit of 
 meditation, is far keener than the insight of the lawyer and 
 the detective. After all the preliminary investigations, after 
 the legal inquiry, and the trial at the Assizes, the Bishop and 
 his secretary, looking down from the height of the terrace, 
 had in truth, by dint of contemplation, succeeded in discover- 
 ing details as yet unknown. 
 
 M. de Granville was playing his evening game of whist in 
 Mme. Graslin's house, and his visitors were obliged to wait 
 for his return. It was near midnight before his decision was 
 known at the palace, and by two o'clock in the morning the 
 Abbe Gabriel started out for Montegnac in the Bishop's own 
 traveling carriage, lent to him for the occasion. The place 
 is about nine leagues distant from Limoges; it lies under 
 the mountains of the Correze, in that part of Limousin 
 which borders on the department of the Creuse. All Limoges, 
 when the Abbe left it, was in a ferment of excitement over the 
 execution promised for this day, an expectation destined to be 
 balked once more.
 
 78 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 III 
 
 THE CUB^f OF MONT^GNAC 
 
 IN priests and fanatics there is a certain tendency to insist 
 upon the very utmost to which they are legally entitled where 
 their interests are concerned. Is this a result of poverty ? Is 
 an egoism which favors the development of greed one of the 
 consequences of isolation upon a man's character? Or are 
 shrewd business habits, as well as parsimony, acquired by a 
 course of management of charitable funds? Each tempera- 
 ment suggests a different explanation, but the fact remains 
 the same whether it lurks (as not seldom happens) beneath 
 urbane good-humor, or (and equally often) is openly mani- 
 fested; and the difficulty of putting the hand in the pocket 
 is evidently increasingly felt on a journey. 
 
 Gabriel de Eastignac, the prettiest young gentleman who 
 had bowed his head before the altar of the tabernacle for 
 some time, only gave thirty sous to the postilions, and trav- 
 eled slowly accordingly. The postilion tribe drive with all 
 due respect a bishop who does but pay twice the amount de- 
 manded of ordinary mortals, but at the same time, they are 
 careful not to damage the episcopal equipage, for fear of 
 getting themselves into trouble. The Abbe, traveling alone 
 for the first time in his life, spoke mildly at each relay : 
 
 "Just drive on a little faster, can't you?" 
 
 "You can't get the whip to work without a little palm- 
 oil," an old postilion replied, and the young Abbe, much 
 mystified, fell back in a corner of the carriage. He amused 
 himself by watching the landscape through which they were 
 traveling, and walked up a hill now and again on the winding 
 road from Bordeaux to Lyons. 
 
 Five leagues beyond Limoges the country changes. You 
 have left behind the charming low hills about the Vienne and 
 the fair meadow slopes of Limousin, which sometimes (and 
 this particularly about Saint-Leonard) put you in mind of
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 79 
 
 Switzerland. Yon find yourself in a wilder and sterner dis- 
 trict. Wide moors, vast steppes without grass or herds of 
 horses, stretch away to the mountains of the Correze on the 
 horizon. The far-off hills do not tower above -the plain, a 
 grandly rent wall of rock like the Alps in the south ; you look 
 in vain for the desolate peaks and glowing gorges of the Apen- 
 Tiine, or for the majesty of the Pyrenees the curving wave- 
 like swell of the hills of the Correze bears witness to their 
 origin, to the peaceful slow subsidence of the waters which 
 once overwhelmed this country. 
 
 These undulations, characteristic of this, and, indeed, of 
 most of the hill districts of France, have perhaps contributed 
 quite as much as the climate to gain for the land its title of 
 "the kindly," which Europe has confirmed. But it is a dreary 
 transition country which separates Limousin from the 
 provinces of Marche and Auvergne. In the mind of the 
 poet and thinker who crosses it, it calls up visions of the In- 
 finite (a terrible thought for certain souls) ; a woman look- 
 ing out on its monotonous sameness is driven to muse; and 
 to those who must dwell with the wilderness, nature shows 
 herself stubborn, peevish, and barren ; 'tis a churlish soil that 
 covers these wide gray plains. 
 
 Only the neighborhood of a great capital can work such a 
 miracle as transformed Brie during the last two centuries. 
 Here there is no large settlement which sometimes puts life 
 into the waste lands which the agricultural economist re- 
 gards as blanks in creation, spots where civilization groans 
 aghast, and the tourist finds no inns and a total absence of 
 that picturesque in which he delights. 
 
 But to lofty spirits the moors, the shadows needed in the 
 vast picture of nature, are not repellent. In our own day, 
 Fenimore Cooper, owner of so melancholy a talent, has set 
 forth the mysterious charm of great solitudes magnificently 
 in The Prairie. But the wastes shunned by every form of 
 plant life, the barren soil covered with loose stones and water- 
 borne pebbles, the "bad lands" of the earth are so many 
 challenges to civilization. France must face her difficulties
 
 80 
 
 and find a solution for them, as the British are doing; their 
 patient heroism is turning the most barren heather land in 
 Scotland into productive farms. Left to their primitive deso- 
 lation, these' fallows produce a crop of discouragement, of 
 idleness, of poor physique from insufficient food, and crime, 
 whenever want grows too clamorous. In these few words, you 
 have the past history of Montegnac. 
 
 What is there to be done when a waste on so vast a scale 
 is neglected by the administration, deserted by the nobles, 
 execrated by workers? Its inhabitants declare war against 
 a social system which refuses to do its duty, and so it was 
 in former times with the folk of Montegnac. They lived, 
 like Highlanders, by murder and rapine. At sight of that 
 country a thoughtful observer could readily imagine how that 
 only twenty years ago the people of the village were at war 
 with society at large. 
 
 The wide plateau, cut away on one side by the Vienne, on 
 another by the lovely valleys of Marche, bounded by Auvergne 
 to the east, and shut in by the mountains of the Corr&ze on 
 the south, is very much like (agriculture apart) the uplands 
 of Beauce, which separate the basin of the Loire from the 
 basin of the Seine, or the plateaux of Touraine or of Berri, 
 or many others of these facets, as it were, on the surface of 
 France, so numerous that they demand the careful attention 
 of the greatest administrators. 
 
 It is an unheard-of thing that while people complain 
 that the masses are discontented with their condition, and 
 constantly aspiring towards social elevation, a government 
 cannot find a remedy for this in a country like France, where 
 statistics show that there are millions of acres of land lying 
 idle, and in some cases (as in Berri) covered with leaf mould 
 seven or eight feet thick! A good deal of this land which 
 should support whole villages, and yield a magnificent return 
 to cultivation, is the property of pig-headed communes which 
 refuse to sell to speculators because, forsooth, they wish to 
 preserve the right of grazing some hundred cows upon it. 
 Impotence is writ large over all these lands, without a pur-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 81 
 
 pose. Yet every bit of land will grow some special thing, and 
 neither arms nor will to work are lacking, but administrative 
 ability and conscience. 
 
 Hitherto the upland districts of France have been sacri- 
 ficed to the valleys. The Government has given its fostering 
 protection to districts well able to take care of themselves. 
 But most of these unlucky wastes have no water supply, the 
 first requisite for cultivation. The mists which might fertilize 
 the gray dead soil by depositing their oxides are swept across 
 them by the wind. There are no trees to arrest the clouds 
 and suck up their nourishing moisture. A few plantations 
 here and there would be a godsend in such places. The poor 
 folk who live in these wilds, at a practically impossible dis- 
 tance from the nearest large town, are without a market for 
 their produce if they have any. Scattered about on the 
 edges of a forest left to nature, they pick up their firewood 
 and eke out a precarious existence by poaching ; in the winter 
 starvation stares them in the face. They have not capital 
 enough to grow wheat, for so poor are they that ploughs and 
 cattle are beyond their means; and they live on chestnuts. 
 If you have wandered through some Natural History Museum 
 and felt the indescribable depression which comes on after 
 a prolonged study of the unvarying brown hues of the Euro- 
 pean specimens, you will perhaps understand how the per- 
 petual contemplation of the gray plains must affect the moral 
 conditions of the people who live face to face with such dis- 
 heartening sterility. There is no shadow, nor contrast, nor 
 coolness ; no sight to stir associations which gladden the mind. 
 One could hail a stunted crab-tree there as a friend. 
 
 The highroad forked at length, and a cross-road branched 
 off towards the village a few leagues distant. Montegnac lying 
 (as its name indicates) at the foot of a ridge of hill is the chief 
 village of a canton on the borders of Haute- Vienne. The hill- 
 side above belongs to the township which encircles hill coun- 
 try and plain, indeed, the commune is a miniature Scotland, 
 and has its Highlands and its Lowlands. Only a league away, 
 si the back of the hill which shelters the township, rises the
 
 82 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 first peak of the chain of the Correze, and all the country 
 between is filled by the great Forest of Montegnac., crowning 
 the slope above the village, covering the little valleys and bleak 
 undulating land (left bare in patches here and there), climbing 
 the peak itself, stretching away to the north in a long narrow 
 strip which ends abruptly in a point on a steep bank above 
 the Aubusson road. That bit of steep bank rises above a 
 deep hollow through which the highroad runs from Lyons to 
 Bordeaux. Many a time coaches and foot-passengers have 
 been stopped in the darkest part of the dangerous ravine; 
 and the robberies nearly always went without punishment. 
 The situation favored the highwaymen, who escaped by paths 
 well known to them into their forest fastnesses. In such a 
 country the investigations of justice find little trace. People 
 accordingly shunned that route. 
 
 Without traffic neither commerce nor industry can exist; 
 the exchange of intellectual and material wealth becomes 
 impossible. The visible wonders of civilization are in all 
 cases the result of the application of ideas as old as man. A 
 thought in the mind of man that is from age to age the 
 starting-point and the goal of all our civilization. The history 
 of Montegnac is a proof of this axiom of social science. When 
 the administration found itself in a position to consider the 
 pressing practical needs of the country, the strip of forest 
 was felled, gendarmes were posted to accompany the diligence 
 through the two stages ; but, to the shame of the gendarmerie 
 be it said, it was not the sword but a voice, not Corporal Cher- 
 vin but Parson Bonnet, who won the battle of civilization by 
 reforming the lives of the people. The cure, seized with pity 
 and compassion for those poor souls, tried to regenerate them, 
 and persevered till he gained his end. 
 
 After another hour's journey across the plains where flints 
 succeeded to dust, and dust to flints, and flocks of partridges 
 abode in peace, rising at the approach of the carriage with a 
 heavy whirring sound of their wings, the Abbe Gabriel, like 
 most other travelers who pass that way, hailed the sight of 
 the roofs of the township with a certain pleasure. As you
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 83 
 
 enter Montegnac you are confronted by one of the queer post- 
 houses, not to be found out of France. The signboard, nailed 
 up with four nails above a sorry empty stable, is a rough 
 oaken plank on which a pretentious postilion has carved an 
 inscription, darkening the letters with ink: Pauste o chevos 
 it runs. The door is nearly always wide open. The threshold 
 is a plank set up edgewise in the earth to keep the rain-water 
 out of the stable, the floor being below the level of the road 
 outside. Within, the traveler sees to his sorrow the harness, 
 worn, mildewed, mended with string, ready to give way at the 
 first tug. The horses are probably not to be seen; they are 
 at work on the land, or out at grass, anywhere and every- 
 where but in the stable. If by any chance they are within, 
 they are feeding. If the horses are ready, the postilion has 
 gone to see his aunt or his cousin, or gone to sleep, or he is 
 getting in his hay. Nobody knows where he is; you must 
 wait while somebody goes to find him. He does not stir until 
 he has a mind ; and when he comes, it takes, him an eternity 
 to find his waistcoat or his whip, or to rub down his cattle. 
 The buxom dame in the doorstep fidgets about even more 
 restlessly than the traveler, and forestalls any outburst on his 
 part by bestirring herself a good deal more quickly than the 
 horses. She personates the post-mistress whose husband is 
 out in the fields. 
 
 It was in such a stable as this that the Bishop's favorite 
 left his traveling carriage. The wall looked like maps; the 
 thatched roof, as gay with flowers as a garden bed, bent under 
 the weight of its growing house-leeks. He asked the woman 
 of the place to have everything in readiness for his departure 
 in an hour's time, and inquired his way to the parsonage of 
 her. The good woman pointed out a narrow alley between 
 two houses. That was the way to the church, she said, and 
 he would find the parsonage hard by. 
 
 While the Abbe climbed the steep path paved with cobble- 
 stones between the hedgerows on either side, the post-mistress 
 fell to questioning the post-boy. Every post-boy along the 
 road from Limoges had passed on to his brother whip the sur-
 
 84 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 mises of the first postilion concerning the Bishop's intentions. 
 So while Limoges was turning out of bed and talking of the 
 execution of old Pingret's murderer, the country folk all 
 along the road were spreading the news of the pardon pro- 
 cured by the Bishop for the innocent prisoner, and prattling 
 of supposed miscarriages of justice, insomuch, that when 
 Jean-Frangois came to the scaffold at a later day, he was like 
 to be regarded as a martyr. 
 
 The Abbe Gabriel went some few paces along the footpath, 
 red with autumn leaves, dark with blackberries and sloes; 
 then he turned and stood, acting on the instinct which 
 prompts us to make a survey of any strange place, an instinct 
 which we share with the horse and dog. The reason of the 
 choice of the sight of Montegnac was apparent; several 
 streams broke out of the hillside, and a small river flowed 
 along by the departmental road which leads from the town- 
 ship to the prefecture. Like the rest of the villages in this 
 plateau, Montegnac is built of blocks of clay, dried in the sun ; 
 if a fire broke out in a cottage, it is possible that it might 
 find it earth and leave it brick. The roofs are of thatch ; alto- 
 gether, it was a poor-looking place that the Bishop's messenger 
 saw. Below Montegnac lay fields of rye, potatoes, and tur- 
 nips, land won from the plain. In the meadows on the lowest 
 elope of the hillside, watered by artificial channels, were some 
 of the celebrated breed of Limousin horses; a legacy (so it is 
 said) of the Arab invaders of France, who crossed the Pyre- 
 nees to meet death from the battle-axes of Charles Martel's 
 Franks, between Poitiers and Tours. Up above on the heights 
 the soil looked parched. Now and again the reddish scorched 
 surface, burnt bare by the sun, indicated the arid soil which 
 the chestnuts love. The water, thriftily distributed along 
 the irrigation channels, was only sufficient to keep the mead- 
 ows fresh and green; on these hillsides grows the fine short 
 grass, the delicate sweet pasture that builds you up a breed of 
 horses delicate and impatient of control, fiery, but not pos- 
 sessed of much staying-power; unexcelled in their native 
 district, but apt to change their character when they change 
 their country.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 85 
 
 Some young mulberry trees indicated an intention of grow- 
 ing silk. Like most villages, Montegnac could only boast a 
 single street, to wit, the road that ran through it; but there 
 was an Upper and Lower Montegnac on either side of it, each 
 cut in two by a little pathway running at right angles to the 
 road. The hillside below a row of houses on the ridge was 
 gay with terraced gardens which rose from a level of several 
 feet above the road, necessitating flights of steps, sometimes 
 of earth, sometimes paved with cobble-stones. A few old 
 women, here and there, who sat spinning or looking after the 
 children, put some human interest into the picture, and kept 
 up a conversation between Upper and Lower Montegnac by 
 talking to each other across the road, usually quiet enough. 
 In this way news traveled pretty quickly from one end of the 
 township to the other. The gardens were full of fruit-trees, 
 cabbages, onions, and pot herbs ; beehives stood in rows along 
 the terraces. 
 
 A second parallel row of cottages lay below the road, their 
 gardens sloping down towards the little river which flowed 
 through fields of thick-growing hemp, the fruit-trees which 
 love damp places marking its coiirse. A few cottages, the 
 post-house among them, nestled in a hollow, a situation well 
 adapted for the weavers who lived in them, and almost every 
 house was overshadowed by the walnut-trees, which flourish 
 best in heavy soil. At the further end of Montegnac, and on 
 the same side of the road, stood a house larger and more care- 
 fully kept than the rest ; it was the largest of a group equally 
 neat in appearance, a little hamlet in fact separated from the 
 township by its gardens, and known then, as to-day, by the 
 name of "TascheronsV The commune was not much in 
 itself, but some thirty outlying farms belonged to it. In the 
 valley, several "water-lanes" like those in Berri and Marche 
 marked out the course of the little streams with green fringes. 
 The whole commune looked like a green ship in the midst 
 of a wide sea. 
 
 Whenever a house, a farm, a village, or a district passes 
 from a deplorable state to a more satisfactory condition of 
 -7
 
 86 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 things, though as yet scarcely to be called strikingly pros- 
 perous, the life there seems so much a matter of course, so 
 natural, that at first sight a spectator can never guess how 
 much toil went to the founding of that not extraordinary pros- 
 perity; what an amount of effort, vast in proportion to the 
 strength that undertook it; what heroic persistence lies there 
 buried and out of sight, effort and persistence without which 
 the visible changes could not have taken place. So the young 
 Abbe saw nothing unusual in the pleasant view before his 
 eyes; he little knew what that country had been before M. 
 Bonnet came to it. 
 
 He turned and went a few paces further up the path, and 
 soon came in sight of the church and parsonage, about six 
 hundred feet above the gardens of Upper Montegnac. Both 
 buildings, when first seen in the distance, were hard to dis- 
 tinguish among the ivy-covered stately ruins of the old Castle 
 of Montegnac, a stronghold of the Navarreins in the twelfth 
 century. The parsonage house had every appearance of being 
 built in the first instance for a steward or head gamekeeper. 
 It stood at the end of a broad terrace planted with lime-trees, 
 and overlooked the whole countryside. The ravages of time 
 bore witness to the antiquity of the flights of steps and the 
 walls which supported the terrace, the stones had been forced 
 out of place by the constant imperceptible thrusting of plant 
 life in the crevices, until tall grasses and wild flowers had 
 taken root among them. Every step was covered with a dark- 
 green carpet of fine close moss. The masonry, solid though it 
 was, was full of rifts and cracks, where wild plants of the 
 pellitory and camomile tribe were growing; the maidenhair 
 fern sprang from the loopholes in thick masses of shaded 
 green. The whole face of the wall, in fact, was hung with 
 the finest and fairest tapestry, damasked with bracken fronds, 
 purple snapdragons with their golden stamens, blue borage, 
 and brown fern and moss, till the stone itself was only seen 
 by glimpses hece and there through its moist, cool covering. 
 
 Up above, upon the terrace, the clipped box borders formed 
 geometrical patterns in a pleasure garden framed by the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 87 
 
 parsonage house, and behind the parsonage rose the crags, 
 a pale background of rock, on which a few drooping, feathery 
 trees struggled to live. The ruins of the castle towered above 
 the house and the church. 
 
 The parsonage itself, built of flints and mortar, boasted a 
 single story and garrets above, apparently empty, to judge 
 by the dilapidated windows in either gable under the high- 
 pitched roof. A couple of rooms on the ground floor, sepa- 
 rated by a passage with a wooden staircase at the further 
 end of it, two more rooms on the second floor, and a little 
 lean-to kitchen built against the side of the house in the 
 yard, where a stable and coach-house stood perfectly empty, 
 useless, abandoned this was all. The kitchen garden lay 
 between the house and the church ; a ruinous covered passage 
 led from the parsonage to the sacristy. 
 
 The young Abbe's eyes wandered over the place. He 
 noted the four windows with their leaded panes, the brown 
 moss-grown walls, the rough wooden door, so full of splits 
 and cracks that it looked like a bundle of matches, and the 
 adorable quaintness of it all by no means took his fancy. 
 The grace of the plant life which covered the roofs, the wild 
 climbing flowers that sprang from the rotting wooden sills 
 and cracks in the wall, the trails and tendrils of the vines, 
 covered with tiny clusters of grapes, which found their way 
 in through the windows, as if they were fain to carry merri- 
 ment and laughter into the house, all this he beheld, and 
 thanked his stars that his way led to a bishopric, and not 
 to a country parsonage. 
 
 The house, open all day long, seemed to belong to every 
 one. The Abbe Gabriel walked into the dining-room, which 
 opened into the kitchen. The furniture which met his eyes 
 was poor an old oak table with four twisted legs, an easy- 
 chair covered with tapestry, a few wooden chairs, and an old 
 chest, which did duty as a sideboard. There was no one in 
 that kitchen except the cat, the sign of a woman in the house. 
 The other room was the parlor ; glancing round it, the young 
 priest noticed that the easy-chairs were made of unpolished
 
 88 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 wood, and covered with tapestry. The paneling of the walls, 
 like the rafters, was of chestnut wood, and black as ebony. 
 There was a timepiece in a green case painted with flowers, 
 a table covered with a worn green cloth, one or two chairs, 
 and on the mantelshelf an Infant Jesus in wax under a 
 glass shade set between two candlesticks. The hearth, sur- 
 rounded by a rough wooden moulding, was hidden by a paper 
 screen representing the Good Shepherd with a sheep on his 
 shoulder. In this way, doubtless, one of the family of the 
 mayor, or of the justice of the peace, endeavored to express 
 his acknowledgments of the care bestowed on his training. 
 
 The state of the house was something piteous. The walls, 
 which had once been limewashed, were discolored here and 
 there, and rubbed and darkened up to the height of a man's 
 head. The wooden staircase, with its heavy balustrades, 
 neatly kept though it was, looked as though it must totter 
 if any one set foot on it. At the end of the passage, just oppo- 
 site the front door, another door stood open, giving the Abbe 
 Gabriel an opportunity of surveying the kitchen garden, shut 
 in by the wall of the old rampart, built of the white crum- 
 bling stone of the district. Fruit-trees in full bearing had 
 been trained espalier-fashion along this side of the garden, 
 but the long trellises were falling to pieces, and the vine- 
 leaves were covered with blight. 
 
 The Abbe went back through the house, and walked along 
 the paths in the front garden. Down below the magnificent 
 wide view of the valley was spread out before his eyes, a sort 
 of oasis on the edge of the great plain, which, in the light 
 morning mists, looked something like a waveless sea. Behind, 
 and rather to one side, the great forest stretched away to the 
 horizon, the bronzed mass making a contrast with the plains, 
 and on the other hand the church and the castle perched on 
 the crag stood sharply out against the blue sky. As the Abbe 
 Gabriel paced the tiny paths among the box-edged diamonds, 
 circles, and stars, crunching the gravel beneath his boots, he 
 looked from point to point at the scene; over the village, 
 where already a few groups of gazers had formed to stare
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 89 
 
 at him, at the valley in the morning light, the quickset 
 hedges that marked the ways, the little river flowing under its 
 willows, in such contrast with the infinite of the plains. Grad- 
 ually his impressions changed the current of his thoughts. 
 He admired the quietness, he felt the influences of the pure 
 air, of the peace inspired by a glimpse of a life of Biblical 
 simplicity; and with these came a dim sense of the beauty 
 of that life. He went back again to look at its details with 
 a more serious curiosity. 
 
 A little girl, left in charge of the house no doubt, but busy 
 pilfering in the garden, came back at the sound of a man's 
 shoes creaking on the flagged pavement of the ground-floor 
 rooms. In her confusion at being caught with fruit in her 
 hand and between her teeth, she made no answer whatever 
 to the questions put to her by this Abbe young, handsome, 
 daintily arrayed. The child had never believed it possible 
 that such an Abbe could exist radiant in fine lawn, neat as 
 a new pin, and dressed in fine black cloth without a speck or 
 a crease. 
 
 "M. Bonnet?" she echoed at last. "M. Bonnet is saying 
 mass, and Mile. Ursule is gone to the church." 
 
 The covered passage from the house to the sacristy had 
 escaped the Abbe Gabriel's notice ; so he went down the path 
 again to enter the church by the principal door. The church 
 porch was a sort of pent-house facing the village, set at the 
 top of a flight of worn and disjointed steps, overlooking a 
 square below; planted with the great elm-trees which date 
 from the time of the Protestant Sully, and full of channels 
 washed by the rains. 
 
 The church itself, one of the poorest in Prance, where 
 churches are sometimes very poor, was not unlike those huge 
 barns which boast a roof above the door, supported by brick 
 pillars or tree trunks. Like the parsonage house, it was built 
 of rubble, the square tower being roofed with round tiles ; but 
 Nature had covered the bare walls with the richest tracery 
 mouldings, and made them fairer still with color and light 
 and shade, carving her lines and disposing her masses, show-
 
 90 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 ing all the craftsman's cunning of a Michael Angelo in her 
 work. The ivy clambered over both sides, its sinewy stems 
 clung to the walls till they were covered, beneath the green 
 leaves, with as many veins as any anatomical diagram. Under 
 this mantle, wrought by Time to hide the wounds which 
 Time had made, damasked by autumn flowers that grew in 
 the crevices, nestled the singing-birds. The rose window in 
 the west front was bordered with blue harebells, like the first 
 page of some richly painted missal. There were fewer flowers 
 on the north side, which communicated with the parsonage, 
 though even there there were patches of crimson moss 
 on the gray stone, but the south wall and the apse were cov- 
 ered with many-colored blossoms; there were a few saplings 
 rooted in the cracks, notably an almond-tree, the symbol of 
 Hope. Two giant firs grew up close to the wall of the apse, 
 and served as lightning-conductors. A low ruinous wall re- 
 paired and maintained at elbow height with fallen fragments 
 of its own masonry ran round the churchyard. In the midst 
 of the space stood an iron cross mounted on a stone pedestal, 
 strewn with sprigs of box blessed at Easter, a reminder of a 
 touching Christian rite, now fallen into disuse except in 
 country places. Only in little villages and hamlets does the 
 priest go at Eastertide to bear to his dead the tidings of the 
 Eesurrection "You shall live again in happiness." Here 
 and there above the grass-covered graves rose a rotten wooden 
 cross. 
 
 The inside was in every way in keeping with the picturesque 
 neglect outside of the poor Church, where all the ornament 
 had been given by Time, grown charitable for once. Within, 
 your eyes turned at once to the roof. It was -lined with chest- 
 nut wood and sustained at equal distances by strong king- 
 posts set on crossbeams; age had imparted to it the richest 
 tones which old woods can take in Europe. The four walls 
 were lime-washed and bare of ornament. Poverty had made 
 unconscious iconoclasts of these worshipers. 
 
 Four pointed windows in the side walls let in the light 
 through their leaded panes; the floor was of brick; the seats,
 
 91 
 
 wooden benches. The tomb-shaped altar bore for ornament 
 a great crucifix, beneath which stood a tabernacle in walnut 
 wood (its mouldings brightly polished and clean), eight can- 
 dlesticks (the candles thriftily made of painted wood), and 
 a couple of china vases full of artificial flowers, things that 
 a broker's man would have declined to look at, but which 
 must serve for God. The lamp in the shrine was simply a 
 floating-light, like a night-light, set in an old silver-plated 
 holy-water stoup, hung from the ceiling by silken cords 
 brought from the wreck of some chateau. The baptismal 
 fonts were of wood like the pulpit, and a sort of cage where 
 the churchwardens sat the patricians of the place. The 
 shrine in the Lady Chapel offered to the admiration of the 
 public two colored lithographs framed in a narrow gilded 
 frame. The altar had been painted white, and adorned with 
 artificial flowers planted in gilded wooden flower-pots set on a 
 white altar-cloth edged with shabby }^ellowish lace. 
 
 But at the end of the church a long window covered with 
 a red cotton curtain produced a magical effect. The lime- 
 washed walls caught a faint rose tint from that glowing crim- 
 son; it was as if some thought divine shone from the altar 
 to fill the poor place with warmth and light. On one wall of 
 the passage which led into the sacristy the patron saint of 
 the village had been carved in wood and painted a St. John 
 the Baptist and his sheep, an execrable daub. Yet in spite 
 of the bareness and poverty of the church, there was about the 
 whole a subdued harmony which appeals to those whose 
 spirits have been finely touched, a harmony of visible and 
 invisible emphasized by the coloring. The rich dark brown 
 tints of the wood made an admirable relief to the pure white 
 of the walls, and both blended with the triumphant crimson 
 of the chancel window, an austere trinity of color which re- 
 called the great doctrine of the Catholic Church. 
 
 If surprise was the first feeling called forth by the sight of 
 this miserable house of God, pity and admiration followed 
 quickly upon it. Did it not express the poverty of those who 
 worshiped there? Was it not in keeping with the quaint
 
 92 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 simplicity of the parsonage ? And it was clean and carefully 
 kept. You breathed, as it were, an atmosphere of the simple 
 virtues of the fields ; nothing within spoke of neglect. Primi- 
 tive and homely though it was, it was clothed in prayer; a 
 soul pervaded it which you felt, though you could not explain 
 how. 
 
 The Abbe Gabriel slipped in softly, so as not to interrupt 
 the meditations of two groups on the front benches before 
 the high-altar, which was railed off from the nave by a balus- 
 trade of the inevitable chestnut wood, roughly made enough, 
 and covered with a white cloth for the Communicn. Just 
 above the space hung the lamp. Some score of peasant folk 
 on' either side were so deeply absorbed in passionate prayer, 
 that they paid no heed to the stranger as he walked up the 
 church in the narrow gangway between the rows of benches. 
 As the Abbe Gabriel stood beneath the lamp, he could see 
 into the two chancels which completed the cross of the ground- 
 plan ; one of them led to the sacristy, the other to the church- 
 yard. It was in this latter, near the graves, that a whole 
 family clad in black were kneeling on the brick floor, for 
 there were no benches in this part of the church. The Abbe 
 bent before the altar on the step of the balustrade and knelt 
 to pray, giving a side glance at this sight, which was soon 
 explained. The Gospel was read ; the cure took off his chasu- 
 ble and came down from the altar towards the railing; and 
 the Abbe, who had foreseen this, slipped away and stood 
 close to the wall before M. Bonnet could see him. The clock 
 struck ten. 
 
 "My brethren," said the cure in a faltering voice, "even 
 at this moment, a child of this parish is paying his forfeit 
 to man's justice by submitting to its supreme penalty. We 
 offer the holy sacrifice of the mass for the repose of his soul. 
 Let us all pray together to God to beseech Him not to forsake 
 that child in his last moments, to entreat that repentance 
 here on earth may find in Heaven the mercy which has been 
 refused to it here below. The ruin of this unhappy child, 
 on whom we had counted most surely to set a good example,
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 93 
 
 can only be attributed to a lapse from religious princi- 
 ples 
 
 The cure was interrupted by the sound of sobbing from 
 the group of mourners in the transept ; and by the paroxysm 
 of grief the young priest knew that this was the Tascheron 
 family, though he had never seen them before. The two 
 foremost among them were old people of seventy years at 
 least. Their faces, swarthy as a Florentine bronze, were cov- 
 ered with deep impassive lines. Both of them, in their old 
 patched garments, stood like statues close against the wall; 
 evidently this was the condemned man's grandfather and 
 grandmother. Their red glassy eyes seemed to shed tears of 
 blood; the old arms trembled so violently that the sticks on 
 which they leant made a faint sound of scratching on the 
 bricks. Behind them the father and mother, their faces hid- 
 den in their handkerchiefs, burst into tears. About the four 
 heads of the family knelt two married daughters with their 
 husbands, then three sons, stupefied with grief. Five kneel- 
 ing little ones, the oldest not more than seven years of age, 
 understood nothing probably of all that went on, but looked 
 and listened with the apparently torpid curiosity, which in 
 the peasant is often a process of observation carried (so far 
 as the outward and visible is concerned) to the highest possi- 
 ble pitch. Last of all came the poor girl Denise, who had 
 been imprisoned by justice, the martyr to sisterly love; she 
 was listening with an expression which seemed to betoken 
 incredulity and straying thoughts. To her it seemed impos- 
 sible that her brother should die. Her face was a wonderful 
 picture of another face, that of one among the three Maries 
 who could not believe that Christ was dead, though she had 
 shared the agony of His Passion. Pale and dry-eyed, as is 
 the wont of those who have watched for many nights, her 
 freshness had been withered more by sorrow than by work in 
 the fields ; but .she still kept the beauty of a country girl, the 
 full plump figure, the shapely red arms, a perfectly round face, 
 and clear eyes, glittering at that moment with the light of 
 despair in them. Her throat, firm-fleshed and white below
 
 94 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 the line of sunburned brown, indicated the rich tissue and 
 fairness of the skin beneath the stuff. The two married 
 daughters were weeping; their husbands, patient tillers of the 
 soil, were grave and sad. None of the three sons in their 
 sorrow raised their eyes from the ground. 
 
 Only Denise and her mother showed any sign of rebellion 
 in the harrowing picture of resignation and despairing 
 anguish. The sympathy and sincere and pious commiseration 
 felt by the rest of the villagers for a family so much respected 
 had lent the same expression to all faces, an expression which 
 became a look of positive horror when they gathered from the 
 cure's words that even in that moment the knife would fall. 
 All of them had known the young man from the day of his 
 birth, and doubtless all of them believed him to be incapable 
 of committing the crime laid to his charge. The sobbing 
 which broke in upon the simple and brief address grew so 
 vehement that the cure's voice suddenly ceased, and he invited 
 those present to fervent prayer. 
 
 There was nothing in this scene to surprise a priest, but 
 Gabriel de Rastignac was too young not to feel deeply moved 
 by it. He had not as }-et put priestly virtues in practice; he 
 knew that a different destiny lay before him; that it would 
 never be his duty to go forth into the social breaches where 
 the heart bleeds at the sight of suffering on every side; his 
 lot would be cast among the upper ranks of the clergy which 
 keep alive the spirit of sacrifice, represent the highest intelli- 
 gence of the Church, and, when occasion calls for it, display 
 these same virtues of the village cure on the largest scale, 
 like the great Bishops of Marseilles and Meaux, the Arch- 
 bishops of Aries and Cambrai. The poor peasants were pray- 
 ing and weeping for one who (as they believed) was even 
 then going to his death in a great public square, before a 
 crowd of people assembled from all parts to see him die, the 
 agony of death made intolerable for him by- the weight of 
 shame; there was something very touching in this feeble 
 counterpoise of sympathy and prayer from a few, opposed 
 to the cruel curiosity of the rabble and the curses, not un-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 95 
 
 deserved. The poor church heightened the pathos of the 
 contrast. 
 
 The Abbe Gabriel was tempted to go over to the Tascherons 
 and cry, "Your son, your brother has been reprieved!" but 
 he shrank from interrupting the mass; he knew, moreover, 
 that it was only a reprieve, the execution was sure to take 
 place sooner or later. But he could not follow the service; 
 in spite of himself, he began to watch the pastor of whom 
 the miracle of conversion was expected. 
 
 Out of the indications in the parsonage house, Gabriel 
 de Eastignac had drawn a picture of M. Bonnet in his own 
 mind: he would be short and stout, he thought, with a red 
 powerful face, a rough working-man, almost like one of the 
 peasants themselves, and tanned by the sun. The reality 
 was very far from this; the Abbe Gabriel found himself in 
 the presence of an equal. M. Bonnet was short, slender, and 
 weakly-looking; yet it was none of these characteristics, but 
 an impassioned face, such a face as we imagine for an 
 apostle, which struck you at a first glance. In shape it was 
 almost triangular; starting from the temples on either side 
 of a broad forehead, furrowed with wrinkles, the meagre 
 outlines of the hollow cheeks met at a point in the chin. In 
 that face, overcast by an ivory tint like the wax of an altar 
 candle, blazed two blue eyes, full of the light of faith and 
 the fires of a living hope. A long slender, straight nose 
 divided it into two equal parts. The wide mouth spoke even 
 when the full, resolute lips were closed, and the voice which 
 issued thence was one of those which go to the heart. The 
 chestnut hair, thin, smooth, and fine, denoted a poor physique, 
 poorly nourished. The whole strength of the man lay in his 
 will. Such were his personal characteristics. In any other 
 such short hands might have indicated a bent towards ma- 
 terial pleasures ; perhaps he too, like Socrates, had found evil 
 in his nature to subdue. His thinness was ungainly, his 
 shoulders protruded too much, and he seemed to be knock- 
 kneed ; his bust was so over developed in comparison with his 
 limbs, that it gave him something of the appearance of a
 
 96 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 hunchback without the actual deformity; altogether, to an 
 ordinary observer, his appearance was not prepossessing. 
 Only those who know the miracles of thought and faith and 
 art can recognize and reverence the light that burns in a 
 martyr's eyes, the pallor of steadfastness, the voice of love, 
 all traits of the Cure Bonnet. Here was a man worthy of 
 that early Church which no longer exists save in the pages 
 of the Martyrology and in pictures of the sixteenth century; 
 he bore unmistakably the seal of human greatness which most 
 nearly approaches the Divine; conviction had set its mark on 
 him, and a convictio-n brings a salient indefinable beauty into 
 faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout wor- 
 shiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, 
 even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light 
 from a woman's face. Conviction is human will come to its 
 full strength ; and being at once the cause and the effect, con- 
 viction impresses the most indifferent, it is a kind of mute 
 eloquence which gains a hold upon the masses. 
 
 As the cure came down from the altar, his eyes fell on the 
 Abbe Gabriel, whom he recognized; but when the Bishop's 
 secretary appeared in the sacristy, he found no one there but 
 Ursule. Her master had already given his orders. Ursule, 
 a woman of canonical age, asked the Abbe de Rastignac to 
 follow her along the passage through the garden. 
 
 "Monsieur le Cure told me to ask you whether you had 
 breakfasted, sir," she said. "You must have started out from 
 Limoges .very early this morning to be here by ten o'clock, 
 so I will set about getting breakfast ready. Monsieur 1'Abbe 
 will not find the Bishop's table here, but we will do our best. 
 M. Bonnet will not be long ; he has gone to comfort those poor 
 souls the Tascherons. Something very terrible is happening 
 to-day to one of their sons." 
 
 "But where do the poor people live?" the Abbe Gabriel 
 put in at length. "I must take M. Bonnet back to Limoges 
 with me at once by the Bishop's orders. The unhappy man is 
 not to be executed to-day; his lordship has obtained a re- 
 prieve -"
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 97 
 
 "Ah !" cried TJrsule, her tongue itching to spread the news. 
 "There will be plenty of time to take that comfort to the 
 poor things whilst I am getting breakfast ready. The 
 Tascherons live at the other end of the village. You follow 
 the path under the terrace, that will take you to the house." 
 
 As soon as the Abbe Gabriel was fairly out of sight, TJrsule 
 went down to take the tidings to the village herself, and to 
 obtain the things needed for breakfast. 
 
 The cure had learned, for the first time, at the church 
 of a desperate resolve on the part of the Tascherons, made 
 since the appeal had been rejected. They would leave the 
 district; they had already sold all they had, and that very 
 morning the money was to be paid down. Formalities and 
 unforeseen delays had retarded the sale ; they had been forced 
 to stay in the countryside after Jean-Frangois was condemned, 
 and every day had been for them a cup of bitterness to drink. 
 The news of the plan, carried out so secretly, had only trans- 
 pired on the eve of the day fixed for the execution. The 
 Tascherons had meant to leave the place before the fatal day ; 
 but the purchaser of their property was a stranger to the 
 canton, a Correzein to whom their motives were indifferent, 
 and he on his own part had found some difficulty in getting 
 the money together. So the family had endured the utmost 
 of their misery. So strong was the feeling of their disgrace 
 in these simple folk who had never tampered witk conscience, 
 that grandfather and grandmother, daughters and sons-in- 
 law, father and mother, and all who bore the name of Tas- 
 cheron, or were connected with them, were leaving the place. 
 Every one in the commune was sorry that they should go, 
 and the mayor had gone to the cure, entreating him to use 
 his influence with the poor mourners. 
 
 As the law now stands, the father is no longer responsible 
 for his son's crime, and the father's guilt does not attach 
 to his children, a condition of things in keeping with other 
 emancipations which have weakened the paternal power, and 
 contributed to the triumph of that individualism which ia 
 eating the heart of society in our days. The thinker who
 
 98 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 looks to the future sees the extinction of the spirit of the 
 family ; those who drew up the new code have set in its place 
 equality and independent opinion. The family will always 
 be the basis of society ; and now the family, as it used to be, 
 exists no longer, it has come of necessity to be a temporary 
 arrangement, continually broken up and reunited only to be 
 separated again; the links between the future and the past 
 are destroyed, the family of an older time has ceased to exist 
 in France. Those who proceeded to the demolition of the old 
 social edifice were logical when they decided that each mem- 
 ber of the family should inherit equally, lessening the author- 
 ity of the father, making of each child the head of a new 
 household, suppressing great responsibilities, but is the social 
 system thus re-edified as solid a structure, with its laws of 
 yesterday unproved by long experience, as the old monarchy 
 was in spite of its abuses ? With the solidarity of the family, 
 society has lost that elemental force which Montesquieu dis- 
 covered and called "honor." Society has isolated its members 
 the better to govern them, and has divided in order to weaken. 
 The social system reigns over so many units, an aggregation 
 of so many ciphers, piled up like grains of wheat in a heap. 
 Can the general welfare take the place of the welfare of the 
 family? Time holds the answer to this great enigma. And 
 yet the old order still exists, it is so deeply rooted that you 
 find it most alive among the people. It is still an active force 
 in remote districts where "prejudice," as it is called, likewise 
 exists ; in old-world nooks where all the members of a family 
 suffer for the crime of one, and the children for the sins of 
 their fathers. 
 
 It was this belief which made their own countryside intol- 
 erable to the Tascherons. Their profoundly religious natures 
 had brought them to the church that morning, for how was it 
 possible to stay away when the mass was said for their son, 
 and prayer offered that God might bring him to a repentance 
 which should reopen eternal life to him ? and, moreover, must 
 they not take leave of the village altar? But, for all that, 
 their plans were made; and when the cure, who followed
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 99 
 
 them, entered the principal house, he found the bundles made 
 up, ready for the journey. The purchaser was waiting with 
 the money. The notary had just made out the receipt. Out 
 in the yard, in front of the house, stood a country cart ready 
 to take the old people and the money and Jean-Frangois' 
 mother. The rest of the family meant to set out on foot that 
 night. 
 
 The young Abbe entered the room on the ground floor 
 where the whole family were assembled, just as the cure of 
 Montegnac had exhausted all his eloquence. The two old 
 people seemed to have ceased to feel from excess of grief ; they 
 were crouching on their bundles in a corner of the room, 
 gazing round them at the old house, which had been a family 
 possession from father to son, at the familiar furniture, at 
 the man who had bought it all, and then at each other, as 
 who should say, "Who would have thought that we should 
 ever have come to this?" For a long time past the old 
 people had resigned their authority to their son, the pris- 
 oner's father; and now, like old kings after their abdication, 
 they played the passive part of subjects and children. 
 Tascheron stood upright listening to the cure, to whom he 
 gave answers in a deep voice by monosyllables. He was a 
 man of forty-eight or thereabouts, with a fine face, such as 
 served Titian for his apostles. It was a trustworthy face, 
 gravely honest and thoughtful; a severe profile, a nose at 
 right angles with the brows, blue eyes, a noble forehead, regu- 
 lar features, dark crisped stubborn hair, growing in the sym- 
 metrical fashion which adds a charm to a visage bronzed by 
 a life of work in the open air this was the present head of 
 the house. It was easy to see that the cure's arguments were 
 shattered against that resolute will. 
 
 Denise was leaning against the bread hutch, watching the 
 notary, who used it as a writing-table; they had given him 
 the grandmother's armchair. The man who had bought the 
 place sat beside the scrivener. The two married sisters were 
 laying the cloth for the last meal which the old folk would 
 offer or partake of in the old house and in their own country
 
 100 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 before they set out to live beneath alien skies. The men of 
 the family half stood, half sat, propped against the large 
 bedstead with the green serge curtains, while Tascheron's 
 wife, their mother, was whisking an omelette by the fire. 
 The grandchildren crowded about the doorway, and the pur- 
 chaser's family were outside. 
 
 Out of the window you could see the garden, carefully cul- 
 tivated, stocked with fruit-trees; the two old people had 
 planted them every one. Everything about them, like the 
 old smoke-begrimed room with its black rafters, seemed to 
 share in the pent-up sorrow, which could be read in so many 
 different expressions on the different faces. The meal was 
 being prepared for the notary, the purchaser, the children, 
 and the men ; neither the father, nor mother, nor Denise, nor 
 her sisters, cared to satisfy their hunger, their hearts were 
 too heavily oppressed. There was a lofty and heart-rending 
 resignation in this last performance of the duties of country 
 hospitality the Tascherons, men of an ancient stock, ended 
 as people usually begin, by doing the honors of their house. 
 
 The Bishop's secretary was impressed by the scene, so 
 simple and natural, yet so solemn, which met his eyes as he 
 came to summon the cure of Montegnac to do the Bishop's 
 bidding. 
 
 "The good man's son is still alive," Gabriel said, addressing 
 the cure. 
 
 At the words, which every one heard in the prevailing 
 silence, the two old people sprang to their feet as if the 
 Trumpet had sounded for the Last Judgment. The mother 
 dropped her frying-pan into the fire. A cry of joy broke from 
 Denise. All the others seemed to be turned to stone in their 
 dull amazement. 
 
 "Jean-Francois is pardoned!" The cry came at that mo- 
 ment as from one voice from the whole village, who rushed up 
 to the Tascherons' house. "It is his lordship the Bishop " 
 
 "I was sure of his innocence !" exclaimed the mother. 
 
 "The purchase holds good all the same, doesn't it?" asked 
 the buyer, and the notary answered him by a nod.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 101 
 
 In a moment the Abbe Gabriel became the point of interest, 
 all eyes were fixed on him; his face was so sad, that it was 
 suspected that there was some mistake, but he could not bear 
 to correct it, and went out with the cure. Outside the house 
 he dismissed the crowd by telling those who came round about 
 him that there was no pardon, it was only a reprieve, and a 
 dismayed silence at once succeeded to the clamor. Gabriel 
 and the cure turned into the house again, and saw a look 
 of anguish on all the faces the sudden silence in the village 
 had been understood. 
 
 "Jean-Frangois has not received his pardon, my friends," 
 said the young Abbe, seeing that the blow had been struck, 
 "but my lord Bishop's anxiety for his soul is so great that 
 he has put off the execution that your son may not perish to 
 all eternity at least." 
 
 "Then is he living?" cried Denise. 
 
 The Abbe took the cure aside and told him of his parish- 
 ioner's impiety, of the consequent peril to religion, and what 
 it was that the Bishop expected of the cure of Montegnac. 
 
 "My lord Bishop requires my death," returned the cure. 
 "Already I have refused to go to this unhappy boy when his 
 afflicted family asked me. The meeting and the scene there 
 afterwards would shatter me like a glass. Let every man 
 do his work. The weakness of my system, or rather the over- 
 sensitiveness of my nervous organization, makes it out of 
 the question for me to fulfil these duties of our ministry. I 
 am still a country parson that I may serve my like, in a 
 sphere where nothing more is demanded of me in a Christian 
 life than I can accomplish. I thought very carefully over 
 this matter, and tried to satisfy these good Tascherons, and 
 to do my duty towards this poor boy of theirs ; but at the bare 
 thought of mounting the cart with him, the mere idea of 
 b'eing present while the preparations for death were being 
 made, a deadly chill runs through my veins. No one would 
 ask it of a mother; and remember, sir, that he is a child of 
 my poor church 
 
 "Then you refuse to obey the Bishop's summons?" asked 
 the Abbe Gabriel.
 
 102 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 M. Bonnet looked at him. 
 
 "His lordship does not know the state of my health," ha 
 said, "nor does he know that my nature rises in revolt 
 against " 
 
 "There are times when, like Belzunce at Marseilles, we are 
 bound to face a certain death," the Abbe Gabriel broke in. 
 
 Just at that moment the cure felt that a hand pulled his 
 cassock; he heard sobs, and, turning, saw the whole family 
 on their knees. Old and young, parents and children, men 
 and women, held out their hands to him imploringly; all the 
 voices united in one cry as he showed his flushed face. 
 
 "Ah ! save his soul at least !" 
 
 It was the old grandmother who had caught at the skirt of 
 his cassock, and was bathing it with tears. 
 
 "I will obey, sir " No sooner were the words uttered 
 
 than the cure was forced to sit down; his knees trembled 
 under him. The young secretary explained the nature of 
 Jean-Francois' frenzy. 
 
 "Do you think that the sight of his younger sister might 
 shake him?" he added, as he came to an end. 
 
 "Yes, certainly," returned the cure. "Denise, you will go 
 with us." 
 
 "So shall I," said the mother. 
 
 "No !" shouted the father. "That boy is dead to us. You 
 know that. Not one of us shall see him." 
 
 "Do not stand in the way of his salvation," said the young 
 Abbe. "If you refuse us the means of softening him, you 
 take the responsibility of his soul upon yourself. In his pres- 
 ent state his death may reflect more discredit on his family 
 than his life." 
 
 "She shall go," said the father. "She always interfered 
 when I tried to correct my son, and this shall be her punish- 
 ment." 
 
 The Abbe Gabriel and M. Bonnet went back together to 
 the parsonage. It was arranged that Denise and her mother 
 should be there at the time when the two ecclesiastics should 
 set out for Limoges. As they followed the footpath along
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 103 
 
 the outskirts of Upper Montegnac, the younger man had 
 an opportunity of looking more closely than heretofore in the 
 church at this country parson, so highly praised by the vicar- 
 general. He was favorably impressed almost at once by his 
 companion's simple dignified manners, by the magic of his 
 voice, and by the words he spoke, in keeping with the voice. 
 The cure had been but once to the palace since the Bishop 
 had taken Gabriel de Eastignac as his secretary, so that he 
 had scarcely seen the favorite destined to be a Bishop some 
 day; he knew that the secretary had great influence, and yet 
 in the dignified kindness of his manner there was a certain 
 independence, as of the cure whom the Church permits to 
 be in some sort a sovereign in his own parish. 
 
 As for the young Abbe, his feelings were so far from ap- 
 pearing in his face that they seemed to have hardened it into 
 severity; his expression was not chilly, it was glacial. 
 
 A man who could change the disposition and manners of 
 a whole countryside necessarily possessed some faculty of 
 observation, and was more or less of a physiognomist; and 
 even had the cure been wise only in well-doing, he had just 
 given proof of an unusually keen sensibility. The coolness 
 with which the Bishop's secretary met his advances and re- 
 sponded to his friendliness struck him at once. He could 
 only account for this reception by some secret dissatisfaction 
 on the other's part, and looked back over his conduct, wonder- 
 ing how he could have given offence, and in what the offence 
 lay. There was a short embarrassing silence, broken by the 
 Abbe de Rastignac. 
 
 "You have a very poor church, Monsieur le Cure," he re- 
 marked, aristocratic insolence in his tones and words. 
 
 "It is too small," answered M. Bonnet. "For great Church 
 festivals the old people sit on benches round the porch, and 
 the younger ones stand in a circle in the square down below; 
 but they are so silent, that those outside can hear." 
 
 Gabriel was silent for several moments. 
 
 "If the people are so devout, why do they leave the church 
 so bare ?" he asked at length.
 
 104 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "Alas! sir, I cannot bring myself to spend money on the 
 building when the poor need it. The poor are the Church. 
 Besides, I should not fear a visitation from my lord Bishop at 
 the Fete-Dieu! Then the poor give the church such things 
 as they have ! Did you notice the nails along the walls ? They 
 fix a sort of wire trellis-work to them, which the women cover 
 with bunches of flowers ; the whole church is dressed in flow- 
 ers, as it were, which keep fresh till the evening. My poor 
 church, which looked so bare to you, is adorned like a bride, 
 and fragrant with sweet scents; the ground is strewn with 
 leaves, and a path in the midst for the passage of the Holy 
 Sacrament is carpeted with rose petals. For that one day I 
 need not fear comparison with Saint Peter's at Rome. The 
 Holy Father has his gold, and I my flowers; to each his 
 miracle. Ah ! the township of Montegnac is poor, but it is 
 Catholic. Once upon a time they used to rob travelers, now 
 any one who passes through the place might drop a bag full 
 of money here, and he would find it when he returned home." 
 
 "Such a result speaks strongly in your praise," said Ga- 
 briel. 
 
 "I have had nothing to do with it," answered the cure, 
 flushing at this incisive epigram. "It has been brought about 
 by the Word of God and the sacramental bread." 
 
 "Bread somewhat brown," said the Abbe Gabriel, smiling. 
 
 "White bread is only suited to the rich," said the cure 
 humbly. 
 
 The Abbe took both M. Bonnet's hands in his, and grasped 
 them cordially. 
 
 "Pardon me, Monsieur le Cure," he said ; and in a moment 
 the reconciliation was completed by a look in the beautiful 
 blue eyes that went to the depths of the cure's soul. 
 
 "My lord Bishop recommended me to put your patience 
 and humility to the proof, but I can go no further. After 
 this little while I see how greatly you have been wronged 
 by the praises of the Liberal party." 
 
 Breakfast was ready. Ursule had spread the white cloth, 
 and set new-laid eggs, butter, honey and fruit, cream and
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 105 
 
 coffee, among bunches of flowers on the old-fashioned table 
 in the old-fashioned sitting-room. The window that looked 
 out upon the terrace stood open, framed about with green 
 leaves. Clematis grew about the ledge white starry blos- 
 soms, with tiny sheaves of golden crinkled stamens at their 
 hearts to relieve the white. Jessamine climbed up on one 
 side of the window, and nasturtiums on the other; above it, 
 a trail of vine, turning red even now, made a rich setting, 
 which no sculptor could hope to render, so full of grace was 
 that lace-work of leaves outlined against the sky. 
 
 "You will find life here reduced to its simplest terms," said 
 the cure, smiling, though his face did not belie the sadness 
 of his heart. "If we had known that you were coming 
 and who could have foreseen the events which have brought 
 you here? TJrsule would have had some trout for you from 
 the torrent; there is a trout-stream in the forest, and the fish 
 are excellent; but I am forgetting that this is August, and 
 that the Gabou will be dry ! My head is very much con- 
 fused " 
 
 "Are you very fond of this place ?" asked the Abbe. 
 
 "Yes. If God permits, I shall die cure of Montegnac. I 
 could wish that other and distinguished men, who have 
 thought to do better by becoming lay philanthropists, had 
 taken this way of mine. Modern philanthropy is the bane 
 of society; the principles of the Catholic religion are the 
 one remedy for the evils which leaven the body social. In- 
 stead of describing the disease and making it worse by 
 jeremiads, each one should have put his hand to the plough 
 and entered God's vineyard as a simple laborer. My task is 
 far from being ended here, sir ; it is not enough to have raised 
 the moral standard of the people, who lived in a frightful 
 state of irreligion when I first came here; I would fain die 
 among a generation fully convinced." 
 
 "You have only done your duty," the younger man re- 
 torted drily ; he felt a pang of jealousy in his heart. 
 
 The other gave him a keen glance. 
 
 "Is this yet another test?" he seemed to say but aloud
 
 106 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 he answered humbly, "Yes. I wish every hour of my life," 
 he added, "that every one in the kingdom would do his duty." 
 
 The deep underlying significance of those words was still 
 further increased by the tone in which they were spoken. 
 It was clear that here, in this year 1829, was a priest of 
 great intellectual power, great likewise in the simplicity of 
 his life; who, though he did not set up his own judgment 
 against that of his superiors, saw none the less clearly 
 whither the Church and the Monarchy were going. 
 
 When the mother and daughter had come, the Abbe left the 
 parsonage and went down to see if the horses had been put in. 
 He was very impatient to return to Limoges. A few minutes 
 later he returned to say that all was in readiness for their 
 departure, and the four set out on their journey. Every 
 creature in Montegnac stood in the road about the post-house 
 to see them go. The condemned man's mother and sister 
 said not a word; and as for the two ecclesiastics, there were 
 so many topics to be avoided that conversation was difficult, 
 and they could neither appear indifferent nor try to take a 
 cheerful tone. Still endeavoring to discover some neutral 
 ground for their talk as they traveled on, the influences of 
 the great plain seemed to prolong the melancholy silence. 
 
 "What made you accept the position of an ecclesiastic?" 
 Gabriel asked at last out of idle curiosity, as the carriage 
 tnrned into the highroad. 
 
 "I have never regarded my office as a 'position,' " the cure 
 answered simply. "I cannot understand how any one can 
 take holy orders for any save the one indefinable and all- 
 powerful reason a vocation. I know that not a few have 
 become laborers in the great vineyard with hearts worn out in 
 the service of the passions ; men who have loved without hope, 
 or whose hopes have been disappointed ; men whose lives were 
 blighted when they laid the wife or the woman they, loved in 
 the grave ; men grown weary of life in a world where in these 
 times nothing, not even sentiments, are stable and secure, 
 where doubt makes sport of the sweetest certainties, and belief 
 is called superstition.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 107 
 
 "Some leave political life in times when to be in power 
 seems to be a sort of expiation, when those who are governed 
 look on obedience as an unfortunate necessity ; and very many 
 leave a battlefield without standards where powers, by nature 
 opposed, combine to defeat and dethone the right. I am not 
 supposing that any man can give himself to God for what 
 he may gain. There are some who appear to see in the clergy 
 a means of regenerating our country; but, according to my 
 dim lights, the patriot priest is a contradiction in terms. 
 The priest should belong to God alone. 
 
 "I had no wish to offer to our Father, who yet accepts all 
 things, a broken heart and an enfeebled will ; I gave myself to 
 Him whole and entire. It was a touching fancy in the old 
 pagan religion which brought the victim crowned with flow- 
 ers to the temple of the gods for sacrifice. There is something 
 in that custom that has always appealed to me. A sacrifice is 
 nothing unless it is made graciously. So the story of my life 
 is very simple, there is not the least touch of romance in it. 
 Still, if you would like to hear a full confession, I will tell 
 you all about myself. 
 
 "My family are well-to-do and almost wealthy. My father. 
 a self-made man, is hard and inflexible; he deals the same 
 measure to himself as to his wife and children. I have never 
 seen the faintest smile on his lips. With a hand of iron, a 
 brow of bronze, and an energetic nature at once sullen and 
 morose, he crushed us all wife and children, clerks and ser- 
 vants, beneath a savage tyranny. I think (I speak for myself 
 alone) that I could have borne the life if the pressure brought 
 to bear on us had been even ; but he was crotchety and change- 
 able, and this fitfulness made it unbearable. We never knew 
 whether we had done right or wrong, and the horrible sus- 
 pense in which we lived at home becomes intolerable in 
 domestic life. It is pleasanter to be out in the streets than 
 in the house. Even as it was, if I had been alone at home, 
 I could have borne all this without a murmur; but there was 
 my mother, whom I loved passionately ; the sight of her misery 
 and the continual bitterness of her life broke my heart; and
 
 108 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 if, as sometimes happened, I surprised her in tears, I was 
 beside myself with rage. I was sent to school; and those 
 years, usually a time of hardship and drudgery, were a sort 
 of golden age for me. I dreaded the holidays. My mother 
 herself was glad to come to see me at the school. 
 
 "When I had finished my humanities, I went home and 
 entered my father's office, but I could only stay there a few 
 months ; youth was strong in me, my mind might have given 
 way. 
 
 "One dreary autumn evening my mother and I took a walk 
 by ourselves along the Boulevard Bourdon, then one of the 
 most depressing spots in Paris, and there I opened my heart 
 to her. I said that I saw no possible life for me save in the 
 Church. So long as my father lived I was bound to be 
 thwarted in my tastes, my ideas, even in my affections. If I 
 adopted the priest's cassock, he would be compelled to respect 
 me, and in this way I might become a tower of strength 
 to the family should occasion call for it. My mother cried 
 bitterly. At that very time my older brother had enlisted 
 as a common soldier, driven out of the house by the causes 
 which had decided my vocation. (He became a general after- 
 wards, and fell in the battle of Leipsic.) I pointed out to 
 my mother as a way of salvation for her that she should marry 
 my sister (as soon as she should be old enough to settle in 
 life) to a man with plenty of character, and look to this new 
 family for support. 
 
 "So in 1807, under the pretext of escaping the conscription 
 without expense to my father, and at the same time declaring 
 my vocation, I entered the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice at the 
 age of nineteen. Within those famous old walls I found 
 happiness and peace, troubled only by thoughts of what my 
 mother and sister must be enduring. Things had doubtless 
 grown worse and worse at home, for when they came to see 
 me they upheld me in my determination. Initiated, it may 
 be, by my own pain into the secrets of charity, as the great 
 Apostle has defined it in his sublime epistle, I longed to bind 
 the wounds of the poor and suffering in some out-of-the-way
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 109 
 
 spot; and thereafter to prove, if God deigned to bless my ef- 
 forts, that the Catholic religion, as put in practice by man, 
 is the one true, good, and noble civilizing agent on earth. 
 
 "During those last days of my diaconate, grace doubtless 
 enlightened me. Fully and freely I forgave my father, for 
 I saw that through him I had found my real vocation. But 
 my mother in spite of a long and tender letter, in which I 
 explained this, and showed how the trace of the finger of 
 God was visible throughout my mother shed many tears 
 when she saw my hair fall under the scissors of the Church; 
 for she knew how many joys I was renouncing, and did not 
 know the hidden glories to which I aspired. Women are so 
 tender-hearted. When at last I was God's, I felt an infinite 
 peace. All the cravings, the vanities, and cares that vex so 
 many souls fell away from me. I thought that Heaven would 
 have care for me as for a vessel of its own. I went forth 
 into a world from which all fear was driven out, where the 
 future was sure, where everything is the work of God even 
 the silence. This quietness of soul is one of the gifts of 
 grace. My mother could not imagine what it was to take 
 a church for a bride ; nevertheless, when she saw that I looked 
 serene and happy, she was happy. After my ordination I 
 came to pay a visit to some of my father's relatives in 
 Limousin, and one of these by accident spoke of the state of 
 things in the Montegnac district. With a sudden illumina- 
 tion like lightning, the thought flashed through my inmost 
 soul 'Behold thy vine !' And I came here. So, as you see, 
 sir, my story is quite simple and uninteresting." 
 
 As he spoke, Limoges appeared in the rays of the sunset, 
 and at the sight the two women could not keep back their 
 tears. 
 
 Meanwhile the young man whom love in its separate guises 
 had come to find, the object of so much outspoken curiosity, 
 hypocritical sympathy, and very keen anxiety, was lying on 
 his prison mattress in the condemned cell. A spy at the 
 door was on the watch for any words that might escape him
 
 110 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 waking or sleeping, or in one of his wild fits of fury ; so bent 
 was justice upon coming at the truth, and on discovering 
 Jean-Frangois' accomplice as well as the stolen money, by 
 every means that the wit of man could devise. 
 
 The des Vanneaulx had the police in their interest; the 
 police spies watched through the absolute silence. Whenever 
 the man told off for this duty looked through the hole made 
 for the purpose, he always saw the prisoner in the same at- 
 titude, bound in his strait-waistcoat, his head tied up by a 
 leather strap to prevent him from tearing the stuff and the 
 thongs with his teeth. Jean-Frangois lay staring at the ceiling 
 with a fixed desperate gaze, his eyes glowed, and seemed as if 
 they were reddened by the full-pulsed tide of life sent surging 
 through him by terrible thoughts. It was as if an antique 
 statue of Prometheus had become a living man, with the 
 thought of some lost joy gnawing his heart ; so when the sec- 
 ond avocat general came to see him, the visitor could not help 
 showing his surprise at a character so dogged. At sight of 
 any human being admitted into his cell, Jean-Frangois flew 
 into a rage which exceeded everything in the doctors' ex- 
 perience of such affections. As soon as he heard the key turn 
 in the lock, or the bolts drawn in the heavily ironed door, a 
 light froth came to his lips. 
 
 In person, Jean-Frangois Tascheron, twenty-five years of 
 age, was short, but well made. His hair was stiff and crisp, 
 and grew rather low on his forehead, signs of great energy. 
 The clear, brilliant, yellow eyes, set rather too close together, 
 gave him something the look of a bird of prey. His face was 
 of the round dark-skinned type common in central France. 
 One of his characteristics confirmed Lavater's assertion that 
 the front teeth overlap in those predestined to be murderers; 
 but the general expression of his face spoke of honesty, of sim- 
 ple warm-heartedness of disposition it would have been 
 nothing extraordinary if a woman had loved such a man pas- 
 sionately. The lines of the fresh mouth, with its dazzling 
 white teeth, were gracious; there was that peculiar shade in 
 the scarlet of the lips which indicates ferocity held in check,
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 111 
 
 and frequently a temperament which thirsts for pleasure and 
 demands free scope for indulgence. There was nothing of the 
 workman's coarseness about him. To the women who watched 
 his trial it seemed evident that it was a woman who had 
 brought flexibility and softness into the fibre inured to toil, 
 the look of distinction into the face of a son of the fields, 
 and grace into his bearing. Women recognize the traces of 
 love in a man, and men are quick to see in a woman whether 
 (to use a colloquial phrase) Love has passed that way. 
 
 That evening Jean-Frangois heard the sound as the bolts 
 were withdrawn and the key was thrust into the lock; he 
 turned his head quickly with the terrible smothered growl 
 with which his fits of fury began; but he trembled violently 
 when through the soft dusk he made out the forms of his 
 mother and sister, and behind the two dear faces another 
 the cure of Montegnac. 
 
 "So this is what those barbarous wretches held in store for 
 me !" he said, and closed his eyes. 
 
 Denise, with her prison experience, was suspicious of every 
 least thing in the room; the spy had hidden himself, mean- 
 ing, no doubt, to return ; she fled to her brother, laid her tear- 
 stained face against his, and said in his ear, "Can they hear 
 what we say?" 
 
 "I should rather think they can, or they would not have 
 sent you here," he answered aloud. "I have asked as a favor 
 this long while that I might not see any of my family." 
 
 "What a way they have treated him !" cried the mother, 
 turning to the cure. "My poor boy ! my poor boy ! . . ." 
 She sank down on the foot of the mattress, and hid her face 
 in the priest's cassock. The cure stood upright beside her. 
 "I cannot bear to see him bound and tied up like that and 
 put into that sack . . ." 
 
 "If Jean will promise me to be good, to make no attempt 
 on his life, and to behave well while we are with him, I will 
 ask for leave to unbind him; but I shall suffer for the 
 slightest infraction of his promise." 
 
 "I have such a craving to stretch myself out and move
 
 112 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 freely, dear M. Bonnet," said the condemned man, his eyes 
 filling with tears, "that I give you my word I will do as you 
 wish." 
 
 The cure went out, the jailer came, and the strait-waistcoat 
 was taken off. 
 
 "You are not going to kill me this evening, are you ?" asked 
 the turnkey. 
 
 Jean made no answer. 
 
 "Poor brother !" said Denise, bringing out a basket which 
 had been strictly searched, "there are one or two things here 
 that you are fond of; here, of course, they grudge you every 
 morsel you eat." 
 
 She brought out fruit gathered as soon as she knew that 
 she might see her brother in prison, and a cake which her 
 mother had put aside at once. This thoughtfulness of theirs, 
 which recalled old memories, his sister's voice and move- 
 ments, the presence of his mother and the cure, all com- 
 bined to bring about a reaction in Jean. He burst into 
 tears. 
 
 "Ah ! Denise," he said, "I have not made a meal these six 
 months past; I have eaten because hunger drove me to eat, 
 that is all." 
 
 Mother and daughter went out and returned, and came and 
 went. The housewifely instinct of seeing to a man's comfort 
 put heart into them, and at last they set supper before their 
 poor darling. The people of the prison helped them in this, 
 having received orders to do all in their power compatible 
 with the safe custody of the condemned man. The des Van- 
 neaulx, with unkindly kindness, had done their part towards 
 securing the comfort of the man in whose power their heritage 
 lay. So Jean by these means was to know a last gleam of 
 family happiness happiness overshadowed by the sombre 
 gloom of the prison and death. 
 
 "Was my appeal rejected?" he asked M. Bonnet. 
 
 "Yes, my boy. There is nothing left to you now but to 
 make an end worthy of a Christian. This life of ours is as 
 nothing compared with the life which awaits us; you must
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 113 
 
 think of your happiness in eternity. Your account with men 
 is settled by the forfeit of your life, but God requires more, 
 a life is too small a thing for Him." 
 
 "Forfeit my life? . . . Ah, you do not know all that 
 I must leave behind." 
 
 Denise looked at her brother, as if to remind him that pru- 
 dence was called for even in matters of religion. 
 
 "Let us say nothing of that/' he went on, eating fruit with 
 on eagerness that denoted a fierce and restless fire within. 
 "When must I ?" 
 
 "No ! no ! nothing of that before me !" cried the mother. 
 
 "I should be easier if I knew," he said in a low voice, turn- 
 ing to the cure. 
 
 "The same as ever !" exclaimed M. Bonnet, and he bent 
 to say in Jean's ear "If you make your peace with God to- 
 night, and your repentance permits me to give you absolution, 
 it shall be to-morrow." Aloud he added, "We have already 
 gained something by calming you." 
 
 At these last words, Jean grew white to the lips, his eyes 
 contracted with a heavy scowl, his features quivered with the 
 coming storm of rage. 
 
 "What, am I calm?" he asked himself. Luckily his eyes 
 met the tearful eyes of his sister Denise, and he regained the 
 mastery over himself. 
 
 "Ah, well," he said, looking at the cure, "I could not listen 
 to any one but you. They knew well how to tame me," and 
 he suddenly dropped his head on his mother's shoulder. 
 
 "Listen, dear," his mother said, weeping, "our dear M. 
 Bonnet is risking his own life by undertaking to be with you 
 on the way to" she hesitated, and then finished "to eternal 
 life." 
 
 And she lowered Jean's head and held it for a few moments 
 on her heart. 
 
 "Will he go with me?" asked Jean, looking at the cure, 
 who took it upon himself to bow his head. "Very well, I will 
 listen to him. I will do everything that he requires of me." 
 
 "Promise me that you will," said Denise, "for your soul
 
 114 THE COUN 7 TRY PARSON 
 
 must be saved; that is what we are all thinking of. And 
 then would you have it said in Limoges and all the coun- 
 try round that a Tascheron could not die like a man ? After 
 all, just think that all that you lose here you may find again in 
 heaven, where forgiven souls will meet again." 
 
 This preternatural effort parched the heroic girl's throat. 
 Like her mother, she was silent, but she had won the victory. 
 The criminal, hitherto frantic that justice had snatched away 
 his cup of bliss, was thrilled with the sublime doctrine of the 
 Catholic Church, expressed so artlessly by his sister. Every 
 woman, even a peasant girl like Denise Tascheron, possesses 
 at need this tender tact; does not every woman love to think 
 that love is eternal? Denise had touched two responsive 
 chords. Awakened pride roused other qualities numbed by 
 such utter misery and stunned by despair. Jean took his sis- 
 ter's hand in his and kissed it, and held her to his heart in 
 a manner profoundly significant; tenderly, but in a mighty 
 grasp. 
 
 "There," he said, "everything must be given up! That 
 was my last heart-throb, my last thought intrusted to you, 
 Denise." And he gave her such a look as a man gives at 
 some solemn moment, when he strives to impress his whole 
 soul on another soul. 
 
 A whole last testament lay in the words and the thoughts ; 
 the mother and sister, the cure and Jean, understood so well 
 that these were mute bequests to be faithfully executed and 
 loyally demanded, that they turned away their faces to hide 
 their tears and the thoughts that might be read in their eyes. 
 Those few words, spoken in the death agony of passion, were 
 the farewell to fatherhood and all that was sweetest on earth 
 the earnest of a Catholic renunciation of the things of 
 earth. The cure, awed by the majesty of human nature, by 
 all its greatness even in sin, measured the force of this mys- 
 terious passion by the enormity of the crime, and raised his 
 eyes as if to entreat God's mercy. In that action the touch- 
 ing consolation, the infinite tenderness of the Catholic fnith 
 was revealed a religion that shows itself so human, so lov-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 115 
 
 ing, by the hand stretched down to teach mankind the laws 
 of a higher world, so awful, so divine, by the hand held out 
 to guide him to heaven. It was Denise who had just discov- 
 ered to the cure, in this mysterious manner, the spot where 
 the rock would yield the streams of repentance. Suddenly 
 Jean uttered a blood-curdling cry, like some hyasna caught by 
 the hunters. Memories had awakened. 
 
 "No ! no ! no !" he cried, falling upon his knees. "I want 
 to live ! Mother, take my place. Change clothes with me. I 
 could escape ! Have pity ! Have pity ! Go to the King and 
 tell him . . ." 
 
 He stopped short, a horrible sound like the growl of a wild 
 beast broke from him; he clutched fiercely at the cure's cas- 
 sock. 
 
 "Go," M. Bonnet said in a low voice, turning to the two 
 women, who were quite overcome by this scene. Jean heard 
 the word, and lifted his head. He looked up at his mother 
 and sister, and kissed their feet. 
 
 "Let us say good-bye," he said. "Do not come back any 
 more. Leave me alone with M. Bonnet; and do not be 
 anxious about me now," he added, as he clasped his mother 
 and sister in a tight embrace, in which he seemed as though 
 he would fain put all the life that was in him. 
 
 "How can any one go through all this and live?" asked 
 Denise as they reached the wicket. 
 
 It was about eight o'clock in the evening when they sepa- 
 rated. The Abbe de Rastignac was waiting at the gate of the 
 prison, and asked the two women for news. 
 
 "He will make his peace with God," said Denise. "If he 
 has not repented already, repentance is near at hand." 
 
 A few minutes later the Bishop learned that the Church 
 would triumph in this matter, and that the condemned man 
 would go to his execution with the most edifying religious 
 sentiments. The public prosecutor was with his lordship, 
 who expressed a wish to see the cure. It was midnight before 
 M. Bonnet came. The Abbe Gabriel, who had been going to 
 and fro between the palace and the prison, considered that
 
 116 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 the Bishop's carriage ought to be sent for him, for the poor 
 man was so exhausted that he could scarcely stand. The 
 thought of to-morrow's horrible journey, the anguish of soul 
 which he had witnessed, the full and entire repentance of 
 this member of his flock, who broke down completely at last 
 when the great forecast of Eternity was put before him, 
 all these things had combined to wear out M. Bonnet's 
 strength, for with his nervous temperament and electric 
 swiftness of apprehension, he was quick to feel the sorrows 
 of others as if they were his own. 
 
 Souls like this beautiful soul are so open to receive the im- 
 pressions, the sorrows, passions, and sufferings of those to- 
 wards whom they are drawn, that they feel the pain as if it 
 were in very truth their own, and this in a manner which is 
 torture; for their clearer eyes can measure the whole extent 
 of the misfortune in a way impossible to those blinded by the 
 egoism of love or paroxysms of grief. In this respect such 
 a confessor as M. Bonnet is an artist who feels, instead of 
 an artist who judges. 
 
 In the drawing-room at the palace, where the two vicars- 
 general, the public prosecutor, and M. de Granville, and the 
 Abbe de Rastignac were waiting, it dawned upon M. Bonnet 
 that he was expected to bring news. 
 
 "Monsieur le Cure," the Bishop began, "have you obtained 
 any confessions with which you may in confidence enlighten 
 justice without failing in your duty?" 
 
 "Before I gave absolution to that poor lost child, my lord, 
 I was not content that his repentance should be as full and 
 entire as the Church could require; I still further insisted on 
 the restitution of the money." 
 
 "I came here to the palace about that restitution," said 
 the public prosecutor. "Some light will be thrown on ob- 
 scure points in the case by the way in which it is made. He 
 certainly has accomplices " 
 
 "With the interests of man's justice I have no concern," 
 the cure said. "I do not know how or where the restitution 
 will be made, but made it will be. When my lord Bishop
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 117 
 
 summoned me here to one of my own parishioners, he re- 
 placed me in the exact conditions which give a cure in his 
 own parish the rights which a bishop exercises in his diocese 
 ecclesiastical obedience and discipline apart." 
 
 "Quite right," said the Bishop. "But the point is to obtain 
 a voluntary confession before justice from the condemned 
 man." 
 
 "My mission was simply to bring a soul to God/' returned 
 M. Bonnet. 
 
 M. de Grancour shrugged his shoulders slightly, and the 
 Abbe Dutheil nodded approval. 
 
 "Tascheron, no doubt, wants to screen some one whom a 
 restitution would identify," said the public prosecutor. 
 
 "Monsieur," retorted the cure, "I know absolutely noth- 
 ing which might either confirm or contradict your conjecture ; 
 and, moreover, the secrets of the confessional are inviolable." 
 
 "So the restitution will be made ?" asked the man of law. 
 
 "Yes, monsieur," answered the man of God. 
 
 "That is enough for me," said the public prosecutor. He 
 relied upon the cleverness of the police to find and follow 
 up any clue, as if passion and personal interest were not 
 keener witted than any detective. 
 
 Two days later, on a market day, Jean-Frangois Tascheron 
 went to his death in a manner which left all pious and politic 
 souls nothing to desire. His humility and piety were exem- 
 plary; he kissed with fervor the crucifix which M. Bonnet 
 held out to him with trembling hands. The unfortunate man 
 was closely scanned; all eyes were on the watch to see the 
 direction his glances might take; would he look up at one of 
 the houses, or gaze on some face in the crowd? His discre- 
 tion was complete and inviolable. He met his death like a 
 Christian, penitent and forgiven. 
 
 The poor cure of Montegnac was taken away unconscious 
 from the foot of the scaffold, though he had not so much as 
 set eyes on the fatal machine.
 
 118 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 The next day at nightfall, three leagues away from 
 Limoges, out on the highroad, and in a lonely spot, Denise 
 Tascheron suddenly stopped. Exhausted though she was with 
 physical weariness and sorrow, she begged her father to allow 
 her to go back to Limoges with Louis-Marie Tascheron, one 
 of her brothers. 
 
 "What more do you want to do in that place?" her father 
 asked sharply, raising his eyebrows, and frowning. 
 
 "We have not only to pay the lawyer, father," she said in 
 his ear; "there is something else. The money that he hid 
 must be given back." 
 
 "That is only right," said the rigorously honest man, 
 fumbling in a leather purse which he carried about him. 
 
 "No," Denise said swiftly, "he is your son no longer; and 
 those who blessed, not those who cursed him, ought to pay 
 the lawyer's fees." 
 
 "We will wait for you at Havre," her father said. 
 
 Denise and her brother crept into the town again before it 
 was day. Though the police learned later on that two of 
 the Tascherons had come back, they never could discover their 
 lodging. It was near four o'clock when Denise and her 
 brother went to the higher end of the town, stealing along 
 close to the walls. The poor girl dared not look up, lest the 
 eyes which should meet hers had seen her brother's head fall. 
 First of all, she had sought out M. Bonnet, and he, unwell 
 though he was, had consented to act as Denise's father and 
 guardian for the time being. With him they went to the 
 barrister, who lived in the Rue de la Comedie. 
 
 "Good-day, poor children," the lawyer began, with a 
 bow to M. Bonnet. "How can I be of use to you? Perhaps 
 you want me to make application for your brother's body." 
 
 "No, sir," said Denise, her tears flowing at the thought, 
 which had not occurred to her; "I have come to pay our debt 
 to you, in so far as money can repay an eternal debt." 
 
 "Sit down a moment," said the lawyer, seeing that Denise 
 and the cure were both standing. Denise turned away to 
 draw from her stays two notes of five hundred francs, pinned
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 119 
 
 to her shift. Then she sat down and handed over the bills 
 to her brother's counsel. The cure looked at the lawyer with 
 a light in his eyes, which soon filled with tears. 
 
 "Keep it," the barrister said; "keep the money yourself, 
 my poor girl. Eich people do not pay for a lost cause in this 
 generous way." 
 
 "I cannot do as you ask, sir, it is impossible," said Denise. 
 
 "Then the money does not come from you?" the barrister 
 asked quickly. 
 
 "Pardon me," she replied, with a questioning glance at M. 
 Bonnet would God be angry with her for that lie? 
 
 The cure kept his eyes lowered. 
 
 "Very well," said the barrister, and, keeping one of the 
 notes in his hand, he gave the other to the cure, "then I will 
 divide it with the poor. And now, Denise, this is certainly 
 mine" he held out the note as he spoke "will you give me 
 your velvet ribbon and gold cross in exchange for it ? I will 
 hang the cross above my chimney-piece in memory of the 
 purest and kindest girl's heart which I shall ever meet with, 
 I doubt not, in my career." 
 
 "There is no need to buy it," cried Denise, "I will give 
 it you," and she took off her gilt cross and handed it to the 
 lawyer. 
 
 "Very well, sir," said the cure, "I accept the five hundred 
 francs to pay the expenses of exhuming and removing the 
 poor boy's body to the churchyard at Montegnac. Doubtless 
 God has forgiven him ; Jean will rise again with all my flock 
 at the Last Day, when the just and the penitent sinner will 
 be summoned to sit at the Father's right hand." 
 
 "So be it," said the barrister. He took Denise's hand and 
 drew her towards him to put a kiss on her forehead, a move- 
 ment made with another end in view. 
 
 "My child," he said, "nobody at Montegnac has such a 
 thing as a five-hundred-franc note; they are rather scarce in 
 Limoges; people don't take them here without asking some- 
 thing for changing them. So this money has been given to 
 you by somebody; you are not going to tell me who it was,
 
 120 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 and I do not ask you, but listen to this : if you hive anything 
 left to do here which has any reference to your poor brother, 
 mind how you set about it. M. Bonnet and you and your 
 brother will all three of you be watched by spies. People 
 know that your family have gone away. If anybody recog- 
 nizes you here, you will be surrounded before you suspect 
 it." 
 
 "Alas !" she said, "I have nothing left to do here.'* 
 
 "She is cautious," said the lawyer to himself, as he went to 
 the door with her. "She has been warned, so let her extricate 
 herself." 
 
 It was late September, but the days were as hot as in the 
 summer. The Bishop was giving a dinner-party. The local 
 authorities, the public prosecutor, and the first avocat general 
 were among the guests. Discussions were started, which grew 
 lively in the course of the evening, and it was very late be- 
 fore they broke up. Whist and backgammon, that game be- 
 loved of bishops, were the order of the day. .It happened 
 that about eleven o'clock the public prosecutor stepped out 
 upon the upper terrace, and from the corner where he stood 
 saw a light on the island, which the Abbe Gabriel and the 
 Bishop had already fixed upon as the central spot and clue 
 to the inexplicable tangle about Tascheron's crime on Vero- 
 nique's Isle of France in fact. There was no apparent reason 
 why anybody should kindle a fire in the middle of the Vienne 
 at that time of night then, all at once, the idea which had 
 struck the Bishop and his secretary flashed upon the public 
 prosecutor's brain, with a light as sudden as that of the fire 
 which shot up out of the distant darkness. 
 
 "What a set of great fools we have all been !" cried he, "but 
 we have the accomplices now." 
 
 He went up to the drawing-room again, found out M. de 
 Granville, and said a word or two in his ear; then both of 
 them vanished. But the Abbe de Rastignac, courteously at- 
 tentive, watched them go out. paw that they went towards the 
 terrace, and noticed too that fire on the shore of the island. 
 
 "It is all over with her," thought he.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 121 
 
 The messengers of justice arrived on the spot too late. 
 Denise and Louis-Marie (whom his brother Jean had taught 
 to dive) were there, it is true, on the bank of the Vienne at 
 a place pointed out by Jean; but Louis-Marie had already 
 dived four times, and each time had brought up with him 
 twenty thousand francs in gold. The first instalment wag 
 secured in a bandana with the four corners tied up. As soon 
 as the water had been wrung from the handkerchief, it was 
 thrown on a great fire of dry sticks, kindled beforehand. A 
 shawl contained the second, and the third was secured in a 
 lawn handkerchief. Just as Denise was about to fling the 
 fourth wrapper into the fire, the police came up accompanied 
 by a commissary, and pounced upon a very important clue, 
 as they thought, which Denise suffered them to seize without 
 the slightest emotion. It was a man's pocket-handkerchief, 
 which still retained some stains of blood in spite of its long 
 immersion. Questioned forthwith as to her proceedings, 
 Denise said that she had brought the stolen money out of 
 the river, as her brother bade her. To the commissary, in- 
 quiring why she had burned the wrappings, she answered that 
 she was following out her brother's instructions. Asked what 
 the wrappings were, she replied boldly, and with perfect 
 truth, "A bandana handkerchief, a lawn handkerchief, and a 
 shawl." 
 
 The handkerchief which had just been seized belonged to 
 her brother. 
 
 This fishing expedition and the circumstances accompany- 
 ing it made plenty of talk in Limoges. The shawl in partic- 
 ular confirmed the belief that there was a love affair at the 
 bottom of Tascheron's crime. 
 
 "He is dead, but he shields her still," commented one lady, 
 when she heard these final revelations, so cleverly rendered 
 useless. 
 
 "Perhaps there is some married man in Limoges who will 
 find that he is a bandana short, but he will perforce hold his 
 tongue," smiled the public prosecutor. 
 
 "Little mistakes in one's wardrobe have come to be so com-
 
 122 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 promising, that I shall set about verifying mine this very 
 evening," said old Mme. Ferret, smiling too. 
 
 "Whose are the dainty little feet that left the footmarks, 
 so carefully erased?" asked M. de Granville. 
 
 "Pshaw ! perhaps they belong to some ugly woman," re- 
 turned the avocat general. 
 
 "She has paid dear for her slip," remarked the Abbe' de 
 Grancour. 
 
 "Do you know what all this business goes to prove?" put 
 in the avocat general. "It just shows how much women have 
 lost through the Revolution, which obliterated social distinc- 
 tions. Such a passion is only to be met with nowadays 
 in a man who knows that there is an enormous distance be- 
 tween himself and the woman he loves." 
 
 "You credit love with many vanities," returned the Abbe 
 Dutheil. 
 
 "What does Mme. Graslin think?" asked the prefect. 
 
 "What would you have her think? She was confined, as 
 she told me she would be, on the day of the execution, and 
 has seen nobody since; she is dangerously ill," said M. de 
 Granville. 
 
 Meanwhile, in another room in Limoges, an almost comic 
 scene was taking place. The des Vanneaulx's friends were 
 congratulating them upon the restitution of their inher- 
 itance. 
 
 "Well, well," said Mme. des Vanneaulx, "they ought to 
 have let him off, poor man. It was love, and not mercenary 
 motives, that brought him to it; he was neither vicious nor 
 wicked." 
 
 "He behaved like a thorough gentleman," said the Sieur 
 des Vanneaulx. "// / knew where, his family was, I would 
 do something for them; they are good people, those Tas- 
 cherons." 
 
 When Mme. Graslin was well enough to rise, towards the 
 end of the year 1829, after the long illness which followed
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 123 
 
 her confinement, and obliged her to keep her hed in absolute 
 solitude and quiet, she heard her husband speak of a rather 
 considerable piece of business which he wanted to conclude. 
 The Navarreins family thought of selling the forest 
 of Montegnac and the waste lands which they owned in the 
 neighborhood. Graslin had not yet put into execution a 
 clause in his wife's marriage settlement, which required that 
 her dowry should be invested in land ; he had preferred to put 
 her money out at interest through the bank, and already had 
 doubled her capital. On this, Veronique seemed to recollect 
 the name of Montegnac, and begged her husband to carry out 
 the contract by purchasing the estate for her. 
 
 M. Graslin wished very much to see M. Bonnet, to ask for 
 information concerning the forest and lands which the Due 
 de Navarreins thought of selling. The Due de Navarreins, 
 be it said, foresaw the hideous struggle which the Prince de 
 Polignac had made inevitable between the Liberals and the 
 Bourbon dynasty; and augured the worst, for which reasons 
 he was one of the boldest opponents of the Coup d'Etat. The 
 Duke had sent his man of business to Limoges with instruc- 
 tions to sell, if a bidder could be found for so large a sum of 
 money, for His Grace recollected the Revolution of 1789 too 
 well not to profit by the lessons then taught to the aristocracy. 
 It was this man of business who, for more than a month, 
 had been at close quarters with Graslin, the shrewdest old 
 fox in Limousin, and the only man whom common report 
 singled out as being able to pay down the price of so large 
 an estate on the spot. 
 
 At a word sent by the Abbe Dutheil, M. Bonnet hastened 
 to Limoges and the Hotel Graslin. Veronique would have 
 prayed the cure to dine with her ; but the banker only allowed 
 M. Bonnet to go up to his wife's room after he had kept him 
 a full hour in his private office, and obtained information 
 which satisfied him so well, that he concluded his purchase 
 out of hand, and the forest and domain of Montegnac became 
 his (Graslin's) for five hundred thousand francs. He 
 acquiesced in his wife's wish, stipulating that this purchase
 
 124 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 and any outlay relating thereto should be held to accomplish 
 the clause in her marriage contract as to her fortune. Graslin 
 did this the more willingly because the piece of honesty now 
 cost him nothing. 
 
 At the time of Graslin's purchase the estate consisted of 
 the forest of Montegnac, some thirty thousand acres in ex- 
 tent, but too inaccessible to bring in any money, the ruined 
 castle, the gardens, and some five thousand acres in the uncul- 
 tivated plains under Montegnac. Graslin made several more 
 purchases at once, so as to have the whole of the first peak 
 of the Correzien range in his hands, for there the vast forest 
 of Montegnac came to an end. Since the taxes had been 
 levied upon it, the Due de Navarreins had not drawn fifteen 
 thousand francs a year from the manor, formerly one of the 
 richest tenures in the kingdom. The lands had escaped sale 
 when put under the Convention, partly because of their bar- 
 renness, partly because it was a recognized fact that nothing 
 could be made of them. 
 
 When the cure came face to face with the woman of whom 
 he had heard, a woman whose cleverness and piety were well 
 known, he started in spite of himself. At this time Veronique 
 had entered upon the third period of her life, a period in 
 which she was to grow greater by the exercise of the loftiest 
 virtues, and become a totally different woman. To the Ra- 
 phael's Madonna, hidden beneath the veil of smallpox scars, a 
 beautiful, noble, and impassioned woman had succeeded, a 
 woman afterwards laid low by inward sorrows, from which 
 a saint emerged. Her complexion had taken the sallow tint 
 seen in the austere faces of Abbesses of ascetic life. A yel- 
 lowish hue had overspread the temples, grown less imperious 
 now. The lips were paler, the red of the opening pome^an- 
 ate flower had changed into the paler crimson of the Bt niral 
 rose. Between the nose and the corners of the eyes sorrow had 
 worn two pearly channels, down which many tears had 
 coursed in secret; much weeping had worn away the traces 
 of smallpox. It was impossible not to fix your eyes on the 
 spot where a network of tiny blue veins stood out swollen and
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 125 
 
 distended with the full pulses that throbbed there, as if they 
 fed the source of many tears. The faint brownish tinge about 
 the eyes alone remained, but there were dark circles under 
 them now, and wrinkles in the eyelids which told of terrible 
 suffering. The lines in the hollow cheeks bore record of sol- 
 emn thoughts. The chin, too, had shrunk, it had lost its 
 youthful fulness of outline, and this scarcely to the advan- 
 tage of a face which wore an expression of pitiless austerity, 
 confined however solely to Veronique herself. At twenty- 
 nine years of age her hair, one of her greatest beauties, had 
 faded and grown scanty; she had been obliged to pull out a 
 large quantity of white hair, bleached during her confinement. 
 Her thinness was shocking to see. In spite of the doctor's 
 orders,, she had persisted in nursing her child herself; and 
 the doctor was not disposed to let people forget this when all 
 his evil prognostications were so thoroughly fulfilled. 
 
 "See what a difference a single confinement has made in a 
 woman !" said he. "And she worships that child of hers ; but 
 I have always noticed that the more a child costs the mother, 
 the dearer it is." 
 
 All that remained of youth in Veronique's face lay in her 
 eyes, wan though they were. An untamed fire flashed from 
 the dark blue iris ; all the life that had deserted the cold im- 
 passive mask of a face, expressionless now save for the chari- 
 table look which it wore when her poorer neighbors were 
 spoken of, seemed to have taken refuge there. So the cure's 
 first dismay and surprise abated somewhat as he went on to 
 explain to her how much good a resident landowner might 
 effect in Montegnac, and for a moment Veronique's face grew 
 beautiful, lighted up by this unexpected hope which began to 
 shine in upon her. 
 
 "I will go there," she said. "It shall be my property. I 
 will ask M. Graslin to put some funds at my disposal, and I 
 will enter into your charitable work with all my might. 
 Montegnac shall be cultivated, we will find water somewhere 
 to irrigate the waste land in the plain. You are striking the 
 rock, like Moses, and tears will flow from it !"
 
 126 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 The Cure de Montegnac spoke of Mme. Graslin as a saint 
 when his friends in Limoges asked him about her. 
 
 The very day after the purchase was completed, Graslin 
 sent an architect to Montegnac. He was determined to re- 
 store the castle, the gardens, terraces, and park, to reclaim 
 the forest by a plantation, putting an ostentatious activity 
 into all that he did. 
 
 Two years later a great misfortune befell Mme. Graslin. 
 Her husband, in spite of his prudence, was involved in the 
 commercial and financial disasters of 1830. The thought of 
 bankruptcy, or of losing three millions, the gains of a life- 
 time of toil, were both intolerable to him. The worry and 
 anxiety aggravated the inflammatory disease, always lurk- 
 ing in his system, the result of impure blood. He was com- 
 pelled to take to his bed. In Veronique a friendly feeling 
 towards Graslin had developed during her pregnancy, and 
 dealt a fatal blow to the hopes of her admirer, M. de Gran- 
 ville. By careful nursing she tried to save her husband's life, 
 but only succeeded in prolonging a suffering existence for 
 a few months. This respite, however, was very useful to 
 Grossetete, who, foreseeing the end, consulted with his old 
 comrade, and made all the necessary arrangements for a 
 prompt realization. 
 
 In April 1831 Graslin died, and his widow's despairing 
 grief only sobered down into Christian resignation. From 
 the first Veronique had wished to give up her whole fortune to 
 her husband's creditors; but M. Graslin's estate proved to be 
 more than sufficient. It -was Grossetete who wound up his 
 affairs, and two months after the settlement Mme. Graslin 
 found herself the mistress of the domains of Montegnac and 
 six hundred and sixty thousand francs, all her own; and no 
 blot rested on her son's name. No one had lost anything 
 through Graslin not even his wife ; and Francis Graslin had 
 about a 'hundred thousand francs. 
 
 Then M. de Granville, who had reason to know Veronique's 
 nature and loftiness of soul, came forward as a suitor; but, 
 to the amazement of all Limoges, Mme. Graslin refused the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 127 
 
 newly-appointed public prosecutor, on the ground that sec- 
 ond marriages 'were discountenanced by the Church. Grosse- 
 tete, a man of unerring forecast and sound sense, advised 
 Veronique to invest the rest of M. Graslin's fortune and her 
 own in the Funds, and effected this for her himself at once, in 
 the month of July, when the three per cents stood at fifty. So 
 Francis had an income of six thousand livres, and his mother 
 about forty thousand. Veronique was still the greatest for- 
 tune in the department. 
 
 All was settled at last, and Mme. Graslin gave out that she 
 meant to leave Limoges to live nearer to M. Bonnet. Again 
 she sent for the cure, to consult him about his work at 
 Montegnac, in which she was determined to share; but he 
 generously tried to dissuade her, and to make it clear to her 
 that her place was io. society. 
 
 "I have sprung f^om the people, and I mean to return to 
 them," said she. 
 
 The cure's great love for his own village resisted the more 
 feebly when he learned that Mme. Graslin had arranged to 
 make over her house in Limoges to M. Grossetete. Certain 
 sums were due to the banker, and he took the house at its full 
 value in settlement. 
 
 Mme. Graslin finally left Limoges 'towards the end of Au- 
 gust 1831. A troop of friends gathered about her, and went 
 with her as far as the outskirts of the town; 'some of them 
 went the whole first stage of the journey. Veronique traveled 
 in a caleche with her mother ; the Abbe Dutheil, recently ap- 
 pointed 'to a bishopric, sat opposite them with old M. Grosse- 
 tete. As they went through the Place d'Aine, Veronique's 
 emotion was almost uncontrollable; her face contracted; 
 every muscle quivered with the pain; she snatched up her 
 child, 'and held him tightly to her in a convulsive grasp, 
 while La Sauviat tried to cover her emotion by following her 
 example it seemed that La Sauviat was not unprepared for 
 something of this kind. 
 
 Chance so ordered it that Mme. Graslin caught a glimpse
 
 128 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 of the house where her father had lived; she clutched Mme. 
 Sauviat's hand, great tears filled her eyes and rolled down her 
 cheeks. When Limoges was fairly left behind, she turned 
 and took a last farewell glance; and all her friends noticed 
 a certain look of happiness in her face. When the ' public 
 prosecutor, the young man of five-and-twenty whom she had 
 declined to marry, came up and kissed her hand with lively 
 expressions of regret, the newly-made Bishop noticed some- 
 thing strange in Veronique's eyes : the dark pupils dilated till 
 the blue became a thin ring about them. It was unmistak- 
 able that some violent revulsion took place within her. 
 
 "Now I shall never see him again !" she said in her mother's 
 ear, but there was not the slightest trace of feeling in the im- 
 passive old face a^ Mme. Sauviat received that confidence. 
 
 Grossetete, the shrewd old banker, sitting opposite, watch- 
 ing the women with keen eyes, had not discovered that Vero- 
 nique hated this man, whom for that matter she received as 
 a visitor. In things of this kind a churchman is far clearer- 
 sighted than other men, and the Bishop surprised Veronique 
 by a glance that revealed an ecclesiastic's perspicacity. 
 
 "You have no regret in leaving Limoges ?" the Bishop said 
 to Mme. Graslin. 
 
 "You are leaving the town," she replied. "And M. Grosse- 
 tete scarcely ever comes among us now," she added, with a 
 smile for her old friend as he said good-bye. 
 
 The Bishop went the whole of the way to Montegnac with 
 Veronique. 
 
 "I ought to have made this journey- in mourning," she said 
 in her mother's ear as they walked up the hill near Saint- 
 Leonard. 
 
 The old woman turned her crabbed, wrinkled face, and 
 laid her finger on her lips; then she pointed to the Bishop, 
 who was giving the child a terrible scrutiny. Her mother's 
 gesture first, and yet more the significant expression in the 
 Bishop's eyes, made Mme. Graslin shudder. The light died 
 out of her face as she looked out across the wide gray stretch 
 of plain before Montegnac, and melancholy overcame her.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 129 
 
 All at once she saw the cure coining to meet her, and made 
 him take a seat in the carriage. 
 
 "This is your domain/' said M. Bonnet, indicating the 
 level waste. 
 
 IV 
 
 MADAME GRASLIN AT MONTEGNAC 
 
 IN a few moments the township of Montegnac came in sight ; 
 the hillside and the conspicuous new buildings upon it shone 
 golden in the light of the sunset; it was a lovely landscape 
 like an oasis in the desert, with a picturesque charm of its 
 own, due to the contrast with its setting. Mme. Graslin's 
 eyes began to fill with tears. The cure pointed out a broad 
 white track like a scar on the hillside. 
 
 "That is what my parishioners have done to show their 
 gratitude to their lady of the manor," he said. "We can drive 
 the whole way to the chateau. The road is finished now, and 
 has not cost you a sou ; we shall put in a row of trees beside 
 it in two months' time. My lord Bishop can imagine how 
 much toil, thought, and devotion went to the making of such 
 a change." 
 
 "And they have done this themselves !" said the Bishop. 
 
 "They would take nothing in return, my lord. The poorest 
 lent a hand, for they all knew that one who would be like a 
 mother to them was coming to live among us." 
 
 There was a crowd at the foot of the hill, all the village 
 was there. Guns were fired off, and mortars exploded, and 
 then the two prettiest girls of Montegnac, in white dresses, 
 came to offer flowers and fruit to Mme. Graslin. 
 
 "That I should be welcomed here like this !" she cried, 
 clutching M, Bonnet's hand as if she felt that she was fall- 
 ing over a precipice. 
 
 The crowd went up as far as the great iron gatewav, 
 whence Mme. Graslin could see her chateau. At first sight
 
 130 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 the splendor of her dwelling was a shock to her. Stone for 
 building is scarce in this district, for the native granite is 
 hard and exceedingly difficult to work; so Graslin's architect 
 had used brick for the main body of the great building, there 
 being plenty of brick earth in the forest of Montegnac, and 
 wood for the felling. All the woodwork and stone in fact 
 came also from the forest and the quarries in it. But for 
 these economies, Graslin must have been put to a ruinous 
 expense; but as it was, the principal outlay was for wages, 
 carriage, and salaries, and the money circulating in the town- 
 ship had put new life into it. 
 
 At a first glance the chateau stood up a huge red mass, 
 scored with dark lines of mortar, and outlined with gray, for 
 the facings and quoins and the string courses along each 
 story were of granite, each block being cut in facets diamond 
 fashion. The surface of the brick walls round the courtyard 
 (a sloping oval like the courtyard of Versailles) was broken 
 by slabs of granite surrounded by bosses, and set at equal 
 distances. Shrubs had been planted under the walls, with 
 a view to obtaining the contrasts of their various foliage. Two 
 handsome iron gateways gave access on the one hand to the 
 terrace which overlooked Montegnac, and on the other to a 
 /arm and outbuildings. The great gateway at the summit 
 of the new road, which had just been finished, had a neat 
 lodge on either side, built in the style of the sixteenth cen 
 tury. 
 
 The fagade of the chateau fronted the courtyard and faced 
 the west. It consisted of three towers, the central towers be- 
 ing connected with the one on either side of it by two wings. 
 The back of the house was precisely similar, and looked over 
 the gardens towards the east. There was but one window in 
 each tower on the side of the courtyard and gardens, each 
 wing having three. The centre tower was built something 
 after the fashion of a campanile, the corner-stones were ver- 
 miculated, and here some delicate sculptured work had been 
 sparingly introduced. Art is timid in the provinces; and 
 though in 1829 some progress had been made in architectural
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 131 
 
 ornament (thanks to certain writers), the owners of houses 
 shrank at that time from an expense which lack of competi- 
 tion and scarcity of craftsmen rendered somewhat formi- 
 dable. 
 
 The tower at either end (three windows in depth) was 
 crowned by a high-pitched roof, with a granite balustrade by 
 way of decoration; each angle of the pyramid was sharply 
 cut by an elegant balcony lined with lead, and surrounded by 
 cast-iron railings, and an elegantly sculptured window oc- 
 cupying each side of the roof. All the door and window 
 cornices on each story were likewise ornamented with carved 
 work copied from Genoese palace fronts. The three side win- 
 dows of the southern tower looked out over Montegnac, the 
 northern gave a view of the forest. 
 
 From the eastern windows you could see beyond the gar- 
 dens that part of Montegnac where the Tascherons had 
 lived, and far down below in the valley the road which led 
 to the chief town in the arrondissement. From the west 
 front which gave upon the courtyard, you saw the wide map 
 of the plain stretching away on the Montegnac side to the 
 mountains of the Correze, and elsewhere to the circle of the 
 horizon, where it blended with the sky. 
 
 The wings were low, the single story being built in the 
 mansard roof, in the old French style, but the towers at either 
 end rose a story higher. The central tower was crowned by 
 a sort of flattened dome like the Clock Towers of the Tui- 
 leries or the Louvre ; the single room in the turret was a sort 
 of belvedere, and fitted with a turret-clock. Eidge tiles had 
 been used for economy's sake; the massive baulks of timber 
 from the forest readily carried the enormous weight of the 
 roof. 
 
 Graslin's "folly," as he called the chateau, had brought 
 five hundred thousand francs into the commune. He had 
 planned the road before he died, and the commune out of 
 gratitude had finished it. Montegnac had moreover grown 
 considerably. Behind the stables and outbuildings, on the 
 north side of the hill where it slopes gradually down into
 
 132 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 the plain, Graslin had begun to build the steadings of a 
 farm on a large scale, which showed that he had meant to 
 turn the waste land in the plain to account. The plantations 
 considered indispensable by M. Bonnet were still proceeding 
 under the direction of a head gardener with six men, who 
 were lodged in the outbuildings. 
 
 The whole ground floor of the chateau, taken up by sitting- 
 rooms, had been splendidly furnished, but the second-story 
 was rather bare, M. Graslin's death having suspended the 
 upholsterer's operations. 
 
 "Ah ! my lord," said Mme. Graslin, turning to the Bishop, 
 after they had been through the chateau, "I had thought to 
 live here in a thatched cottage. Poor M. Graslin committed 
 many follies " 
 
 "And you " the Bishop added, after a pause, and Mme. 
 
 Graslin's light shudder did not escape him "you are about 
 to do charitable deeds, are you not?" 
 
 She went to her mother, who held little Francis by the 
 hand, laid her hand on the old woman's arm, and went with 
 the two as far as the long terrace which rose above the 
 church and the parsonage ; all the houses in the village, rising 
 stepwise up the hillside, could be seen at once. The cure took 
 possession of M. Dutheil, and began to point out the various 
 features of the landscape; but the eyes of both ecclesiastics 
 soon turned to the terrace, where Yeronique and her mother 
 stood motionless as statues; the older woman took out a hand- 
 kerchief and wiped her eyes, her daughter leant upon the 
 balustrade, and seemed to be pointing out the church below. 
 
 "What is the matter, madame?" the Cure Bonnet asked, 
 turning to La Sauviat. 
 
 "Nothing," answered Mme. Graslin, coming towards the 
 two priests and facing them. "I did not know that the 
 churchyard would be right under my eyes " 
 
 "You can have it removed ; the law is on your side." 
 
 "The law!" the words broke from her like a cry of pain. 
 
 Again the Bishop looked at Veronique. But she tired of 
 meeting that sombre glance, which seemed to lay bare the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 133 
 
 soul arid discover her secret in its depths, a secret buried in 
 a grave in that churchyard cried out: 
 
 "Very well, then yes!" 
 
 The Bishop laid his hand over his eyes, so overwhelmed by 
 this, that for some moments he stood lost in thought. 
 
 "Hold her up," cried the old mother ; "she is turning pale." 
 
 "The air here is so keen, I have taken a chill," murmured 
 Mme. Graslin, and she sank fainting as the two ecclesiastics 
 caught her in their arms. They carried her into the house, 
 and when she came to herself again she saw the Bishop and 
 the cure kneeling in prayer for her. 
 
 "May the angel which has visited you ever stay beside 
 you !" the Bishop said, as he gave her his blessing. "Adieu, 
 my daughter." 
 
 Mme. Graslin burst into tears at the words. 
 
 "Is she really saved ?" cried the old mother. 
 
 "In this world and in the next," the Bishop turned to an- 
 swer, as he left the room. 
 
 Mme. Graslin had been carried by her mother's orders to 
 a room on the first floor of the southern tower; the windows 
 looked out upon the churchyard and the south side of 
 Montegnac. Here she chose to remain, and installed herself 
 there as best she could with her maid Aline, and little Fran- 
 cis. Mme. Sauviat's room naturally was near her daughter's. 
 
 It was some days before Mme. Graslin recovered from the 
 cruel agitation which prostrated her on the day of her ar- 
 rival, and, moreover, her mother insisted that she must stay 
 in bed in the morning. In the evening, however, Veronique 
 came to sit on a bench on the terrace, and looked down on 
 the church and parsonage and into the churchyard. In spite 
 of mute opposition on Mme. Sauviat's part, Veronique con- 
 tracted a habit of always sitting in the same place and giving 
 way to melancholy broodings ; it was almost a mania. 
 
 "Madame is dying," Aline said to the old mother. 
 
 At last the two women spoke to the cure"; and he, good 
 man, who had shrunk from intruding himself upon Mme. 
 Graslin, came assiduously to see her when he learned that she
 
 134 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 was suffering from some malady of the soul, carefully timing 
 his visits so that he always found Veronique and the child, 
 both in mourning, out 'on the terrace. The country was al- 
 ready beginning to look dreary and sombre in the early days 
 of October. 
 
 When Veronique first came to the chateau, M. Bonnet had 
 seen at once that she was suffering from some hidden wound, 
 but he thought it better to wait until his future penitent 
 should give him her confidence. One evening, however, he 
 saw an expression in Mme. Graslin's eyes that warned him to 
 hesitate no longer the dull apathy of a mind brooding over 
 the thought of death. He set himself to check the progress 
 of this cruel disease of the mind. 
 
 At first there was a sort of struggle between them, a fence 
 of empty words, each of them striving to disguise their 
 thoughts. The evening was chilly, but for all that, Veronique 
 sat out on the granite bench with little Francis on her knee. 
 She could not see the churchyard, for Mme. Sauviat, leaning 
 against the. parapet, deliberately shut it out from sight. 
 Aline stood waiting to take the child indoors. It was the 
 seventh time that the cure had found Veronique there on the 
 terrace. He spoke: 
 
 "I used to think that you were merely sad, madame, but," 
 and he lowered his voice and spoke in her ear, "this is despair. 
 Despair is neither Christian nor Catholic." 
 
 "Oh !" she exclaimed, with an intent glance at the sky, and 
 a bitter smile stole over her lips, "what would the Church 
 leave to a damned soul, if not despair?" 
 
 Her words revealed to the cure how far this soul had been 
 laid waste. 
 
 "Ah ! you are making for yourself a hell out of this hill- 
 side, when it should rather be a Calvary whence your soul 
 might lift itself up towards Heaven." 
 
 "I am too humble now," she said, "to put myself on such 
 a pedestal," and her tone was a revelation of the depth of her 
 self-scorn. 
 
 Then a sudden light flashed across the cur6 one of the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 135 
 
 inspirations which come so often and so naturally to noble 
 and pure souls who live with God. He took up the child and 
 kissed him on the forehead. "Poor little one !" he said, in 
 a fatherly voice, and gave the child to the nurse, who took 
 him away. Mme. Sauviat looked at her daughter, and saw 
 how powerfully those words had wrought on her, for Vero- 
 nique's eyes, long dry,, were wet with tears. Then she too 
 went, with a sign to the priest. 
 
 "Will you take a walk on the terrace ?" suggested M. Bon- 
 net when they were alone. "You are in my charge; I am 
 accountable to God for your sick soul," and they went towards 
 the end of the terrace above "Tascherons'." 
 
 "Leave me to recover from my prostration," she said. 
 
 "Your prostration is the result of pernicious broodings." 
 
 "Yes," she said, with the naivete of pain, too sorely 
 troubled to fence any longer. 
 
 "I see," he answered; "you have sunk into the depths of 
 indifference. If physical pain passes a certain point it ex- 
 tinguishes modesty, and so it is with mental anguish, it 
 reaches a degree when the soul grows faint within us; I 
 know." 
 
 Veronique was not prepared for this subtle observation 
 and tender pity in M. Bonnet; but as has been seen already, 
 the quick sympathies of a heart unjaded by emotion of its 
 own had taught him to detect and feel the pain of others 
 among his flock with the maternal instinct of a woman. This 
 apostolic tenderness, this mens divinior, raises the priest above 
 his fellow-men and makes of him a being divine. Mme. 
 Graslin had not as yet looked deep enough into the cure's 
 nature to discover the beauty hidden away in that soul, the 
 source of its grace and freshness and its inner life. 
 
 "Ah ! monsieur . . ." she began, and a glance and a 
 gesture, such a gesture and glance as the dying give, put her 
 secret into his keeping. 
 
 "I understand !" he answered. "But what then ? What is 
 to be done ?" 
 
 Silently they went along the terrace towards the plain.
 
 136 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 To the bearer of good tidings, the son of Christ, the solemn 
 moment seemed propitious. 
 
 "Suppose that you stood now before the Throne of God," 
 he said, and his voice grew low and mysterious, "what would 
 you say to Him ?" 
 
 Mme. Graslin stopped short as if thunderstruck; a light 
 shudder ran through her. 
 
 "I should say to Him as Christ said, 'My Father, Thou 
 hast forsaken me !' " she answered simply. The tones of her 
 voice brought tears to the cure's eyes. 
 
 "0 Magdalen, those are the very words I was waiting 
 to hear!" he exclaimed, unable to refuse his admiration. 
 "You see, you appeal to God's justice ! Listen, madame, Re- 
 ligion is the rule of God before the time. The Church re- 
 serves the right of judgment in all that concerns the soul. 
 Man's justice is but the faint image of God's justice, a pale 
 shadow of the eternal adapted to the temporal needs of so- 
 ciety." 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 "You are not judge in your own cause, you are amenable 
 to God ; you have no right to condemn nor to pardon yourself. 
 God is the great Eeviser of judgments, my daughter." 
 
 "Ah !" she cried. 
 
 "He sees to the origin of all things, while we only see the 
 things themselves." 
 
 Again Veronique stopped. These ideas were new to her. 
 
 "To a soul as lofty as } r ours," he went on courageously, 
 "I do not speak as to my poor parishioners; I owe it to 
 you to use a different language. You who have so cultivated 
 your mind can rise to the knowledge of the spirit of the 
 Catholic religion, which words and symbols must express and 
 make visible to the eyes of babes and the poor. Follow what 
 I am about to say carefully, for it refers to you ; and if the 
 point of view which I take for the moment seems wide, it is 
 none the less your own case which I am considering. 
 
 "Justice, devised for the protection of society, is based 
 upon a theory of the equality of individuals. Society, which
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 137 
 
 is nothing but an aggregation of facts, is based on inequality. 
 So there is a fundamental discrepancy between justice and 
 fact. Should the law exercise a restraining or encouraging 
 influence on the progress of society ? In other words, should 
 the law oppose itself to the internal tendency of society, so as 
 to maintain things as they are ; or, on the other hand, should 
 the law be more flexible, adapt itself, and keep pace with the 
 tendency so as to guide it? No maker of laws since men 
 began to live together has taken it upon himself to decide 
 that problem. All legislators have been cdntent to analyze 
 facts, to indicate those which seemed to them to be blame- 
 worthy or criminal, and to prescribe punishments or rewards. 
 Such is law as man has made it. It is powerless to prevent 
 evil-doing; powerless no less to prevent offenders who have 
 been punished from offending again. 
 
 "Philanthropy is a sublime error. Philanthropy vainly 
 applies severe discipline to the body, while it cannot find the 
 balm which heals the soul. Philanthropy conceives projects, 
 sets forth theories, and leaves mankind to carry them out by 
 means of silence, work, and discipline dumb methods, with 
 no virtue in them. Eeligion knows nought of these imperfec- 
 tions; for her, life extends beyond this world; for Eeligion, 
 we are all of us fallen creatures in a state of degradation, 
 and it is this very view of mankind which opens out to us 
 an inexhaustible treasure of indulgence. All of us are on 
 the way to our complete regeneration, some of us are further 
 advanced, and some less, but none of us are infallible; the 
 Church is prepared for sins, ay, and even for crimes. In a 
 criminal, society sees an individual to be cut off from its 
 midst, but the Church sees in him a soul to be saved. And 
 more, far more ! . . . Inspired by God, whose dealings 
 with man She watches and ponders, the Church admits our 
 inequality as human beings, and takes the disproportionate 
 burden into account, and we who are so unequal in heart, in 
 body or mind, in courage or aptitude, are made equal by 
 repentance. In this, madame, equality is no empty word; 
 we can be, and are, all equal through our sentiments.
 
 138 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "One idea runs through all religions, from the uncouth 
 fetichism of the savage to the graceful imaginings of the 
 Greek and the profound and ingenious doctrines of India and 
 Egypt, an idea that finds expression in all cults joyous or 
 gloomy, a conviction of man's fall and of his sin, whence, 
 everywhere, the idea of sacrifice and redemption. 
 
 "The death of the Eedeemer who died for the whole human 
 race is for us a Symbol ; this, too, we must do for ourselves ; 
 we must redeem our errors ! redeem our sins ! redeem our 
 crimes ! There fe no sin beyond redemption all Catholicism 
 lies in that. It is the wherefore of the holy sacraments which 
 assist in the work of grace and sustain the repentant sinner. 
 And though one should weep, madame, and sigh like the 
 Magdalen in the desert, this is but the beginning an action 
 is the end. The monasteries wept, but acted too; they 
 prayed, but they civilized; they were the active practical 
 spreaders of our divine religion. They built, and planted, 
 and tilled Europe ; they rescued the treasures of learning for 
 us; to them we owe the preservation of our jurisprudence, 
 our traditions of statecraft and art. The sites of those 
 centres of light will be for ever remembered in Europe with 
 gratitude. Most modern towns sprang up about a monastery. 
 
 "If you believe that God is to judge you, the Church, 
 using my voice, tells you that there is no sin beyond redemp- 
 tion through the good works of repentance. The evil we have 
 wrought is weighed against the good that we have done by 
 the great hands of God. Be yourself a monastery here ; it is 
 within your power to work miracles once more. For you, 
 work must be prayer. Your work should be to diffuse happi- 
 ness among those above whom you have been set by your for- 
 tune and your intellect, and in all ways, even by your natural 
 position, for the height of your chateau above the village is 
 a visible expression of your social position." 
 
 They were turning towards the plains as he spoke, so that 
 the cure could point out the village on the lower slopes of 
 the hill and the chateau towering above it. It was half-past 
 four in the afternoon. A shaft of yellow sunlight fell across
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 139 
 
 the terrace and the gardens; it lighted up the chateau and 
 brought out the pattern of the gleaming gilt scroll-work on 
 the corner balconies high up on the towers; it lit the plain 
 which stretched into the distance divided by the road, a sober 
 gray ribbon with no embroidery of trees as yet to outline a 
 waving green border on either side. Veronique and M. Bon- 
 net passed the end of the chateau and came into the court- 
 yard, beyond which the stables and farm buildings lay in 
 sight, and further yet the forest of Montegnac; the sunlight 
 slid across the landscape like a lingering caress. Even when 
 the last glow of the sunset had faded except from the highest 
 hills, it was still light enough in the plain below to see all the 
 chance effects of color in the splendid tapestry of an autumn 
 forest spread between Montegnac and the first peak of the 
 chain of the Correze. The oak-trees stood out like masses 
 of Florentine bronze among the verdigris greens of the wal- 
 nuts and chestnuts; the leaves of a few trees, the first to 
 change, shone like gold among the others; and all these dif- 
 ferent shades of color were emphasized by the gray patches 
 of bare earth. The trunks of leafless trees looked like pale 
 columns; and every tint, red, tawny, and gray, picturesquely 
 blended in the pale October sunshine, made a harmony of 
 color with the fertile lowland, where the vast fallows were 
 green as stagnant water. Not a tree stirred, not a bird 
 death in the plain,, silence in the forest; a thought in the 
 priest's mind, as yet unuttered, was to be the sole comment 
 on that dumb beauty. A streak of smoke rose here and there 
 from the thatched roofs of the village. The chateau seemed 
 sombre as its mistress' mood, for there is a mysterious law 
 of uniformity, in virtue of which the house takes its char- 
 acter from the dominant nature within it, a subtle presence 
 which hovers throughout. The sense of the cure's words 
 had reached Mme. Graslin's brain; they had gone to her 
 heart with all the force of conviction; the angelic resonance 
 of his voice had stirred her tenderness; she stopped suddenly 
 short. The cure stretched his arm out towards the forest; 
 Veronique looked at him.
 
 140 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "Do you not see a dim resemblance between this and the 
 life of humanity ? His own fate for each of us ! And what 
 unequal lots there are among that mass of trees. Those on 
 the highest ground have poorer soil and less water; they are 
 the first to die " 
 
 "And some are cut down in the grace of their youth by 
 some woman gathering wood !" she said bitterly. 
 
 "Do not give way to those feelings again," he answered 
 firmly, but with indulgence in his manner. "The forest 
 has not been cut down, and that has been its ruin. Do you 
 see something yonder there among the dense forest?" 
 
 V6ronique could scarcely distinguish between the usual 
 and unusual in a forest, but she obediently looked in the 
 required direction, and then timidly at the cure. 
 
 "Do you not observe," he said, seeing in that glance that 
 Veronique did not understand, "that there are strips where 
 all the trees of every kind are still green?" 
 
 "Oh, so there are !" she cried. "How is it ?" 
 
 "In those strips of green lies a fortune for Montegnac and 
 for you a vast fortune, as I pointed out to M. Graslin. You 
 can see three furrows; those are three valleys, the streams 
 there are lost in the torrent-bed of the Gabou. The Gabon 
 is the boundary line between us and the next commune. 
 All through September and October it is dry, but when No- 
 vember comes it will be full. All that water runs to waste; 
 but it would be easy to make one or two weirs across from 
 side to side of the valley to keep back the water (as Riquet 
 did at Saint-Ferreol, where there are huge reservoirs which 
 supply the Languedoc canal) ; and it would be easy to increase 
 the volume of the water by turning several little streams 
 in the forest into the river. Wisely distributing it as re- 
 quired, by means of sluices and irrigation trenches, the whole 
 plain can be brought into cultivation, and the overflow, be- 
 sides, could be turned into our little river. 
 
 "You will have fine poplars along all the channels, and you 
 will raise cattle in the finest possible meadows. What is grass 
 but water and sun ? You could grow corn in the plain, there
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 141 
 
 is quite enough depth of earth; with so many trenches there 
 will be moisture to enrich the soil ; the poplar-trees will flour- 
 ish along the channels and attract the rain clouds, and the 
 fields will absorb the principles of the rain: these are the 
 secrets of the luxuriant greenness of the valleys. Some day 
 you will see life and joy and stir instead of this prevailing 
 silence and barren dreariness. Will not this be a noble 
 prayer? Will not these things occupy your idleness better 
 than melancholy broodings?" 
 
 Veronique grasped the cure's hand, and made but a brief 
 answer, but that answer was grand: 
 
 "It shall be done, monsieur." 
 
 "You have a conception of this great thing," he began 
 again, "but you will not carry it out yourself. Neither you 
 nor I have knowledge enough for the realization of a thought 
 which might occur to any one, but that raises immense prac- 
 tical difficulties; for simple and almost invisible as those 
 difficulties are, they call for the most accurate skill of 
 science. So to-morrow begin your search for the human in- 
 struments which, in a dozen 3 r ears' time, will contrive that the 
 six thousand acres thus brought into cultivation shall yield 
 you an income of six or seven thousand louis d'or. The un- 
 dertaking will make Montegnac one of the richest communes 
 in the department some day. The forest brings in nothing 
 as yet ; but sooner or later buyers will come here for the splen- 
 did timber, treasures slowly accumulated by time, the only 
 treasures which man cannot procure save by patient waiting, 
 and cannot do without. Perhaps some day (who knows) the 
 Government will take steps to open up ways of transporting 
 timber grown here to its dockyards; but the Government 
 will wait until Montegnac is ten times its present size before 
 giving its fostering aid; for the Government, like Fortune, 
 gives only to those who have. By that time this estate will 
 be one of the finest in France; it will be the pride of your 
 grandson, who may possibly find the chateau too small in 
 proportion to his income." 
 
 "That is a future for me to live for/' said Veronique.
 
 142 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "Such a work might redeem many errors," said the cure. 
 
 Seeing that he was understood, he endeavored to send a 
 last shaft home by way of her intelligence; he had divined 
 that in the woman before him the heart could only be reached 
 through the brain; whereas, in other women, the way to the 
 brain lies through the heart. 
 
 "Do you know what a great mistake you are making?" he 
 asked, after a pause. 
 
 She looked at him with frightened eyes. 
 
 "Your repentance as yet is only the consciousness of a 
 defeat. If there is anything fearful, it is the despair of 
 Satan; and perhaps man's repentance was like this before 
 Jesus Christ came on earth. But for us Catholics, repentance 
 is the horror which seizes on a soul hurrying on its downward 
 course, and in that shock God reveals Himself. You are like 
 a Pagan Orestes ; become a Saint Paul !" 
 
 "Your words have just wrought a complete change in me," 
 she cried. "Now, oh ! I want to live !" 
 
 "The spirit has overcome," the humble priest said to him- 
 self, as he went away, glad at heart. He had found food for 
 the secret despair which was gnawing Mme. Graslin, by 
 giving to her repentance the form of a good and noble deed. 
 
 The very next day, therefore, Yeronique wrote to M. Grosse- 
 tete, and in answer to her letter three saddle-horses arrived 
 from Limoges for her in less than a week. M. Bonnet made 
 inquiries, and sent the postmaster's son to the chateau; the 
 young fellow, Maurice Champion by name, was only too 
 pleased to put himself at Mme. Graslin's disposal, with a 
 chance of earning some fifty crowns. Yeronique took a liking 
 for the lad round-faced, black-eyed, and black-haired, short, 
 and well-built and he was at once installed as groom ; he was 
 to ride out with his mistress and to take charge of the horses. 
 
 The head forester at Montegnac was a native of Limoges, 
 an old quartermaster in the Eoyal Guard. He had been trans- 
 ferred from another estate when the Due de Navarreins began 
 to think of selling the Montegnac lands, and wanted informa- 
 tion to guide him in the matter; but in Montegnac Forest
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 143 
 
 Jerome Colorat only saw waste land, never likely to come 
 under cultivation, timber valueless for lack of means of trans- 
 port, gardens run wild, and a castle in ruins, calling for a 
 vast outlay if it was to be set in order and made habitable. 
 He saw wide rock-strewn spaces and conspicuous gray patches 
 of granite even in the forest, and the honest but unintelligent 
 servant took fright at these things. This was how the prop- 
 erty had come into the market. 
 
 Mme. Graslin sent for this forester. 
 
 "Colorat," she said, "I shall most probably ride out to-mor- 
 row morning and every following day. You should know the 
 different bits of outlying land which M. Graslin added to 
 the estate, and you must point them out to me ; I want to see 
 everything for myself." 
 
 The servants at the chateau were delighted at this change 
 in Veronique's life. Aline found out her mistress' old black 
 riding habit, and mended it, without being told to do so, and 
 next morning, with inexpressible pleasure, Mme. Sauviat saw 
 her daughter dressed for a riding excursion. With Champion 
 and the forester as her guides, Mme. Graslin set herself first 
 of all to climb the heights. She wanted to understand the 
 position of the slopes and the glens, the natural roadways 
 cleft in the long ridge of the mountain. She would measure 
 her task, study the course of the streams, and see the rough 
 material of the cure's schemes. The forester and Champion 
 were often obliged to consult their memories, for the mountain 
 paths were scarcely visible in that wild country. Colorat went 
 in front, and Champion followed a few paces from her side. 
 
 So long as they kept to the denser forest, climbing and 
 descending the continual undulations of a French mountain 
 district, its wonders filled Veronique's mind. The mighty 
 trees which had stood for centuries amazed her, until she 
 saw so many that they ceased to be a surprise. Then others 
 succeeded, full grown and ready for felling; or in a forest 
 clearing some single pine risen to giant height; or, stranger 
 still, some common shrub, a dwarf growth elsewhere, here 
 .risen, under some unusual conditions, to the height of a tree
 
 144 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 near as old as the soil in which it grew. The wreaths of mist 
 rolling over the bare rocks filled her with indescribable feel- 
 ings. Higher yet, pale furrows cut by the melting snows 
 looked like scars far up on the mountain sides; there were 
 bleak ravines in which no plant grew, hillside slopes where 
 the soil had been washed away, leaving bare the rock clefts, 
 where the hundred-year-old chestnuts grew straight and tall 
 as pines in the Alps; sometimes they went by vast shifting 
 sands, or boggy places where the trees are few; by fallen 
 masses of granite, overhanging crags, dark glens, wide 
 stretches of burnt grass or moor, where the heather was still 
 in bloom, arid and lonely spots where the caper grows and 
 the juniper, then through meadows covered with fine short 
 grass, where the rich alluvial soil had been brought down 
 and deposited century after century by the mountain torrents ; 
 in short, this rapid ride gave her something like a bird's-eye 
 view of the land, a glimpse of the dreariness and grandeur, 
 the strength and sweetness, of nature's wilder moods in the 
 mountain country of midland France. And by dint of gazing 
 at these pictures so various in form, but instinct with the 
 same thought, trie deep sadness expressed by the wild ruined 
 land in its barrenness and neglect passed into her own 
 thoughts, and found a response in her secret soul. As, 
 through some gap in the woods, she looked down on the gray 
 stretch of plain below, or when their way led up some parched 
 ravine where a few stunted shrubs starved among the boulders 
 and the sand, by sheer reiteration of the same sights she fell 
 under the influence of this stern scenery; it called up new 
 ideas in her mind, stirred to a sense of the significance under- 
 lying these outward and visible forms. There is no spot in 
 a forest but has this inner sense, not a clearing, not a thicket, 
 but has an analogy in the labyrinth of the human thought. 
 
 Who is there with a thinking brain or a wounded heart 
 that can pass through a forest and find the forest dumb? 
 Before you are aware its voice is in your ears, a soothing or 
 an awful voice, but more often soothing than awful. And 
 if you were to examine very closely into the causes of this
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 145 
 
 sensation, this solemn, incomplex, subduing, and mysterious 
 forest-influence that comes over you, perhaps you will find 
 its source in the sublime and subtle effect of the presence of 
 BO many creatures all obedient to their destinies, immovable 
 in submission. Sooner or later the overwhelming sense of the 
 abidingness of nature fills your heart and stirs deeper feel- 
 ings, until at length you grow restless to find God in it. And 
 so it was that with the silence of the mountain heights about 
 her, out in the pure clear air with the forest scents in it, 
 Veronique recovered, as she told M. Bonnet in the evening, 
 the certainty of Divine mercy. She had glimpses of the pos- 
 sibility of an order of things above and beyond that in which 
 her musings had hitherto revolved. She felt something like 
 happiness. For a long time past she had not known such 
 peace. Could it have been that she was conscious of a certain 
 likeness between this country and the waste and dried-up 
 places in her own soul? Did she look with a certain exulta- 
 tion on the troubles of nature with some thought that matter 
 was punished here for no sin? Certain it is that her inner 
 self was strongly stirred. 
 
 More than once Colorat and Champion looked at her, and 
 then at each other, as if for them she were transfigured. One 
 spot in particular that they reached in the steep bed of a dry 
 torrent seemed to Veronique to be unspeakably arid. It was 
 with a certain surprise that she found herself longing to hear 
 the sound of falling water in those scorching ravines. 
 
 "Always to love !" she thought. The words seemed like 
 a reproach spoken aloud by a voice. In confusion she urged 
 her horse blindly up towards the summit of the mountain of 
 the Correze, and in spite of her guides dashed up to the top 
 (called the Living Eock), and stood there alone. For several 
 moments she scanned the whole country below her. She had 
 heard the secret voices of so many existences asking to live, 
 and now something took place within her that determined 
 her to devote herself to this work with all the perseverance 
 which she had already displayed to admiration. She tied 
 her horse's bridle to a tree and sat down on a slab of rock.
 
 146 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Her eyes wandered over the land where nature showed herself 
 so harsh a step-dame, and felt within her own heart some- 
 thing of the mother's yearning which she had felt over her 
 child. Her half-unconscious meditations, which, to use her 
 own beautiful metaphor, "had sifted her heart," had prepared 
 her to receive the sublime teaching of the scene that lay before 
 her. 
 
 "It was then," she told the cure, "that I understood that 
 our souls need to be tilled quite as much as the land." 
 
 The pale November sunlight shone over the wide landscape, 
 but already a few gray clouds were gathering, driven across 
 the sky by a cold west wind. It was now about three o'clock. 
 Veronique had taken four hours to reach the point; but, as 
 is the wont of those who are gnawed by profound inward 
 misery, she gave no heed to anything without. At that mo- 
 ment her life shared the sublime movement of nature and 
 dilated within her. 
 
 "Do not stay up there any longer, madame," said a man's 
 voice, and something in its tone thrilled her. "You cannot 
 reach home again in any direction if you do, for the nearest 
 house lies a couple of leages away, and it is impossible to find 
 your way through the forest in the dark. And even those 
 risks are nothing compared with the risk you are running 
 where you are ; in a few moments it will be deadly cold on the 
 peak; no one knows the why or wherefore, but it has been 
 the death of many a one before now." 
 
 Mme. Graslin, looking down, saw a face almost black with 
 sunburn, and two eyes that gleamed from it like tongues of 
 fire. A shock of brown hair hung on either side of the face, 
 and a long pointed beard wagged beneath it. The owner of 
 the face respectfully raised one of the great broad-brimmed 
 hats which the peasantry wear in the midland districts of 
 France, and displayed a bald but magnificent brow, such as 
 sometimes in a poor man compels the attention of passers-by. 
 Veronique felt not the slightest fear; for a woman in such 
 a position as hers, all the petty considerations which cause 
 feminine tremors have ceased to exist.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 147 
 
 "How did you come there?" she asked him. 
 
 "I live here, hard by," the stranger answered. 
 
 "And what do you do in this out-of-the-way place ?" asked 
 Veronique. 
 
 "I live in it." 
 
 "But how, and on what do you live ?" 
 
 "They pay me a trifle for looking after this part of the 
 forest," he said, pointing to the slopes of the peak opposite 
 the plains of Montegnac. As he moved, Mme. Graslin caught 
 sight of a game-bag and the muzzle of a gun, and any mis- 
 givings she might have entertained vanished forthwith. 
 
 "Are you a keeper ?" 
 
 "No, madame. You can't be a keeper until you have been 
 sworn, and you can't take the oath unless you have all your 
 civic rights " 
 
 "Then, who are you?" 
 
 "I am Farrabesche," said the man, in deep humility, with 
 his eyes on the ground. 
 
 The name told Mme. Graslin nothing. She looked at the 
 man before her. In an exceedingly kindly face there were 
 signs of latent savagery; the uneven teeth gave an ironical 
 turn, a suggestion of evil hardihood to the mouth and blood- 
 red lips. In person he was of middle height, broad in the 
 shoulders, short in the neck, which was very full and deeply 
 sunk. He had the large hairy hands characteristic of violent 
 tempered people capable of abusing their physical advan- 
 tages. His last words suggested some mystery, and his bear- 
 ing, face, and figure all combined to give to that mystery a ter- 
 rible interpretation. 
 
 "So you are in my employ?" Veronique said gently. 
 
 "Then have I the honor of speaking to Mme. Graslin?" 
 asked Farrabesche. 
 
 "Yes, my friend," said she. 
 
 Farrabesche vanished with the speed of some wild creature 
 after a frightened glance at his mistress. Veronique hastily 
 mounted and went down to her two servants; the men were 
 growing uneasy about her, for the inexplicable unwholesome-
 
 148 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 ness of the Living Eock was well known in the country. 
 Colorat begged her to go down a little valley into the plain. 
 "It would be dangerous to return by the higher ground," he 
 said; the tracks were hard to find, ancl crossed each other, 
 and in spite of his knowledge of the country, he might lose 
 himself. 
 
 Once in the plain, Veronique slackened the pace of her 
 horse. 
 
 "Who is this Farrabesche whom you employ?" she asked, 
 turning to the head forester. 
 
 "Did madame meet him?" exclaimed Colorat. 
 
 "Yes, but he ran away." 
 
 "Poor fellow! Perhaps he does not know how kind 
 madame is." 
 
 "But, after all, what has he done ?" 
 
 "Why, madame, Farrabesche is a murderer," Champion 
 blurted out. 
 
 "Then, of course, he was pardoned, was he not ?" Veronique 
 asked in a tremulous voice. 
 
 "No, madame," Colorat answered. "Farrabesche was tried 
 at the Assizes, and condemned to ten years' penal servitude; 
 but he only did half his time, for they let him oft* the rest of 
 the sentence; he came back from the hulks in 1827. He owes 
 his life to M. le Cure, who persuaded him to give himself up. 
 Judged by default, and sentenced to death, they would have 
 caught him sooner or later, and he would have been in a bad 
 way. M. Bonnet went out to look for him at the risk of his 
 life. Nobody knows what he said to Farrabesche; they were 
 alone for a couple of days; on the third he brought Farra- 
 besche back to Tulle, and there he gave himself up. M. 
 Bonnet went to see a clever lawyer, and got him to take up 
 Farrabesche's case; and Farrabesche came off with ten years 
 in jail. M. le Cure used to go to see him while he was in 
 prison; and that fellow yonder, who was a terror to the whole 
 countryside, grew as meek as any maid, and let them take 
 him off to prison quietly. When he came out again, he settled 
 down hereabouts under M. le Cure's direction. People mind
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 149 
 
 what they say to him; he always goes on Sundays and holi- 
 days to the services and to mass. He has a seat in the 
 church along with the rest of us, but he always, keeps by him- 
 self close to the wall. He takes the sacrament from time 
 to time, but at the Communion-table he keeps apart too." 
 
 "And this man has killed another man !" 
 
 "One ?" asked Colorat ; "he has killed a good many, he has ! 
 But he is not a bad sort for all that." 
 
 "Is it possible?" cried Veronique, and in her amazement 
 she let the bridle fall on the horse's neck. 
 
 The head forester asked nothing better than to tell the 
 tale. 
 
 "You see, madame," he said, "Farrabesche maybe was in 
 the right at bottom. He was the last of the Farrabesches, 
 an old family in the Correze ; ay, yes ! His eldest brother, 
 Captain Farrabesche, was killed just ten years before in 
 Italy, at Montenotte ; only twenty-two he was, and a captain ! 
 That is what you might call bad luck, now, isn't it ? And he 
 had a little book-learning too; he could read and write, and 
 he had made up his mind to be a general. They were sorry 
 at home when he died, as well they might be, indeed ! I was 
 in the army with The Other* then; and I heard talk of his 
 death. Oh ! Captain Farrabesche fell gloriously ; he saved 
 the army, he did, and the Little Corporal ! I was serving 
 at that time under General Steingel, a German that is to 
 say, an Alsatian a fine soldier he was, but shortsighted, and 
 that was how he came by his end, sometime after Captain 
 Farrabesche. The youngest boy, that is the one yonder, was 
 just six years old when he heard them talking about his big 
 brother's death. The second brother went into the army too, 
 but he went as a private soldier; and died a sergeant, first 
 regiment of the Guard, a fine post, at the battle of Austerlitz, 
 where, you see, madame, they manoeuvred us all as smoothly 
 as if it had been review day at the Tuileries. ... I was 
 there myself. Oh! I was lucky; I went through it all, and 
 never came in for a single wound. . . . Well, then, our 
 
 *L'Aulre, viz. Napoleon.
 
 150 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Farrabesche, the youngest, brave though he was, took it into 
 his head that he would not go for a soldier. And 'tis a fact, 
 the army did Jiot suit that family. When the sous-prefet 
 wanted him in 1811, he took to the woods; a 'refractory con- 
 script,' eh! that's what they used to call them. Thereupon 
 a gang of chauffeurs got hold of him by fair means or foul, 
 and he took to warming people's feet at last ! You under- 
 stand that no one except M. le Cure knows what he did along 
 with those rascals, asking their pardon! Many a brush he 
 had with the gendarmes, and the regular troops as well! 
 First and last he has seen seven skirmishes." 
 
 "People say that he killed two soldiers and three gen- 
 darmes!" put in Champion. 
 
 "Who is to know how many ?" Colorat answered. "He did 
 aot tell them. At last, madame, almost all the others were 
 eaught ; but he, an active young fellow, knowing the country 
 as he did, always got away. That gang of chauffeurs used to 
 hang on the outskirts of Brives and Tulle, and they would 
 often come over here to lie low, because Farrabesche knew 
 places where they could hide easily. After 1814 nobody trou- 
 bled about him any more, the conscription was abolished; 
 but he had to spend the year 1815 in the woods. As he could 
 not sit down with his arms folded and live, he helped once 
 more to stop a coach down below yonder in the ravine; but 
 in the end he took M. le Cure's advice, and gave himself up. 
 It was not easy to find witnesses ; nobody dared give evidence 
 against him. Then M. le Cure and his lawyer worked so hard 
 for him, that they let him off with ten years. He was lucky 
 after being a chauffeur, for a chauffeur he was." 
 
 "But what is a chauffeur?" 
 
 "If you like, madame, I will just tell you the sort of thing 
 they did, by all that I can make out from one and another, 
 for you will understand that I was never a chauffeur myself. 
 It was not nice, but necessity knows no law. It was like this : 
 if they suspected some farmer or landowner of having money 
 in his possession, seven or eight of them would drop in in 
 the middle of the night, and they would light a fire aixJ have
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 151 
 
 supper there and then, when supper was over, if the master 
 of the house would not give them as much money as they 
 asked, they would tie his feet up to the pot-hook at the back 
 of the fire, and would not let him go until they had what 
 they asked for. That was all. They came in masks. With 
 so many expeditions, there were a few mishaps. Lord ! yes ; 
 there are obstinate folk and stingy people everywhere. There 
 was a farmer once, old Cochegrue, a regular skinflint he was, 
 he let them burn his feet ; and, well, the man died of it. There 
 was M. David's wife too, not far from Brives ; she died after- 
 wards of the fright they gave her, simply seeing them tie her 
 husband's feet. 'Just give them what you have !' she said to 
 him as she wept. He would not, and she showed them the 
 hiding-place. For five years the chauffeurs were the terror of 
 the countryside; but get this well into your pate I beg 
 pardon, madame ! that more than one of them belonged to 
 good families, and that sort of people are not the ones to let 
 themselves be nabbed." 
 
 Mme. Graslin listened and made no reply. There was 
 a moment's pause; then young Champion, eager to interest 
 his mistress in his turn, was anxious to tell what he knew 
 of Farrabesche. 
 
 "Madame ought to hear the whole truth of the matter. 
 Farrabesche has not his match on horseback or afoot. He 
 will fell an ox with a blow of his fist ! He can carry seven 
 hundred-weight, that he can! and there is not a better shot 
 anywhere. When I was a little chap they used to tell me tales 
 about Farrabesche. One day he and three of his comrades 
 were surprised ; they fought till one was killed and two were 
 wounded ; well and good, Farrabesche saw that he was caught ;* 
 bah ! he jumps on a gendarme's horse behind the man, claps 
 spurs to the animal, which bolts off at a furious gallop and is 
 out of sight, he gripping that gendarme round the waist all 
 the time; he hugged the man so tight that after a while he 
 managed to fling him off and ride single in the saddle, so 
 he escaped and came by a horse. And he had the impudence 
 to sell it directly afterwards ten leagues on the other side
 
 152 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 of Limoges. He lay in hiding for three months after that 
 exploit, and no one could find him. They offered a reward of 
 a hundred louis to any one who would betray him." 
 
 "Another time," added Colorat, "as to those hundred louis 
 put on his head by the prefect at Tulle, Farrabesche put a 
 cousin of his in the way of earning it Giriex it was, over at 
 Vizay. His cousin denounced him, and seemed as if he 
 meant to give him up. Oh! he actually gave him up; 
 and very glad the gendarmes were to take him to Tulle. 
 But he did not go far; they had to put him in the 
 prison at Lubersac, and he got away the very first night, 
 by way of a hole made by one of the gang, one Gabil- 
 leau, a deserter from the 17th, executed at Tulle, who was 
 moved away the night before he expected to escape. A pretty 
 character Farrabesche gained by these adventures. The troop 
 had trusty friends, you know. And, besides, people liked the 
 chauffeurs. Lord, they were quite different then from what 
 they are nowadays, jolly fellows every one of them, that 
 spent their money like princes. Just imagine it, madame ; he 
 finds the gendarmes on his track one evening, does he ? Well, 
 he slipped through their fingers that time by lying twenty- 
 four hours in a pond in a farmyard, drawing his breath 
 through a hole in the straw at the edge of a dung heap. What 
 did a little discomfort like that matter to him when he had 
 spent whole nights up among the little branches at the very 
 top of a tree where a sparrow could hardly hold, watching 
 the soldiers looking for him, passing and repassing below. 
 Farrabesche was one of the five or six chauffeurs whom they 
 never could catch; for as he was a fellow-countryman, and 
 joined the gang perforce (for, after all, he only took to the 
 woods to escape the conscription), all the women took his 
 part, and that counts for much." 
 
 "So Farrabesche has really killed several men," Mme. 
 Graslin said again. 
 
 "Certainly," Colorat replied ; "they even say that it was he 
 who murdered the traveler in the coach in 1812; but the 
 courier and postilion, the only witnesses who could have iden- 
 tified him, were dead when he came up for trial."
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 153 
 
 "And the robbery?" asked Mme. Graslin. 
 
 "Oh! They took all there was; but the five-and-twenty 
 thousand francs which they found belonged to the Govern- 
 ment." 
 
 For another league Mme. Graslin rode on in silence. The 
 sun had set, and in the moonlight the gray plain looked like 
 the open sea. Once or twice Champion and Colorat looked at 
 Mme. Graslin, for her silence made them uneasy, and both 
 were greatly disturbed to see that her eyes were red with 
 much weeping and full of tears, which fell drop by drop 
 and glittered on her cheeks. 
 
 "Oh ! don't be sorry for him, madame," said' Colorat. "The 
 fellow led a jolly life, and has had pretty sweethearts. And 
 if the police keep an eye on him now, he is protected by M. le 
 Cure's esteem and friendship; for he repented, and in the 
 convict's prison he behaved in the most exemplary way. 
 Everybody knows that he is as good as the best among us; 
 only he is so proud, he has no mind to lay himself open to any 
 slight, but he lives peaceably and does good after his fashion. 
 Over the other side of the Living Eock he has ten acres or 
 so of young saplings of his own planting; and when he sees 
 a place for a tree in the forest, he will stick one of them in. 
 Then he lops off the dead branches, and collects the wood, and 
 does it up in faggots ready for poor people. And the poor 
 people, knowing that they can have firewood all ready for 
 the asking, go to him instead of helping themselves and dam- 
 aging your woods. So if he still 'warms people's feet/ as you 
 may say, it does them good now. Farrabesche is fond of 
 your forest ; he looks after it as if it were his own." 
 
 "And yet he lives ! . . . quite alone." Mme. Graslin 
 hastily added the last two words. 
 
 "Asking your pardon, madame, no. He is bringing up a 
 little lad ; going fifteen now he is," said Maurice Champion. 
 
 "Faith, yes, that he is," Colorat remarked, "for La Curieux 
 had that child a good while before Farrabesche gave himself 
 up." 
 
 "Is it his son ?" asked Mme. Graslin.
 
 154 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "Well, every one thinks so." 
 
 "And why did he not marry the girl ?" 
 
 "Why? Because they would have caught him! And, be- 
 sides, when La Curieux knew that he was condemned, she 
 left the neighborhood, poor thing." 
 
 "Was she pretty?" 
 
 "Oh, my mother says that she was very much like dear 
 me! another girl who left the place too very much like 
 Denise Tascheron." 
 
 "Was he loved ?" asked Mme. Graslin. 
 
 "Bah ! yes, because he was a chauffeur!" said Colorat. "The 
 women always fall in love with anything out of the way. But 
 for all that, nothing astonished people hereabouts so much as 
 this love affair. Catherine Curieux was a good girl who lived 
 like a virgin saint ; she was looked on as a paragon of virtue 
 in her neighborhood over at Vizay, a large village in the 
 Correze, on the boundary of two departments. Her father 
 and mother were tenants of M. Brezac's. Catherine Curieux 
 was quite seventeen years old at the time of Farrabesche's 
 sentence. The Farrabesches were an old family out of the 
 same district, but they settled on the Montegnac lands; they 
 had the largest farm in the village. Farrabesche's father and 
 mother are dead now, and La Curieux's three sisters are mar- 
 ried ; one lives at Aubusson, one at Limoges, and one at Saint- 
 Leonard." 
 
 "Do you think that Farrabesche knows where Catherine 
 is?" asked Mme. Graslin. 
 
 "If he knew, he would break his bounds. Oh ! he would go 
 to her. ... As soon as he came back he asked her 
 father and mother (through M. Bonnet) for the child. La 
 Curieux's father and mother were taking care of the child; 
 M. Bonnet persuaded them to give him up to Farrabesche." 
 
 "Does nobody know what became of her?" 
 
 "Bah!" said Colorat. "The lass thought herself ruined, 
 she was afraid to stop in the place ! She went to Paris. What 
 does she do there? That is the rub. As for looking for her 
 in Paris, you might as well try to find a marble among the 
 flints there in the plain."
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 155 
 
 Colorat pointed to the plain of Montegnac as he spoke. 
 By this time Mme. Graslin was only a few paces from the 
 great gateway of the chateau. Mme. Sauviat, in anxiety, 
 was waiting there for her with Aline and the servants; they 
 did not know what to think of so long an absence. 
 
 "Well," said Mme. Sauviat, as she helped her daughter to 
 dismount, "you must be horribly tired." 
 
 "No, dear mother," Mme. Graslin answered, in an unsteady 
 voice, and Mme. Sauviat, looking at her daughter, saw that 
 she had been weeping for a long time. 
 
 Mme. Graslin went into the house with Aline, her confi- 
 dential servant, and shut herself into her room. She would 
 not see her mother; and when Mme. Sauviat tried to enter, 
 Aline met the old Auvergnate with "Madame is asleep." 
 
 The next morning Veronique set out on horseback, with 
 Maurice as her sole guide. She took the way by which they 
 had returned the evening before, so as to reach the Living 
 Rock as quickly as might be. As they climbed up the ravine 
 which separates the last ridge in the forest from the actual 
 summit of the mountain (for the Living Eock, seen from 
 the plain, seems to stand alone), Veronique bade Maurice 
 show her the way to Farrabesche's cabin and wait with the 
 horses until she came back. She meant to go alone. Maurice 
 went with her as far as a pathway which turned off towards 
 the opposite side of the Living Eock, furthest from the plain, 
 and pointed out the thatched roof of a cottage half hidden 
 on the mountain side; below it lay the nursery-ground of 
 which Colorat had spoken. 
 
 It was almost noon. A thin streak of smoke rising from 
 the cottage chimney guided Veronique, who soon reached 
 the place, but would not show herself at first. At the sight of 
 the little dwelling, and the garden about it, with its fence 
 of dead thorns, she stood for a few moments lost in thoughts 
 known to her alone. Several acres of grass land, enclosed 
 by a quickset hedge, wound away beyond the garden ; the low 
 spreading branches of apple and pear and plum trees were
 
 156 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 visible here and there in the field. Above the house, on the 
 sandier soil of the high mountain slopes, there rose a splendid 
 grove of tall chestnut trees, their topmost leaves turned yellow 
 and sere. 
 
 Mme. Graslin pushed open the crazy wicket wnich did 
 duty as a gate, and saw before her the shed, the little yard, 
 and all the picturesque and living details of the dwellings 
 of the poor. Something surely of the grace of the open fields 
 hovers about them. Who is there that is not moved by the 
 revelation of lowly, almost vegetative lives the clothes dry- 
 ing on the hedge, the rope of onions hanging from the roof, 
 the iron cooking pots set out in the sun, the wooden bench 
 hidden among the honeysuckle leaves, the houseleeks that 
 grow on the ridges of almost every thatched hovel in France ? 
 
 Veronique found it impossible to appear unannounced in 
 her keeper's cottage, for two fine hunting-dogs began to bark 
 as soon as they heard the rustle of her riding-habit on the 
 dead leaves ; she gathered up her skirts on her arm, and went 
 towards the house. Farrabesche and the boy were sitting on 
 a wooden bench outside. Both rose to their feet and un- 
 covered respectfully, but without a trace of servility. 
 
 "I have been told that you are seeing after my interests," 
 said Veronique, with her eyes fixed on the lad; "so I deter- 
 mined to see your cottage and nursery of saplings for myself, 
 and to ask you about some improvements." 
 
 "I am at your service, madame," replied Farrabesche. 
 
 Veronique was admiring the lad. It was a charming face ; 
 somewhat sunburned and brown, but in shape a faultless 
 oval; the outlines of the forehead were delicately fine, the 
 orange-colored eyes exceedingly bright and alert; the long 
 dark hair, parted on the forehead, fell upon either side of the 
 brow. Taller than most boys of his age, he was very nearly five 
 feet high. His trousers were of the same coarse brown linen 
 as his shirt; he wore a threadbare waistcoat of rough blue 
 cloth with horn buttons, a short jacket of the material face- 
 tiously described as "Maurienne velvet," in which Savoyards 
 are wont to dress, and a pair of iron-bound shoes on his other-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 15? 
 
 wise bare feet to complete the costume. His father was 
 dressed in the same fashion; but instead of the little lad's 
 brown woolen cap, Farrabesche wore the wide-brimmed 
 peasant's hat. In spite of its quick intelligence, the child's 
 face wore the look of gravity (evidently unforced) peculiar 
 to young creatures brought up in solitude; he must have put 
 himself in harmony with the silence and the life of the forest. 
 Indeed, in both Farrabesche and his son the physical side of 
 their natures seemed to be the most highly developed; they 
 possessed the peculiar faculties of the savage the keen sight, 
 the alertness, the complete mastery of the body as an instru- 
 ment, the quick hearing, the signs of activity and intelligent 
 skill. No sooner did the boy's eyes turn to his father than 
 Mme. Graslin divined that here was the limitless affection 
 in which the prompting of natural instinct and deliberate 
 thought were confirmed by the most effectual happiness. 
 
 "Is this the child of whom I have heard ?" asked Veronique, 
 indicating the lad. 
 
 "Yes, madame." 
 
 Veronique signed to Farrabesche to come a few paces away. 
 "But have you taken no steps towards finding his mother?" 
 she asked. 
 
 "Madame does not know, of course, that I am not allowed 
 to go beyond the bounds of the commune where I am liv- 
 ing ' : 
 
 "And have you never heard of her ?" 
 
 "When my time was out," he said, "the commissary paid 
 over to me the sum of a thousand francs, which had been sent 
 me, a little at a time, every quarter ; the rules would not allow 
 me to have it until I came out. I thought that no one but 
 Catherine would have thought of me, as it was not M. Bonnet 
 who srr.it it; so I am keeping the money for Benjamin." 
 
 "A^ how about Catherine's relations?" 
 
 ar fc v f thought no more about her after she went away. 
 Besic'r , they did their part by looking after the child." 
 
 Vewnique turned to go towards the house. 
 
 "Very well, Farrabesche/' she said; "I will have inquiry
 
 158 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 made, so as to make sure that Catherine is still living, and 
 where she is, and what kind of life she is leading " 
 
 "Madame, whatever she may be, I shall look upon it as good 
 fortune to have her for my ^ife," the man cried in a softened 
 tone. "It is for her to show reluctance, not for me. Our 
 marriage will legitimatize the poor hoy, who has no suspicion 
 yet of how he stands." 
 
 The look in the father's eyes told the tale of the life these 
 two outcasts led in their voluntary exile ; they were all in all 
 to each other, like two fellow-countrymen in the midst of 
 a desert. 
 
 "So you love Catherine ?" asked Veronique. 
 
 "It is not so much that I love her, madame," he answered, 
 "as that, placed as I am, she is the one woman in the world 
 for me." 
 
 Mme. Graslin turned swiftly, and went as far as the 
 chestnut-trees, as if some pang had shot through her. The 
 keeper thought that this was some whim of hers, and did 
 not venture to follow. For nearly a quarter of an hour she 
 sat, apparently engaged in looking out over the landscape. 
 She could see all that part of the forest which lay along the 
 side of the valley, with the torrent in the bottom ; it was dry 
 now, and full of boulders, a sort of huge ditch shut in be- 
 tween the forest-covered mountains above Montegnac and 
 another parallel range, these last hills beings steep though 
 low, and so bare that there was scarcely so much as a starveling 
 tree here and there to crown the slopes, where a few rather 
 melancholy-looking birches, juniper bushes, and briars were 
 trying to grow. This second range belonged to a neighboring 
 estate, and lay in the department of the Correze; indeed, 
 the cross-road which meanders along the winding valley is 
 the boundary line of the arrondissement of Montegnac, and 
 also of the two estates. The opposite side of the valley beyond 
 the torrent was quite unsheltered and barren enough. i was 
 a sort of long wall with a slope of fine woodland beh/id it. 
 and a complete contrast in its bleakness to the side of the 
 mountain on which Farrabesche's cottage stood. Gnarled
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 159 
 
 and twisted forms on the one side, and on the other shapely 
 growths and delicate curving lines ; on the one side the dreary, 
 unchanging silence of a sloping desert, held in place by blocks 
 of stone and bare, denuded rocks, and on the other, the con- 
 trasts of green among the trees. Many of them were leafless 
 now, but the fine variegated tree trunks stood up straight 
 and tall on each ledge, and the branches waved as the wind 
 stirred through them. A few of them, the oaks,, elms, beeches, 
 and chestnuts which held out longer against the autumn than 
 the rest, still retained their leaves golden, or bronze, or 
 purple. 
 
 In the direction of Montegnac the valley opens out so 
 widely that the two sides describe a vast horseshoe. Vero- 
 nique, with her back against a chestnut-tree, could see glen 
 after glen arranged after the stages of an amphitheatre, the 
 topmost crests of the trees rising one above the other in rows 
 like the heads of spectators. On the other side of the ridge 
 lay her own park, in which, at a later time, this beautiful hill- 
 side was included. Near Farrabesche's cottage the valley 
 grew narrower and narrower, till it closed in as a gully scarce 
 a hundred feet across. 
 
 The beauty of the view over which Mme. Graslin's eyes 
 wandered, heedlessly at first, soon recalled her to herself. 
 She went back to the cottage, where the father and son were 
 standing in silence, making no attempt to explain the strange 
 departure of their mistress. Veronique looked at the house. 
 It was more solidly built than the thatched roof had led her 
 to suppose ; doubtless it had been left to go to ruin at the time 
 when the Navarreins ceased to trouble themselves about the 
 estate. No sport, no gamekeepers. But though no one had 
 lived in it for a century, the walls held good in spite of the 
 ivy and climbing plants which clung about them on every side. 
 Farrabesche himself had thatched the roof when he received 
 permission to live there; he had laid the stone flags on the 
 floor, -nd brought in such furniture as there was. 
 
 V6- mique went inside the cottage. Two beds, such as the 
 peasants use, met her eyes; there was a large cupboard of
 
 160 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 walnut wood, a hutch for bread, a dresser, a table, three 
 chairs, a few brown earthen platters on the shelves of the 
 dresser; in fact, all the necessary household gear. A couple 
 of guns and a game-bag hung above the mantelshelf. It went 
 to Veronique's heart to see how many things the father had 
 made for the little one ; there was a toy man-of-war, a fishing 
 smack, and a carved wooden cup, a chest wonderfully orna- 
 mented, a little box decorated with mosaic work in straw, a 
 beautifully-wrought crucifix and rosary. The rosary was made 
 of plum-stones; on each a head had been carved with won- 
 derful skill Jesus Christ, the Apostles, the Madonna, St. 
 John the Baptist, St. Anne, the two Magdalens. 
 
 "I did it to amuse the child during the long winter 
 evenings," he said, with something of apology in his tone. 
 
 Jessamine and climbing roses covered the front of the 
 house, and broke into blossom about the upper windows. 
 Farrabesche used the first floor as a storeroom ; he kept poul- 
 try, ducks, and a couple of pigs, and bought nothing but 
 bread, salt, sugar, and such groceries as they needed. Neither 
 he nor the lad drank wine. 
 
 "Everything that I have seen and heard of you," Mme. 
 Graslin said at last, turning to Farrabesche, "has led me 
 to take an interest in you which shall not come to nothing." 
 
 "This is M. Bonnet's doing, I know right well !" cried 
 Farrabesche with touching fervor. 
 
 "You are mistaken ; M. le Cure has said nothing to me of 
 you as yet; chance or God, it may be, has brought it all 
 about." 
 
 "Yes, madame, it is God's doing ; God alone can work won- 
 ders for such a wretch as I." 
 
 "If your life has been a wretched one," said Mme. Graslm, 
 in tones so low that they did not reach the boy (a piece of 
 womanly feeling which touched Farrabesche), "your repent- 
 ance, your conduct, and M. Bonnet's good opinion should go 
 far to retrieve it. I have given orders that the buildings on 
 the large farm near the chateau which M. Graslin panned 
 are to be finished; you shall be my steward there; you will
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 161 
 
 find scope for your energies and employment for your son. 
 The public prosecutor at Limoges shall be informed of your 
 case, and I will engage that the humiliating restrictions which 
 make your life a burden to you shall be removed/' 
 
 Farrabesche dropped down on his knees as if thunderstruck 
 at the words which opened out a prospect of the realization 
 of hopes hitherto cherished in vain. He kissed the hem of 
 Mme. Graslin's riding habit; he kissed her feet. Benjamin 
 saw the tears in his father's eyes, and began to sob without 
 knowing why. 
 
 "Do not kneel, Farrabesche," said Mme. Graslin; "you do 
 not know how natural it is that I should do for you these 
 things that I have promised to do. ... Did you not 
 plant those trees ?" she added, pointing to one or two pitch- 
 pines, Norway pines, firs, and larches at the base of the arid, 
 thirsty hillside opposite. 
 
 "Yes, madame." 
 
 "Then is the soil better just there?" 
 
 "The water is always wearing the rocks away, so there is 
 a little light soil washed down on to your land, and I took ad- 
 vantage of it, for all the valley down below the road belongs 
 to you; the road is the boundary line." 
 
 "Then does a good deal of water flow down the length of 
 the valley?" 
 
 "Oh ! in a few days, madame, if the weather sets in rainy, 
 you will maybe hear the roaring of the torrent over at the 
 chateau ! but even then it is nothing compared with what it 
 will be when the snow melts. All the water from the whole 
 mountain side there at the back of your park and gardens 
 flows into it ; in fact, all the streams hereabouts flow down to 
 the torrent, and the water comes down like a deluge. Luckily 
 for you, the tree roots on your side of the valley bind the soil 
 together, and the water slips off the leaves, for the fallen 
 leaves there in autumn are like an oilcloth cover for the land, 
 or it would be all washed down into the valley bottom, and 
 the bed of the torrent is so steep that I doubt whether the 
 soil would stop there."
 
 162 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "What becomes of all the water ?" asked Mme. Graslin. 
 
 Farrabesche pointed to the gully which seemed to shut in 
 the valley below his cottage. 
 
 "It pours out over a chalky bit of level ground that sepa- 
 rates Limousin from the Correze, and there it lies for several 
 months in stagnant green pools, sinking slowly down into 
 the soil. That is how the common came to be so unhealthy 
 that no one lives there, and nothing can be done with it. Xo 
 kind of cattle will pasture on the reeds and rushes in those 
 brackish pools. Perhaps there are three thousand acres of 
 it altogether ; it is the common land of three parishes ; but it 
 is just like the plain of Montegnac, you can do nothing with 
 it. And down in your plain there is a certain amount of sand 
 and a little soil among the flints, but here there is nothing 
 but the bare tufa." 
 
 "Send for the horses ; I mean to see all this for myself." 
 
 Mme. Graslin told Benjamin where she had left Maurice, 
 and the lad went forthwith. 
 
 "They tell me that you know every yard of this country," 
 Mme. Graslin continued ; "can you explain to me how it hap- 
 pens that no water flows into the plain of Montegnac from 
 my side of the ridge? there is not the smallest torrent there 
 even in rainy weather or in the time of the melting of the 
 snows." 
 
 "Ah, madame," Farrabesche answered, "M. le Cure, who 
 is always thinking of the prosperity of Montegnac, guessed 
 the cause, but had not proof of it. Since you came here he 
 told me to mark the course of every runnel in every little 
 valley. I had been looking at the lie of the land yesterday, 
 and was on my way back when I had the honor of meeting 
 you at the base of the Living Eock. I heard the sound of 
 horse hoofs, and I wanted to know who was passing this wnv. 
 Madame, M. Bonnet is not only a saint, he is a man of science. 
 'Farrabesche,' said he (I being at work at the time on the 
 road which the commune finished up to the chateau for'you) 
 'Farrabesche, if no water from this side of the hill reaches 
 the plain below, it must be because nature has some sort
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 163 
 
 of drainage arrangement for carrying it off elsewhere.' Well, 
 madame, the remark is so simple that it looks downright trite, 
 as if any child might have made it. But nobody since Mon- 
 tegnac was Montegnac, neither great lords, nor stewards, nor 
 keepers, nor rich, nor poor, though the plain lay there before 
 their eyes with nothing growing on it for want of water, not 
 one of them ever thought of asking what became of the water 
 in the Gabou. The stagnant water gives them the fever in 
 three communes, but they never thought of looking for the 
 remedy ; and I myself never dreamed of it ; it took a man of 
 God to see that " 
 
 Farrabesche's eyes filled with tears as he spoke. 
 
 "The discoveries of men of genius are all so simple, that 
 every one thinks he could have found them out," said Mme. 
 Graslin; and to herself she added, "But there is this grand 
 thing about genius, that while it is akin to all others, no one 
 resembles it." 
 
 "At once I saw what M. Bonnet meant," Farrabesche went 
 on. "He had not to use a lot of long words to explain my 
 job to me. To make the thing all the queerer, madame, all 
 the ridge above your plain (for it all belongs to you) is full 
 of pretty deep cracks, ravines, and gullies, and what not ; but 
 all the water that flows down all the valleys, clefts, ravines, 
 and gorges, every channel, in fact, empties itself into a little 
 valley a few feet lower than the level of your plain, madame. 
 I know the cause of this state of things to-day, and here it is : 
 There is a sort of embankment of rock (schist, ~M.. Bonnet calls 
 it) twenty to thirty feet thick, which runs in an unbroken 
 line all round the bases of the hills between Montegnac and 
 the Living Eock. The earth, being softer than the stone, 
 has been worn away and been hollowed out ; so, naturally, the 
 water all flows round into the Gabou, eating its passage out of 
 each valley. The trees and thickets and brushwood hide the 
 lie of the land; but when you follow the streams and track 
 their passage, it is easy to convince yourself of the facts. In 
 this way both hillsides drain into the Gabou, all the water 
 from this side that we see, and the other over the ridge where
 
 164 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 your park lies, as well as from the rocks opposite. M. !e Cure 
 thinks that this state of things would work its own cure when 
 the water-courses on your side of the ridge are blocked up 
 at the mouth by the rocks and soil washed down from above, 
 so that they raise barriers between themselves and the Gabou. 
 When that time comes your plain will be flooded in turn like 
 the common land you are just about to see ; but it would take 
 hundreds of years to bring that about. And besides, is it a 
 thing to wish for, madame? Suppose that your plain of 
 Montgnac should not suck up all the water, like the common 
 land here, there would be some more standing pools there to 
 poison the whole country." 
 
 "So the places M. le Cure pointed out to me a few days ago, 
 where the trees are still green, must mark the natural chan- 
 nels through which the water flows down into the Gabou ?" 
 
 "Yes, madame. There are three hills between the Living 
 Eock and Montegnac, and consequently there are three water- 
 courses, and the streams that flow down them, banked in by 
 the schist barrier, turn to the Gabou. That belt of wood still 
 green, round the base of the hills, looks as if it were part 
 of your plain, but it marks the course of the channel which 
 was there, as M. le Cure guessed it would be." 
 
 "The misfortune will soon turn to a blessing for Mon- 
 tegnac/' said Mme. Graslin, with deep conviction in her tones. 
 "And since you have been the first instrument, you shall share 
 in the work; you shall find active and willing workers, for 
 hard work and perseverance must make up for the money 
 which we lack." 
 
 Mme. Graslin had scarcely finished the sentence when 
 Benjamin and Maurice came up; she caught at her horse's 
 bridle, and, by a gesture, bade Farrabesche mount Maurice's 
 horse. 
 
 "Now bring me to the place where the water drowns the 
 common land," she said. 
 
 "It will be so much the better that you should go, madame, 
 eince that the late M. Graslin, acting on M. Bonnet's advice, 
 bought about three hundred acres of land at the mouth of
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 165 
 
 the gully where the mud has been deposited by the torrent, 
 so that over a certain area there is some depth of rich soil. 
 Madame will see the other side of the Living Rock; there is 
 some magnificent timber there, and doubtless M. Graslin 
 would have had a farm on the spot. The best situation would 
 be a place where the little stream that rises near my house 
 sinks into the ground again; it might be turned to advan- 
 tage." 
 
 Farrabesche led the way, and Veronique followed down 
 a steep path towards a spot where the two sides of the gully 
 drew in, and then separated sharply to east and west, as if 
 divided by some earthquake shock. The gully was about 
 sixty feet across. Tall grasses were growing among the huge 
 boulders in the bottom. On the one side the Living Eock, 
 cut to the quick, stood up a solid surface of granite without 
 the slightest flaw in it ; but the height of the uncompromising 
 rock wall was crowned with the overhanging roots of trees, 
 for the pines clutched the soil with their branching roots, 
 seeming to grasp the granite as a bird clings to a bough ; but 
 on the other side the rock was yellow and sandy, and hollowed 
 out by the weather; there was no depth in the caverns, no 
 boldness in the hollows of the soft crumbling ochre-tinted 
 rock. A few prickly-leaved plants, burdocks, reeds, and water- 
 plants at its base were sufficient signs of a north aspect and 
 poor soil. Evidently the two ranges, though parallel, and as 
 it were blended at the time of the great cataclysm which 
 changed the surface of the globe, were composed of entirely 
 different materials an inexplicable freak of nature, or the 
 result of some unknown cause which waits for genius to dis- 
 cover it. In this place the contrast between them was most 
 strikingly apparent. 
 
 Veronique saw in front of her a vast dry plateau. There 
 was no sign of plant-life anywhere ; the chalky soil explained 
 the infiltration of the water, only a few stagnant pools re- 
 mained here and there where the surface was incrusted. To 
 the right stretched the mountains of the Correze, and to the 
 left the ey^ was arrested by the huge mass of the Living
 
 166 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Rock, the tall forest trees that clothed its sides, and two hun- 
 dred acres of grass below the forest, in strong contrast with 
 the ghastly solitude about them. 
 
 "My son and I made the ditch that you see down yonder," 
 said Farrabesche; "you can see it by the line of tall grass; 
 it will be connected shortly with the ditch that marks the edge 
 of your forest. Your property is bounded on this side by a 
 desert, for the first village lies a league away." 
 
 Veronique galloped into the hideous plain, and her keeper 
 followed. She cleared the ditch and rode at full speed across 
 the dreary waste, seeming to take a kind of wild delight in 
 the vast picture of desolation before her. Farrabesche was 
 right. No skill, no human power could turn that soil to ac- 
 count, the ground rang hollow beneath the horses' hoofs. This 
 was the result of the porous nature of the tufa, but there were 
 cracks and fissures no less through which the flood water sank 
 out of sight, doubtless to feed some far-off springs. 
 
 "And yet there are souls like this!" Veronique exclaimed 
 within herself as she reined her horse, after a quarter of an 
 hour's gallop. 
 
 She mused a while with the desert all about her ; there was 
 no living creature, no animal, no insect; birds never crossed 
 the plateau. In the plain of Montegnac there were at any 
 rate the flints, a little sandy or clayey soil, and crumbled rock 
 to make a thin crust of earth a few inches deep as a beginning 
 for cultivation; but here the ungrateful tufa, which had 
 ceased to be earth, and had not become stone, wearied the eyes 
 so cruelly that they were absolutely forced to turn for relief 
 to the illimitable ether of space. Veronique looked along the 
 boundary of her forests and at the meadow which her hus- 
 band had added to the estate, then she went slowly back 
 towards the mouth of the Gabou. She came suddenly upon 
 Farrabesche, and found him looking into a hole, which might 
 have suggested that some one of a speculative turn had been 
 probing this unlikely spot, imagining that nature had hidden 
 some treasure there. 
 
 "What is it ?" asked Veronique, noticing the deep sadness 
 of the expression on the manly face.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 187 
 
 "Madame, I owe my life to this trench here, or, more prop- 
 erly, I owe to it a space for repentance and time to redeem 
 my faults in the eyes of men " 
 
 The effect of this explanation of life was to nail Mme. 
 Graslin to the spot. She reined in her horse. 
 
 "I used to hide here, madame. The ground is so full of 
 echoes, that if I laid my ear to the earth I could catch 
 the sound of the horses of the gendarmerie or the tramp of 
 soldiers (an unmistakable sound that!) more than a league 
 away. Then I used to escape by way of the Gabou. I had 
 a horse ready in a place there, and I always put five or six 
 leagues between myself and them that were after me. Cath- 
 erine used to bring me food of a night. If she did not find 
 any sign of me, I always found bread and wine left in a hole 
 covered over by a stone." 
 
 These recollections of this wild vagrant life, possibly un- 
 wholesome recollections for Farrabesche, stirred Veronique's 
 most indulgent pity, but she rode rapidly on towards the 
 Gabou, followed by the keeper. While she scanned the gap, 
 looking down the long valley, so fertile on one side, so for- 
 lorn on the other, and saw, more than a league away, the hill- 
 side ridges, tier on tier, at the back of Montegnac, Farra- 
 besche said, "There will be famous waterfalls here in a few 
 days." 
 
 "And by the same day next year, not a drop of water will 
 ever pass that way again. I am on my own property on either 
 side, so I shall build a wall solid enough and high enough 
 to keep the water in. Instead of a valley which is doing noth- 
 ing, I shall have a lake, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty feet 
 deep, and about a league across a vast reservoir for the 
 irrigation channels that shall fertilize the whole plain of 
 Montegnac." 
 
 "M. le Cure was right, madame, when he told us, as we 
 were finishing your road, that we were working for our 
 mother; may God give His blessing to such an enterprise." 
 
 "Say nothing about it, Farrabesche," said Mme. Graslin; 
 "it is M. Bonnet's idea."
 
 168 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Vronique returned to Farrabesche's cottage, found 
 Maurice, and went back at once to the chateau. Her mother 
 and Aline were surprised at the change in her face ; the hope 
 of doing good to the country had given it a look of something 
 like happiness. Mme. Graslin wrote to M. Grossetete; she 
 wanted him to ask M. de Granville for complete liberty for 
 the poor convict, giving particulars as to his good conduct, 
 which was further vouched for by the mayor's certificate and 
 a letter from M. Bonnet. She also sent other particulars 
 concerning Catherine Curieux, and entreated Grossetete to in- 
 terest the public prosecutor in her kindly project, and to 
 cause a letter to be written to the prefecture of police in Paris 
 with a view to discovering the girl. The mere fact that Cath- 
 erine had remitted sums of money to the convict in prison 
 should be a sufficient clue by which to trace her. Veronique 
 had set her heart on knowing the reason why Catherine had 
 failed to come back to her child and to Farrabesche. Then 
 she told her old friend of her discoveries in the torrent-bed 
 of the Gabou, and laid stress on the necessity of finding the 
 clever man for whom she had already asked him. 
 
 The next day was Sunday. For the first time since Vero- 
 nique took up her abode in Montegnac, she felt able to go to 
 church for mass. She went and took possession of her pew 
 in the Lady Chapel. Looking round her, she saw how bare 
 the poverty-stricken church was, and determined to set by a 
 certain sum every year for repairs and the decoration of the 
 altars. She heard the words of the priest, tender, gracious, 
 and divine; for the sermon, couched in such simple lan- 
 guage that all present could understand it, was in truth sub- 
 lime. The sublime comes from the heart; it is not to be 
 found by effort of the intellect; and religion is an inexhaust- 
 ible source of sublime thoughts with no false glitter of brill- 
 iance, for the Catholicism which penetrates and changes 
 hearts is wholly of the heart. M. Bonnet found in the epistle 
 a text for his sermon, to the effect that soon or late God 
 fulfils His promises, watches over His own, and encourages 
 the good. He made it clear that great things would be the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 169 
 
 result of the presence of a rich and charitable resident in the 
 parish, by pointing out that the duties of the poor towards 
 the beneficent rich were as extensive as those of the rich to- 
 wards the poor, and that the relation should be one of mutual 
 help. 
 
 Farrabesche had spoken to some of those who were glad to 
 see him (one consequence of the spirit of Christian charity 
 which M. Bonnet had infused into practical action in his 
 parish), and had told them of Mme. Graslin's kindness to 
 him. All the commune had talked this over in the square 
 below the church, where, according to country custom, 
 they gathered together before mass. Nothing could more 
 completely have won the goodwill of these folk, who are so 
 readily touched by any kindness shown to them; and when 
 Veronique came out of church, she found almost all the 
 parish standing in a double row. All hats went off respect- 
 fully and in deep silence as she passed. This welcome 
 touched her, though she did not know the real reason of it. 
 Among the last of all she saw Farrabesche, and spoke to 
 him. 
 
 "You are a good sportsman ; do not forget to send us some 
 game." 
 
 A few days after this Veronique walked with the cure in 
 that part of the forest nearest her chateau; she determined 
 to descend the ridges which she had seen from the Living 
 Eock, ranged tier on tier on the other side of the hill. With 
 the cure's assistance, she would ascertain the exact position 
 of the higher affluents of the Gabou. The result was the 
 discovery by the cure of the fact that the streams which water 
 Upper Montegnac really rose in the mountains of the Cor- 
 reze. These ranges were united to the mountain by the arid 
 rib of hill which ran parallel to the chain of the Living Rock. 
 The cure came back from that walk with boyish glee ; he saw, 
 with the naivete of a poet, the prosperity of the village that 
 he loved. And what is a poet but a man who realizes his 
 dreams before the time? M. Bonnet reaped his harvests as 
 he looked down from the terrace at the barren plain.
 
 170 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Farrabesche and his son came up to the chateau next morn- 
 ing loaded with game. The keeper had brought a cup for 
 Francis Graslin; it was nothing less than a masterpiece a 
 battle scene carved on a cocoanut shell. Mme. Graslin hap- 
 pened to be walking on the terrace, on the side that overlooked 
 "Tascherons." She sat down on a garden seat, and looked 
 long at that fairy's work. Tears came into her eyes from time 
 to time. 
 
 "You must have been very unhappy," she said, addressing 
 Farrabesche after a silence. 
 
 "What could I do, madame?" he answered. "I was there 
 without the hope of escape, which makes life bearable to al- 
 most all the convicts " 
 
 "It is an appalling life !" she said, and her look and com- 
 passionate tones invited Farrabesche to speak. 
 
 In Mme. Graslin's convulsive tremor and evident emotion 
 Farrabesche saw nothing but the overwrought interest ex- 
 cited by pitying curiosity. Just at that moment Mme. 
 Sauviat appeared in one of the garden walks, and seemed 
 about to join them, but Yeronique drew out her handkerchief 
 and motioned her away. "Let me be, mother," she cried, in 
 sharper tones than she had ever before used to the old Au- 
 vergnate. 
 
 "For five years I wore a chain riveted here to a heavy iron 
 ring, madame," Farrabesche said, pointing to his leg. "I was 
 fastened to another man. I have had to live like that with 
 three convicts first and last. I used to lie on a wooden camp 
 bedstead, and I had to work uncommonly hard to get a thin 
 mattress, called a serpentin. There were eight hundred men 
 in each ward. Each of the beds (tolards, they called them) 
 held twenty-four men, all chained together two and two, and 
 nights and mornings they passed a long chain called the 
 'bilboes string/ in and out of the chains that bound each 
 couple together, and made it fast to the tolard, so that all 
 of us were fastened down by the feet. Even after a couple 
 of years of it, I could not get used to the clank of those 
 chains; every moment they said, 'You are in a convicts'
 
 .THE COUNTRY PARSON 171 
 
 prison !' If you dropped off to sleep for a minute, some 
 rogue or other would begin to wrangle or turn himself round, 
 and put you in mind of your plight. You had to serve an 
 apprenticeship to learn how to sleep. I could not sleep at 
 all, in fact, unless I was utterly exhausted with a heavy 
 day's work. 
 
 "After I managed to sleep, I had, at any rate, the night 
 when I could forget things. Forgetfulness that is some- 
 thing, madame! Once a man is there, he must learn to 
 satisfy his needs after a manner fixed by the most pitiless 
 rules. You can judge, madame, what sort of effect this life 
 was like to have on me, a young 'fellow who had always lived 
 in the woods, like the wild goats and the birds ! Ah ! if I had 
 not eaten my bread cooped up in the four walls of a prison 
 for six months beforehand, I should have thrown myself into 
 the sea at the sight of my mates, for all the beautiful 
 things M. Bonnet said, and (I may say it) he has been the 
 father of my soul. I did pretty well in the open air; but 
 when once I was shut up in the ward to sleep or eat (for we 
 ate our food there out of troughs, three couples to each 
 trough), it took all the life out of me; the dreadful faces and 
 the language of the others always sickened me. Luckily, 
 at five o'clock in the summer, and half-past seven in winter, 
 out we went in spite of heat or cold or wind or rain, in the 
 'jail gang' that means to work. So we were out of doors 
 most of our time, and the open air seems very good to you 
 when you come out of a place where eight hundred convicts 
 herd together. . . . The air, you must always remember, 
 is sea air ! You enjoy the breeze, the sun is like a friend, and 
 you watch the clouds pass over, and look for hopeful signs 
 of a beautiful day. For my own part, I took an interest in 
 my work." 
 
 Farrabesche stopped, for two great tears rolled down Vero- 
 niqne's cheeks. 
 
 "Oh ! madame, these are only the roses of that existence !" 
 he cried, taking the expression on Mme. Graslin's face for 
 pity of his lot. "There are the dreadful precautions the Gov-
 
 172 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 eminent takes to make sure of us, the inquisition kept up by 
 the warders, the inspection of fetters morning and evening, 
 the coarse food, the hideous clothes that humiliate you at 
 every moment, the constrained position while you sleep, the 
 frightful sound of four hundred double chains clanking in an 
 echoing ward, the prospect of being mowed down with grape- 
 shot if half-a-dozen scoundrels take it into their heads to 
 rebel, all these horrible things are nothing, they are the 
 roses of that life, as I said before. Any respectable man un- 
 lucky enough to be sent there must die of disgust before very 
 long. You have to live day and night with another convict; 
 you have to endure the company of five more at every meal, 
 and twenty-three at night ; you have to listen to their talk. 
 
 "The convicts have secret laws among themselves, madame ; 
 if you make an outlaw of yourself, they will murder you; 
 if you submit, you become a murderer. You have your choice 
 you must be either victim or executioner. After all, if 
 you die at a blow, that would put an end to you and your 
 troubles; but they are too cunning in wickedness, it is im- 
 possible to hold out against their hatred : any one whom they 
 dislike is completely at their mercy, they can make every 
 moment of his life, one constant torture worse than death. 
 Any man who repents and tries to behave well is the common 
 enemy, and more particularly they suspect him of tale-tell- 
 ing. They will take a man's life on a mere suspicion of tale- 
 telling. Every ward has its tribunal, where they try crimes 
 against the convicts' laws. It is an offence not to conform to 
 their customs, and a man may be punished for that. For 
 instance, everybody is bound to help the escape of a convict ; 
 'every convict has his chance of escape in turn, when the 
 whole prison is bound to give him help and protection. -It is 
 a crime to reveal anything done by a convict to further his 
 escape. I will not speak of the horrible moral tone of the 
 prison ; strictly speaking, it has nothing to do with the sub- 
 ject. The prison authorities chain men of opposite disposi- 
 tions together, so as to neutralize any attempt at escape or re- 
 bellion; and always put those who either could not endure
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 173 
 
 each other, or were suspicious of each other, on the same 
 chain." 
 
 "What did you do ?" asked Mme. Graslin. 
 
 "Oh ! it was like this, I had luck," said Farrabesche ; "the 
 lot never fell to me to kill a doomed man, I never voted the 
 death of anybody, no matter whom, I was never punished, 
 no one took a dislike to me, and I lived comfortably with 
 the three mates they gave me one after another all three of 
 them feared and liked me. But then I was well known in the 
 prison before I got there,, madame. A chauffeur! for I was 
 supposed to be one of those brigands ... I have seen 
 them do it," Farrabesche went on in a low voice, after a 
 pause, "but I never would help to torture folk, nor take any 
 of the stolen money. I was a 'refractory conscript/ that was 
 all. I used to help the rest, I was scout for them, I fought, I 
 was forlorn sentinel, rearguard, what you will, but I never 
 shed blood except in self-defence. Oh ! I told M. Bonnet and 
 my lawyer everything, and the judges knew quite well that I 
 was not a murderer. But, all the. same, I am a great criminal ; 
 the things that I have done are all against the law. 
 
 "Two of my old comrades had told them about me before 
 I came. I was a man of whom the greatest things might be 
 expected, they said. In the convicts' prison, you see, 
 madame, there is nothing like a character of that kind; it is 
 worth even more than money. A murder is a passport in this 
 republic of wretchedness; they leave you in peace. I did 
 nothing to destroy their opinion of me, I looked gloomy 
 and resigned; it was possible to be misled by my face, and 
 they were misled. My sullen manner and my silence were 
 taken for signs of ferocity. Every one there, convicts and 
 warders, young and old, respected me. I was president of 
 my ward. I was never tormented at night, nor suspected of 
 tale-telling. I lived honestly according to their rules; I 
 never refused to do any one a good turn; I never showed a 
 sign of disgust; in short, I 'howled with the wolves,' to all 
 appearance, and in my secret soul I prayed to God. My last 
 mate was a soldier, a lad of two-and-twenty, who had stolen
 
 174 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 something, and then deserted in consequence; I had him for 
 four years. We were friends, and wherever I may be I can 
 reckon on him when he comes out. The poor wretch, Guepin 
 they called him, was not a rascal, he was only a hare-brained 
 boy ; his ten years will sober him down. Oh ! if the rest had 
 known that it was religion that reconciled me to my fate; 
 that when my time was up I meant to live in some corner 
 without letting them know where I was, to forget those fear- 
 ful creatures, and never to be in the way of meeting one of 
 them again, they would very likely have driven me mad." 
 
 "But, then, suppose that some unhappy, sensitive boy had 
 been carried away by passion, and pardoned so far as the 
 death penalty is concerned ?" 
 
 "Madame, a murderer is never fully pardoned. They begin 
 by commuting the sentence for twenty years of penal servi- 
 tude. But for a decent young fellow it is a thing to shudder 
 at ! It is impossible to tell you about the life in store for 
 him; it would be a hundred times better for him that he 
 should die! Yes, for such a death on the scaffold is good 
 fortune." 
 
 "I did not dare to think it," said Mme. Graslin. 
 
 Veronique had grown white as wax. She leant her fore- 
 head against the balustrade to hide her face for several mo- 
 ments. Farrabesche did not know whether he ought to go 
 or stay. Then Mme. Graslin rose to her feet, and with an 
 almost queenly look she said, to Farrabesche's great astonish- 
 ment, "Thank you, my friend !" in tones that went to his 
 heart. Then after a pause "Where did you draw courage 
 to live and suffer as you did ?" she asked. 
 
 "Ah, madame, M. Bonnet had set a treasure in my soul ! 
 That is why I love him more than I have ever loved any one 
 else in this world." 
 
 "More than Catherine?" asked Mme. Graslin, with a cer- 
 tain bitterness in her smile. 
 
 "Ah, madame, almost as much." 
 
 "How did he do it ?" 
 
 "Madame, the things that he said and the tones of his
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 175 
 
 voice subdued me. It was Catherine who showed him the 
 way to the hiding-place in the chalk-land which I showed you 
 the other day. He came to me quite alone. He was the new 
 cure of Montegnac, he told me; I was his parishioner, I was 
 dear to him, he knew that I had only strayed from the path, 
 that I was not yet lost ; he did not mean to betray me, but to 
 save me; in fact, he said things that thrill you to the very 
 depths of your nature. And you see, madame, he can make 
 you do right with all the force that other people take to make 
 you do wrong. He told me, poor dear man, that Cath- 
 erine was a mother; I was about to give over two creatures 
 to shame and neglect. 'Very well/ said I, 'then they will be 
 just as I am ; I have no future before me.' He answered that 
 I had two futures before me, and both of them bad one in 
 this world, the other in the next unless I desisted and re- 
 formed. Here below I was bound to die on the scaffold. If 
 I were caught, my defence would break down in a court of 
 law. On the other hand, if I took advantage of the mildness 
 of the new Government towards 'refractory conscripts' of 
 many years' standing, and gave myself up, he would strain 
 every nerve to save my life. He would find me a clever advo- 
 cate who would pull me through with ten years' penal servi- 
 tude. After that M. Bonnet talked to me of another life. 
 Catherine cried like a Magdalen at that. There, madame," 
 said Farrabesche, holding out his right hand, "she laid her 
 face against this, and I felt it quite wet with her tears. She 
 prayed me to live ! M. le Cure promised to contrive a quiet 
 and happy lot for me and for my child, even in this district, 
 and undertook that no one should cast up the past to me. In 
 short, he lectured me as if I had been a little boy. After three 
 of those nightly visits I was as p^ant as a glove. Do you care 
 to know why, madame?" 
 
 Farrabesche and Mme. Graslin looked at each other, and 
 neither of them to their secret souls explained the real mo- 
 tive of their mutual curiosity. 
 
 ''Very well," the poor ticket-of-leave man continued, "the 
 first time when he had gone away, and Catherine wenr, too,
 
 176 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 to show him the way back, and I was left alone, I felt a kind 
 of freshness and calm and happiness such as I had not known 
 since I was a child. It was something like the happiness I 
 had felt with poor Catherine. The love of this dear man, 
 who had come to seek me out, the -interest that he took in 
 me, in my future, in my soul it all worked upon me and 
 changed me. It was as if a light arose in me. So long as 
 he was with me and talked, I held out. How could I help it ? 
 He was a priest, and we bandits do not eat their bread. But 
 when the sound of his footsteps and Catherine's died away 
 oh ! I was, as he said two days later, 'enlightened by grace.' 
 
 "From that time forwards, God gave me strength to endure 
 everything the jail, the sentence, the putting on of the 
 irons, the journey, the life in the convicts' prison. I reckoned 
 upon M. Bonnet's promise as upon the truth of the Gospel ; 
 I looked on my sufferings as a payment of arrears. Whenever 
 things grew unbearable, I used to see, at the end of the ten 
 years, this house in the woods, and my little Benjamin and 
 Catherine there. Good M. Bonnet, he kept his promise; but 
 some one else failed me. Catherine was not at the prison 
 door when I came out, nor yet at the trysting place en the 
 common lands. She must have died of grief. That is why 
 I am always sad. Now, thanks to you, madame, I shall hare 
 work to do that needs doing; I shall put myself into K body 
 and soul, so will my boy for whom I live 
 
 "You have shown me how it was that M. le Cure could 
 bring about the changes in his parish " 
 
 "Oh ! nothing can resist him," said Farrabesche. 
 
 "No, no. I know that," Veronique answered briefly, and 
 she dismissed Farrabesche with a sign of farewell. 
 
 Farrabesche went. Most dof that day Yeronique spent in 
 pacing to and fro along the terrace, in spite of the drizzling 
 rain that fell till evening came on. She was gloomy and sad. 
 When Yeronique's brows were thus contracted, neither her 
 mother nor Aline dared to break in on her mood ; she did not 
 Bee her mother talking in the dusk with M. Bonnot, who, 
 seeing that she must be roused from this appalling dejection*
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 177 
 
 the child to find her. Little Francis went up to his 
 mother and took her hand, and Veronique suffered herself 
 to be led away. At the sight of M. Bonnet she started with 
 something almost like dismay. The cure led the way back 
 to the terrace. 
 
 "Well, madame," he said, "what can you have been talking 
 about with Farrabesche ?" 
 
 Veronique did not wish to lie nor to answer the question; 
 she replied to it by another : 
 
 "Was he your first victory ?" 
 
 "Yes," said M. Bonnet. "If I could win him, I felt sure 
 of Montegnac; and so it proved." 
 
 Veronique pressed M. Bonnet's hand. 
 
 "From to-day I am your penitent, M. le Cure," she said, 
 with tears in her voice; "to-morrow I will make you a 
 general confession." 
 
 The last words plainly spoke of a great inward struggle 
 and a hardly won victory over herself. The cure led the 
 way back to the chateau without a word, and stayed with her 
 till dinner, talking over the vast improvements to be made 
 in Montegnac. 
 
 "Agriculture is a question of time," he said. "The little 
 that I know about it has made me to understand how much 
 may be done by a well-spent winter. Here are the rains be- 
 ginning, you see; before long the mountains will be covered 
 with snow, and your operations will be impossible; so hurry 
 M. Grossetete." 
 
 M. Bonnet exerted himself to talk, and drew Mme. Graslin 
 into the conversation; gradually her thoughts were forced to 
 take another turn, and by the time he left her she had almost 
 recovered from the day's excitement. But even so, Mme. 
 Sauviat saw that her daughter was so terribly agitated that 
 she spent the night with her. 
 
 Two days later a messenger sent by M. Grossetete arrived 
 with the following letters for Mme. Graslin :
 
 178 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Grossetete to Mme. Oraslin. 
 
 "MY DEAR CHILD, Horses are not easily to be found, but 
 I hope that you are satisfied with the three which I sent you. 
 If you need draught-horses, or plow-horses, they must be 
 looked for elsewhere. It is better in any case to use oxen 
 for plowing and as draught animals. In all districts where 
 they use horses on the land, they lose their capital as soon as 
 the animal is past work, while an ox, instead of being a loss, 
 yields a profit to the farmer. 
 
 "I approve your enterprise in every respect, my child; 
 you will find in it an outlet for the devouring mental energy 
 which was turned against yourself and wearing you out. But 
 when you ask me to find you, over and above the horses, a 
 man able to second you, and more particularly to enter into 
 your views, you ask me for one of those rare birds that we 
 rear, it is true, in the provinces, but which we in no case 
 keep among us. The training of the noble animal is too 
 lengthy and too risky a speculation for us to undertake, and 
 besides, we are afraid of these very clever folk 'eccentrics,' 
 we call them. 
 
 "As a matter of fact, too, the men who are classed in the 
 scientific category in which you are fain to find a co-op- 
 erator are, as a rule, so prudent and so well provided for, that 
 I hardly liked to write to tell you how impossible it would 
 be to come by such a prize. You asked me for a poet, or, if 
 you prefer it, a madman; but all our madmen betake them- 
 selves to Paris. I did speak to one or two young fellows en- 
 gaged on the land survey and assessments, contractors for em- 
 bankments, or foremen employed on canal cuttings ; but none 
 of them thought it worth their while to entertain your pro- 
 posals. Chance all at once threw in my way the very man you 
 want, a young man whom I thought to help ; for you will see 
 by his letter that one ought not to set about doing a kindness 
 in a happy-go-lucky fashion, and, indeed, an act of kindness 
 requires more thinking about than anything else on this 
 earth. You can never tell whether what seemed to you to
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 179 
 
 be right at the time may not do harm by and by. By help- 
 ing others we shape our own destinies ; I see that now " 
 
 As Mme. Graslin read those words, the letter dropped from 
 her hands. For some moments she sat deep in thought. 
 
 "Oh, God," she cried, "when wilt Thou cease to smite me 
 by every man's hand ?" 
 
 Then she picked up the letters and read on : 
 
 "Gerard seems to me to have plenty of enthusiasm and 
 a cool head ; the very man for you ! Paris is in a ferment 
 just now with this leaven of new doctrine, and I shall be de- 
 lighted if the young fellow keeps out of the snares spread by 
 ambitious spirits, who work upon the instincts of the generous 
 youth of France. The rather torpid existence of the provinces 
 is not altogether what I like for him, but neither do I like 
 the idea of the excitement of the life in Paris, and the en- 
 thusiasm for renovating, which urges youngsters into the 
 new ways. You, and you only, know my opinions; to me it 
 seems that the world of ideas revolves on its axis much as the 
 material world does. Here is this poor protege of mine 
 wanting impossibilities. ISTo power on earth could stand be- 
 fore ambitions so violent, imperious, and absolute. I have 
 a liking myself for a jog trot ; I like to go slowly in politics, 
 and have but very little taste for the social topsy-turvydom 
 which all these lofty spirits are minded to inflict upon us. To 
 you I confide the principles of an old and crusted supporter 
 of the monarchy, for you are discreet. I hold my tongue 
 here among these good folk, who believe more and more in 
 progress the further they get into a mess ; but for all that, it 
 hurts me to see the irreparable damage done already to our 
 dear country. 
 
 "So I wrote and told the young man that a task worthy 
 of him was waiting for him here. He is coming to see you; 
 for though his letter (which I enclose) will give you a very- 
 fair idea of him, you would like to see him as well, would 
 you not? You women can tell so much from the look of
 
 180 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 people; and besides, you ought not to have any one, however 
 insignificant, in your service unless you like him. If he is 
 not the man you want, you can decline his services; but if 
 he suits you, dear child, cure him of his flimsily disguised 
 ambitions, induce him to adopt the happy and peaceful life 
 of the fields, a life in which beneficence is perpetual, where all 
 the qualities of great and strong nature are continually 
 brought into play, where the products of Nature are a daily 
 source of new wonder, and a man finds worthy occupation in 
 making a real advance and practical improvements. I do 
 not in any way overlook the fact that great deeds come of 
 great ideas great theories; but as ideas of that kind are 
 seldom met with, I think that, for the most part, practical at- 
 tainments are worth more than ideas. A man who brings a 
 bit of land into cultivation, or a tree or fruit to perfection, 
 who makes grass grow where grass would not grow before, 
 ranks a good deal higher than the seeker after formulas for 
 humanity. In what has Newton's science changed the lot of 
 the worker in the fields ? . . . Ah ! my dear, I loved you 
 before, but to-day, appreciating to the full the task which 
 you have set before you, I love you far more. You are not 
 forgotten here in Limoges, and every one admires your great 
 resolution of improving Montegnac. Give us our little due, 
 in that we have the wit to admire nobility when we see it, 
 and do not forget that the first of your admirers is also 
 your earliest friend. 
 
 "F. GROSSETETE." 
 
 Gerard to Grossetete. 
 
 "I come to you, monsieur, with sad confidences, but you 
 have been like a father to me, when you might have been 
 simply a patron. So to you alone who have made me anv- 
 thing that I am, can I make them. I have fallen a victim 
 to a cruel disease, a disease, moreover, not of the body; I am 
 conscious that I ?.m completely unfitted by my thoughts, feel- 
 ings, and opinions, and by the whole bent of my mind, to
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 181 
 
 do what is expected of me by the Government and hy so- 
 ciety. Perhaps this will seem to you to be a piece of ingrati- 
 tude, but it is simply and solely an indictment that I ad- 
 dress to you. 
 
 "When I was twelve years old you saw the signs of a cer- 
 tain aptitude for the exact sciences, and a precocious am- 
 bition to succeed, in a working-man's son, and it was through 
 you, my generous godfather, that I took my flight towards 
 higher spheres; but for you I should be following out my 
 original destiny ; I should be a carpenter like my poor father, 
 who did not live to rejoice in my success. And most surely, 
 monsieur, you did me a kindness; there is no day on which 
 I do not bless you; and so, perhaps, it is I who am in the 
 wrong. But whether right or wrong, I am unhappy; and 
 does not the fact that I pour out my complaints to you set 
 you very high ? Is it not as if I made of you a supreme judge, 
 like God ? In any case, I trust to your indulgence. 
 
 "I studied the exact sciences so hard between the ages of 
 sixteen and eighteen that I made myself ill, as you know. 
 My whole future depended on my admission to the ^cole 
 polytechnique. The work that I did at that time was a dis- 
 proportionate training for the intellect ; I all but killed my- 
 self ! I studied day and night ; I exerted myself to do more 
 than I was perhaps fit for. I was determined to pass my ex- 
 aminations so well that I should be sure not only of admit- 
 tance into the Ecole, but of a free education there, for I 
 wanted to spare you the expense, and I succeeded ! 
 
 "It makes me shudder now to think of that appalling con- 
 scription of brains yearly made over to the Government by 
 family ambition; a conscription which demands such severe 
 study at a time when a lad is almost a man, and growing fast 
 in every way, cannot but do incalculable mischief; many 
 precious faculties which later would have developed and 
 growTi strong and powerful, are extinguished by the light of 
 the student's lamp. Nature's laws are inexorable; they are 
 not to be thrust aside by the schemes nor at the pleasure of 
 society; and the laws of the physical world, the laws which 
 '3
 
 182 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 govern the nature without, hold good no less of human na- 
 ture every abuse must be paid for. If you must have fruit 
 out of season, you have it from a forcing house either at the 
 expense of the tree or of the quality of the fruit. La Quin- 
 tinie killed the orange-trees that Louis XIV. might have a 
 bouquet of orange blossoms every morning throughout the 
 year. Any heavy demand made on a still growing intellect 
 is a draft on its future. 
 
 "The pressing and special need of our age is the spirit of 
 the lawgiver. Europe has so far seen no lawgiver since Jesus 
 Christ ; and Christ, who gave us no vestige of a political code, 
 left His work incomplete. For example, before technical 
 schools were established, and the present means of filling 
 them with scholars was adopted, did they call in one of the 
 great thinkers who hold in their heads the immensity of the 
 sum of the relations of the institution to human brain-power ; 
 who can balance the advantages and disadvantages, and study 
 in the past the laws of the future? Was any inquiry made 
 into the after-lives of men who, for their misfortune, knew 
 the circle of the sciences at too early an age ? Was any esti- 
 mate of their rarity attempted ? Was their fate ascertained ? 
 Was it discovered how they contrived to endure the continual 
 strain of thought ? How many of them died like Pascal, pre- 
 maturely, worn out by science ? Some, again, lived to old age ; 
 when did these begin their studies ? Was it known then, is it 
 known now as I write, what conformation of the brain is best 
 fitted 'to stand the strain, and to cope prematurely with 
 knowledge? Is it so much as suspected that this is before all 
 things a physiological question? 
 
 "Well, I think myself that the general rule is that the 
 vegetative period of adolescence should be prolonged. There 
 are exceptions; there are some so constituted that they are 
 capable of this effort in youth, but the result is the shorten- 
 ing of life in most cases. Clearly the man of genius who can 
 stand the precocious exercise of his faculties is bound to be 
 an exception among exceptions. If medical testimony and 
 social data bear me out, our way of recruiting for the tech-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 183 
 
 nical schools in France works as much havoc among the best 
 human specimens of each generation as La Quintinie's pro- 
 cess among the orange-trees. 
 
 "But to continue (for I will append my doubts to each 
 series of facts), I began my work anew at the Ecole, and with 
 more enthusiasm than ever. I meant to leave it as success- 
 fully as I had entered it. Between the ages of nineteen and 
 one-and-twenty I worked with all my might, and developed 
 my faculties by their constant exercise. Those two years set 
 the crown on the three which came before them, when I was 
 only preparing to do great things. And then, what pride did 
 I not feel when I had won the privilege of choosing the career 
 most to my mind ? I might be a military or marine engineer, 
 might go on the staff of the Artillery, into the Mines de- 
 partment, or the Eoads and Bridges. I took your advice, 
 and became a civil engineer. 
 
 "Yet where I triumphed, how many fell out of the ranks ! 
 You know that from year to year the Government raises the 
 standard of the Ecol'e. The work grows harder and more 
 trying from time to time. The course of preparatory study 
 through which I went^was nothing compared with the work 
 at fever-heat in the Ecole, to the end that every physical 
 science mathematics, astronomy, and chemistry, and the 
 terminologies of each may be packed into the heads of so 
 many young men between the ages of nineteen and twenty- 
 one. The Government here in France, which in so may ways 
 seems to aim at taking the place of the paternal authority, 
 has in this respect no bowels no father's pity for its chil- 
 dren; it makes its experiments in anima vtti. The ugly 
 statistics of the mischief it has wrought have never been asked 
 for ; no one has troubled to inquire how many cases of brain 
 fever there have been during the last thirty-six years; how 
 many explosions of despair among those young lads; no one 
 takes account of the moral destruction which decimates the 
 victims. I lay stress on this painful aspect of the problem, 
 because it occurs by the way, and before the final result; for 
 a few weaklings the result comes soon instead of late. You
 
 184 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 know, besides, that these victims, whose minds work slowly, 
 or who, it may be, are temporarily stupefied with overwork, 
 are allowed to stay for three years instead of two at the Ecole, 
 but the way these are regarded there has no very favorable in- 
 fluence on their capacity. In fact, it may chance that young 
 men, who at a later day will show that they have something 
 in them, may leave the Ecole without an appointment at all, 
 because at the final examination they do not exhibit the 
 amount of knowledge required of them. These are 'plucked,' 
 as they say, and Napoleon used to make sub-lieutenants of 
 them. In these days the 'plucked' candidate represents a 
 vast loss of capital invested by families, and a loss of time 
 for the lad himself. 
 
 "But, after all, I myself succeeded ! At the age of one- 
 and-twenty I had gone over all the ground discovered in 
 mathematics by men of genius, and I was impatient to dis- 
 tinguish myself by going further. The desire is so natural 
 that almost every student when he leaves the Ecole fixes his 
 eyes on the sun called glory in an invisible heaven. The first 
 thought in all our minds was to be a Newton, a Laplace, or a 
 Vauban. Such are the efforts which France requires of 
 young men who leave the famous Ecole polytechnique ! 
 
 "And now let us see what becomes of the men sorted and 
 sifted with such care out of a whole generation. At one-and- 
 twenty we dream dreams, a whole lifetime lies before us, we 
 expect wonders. I entered the Schood of Koads and Bridges, 
 and became a civil engineer. I studied construction, and 
 with what enthusiasm ! You must remember it. In 1826, 
 when I left the School, at the age of twenty-four, I was still 
 only a civil engineer on my promotion, with a Government 
 grant of a hundred and fifty francs a month. The worst 
 paid book-keeper in Paris will earn as much by the time he 
 is eighteen, and with four hours' work in the day. By un- 
 hoped-for good luck, it may be because my studies had 
 brought me distinction, I received an appointment as a sur- 
 veyor in 1828. I was twenty-six years old. They sent me, 
 you know where, into a sub-prefecture with a salary of two
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 185 
 
 thousand five hundred francs. The money matters nothing. 
 My lot is at any rate more brilliant than a carpenter's son 
 has a right to expect; but what journeyman grocer put into 
 a shop at the age of sixteen will not be fairly on the way to 
 an independence by the time he is six-and-twenty ? 
 
 "Then I found out the end to which these terrible displays 
 of intelligence were directed, and why the gigantic efforts, 
 required of us by the Government, were made. The Govern- 
 ment set me to count paving-stones and measure the heaps 
 of road-metal by the waysides. I must repair, keep in order, 
 and occasionally construct runnels and culverts, maintain the 
 ways, clean out, and occasionally open ditches. At the office 
 I must answer all questions relating to the alignment or 
 the planting and felling of trees. These are, in fact, the 
 principal and often the only occupations of an ordinary sur- 
 veyor. Perhaps from time to time there is some bit of level- 
 ing to be done, and that we are obliged to do ourselves, 
 though any of the foremen with his practical experience could 
 do the work a good deal better than we can with all our 
 science. 
 
 "There are nearly four hundred of us altogether ordinary 
 surveyors and assistants and as there are only some hundred 
 odd engineers-in-chief, all the subordinates cannot hope for 
 promotion; there is practically no higher rank to absorb the 
 engineers-in-chief, for twelve or fifteen inspectors-general or 
 divisionaries scarcely count, and their posts are almost as 
 much of sinecures in our corps as colonelcies in the artillery 
 when the battery is united with it. An ordinary civil en- 
 gineer, like a captain of artillery, knows all that is known 
 about his work; he ought not to need any one to look after 
 him except an administrative head to connect the eighty-six 
 engineers with each other and the government, for a single 
 engineer with two assistants is quite enough for a department. 
 A hierarchy in such a body as ours works in this way. Ener- 
 getic minds are subordinated to old effete intelligences, who 
 think themselves bound to distort and alter (they think for 
 the better) the drafts submitted to them; perhaps they do
 
 186 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 this simply to give some reason for their existence ; and this, 
 it seems to me, is the only influence exerted on public works 
 in France by the General Council of Roads and Bridges. 
 
 "Let us suppose, however, that between the ages of thirty 
 and forty I become an engineer of the first-class, and am 
 an engineer-in-chief by the time I am fifty. Alas ! I foresee 
 my future ; it lies before my eyes. My engineer-in-chief is a 
 man of sixty. He left the famous Ecole with distinction, 
 as I did; he has grown gray in two departments over such 
 work as I am doing; he has become the most commonplace 
 man imaginable, has fallen from the heights of attainment 
 he once reached; nay, more than that, he is not even abreast 
 of science. Science has made progress, and he has remained 
 stationary ; worse still, has forgotten what he once knew ! 
 The man who came to the front at the age of twenty-two with 
 every sign of real ability has nothing of it left now but the 
 appearance. At the very outset of his career his education 
 was especially directed to mathematics and the exact sciences, 
 and he took no interest in anything that was not 'in his line.' 
 You would scarcely believe it, but the man knows absolutely 
 nothing of other branches of learning. Mathematics have 
 dried up his heart and brain. I cannot tell any one but you 
 what a nullity he really is, screened by the name of the Ecole 
 polytechnique. The label is impressive; and people, being 
 prejudiced in his favor, do not dare to throw any doubt on 
 his ability. But to you I may say that his befogged intellects 
 have cost the department in one affair a million francs, where 
 two hundred thousand should have been ample. I was for 
 protesting, for opening the prefect's eyes, and what not ; but 
 a friend of mine, another surveyor, told me about a man in 
 the corps who became a kind of black sheep in the eyes of 
 administration by doing something of this sort. 'Would you 
 yourself be very much pleased, when you are engineer-in- 
 chief, to have your mistakes shown up by a subordinate?' 
 asked he. 'Your engineer-in-chief will be a divisionary in- 
 spector before very long. As soon as one of us makes some 
 egregious blunder, the Administration (which, of course,
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 187 
 
 must never be in the wrong) withdraws the perpetrator from 
 active service and makes him an inspector.' That is how the 
 reward due to a capable man becomes a sort of premium on 
 stupidity. 
 
 "All France saw one disaster in the heart of Paris, the 
 miserable collapse of the first suspension bridge which an 
 engineer (a member of the Academic des Sciences moreover) 
 endeavored to construct, a collapse caused by blunders which 
 would not have been made by the constructor of the Canal 
 de Briare in the time of Henri IV., nor by the monk who 
 built the Pont Eoyal. Him too the Administration consoled 
 by a summons to the Board of the General Council. 
 
 "Are the technical schools really manufactories of incom- 
 petence? The problem requires prolonged observation. If 
 there is anything in what I say, a reform is needed, at any 
 rate in the way in which they are carried on, for I do not 
 venture to question the usefulness of the Ecoles. Still, look- 
 ing back over the past, does it appear that France has ever 
 lacked men of great ability at need, or the talent she tries 
 to hatch as required in these days by Monge's method ? What 
 school turned out Vauban save the great school called 'voca- 
 tion?' Who was Piquet's master? When genius has raised 
 itself above the social level, urged upwards by a vocation, it 
 is almost always fully equipped ; and in that case your man is 
 no 'specialist,' but has something universal in his gift. I 
 do not believe that any engineer who ever left the Ecole 
 could build one of the miracles of architecture which 
 Leonardo da Vinci reared ; Leonardo at once mechanician, 
 architect, and painter, one of the inventors of hydraulic 
 science, the indefatigable constructor of canals. They are so 
 accustomed while yet in their teens to the bald simplicity of 
 geometry, that by the time they leave the Ecole they have 
 quite lost all feeling for grace or ornament; a column to 
 their eyes i* a useless waste of material ; they return to the 
 point where art begins on utility they take their stand, and 
 stay there. 
 
 "But this is as nothing compared with the disease which
 
 188 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 is consuming me. I feel that a most terrible change is being 
 wrought in me; I feel that my energy and faculties, after 
 the exorbitant strain put upon them, are dwindling and grow- 
 ing feeble. The influence of my humdrum life is creeping 
 over me. After such efforts as mine, I feel that I am destined 
 to do great things, and I am confronted by the most trivial 
 task work, such as verifying yards of road metal, inspecting 
 highways, checking inventories of stores. I have not enough 
 to do to fill two hours in the day. 
 
 "I watch my colleagues marry and fall out of touch with 
 modern thought. Is my ambition really immoderate? I 
 should like to serve my country. My country required me to 
 give proof of no ordinary powers, and bade me become an en- 
 cyclopedia of the sciences and here I am, folding my arms 
 in an obscure corner of a province. I am not allowed to 
 leave the place where I am penned up, to exercise my wits 
 by trying new and useful experiments elsewhere. A vague 
 indefinable grudge is the certain reward awaiting any one of 
 us who follows his own inspirations, and does more than the 
 department requires of him. The most that such a man ought 
 to hope for is that his overweening presumption may be 
 passed over, his talent neglected, while his project receives 
 decent burial in the pigeon-holes at headquarters. What will 
 Vicat's reward be, I wonder? (Between ourselves, Yicat 
 is the only man among us who has made any real advance in 
 the science of construction.) 
 
 "The General Council of Eoads and Bridges is partly made 
 up of men worn out by long and sometimes honorable ser- 
 vice, but whose remaining brain power only exerts itself nega- 
 tively; these gentlemen erase anything that they cannot un- 
 derstand at their age, and act as a sort of extinguisher to be 
 put when required on audacious innovations. The Council 
 might have been created for the express purpose of paralyz- 
 ing the arm of the generous younger generation, which only 
 asks for leave to work, and would fain serve France. 
 
 "Monstrous things happen in Paris. The future of a 
 province depends on the visa of these bureaucrats. I have not
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 189 
 
 time to tell you about all the intrigues which balk the best 
 schemes; for them the best schemes are, as a matter of fact, 
 those which open up the best prospects of money-making to 
 the greed of speculators and companies, which knock most 
 abuses on the head, for abuses are always stronger than the 
 spirit of improvement in France. In five years' time my old 
 self-will no longer exists. I shall see my ambitions die out in 
 me, and my noble desire to use the faculties which my country 
 bade me display, and then left to rust in my obscure corner. 
 
 "Taking the most favorable view possible, my outlook 
 seems to me to be very poor. I took advantage of leave of ab- 
 sence to come to Paris. I want to change my career, to find 
 scope for my energies, knowledge, and activity. I shall send 
 in my resignation, and go to some country where men with 
 my special training are needed, where great things may be 
 done. If none of all this is possible, I will throw in my lot 
 with some of these new doctrines which seem as if they must 
 make some great change in the present order of things, by 
 directing the workers to better purpose. For what are we but 
 laborers without work, tools lying idle in the warehouse ? We 
 are organized as if it was a question of shaking the globe, 
 and we are required to do nothing. 
 
 "I am conscious that there is something great in me which 
 is pining away and will perish; I tell you this with mathe- 
 matical explicitness. But I should like to have your advice 
 before I make a change in my condition. I look on myself as 
 your son, and should never take any important step with- 
 out consulting you, for your experience is as great as your 
 goodness. I know, of course, that when the Government 
 has obtained its specially trained men, it can no more set its 
 engineers to construct public monuments than it can declare 
 war to give the army an opportunity of winning great battles 
 and of finding out which are its great captains. But, then, 
 as the man has never failed to appear when circumstances 
 called for him ; as, at the moment when there is much money 
 to be spent and great things to be done, one of these unique 
 men of genius springs up from the crowd; and as, particu-
 
 IdO THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 larly in matters of this kind, one Vauban is enough at a time, 
 nothing could better demonstrate the utter uselessness of the 
 institution. In conclusion, when a picked man's mental 
 energies have been stimulated by all this preparation, how 
 can the Government help seeing that he will make any amount 
 of struggle before he allows himself to be effaced ? Is it wise 
 policy ? What is it but a way of kindling burning ambition ? 
 Would they bid all those perfervid heads learn to calculate 
 anything and everything but the probabilities of their own 
 futures? 
 
 "There are, no doubt, exceptions among some six hundred 
 young men, some firm and unbending characters, who decline 
 to be withdrawn in this way from circulation. I know some of 
 them ; but if the story of their struggles with men and things 
 could be told in full; if it were known how that, while full 
 of useful projects and ideas which would put life and wealth 
 into stagnant country districts, they meet with hindrances 
 put in their way by the very men who (so the Government 
 led them to believe) would give them help and countenance, 
 the strong man, the man of talent, the man whose nature is 
 a miracle, would be thought a hundred times more unfor- 
 tunate and more to be pitied than the man whose degenerate 
 nature tamely resigns himself to the atrophy of his faculties. 
 
 "So I would prefer to direct some private commercial or 
 industrial enterprise, and live on very little, while trying to 
 find a solution of some one of the many unsolved problems of 
 industry and modern life, rather than remain where I am. 
 You will say that there is nothing to prevent me from em- 
 ploying my powers as it is; that in the silence of this hum- 
 drum life I might set myself to find the solution of one of 
 those problems which presses on humanity. Ah ! monsieur, 
 do you not understand what the influence of the provinces is ; 
 the enervating effect of a life just sufficiently busy to fill the 
 dnys with all but futile work, but yet not full enough to 
 give occupation to the powers so fully developed by such a 
 training as ours? You will not think, my dear guardian, 
 that I am eaten up with the ambition of money-making, or
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 191 
 
 consumed with a mad desire for fame. I have not learned to 
 calculate to so little purpose that I cannot measure the 
 emptiness of fame. The inevitable activity of the life has 
 led me not to think of marriage ; and looking at my present 
 prospects, I have not so good an opinion of existence as to 
 give such a sorry present to another self. Although I look 
 upon money as one of the most powerful instruments that 
 can be put in the hands of a civilized man, money is, after 
 all, only a means. My sole pleasure lies in the assurance that 
 I am serving my country. To have employment for my facul- 
 ties in a congenial atmosphere would be the height of enjoy- 
 ment for me. Perhaps among your acquaintance in your 
 part of the world, in the circle on which you shine, you might 
 hear of something which requires some of the aptitude which 
 you know that I possess ; I will wait six months for an answer 
 from you. 
 
 "These things which I am writing to you, dear patron and 
 friend, others are thinking. I have seen a good many of my 
 colleagues or old scholars at the Ecole, caught, as I was, in 
 the snare of a special training; ordnance surveyors, captain- 
 professors, captains in the Artillery, doomed (as they see) to 
 be captains for the rest of their days, bitterly regretting that 
 they did not go into the regular army. Again and again, 
 in fact, we have admitted to each other in confidence that 
 we are victims of a long mystification, which we only dis- 
 cover when it is too late to draw back, when the mill-horse is 
 used to the round, and the sick man accustomed to his 
 disease. 
 
 "After looking carefully into these melancholy results, I 
 have asked myself the following questions, which I send to 
 you, as a man of sense, whose mature wisdom will see all that 
 lies in them, knowing that they are fruit of thought refined 
 by the fires of painful experience. 
 
 "What end has the Government in view? To obtain the 
 best abilities? If so, the Government sets to work to obtain 
 a directly opposite result : if it had hated talent, it could not 
 have had better success in producing respectable mediocrities.
 
 392 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Or does it intend to open out a career to selected intelli- 
 gence ? It could not well have given it a more mediocre posi- 
 tion. There is not a man sent out by the Ecoles who does not 
 regret between fifty and sixty that he fell into the snare 
 concealed by the offers of the Government. Does it mean 
 to secure men of genius? What really great man have the 
 Ecoles turned out since 1790? Would Cachin, the genius 
 to whom we owe Cherbourg, have existed but for Napoleon? 
 It was Imperial despotism which singled him out; the Con- 
 stitutional Administration would have stifled him. Does the 
 Academic des Sciences number many members who have 
 passed through the technical schools ? Two or three, it may 
 be; but the man of genius invariably appears from outside. 
 In the particular sciences which are studied at these schools, 
 genius obeys no laws but its own; it only develops under 
 circumstances over which we have no control; and neither 
 the Government, nor anthropology, knows the conditions. 
 Riquet, Perronet, Leonardo da Vinci, Cachin, Palladio, 
 Brunelleschi, Michael Angelo, Bramante, Vauban, and Vicat 
 all derived their genius from unobserved causes and prepara- 
 tion to which we give the name of chance the great word 
 for fools to fall back upon. Schools or no schools, these 
 sublime workers have never been lacking in every age. And 
 now, does the Government, by means of organizing, obtain 
 works of public utility better done or at a cheaper rate? 
 
 "In the first place, private enterprise does very well with- 
 out professional engineers ; and, in the second, State-directed 
 works are the most expensive of all; and besides the actual 
 outlay, there is the cost of the maintenance of the great staff 
 of the Roads and Bridges Department. Finally, in other 
 countries where they have no institutions of this kind, in 
 Germany, England, and Italy, such public works are carried 
 out quite as well, and cost less than ours in France. Each 
 of the three countries is well known for new and useful in- 
 ventions of this kind. I know it is the fashion to speak of 
 our Ecoles as if they were the envy of Europe; but Europe 
 has been watching us these fifteen years, and nowhere will
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 193 
 
 you find the like instituted elsewhere. The English, those 
 shrewd men of business, have uetter schools among their 
 working classes, where they train practical men, who become 
 conspicuous at once when they rise from practical work to 
 theory. Stephenson and Macadam were not pupils in these 
 famous institutions of ours. 
 
 "But where is the use ? "When young and clever engineers, 
 men of spirit and enthusiasm, have solved at the outset of their 
 career the problem of the maintenance of the roads of France, 
 which requires hundreds of millions of francs every twenty- 
 five years, which roads are in a deplorable state, it is in vain 
 for them to publish learned treatises and memorials; every- 
 thing is swallowed down by the board of direction, every- 
 thing goes in and nothing comes out of a central bureau in 
 Paris, where the old men are jealous of their juniors, and 
 high places are refuges for superannuated blunderers. 
 
 "This is how, with a body of educated men distributed all 
 over France, a body which is part of the machinery of ad- 
 ministrative government, and to whom the country looks 
 for direction and enlightenment on the great questions 
 within their department, it will probably happen that we in 
 France shall still be talking about railways when other coun- 
 tries have finished theirs. Now, if ever France ought to 
 demonstrate the excellence of her technical schools as an in- 
 stitution, should it not be in a magnificent public work of 
 this special kind, destined to change the face of many coun- 
 tries, and to double the length of human life by modify- 
 ing the laws of time and space ? Belgium, the United States, 
 Germany, and England, without an Ecole polytechnique, will 
 have a network of railways while our engineers are still 
 tracing out the plans, and hideous jobbery lurking behind 
 the projects will check their execution. You cannot lay a 
 stone in France until half a score of scribblers in Paris have 
 drawn up a driveling report that nobody wants. The Gov- 
 ernment, therefore, gets no good of its technical schools ; and 
 as for the individual he is tied down to a mediocre career, 
 his life is a cruel delusion. Certain it is that with the abilities
 
 194 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 which he displayed between the ages of sixteen and twenty- 
 five he would have gained more reputation and riches if he 
 had been left to shift for himself than he will acquire in the 
 career to which Government condemns him. As a merchant, 
 a scientific man, or a soldier, this picked man would have 
 a wide field before him, his precious faculties and enthusiasm 
 would not have been prematurely and stupidly exhausted. 
 Then where is the advance? Assuredly the individual and 
 the State both lose by the present system. Does not an ex- 
 periment carried on for half a century show that changes 
 are needed in the way the institution is worked ? What priest- 
 hood qualifies a man for the task of selecting from a whole 
 generation those who shall hereafter be the learned class of 
 France? What studies should not these high priests of Des- 
 tiny have made? A knowledge of mathematics is, perhaps, 
 scarcely so necessary as physiological knowledge; and does 
 it not seem to you that something of that clairvoyance which 
 is the wizardry of great men might be required too? As 
 a matter of fact, the examiners are old professors, men 
 worthy of all honor, grown old in harness; their duty it is 
 to discover the best memories, and there is an end of it; 
 they can do nothing but what is required of them. Truly 
 their functions should be the most important ones in the 
 State, and call for extraordinary men to fulfil them. 
 
 "Do not think, my dear friend and patron, that my censure 
 is confined to the Ecole through which I myself passed; it 
 applies not only to the institution itself, but also and still 
 more to the methods by which lads are admitted; that is to 
 say, to the system of competitive examination. Competi- 
 tion is a modern invention, and essentially bad. It is bad 
 not only in learning but in every possible connection, in the 
 arts, in every election made of men, projects, or things. It 
 is unfortunate that our famous schools should not have 
 turned out better men than any other chance assemblage of 
 lads; but it is still more disgraceful that among the prize- 
 men at the Institute there has been no great painter, mu- 
 sician, architect, or sculptor; even as for the past twenty
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON . 195 
 
 years the general elections have swept no single great states- 
 man to the front out of all the shoals of mediocrities. My 
 remarks have a bearing upon an error which is vitiating both 
 politics and education in France. This cruel error is based 
 on the following principle, which organizers have over- 
 looked : 
 
 " 'Nothing in experience or in the nature of things can 
 warrant the assumption that the intellectual qualities of early 
 manhood will l)e those of maturity.' 
 
 "At the present time I have been brought in contact with 
 several distinguished men who are studying the many moral 
 maladies which prey upon France. They recognize, as I do, 
 the fact that secondary education forces a sort of temporary 
 capacity in those who have neither present work nor future 
 prospects; and that the enlightenment diffused by primary 
 education is of no advantage to the State, because it is bereft 
 of belief and sentiment. 
 
 "Our whole educational system calls for sweeping reform, 
 which should be carried out under the direction of a man of 
 profound knowledge, a man with a strong will, gifted with 
 that legislative faculty which, possibly, is found in Jean- 
 Jacques Bousseau alone of all moderns. 
 
 "Then, perhaps, the superfluous specialists might find em- 
 ployment in elementary teaching; it is badly needed by the 
 mass of the people. We have not enough patient and devoted 
 teachers for the training of these classes. The deplorable 
 prevalence of crimes and misdemeanors points to a weak spot 
 in our social system the one-sided education which tends to 
 weaken the fabric of society, by teaching the masses to think 
 sufficiently to reject the religious beliefs necessary for their 
 government, yet not enough to raise them to a conception 
 of the theory of obedience and duty, which is the last word 
 of transcendental philosophy. It is impossible to put a whole 
 nation through a course of Kant; and belief and use and 
 wont are more wholesome for the people than study and 
 ai-gument. 
 
 "If I had to begin again from the very beginning, I dare
 
 196 - THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 say I might enter a seminary and incline to the life of a 
 simple country parson or a village schoolmaster. But now 
 I have gone too far to be a mere elementary teacher; and, 
 besides, a wider field of action is open to me than the school- 
 house or the parish. I cannot go the whole way with the 
 Saint-Simonians, with whom I am tempted to throw in my 
 lot; but with all their mistakes, they have laid a finger on 
 many weak points in our social system, the results of our 
 legislation, which will be palliated rather than remedied 
 simply putting off the evil day for France. Good-bye, dear 
 sir; in spite of these observations of mine, rest assured of my 
 respectful and faithful friendship, a friendship which can 
 only grow with time. 
 
 "GREGOIRE GERARD." 
 
 Acting on old business habit, Grossetete had indorsed the 
 letter with the rough draft of a reply, and written beneath 
 it the sacramental word "Answered." 
 
 "MY DEAR GERARD, It is the more unnecessary to enter 
 upon any discussion of the observations contained in your 
 letter, since that chance (to make use of the word for fools) 
 enables me to make you an offer which will practically ex- 
 tricate you from a position in which you find yourself so 
 ill at ease. Mme. Graslin, who owns the Forest of Monte- 
 gnac, and a good deal of barren land below the long range 
 of hills on which the forest lies, has a notion of turning her 
 vast estates to some account, of exploiting the woods and 
 bringing the stony land into cultivation. Small pay and 
 plenty of work! A great result to be brought about by in- 
 significant means, a district to be transformed ! Abundance 
 made to spring up on the barest rock ! Is not this what you 
 wished to do, you who would fain realize a poet's dream? 
 From the sincere ring of your letter, I do not hesitate to 
 ask you to come to Limoges to see me; but do not send in 
 your resignation, my friend, only sever your connection with 
 your corps, explain to the authorities that you are about to
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 1T 
 
 make a study of some problems that lie within your province, 
 but outside the limits of your work for the Government. In 
 that way you will lose none of your privileges, and you will 
 gain time in which to decide whether this scheme of the cure's 
 at Montegnac, which finds favor in Mme. Graslin's eyes, is a 
 feasible one. If these vast changes should prove to be prac- 
 ticable, I will lay the possible advantages before you by word 
 of mouth, and not by letter. Believe me to be, always sin- 
 cerely, your friend, 
 
 "GBOSSET^TE." 
 
 For all reply Mme. Graslin wrote: 
 
 "Thank you, my friend; I am waiting to see your pro- 
 tege." 
 
 She showed the letter to M. Bonnet with the remark, "Here 
 is one more wounded creatur.6 seeking the great hospital !" 
 
 The cure read the letter and re-read it, took two or three 
 turns upon the terrace, and handed the paper back to Mme. 
 Graslin. 
 
 "It comes from a noble nature, the man has something 
 in him," he said. "He writes that the schools, invented by 
 the spirit of the Revolution, manufacture ineptitude; for 
 my own part, I call them manufactories of unbelief; for if 
 M. Gerard is not an atheist, he is a Protestant " 
 
 "We will ask him," she said, struck with the curb's an- 
 swer. 
 
 A fortnight later, in the month of December, M. Grosse- 
 tete came to Montegnac, in spite of the cold, to introduce 
 his protege. Veronique and M. Bonnet awaited his arrival 
 with impatience. 
 
 "One must love you very much, my child," said the old 
 man, taking both of Veronique's hands, and kissing them 
 with the old-fashioned elderly gallantry which a woman never 
 takes amiss; "yes, one must love you very much indeed to 
 stir out of Limoges in such weather as this; but I have made 
 
 up my mind that I must come in person to make you a 
 -14
 
 198 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 present of M. Gregoire Gerard. Here he is. A man after 
 your own heart, M. Bonnet," the old banker added with an 
 affectionate greeting to the cure. 
 
 Gerard's appearance was not very prepossessing. He was 
 a thick-set man of middle height; his neck was lost in his 
 shoulders, to use the common expression; he had the golden 
 hair and red eyes of an Albino; and his eyelashes and eye- 
 brows were almost white. Although, as often happens in 
 these cases, his complexion was dazzlingly fair, its original 
 beauty was destroyed by the very apparent pits and seams 
 left by an attack of smallpox; much reading had doubtless 
 injured his eyesight, for he wore colored spectacles. Nor 
 when he divested himself of a thick overcoat, like a gen- 
 darme's, did his dress redeem these personal defects. 
 
 The way in which his clothes were put on and buttoned, 
 like his untidy cravat and crumpled shirt, were distinctive 
 signs of that personal carelessness, laid to the charge of 
 learned men, who are all, more or less, oblivious of their sur- 
 roundings. His face and bearing, the great development of 
 chest and shoulders, as compared with his thin legs, sug- 
 gested a sort of physical deterioration produced by meditative 
 habits, not uncommon in those who think much; but the 
 stout heart and eager intelligence of the writer of the letter 
 were plainly visible on a forehead which might have been 
 chiseled in Carrara marble. Nature seemed to have reserved 
 her seal of greatness for the brow, and stamped it with the 
 steadfastness and goodness of the man. The nose was of the 
 true Gallic type, and blunted. The firm, straight lines of the 
 mouth indicated an absolute discretion and the sense of econ- 
 omy ; but the whole face looked old before its time, and worn 
 with study. 
 
 Mme. Graslin turned to speak to the inventor. "We al- 
 ready owe you thanks, monsieur," she said, "for being so good 
 as to come to superintend engineering work in a country 
 which can hold out no inducements to you save the satisfac- 
 tion of knowing that you can do good." 
 
 "M. Grossetete told me enough about you on our way here,
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 199 
 
 madame," he answered, "to make me feel very glad to be 
 of any use to you. The prospect of living near to you and 
 M. Bonnet seemed to me charming. Unless I am driven away, 
 I look to spend my life here." 
 
 "We will try to give you no cause for changing your opin- 
 ion," smiled Mme. Graslin. 
 
 Grossetete took her aside. "Here are the papers which 
 the public prosecutor gave me," he said. "He seemed very 
 much surprised that you did not apply directly to him. All 
 that you have asked has been done promptly and with good- 
 will. In the first place, your protege will be reinstated in all 
 his rights as a citizen ; and in the second, Catherine Curieux 
 will be sent to you in three months' time. 
 
 "Where is she ?" asked Veronique. 
 
 "At the Hopital Saint-Louis," Grossetete answered. "She 
 cannot leave Paris until she is recovered." 
 
 "Ah! is she ill, poor thing?" 
 
 "You will find all that you want to know here," said 
 Grossetete, holding out a packet. 
 
 Veronique went back to her guests, and led the way to the 
 magnificent dining-hall on the ground floor, walking between 
 Grossetete and Gerard. She presided over the dinner without 
 joining them, for she had made it a rule to take her meals 
 alone since she had come to Montegnac. No one but Aline 
 was in the secret, which the girl kept scrupulously until her 
 mistress was in danger of her life. 
 
 The mayor of Montegnac, the justice of the peace, and the 
 doctor had naturally been invited to meet the newcomer. 
 
 The doctor, a young man of seven-and-twenty, Roubaud 
 by name, was keenly desirous of making the acquaintance of 
 the great lady of Limousin. The cure was the better pleased 
 to introduce him at the chateau since it was M. Bonnet's 
 wish that Veronique should gather some sort of society about 
 her, to distract her thoughts from herself, and to find some 
 mental food. Eoubaud was one of the young doctors per- 
 fectly equipped in his science, such as the J5cole de medecine 
 turns out in Paris, a man who might, without doubt, have
 
 200 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 looked to a brilliant future in the vast theatre of the capital ; 
 but he had seen something of the strife of ambitions there, 
 and took fright, conscious that he had more knowledge than 
 capacity for scheming, more aptitude than greed; his gentle 
 nature had inclined him to the narrower theatre of provincial 
 life, where he hoped to win appreciation sooner than in 
 Paris. 
 
 At Limoges Roubaud had come into collision with old- 
 fashioned ways and patients not to be shaken in their preju- 
 dices; he had been won over by M. Bonnet, who at sight of 
 the kindly and prepossessing face had thought that here was 
 a worker to co-operate with him. Eoubaud was short and 
 fair-haired, and would have been rather uninteresting look- 
 ing but for the gray eyes, which revealed the physiologist's 
 sagacity and the perseverance of the student. Hitherto 
 Montegnac was fain to be content with an old army sur- 
 geon, who found his cellars a good deal more interesting than 
 his patients, and who, moreover, was past the hard work of 
 a country doctor. He happened to die just at that time. 
 Roubaud had been in Montegnac for some eighteen months, 
 and was very popular there; but Desplein's young disciple, 
 one of the followers of Cabanis, was no Catholic in his be- 
 liefs. In fact, as to religion, he had lapsed into a fatal in- 
 difference, from which he was not to be roused. He was 
 the despair of the cure, not that there was any harm what- 
 ever in him, his invariable absence from church was excused 
 by his profession, he never talked on religious topics, he was 
 incapable of making proselytes, no good Catholic could have 
 behaved better than he, but he declined to occupy himself 
 with a problem which, to his thinking, was beyond the scope 
 of the human mind; and the cure once hearing him let fall 
 the remark that Pantheism was the religion of all great 
 thinkers, fancied that Roubaud inclined to the Pythagorean 
 doctrine of the transformation of souls. 
 
 Roubaud, meeting Mme. Graslin for the first time, felt 
 violently startled at the sight of her. His medical knowledge 
 enabled him to divine in her face and bearing and worn
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 201 
 
 features unheard-of suffering of mind and body, a preter- 
 natural strength of character, and the great faculties which 
 can endure the strain of very different vicissitudes. He, in 
 a manner, read her inner history, even the dark places de- 
 liberately hidden away; and more than this, he saw the dis- 
 ease that preyed upon the secret heart of this fair woman; 
 for there are certain tints in human faces that indicate a 
 poison working in the thoughts, even as the color of fruit 
 will betray the presence of the worm at its core. From 
 that time forward M. Eoubaud felt so strongly attracted to 
 Mme. Graslin, that he feared to be drawn beyond the limit 
 where friendship ends. There was an eloquence, which men 
 always understand, in Veronique's brows and attitude, and, 
 above all, in her eyes; it was sufficiently unmistakable that 
 she was dead to love, even as other women with a like elo- 
 quence proclaim the contrary. The doctor became her chiv- 
 alrous worshiper on the spof;. He exchanged a swift glance 
 with the cure, and M. Bonnet said within himself: 
 
 "Here is the flash from heaven that will change this poor 
 unbeliever ! Mme. Graslin will have more eloquence than I." 
 
 The mayor, an old countryman, overawed by the splendor 
 of the dining-room, and surprised to be asked to meet one 
 of the richest men in the department, had put on his best 
 clothes for the occasion; he felt somewhat uneasy in them, 
 and scarcely more at ease with his company. Mme. Graslin, 
 too, in her mourning dress was an awe-inspiring figure; the 
 worthy mayor was dumb. He had once been a farmer at 
 Saint-Leonard, had bought the one habitable house in the 
 township, and cultivated the land that belonged to it himself. 
 He could read and write, but only managed to acquit himself 
 in his official capacity with the help of the justice's clerk, who 
 prepared his work for him ; so he ardently desired the advent 
 of a notary, meaning to lay the burden of his public duties 
 on official shoulders when that day should come; but Mon- 
 tegnac was so poverty-stricken, that a resident notary was 
 hardly needed, and the notaries of the principal place in 
 the arrondissement found clients in Montegnac.
 
 202 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 The justice of the peace, Clousier by name, was a retired 
 barrister from Limoges. Briefs had grown scarce with the 
 learned gentleman, owing to a tendency on his part to put in 
 practice the noble maxim that a barrister is the first judge 
 of the client and the case. About the year 1809 he obtained 
 this appointment; the salary was a meagre pittance, but 
 enough to live upon. In this way he had reached the most 
 honorable but the most complete penury. Twenty-two years 
 of residence in the poor commune had transformed the 
 worthy lawyer into a countryman, scarcely to be distinguished 
 from any of the small farmers round about, whom he re- 
 sembled even in the cut of his coat. But beneath Clousier's 
 homely exterior dwelt a clairvoyant spirit, a philosophical 
 politician whose Gallio's attitude was due to his perfect 
 knowledge of human nature and of men's motives. For a 
 long time he had baffled M. Bonnet's perspicacity. The man 
 who, in a higher sphere, might have played the active part 
 of a L'Hopital, incapable of intrigue, like all deep thinkers, 
 had come at last to lead the contemplative life of a hermit 
 of olden time. Rich without doubt, with all the gains of 
 privation, he was swayed by no personal considerations; he 
 knew the law and judged impartially. His life, reduced to 
 the barest necessaries, was regular and pure. The peasants 
 loved and respected M. Clousier for the fatherly disinterested- 
 ness with which he settled their disputes and gave advice in 
 their smallest difficulties. For the last two years "Old 
 Clousier," as every one called him in Montegnac, had had 
 one of his nephews to help him, a rather intelligent young 
 man, who, at a later day, contributed not a little to the pros- 
 perity of the commune. 
 
 The most striking thing about the old man's face was the 
 broad vast forehead. Two bushy masses of white hair stood 
 out on either side of it. A florid complexion and magisterial 
 portliness might give the impression that (in spite of his real 
 sobriety) he was as earnest a disciple of Bacchus as of Trop- 
 long and Toullier. His scarcely audible voice indicated 
 asthmatic oppression of breathing; possibly the dry air of
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 303 
 
 Montegnac had counted for something in his decision when 
 he made up his mind to accept the post. His little house 
 had been fitted up for him by the well-to-do sabot maker, 
 his landlord. Clousier had already seen Veronique at church, 
 and had formed his own opinion of her, which opinion he 
 kept to himself ; he had not even spoken of her to M. Bonnet, 
 with whom he was beginning to feel at home. For the first 
 time in his life, the justice of the peace found himself in the 
 company of persons able to understand him. 
 
 When the six guests had taken their places round a hand- 
 somely-appointed table (for Veronique had brought all her 
 furniture with her to Montegnac), there was a brief em- 
 barrassed pause. The doctor, the mayor, and the justice were 
 none of them acquainted with Grossetete or with Gerard. 
 But during the first course the banker's geniality thawed the 
 ice, Mme. Graslin graciously encouraged M. Roubaud and 
 drew out Gerard; under her influence all these different 
 natures, full of exquisite qualities, recognized their kinship. 
 It was not long before each felt himself to be in a congenial 
 atmosphere. So by the time dessert was put on the table, 
 and the crystal and the gilded edges of the porcelain sparkled, 
 when choice wines were set in circulation, handed to the 
 guests by Aline, Maurice Champion, and Grossetete's man, 
 the conversation had become more confidential, so that the 
 four noble natures thus brought together by chance felt free 
 to speak their real minds on the great subjects that men love 
 to discuss in good faith. 
 
 "Your leave of absence coincided with the Revolution of 
 July," Grossetete said, looking at Gerard in a way that asked 
 his opinion. 
 
 "Yes," answered the engineer. "I was in Paris during the 
 three famous days; I saw it all; I drew some disheartening 
 conclusions." 
 
 "What were they ?" M. Bonnet asked quickly. 
 
 "There is no patriotism left except under the workman's 
 shirt," answered Gerard. "Therein lies the ruin of France. 
 The Revolution of July is the defeat of men who are notable
 
 204 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 for birth, fortune, and talent, and a defeat in which they ac- 
 quiesce. The enthusiastic zeal of the masses has gained a 
 victory over the rich and intelligent classes, to whom zeal and 
 enthusiasm is antipathetic." 
 
 "To judge by last year's events," added M. Clousier, "the 
 change is a direct encouragement to the evil which is devour- 
 ing us to Individualism. In fifty years' time every generous 
 question will be replaced by a 'What is that to me?' the watch- 
 word of independent opinion descended from the spiritual 
 heights where Luther, Calvin, Zwingle, and Knox inau- 
 gurated it, till even in political economy each has a right to 
 his own opinion. Each for himself! Let each man mind his 
 own business! these two terrible phrases, together with What 
 is that to me? complete a trinity of doctrine for the bour- 
 geoisie and the peasant proprietors. This egoism is the result 
 of defects in our civil legislation, somewhat too hastily accom- 
 plished in the first instance, and now confirmed by the terrible 
 consecration of the Revolution of July." 
 
 The justice relapsed into his wonted silence again with this 
 speech, which gave the guests plenty to think over. Then 
 M. Bonnet ventured yet further, encouraged by Clousier's 
 remarks, and by a glance exchanged between Gerard and 
 Grossetete. 
 
 "Good King Charles X.," said he, "has just failed in the 
 most provident and salutary enterprise that king ever under- 
 took for the happiness of a nation intrusted to him. The 
 Church should be proud of the share she had in his councils. 
 But it was the heart and brain of the upper classes which 
 failed him, as they had failed before over the great question 
 of the law with regard to the succession of the eldest son, the 
 eternal honor of the one bold statesman of the Restoration 
 the Comte de Peyronnet. To reconstruct the nation on 
 the basis of the family, to deprive the press of its power to do 
 harm without restricting its usefulness, to confine the elective 
 chamber to the functions for which it was really intended, 
 to give back to religion its influence over the people, such 
 were the four cardinal points of the domestic policy of the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 205 
 
 House of Bourbon. Well, in twenty years' time all France 
 will see the necessity of that great and salutary course. King 
 Charles X. was, moreover, more insecure in the position which 
 he decided to quit than in the position in which his paternal 
 authority came to an end. The future history of our fair 
 country, when everything shall be periodically called in ques- 
 tion, when ceaseless discussion shall take the place of action, 
 when the press shall become the sovereign power and the 
 tool of the basest ambitions, will prove the wisdom of the 
 king who has just taken with him the real principles of gov- 
 ernment. History will render to him his due for the courage 
 with which he withstood his best friends, when once he had 
 probed the wound, seen its extent, and the pressing necessity 
 for the treatment, which has not been continued by those 
 for whom he threw himself into the breach." 
 
 "Well, M. le Cure, you go straight to the point without 
 the slightest disguise," cried M. Gerard, "but I do not say 
 nay. When Napoleon made his Russian campaign he was 
 forty years ahead of his age; he was misunderstood. Eussia 
 and England, in 1830, can explain the campaign of 1812. 
 Charles X. was in the same unfortunate position ; twenty-five 
 years hence his ordinances may perhaps become law." 
 
 "France, too eloquent a country not to babble, too vain- 
 glorious to recognize real ability, in spite of the sublime good 
 sense of her language and the mass of her people, is the very 
 last country in which to introduce the system of two delib- 
 erating chambers," the justice of the peace remarked. "At 
 any rate, not without the admirable safeguards against these 
 elements in the national character, devised by Napoleon's 
 experience. The representative system may work in a country 
 like England, where its action is circumscribed by the nature 
 of the soil ; but the right of primogeniture, as applied to real 
 estate, is a necessary part of it ; without this factor, the repre- 
 sentative system becomes sheer nonsense. England owes its 
 existence to the quasi-feudal law which transmitted the house 
 and lands to the oldest son. Russia is firmly seated on the 
 feudal system of autocracy. For these reasons, both nations
 
 206 THE COUNTRY i'ARSON 
 
 at the present day are making alarming progress. Austria 
 could not have resisted our invasions as she did, nor declared 
 a second war against Napoleon, had it not been for the law 
 of primogeniture, which preserves the strength of the family 
 and maintains production on the large scale necessary to 
 the State. The House of Bourbon, conscious that Liberalism 
 had relegated France to the rank of a third-rate power in 
 Europe, determined to regain and keep their place, and the 
 country shook off the Bourbons when they had all but saved 
 the country. I do not know how deep the present state of 
 things will sink us." 
 
 "If there should be a war," cried Grossetete, "France will 
 be without horses, as Napoleon was in 1813, when he was 
 reduced to the resources of France alone, and could not make 
 use of the victories of Lutzen and Bautzen, and was crushed 
 at Leipsic! If peace continues, the evil will grow worse: 
 twenty years hence, the number of horned cattle and horses 
 in France will be diminished by one-half." 
 
 "M. Grossetete is right," said Gerard. "So the work which 
 you have decided to attempt here is a service done to your 
 country, madarne," he added, turning to Veronique. 
 
 "Yes," said the justice of the peace, '^because Mme. Graslin 
 has but one son. But will this chance in the succession repeat 
 itself? For a certain time, let us hope, the great and magnifi- 
 cent scheme of cultivation which you are to carry into effect 
 will be in the hands of one owner, and therefore will continue 
 to provide grazing land for horses and cattle. But, in spite 
 of all, a day will come when forest and field will be either 
 divided up or sold in lots. Division and subdivision will fol- 
 low, until the six thousand acres of plain will count ten or 
 twelve hundred owners; and when that time comes, there will 
 be no more horses nor prize cattle." 
 
 "Oh ! when that time comes " said the mayor. 
 
 "There is a What is that to me?" cried M. Grossetete, "and 
 M. Clousier sounded the signal for it ; he is caught in the act. 
 But, monsieur," the banker went on gravely, addressing
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 207 
 
 the bewildered mayor, "the time has come! Round about 
 Paris for a ten-league radius, the land is divided up into little 
 patches that will hardly pasture sufficient milch cows. The 
 commune of Argenteuil numbers thirty-eight thousand eight 
 hundred and eighty-five plots of land, a good many of them 
 bringing in less than fifteen centimes a year ! If it were not 
 for high farming and manure from Paris, which gives heavy 
 crops of fodder of different kinds, I do not know how cow- 
 keepers and dairymen would manage. As it is, the animals 
 are peculiarly subject to inflammatory diseases consequent 
 on the heating diet and confinement to cowsheds. They 
 wear out their cows round about Paris just as they wear 
 out horses in the streets. Then market-gardens, orchards, 
 nurseries, and vineyards pay so much better than pasture, 
 that the grazing land is gradually diminishing. A few years 
 more, and milk will be sent in by express to Paris, like salt- 
 fish, and what is going on round Paris is happening also about 
 all large towns. The evils of the minute subdivision of landed 
 property are extending round a hundred French cities; some 
 day all France will be eaten up by them. 
 
 "In 1800, according to Chaptal, there were about five mill- 
 ion acres of vineyard, exact statistics would show fully five 
 times as much to-day. When Normandy is split up into an 
 infinitude of small holdings, by our system of inheritance, 
 fifty per cent of the horse and cattle trade there will fall off ; 
 still Normandy will have the monopoly of the Paris milk 
 trade, for luckily the climate will not permit vine culture. 
 Another curious thing to notice is the steady rise in the price 
 of butcher meat. In 1814, prices ranged from seven to eleven 
 sous per pound; in 1850, twenty years hence, Paris will pay 
 twenty sous, unless some genius is raised up to carry out the 
 theories of Charles X." 
 
 <f You have pointed out the greatest evil in France," said 
 the justice of the peace. "The cause of it lies in the chapter 
 Des Successions in the Civil Code, wherein the equal division 
 of real estate among the children of the family is required. 
 That is the pestle which is constantly grinding the country to
 
 208 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 powder, giving to every one but a life-interest in property 
 which cannot remain as it is after his death. A continuous 
 process of decomposition (for the reverse process is never set 
 up) will end by ruining France. The French Revolution 
 generated a deadly virus, and the Days of July have set the 
 poison working afresh; this dangerous germ of disease is the 
 acquisition of land by peasants. If the chapter Des Succes- 
 sions is the origin of the evil, it is through the peasant that 
 it reaches its worst phase. The peasant never relinquishes 
 the land he has won. Let a bit of land once get between the 
 ogre's ever-hungry jaws, he divides and subdivides it till there 
 are but strips of three furrows left. Nay, even there he does 
 not stop ! he will divide the three furrows in lengths. The 
 commune of Argenteuil, which M. Grossetete instanced just 
 now, is a case in point. The preposterous value which the 
 peasants set on the smallest scraps of land makes it quite im- 
 possible to reconstruct an estate. The law and procedure are 
 made a dead letter at once by this division, and ownership 
 is reduced to absurdity. But it is a comparatively trifling 
 matter that the minute subdivision of the law should paralyze 
 the treasury and the law by making it impossible to carry out 
 its wisest regulations. There are far greater evils than even 
 these. There are actually landlords of property bringing in 
 fifteen and twenty centimes per annum ! 
 
 "Monsieur has just said something about the falling off of 
 cattle and horses," Clousier continued, looking at Grossetete ; 
 "the system of inheritance counts for much in that matter. 
 The peasant proprietor keeps cows, and cows only, because 
 milk enters into his diet; he sells the calves; he even sells 
 butter. He has no mind to raise oxen, still less to breed 
 horses ; he has only just sufficient fodder for a year's consump- 
 tion; and when a dry spring comes and hay is scarce, he is 
 forced to take his cow to market ; he cannot afford to keep her. 
 If it should fall out so unluckily that two bad hay harvests 
 came in succession, you would see some strange fluctuations 
 in the price of beef in Paris, and, above all, in veal, when the 
 third year came."
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 209 
 
 "And how would they do for 'patriotic banquets' then?" 
 asked the doctor, smiling. 
 
 "Ah !" exclaimed Mme. Graslin, glancing at Roubaud, "so 
 even here, as everywhere else, politics must be served up with 
 journalistic 'items/ ' : 
 
 "In this bad business the bourgeoisie play the part of Amer- 
 ican pioneers," continued Clousier. "They buy up the large 
 estates, too large for the peasant to meddle with, and divide 
 them. After the bulk has been cut up and triturated, a forced 
 sale or an ordinary sale in lots hands it over sooner or later 
 to the peasant. Everything nowadays is reduced to figures, 
 and I know of none more eloquent than these : France pos- 
 sesses forty-nine million hectares of land ; for the sake of con- 
 venience, let us say forty, deducting something for roads and 
 highroads, dunes, canals, land out of cultivation, and wastes 
 like the plain of Montegnac, which need capital. Now, out 
 of forty million hectares to a population of thirty-two mill- 
 ions, there are a hundred and twenty-five million parcels of 
 land, according to the land-tax returns. I have not taken 
 the fractions into account. So we have outrun the Agrarian 
 law, and yet neither poverty nor discord are at an end. Then 
 the next thing will be that those who are turning the land 
 into crumbs and diminishing the output of produce, will find 
 mouthpieces for the cry that true social justice only permits 
 the usufruct of the land to each. They will say that owner- 
 ship in perpetuity is robbery. The Saint-Simonians have 
 begun already." 
 
 "There spoke the magistrate," said Grossetete, "and this is 
 what the banker adds to his bold reflections. When landed 
 property became tenable by peasants and small shopkeepers, 
 a great wrong was done to France, though the Government 
 does not so much as suspect it. Suppose that we set down 
 the whole mass of the peasants at three million families, 
 after deducting the paupers. Those families all belong to 
 the wage-earning class. Their wages are paid in money in- 
 etead of in kind 
 
 "There is another Immense blunder in our legislation/'
 
 210 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Clousier cried, breaking in on the banker. "In 1790 it might 
 still have been possible to pass a law empowering employers to 
 pay wages in kind, but now to introduce such a measure 
 would be to risk a Revolution." 
 
 "In this way," Grossetete continued, "the money of the 
 country passes into the pockets of the proletariat. Now, the 
 peasant has one passion, one desire, one determination, one aim 
 in life to die a landed proprietor. This desire, as M. Clousier 
 has very clearly shown, is one result of the Revolution a 
 direct consequence of the sale of the national lands. Only 
 those who have no idea of the state of things in country dis- 
 tricts could refuse to admit that each of those three million 
 families annually buries fifty francs as a regular thing, and 
 in this way a hundred and fifty millions of francs are with- 
 drawn from circulation every year. The science of political 
 economy has reduced to an axiom the statement that a five- 
 franc piece, if it passes through a hundred hands in the 
 course of a day, does duty for five hundred francs. Now, it is 
 certain for some of us old observers of the state of things in 
 country districts, that the peasant fixes his eyes on a bit of 
 land, keeps ready to pounce upon it, and bides his time 
 meanwhile he never invests his capital. The intervals in the 
 peasant's land-purchases should, therefore, be reckoned at 
 periods of seven years. For seven years, consequently, a 
 capital of eleven hundred million francs is lying idle in the 
 peasants' hands ; and as the lower middle classes do the same 
 thing to quite the same extent, and behave in the same way 
 with regard to land on too large a scale for the peasant to 
 nibble at, in forty-two years France loses the interest on two 
 milliards of francs at least that is to say, on something like 
 a hundred millions every seven } r ears, or six hundred millions 
 in forty-two years. But this is not the only loss. France has 
 failed to create the worth of six hundred millions in agricul- 
 tural or industrial produce. And this failure to produce may 
 be taken as a loss of twelve hundred million francs; for if 
 the market price of a product were not double the actual cost 
 of production, commerce would be at a standstill. The
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 211 
 
 proletariat deprives itself of six hundred million francs of 
 wages. These six hundred millions of initial loss that repre- 
 sent, for an economist, twelve hundred millions of loss of 
 benefit derived from circulation, explain how it is that our 
 commerce, shipping trade, and agriculture compare so badly 
 with the state of things in England. In spite of the differ- 
 ences between the two countries (a good two-thirds of them, 
 moreover, in our favor), England could mount our cavalry 
 twice over, and every one there eats meat. But then, under 
 the English system of land-tenure, it is almost impossible for 
 the working classes to buy land, and so all the money is kept 
 in constant circulation. So besides the evils of comminu- 
 tion of the land, and the decay of the trade in cattle, horses, 
 and sheep, the chapter Des Successions costs us a further loss 
 of six hundred million francs of interest on the capital buried 
 by the peasants and tradespeople, or twelve hundred million 
 francs' worth of produce (at the least) that is to say, a total 
 loss of three milliards of francs withdrawn from circulation 
 every half-century." 
 
 "The moral effect is worse than the material effect !" cried 
 the cure. "We are turning the peasantry into pauper land- 
 owners, and half educating the lower middle classes. It will 
 not be long before the canker of Each for himself! Let each 
 mind his own business! which did its work last July among 
 the upper classes, will spread to the middle classes. A 
 proletariat of hardened materialists, knowing no God but 
 envy, no zeal but the despair of hunger, with no faith nor 
 belief left, will come to the front, and trample the heart of 
 the country under foot. The foreigner, waxing great under 
 a monarchical government, will find us under the shadow of 
 royalty without the reality of a king, without law under the 
 cover of legality, owners of property but not proprietors, with 
 .the right of election but without a government, listless 
 holders of free and independent opinions, equal but equally 
 unfortunate. Let us hope that between now and then God 
 will raise up in France the man for the time, one of those 
 elect who breathe a new spirit into a nation, a man who,
 
 212 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 whether he is a Sylla or a Marius, whether he comes from the 
 heights or rises from the depths, will reconstruct society." 
 
 "The first thing to do will be to send him to the Assizes 
 or to the police court," said Gerard. "The judgment of 
 Socrates or of Christ will he given to him, here in 1831, as of 
 old in Attica and at Jerusalem. To-day, as of old, jealous 
 mediocrity allows the thinker to starve. If the great political 
 physicians who have studied the diseases of France, and are 
 opposed to the spirit of the age, should resist to the starva- 
 tion-point, we ridicule them, and treat them as visionaries. 
 Here in France we revolt against the sovereign thinker, the 
 great man of the future, just as we rise in revolt against the 
 political sovereign." 
 
 "But in those old times the Sophists had a very limited 
 audience," cried the justice of the peace; "while to-day, 
 through the medium of the periodical press, they can lead 
 a whole nation astray; and the press which pleads for 
 common-sense finds no echo !" 
 
 The mayor looked at M. Clousier with intense astonish- 
 ment. Mme. Graslin, delighted to find a simple justice of the 
 peace interested in such grave problems, turned to her neigh- 
 bor M. Roubaud with, "Do you know M. Clousier?" 
 
 "Not till to-day ! Madame, you are working miracles," he 
 added in her ear. "And yet look at his forehead, how finely 
 shaped it is ! It is like the classical or traditional brow that 
 sculptors gave to Lycurgus and the wise men of Greece, is it 
 not ? Clearly there was an impolitic side to the Revolution of 
 July," he added aloud, after going through Grossetete reason- 
 ings. He had been a medical student, and perhaps would have 
 lent a hand at a barricade. 
 
 "'Twas trebly impolitic," said Clousier. "We have con- 
 cluded the case for law and finance, now for the Government. 
 The Royal power, weakened by the dogma of the national 
 sovereignty, in virtue of which the election was made on the 
 9th of August 1830, will strive to overcome its rival, a prin- 
 ciple which gives the people the right of changing a dynasty 
 every time they fail to apprehend the intentions of their king;
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 213 
 
 K> there is a domestic struggle before us which will check 
 progress in France for a long while yet." 
 
 "England has wisely steered clear of all these sunken 
 rocks," said Gerard. "I have been in England. I admire 
 the hive which sends swarms over the globe to settle and civ- 
 ilize. In England political debate is a comedy intended to 
 satisfy the people and to hide the action of authority which 
 moves untrammeled in its lofty sphere ; election there, is not, 
 as in France, the referring of a question to a stupid bour- 
 geoisie. If the land were divided up, England would cease 
 to exist at once. The great landowners and the lords control 
 the machinery of Government. They have a navy which 
 takes possession of whole quarters of the globe (and under 
 the very eyes of Europe) to fulfil the exigencies of their trade, 
 and form colonies for the discontented and unsatisfactory. 
 Instead of waging war on men of ability, annihilating and 
 underrating them, the English aristocracy continually seeks 
 them out, rewards and assimilates them. The English are 
 prompt to act in all that concerns the Government, and in 
 the choice of men and material, while with us action of any 
 kind is slow ; and yet they are slow, and we impatient. Cap- 
 ital with them is adventurous, and always moving ; with us it 
 is shy and suspicious. Here is corroboration of M. Grosse- 
 tete's statements about the loss to industry of the peasants' 
 capital; I can sketch the difference in a few words. English 
 capital, which is constantly circulating, has created ten mill- 
 iards of wealth in the shape of expanded manufactures and 
 joint-stock companies paying dividends ; while here in France, 
 though we have more capital, it has not yielded one-tenth part 
 of the profit." 
 
 "It is all the more extraordinary," said Roubaud, "since 
 that they are lymphatic, and we are generally either sanguine 
 or nervous." 
 
 "Here is a great problem for you to study, monsieur," said 
 Clousier. "Given a national temperament, to find the insti- 
 tutions best adapted to counteract it. Truly, Cromwell was 
 a great legislator. He, one man, made England what she is 
 IS
 
 214 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 by promulgating the Act of Navigation, which made the 
 English the enemy of all other nations, and infused into them 
 a fierce pride, that has served them as a lever. But in spite of 
 their garrison at Malta, as soon as France and Russia fully 
 understand the part to be played in politics by the Black Sea 
 and the Mediterranean, the discovery of a new route to Asia 
 by way of Egypt or the Euphrates valley will be a death-blo\v 
 to England, just as the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope 
 was the ruin of Venice." 
 
 "And nothing of God in all this !" cried the cure. "M. 
 Clousier and M. Roubaud are indifferent in matters of re- 
 ligion . . . and you, monsieur ? v he asked questioningly, 
 . turning to Gerard. 
 
 "A Protestant," said Grossetete. 
 
 "You guessed rightly !" exclaimed Veronique, with a glance 
 at the cure as she offered her hand to Clousier to return to her 
 apartments. 
 
 All prejudices excited by M. Gerard's appearance quickly 
 vanished, and the three notables of Montegnac congratulated 
 themselves on such an acquisition. 
 
 "Unluckily," said M. Bonnet, "there is a cause for antago- 
 nism between Russia and the Catholic countries on the shores 
 of the Mediterranean ; a schism of little real importance 
 divides the Greek Church from the Latin, for the great mis- 
 fortune of humanity." 
 
 "Each preaches for his saint," said Mme. Graslin, smiling. 
 "M. Grossetete thinks of lost milliards; M. Clousier of law 
 in confusion ; the doctor sees in legislation a question of tem- 
 peraments ; M. le Cure sees in religion an obstacle in the way 
 of a good understanding between France and Russia." 
 
 "Please add, madame," said G6rard, "that in the sequestra- 
 tion of capital by the peasant and small tradesman, I see the 
 delay of the completion of railways in France " 
 
 "Then what would you have ?" asked she. 
 
 "Oh ! The admirable Councillors of State who devised 
 laws in the time of the Emperor and the Corps Ugislatif,
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 215 
 
 when those who had brains as well as those who had property 
 had a voice in the election, a body whose sole function it was 
 to oppose unwise laws or capricious wars. The present Cham- 
 ber of Deputies is like to end, as you will see, by becoming the 
 governing body, and legalized anarchy it will be." 
 
 "Great heavens !" cried the cure in an access of lofty 
 patriotism, "how is it that minds so enlightened" he indi- 
 cated Clousier, Eoubaud, and Gerard "see the evil, and 
 point out the remedy, and do not begin by applying it to 
 themselves ? All of you represent the classes attacked ; all of 
 you recognize the necessity of passive obedience on the part 
 of the great masses in the State, an obedience like that of 
 the soldier in time of war; all of you desire the unity of 
 authority, and wish that it shall never be called in question. 
 But that consolidation to which England has attained through 
 the development of pride and material interests '(which are 
 a sort of belief) can only be attained here by sentiments in- 
 duced by Catholicism, and you are not Catholics ! I the 
 priest drop my character, and reason with rationalists. 
 
 "How can you expect the masses to become religious and 
 to obey if they see irreligion and relaxed discipline around 
 them ? A people united by any faith will easily get the better 
 of men without belief. The law of the interest of all, which 
 underlies patriotism, is at once annulled by the law of 
 individual interest, which authorizes and implants selfishness. 
 Nothing is solid and durable but that which is natural, and 
 the natural basis of politics is the family. The family should 
 be the basis of all institutions. A universal effect denotes a 
 co-extensive cause. These things that you notice proceed 
 from the social principle itself, which has no force, because 
 it is based on independent opinion, and the right of private 
 judgment is the forerunner of individualism. There is less 
 wisdom in looking for the blessing of security from the in- 
 telligence and capacity of the majority, than in depending 
 upon the intelligence of institutions and the capacity of one 
 single man for the blessing of security. It is easier to find 
 wisdom in one man than in a whole nation. The peoples have
 
 216 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 but a blind heart to guide them; they feel, but they do not 
 see. A government must see, and must not be swayed by sen- 
 timents. There is therefore an evident contradiction between 
 the first impulses of the masses and the action of authority 
 which must direct their energy and give it unity. To find a 
 great prince is a great chance (to use your language), but to 
 trust your destinies to any assembly of men, even if they are 
 honest, is madness. 
 
 "France is mad at this moment ! Alas ! you are as thor- 
 oughly convinced of this as I. If all men who really believe 
 what they say, as you do, would set the example in their own 
 circle; if every intelligent thinker would set his hand to 
 raising once more the altars of the great spiritual republic, 
 of the one Church which has directed humanity, we might 
 see once more in France the miracles wrought there by our 
 fathers." ' 
 
 "What would you have, M. le Cure ?" said Gerard, "if one 
 must speak to you as in the confessional I look on faith as 
 a lie which you consciously tell yourself, on hope as a lie 
 about the future, and on this charity of yours as a child's 
 trick; one is a good boy, for the sake of the jam." 
 
 "And yet, monsieur, when hope rocks us we sleep well," 
 said Mme. Graslin. 
 
 Eoubaud, who was about to speak, supported by a glance 
 from Grossetete and the cure, stopped short at the words. 
 
 "Is it any fault of ours," said Clousier, "if Jesus Christ 
 had not time to formulate a system of government in accord- 
 ance with His teaching, as Moses did and Confucius the two 
 greatest legislators whom the world has seen, for the Jews and 
 the Chinese still maintain their national existence, though 
 the first are scattered all over the earth, and the second an 
 isolated people?" 
 
 "Ah ! you are giving me a task indeed," said the cure can- 
 didly, "but I shall triumph, I shall convert all of you. . . . 
 You are nearer the Faith than you think. Truth lurks be- 
 neath the lie ; come forward but a step, and you return !" 
 
 And with this cry from the cure the conversation took a 
 fresh direction.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 217 
 
 The next morning before M. Grossetete went, he promised 
 to take an active share in Veronique's schemes so soon as they 
 should be judged practicable. Mme. Graslin and Gerard 
 rode beside his traveling carriage as far as the point where 
 the cross-road joined the highroad from Bordeaux to Lyons. 
 Gerard was so eager to see the place, and Veronique so 
 anxious to show it to him, that this ride had been planned 
 overnight. After they took leave of the kind old man, they 
 galloped down into the great plain and skirted the hillsides 
 that lay between the chateau and the Living Rock. The sur- 
 veyor recognized the rock embankment which Farrabesche 
 had pointed out; it stood up like the lowest course of ma- 
 sonry under the foundations of the hills, in such a sort that 
 when the bed of this indestructible canal of nature^ making 
 should be cleared out, and the water-courses regulated so as 
 not to choke it, irrigation would actually be facilitated by 
 that long channel which lay about ten feet above the surface 
 of the plain. The first thing to be done was to estimate the 
 volume of water in the Gabou, and to make certain that the 
 sides of the valley could hold it ; no decision could be made till 
 this was known. 
 
 Veronique gave a horse to Farrabesche, who was to accom- 
 pany Gerard and acquaint him with the least details which he 
 himself had observed. After some days of consideration 
 Gerard thought the base of either parallel chains of hill solid 
 enough (albeit of different material) to hold the water. 
 
 In the January of the following year, a wet season, Gerard 
 calculated the probable amount of water discharged by the 
 Gabou, and found that when the three water-courses had 
 been diverted into the torrent, the total amount would be suf- 
 ficient to water an area three times as great as the plain of 
 Montegnac. The dams across the Gabou, the masonry and 
 engineering works needed to bring the water-supply of the 
 three little valleys into the plain, should not cost more than 
 sixty thousand francs; for the surveyor discovered a quantity 
 of chalky deposit on the common, so that lime would be 
 cheap, and the forest being so near at hand, stone and timber
 
 218 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 would cost nothing even for transport. All the preparations 
 could be made before the Gabou ran dry, so that when the 
 important work should be begun it should quickly be finished. 
 But the plain was another matter. Gerard considered that 
 there the first preparation would cost at least two hundred 
 thousand francs, sowing and planting apart. 
 
 The plain was to be divided into four squares of two hun- 
 dred and fifty acres each. There was no question of breaking 
 up the waste; the first thing to do was to remove the largest 
 flints. Navvies would be employed to dig a great number of 
 trenches and to line the channels with stone to keep the water 
 in. for the water must be made to flow or to stand as required. 
 All this work called for active, devoted, and painstaking 
 workers. Chance so ordered it that the plain was a straight- 
 forward piece of work, a level stretch, and the water with 
 a ten-foot fall could be distributed at will. There was nothing 
 to prevent the finest results in farming the land; here there 
 might be just such a splendid green carpet as in North Italy, 
 a source of wealth and of pride to Lombardy. Gerard sent to 
 his late district for an old and experienced foreman, Fresquin 
 by name. 
 
 Mme. Graslin, therefore, wrote to ask Grossetete to nego- 
 tiate for her a loan of two hundred and fifty thousand francs 
 on the security of her Government stock; the interest of six 
 years, Gerard calculated, should pay off the debt, capital and 
 interest. The loan was concluded in the course of the month 
 of March; and by that time Gerard, with Fresquin's assist- 
 ance, had finished all the preliminary operations, leveling, 
 boring, observations, and estimates. The news of the great 
 scheme had spread through the country and roused the poor 
 people; and the indefatigable Farrabesche, Colorat, Clousier, 
 Roubaud, and the Mayor of Montegnac, all those, in fact, who 
 were interested in the enterprise for its own sake or for Mme. 
 Graslin's, chose the workers or gave the names of the poor 
 who deserved to be employed. 
 
 Gerard bought partly for M. Grossetete, partly on his own 
 account, some thousand acres of land on the other side of the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 219 
 
 road through Montegnac. Fresquin, his foreman, also took 
 five hundred acres, and sent for his wife and children. 
 
 In the early days of April 1833, M. Grossetete came to 
 Montegnac to see the land purchased for him by Gerard ; but 
 the principal motive of his journey was the arrival of Cath- 
 erine Curieux. She had come by the diligence from Paris to 
 Limoges, and Mme. Graslin was expecting her. Grosse- 
 tete found Mme. Graslin about to start for the church. M. 
 Bonnet was to say a mass to ask the blessing of Heaven on the 
 work about to begin. All the men, women, and children 
 were present. 
 
 M. Grossetete brought forward a woman of thirty or 
 thereabouts, who looked weak and out of health. "Here is 
 your protegee'' he said, addressing Veronique. 
 
 "Are you Catherine Curieux?" Mme. Graslin asked. 
 
 "Yes, madame." 
 
 For a moment Veronique looked at her; Catherine was 
 rather tall, shapely, and pale ; the exceeding sweetness of her 
 features was not belied by the beautiful soft gray eyes. In 
 the shape of her face and the outlines of her forehead there 
 was a nobleness, a sort of grave and simple majesty, some- 
 times seen in very young girls' faces in the country, a kind of 
 flower of beauty, which field work, and the constant wear 
 of household cares, and sunburn, and neglect of appearance, 
 wither with alarming rapidity. From her attitude as she 
 stood it was easy to discern that she would move with the 
 ease of a daughter of the fields and something of an added 
 grace, unconsciously learned in Paris. If Catherine had 
 never left the Correze, she would no doubt have been by this 
 time a wrinkled and withered woman, the bright tints in her 
 face would have grown hard; but Paris, which had toned 
 down the high color, had preserved her beauty ; and ill-health, 
 weariness, and sorrow had given to her the mysterious gifts 
 of melancholy and of that inner life of thought denied to poor 
 toilers in the field who lead an almost animal existence. Her 
 dress likewise marked a distinction between her and the 
 peasants ; for it abundantly displayed the Parisian taste which
 
 220 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 even the least coquettish women are so quick to acquire. 
 Catherine Curieux, not knowing what might await her, and 
 unable to judge the lady in whose presence she stood, seemed 
 somewhat embarrassed. 
 
 "Do you still love Farrabesche ?" asked Mme. Graslin, when 
 Grossetete left the two women together for a moment. 
 
 "Yes, madame," she answered, flushing red. 
 
 "But if you sent him a thousand francs while he was in 
 prison, why did you not come to him when he came out ? Do 
 you feel any repugnance for him ? Speak to me as you would 
 to your own mother. Were you afraid that he had gone 
 utterly to the bad ? that he cared for you no longer ?" 
 
 "No, madame; but I can neither read nor write. I was 
 living with a very exacting old lady; she fell ill; we sat up 
 with her of a night, and I had to nurse her. I knew the time 
 was coming near when Jacques would be out of prison, but 
 I could not leave Paris until the lady died. She left me noth- 
 ing, after all my devotion to her and her interests. I had 
 made myself ill with sitting up with her and the hard work 
 of nursing, and I wanted to get well again before I came back. 
 I spent all my savings, and then I made up my mind to go 
 into the Hopital Saint-Louis, and have just been discharged 
 as cured." 
 
 Mme. Graslin was touched by an explanation so simple. 
 
 "Well, but, my dear," she said, "tell me why you left your 
 people so suddenly; what made you leave your child? why 
 did you not send them news of yourself, or get some one to 
 wr ite ?" 
 
 For all answer, Catherine wept. 
 
 "Madame," she said at last, reassured by the pressure of 
 Veronique's hand, "I daresay I was wrong, but it was more 
 than I could do to stop in the place. It was not that I felt 
 that I had done wrong ; it was the rest of them ; I was afraid 
 of their gossip and talk. So long as Jacques was here in 
 danger, he could not do without me; but when he was gone, 
 I felt as if I could not stop. There was I, a girl with a child
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 2^1 
 
 and no husband ! The lowest creature would have been better 
 than I. If I had heard them say the least word about Benja- 
 min or his father., I do not know what I should have done. I 
 should have killed myself perhaps, or gone out of my mind. 
 My own father or mother might have said something hasty in 
 a moment of anger. Meek as I am, I am too irritable to bear 
 hasty words or insult. I have been well punished; I could 
 not see my child, and never a day passed but I thought of 
 him ! I wanted to be forgotten, and forgotten I am. No- 
 body has given me a thought. They thought I was dead, and 
 yet many and many a time I felt I would like to leave every- 
 thing to have one day here and see my little boy " 
 
 "Your little boy see, Catherine, here he is !" 
 
 Catherine looked up and saw Benjamin, and something like 
 a feverish shiver ran through her. 
 
 "Benjamin," said Mme. Graslin, "come and kiss your 
 mother." 
 
 "My mother?" cried Benjamin in amazement. He flung 
 his arms round Catherine's neck, and she clasped him to her 
 with wild energy. But the boy escaped, and ran away crying, 
 "I will find WTO /" 
 
 Mme. Graslin, seeing that Catherine's strength was failing, 
 made her sit down ; and as she did so her eyes met M. Bonnet's 
 look, her color rose, for in that keen glance her confessor read 
 her heart. She spoke tremulously. 
 
 "I hope, M. le Cure," she said, "that you will marry Cath- 
 erine and Farrabesche at once. Do you not remember M. 
 Bonnet, my child? He will tell you that Farrabesche has 
 behaved himself like an honest man since he came back. 
 Every one in the countryside respects him ; if there is a place 
 in the world where you may live happily with the good opinion 
 of every one about you, it is here in Montegnac. With God's 
 will, you will make your fortune here, for you shall be my 
 tenants. Farrabesche has all his citizen's rights again." 
 
 "This is all true, my daughter," said the cure. 
 
 As he spoke, Farrabesche came in, led by his eager son. 
 Face to face with Catherine in Mme. Graslin's presence, his
 
 222 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 face grew white, and he was mute. He saw how active the 
 kindness of the one had been for him, and guessed all that 
 the other had suffered in her enforced absence. Veronique 
 turned to go with M. Bonnet, and the cure for his part wished 
 to take Veronique aside. As soon as they were out of hearing, 
 Veronique's confessor looked full at her and saw her color 
 rise ; she lowered her eyes like a guilty creature. 
 
 "You are degrading charity," he said severely. 
 
 "And how ?" she asked, raising her head. 
 
 "Charity," said M. Bonnet, "is a passion as far greater than 
 love, as humanity, madame, is greater than one human 
 creature. All this is not the spontaneous work of disinter- 
 ested virtue. You are falling from the grandeur of the ser- 
 vice of man to the service of a single creature. In your kind- 
 ness to Catherine and Farrabesche there is an alloy of memo- 
 ries and after-thoughts which spoils it in the sight of God. 
 Pluck out the rest of the dart of the spirit of evil from your 
 heart. Do not spoil the value of your good deeds in this way. 
 Will you ever attain at last to that holy ignorance of the 
 good that you do, which is the supreme grace of man's ac- 
 tions?" 
 
 Mme. Graslin turned away to dry her eyes. Her tears told 
 the cure that his words had reached and probed some un- 
 healed wound in her heart. Farrabesche, Catherine, and 
 Benjamin came to thank their benefactress, but she made a 
 sign to them to go away and leave her with M. Bonnet. 
 
 "You see how I have hurt them," she said, bidding him see 
 their disappointed faces. And the tender-hearted cure beck- 
 oned to them to come back. 
 
 "You must be completely happy," she said. "Here is the 
 patent which gives you back all your rights as a citizen, and 
 exempts you from the old humiliating formalities," she 
 added, holding out to Farrabesche a paper which she had kept. 
 Farrabesche kissed Veronique's hand. There was an expres- 
 sion of submissive affection and quiet devotion in his eyes, 
 the devotion which nothing could change, the fidelity of a dog 
 for his master.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 223 
 
 "If Jacques has suffered much, madame, I hope that it 
 be possible for me to make up to him in happiness for 
 the trouble he has been through," said Catherine; "for what- 
 ever he may have done, he is not bad." 
 
 Mme. Graslin turned away her head. The sight of their 
 happiness seemed to crush her. M. Bonnet left her to go to 
 the church, and she dragged herself thither on M. Grosse- 
 tete's arm. 
 
 After breakfast, every one went to see the work begun. 
 All the old people of Montegnac were likewise present. Ve- 
 ronique stood between M. Grossetete and M. Bonnet on the 
 top of the steep slope which the new road ascended, whence 
 they could see the alignment of the four new roads, which 
 served as a deposit for the stones taken off the land. Five 
 navvies were clearing a space of eighteen feet (the width of 
 each road), and throwing up a sort of embankment of good 
 soil as they .worked. Four men on either side were engaged 
 in making a ditch, and these also made a bank of fertile 
 earth along the edge of the field. Behind them came two 
 men, who dug holes at intervals, and planted trees. In each 
 division, thirty laborers (chosen from among the poor), 
 twenty women, and forty girls and children, eighty-six 
 workers in all, were busy piling up the stones which the 
 workmen riddled out along the bank so as to measure the 
 quantity produced by each group. In this way all went 
 abreast, and with such picked and enthusiastic workers rapid 
 progress was being made. Grossetete promised to send some 
 trees, and to ask for more, among Mme. Graslin's friends. 
 It was evident that there would not be enough in the nursery 
 plantations at the chateau to supply such a demand. 
 
 Towards the end of the day, which was to finish with a 
 great dinner at the chateau, Farrabesche begged to speak 
 with Mme. Graslin for a moment. Catherine came with 
 him. 
 
 "Madame," he said, "you were so kind as to promise me 
 the home farm. You meant to help me to a fortune when 
 you granted me such a favor, but I have come round to
 
 224 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Catherine's ideas about our future. If I did well there, 
 there would be jealousy; a word is soon said; I might find 
 things unpleasant, I am afraid, and besides, Catherine would 
 never feel comfortable; it would be better for us to keep to 
 ourselves, in fact. So I have come just to ask you if you 
 will give us the land about the mouth of the Gabou, near 
 the common, to farm instead, and a little bit of the wood 
 yonder under the Living Rock. You will have a lot of work- 
 men thereabouts in July, and it would be easy then to build 
 a farmhouse on a knoll in a good situation. We should be 
 very happy. I would send for Guepin, poor fellow, when he 
 comes out of prison; he would work like a horse, and it is 
 likely I might find a wife for him. My man is no do-nothing. 
 No one will come up there to stare at us; we will colonize 
 thai bit of land, and it will be my great ambition to make a 
 famous farm for you there. Besides, I have come to suggest 
 a tenant for your great farm a cousin of Catherine's, who 
 has a little money of his own ; he will be better able than I 
 to look after such a big concern as that. In five years' time, 
 please God, you will have five or six thousand head of cattle 
 or horses down there in the plain that they are breaking up, 
 and it will really take a good head to look after it all." 
 
 Mme. Graslin recognized the good sense of Farrabesche's 
 request, and granted it. 
 
 As soon as the beginning was made in the plain, Mme. 
 Graslin fell into the even ways of a country life. She went 
 to mass in the morning, watched over the education of the 
 son whom she idolized, and went to see her workmen. After 
 dinner she was at home to her friends in the little drawing- 
 room on the first floor of the centre tower. She taught Rou- 
 baud. Clousier, and the cure whist Gerard knew the game 
 already and when the party broke up towards nine o'clock, 
 every one went home. The only events in the pleasant life 
 were the successes of the different parts of the great enter- 
 prise. 
 
 June came, the bed of the Gabou was dry, Gerard had 
 taken up his quarters in the old keeper's cottage ; for Farra-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 225 
 
 besche's farmhouse was finished by this time, and fifty masons, 
 returned from Paris, were building a wall across the valley 
 from side to side. The masonry was twenty feet thick at 
 the base, gradually sloping away to half that thickness at the 
 top, and the whole length of it was embedded in twelve feet 
 of solid concrete. On the side of the valley Gerard added a 
 course of concrete with a sloping surface twelve feet thick at 
 the base, and a similar support on the side nearest the com- 
 mons, covered with leaf-mould several feet deep, made a sub- 
 stantial barrier which the flood water could not break through. 
 In case of a very wet season, Gerard contrived a channel at a 
 suitable height for the overflow. Everywhere the masonry 
 was carried down on the solid rock (granite, or tufa), that 
 the water might not escape at the sides. By the middle of 
 August the dam was finished. Meanwhile, Gerard also pre- 
 pared three channels in the three principal valleys, and all of 
 the undertakings cost less than the estimate. In this way 
 the farm by the chateau could be put in working order. 
 
 The irrigation channels in the plain under Fresquin's su- 
 perintendence corresponded with the natural canal at the 
 base of the hills ; all the water-courses departed thence. The 
 great abundance of flints enabled him to pave all the chan- 
 nels, and sluices were constructed so that the water might be 
 kept at the required height in them. 
 
 Every Sunday after mass Veronique went down through 
 the park with Gerard and the cure, the doctor, and the mayor, 
 to see how the system of water supply was working. The 
 winter of 1833-1834 was very wet. The water from the three 
 streams had been turned into the torrent, and the flood had 
 made the valley of the Gabou into three lakes, arranged of 
 set design one above the other, so as to form a. reserve for 
 times of great drought. In places where the valley widened 
 out, Gerard had taken advantage of one or two knolls to 
 make an island here and there, and to plant them with dif- 
 ferent trees. This vast engineering operation had completely 
 altered the appearance of the landscape, but it would still be 
 five or six years before it would take its true character.
 
 226 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "The land was quite naked," Farrabesche .used to say, "and 
 now madame has clothed it." After all these great changes, 
 every one spoke of Veronique as "madame" in the country- 
 side. When the rains ceased in June 1834, trial was made of 
 the irrigation system in the part of the plain where seed had 
 been sown; and the green growth thus watered was of the 
 same fine quality as in an Italian marcita, or a Swiss meadow. 
 The method in use on farms in Lombardy had been em- 
 ployed ; the whole surface was kept evenly moist, and the plain 
 was as even as a carpet. The nitre in the snow, dissolved in 
 the water, doubtless contributed not a little to the fineness of 
 the grass. Gerard hoped that the produce would be some- 
 thing like that of Switzerland, where, as is well known, this 
 substance is an inexhaustible source of riches. The trees 
 planted along the roadsides, drawing water sufficient from 
 the ditches, made rapid progress. So it came to pass that in 
 1838, five years after Mme. Graslin came to Montegnac, the 
 waste land, condemned as sterile by twenty generations, was 
 a green and fertile plain, the whole of it under cultivation. 
 
 Gerard had built houses for five farms, besides the large 
 one at the chateau ; Gerard's farm, like Grossetete's and Fres- 
 quin's, received the overflow from Mme. Graslin's estate ; they 
 were conducted on the same methods, and laid out on the same 
 lines. Gerard built a charming lodge on his own property. 
 
 When all was finished, the township of Montegnac acted 
 on the suggestion of its mayor, who was delighted to resign 
 his office to Gerard, and the surveyor became mayor in his 
 stead. 
 
 In 1840 the departure of the first herd of fat cattle sent 
 from Montegnac to the Paris markets was an occasion for a 
 rural fete. . Cattle and horses were raised on the farms ITT 
 the plain; for when the ground was cleared, seven inches of 
 mould were usually found, which were manured by pasturing 
 cattle on them, and continually enriched by the leaves that 
 fell every autumn from the trees, and, first and foremost, by 
 the melted snow-water from the reservoirs in the Gabou. 
 
 It was in this year that Mme. Graslin decided that a tutor
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 227 
 
 must be found for her son, now eleven years old. She was 
 unwilling to part with him, and yet desired to make a well- 
 educated man of her boy. M. Bonnet wrote to the seminary. 
 Mme. Graslin, on her side, let fall a few words concerning 
 her wishes and her difficulty to Monseigneur Dutheil, recently 
 appointed to an archbishopric. It was a great and serious 
 matter to make choice of a man who must spend at least nine 
 months out of twelve at the chateau. Gerard had offered 
 already to ground his friend Francis in mathematics, but it 
 was impossible to do without a tutor ; and this choice that she 
 must make was the more formidable to Mme. Graslin, because 
 she knew that her health" was giving way. As the value of 
 the land in her beloved Montegnac increased, she redoubled 
 the secret austerities of her life. 
 
 Monseigneur Dutheil, with whom Mme. Graslin still cor- 
 responded, found her the man for whom she wished. He 
 sent a schoolmaster named Kuffin from his own diocese. Kuf- 
 fin was a young man of five-and-twenty with genius for pri- 
 vate teaching; he was widely read; in spite of an excessive 
 sensibility, could, when necessary, show himself sufficiently 
 severe for the education of a child, nor was his piety in any 
 way prejudicial to his knowledge ; finally, he was patient and 
 pleasant-looking. 
 
 "This is a real gift which I am sending you, my dear 
 daughter," so the Archbishop wrote; "the young man is 
 worthy to be the tutor of a prince, so I count upon you to se- 
 cure his future, for he will be your son's spiritual father." 
 
 M. Euffin was so much liked by Mme. Graslin's little, 
 circle of faithful friends, that his coming made no change 
 in the various intimacies of those who, grouped about their 
 idol, seized with a sort of jealousy on the hours and moments 
 spent with her. 
 
 The year 1843 saw the prosperity of Montegnac increasing 
 beyond all hopes. The farm on the Gabou rivaled the farms 
 on the plain, and the chateau led the way in all improve-
 
 228 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 raents. The five other farms, which by the terms of the lease 
 paid an increasing rent, and would each bring in the sum of 
 thirty thousand francs in twelve years' time, then brought in 
 sixty thousand francs a year all told. The farmers were just 
 beginning to reap the benefits of their self-denial and Mme. 
 Graslin's sacrifices, and could afford to manure the meadows 
 in the plain where the finest crops grew without fear of dry 
 seasons. The Gabou farm paid its first rent of four thou- 
 sand francs joyously. 
 
 It was in this year that a man in Montegnac started a 
 diligence between the chief town in the arrondissement and 
 Limoges ; a coach ran either way daily. M. Clousier's nephew 
 sold his clerkship and obtained permission to practice as a 
 notary, and Fresquin was appointed to be tax-collector in the 
 canton. Then the new notary built himself a pretty house 
 in upper Montegnac, planted mulberry trees on his land, and 
 became Gerard's deputy. And Gerard himself, grown bold 
 with success, thought of a plan which was to bring Mme. 
 Graslin a colossal fortune ; for this year she paid off her loan, 
 and began to receive interest from her investment in the 
 funds. This was Gerard's scheme: He would turn the little 
 river into a canal, by diverting the abundant water of the 
 Gabon into it. This canal should effect a junction with the 
 Vienne, and in this way it would be possible to exploit twenty 
 thousand acres of the vast forest of Montegnac. The woods 
 were admirably superintended by Colorat, but hitherto had 
 brought in nothing on account of the difficulty of transport. 
 With this arrangement it would be possible to fell a thousand 
 acres every year (thus dividing the forest into twenty strips 
 for successive cuttings), and the valuable timber for build- 
 ing purposes could be sent by water to Limoges. This had 
 been Graslin's plan; he had scarcely listened to the cuiv's 
 projects for the plain, he was far more interested in the 
 scheme for making a canal of the little river.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 229 
 
 V 
 
 IS LAID IN THE TOMB 
 
 IN the beginning of the following year, in spite of Mme. 
 Graslin's bearing, her friends saw warning signs that death 
 was near. To all Boubaud's observations, as to the utmost 
 ingenuity of the keen-sighted questioners, Veronique gave but 
 one answer, "She felt wonderfully well." Yet that spring, 
 when she revisited forest and farms and her rich meadows, 
 it was with a childlike joy that plainly spoke of sad forebod- 
 ings. 
 
 Gerard had been obliged to make a low wall of concrete 
 from the dam across the Gabou to the park at Montegnac 
 along the base of the lower slope of the hill of the Correze; 
 this had suggested an idea to him. He would enclose the 
 whole forest of Montegnac, and throw the park into it. Mme. 
 Graslin put by thirty thousand .francs a year for this purpose. 
 It would take seven years to complete the wall; but when it 
 was finished, the splendid forest would be exempted from the 
 dues claimed by the Government over unenclosed woods and 
 lands, and the three ponds in the Gabou valley would lie 
 within the circuit of the park. Each of the ponds, proudly 
 dubbed "a lake," had its island. This year, too, Gerard, in 
 concert with Grossetete, prepared a surprise for Mme. Gras- 
 lin's birthday; he had built on the second and largest island 
 a little Chartreuse a summer-house, satisfactorily rustic 
 without, and perfectly elegant within. The old banker was 
 in the plot, so were Farrabesche, Fresquin, and Clousier's 
 nephew, and most of the well-to-do folk in Montegnac. 
 Grossetete sent the pretty furniture. The bell tower, copied 
 from the tower of Vevay, produced a charming effect in the 
 landscape. Six boats (two for each lake) had been secretly 
 built, rigged, and painted during the winter by Farrabesche 
 and Guepin, with some help from the village carpenter at 
 Montegnac. 
 
 So one morning in the middle of May, after Mme. Graslin's 
 16
 
 &0 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 friends had breakfasted with her, they led her out into the 
 park, which Gerard had managed for the last five years as 
 architect and naturalist. It had been admirably laid out, 
 sloping down towards the pleasant meadows in the Gabou val- 
 ley, where below, on the first lake, two boats were in readiness 
 for them. The meadowland, watered by several clear streams, 
 had been taken in at the base of the great amphitheatre at 
 the head of the Gabou valley. The woods round about them 
 had been carefully thinned and disposed with a view to the 
 effect; here the shapeliest masses of trees, there a charming 
 inlet of meadow; there was an air of loneliness about the 
 forest-surrounded space which soothed the soul. 
 
 On a bit of rising ground by the lake Gerard had carefully 
 reproduced the chalet which all travelers see and admire on 
 the road to Brieg through the Rhone valley. This was to be 
 the chateau, dairy, and cowshed. From the balcony there 
 was a view over this landscape created by the engineer's art, 
 a view comparable, since the lakes had been made, to the love- 
 liest Swiss scenery. 
 
 It was a glorious day. Not a cloud in the blue sky, and 
 on the earth beneath, the myriad gracious chance effects that 
 the fair May month can give. Light wreaths of mist, risen 
 from the lake, still hung like a thin smoke about the trees by 
 the water's edge willows and weeping willows, ash and alder 
 and abeles, Lombard and Canadian poplars, white and pink 
 hawthorn, birch and acacia, had been grouped about the lake, 
 as the nature of the ground and the trees themselves (all 
 finely-grown specimens now ten years old) suggested. The 
 high green wall of forest trees was reflected in the sheet of 
 water, clear as a mirror, and serene as the sky ; their topmost 
 crests, clearly outlined in that limpid atmosphere, stood out 
 in contrast with the thickets below them, veiled in delicate 
 green undergrowth. The lakes, divided by strongly-built 
 embankments with a causeway along them that served as a 
 short cut from side to side of the valley, lay like three mirrors, 
 each with a different reflecting surface, the water trickling 
 from one to another in musical cascades. And beyond this,
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 231 
 
 from the chalet you caught a glimpse of the bleak and barren 
 common lands, the pale chalky soil (seen from the balcony) 
 looked like a wide sea, and supplied a contrast with the fresh 
 greenery about the lake. Veronique saw the gladness in her 
 friends' faces as their hands were held out to assist her to 
 enter the larger boat, tears rose to her eyes, and they rowed 
 on in silence until they reached the first causeway. Here they 
 landed, to embark again on the second lake; and Veronique, 
 looking up, saw the summer-house on the island, and Grosse- 
 tete and his family sitting on a bench before it. 
 
 "They are determined to make me regret life, it seems," 
 she said, turning to the cure. 
 
 "We want to keep you among us," Clousier said. 
 
 "There is no putting life into the dead," she answered ; but 
 at M. Bonnet's look of rebuke, she withdrew into herself 
 again. 
 
 "Simply let me have the charge of your health," pleaded 
 Eoubaud in a gentle voice ; "I. am sure that I could preserve 
 her who is the living glory of the canton, the common bond 
 that unites the lives of all our friends." 
 
 Veronique bent her head, while Gerard rowed slowly out 
 towards the island in the middle of the sheet of water, the 
 largest of the three. The upper lake chanced to be too full : 
 the distant murmur of the weir seemed to find a voice for the 
 lovely landscape. 
 
 "You did well indeed to bring me here to bid farewell to 
 this entrancing view !" she said, as she saw the beauty of the 
 trees so full of leaves that they hid the bank on either side. 
 
 The only sign of disapprobation which Veronique's friends 
 permitted themselves was a gloomy silence; and, at a second 
 glance from M. Bonnet, she sprang lightly from the boat with 
 an apparent gaiety, which she sustained. Once more she be- 
 came the lady of the manor, and so charming was she, that 
 the Grossetete family thought that they saw in her the beau- 
 tiful Mme. Graslin of old days. 
 
 "Assuredly, you may live yet," her mother said in Vero- 
 nique's ear.
 
 232 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 On that pleasant festival day, in the midst of a scene sub- 
 limely transformed by the use of nature's own resources, how- 
 should anything wound Veronique ? Yet then and there she 
 received her death-blow. 
 
 It had been arranged that the party should return home 
 towards nine o'clock by way of the meadows; for the roads, 
 quite as fine as any in England or Italy, were the pride of 
 their engineer. There were flints in abundance ; as the stones 
 were taken off the land they had been piled in heaps by the 
 roadside; and with such plenty of road metal, it was so easy 
 to keep the ways in good order, that in five years' time they 
 were in a manner macadamized. Carriages were waiting 
 for the party at the lower end of the valley nearest the plain, 
 almost under the Living Eock. The horses had all been bred 
 in Montegnac. Their trial formed part of the programme for 
 the day ; for these were the first that were ready for sale, the 
 manager of the stud having just sent ten of them up to the 
 stables of the chateau. Four handsome animals in light and 
 plain harness were to draw Mme. Graslin's caleche, a present 
 from Grossetete. 
 
 After dinner the joyous company went to take coffee on a 
 promontory where a little wooden kiosk had been erected,- a 
 copy of one on the shores of the Bosphorus. From this point 
 there was a wide outlook over the lowest lake, stretching away 
 to the great barrier across the Gabou, now covered thickly 
 with a luxuriant growth of green, a charming spot for the 
 eyes to rest upon. Colorat's house and the old cottage, now 
 restored, were the only buildings in the landscape; Colorat's 
 capacities were scarcely adequate for the difficult post of head 
 forester in Montegnac, so he had succeeded to Farrabesche's 
 office. 
 
 From this point Mme. Graslin fancied that she could see 
 Francis near Farrabesche's nursery of saplings; she looked 
 for the child, and could not find him, till M. Ruffin pointed 
 him out, playing on the brink of the lake with M. Grosse- 
 tete's great-grandchildren. Veronique felt afraid that some 
 accident might happen, and without listening to remon-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 233 
 
 strances, sprang into one of the boats, landed on the cause- 
 way, and herself hurried away in search of her son. This 
 little incident broke up the party on the island. Grossetete, 
 now a venerable great-grandfather, was the first to suggest a 
 walk along the beautiful field path that wound up and down 
 by the side of the lower lakes. 
 
 Mme. Graslin saw Francis a long way off. He was with a 
 woman in mourning, who had thrown her arms about him. 
 She seemed to be from a foreign country, judging by her dress 
 and the shape of her hat. Veronique in dismay called her 
 son to her. 
 
 "Who is that woman ?" she asked of the other children ; 
 "and why did Francis go away from you ?" 
 
 "The lady called him by his name," said one of the little 
 girls. Mme. Sauviat and Gerard, who were ahead of the 
 others, came up at that moment. 
 
 "Who is that woman, dear?" said Mme. Graslin, turning 
 to Francis. 
 
 "I do not know," he said, "but no one kisses me like that 
 except you and grandmamma. She was crying," he added 
 in his mother's ear. 
 
 "Shall I run and fetch her ?" asked Gerard. 
 
 "No !" said Mme. Graslin, with a curtness very unusual 
 with her. 
 
 With kindly tact, which Veronique appreciated, Gerard 
 took the little ones with him and went back to meet the others ; 
 so that Mme. Sauviat, Mme. Graslin, and Francis were left 
 together. 
 
 "What did she say to you ?" asked Mme. Sauviat, address- 
 ing her grandson. 
 
 "I don't know. She did not speak French." 
 
 "Did you not understand anything she said ?" asked Vero- 
 nique. 
 
 "O'h yes; one thing she said over and over again, that is 
 how I can remember it dear brother! she said." 
 
 Veronique leant on her mother's arm and took her child's 
 hand, but she could scarcely walk, and her strength failed 
 her,
 
 234 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "What is it? . . . What has happened?" . . . 
 every one asked of Mme. Sauviat. 
 
 A cry broke from the old Auvergnate : "Oh ! my daughter 
 is in danger !" she exclaimed, in her guttural accent and deep 
 voice. 
 
 Mme. Graslin had to be carried to her carriage. She or- 
 dered Aline to keep beside Francis, and beckoned to Gerard. 
 
 "You have been in Englan'd, I believe," she said, when she 
 had recovered herself; "do you understand English? What 
 do these words mean dear brother?" 
 
 "That is very simple," said Gerard, and he explained. 
 
 Veronique exchanged glances with Aline and Mme. Sau- 
 viat; the two women shuddered, but controlled their feelings. 
 Mme. Graslin sank into a torpor from which nothing roused 
 her; she did not heed the gleeful voices as the carriages 
 started, nor the splendor of the sunset light on the meadows, 
 the even pace of the horses, nor the laughter of the friends 
 who followed them on horseback at a gallop. Her mother 
 bade the man drive faster, and her carriage was the first to 
 reach the chateau. When the rest arrived they were told 
 that Veronique had gone to her room, and would see no one. 
 
 "I am afraid that Mme. Graslin must have received a fatal 
 wound," Gerard began, speaking to his friends. 
 
 "Where? . . . How?" asked they. 
 
 "In the heart," answered Gerard. 
 
 Two days later Eoubaud set out for Paris. He had seen 
 that Mme. Graslin's life was in danger, and to save her he 
 had gone to summon the first doctor in Paris to give his 
 opinion of the case. But Veronique had only consented to 
 see Eoubaud to put an end to the importunities of Aline and 
 her mother, who begged her to be more careful of herself ; she 
 knew that she was dying. She declined to see M. Bonnet, 
 saying that the time had not yet come; and although all the 
 friends who had come from Limoges for her birthday festival 
 were anxious to stay with her, she entreated them to pardon 
 her if she could not fulfil the duties of hospitality, but she 
 needed the most profound solitude. So, after Roubaud's
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 235 
 
 sudden departure, the guests left the chateau of Montegnac 
 and went back to Limoges, not so much in disappointment as 
 in despair, for all who had come with Grossetete adored Vero- 
 nique, and were utterly at a loss as to the cause of this mys- 
 terious disaster. 
 
 One evening, two days after Grossetete's large family party 
 had left the chateau, Aline brought a visitor to Mme. Gras- 
 lin's room. It was Catherine Farrabesche. At first Cather- 
 ine stood glued to the spot, so astonished was she at this 
 sudden change in her mistress, the features so drawn. 
 
 "Good God ! madame, what harm that poor girl has done ! 
 If only we could have known, Farrabesche and I, we would 
 never have taken her in. She has just heard that madame 
 is ill, and sent me to tell Mme. Sauviat that she should like 
 to speak to her." 
 
 "Here!" cried Veronique. "Where is she at this mo- 
 ment ?" 
 
 "My husband took her over to the chalet." 
 
 "Good," said Mme. Graslin; "leave us, and tell Farra- 
 besche to go. Tell the lady to wait, and my mother will go 
 to see her." 
 
 At nightfall Veronique, leaning on her mother's arm, crept 
 slowly across the park to the chalet. The moon shone with 
 its most brilliant glory, the night air was soft ; the two women, 
 both shaken with emotion that they could not conceal, received 
 in some sort the encouragement of Nature. From moment 
 to moment Mme. Sauviat stopped and made her daughter 
 rest ; for Veronique's sufferings were so poignant that it was 
 nearly midnight before they reached the path that turned 
 down through the wood to the meadows, where the chalet roof 
 sparkled like silver. The moonlight on the surface of the 
 still water lent it a pearly hue. The faint noises of the night, 
 which travel so far in the silence, made up a delicate harmony 
 of sound. 
 
 Veronique sat down on the bench outside the chalet in the 
 midst of the glorious spectacle beneath the starry skies. The 
 murmur of two voices and footfalls on the sands made by two
 
 236 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 persons still some distance away was borne to her by the water, 
 which transmits every sound in the stillness as faithfully as 
 it reflects everything in its calm surface. There was an ex- 
 quisite quality in the intonation of one of the voices, by which 
 Veronique recognized the cure, and with the rustle of his cas- 
 sock was blended the light sound of a silk dress. Evidently 
 there was a woman. 
 
 "Let us go in," she said to her mother. Mme. Sauviat and 
 Ve'ronique sat down on a manger in the low, large room 
 built for a cowshed. 
 
 "I am not blaming you at all, my child," the cure was say- 
 ing ; "but you may be the cause of an irreparable misfortune, 
 for she is the life and soul of this countryside." 
 
 "Oh, monsieur! I will go to-night," the stranger woman's 
 voice answered; "but I can say this to you it will be like 
 death to me to leave my country a second time. If I had 
 stayed a day longer in that horrible New York or in the 
 United States, where there is neither hope nor faith nor char- 
 ity, I should have died, without any illness. The air I was 
 breathing hurt my chest, the food did me no good, I was dying 
 though I looked full of life and health. When I stepped on 
 board the suffering ceased ; I felt as if I were in France. Ah, 
 monsieur ! I have seen my mother and my brother's wife die 
 of grief. And then my grandfather and grandmother Tas- 
 cheron died died, dear M. Bonnet, in spite of the unheard-of 
 prosperity of Tascheronville. . . . Yes. Our father be- 
 gan a settlement, a village in Ohio, and now the village is al- 
 most a town. One-third of the land thereabouts belongs to 
 our family, for God has watched over us all along, and the 
 farms have done well, our crops are magnificent, and we are 
 rich so rich that we managed to build a Catholic church. 
 The whole town is Catholic; we will not allow any other wor- 
 ship, and we hope to convert all the endless sects about us by 
 our example. The true faith is in a minority in that dreary 
 mercenary land of the dojlar, a land which chills one to the 
 soul. Still I would go back to die there sooner than do the 
 least harm here or give the slightest pain to the mother of
 
 Tascheron's sister clasped her hands at the sight of this ghost
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 237 
 
 our dear Francis. Only take me to the parsonage house to- 
 night, dear M. Bonnet, so that I can pray awhile on his grave ; 
 it was just that that drew me here, for as I came nearer and 
 nearer the place where he lies I felt quite a different being. 
 No, I did not believe I should feel so happy here " 
 
 "Very well," said the cure; "come, let us go. If at some 
 future day you can come back without evil consequences, I 
 will write to tell you, Denise; but perhaps after this visit to 
 your old home you may feel able to live yonder without suf- 
 fering " 
 
 "Leave this country now when it is so beautiful here! 
 Just see what Mme. Graslin has made- of the Gabou !" she 
 added, pointing to the moonlit lake. "And then all this 
 will belong to our dear Francis " 
 
 "You shall not go, Denise," said Mme. Graslin, appear- 
 ing in the stable doorway. 
 
 Jean-Frangois Tascheron's sister clasped her hands at the 
 sight of this ghost who spoke to her; for Veronique's white 
 face in the moonlight looked unsubstantial as a shadow 
 against the dark background of the open stable door. Her 
 eyes glittered like two stars. 
 
 "No, child, you shall not leave the country you have trav- 
 eled so far to see, and you shall be happy here, unless God 
 should refuse to second my efforts; for God, no doubt, has 
 sent you here, Denise." 
 
 She took the astonished girl's hand in hers, and went with 
 her down the path towards the opposite shore of the lake. 
 Mme. Sauviat and the cure, left alone, sat down on the bench. 
 
 "Let her have her way," murmured Mme. Sauviat. 
 
 A few minutes later Veronique returned alone ; her mother 
 and the cure brought her back to the chateau. Doubtless she 
 had thought of some plan of action which suited the mystery, 
 for nobody saw Denise, no one knew that she had come back. 
 
 Mme. Graslin took to her bed, nor did she leave it. Every 
 day she grew worse. It seemed to vex her that she could not 
 rise, for again and again she made vain efforts to get up and 
 take a walk in the park. One morning in early June, some
 
 238 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 days after that night at the chalet, she made a violent effort 
 and rose and tried to dress herself, as if for a festival. She 
 begged Gerard to lend her his arm; for her friends came 
 daily for news of her, and when Aline said that her mistress 
 meant to go out they all hurried up to the chateau. Mme. 
 Graslin had summoned all her remaining strength to spend it 
 on this last walk. She gained her object by a violent spas- 
 modic effort of the will, inevitably followed by a deadly reac- 
 tion. 
 
 "Let us go to the chalet and alone," she said to Gerard. 
 The tones of her voice were soft, and there was something like 
 coquetry in her glance. "This is my last escapade, for I 
 dreamed last night that the doctors had come." 
 
 "Would you like to see your woods?" asked Gerard. 
 
 "For the last time. But," she added, in coaxing tones, "I 
 have some strange proposals to make to you." 
 
 Gerard, by her direction, rowed her across the second lake, 
 when she had reached it on foot. He was at a loss to under- 
 stand such a journey, but she indicated the summer-house as 
 their destination, and he plied his oars. 
 
 There was a long pause. Her eyes wandered over the 
 hillsides, the water, and the sky; then she spoke: 
 
 "My friend, it is a strange request that I am about to make 
 to you, but I think that you are the man to obey me." 
 
 "In everything," he said, "sure as I am that you cannot 
 will anything but good." 
 
 "I want you to marry," she said ; "you will fulfil the wishes 
 of a dying woman, who is certain that she is securing your 
 happiness." 
 
 "I am too ugly!" said Gerard. 
 
 "She is pretty, she is young, she wants to live in Mon- 
 tegnac ; and if you marry her, you will do something towards 
 making my last moments easier. We need not discuss her 
 qualities. I tell you this, that she is a woman of a thousand ; 
 and as for her charms, youth, and beauty, the first sight will 
 suffice; we shall see her in a moment in the summer-house. 
 On our way back you shall give me your answer, a 'Yes' or a 
 'No/ in sober earnest."
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 239 
 
 Mme. Graslin smiled as she saw the oars move more swiftly 
 after this confidence. Denise, who was living out of sight in 
 the island sanctuary, saw Mme. Graslin, and hurried to the 
 door. Veronique and Gerard came in. In spite of herself, 
 the poor girl flushed as she met the eyes that Gerard turned 
 upon her; Denise's beauty was an agreeable surprise to him. 
 
 "La Curieux does not let you want for anything, does she ?" 
 asked Veronique. 
 
 "Look, madame," said Denise, pointing to the breakfast 
 table. 
 
 "This is M. Gerard, of whom I have spoken to you," Vero- 
 nique went on. "He will be my son's guardian, and when I 
 am dead you will all live together at the chateau until Francis 
 comes of age." 
 
 "Oh, madame ! don't talk like that." 
 
 "Just look at me, child !" said Veronique, and all at once 
 she saw tears in the girl's eyes. "She comes from New 
 York," she added, turning to Gerard. 
 
 This by way of putting both on a footing of acquaintance. 
 Gerard asked questions of Denise, and Mme. Graslin left 
 them to chat, going to look out over the view of the last lake 
 on the Gabou. At six o'clock Gerard and Veronique rowed 
 back to the chalet. 
 
 "Well ?" queried she, looking at her friend. 
 
 "You have my word." 
 
 "You may be without prejudices," Veronique began, "but 
 you ought to know how it was that she was obliged to leave 
 the country, poor child, brought back by a homesick long- 
 ing." 
 
 "A slip." 
 
 "Oh no," said Veronique, "or should I introduce her tc 
 you? She is the sister of a working-man who died on the 
 scaffold . . ." 
 
 "Oh! Tascheron, who murdered old Pingret " 
 
 "Yes. She is the murderer's sister," said Mme. Graslin, 
 with inexpressible irony in her voice; "you can take back 
 your word."
 
 240 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 She went no further. Gerard was compelled to carry her 
 to the bench at the chalet, and for some minutes she lay there 
 unconscious. Gerard, kneeling beside her, said, as soon as 
 she opened her eyes : 
 
 "I will marry Denise." 
 
 Mme. Graslin made him rise, she took his head in her 
 hands, and set a kiss on his forehead. Then, seeing that he 
 was astonished to be thus thanked, she grasped his hand and 
 said: 
 
 <f You will soon know the meaning of this puzzle. Let us 
 try to reach the terrace again, our friends are there. It is 
 very late, and I feel very weak, and yet, I should like to bid 
 farewell from afar to this dear plain of mine." 
 
 The weather had been intolerably hot all day; and though 
 the storms, which did so much damage that year in different 
 parts of Europe and in France itself, respected the Limousin, 
 there had been thunder along the Loire, and the air began to 
 grow fresher. The sky was so pure that the least details on 
 the horizon were sharp and clear. What words can describe 
 the delicious concert of sounds, the smothered hum of the 
 township, now alive with workers returning from the fields? 
 It would need the combined work of a great landscape painter 
 and a painter of figures to do justice to such a picture. Is 
 there not, in fact, a subtle connection between the lassitude of 
 Nature and the laborer's weariness, an affinity of mood hardly 
 to be rendered? In the tepid twilight of the dog days, the 
 rarefied air gives its full significance to the least sound made 
 by every living thing. 
 
 The women sit chatting at their doors with a bit of work 
 even then in their hands, as they wait for the goodman who, 
 probably, will bring the children home. The smoke going up 
 from the roofs is the sign of the last meal of the day and the 
 gayest for the peasants ; after it they will sleep. The stir at 
 that hour is the expression of happy and tranquil thoughts 
 in those who have finished their day's work. There is a very 
 distinct difference between their evening and morning 
 of song; for in this the village folk are like the birds,
 
 THE COUNTRY PAItSON 241 
 
 the last twitterings at night are utterly unlike their notes at 
 dawn. All Nature joins in the hymn of rest at the end of the 
 day, as in the hymn of gladness at sunrise ; all things take the 
 softly blended hues that the sunset throws across the fields, 
 tingeing the dusty roads with mellow light. If any should 
 be bold enough to deny the influences of the fairest hour of 
 the day, the very flowers would convict him of falsehood, in- 
 toxicating him with their subtlest scents, mingled with the 
 tenderest sounds of insects, the amorous faint twitter of birds. 
 
 Thin films of mist hovered above the "water-lanes" that 
 furrowed the plain below the township. The poplars and 
 acacias and sumach trees, planted in equal numbers along the 
 roads, had grown so tall already that they shaded it, and in 
 the wide fields on either side the large and celebrated herds 
 of cattle were scattered about in groups, some 'still browsing, 
 others chewing the cud. Men, women, and children were 
 busy getting in the last of the hay, the most picturesque of all 
 field work. The evening air, less languid since the sudden 
 breath of coolness after the storms, bore the wholesome scents 
 of mown grass and swaths of hay. The least details in the 
 beautiful landscape stood out perfectly sharp and clear. 
 
 There was some fear for the weather. The ricks were be- 
 ing finished in all haste ; men hurried about them with loaded 
 forks, raked the heaps together, and loaded the carts. Out 
 in the distance the scythes were still busy, the women were 
 turning the long swaths that looked like hatched lines across 
 the fields into dotted rows of haycocks. 
 
 Sounds of laughter came up from the hayfields, the work- 
 ers frolicked over their work, the children shouted as they 
 buried each other in the heaps. Every figure was distinct, 
 the women's petticoats, pink, red, or blue, their kerchiefs, 
 their bare arms and legs, the wide-brimmed straw hats of 
 field-workers, the men's shirts, the white trousers that nearly 
 all of them wore. 
 
 The last rays of sunlight fell like a bright dust over the 
 long lines of poplar trees by the channels which divided up 
 the plain into fields of various sizes, and lingered caressingly
 
 242 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 over the groups of men, women, and children, horses and 
 carts and cattle. The shepherds and herdsmen began to 
 gather their flocks together with the sound of their horns. 
 The plain seemed so silent and so full of souiid, a strange an- 
 tithesis, but only strange to those who do not know the 
 splendors of the fields. Loads of green fodder came into 
 the township from every side. There was something inde- 
 scribably somnolent in the influence of the scene, and Vero- 
 nique, between the cure and Gerard, uttered no word. 
 
 At last they came to a gap made by a rough track that led 
 from the houses ranged below the terrace to the parsonage 
 house and the church; and looking down into Montegnac, 
 Gerard and M. Bonnet saw the upturned faces of the women, 
 men, and children, all looking at them. Doubtless it was 
 Mme. Graslin more particularly whom they followed with 
 their eyes. And what affection and gratitude there was in 
 their way of doing this! With what blessings did they not 
 greet Veronique's appearance ! With what devout intent- 
 ness they watched the three benefactors of a whole country- 
 side ! It was as if man added a hymn of gratitude to all the 
 songs of evening. While Mme. Graslin walked with her eyes 
 set on the magnificent distant expanse of green, her dearest 
 creation, the mayor and the cure watched the groups below. 
 There was no mistake about their expression; grief, melan- 
 choly, and regret, mingled with hope, were plainly visible in 
 them all. There was not a soul in Montegnac but knew how 
 that M. Koubaud had gone to Paris to fetch some great doc- 
 tors, and that the beneficent lady of the canton was nearing 
 the end of a fatal illness. On market days in every place for 
 thirty miles round, the peasants asked the Montegnac folk, 
 "How is your mistress ?" And so, the great thought of death 
 hovered over this countryside amid the fair picture of the 
 hay fields. 
 
 Far off in the plain, more than one mower sharpening his 
 scythe, more than one girl leaning on her rake, or farmer 
 among his stacks of hay, looked up and paused thoughtfully 
 to watch Mme. Graslin, their great lady, the pride of the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 243 
 
 Correze. They tried to discover some hopeful sign, or 
 watched her admiringly, prompted hy a feeling which put 
 work out of their minds. "She is out of doors, so she must 
 be better !" The simple phrase was on all lips. 
 
 Mme. Graslin's mother was sitting at the end of the ter- 
 race. Veronique had placed a cast-iron garden-seat in the 
 corner, so that she might sit there and look down into the 
 churchyard through the balustrade. Mme. Sauviat watched 
 her daughter as she walked along the terrace, and her eyes 
 filled with tears. She knew something of the preternatural 
 effort which Veronique was making; she knew that even at 
 that moment her daughter was suffering fearful pain, and 
 that it was only a heroic effort of will that enabled her to 
 stand. Tears, almost like tears of blood, found their way 
 down among the sunburned wrinkles of a face like parchment, 
 that seemed as if it could not alter one crease for any emotion 
 any more. Little Graslin, standing between M. Euffin's 
 knees, cried for sympathy. 
 
 "What is the matter, child?" the tutor asked sharply. 
 
 "Grandmamma is crying " 
 
 M. Kuffin's eyes had been fixed on Mme. Graslin, who was 
 coming towards them ; he looked at Mme. Sauviat ; the Eoman 
 matron's face, stony with sorrow and wet with tears, gave him 
 a great shock. That dumb grief had invested the old woman 
 with a certain grandeur and sacredness. 
 
 "Madame, why did you let her go out ?" asked the tutor. 
 
 Veronique was coming nearer. She walked like a queen, 
 with admirable grace in her whole bearing. And Mme. Sau- 
 viat knew that she should outlive her daughter, and in the 
 cry of despair that broke from her, a secret escaped that re- 
 vealed many things which roused curiosity. 
 
 "To think of it ! She walks and wears a horrible hair shirt 
 always pricking her skin !" 
 
 The young man's blood ran cold at her words ; he could not 
 be insensible to the exquisite grace of Veronique's move- 
 ments, and shuddered as he thought of the cruel, unrelenting 
 mastery that the soul must have gained over the body. A
 
 244 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Parisienne famed for her graceful figure, the ease of her car- 
 riage and bearing, might perhaps have feared comparison 
 with Veronique at that moment. 
 
 "She has worn it for thirteen years, ever since the child 
 was weaned," the old. woman said, pointing to young Graslin. 
 "She has worked miracles here ; and if they but knew her life, 
 they might put her among the saints. Nobody has seen her 
 eat since she came here, do you know why ? Aline brings her 
 a bit of dry bread three times a day on a great platter full of 
 ashes, and vegetables cooked in water without any salt, on a 
 red earthenware dish that they put a dog's food in ! Yes. 
 That is the way she lives who has given life to the canton. 
 She says her prayers kneeling on the hem of her cilice. She 
 says that if she did not practise these austerities, she could 
 not wear the smiling face you see. I am telling you this" 
 (and the old woman's voice dropped lower) "for you to tell it 
 to the doctor that M. Roubaud has gone to fetch from Paris. 
 If he will prevent my daughter from continuing these pen- 
 ances, they might save her yet (who knows ?) though the hand 
 of death is on her head. Look ! Ah, I must be very strong 
 to have borne all these things for fifteen years." 
 
 The old woman took her grandson's hand, raised it, and 
 passed it over her forehead and cheeks as if some restorative 
 balm communicated itself in the touch of the little hand; 
 then she set a kiss upon it, a kiss full of the love which is the 
 secret of grandmothers no less than mothers. By this time 
 Veronique was only a few paces distant, Clousier was with 
 her, and the cure and Gerard. Her face, lit up by the setting 
 Bun, was radiant with awful beauty. 
 
 One thought, steadfast amid many inward troubles, seemed 
 to be written in the lines that furrowed the sallow forehead 
 in long folds piled one above the other like clouds. The out- 
 lines of her face, now completely colorless, entirely white 
 with the dead olive-tinged whiteness of plants grown without 
 sunlight, were thin but not withered, and showed traces of 
 great physical suffering produced by mental anguish. She 
 had quelled the body through the soul, and the soul through
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 245 
 
 the body. So completely worn out was she, that she resembled 
 her past self only as an old woman resembles her portrait 
 painted in girlhood. The glowing expression of her eyes 
 spoke of the absolute domination of a Christian will over a 
 body reduced to the subjection required by religion, for in 
 this woman the flesh was at the mercy of the spirit. As in 
 profane poetry Achilles dragged the dead body of Hector, 
 victoriously she dragged it over the stony ways of life; and 
 thus for fifteen years she had compassed the heavenly Jeru- 
 salem which she hoped to enter, not as a thief, but amid 
 triumphant acclamations. Never was anchorite amid the 
 parched and arid deserts of Africa more master of his senses 
 than Veronique in her splendid chateau in a rich land of soft 
 and luxuriant landscape, nestling under the mantle of the 
 great forest where science, heir to Moses' rod, had caused 
 plenty to spring forth and the prosperity and the welfare of 
 a whole countryside. Veronique was looking out over the re- 
 sults of twelve years of patience, on the accomplishment of 
 a task on which a man of ability might have prided himself; 
 but with the gentle modesty which Pontorno's brush depicted 
 in the expression of his symbolical Christian Chastity with 
 her arms about the unicorn. Her two companions respected 
 her silent mood when they saw that she was gazing over the 
 vast plain, once sterile, and now fertile; the devout lady of 
 the manor went with folded arms and eyes fixed on the point 
 where the road reached the horizon. 
 
 Suddenly she stopped when but two paces away from Mme. 
 Sauviat, who watched her as Christ's mother must have gazed 
 at her Son upon the Cross. Veronique raised her hand and 
 pointed to the spot where the road turned off to Montegnac. 
 
 "Do you see that caleche and the four post-horses?" she 
 asked, smiling. "That is M. Roubaud. He is coming back. 
 We shall soon know now how many hours I have to live." 
 
 "Hours!" echoed Gerard. 
 
 "Did I not tell you that this was my last walk ?" she said. 
 "Did I not come to see this beautiful view in all its glory for 
 the last time?"
 
 246 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 She indicated the fair meadow-land, lit up by the last rays 
 of the sun, and the township below. All the village had come 
 out and stood in the square in front of the church. 
 
 "Ah," she went on, "let me think that there is God's bene- 
 diction in the strange atmospheric conditions that have 
 favored our hay harvest. Storms all about us, rain and hail 
 and thunder have laid waste pitilessly and incessantly, but 
 not here. The people think so ; why should I not follow their 
 example ? I need so much to find some good augury on earth 
 for that which awaits me when my eyes shall be closed !" 
 
 Her child came to her, took his mother's hand, and laid it 
 on his hair. The great eloquence of that movement touched 
 Veronique; with preternatural strength she caught him up, 
 held him on her left arm a moment as she used to hold him as 
 a child at the breast, and kissed him. "Do you see this land, 
 my boy?" she said. "You must go on with your mother's 
 work when you are a man." 
 
 Then the cure spoke sadly : "There are a very few strong 
 and privileged natures who are permitted to see Death face 
 to face, to fight a long duel with him, and to show courage 
 and skill that strike others with admiration ; this is the dread- 
 ful spectacle that you give us, madame ; but, perhaps, you are 
 somewhat wanting in pity for us. Leave us at least the hope 
 that you are mistaken, that God will permit you to finish all 
 that you have begun." 
 
 "I have done nothing save through you, my friends," said 
 she. "It was in my power to be useful to you; it is so no 
 longer. Everything about us is green; there is no desolate 
 waste here now, save my own heart. You know it, dear cur6, 
 you know that I can only find peace and pardon there " 
 
 She held out her hand over the churchyard. She had never 
 said so much since the day when she first came to Montegnac 
 and fainted away on that very spot. The cure gazed at his 
 penitent ; and, accustomed as he had been for long to read her 
 thoughts, he knew from those simple words that he had won 
 a fresh victory. It must have cost Veronique a terrible effort 
 over herself to break a twelve years' silence with such preg-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 247 
 
 nant words; and the cure clasped his hands with the devout 
 fervor familiar to him, and looked with deep religious emotion 
 on the family group about him. All their secrets had passed 
 through his heart. 
 
 Gerard looked bewildered; the words "peace and pardon" 
 seemed to sound strangely in his ears; M. Ruffin's eyes were 
 fixed in a sort of dull amazement on Mme. Graslin. And 
 meanwhile the caleche sped rapidly along the road, threading 
 its way from tree to tree. 
 
 "There are five of them !" said the cure, who could see and 
 count the travelers. 
 
 "Five!" exclaimed M. Gerard. "Will five of them know 
 more than two ?" 
 
 "Ah!" murmured Mme. Graslin, who leant on the cure's 
 arm, "there is the public prosecutor. What does he come to do 
 here?" 
 
 "And papa Grossetete too !" cried Francis. 
 
 "Madame, take courage, be worthy of yourself," said the 
 cure. He drew Mme. Graslin, who was leaning heavily on 
 him, a few paces aside. 
 
 "What does he want?" she said for all answer, and she 
 went to lean against the balustrade. "Mother!" 
 
 Mme. Sauviat sprang forward with an activity that belied 
 her years. 
 
 "I shall see him again . . ." said Veronique. 
 
 "If he is coming with M. Grossetete," said the cure, "it 
 can only be with good intentions, of course." 
 
 "Ah! sir, my daughter is dying!" cried Mme. Sauviat, 
 seeing the change that passed over Mme. Graslin's face at the 
 words. "How will she endure such cruel agitations? M. 
 Grossetete has always prevented that man from coming to 
 see Veronique : 
 
 Veronique's face flamed. 
 
 "So you hate him, do you ?" the Abbe Bonnet asked, turning 
 to his penitent. 
 
 "She left Limoges lest all Limoges should know her 
 secrets," said Mme. Sauviat, terrified by that sudden change 
 wrought in Mme. Graslin's drawn features.
 
 248 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "Do you not see that his presence will poison the hours 
 that remain to me, when Heaven alone should be in my 
 thoughts? He is nailing me down to earth!" cried Vero- 
 nique. 
 
 The cure took Mme. Graslin's arm once more, and con- 
 strained her to walk a few paces; when they were alone, he 
 looked full at her with one of those angelic looks which calm 
 the most violent tumult in the soul. 
 
 "If it is thus," he said, "I, as your confessor, bid you to 
 receive him, to be kind and gracious to him, to lay aside this 
 garment of anger, and to forgive him as God will forgive you. 
 Can there be a taint of passion in the soul that I deemed 
 purified? Burn this last grain of incense on the altar of 
 penitence, lest all shall be one lie in you." 
 
 "There was still this last struggle to make, and it is made," 
 she said, drying her eyes. "The evil one was lurking in the 
 last recess in my heart, and doubtless it was God who put into 
 M. de Granville's heart the thought that sends him here. 
 How many times will He smite me yet?" she cried. 
 
 She stopped as if to put up an inward prayer; then she 
 turned to Mme. Sauviat, and said in a low voice : 
 
 "Mother dear, be nice and kind to M. le Procureur 
 general." 
 
 In spite of herself, the old Auvergnate shuddered fever- 
 ishly. 
 
 "There is no hope left," she said, as she caught at the cure's 
 hand. 
 
 As she spoke, the cracking of the postilion's whip an- 
 nounced that the caleche was climbing the avenue ; the great 
 gateway stood open, the carriage turned the courtyard, and 
 in another moment the travelers came out upon the terrace. 
 Beside the public prosecutor and M. Grossetete, the Arch- 
 bishop had come (M. Dutheil was in Limoges for Gabriel de 
 Rastignac's consecration as Bishop), and M. Roubaud came 
 arm-in-arm with Horace Bianchon, one of the greatest doctors 
 in Paris. 
 
 "You are welcome," said Veronique, addressing her guests,
 
 THfc COUNTRY PARSON 249 
 
 "and you" (holding out a hand to the public prosecutor 
 and grasping his) "especially welcome." 
 
 M. Grossetete, the Archbishop, and Mme. Sauviat ex- 
 changed glances at this; so great was their astonishment, 
 that it overcame the profound discretion of old age. 
 
 "And I thank him who brought you here," Veronique went 
 on, as she looked on the Comte de Granville's face for the first 
 time in fifteen years. "I have borne you a grudge for a long 
 time, but now I know that I have done } r ou an injustice ; you 
 shall know the reason of all this if you will stay here in Mon- 
 tegnac for two days." She turned to Horace Bianchon 
 "This gentleman will confirm my apprehensions, no doubt." 
 Then to the Archbishop "It is God surely who sends you 
 to me, my lord," she said with a bow. "For our old friend- 
 ship's sake you will not refuse to be with me in my last mo- 
 ments. By what grace, I wonder, have I all those who have 
 loved and sustained me all my life about me now ?" 
 
 At the word "loved" she turned with graceful, deliberate 
 intent towards M. de Granville; the kindness in her manner 
 brought tears into his eyes. There was a deep silence. The 
 two doctors asked themselves what witchcraft it was that 
 enabled the woman before them to stand upright while endur- 
 ing the agony which she must suffer. The other three were 
 so shocked at the change that illness had wrought in her that 
 they could only communicate their thoughts by the eyes. 
 
 "Permit me to go with these gentlemen," she said, with 
 her unvarying grace of manner; "it is an urgent question." 
 She took leave of her guests, and, leaning upon the two 
 doctors, went towards the chateau so slowly and painfully that 
 it was evident that the end was at hand. 
 
 The Archbishop looked at the cure. 
 
 "M. Bonnet," he said, "you have worked wonders !" 
 
 "Not I, but God, my lord," answered the other. 
 
 "They said that she was dying," exclaimed M. Grossetete; 
 "why, she is dead ! There is nothing left but a spirit " 
 
 "A soul," said M. Gerard. 
 
 "She is the same as ever," cried the public prosecutor.
 
 250 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "She is a Stoic after the manner of the old Greek Zeno,* 
 said the tutor. 
 
 Silently they went along the terrace and looked out over the 
 landscape that glowed a most glorious red color in the light 
 shed abroad by the fires of the sunset. 
 
 "It is thirteen years since I saw this before," said the 
 Archbishop, indicating the fertile fields, the valley, and the 
 trill above Montegnac, "so for me this miracle is as extraor- 
 dinary as another which I have just witnessed; for how can 
 you let Mme. Graslin stand upright ? She ought to be lying 
 in bed 
 
 "So she was," said Mme. Sauviat. "She never left her bed 
 for ten days, but she was determined to get up to see this 
 place for the last time." 
 
 "I understand," said M. de Granville. "She wished to say 
 farewell to all that she had called into being, but she ran the 
 risk of dying here on the terrace." 
 
 "M. Eoubaud said that she was not to be thwarted," said 
 Mme. Sauviat. 
 
 "What a marvelous thing!" exclaimed the Archbishop, 
 whose eyes never wearied of wandering over the view. "She 
 has made the waste into sown fields. But we know, mon- 
 sieur," he added, turning to Gerard, "that your skill and your 
 labors have been a great factor in this." 
 
 "We have only been her laborers," the mayor said. "Yes; 
 we are only the hands, she was the head." 
 
 Mme. Sauviat left the group, and went to hear what the 
 opinion of the doctor from Paris was. 
 
 "We shall stand in need of heroism to be present at this 
 deathbed," said the public prosecutor, addressing the Arch- 
 bishop and the cure. 
 
 "Yes/' said M. Grossetete; "but for such a friend, great 
 things should be done." 
 
 While they waited and came and went, oppressed by heavy 
 thoughts, two of Mme. Graslin's tenants came up. They had 
 come, they said, on behalf of a whole township waiting in 
 painful suspense to hear the verdict of the doctor from Paris.
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 251 
 
 "They are in consultation, we know nothing as yet, my 
 friends," said the Archbishop. 
 
 M. Boubaud came hurrying towards them, and at the sound 
 of his quick footsteps the others hastened to meet him. 
 
 "Well?" asked the mayor. 
 
 "She has not forty-eight hours to live," answered M. Rou- 
 baud. "The disease has developed while I was away. M. 
 Bianchon cannot understand how she could walk. These 
 seldom seen phenomena are always the result of great exalta- 
 tion of mind. And so, gentlemen," he added, speaking to 
 the churchmen, "she has passed out of our hands and into 
 yours; science is powerless; my illustrious colleague thinks 
 that there is scarcely time for the ceremonies of the Church." 
 
 "Let us put up the prayers appointed for times of great 
 calamity," said the cure, and he went away with his parish- 
 ioners. "His lordship will no doubt condescend to administer 
 the last sacraments." 
 
 The Archbishop bowed his head in reply; he could not say 
 a word, his eyes were full of tears. The group sat down or 
 leant against the balustrade, and each was deep in his own 
 thoughts. The church bells pealed mournfully, the sound 
 of many footsteps came up from below, the whole village was 
 flocking to the service. The light of the altar candles gleamed 
 through the trees in M. Bonnet's garden, and then began the 
 sounds of chanting. A faintly flushed twilight overspread 
 the fields, the birds had ceased to sing, and the only sound in 
 the plain was the shrill, melancholy, long-drawn note of the 
 frogs. 
 
 "Let us do our duty," said the Archbishop at last, and he 
 went slowly towards the house, like a man who carries a 
 burden greater than he can bear. 
 
 The consultation had taken place in the great drawing- 
 room, a vast apartment which communicated with a state 
 bedroom, draped with crimson damask. Here Graslin had 
 exhibited to the full the self-made man's taste for display. 
 Veronique had not entered the room half-a-dozen times in 
 fourteen years ; the great suite of apartments was completely
 
 252 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 useless to her; she had never received visitors in them, 
 but the effort she had made to discharge her last obligations 
 and to quell her revolted physical nature had left her power- 
 less to reach her own rooms. 
 
 The great doctor had taken his patient's hand and felt her 
 pulse, then he looked significantly at M. Eoubaud, and the 
 two men carried her into the adjoining room and laid her 
 on the bed, Aline hastily flinging open the doors for them. 
 There were, of course, no sheets on the state bed; the two 
 doctors laid Mine. Graslin at full length on the crimson quilt, 
 Roubaud opened the windows, flung back the Venetian shut- 
 ters, and summoned help. La Sauviat and the servants 
 came hurrying to the room; they lighted the wax candles 
 (yellow with age) in the sconces. 
 
 Then the dying woman smiled. "It is decreed that my 
 death shall be a festival, as a Christian's death should be." 
 
 During the consultation she spoke again: 
 
 "The public prosecutor has done his work; I was going; 
 he has dispatched me sooner " 
 
 The old mother laid a finger on her lips with a warning 
 glance. 
 
 "Mother, I will speak now," Veronique said in answer. 
 "Look ! the finger of God is in all this ; I shall die very soon 
 in this room hung with red . . ." 
 
 La Sauviat went out in dismay at the words. 
 
 "Aline !" she cried, "she is speaking out ! " 
 
 "Ah ! madame's mind is wandering," said the faithful wait- 
 ing-woman, coming in with the sheets. "Send for M. le Cure, 
 madame." 
 
 "You must undress your mistress," said Bianchon, as soon 
 as Aline entered the room. 
 
 "It will be very difficult ; madame wears a hair shirt next 
 her skin." 
 
 "What?" the great doctor cried, "are such horrors still 
 practised in this nineteenth century?" 
 
 "Mme. Graslin has never allowed me to touch the stomach." 
 said M. Roubaud. "I could learn nothing of her complaint
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 253 
 
 save from her face and her pulse, and from what I could 
 learn from her mother and her maid." 
 
 Veronique was laid on a sofa while they made the great 
 bed ready for her at the further end of the room. The doctors 
 spoke together with lowered voices as La Sauviat and Aline 
 made the bed. There was a look terrible to see in the two 
 women's faces; the same thought was wringing both their' 
 hearts. "We are making her bed for the last time this will 
 be her bed of death." 
 
 The consultation was brief. In the first place, Bianchon 
 insisted that Aline and La Sauviat must cut the patient out 
 of the cilice and put her in a night-dress. The two doctors 
 waited in the great drawing-room while this was done. Aline 
 came out with the terrible instrument of penance wrapped 
 in a towel. "Madame is just one wound," she told them. 
 
 "Madame, you have a stronger will than Napoleon had," 
 said Bianchon, when the two doctors had come in again, and 
 Veronique had given clear answers to the questions put to her. 
 "You are preserving your faculties in the last stage of a dis- 
 ease in which the Emperor's brilliant intellect sank. From 
 what I know of you, I feel that I owe it to you to tell you 
 the truth." 
 
 "I implore you, with clasped hands, to tell it me," she said ; 
 "you can measure the strength that remains to me, and I 
 have need of all the life that is in me for a few hours yet." 
 
 "You must think of nothing but your salvation," said 
 Bianchon. 
 
 "If God grants that body and mind die together," she said, 
 with a divinely sweet smile, "believe that the favor is vouch- 
 safed for the glory of His Church on earth. My mind is 
 still needed to carry out a thought from God, while Napoleon 
 had accomplished his destiny." 
 
 The two doctors looked at each other in amazement; the 
 words were spoken as easily as if Mme. Graslin had been in 
 her drawing-room. 
 
 "Ah! here is the doctor who will heal me," she added as 
 the Archbishop entered.
 
 254 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 She summoned all her strength to sit upright to take leave 
 of M. Bianchon, speaking graciously, and asking him to 
 accept something besides money for the good news which he 
 had just brought her; then she whispered a few words to her 
 mother, who went out with the doctor. She asked the Arch- 
 bishop to wait until the cure should come, and seemed to wish 
 "to rest for a little while. Aline sat by her mistress' bedside. 
 
 At midnight Mme. Graslin woke and asked for the Arch- 
 bishop and the cure. Aline told her that they were in the 
 room engaged in prayer for her. With a sign she dismissed 
 her mother and the maid, and beckoned the two priests to 
 her bed. 
 
 "Nothing of what I shall say is unknown to you, my lord, 
 nor to you, M. le Cure. You, my Lord Archbishop, were the 
 first to look into my conscience ; at a glance you read almost 
 the whole past, and that which you saw was enough for you. 
 My confessor, an angel sent by Heaven to be near me, 
 knows something more; I have confessed all to him, as in 
 duty bound. And now I wish to consult you whose minds 
 are enlightened by the spirit of the Church; I want to ask 
 you how such a woman as I should take leave of this life as a 
 true Christian. You, spirits holy and austere, do you think 
 that if Heaven vouchsafes pardon to the most complete and 
 profound repentance ever made by a guilty soul, I shall have 
 accomplished my whole task here on earth?" 
 
 "Yes ; yes, my daughter," said the Archbishop. 
 
 "No, my father, no !" she cried, sitting upright, and light- 
 nings flashed from her eyes. "Yonder lies an unhappy man 
 in his grave, not many steps away, under the sole weight of a 
 hideous crime; here, in this sumptuous house, there is a 
 woman crowned with the aureole of good deeds and a virtuous 
 life. They bless the woman ; they curse him, poor boy. On 
 the criminal they heap execrations, I enjoy the good opinion 
 of all; yet most of the blame of his crime is mine, and a 
 great part of the good for which they praise me so and are 
 grateful to me is his ; cheat that I am ! I have the credit 
 of it, and he, a martyr to his loyalty to me, is covered with
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 255 
 
 shame. In a few hours I shall die, and a whole canton will 
 weep for me, a whole department will praise my good deeds, 
 my piety, and my virtues; and he died reviled and scorned, 
 a whole town crowding about to see him die, for hate of the 
 murderer ! You, my judges, are indulgent to me, but I hear an 
 imperious voice within me that will not let me rest. Ah ! God's 
 hand, more heavy than yours, has been laid upon me day by 
 day, as if to warn me that all was not expiated yet. My sin 
 shall be redeemed by public confession. Oh! he was happy, 
 that criminal who went to a shameful death in the face of 
 earth and heaven ! But as for me, I cheated justice, and I 
 am still a cheat ! All the respect shown to me has been like 
 mockery, not a word of praise but has scorched my heart like 
 fire. And now the public prosecutor has come here. Do you 
 not see that the will of Heaven is in accordance with this voice 
 that cries 'Confess ?' ' : 
 
 Both priests, the prince of the Church and the simple coun- 
 try parson, the two great luminaries, remained silent, and 
 kept their eyes fixed on the ground. So deeply moved were 
 the judges by the greatness and the submission of the sinner, 
 that they could not pass sentence. After a pause the Arch- 
 bishop raised his noble face, thin and worn with the daily 
 practice of austerity in a devout life. 
 
 "My child," he said, "you are going beyond the command- 
 ments of the Church. It is the glory of the Church that she 
 adapts her dogmas to the conditions of life in every age ; for 
 the Church is destined to make the pilgrimage of the cen- 
 turies side by side with humanity. According to the decision 
 of the Church, private confession has replaced public confes- 
 sion. This substitution has made the new rule of life. The 
 sufferings which you have endured suffice. Depart in peace. 
 God has heard you indeed." 
 
 "But is not this wish of a criminal in accordance with the 
 rule of the Early Church, which filled heaven with as many 
 saints and martyrs and confessors as there are stars in 
 heaven ?" Veronique cried earnestly. "Who was it that wrote 
 'Confess your faults one to another?' Was it not one of our
 
 256 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 Saviour's own immediate disciples? Let me confess my 
 shame publicly upon my knees. That will be an expiation 
 of the wrong that I have done to the world, and to a family 
 exiled and almost extinct through my sin. The world should 
 know that my good deeds are not an offering to God; that 
 they are only the just payment of a debt. . . . Suppose 
 that, when I am gone, some finger should raise the veil of lies 
 that covers me ? . . . Oh, the thought of it brings the su- 
 preme hour nearer." 
 
 "I see calculation in this, my child," the Archbishop said 
 gravely. "There are still strong passions left in you ; that 
 which I deemed extinguished is " 
 
 "My lord," she cried, breaking in upon the speaker, turning 
 her fixed horror-stricken eyes on him, "I swear to you that my 
 heart is purified so far as it may be in a guilty and repentant 
 woman; there is no thought left in me now but the thought 
 of God." 
 
 "Let us leave Heaven's justice to take its course, my lord," 
 the cure said, in a softened voice. "I have opposed this idea 
 for four years. It has caused the only differences of opinion 
 which have arisen between my penitent and me. I have seen 
 the very depths of this soul ; earth has no hold left there. When 
 the tears, sighs, and contrition of fifteen years have buried a 
 sin in which two beings shared, do not think that there is the 
 least luxurious taint in the long and dreadful remorse. For 
 a long while memory has ceased to mingle its flames in the 
 most ardent repentance. Yes, many tears have quenched 
 so great a fire. I will answer," he said, stretching his hand 
 out above Mme. Graslin's head and raising his tear-filled eyes, 
 "I will answer for the purity of this archangel's soul. I 
 used once to see in this desire a thought of reparation to an 
 absent family; it seems as if God Himself has sent one mem- 
 ber of it here, through one of those accidents in which His 
 guidance is unmistakably revealed." 
 
 Veronique took the cure's trembling hand, and kissed it. 
 
 "You have often bcon harsh to me, dear pastor," she paid ; 
 "and now, in this moment, I discover where your apostolic
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 257 
 
 sweetness lay hidden. You," she said, turning to the Arch- 
 bishop, "you, the supreme head of this corner of God's earthly 
 kingdom, be my stay in this time of humiliation. I shall 
 prostrate myself as the lowest of women; you will raise me, 
 a forgiven soul, equal, it may be, with those who have never 
 gone astray." 
 
 The Archbishop was silent for a while, engaged, no doubt, 
 in weighing the considerations visible to his eagle's glance. 
 
 "My lord," said the cure, "deadly blows have been aimed at 
 religion. Will not this return to ancient customs, made 
 necessary by the greatness both of the sin and the repentance, 
 be a triumph which will redound to us ?" 
 
 "They will say that we are fanatics ! that we have insisted 
 on this cruel scene !" and the Archbishop fell once more to his 
 meditations. 
 
 Just at that moment Horace Bianchon and Roubaud came 
 in without knocking at the door. As it opened, Veronique 
 saw her mother, her son, and all the servants kneeling in 
 prayer. The cures of the two neighboring parishes had come 
 to assist M. Bonnet; perhaps also to pay their respects to 
 the great Archbishop, in whom the Church of France saw a 
 cardinal-designate, hoping that some day the Sacred College 
 might be enlightened by the advent of an intellect so thor- 
 oughly Gallican. 
 
 Horace Bianchon was about to start for Paris; he came 
 to bid farewell to the dying lady, and to thank her for her 
 munificence. He approached the bed slowly, guessing from 
 the manner of the two priests that the inward wound which 
 had caused the disease of the body was now under considera- 
 tion. He took Veronique's hand, laid it on the bed, and felt 
 her pulse. The deepest silence, the silence of the fields in 
 a summer night, added solemnity to the scene. Lights shone 
 from the great drawing-room, beyond the folding doors, and 
 fell upon the little company of kneeling figures, the cures 
 only were seated, reading their breviaries. About the crimson 
 bed of state stood the Archbishop in his violet robes, the cur6, 
 and the two men of science.
 
 258 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 "She is troubled even in death !" said Horace Bianchon. 
 Like many men of great genius, he not seldom found grand 
 words worthy of the scenes at which he was present. 
 
 The Archbishop rose, as if goaded by some inward impulse. 
 He called M. Bonnet, and went towards the door. They 
 crossed the chamber and the drawing-room, and went out 
 upon the terrace, where they walked up and down for a few 
 minutes. As they came in after a consideration of this point 
 of ecclesiastical discipline, Roubaud went to meet them. 
 
 "M. Bianchon sent me to tell you to be quick ; Mme. Graslin 
 is dying in strange agitation, which is not caused by the 
 severe physical pain which she is suffering." 
 
 The Archbishop hurried back, and in reply to Mme. Gras- 
 lin's anxious eyes, he said, "You shall be satisfied." 
 
 Bianchon (still with his fingers on the dying woman's 
 wrist) made an involuntary start of surprise; he gave Rou- 
 baud a quick look, and then glanced at the priests. 
 
 "My lord, this body is no longer our province," he said; 
 "your words brought life in the place of death. You make a 
 miracle credible." 
 
 "Madame has been nothing but soul this long time past," 
 said Roubaud, and Veronique thanked him by a glance. 
 
 A smile crossed her face as she lay there, and, with the 
 smile that expressed the gladness of a completed expiation, 
 the innocent look of the girl of eighteen returned to her. 
 The appalling lines traced by inward tumult, the dark color- 
 ing, the livid patches, all the details that but lately had con- 
 tributed a certain dreadful beauty to her face, all alterations 
 of all kinds, in short, had vanished; to those who watched 
 Veronique it seemed as if she had been wearing a mask and 
 had suddenly dropped it. The wonderful transfiguration by 
 which the inward life and nature of this woman was made 
 visible in her features was wrought for the last time. Her 
 whole being was purified and illuminated, her face might 
 have caught a gleam from the flaming swords of the guardian 
 angels about her. She looked once more as she used to look- 
 in Limoges when they called her "the little Virgin." The
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 259 
 
 love of God manifestly was yet stronger in her than the 
 guilty love had been; the earthly love had brought out all 
 the forces of life in her ; the love of God dispelled every trace 
 of the inroads of death. A smothered cry was heard. La 
 Sauviat appeared ; she sprang to the bed. "So I see my child 
 again at last !" she exclaimed. 
 
 Something in the old woman's accent as she uttered the 
 two words, "my child," conjured up such visions of early 
 childhood and its innocence, that those who watched by this 
 heroic deathbed turned their heads away to hide their emotion. 
 The great doctor took Mine. Graslin's hand, kissed it, 
 and then went his way, and soon the sound of his departing 
 carriage sent echoes over the countryside, spreading the 
 tidings that he had no hope of saving the life of her who was 
 the life of the country. The Archbishop, cure, and doctor, 
 and all who felt tired, went to take a little rest. Mme. Graslin 
 herself slept for some hours. When she awoke the dawn was 
 breaking; she asked them to open the windows, she would see 
 her last sunrise. 
 
 At ten o'clock in the morning the Archbishop, in pontifical 
 vestments, came back to Mme. Graslin's room. Both he and 
 M. Bonnet reposed such confidence in her that they made no 
 recommendations as to the limits to be observed in her confes- 
 sion. Veronique saw other faces of other clergy, for some of 
 the cures from neighboring parishes had come. The splendid 
 ornaments which Mme. Graslin had presented to her beloved 
 parish church lent splendor to the ceremony. Eight children, 
 choristers in their red-and-white surplices, stood in a double 
 row between the bed and the door of the great drawing-room, 
 each of them holding one of the great candlesticks of gilded 
 bronze which Veronique had ordered from Paris. A white- 
 haired sacristan on either side of the dai's held the banner 
 of the Church and the crucifix. The servants, in their devo- 
 tion, had removed the wooden altar from the sacristy and 
 erected it near the drawing-room door; it was decked and 
 ready for the Archbishop to say mass. Mme. Graslin was 
 touched by an attention which the Church pays only to
 
 260 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 crowned heads. The great folding doors that gave access to 
 the dining-room stood wide open, so that she could see the 
 hall of the chateau filled with people; nearly all the village 
 was there. 
 
 Her friends had seen to everything, none but the people 
 of the house stood in the drawing-room; and before them, 
 grouped about the door of her room, she saw her intimate 
 friends and those whose discretion might be trusted. M. 
 Grossetete, M. de Granville, Eoubaud, Gerard, Clousier, and 
 Euffin stood foremost among these. All of them meant to 
 stand upright when the time came, so that the dying woman's 
 confession should not travel beyond them. Other things 
 favored this design, for the sobs of those about her drowned 
 her voice. 
 
 Two of these stood out dreadfully conspicuous among the 
 rest. The first was Denise Tascheron. In her foreign dress, 
 made with Quakerly simplicity, she was unrecognizable to any 
 of the villagers who might have caught a glimpse of her. Not 
 so for the public prosecutor ; she was a figure that he was not 
 likely to forget, and with her reappearance a dreadful light 
 began to dawn on him. Now he had a glimpse of the truth, 
 a suspicion of the part which he had played in Mme. Graslin's 
 life, and then the whole truth flashed upon him. Less over- 
 awed than the rest by the religious influence, the child of the 
 nineteenth century, the man of law felt a cruel sensation of 
 dismay; the whole drama of Veronique's inner life in the 
 Hotel Graslin during Tascheron's trial opened out before him. 
 The whole of that tragic epoch reconstructed itself in his 
 memory, lighted up by La Sauviat's eyes, which gleamed with 
 hate of him not ten paces away ; those eyes seemed to direct a 
 double stream of molten lead upon him. The old woman 
 had forgiven him nothing. The impersonation of man's jus- 
 tice felt shudders run through his frame. He stood there 
 heart-stricken and pallid, not daring to turn his eyes to the 
 bed where the woman whom he had loved was lying, livid 
 beneath the shadow of Death's hand, drawing strength from 
 the very magnitude of her offence to quell her agony. Vertigo
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 261 
 
 seized on him as he saw Veronique's shrunken profile, a white 
 outline in sharp relief against the crimson damask. 
 
 The mass began at eleven o'clock. When the cure of Vizay 
 had read the epistle, the Archbishop divested himself of his 
 dalmatic, and took up his station in the doorway. 
 
 "Christians here assembled to witness the administration 
 of extreme unction to the mistress of this house, you who are 
 uniting your prayers to those of the Church to make inter- 
 cession with God for the salvation of her soul, learn that she 
 thinks herself unworthy to receive the holy viaticum until 
 she has made, for the edification of others, a public confession 
 of her greatest sin. We withstood her pious desire, although 
 this act of contrition was long in use in the Church in the 
 earliest Christian times; but as the afflicted woman tells us 
 that the confession touches on the rehabilitation of an un- 
 happy child of this parish, we leave her free to follow the 
 inspirations of repentance." 
 
 After these words, spoken with the benign dignity of a 
 shepherd of souls, the Archbishop turned and gave place to 
 Veronique. The dying woman was seen, supported by her 
 mother and the cure, two great and venerable symbols: did 
 she not owe her double existence to the earthly mother who 
 had borne her, and to the Church, the mother of her soul? 
 Kneeling on a cushion, she clasped her hands and meditated 
 for a moment to gather up and concentrate the strength to 
 speak from some source derived from Heaven. There was 
 something unspeakably awful in that silent pause. No one 
 dared to look at his neighbor. All eyes were fixed on the 
 ground. Yet when Veronique looked up, she met the public 
 prosecutor's glance, and the expression of that white face sent 
 the color to her own. 
 
 "I should not have died in peace," Veronique began, in 
 a voice unlike her natural tone, "if I had left behind the false 
 impression which each one of you who hears me speak has pos- 
 sibly formed of me. In me you see a great sinner, who be- 
 seeches your prayers, and seeks to merit pardon by the public 
 
 confession of her sin. So deeply has she sinned, so fatal were 
 VOL 10-18
 
 262 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 the consequences of her guilt, that it may be that no repent- 
 ance will redeem it. And yet the greater my humiliation on 
 earth, the less, doubtless, have I to dread from God's anger 
 in the heavenly kingdom whither I fain would go. 
 
 "It is nearly twenty years since my father, who had such 
 great belief in me, recommended a son of this parish to my 
 care ; he had seen in him a wish to live rightly, aptitude, and 
 an excellent disposition. This young man was the unhappy 
 Jean-Frangois Tascheron, who thenceforward attached him- 
 self to me as his benefactress. How was it that my affection 
 for him became a guilty one ? That explanation need not, I 
 think, be required of me. Yet, perhaps it might be thought 
 that the purest possible motives were imperceptibly trans- 
 formed by unheard-of self-sacrifice, by human frailty, by a 
 host of causes which might seem to be extenuations of my 
 guilt. But am I the less guilty because our noblest affections 
 were my accomplices? I would rather admit, in spite of the 
 barriers raised by the delicacy natural to our sex between 
 me and the young man whom my father intrusted to me, that 
 I, who by my education and social position might regard 
 myself as his protege's superior, listened, in an evil hour, to 
 the voice of the Tempter. I soon found that my maternal 
 position brought me into contact with him so close that I 
 could not but be sensible of his mute and delicate admiration. 
 He was the first and only creature to appreciate me at my just 
 value. Perhaps, too, I myself was led astray by unworthy 
 considerations. I thought that I could trust to the discretion 
 of a young man who owed every thing -to me, whom chance 
 had placed so far below me, albeit by birth we were equals. 
 In fact, I found a cloak to screen my conduct in my name 
 for charity and good deeds. Alas! (and this is one of my 
 worst sins) I hid my passion in the shadow of the altar. I 
 made everything conduce to the miserable triumph of a mad 
 passion, the most irreproachable actions, my love for my 
 mother, acts of a devotion that was very real and sincere and 
 through so many errors, all these things were so many links 
 in a chain that bound me. My poor mother, whom I love
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 283 
 
 so much, who hears me even now, was unwittingly and for 
 a long while my accomplice. When her eyes were opened, I 
 was too deeply committed to my dangerous way, and she 
 found strength to keep my secret in the depths of her mother's 
 heart. Silence in her has thus become the loftiest of virtues. 
 Love for her daughter overcame the love of God. Ah ! now 
 I solemnly relieve her of the load of secrecy which she has 
 carried. She shall end her days with no lie in her eyes and 
 brow. May her motherhood absolve her, may her noble and 
 sacred old age, crowned with virtues, shine forth in all its 
 radiance, now that the link which bound her indirectly to 
 touch such infamy is severed 
 
 Here Veronique's sobs interrupted her words; Aline made 
 her inhale salts. 
 
 "Only one other has hitherto been in this secret, the faith- 
 ful servant who does me this last service; she has, at least, 
 feigned not to know what she must have known, but she has 
 been in the secret of the austerities by which I have broken 
 this weak flesh. So I ask pardon of the world for having 
 lived a lie, drawn into that lie by the remorseless logic of the 
 world. 
 
 "Jean-Frangois Tascheron is not as guilty as men may 
 have thought him. Oh, all you who hear me ! I beg of you to 
 remember how young he was, and that his frenzy was caused 
 at least as much by the remorse which seized on me, as by 
 the spell of an involuntary attraction. And more, far more, 
 do not forget that it was a sense of honor, if a mistaken sense 
 of honor, which caused the greatest disaster of all. Neither 
 of us could endure that life of continual deceits. He turned 
 from them to my own greatness, and, unhappy that he was, 
 sought to make our fatal love as little of a humiliation as 
 might be to me. So I was the cause of his crime. Driven by 
 necessity, the unhappy man, hitherto only guilty of too great 
 a love for his idol, chose of all evil actions the one most 
 irreparable. I knew nothing of it until the very moment 
 when the deed was done. Even as it was being carried out, 
 God overturned the whole fabric of crooked designs. I heard
 
 264 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 cries that ring even yet in my ears, and went into the house 
 again. I knew that it was a struggle for life and death, and 
 that I, the object of this mad endeavor, was powerless to in- 
 terfere. For Tascheron was mad ; I bear witness that he was 
 mad! . . ." 
 
 Here Veronique looked at the public prosecutor, and a deep 
 audible sigh came from Denise. 
 
 "He lost his head when he saw his happiness (so he believed 
 it to be) destroyed by unforeseen circumstances. Love 
 led him astray, then dragged him from a misdemeanor 
 to a crime, and from a crime to a double murder. 
 At any rate, when he left my mother's house he was an 
 innocent man; when he returned, he was a murderer. 
 I, and I only in the world, knew that the crime was not pre- 
 meditated, nor accompanied by the aggravating circumstances 
 which brought the sentence of death on him. A hundred 
 times I determined to give myself up to save him, and a 
 hundred times a terrible but necessary heroism outweighed 
 all other considerations, and the words died on my lips. 
 Surely my presence a few steps away must have contributed 
 to give him the hateful, base, cowardly courage of a mur- 
 derer. If he had been alone, he would have fled. ... It 
 was I who had formed his nature, who had given him loftier 
 thoughts and a greater heart ; I knew him ; he was incapable 
 of anything cowardly or base. Do justice to the innocent 
 hand, do justice to him ! God in His mercy lets him sleep 
 in the grave that you, guessing, doubtless, the real truth, have 
 watered with your tears ! Punish and curse the guilty thing 
 here before you ! : When once the deed was done, I was horror- 
 struck ; I did all that I could to hide it. My father had left 
 a charge to me, a childless woman ; I was to bring one child 
 of God's family to God, and I brought him to the scaf- 
 fold. . . . Oh, heap all your reproaches upon me ! The 
 hour has come !" 
 
 Her eyes glittered with fierce pride as she spoke. The 
 Archbishop, standing bebind her. with his pastoral cross held 
 out above her head, no longer maintained his impassive atti-
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 265 
 
 tude; he covered his eyes with his right hand. A smothered 
 sound like a dying groan broke the silence, and two men 
 Gerard and Boubaud caught Denise Tascheron in their 
 arms. She had swooned away. The fire died down in Vero- 
 nique's eyes; she looked troubled, but the martyr's serenity 
 soon returned to her face. 
 
 "I deserve no praise, no blessings for my conduct here, as 
 you know now," she said. "In the sight of Heaven I have led 
 a life full of sharp penance, hidden from all other eyes, and 
 Heaven will value it at its just worth. My outward life has 
 been a vast reparation of the evil that I have wrought ; I have 
 engraved my repentance in characters ineffaceable upon this 
 wide land, a record that will last for ever. It is written every- 
 where in the fields grown green, in the growing township, in 
 the mountain streams turned from their courses into the 
 plain, once wild and barren, now fertile and productive. Not 
 a tree shall be felled here for a century but the peasants will 
 tell the tale of the remorse to which they owe its shade. In 
 these ways the repentant spirit which should have inspired a 
 long and useful life will still make its influence felt among 
 you for a long time to come. All that you should have owed 
 to his talents and a fortune honorably acquired has been done 
 for you by the executrix of his repentance, by her who caused 
 his crime. All the wrong done socially has been repaired ; 
 I have taken upon myself the work of a life cut short in its 
 flower, the life intrusted to my guidance, the life for which 
 I must shortly give an account 
 
 Here once more the burning eyes were quenched in tears. 
 She paused. 
 
 "There is one among those present," she continued, "whom 
 I have hated with a hate which I thought must be eternal, 
 simply because he did no more than his duty. He was the 
 first instrument of my punishment. I was too close to the 
 deed, my feet were dipped too deep in blood, I was bound to 
 hate justice. I knew that there was^ a trace of evil passion 
 in my heart so long as that spark of anger should trouble 
 it; I have had nothing to forgive, I have simply purged the
 
 266 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 corner where the Evil One lurked. Whatever the victory cost, 
 it is complete." 
 
 The public prosecutor turned a tear-stained face to Vero- 
 nique. It was as if man's justice was remorseful in him. 
 Veronique, turning her face away to continue her story, met 
 the eyes of an old friend; Grossetete, bathed in tears, 
 stretched out his hands entreatingly towards her. "It is 
 enough I" he seemed to say. The heroic woman heard such 
 a chorus of sobs about her, received so much sympathy, that 
 she broke down; the balm of the general forgiveness was too 
 much, weakness overcame her. Seeing that the sources of her 
 daughter's strength were exhausted, the old mother seemed 
 to find in herself the vigor of a young woman; she held out 
 her arms to carry Veronique. 
 
 "Christians," said the Archbishop, "you have heard the 
 penitent's confession ; it confirms the decree of man's justice ; 
 it may lay all scruples and anxiety on that score to rest. In 
 this confession you should find new reasons for uniting your 
 prayers to those of the Church, which offers to God the holy 
 sacrifice of the mass to implore His mercy for the sinner after 
 so grand a repentance." 
 
 The office was finished. Veronique followed all that was 
 said with an expression of such inward peace that she no 
 longer seemed to be the same woman. Her face wore a look 
 of frank innocence, such as it might have worn in the days 
 when, a pure and ingenuous girl, she dwelt under her father's 
 roof. Her brows grew white in the dawn of eternity, her face 
 glowed golden in the light of Heaven. Doubtless she caught 
 something of its mystic harmonies; and in her longing to be 
 made one with God on earth for the last time, she exerted all 
 her powers of vitality to live. M. Bonnet came to the bedside 
 and gave her absolution; the Archbishop anointed her with 
 the holy oil, with a fatherly tenderness that revealed to those 
 who stood about how dear he held this sheep that had been 
 lost and was found. With that holy anointing the eyes that 
 had wrought such mischief on earth were closed to the things 
 of earth, the seal of the Church was set on those too eloquent
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 267 
 
 lips, and the ears that had listened to the inspirations of evil 
 were closed for ever. All the senses, mortified by penitence, 
 were thus sanctified; the spirit of evil could have no power 
 over this soul. 
 
 Never had all the grandeur and deep meaning of a sacra- 
 ment been apprehended more thoroughly than by those who 
 saw the Church's care thus justified by the dying woman's 
 confession. After that preparation, Veronique received the 
 Body of Christ with a look of hope and joy that melted the 
 icy barrier of unbelief at which the cure had so often knocked 
 in vain. Roubaud, confounded, became a Catholic from that 
 moment. 
 
 Awful as this scene was, it was no less touching; and in 
 its solemnity, as of the culminating-point of a drama, it 
 might have given some painter the subject of a masterpiece. 
 When the mournful episode was over, and the words of the 
 Gospel of St. John fell on the ears of the dying woman, she 
 beckoned to her mother to bring Francis back again. (The 
 tutor had taken the boy out of the room.) When Francis 
 knelt on the step by the bedside, the mother whose sins had 
 been forgiven felt free to lay her hands in blessing on his 
 head, and so she drew her last breath, La Sauviat standing at 
 the post she had filled for twenty years, faithful to the end. 
 It was she, a heroine after her manner, who closed the eyes 
 of the daughter who had suffered so much, and laid a kiss on 
 them. 
 
 Then all the priests and assistants came round the bed, 
 and intoned the dread chant De profundis by the light of 
 the flaming torches; and from those sounds the people of the 
 whole countryside kneeling without, together with the friends 
 and all the servants praying in the hall, knew that the mother 
 of the canton had passed away. Groans and sobs mingled 
 with the chanting. The noble woman's confession had not 
 passed beyond the threshold of the drawing-room; it had 
 reached none but friendly ears. When the peasants came 
 from Montegnac, and all the district round about came in, 
 each with a green spray, to bid their benefactress a supreme
 
 268 THE COUNTRY PARSON 
 
 farewell mingled with tears and prayers, they saw a repre- 
 sentative of man's justice, bowed down with anguish, holding 
 the cold hand of the woman to whom all unwittingly he had 
 meted out such a cruel but just punishment. 
 
 Two days later, and the public prosecutor, with Grossetete, 
 the Archbishop, and the mayor, bore the pall when Mme. 
 Graslin was carried to her last resting-place. Amid deep 
 silence they laid her in the grave; no one uttered a word, 
 for no one had the heart to speak, and all eyes were full of 
 tears. 
 
 "She is a saint !" Everywhere the words were repeated 
 along the roads which she had made, in the canton which 
 owed its prosperity to her. It was as if the words were sown 
 abroad across her fields to quicken the life in them. It struck 
 nobody as a strange thing that Mme. Graslin should be buried 
 beside Jean-Frangois Tascheron. She had not asked this; 
 but a trace of pitying tenderness in the old mother prompted 
 her to bid the sacristan put those together whom earth had 
 separated by a violent death, whom one repentance should 
 unite in Purgatory. 
 
 Mme. Graslin's will fulfilled all expectations. She founded 
 scholarships in the school at Limoges, and beds in the hos- 
 pital, intended for the working classes only. A considerable 
 sum (three hundred thousand francs in a period of six years) 
 was left to purchase that part of the village called "Tasche- 
 ron's," and for building an almshouse there. It was to serve 
 as an asylum for the sick and aged poor of the district, a 
 lying-in hospital for destitute women, and a home for found- 
 ling children, and was to be known by the name of Tasche- 
 ron's Almshouse. Veronique directed that it was to be placed 
 in the charge of the Franciscan Sisters, and fixed the salary of 
 the head physician and house surgeon at four thousand francs. 
 Mme. Graslin begged Roubaud to be the first head physician, 
 and to superintend the execution of the sanitary arrange- 
 ments and plans to be made by the architect, M. Gerard. She 
 also endowed the commune of Montegnac with sufficient land 
 to pay the taxes. A certain fund was put in the hands of the
 
 THE COUNTRY PARSON 269 
 
 Church to be used as determined in some exceptional cases 1 , 
 for the Church was to be the guardian of the young; and if 
 any of the children in Montegnac should show a special apti- 
 tude for art or science or industrial pursuits, the far-sighted 
 benevolence of the testatrix provided thus for their encour- 
 agement. 
 
 The tidings of her death were received as the news of a 
 calamity "to the whole country, and no word that reflected on 
 her memory went with it. This silence was the homage paid 
 to her virtues by a devoutly Catholic and hardworking popula- 
 tion, which is about to repeat the miracles of the Lettres 
 edifiantes in this corner of France. 
 
 Gerard, appointed Francis Graslin's guardian, was required 
 by the terms of the will to live at the chateau, and thither he 
 went ; but not until three months after Veronique's death did 
 he marry Denise Tascheron, in whom Francis found, as it 
 were, a second mother.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 To Madame Emile Girardin. 
 
 ONE of the few drawing-rooms where, under the Restoration, 
 the Archbishop of Besangon was sometimes to be seen, was 
 that of the Baronne de Watteville, to whom he was particu- 
 larly attached on account of her religious sentiments. 
 
 A word as to this lady, the most important lady of 
 Besangon. 
 
 Monsieur de Watteville, a descendant of the famous Watte- 
 ville, the most successful and illustrious of murderers and 
 renegades his extraordinary adventures are too much a part 
 of history to be related here this nineteenth century Mon- 
 sieur de Watteville was as gentle and peaceable as his ancestor 
 of the Grand Siecle had been passionate and turbulent. After 
 living in the Comte* like a wood-louse in the crack of a wain- 
 scot, he had married the heiress of the celebrated house of 
 Rupt, Mademoiselle de Rupt brought twenty thousand francs 
 a year in the funds to add to the ten thousand francs a year in 
 real estate of the Baron de Watteville. The Swiss gentleman's 
 coat-of-arms (the Wattevilles are Swiss) was then borne as 
 an escutcheon of pretence on the old shield of the Rupts. The 
 marriage, arranged in 1802, was solemnized in 1815 after the 
 second Restoration. Within three years of the birth of a 
 daughter all Madame de Watteville's grandparents were dead, 
 and their estates wound up. Monsieur de Watteville's house 
 was then sold, and they settled in the Rue de la Prefecture in 
 the fine old mansion of the Rupts, with an immense garden 
 stretching to the Rue du Perron. Madame de Watteville, de- 
 vout as a girl, became even more so after her marriage. She 
 
 * La Franche Comtfe. 
 (271)
 
 272 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 is one of the queens of the saintly brotherhood which gives the 
 upper circles of Besangon a solemn air and prudish manners 
 in harmony with the character of the town. 
 
 Monsieur le Baron de Watteville, a dry, lean man devoid of 
 intelligence, looked worn out without any one knowing 
 whereby, for he enjoyed the profoundest ignorance ; but as his 
 wife was a red-haired woman, and of a stern nature that be- 
 came proverbial (we still say "as sharp as Madame de Watte- 
 ville"), some wits of the legal profession declared that he had 
 been worn against that rock Rupt is obviously derived from 
 rupes. Scientific students of social phenomena will not fail 
 to have observed that Rosalie was the only offspring of the 
 union between the Wattevilles and the Rupts. 
 
 Monsieur de Watteville spent his existence in a handsome 
 workshop with a lathe ; he was a turner ! As subsidiary to this 
 pursuit, he took up a fancy for making collections. Philo- 
 sophical doctors, devoted to the study of madness, regard this 
 tendency towards collecting as a first degree of mental aberra- 
 tion when it is set on small things. The Baron de Watteville 
 treasured shells and geological fragments of the neighborhood 
 of Besangon. Some contradictory folk, especially women, 
 would say of Monsieur de Watteville, "He has a noble soul ! 
 He perceived from the first days of his married life that he 
 would never be his wife's master, so he threw himself into a 
 mechanical occupation and good living." 
 
 The house of the Rupts was not devoid of a certain magnifi- 
 cence worthy of Louis XIV., and bore traces of the nobility 
 of the two families who had mingled in 1815. The chande- 
 liers of glass cut in the shape of leaves, the brocades, the 
 damask, the carpets, the gilt furniture, were all in harmony 
 with the old liveries and the old servants. Though served in 
 blackened family plate, round a looking-glass tray furnished 
 with Dresden china, the food was exquisite. The wines se- 
 lected by Monsieur de Watteville, who, to occupy his time and 
 vary his employments, was his own butler, enjoyed a sort of 
 fame throughout the department. Madame de Watteville's 
 fortune was a fine one; while her husband's, which consisted
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 273 
 
 only of the estate of Rouxey, worth about ten thousand francs 
 a year, was not increased by inheritance. It is needless to add 
 that in consequence of Madame de Watteville's close intimacy 
 with the Archbishop, the three or four clever or remarkable 
 Abbes of the diocese who were not averse to good feeding were 
 very much at home at her house. 
 
 At a ceremonial dinner given in honor of I know not whose 
 wedding, at the beginning of September 1834, when the 
 women were standing in a circle round the drawing-room 
 fire, and the men in groups by the windows, every one ex- 
 claimed with pleasure at the entrance of Monsieur 1'Abbe de 
 Grancey, who was announced. 
 
 "Well, and the lawsuit ?" they all cried. 
 
 "Won !" replied the Vicar-General. "The verdict of the 
 Court, from which we had no hope, you know why " 
 
 This was an allusion to the members of the First Court of 
 Appeal of 1830; the Legitimists had almost all withdrawn. 
 
 "The verdict is in our favor on every point, and reverses the 
 decision of the Lower Court." 
 
 "Everybody thought you were done for/' 
 
 "And we should have been, but for me. I told our advocate 
 to be off to Paris, and at the crucial moment I was able to 
 secure a new pleader, to whom we owe our victory, a wonder- 
 ful man 
 
 "At Besangon ?" said Monsieur de Watteville, guilelessly. 
 
 "At Besangon," replied the Abbe de Grancey. 
 
 "Oh yes, Savaron," said a handsome young man sitting near 
 the Baroness, and named de Soulas. 
 
 "He spent five or six nights over it ; he devoured documents 
 and briefs ; he had seven or eight interviews of several hours 
 with me," continued Monsieur de Grancey, who had just re- 
 appeared at the Hotel de Rupt for the first time in three 
 weeks. "In short, Monsieur Savaron has just completely 
 beaten the celebrated lawyer whom our adversaries had sent 
 for from Paris. This young man is wonderful, the bigwigs 
 say. Thus the chapter is twice victorious; it has triumphed 
 in law and also in politics, since it has vanquished Liberalism
 
 274 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 in the person of the Counsel of our Municipality. 'Our ad- 
 versaries/ so our advocate said, 'must not expect to find readi- 
 ness on all sides to ruin the Archbishoprics.' The President 
 was obliged to enforce silence. All the townsfolk of Besangon 
 applauded. Thus the possession of the buildings of the old 
 convent remains with the Chapter of the Cathedral of Be- 
 sangon. Monsieur Savaron, however, invited his Parisian 
 opponent to dine with him as they came out of court. He ac- 
 cepted, saying, 'Honor to every conqueror/ and complimented 
 him on his success without bitterness." 
 
 "And where did you unearth this lawyer?" said Madame 
 de Watteville. "I never heard his name before." 
 
 "Why, you can see his windows from hence," replied the 
 Vicar-General. "Monsieur Savaron lives in the Rue du Per- 
 ron ; the garden of his house joins on to yours." 
 
 "But he is not a native of the Comte," said Monsieur de 
 Watteville. 
 
 "So little is he a native of any place, that no one knows 
 where he comes from," said Madame de Chavoncourt. 
 
 "But who is he?" asked Madame de Watteville, taking the 
 Abbe's arm to go into the dining-room. "If he is a stranger, 
 by what chance has he settled, at Besangon? It is ? strange 
 fancy for a barrister." 
 
 "Very strange !" echoed Amedee de Soulas, whose biography 
 is here necessary to the understanding of this tale. 
 
 In all ages France and England have carried on an ex- 
 change of trifles, which is all the more constant because it 
 evades the tyrann}' of the Custom-houpe. The fashion that is 
 called English in Paris is called French in London, and this 
 is reciprocal. The hostility of the two nations is suspended 
 on two points the uses of words and the fashion of dress. 
 God save the King, the national air of England, is a tune 
 written by Lulli for the Chorus of Esther or of Athalie. 
 Hoops, introduced at Paris by an Englishwoman, were in- 
 vented in London, it is known why, by a Frenchwoman, the 
 notorious Duchess of Portsmouth. They were at first so jeered
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 275 
 
 at that the first Englishwoman who appeared in them at the 
 Tuileries narrowly escaped being crushed by the crowd; but 
 they were adopted. This fashion tyrannized over the ladies 
 of Europe for half a century. At the peace of 1815, for a year, 
 the long waists of the English were a standing jest ; all Paris 
 went to see Pothier and Brunet in Les Anglaises pour rire; 
 but in 1816 and 1817 the belt of the Frenchwoman, which in 
 1814 cut her across the bosom, gradually descended till it 
 reached the hips. 
 
 Within ten years England has made two little gifts to our 
 language. The Incroyable, the Merveilleux, the Elegant, the 
 three successes of the petit-maitre of discreditable etymology, 
 have made way for the "dandy" and the "lion." The lion is 
 not the parent of the lionne. The lionne is due to the famous 
 song by Alfred de Musset : 
 
 Avez vous vu dans Barcelona 
 G'est ma maitresse et ma lionne. 
 
 There has been a fusion or, if you prefer it, a confusion 
 of the two words and the leading ideas. When an absurdity 
 can amuse Paris, which devours as many masterpieces as ab- 
 surdities, the provinces can hardly be deprived of them. So, as 
 soon as the lion paraded Paris with his mane, his beard and 
 moustaches, his waistcoats and his eyeglass, maintained in 
 its place, without the help of his hands, by the contraction of 
 his cheek and eye-socket, the chief towns of some departments 
 had their sub-lions, who protested by the smartness of their 
 trouser-straps against the untidiness of their fellow-towns- 
 men. 
 
 Thus, in 1834, Besangon could boast of a lion, in the person 
 of Monsieur Amedee-Sylvain de Soulas, spelt Souleyas at the 
 time of the Spanish occupation. Amedee de Soulas is perhaps 
 the only man in Besangon descended from a Spanish family. 
 Spain sent men to manage her business in the Cotnte, but very 
 few Spaniards settled there. The Soulas remained in conse-
 
 276 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 quence of their connection with Cardinal Granvelle. Young 
 Monsieur de Soulas was always talking of leaving Besangon, a 
 dull town, church-going, and not literary, a military centre 
 and garrison town, of which the manners and customs and 
 physiognomy are worth describing. This opinion allowed of 
 his lodging, like a man uncertain of the future, in three very 
 scantily furnished rooms at the end of the Rue Neuve, just 
 where it opens into the Rue de la Prefecture. 
 
 Young Monsieur de Soulas could not possibly live without 
 a tiger. This tiger was the son of one of his farmers, a small 
 servant aged fourteen, thick-set, and named Babylas. The 
 lion dressed his tiger very smartly a short tunic-coat of iron- 
 gray cloth, belted with patent leather, bright blue plush 
 breeches, a red waistcoat, polished leather top-boots, a shiny 
 hat with black lacing, and brass buttons with the arms of 
 Soulas. Amedee gave this boy white cotton gloves and his 
 washing, and thirty-six francs a month to keep himself a 
 sum that seemed enormous to the grisettes of Besangon : four 
 hundred and twenty francs a year to a child of fifteen, without 
 counting extras ! The extras consisted in the price for which 
 he could sell his turned clothes, a present when Soulas ex- 
 changed one of his horses, and the perquisite of tHe manure. 
 The two horses, treated with sordid economy, cost, one with 
 another, eight hundred francs a year. His bills for articles 
 received from Paris, such as perfumery, cravats, jewelry, pat- 
 ent blacking, and clothes, ran to another twelve hundred 
 francs. Add to this the groom, or tiger, the horses, a very 
 superior style of dress, and six hundred francs a year for rent, 
 and you will see a grand total of three thousand francs. 
 
 Now, Monsieur de Soulas' father had left him only four 
 thousand francs a year, the income from some cottage farms 
 in rather bad repair, which required keeping up, a charge 
 which lent painful uncertainty to the rents. The lion had 
 hardly three francs a day left for food, amusements, and gam- 
 bling. He very often dined out, and breakfasted with remark- 
 able frugality. When he was positively obliged to dine at his 
 own cost, he sent his tigor to fetch a couple of dishes from a 
 cookshop, never spending more than twenty-five sous.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 277 
 
 Young Monsieur de Soulas was supposed to be a spend- 
 thrift, recklessly extravagant, whereas the poor man made 
 the two ends meet in the year with a keenness and skill which 
 would have done honor to a thrifty housewife. At Besangon 
 in those days no one knew how great a tax on a man's capital 
 were six francs spent in polish to spread on his boots or shoes, 
 yellow gloves at fifty sous a pair, cleaned in the deepest secrecy 
 to make them three times renewed, cravats costing ten francs, 
 and lasting three months, four waistcoats at twenty-five 
 francs, and trousers fitting close to the boots. How could he 
 do otherwise, since we see women in Paris bestowing their 
 special attention on simpletons who visit them, and cut out 
 the most remarkable men by means of these frivolous advan- 
 tages, which a man can buy for fifteen louis, and get his hair 
 curled and a fine linen shirt into the bargain ? 
 
 If this unhappy youth should seem to you to have become a 
 lion on very cheap terms, you must know that Amedee de 
 Soulas had been three times to Switzerland, by coach and in 
 short stages, twice to Paris, and once from Paris to England. 
 He passed as a well-informed traveler, and could say, "In Eng- 
 land, where I went. . ." The dowagers of the town would 
 say to him, "You, who have been in England . . ." He 
 had been as far as Lombardy, and seen the shores of. the 
 Italian lakes. He read new books. Finally, when he was 
 cleaning his gloves, the tiger Babylas replied to callers, "Mon- 
 sieur is very busy." An attempt had been made to withdraw 
 Monsieur Amedee de Soulas from circulation by pronouncing 
 him "A man of advanced ideas." Amedee had the gift of ut- 
 tering with the gravity of a native the commonplaces that 
 were in fashion, which gave him the credit of being one of the 
 most enlightened of the nobility. His person was garnished 
 with fashionable trinkets, and his head furnished with ideas 
 hall-marked by the press. 
 
 In 1834 Amedee was a young man of five-and-twenty, of 
 medium height, dark, with a very prominent thorax, well- 
 made shoulders, rather plump legs, feet already fat, white 
 dimpled hands, a beard under his chin, moustaches worthy of
 
 278 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 the garrison, a good-natured, fat, rubicund face, a flat nose, 
 and brown expressionless eyes; nothing Spanish about him. 
 He was progressing rapidly in the direction of obesity, which 
 would be fatal to his pretensions. His nails were well kept, 
 his beard trimmed, the smallest details of his dress attended 
 to with English precision. Hence Amedee de Soulas was 
 looked upon as the finest man in Besanc/m. A hairdresser who 
 waited upon him at a fixed hour another luxury, costing 
 sixty francs a year held him up as the sovereign authority in 
 matters of fashion and elegance. 
 
 Amedee slept late, dressed and went out towards noon, to 
 go to one of his farms and practise pistol-shooting. He at- 
 tached as much importance to this exercise as Lord Byron did 
 in his later days. Then, at three o'clock he came home, ad- 
 mired on horseback by the grisettes and the ladies who hap- 
 pened to be at their windows. After an affectation of study or 
 business, which seemed to engage him till four, he dressed 
 to dine out, spent the evening in the drawing-rooms of the 
 aristocracy of Besangon playing whist, and went home to bed 
 at eleven. No life could be more above board, more prudent, 
 or more irreproachable, for he punctually attended the services 
 at church on Sundays and holy days. 
 
 To enable you to understand how exceptional is such a life, 
 it is necessary to devote a few words to an account of Besangon. 
 No town ever offered more deaf and dumb resistance to prog- 
 ress. At Besangon the officials, the employes, the military, 
 in short, every one engaged in governing it, sent thither from 
 Paris to fill a post of any kind, are all spoken of by the expres- 
 sive general name of the Colony. The colony is neutral 
 ground, the only ground where, as in church, the upper rank 
 and the townsfolk of the place can meet. Here, fired by 
 a word, a look, or gesture, are started those feuds between 
 house and house, between a woman of rank and a citizen's 
 wife, which endure till death, and widen the impassable gulf 
 which parts the two classes of society. With the exception of 
 the Clermont-Mont-Saint-Jean, the Boauffremont, the de 
 Scey, and the Gramont families, with a few others who come
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 279 
 
 only to stay on their estates in the Comte, the aristocracy of 
 Besangon dates no further back than a couple of centuries, 
 the time of the conquest by Louis XIV. This little world is 
 essentially of the parlement, and arrogant, stiff, solemn, un- 
 compromising, haughty beyond all comparison, even with the 
 Court of Vienna, for in this the nobility of Besangon would 
 put the Viennese drawing-rooms to shame. As to Victor Hugo, 
 Nodier, Fourier, the glories of the town, they are never men- 
 tioned, no one thinks about them. The marriages in these 
 families are arranged in the cradle, so rigidly are the greatest 
 things settled as well as the smallest. No stranger, no in- 
 truder, ever finds his way into one of these houses, and to 
 obtain an introduction for the colonels or officers of title 
 belonging to the first families in France when quartered 
 there, requires efforts of diplomacy which Prince Talleyrand 
 would gladly have mastered to use at a congress. 
 
 In 1834 Amedee was the only man in Besangon who wore 
 trouser-straps ; this will account for the young man's being 
 regarded as a lion. And a little anecdote will enable you to 
 understand the city of Besangon. 
 
 Some time before the opening of this story, the need arose 
 at the prefecture for bringing an editor from Paris for the 
 official newspaper, to enable it to hold its own against the 
 little Gazette, dropped at Besangon by the great Gazette, and 
 the Patriot, which frisked in the hands of the Kepublicans. 
 Paris sent them a young man, knowing nothing about la 
 Franche Comte, who began by writing them a leading article 
 of the school of the Charivari. The chiet of the moderate 
 party, a member of the municipal council, sent for the journal- 
 ist and said to him, "You must understand, monsieur, that we 
 are serious, more than serious tiresome; we resent being 
 amused, and are furious at having been made to laugh. B< 
 as hard of digestion as the toughest disquisitions in the Revue 
 des Deux Mondes, and you will hardly reach the level of 
 Besangon." 
 
 The editor took the hint, and thenceforth spoke the most 
 incomprehensible philosophical lingo. His success was com- 
 plete.
 
 280 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 If young Monsieur de Soulas did not fall in the esteem of 
 Besangon society, it was out of pure vanity on its part; the 
 aristocracy were happy to affect a modern air, and to be able 
 to show any Parisians of rank who visited the Comte a young 
 man who bore some likeness to them. 
 
 All this hidden labor, all this dust thrown in people's eyes, 
 this display of folly and latent prudence, had an object, or 
 the lion of Besangon would have been no son of the soil. 
 Amedee wanted to achieve a good marriage by proving some 
 day that his farms were not mortgaged, and that he had some 
 savings. He wanted to be the talk of the town, to be the 
 finest and best-dressed man there, in order to win first the 
 attention, and then the hand, of Mademoiselle Rosalie 
 de Watteville. 
 
 In 1830, at the time when young Monsieur de Soulas was 
 setting up in business as a dandy, Eosalie was but fourteen. 
 Hence, in 1834, Mademoiselle de Watteville had reached the 
 age when young persons are easily struck by the peculiarities 
 which attracted the attention of the town to Amedee. There 
 are many lions who become lions out of self-interest and spec- 
 ulation. The Wattevilles, who for twelve years had been 
 drawing an income of fifty thousand francs, did not spend 
 more than four-and-twenty thousand francs a year, while 
 receiving all the upper circle of Besangon every Monday and 
 Friday. On Monday they gave a dinner, on Friday an even- 
 ing party. Thus, in twelve years, what a sum must have ac- 
 cumulated from twenty-six thousand francs a year, saved and 
 invested with the judgment that distinguishes those old fam- 
 ilies ! It was very generally supposed that Madame de 
 Watteville, thinking she had land enough, had placed her 
 savings in the three per cents, in 1830. Rosalie's dowry 
 would therefore, as the best informed opined, amount to 
 about twenty thousand francs a year. So for the last five 
 years Amedee had worked like a mole to get into the highest 
 favor of the severe Baroness, while laying himself out to 
 flatter Mademoiselle de Watteville's conceit. 
 
 Madame de Watteville was in the secret of the devices by
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 281 
 
 which Amedee succeeded in keeping up his rank in Besangon, 
 and esteemed him highly for it. Soulas had placed himself 
 under her wing when she was thirty, and at that time had 
 dared to admire her and make her his idol ; he had got so far 
 as to be allowed he alone in the world to pour out to her 
 all the unseemly gossip which almost all very precise women 
 love to hear, being authorized by their superior virtue to look 
 into the gulf without falling, and into the devil's snares with- 
 out being caught. Do you understand why the lion did not 
 allow himself the very smallest intrigue? He lived a public 
 life, in the street so to speak, on purpose to play the part of a 
 lover sacrificed to duty by the Baroness, and to feast her mind 
 with the sins she had forbidden to her senses. A man who is 
 so privileged as to be allowed to pour light stories into the ear 
 of a bigot is in her eyes a charming man. If this exemplary 
 youth had better known the human heart, he might without 
 risk have allowed himself some flirtations among the grisettes 
 of Besangon who looked up to him as a king ; his affairs might 
 perhaps have been all the more hopeful with the strict and 
 prudish Baroness. To Eosalie our Cato affected prodigality ; 
 he professed a life of elegance, showing her in perspective 
 the splendid part played by a woman of fashion in Paris, 
 whither he meant to go as Depute. 
 
 All these manoeuvres were crowned with complete success. 
 In 1834 the mothers of the forty noble families composing the 
 high society of Besangon quoted Monsieur Amedee de Soulas 
 as the most charming young man in the town ; no one would 
 have dared to dispute his place as cock of the walk at the 
 Hotel de Eupt, and all Besangon regarded him as Eosalie de 
 Watteville's future husband. There had even been some ex- 
 change of ideas on the subject between the Baroness and 
 Amedee, to which the Baron's apparent nonentity gave some 
 certainty. 
 
 Mademoiselle de Watteville, to whom her enormous pros- 
 pective fortune at that time lent considerable importance, 
 had been brought up exclusively within the precincts of the 
 Hotel de Eupt which her mother rarely quitted, so devoied
 
 282 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 was she to her dear Archbishop and severely repressed by an 
 exclusively religious education, and by her mother's despot- 
 ism, which held her rigidly to principles. Eosalie knew abso- 
 lutely nothing. Is it knowledge to have learned geography 
 from Guthrie, sacred history, ancient history, the history of 
 France, and the four rules, all passed through the sieve of an 
 old Jesuit? Dancing and music were forbidden, as being 
 more likely to corrupt life than to grace it. The Baroness 
 taught her daughter every conceivable stitch in tapestry and 
 women's work plain sewing, embroidery, netting. At seven- 
 teen Rosalie had never read anything but the Lettres edifiantes 
 and some works on heraldry. No newspaper had ever defiled 
 her sight. She attended mass at the Cathedral every morn- 
 ing, taken there by her mother, came back to breakfast, did 
 needlework after a little walk in the garden, and received 
 visitors, sitting with the Baroness until dinner-time. Then, 
 after dinner, excepting on Mondays and Fridays, she accom- 
 panied Madame de Watteville to other houses to spend the 
 evening, without being allowed to talk more than the maternal 
 rule permitted. 
 
 At eighteen Mademoiselle de Watteville was a slight, thin 
 girl with a flat figure, fair, colorless, and insignificant to the 
 last degree. Her eyes, of a very light blue, borrowed beauty 
 from their lashes, which, when downcast, threw a shadow on 
 her cheeks. A few freckles marred the whiteness of her fore- 
 head, which was shapely enough. Her face was exactly like 
 those of Albert Diirer's saints, or those of the painters before 
 Perugino; the same plump, though slender modeling, the same 
 delicacy saddened by ecstasy, the same severe guilelessness. 
 Everything about her, even to her attitude, was suggestive 
 of those virgins, whose beauty is only revealed in its mystical 
 radiance to the eyes of the studious connoisseur. She had 
 fine hands though red, and a pretty foot, the foot of an aristo- 
 crat. 
 
 She habitually wore simple checked cotton dresses ; but on 
 Sundays and in the evening her mother allowed her silk. The 
 cut of her frocks, made at Besangon, almost made her ugly,
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 283 
 
 while her mother tried to borrow grace, beauty, and elegance 
 from Paris fashions ; for through Monsieur de Soulas she pro- 
 cured the smallest trifles of her dress from thence. Eosalie 
 had never worn a pair of silk stockings or thin boots, but 
 always cotton stockings and leather shoes. On high days she 
 was dressed in a muslin frock, her hair plainly dressed, and 
 had bronze kid shoes. 
 
 This education, and her own modest demeanor, hid in 
 Eosalie a spirit of iron. Physiologists and profound ob- 
 servers will tell you, perhaps to your great astonishment, that 
 tempers, characteristics, wit, or genius reappear in families 
 at long intervals, precisely like what are known as hereditary 
 diseases. Thus talent, like the gout, sometimes skips over 
 two generations. We have an illustrious example of this phe- 
 nomenon in George Sand, in whom are resuscitated the force, 
 the power, and the imaginative faculty of the Marechal de 
 Saxe, whose natural granddaughter she is. 
 
 The decisive character and romantic daring of the famous 
 Watteville had reappeared in the soul of his grand-niece, re- 
 inforced by the tenacity and pride of blood of the Eupts. But 
 these qualities or faults, if you will have it so were as 
 deeply buried in this young girlish soul, apparently so weak 
 and yielding, as the seething lavas within a hill before it 
 becomes a volcano. Madame de Watteville alone, perhaps, 
 suspected this inheritance from two strains. She was so 
 severe to her Eosalie, that she replied one day to the Arch- 
 bishop, who blamed her for being too hard on the child, "Leave 
 me to manage her, monseigneur. I know her ! She has more 
 than one Beelzebub in her skin !" 
 
 The Baroness kept all the keener watch over her daughter, 
 because she considered her honor as a mother to be at stake. 
 After all, she had nothing else to do. Clotilde de Eupt, at 
 this time five-and-thirty, and as good as widowed, with a hus- 
 band who turned egg-cups in every variety of wood, who set 
 his mind on making wheels with six spokes out of iron-wood, 
 and manufactured snuff-boxes for everyone of his acquaint- 
 ance, flirted in strict propriety with Amedee de Soulas. When
 
 284 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 this young man was in the house, she alternately dismissed and 
 recalled her daughter, and tried to detect symptoms of jeal- 
 ousy in that youthful soul, so as to have occasion to repress 
 them. She imitated the police in its dealings with the repub- 
 licans ; but she labored in vain. Eosalie showed no symptoms 
 of rebellion. Then the arid bigot accused her daughter of 
 perfect insensibility. Rosalie knew her mother well enough 
 to be sure that if she had thought young Monsieur de Soulas 
 nice, she would have drawn down on herself a smart reproof. 
 Thus, to all her mother's incitement she replied merely by 
 such phrases as 'are wrongly called Jesuitical wrongly, be- 
 cause the Jesuits were strong, and such reservations are the 
 chevaux de frise behind which weakness takes refuge. Then 
 the mother regarded the girl as a dissembler. If by mis- 
 chance a spark of the true nature of the Wattevilles and the 
 Eupts blazed out, the mother armed herself with the respect 
 due from children to their parents to reduce Rosalie to 
 passive obedience. 
 
 This covert battle was carried on in the most secret se- 
 clusion of domestic life, with closed doors. The Vicar- 
 General, the dear Abbe Grancey, the friend of the late Arch- 
 bishop, clever as he was in his capacity of the chief Father 
 Confessor of the diocese, could not discover whether the 
 struggle had stirred up some hatred between the mother and 
 daughter, whether the mother were jealous in anticipation, 
 or whether the court Amedee was paying to the girl through 
 her mother had not overstepped its due limits. Being 
 a friend of the family, neither mother nor daughter, con- 
 fessed to him. Rosalie, a little too much harried, morally, 
 about young de Soulas, could not abide him, to use a homely 
 phrase, and when he spoke to her, trying to take her heart by 
 surprise, she received him but coldly. This aversion, dis- 
 cerned only by her mother's eye, was a constant subject of 
 admonition. 
 
 "Rosalie, I cannot imagine why yon affect such coldness 
 towards Amedee. Is it because he is a friend of the family, 
 and because we like him your father and I ?"
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 285 
 
 "Well, mamma/' replied the poor child one day, "if I 
 made him welcome, should I not be still more in the wrong?" 
 
 "What do you mean by that?" cried Madame de Watte- 
 ville. "What is the meaning of such words? Your mother 
 is unjust, no doubt, and, according to you, would be so in 
 any case ! Never let such an answer pass your lips again to 
 your mother " and so forth. 
 
 This quarrel lasted three hours and three-quarters. Eo- 
 salie noted the time. Her mother, pale with fury, sent her to 
 her room, where Eosalie pondered on the meaning of this scene 
 without discovering it, so guileless was she. Thus young 
 Monsieur de Soulas, who was supposed by every one to be very 
 near the end he was aiming at, all neckcloths set, and by dint 
 of pots of patent blacking an end which required so much 
 waxing of his moustaches, so many smart waistcoats, wore out 
 so many horseshoes and stays for he wore a leather vest, the 
 stays of the lion Amedee, I say, was further away than any 
 chance comer, although he had on his side the worthy and 
 noble Abbe de Grancey. 
 
 "Madame," said Monsieur de Soulas, addressing the Baron- 
 ess, while waiting till his soup was cool enough to swallow, 
 and affecting to give a romantic turn to his narrative, "one 
 fine morning the mail-coach dropped at the Hotel National a 
 gentleman from Paris, who, after seeking apartments, made 
 up his mind in favor of the first floor in Mademoiselle Ga- 
 lard's house, Eue du Perron. Then the stranger went straight 
 to the Mairie, and had himself registered as a resident with 
 all political qualifications. Finally, he had his name entered 
 on the list of barristers to the Court, showing his title in due 
 form, and he left his card on all his new colleagues, the Min- 
 isterial officials, the Councillors of the Court, and the mem- 
 bers of the bench, with the name, 'ALBERT SAVARON.' ' ; 
 
 "The name of Savaron is famous," said Mademoiselle de 
 Watteville, who was strong in heraldic information. "The 
 Savarons of Savarus are one of the oldest, noblest, and richest 
 families in Belgium."
 
 286 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 "He is a Frenchman, and no man's son," replied Amedee 
 de Soulas. "If he wishes to bear the arms of the Savarons 
 of Savarus, he must add a bar-sinister. There is no one left 
 of the Brabant family but a Mademoiselle de Savarus, a rich 
 heiress, and unmarried/' 
 
 "The bar-sinister is, of course, the badge of a bastard ; but 
 the bastard of a Comte de Savarus is noble," answered 
 Eosalie. 
 
 "Enough, that will do, mademoiselle!" said the Baroness. 
 
 "You insisted on her learning heraldry," said Monsieur de 
 Watteville, "and she knows it very well." 
 
 "Go on, I beg, Monsieur de Soulas." 
 
 "You may suppose that in a town where everything is 
 classified, known, pigeon-holed, ticketed, and numbered, as 
 in Besangon, Albert Savaron was received without hesitation 
 by the lawyers of the town. They were satisfied to say, 'Here 
 is a man who does not know his Besangon. Who the devil 
 can have sent him here ? What can he hope to do ? Sending 
 his card to the Judges instead of calling -in person ! What a 
 blunder!' And so, three days after, Savaron had ceased to 
 exist. He took as his servant old Monsieur Galard's man 
 Galard being dead Jerome, who can cook a little. Albert 
 Savaron was all the more completely forgotten, because no 
 one had seen him or met him anywhere." 
 
 "Then, does he not go to mass?" asked Madame de Cha- 
 voncourt. 
 
 "He goes on Sundays to Saint-Pierre, but to the early ser- 
 vice at eight in the morning. He rises every night between 
 one and two in the morning, works till eight, has his breakfast, 
 and then goes on working. He walks in his garden, going 
 round fift) r , or perhaps sixty times ; then he goes in, dines, and 
 goes to bed between six and seven." 
 
 "How did you learn all that?" Madame de Chavoncourt 
 asked Monsieur de Soulas. 
 
 "In the first place, madame, I live in the Rue Neuve, at the 
 corner of the Eue du Perron ; I look out on the house where 
 this mysterious personage lodges; then, of course, there are 
 communications between my tiger and Jerome."
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 287 
 
 "And you gossip with Babylas?" 
 
 "What would you have me do out riding ?" 
 
 "Well and how was it that you engaged a stranger for 
 your defence?" asked the Baroness, thus placing the con- 
 versation in the hands of the Vicar-General. 
 
 "The President of the Court played this pleader a trick by 
 appointing him to defend at the Assizes a half-witted peasant 
 accused of forgery. But Monsieur Savaron procured the poor 
 man's acquittal by proving his innocence and showing that he 
 had been a tool in the hands of the real culprits. Not only 
 did his line of defence succeed, but it led to the arrest of two 
 of the witnesses, who were proved guilty and condemned. His 
 speech struck the Court and the jury. One of these, a mer- 
 chant, placed a difficult case next day in the hands of Mon- 
 sieur Savaron, and he won it. In the position in which we 
 found ourselves, Monsieur Berryer finding it impossible to 
 come to Besanc,on, Monsieur de Garcenault advised him to 
 employ this Monsieur Albert Savaron, foretelling our success. 
 As soon as I saw him and heard him, I felt faith in him, and 
 I was not wrong." 
 
 "Is he then so extraordinary ?" asked Madame de Chavon- 
 court. 
 
 "Certainly, madame," replied the Vicar-General. 
 
 "Well, tell us about it," said Madame de Watteville. 
 
 "The first time I saw him," said the Abbe de Grancey, "he 
 received me in his outer room next the ante-room old Ga- 
 lard's drawing-room which he has had painted like old oak, 
 and which I found to be entirely lined with law-books, ar- 
 ranged on shelves also painted as old oak. The painting and 
 the books are the sole decoration of the room, for the furniture 
 consists of an old writing-table of carved wood, six old arm- 
 chairs covered with tapestry, window curtains of gray stuff 
 bordered with green, and a green carpet over the floor. The 
 ante-room stove heats this library as well. As I waited there 
 I did not picture my advocate as a young man. But this 
 singular setting is in perfect harmony with his person; for 
 Monsieur Savaron came out in a black merino dressing-gown
 
 288 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 tied with a i\ d cord, red slippers, a red flannel waistcoat, and 
 a red smoking cap." 
 
 "The devil's Colors !" exclaimed Madame de Watteville. 
 
 "Yes," said the Abbe; "but a magnificent head. Black 
 hair already streaked with a little gray, hair like that of Saint 
 Peter and Saint Paul in pictures, with thick shining curls, 
 hair as stiff as horse-hair; a round white throat like a wo- 
 man's; a splendid forehead, furrowed by the strong median 
 line which great schemes, great thoughts, deep meditations 
 stamp on a great man's brow; an olive complexion marbled 
 with red, a square nose, eyes of flame, hollow cheeks, with two 
 long lines betraying much suffering, a mouth with a sardonic 
 smile, and a small chin, narrow, and too short ; crow's feet on 
 his temples ; deep-set eyes, moving in their sockets like burning 
 balls; but, in spite of all these indications of a violently 
 passionate nature, his manner was calm, deeply resigned, and 
 his voice of penetrating sweetness, which surprised me in 
 Court by its easy flow; a true orator's voice, now clear and 
 appealing, sometimes insinuating, but a voice of thunder 
 when needful, and lending itself to sarcasm to become in- 
 cisive. 
 
 "Monsieur Albert Savaron is of middle height, neither stout 
 nor thin. And his hands are those of a prelate. 
 
 "The second time I called on him he received me in his bed- 
 room, adjoining the library, and smiled at my astonishment 
 when I saw there a wretched chest of drawers, a shabby carpet, 
 a camp-bed, and cotton window-curtains. He came out of 
 his private room, to which no one is admitted, as Jerome in- 
 formed me ; the man did not go in, but merely knocked at the 
 door. 
 
 "The third time he was breakfasting in his library on the 
 most frugal fare; but on this occasion, as he had spent the 
 night studying our documents, as I had my attorney with me, 
 and as that worthy Monsieur Girardet is long-winded, I had 
 leisure to study the stranger. He certainly is no ordinary 
 man. There is more than one secret behind that face, at once 
 so terrible and so gentle, patient and yet impatient, broad and
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 289 
 
 yet hollow. I saw, too, that he stooped a little, like all men 
 who have some heavy burden to bear." 
 
 "Why did so eloquent a man leave Paris? For what pur- 
 pose did he come to Besangon?" asked pretty Madame de 
 Chavoncourt. "Could no one tell him how little chance a 
 stranger has of succeeding here ? The good folks of Besangon 
 will make use of him, but they will not allow him to make use 
 of them. Why, having come, did he make so little effort that 
 it needed a freak of the President's to bring him forward ?" 
 
 "After carefully studying that fine head," said the Abbe, 
 looking keenly at the lady who had interrupted him, in such 
 a way as to suggest that there was something he would not 
 tell, "and especially after hearing him this morning reply to 
 one of the bigwigs of the Paris Bar, I believe that this man, 
 who may be five-and-thirty, will by and by make a great sensa- 
 tion." 
 
 "Why should we discuss him? You have gained your 
 action, and paid him," said Madame de Watteville, watching 
 her daughter, who, all the time the Vicar-General had been 
 speaking, seemed to hang on his lips. 
 
 The conversation changed, and no more was heard of Albert 
 Savaron. 
 
 The portrait sketched by the cleverest of the Vicars-General 
 of the diocese had all the greater charm for Eosalie because 
 there was a romance behind it. For the first time in her life 
 she had come across the marvelous, the exceptional, which 
 smiles on every youthful imagination, and which curiosity, so 
 eager at Rosalie's age, goes forth to meet half-way. What an 
 ideal being was this Albert gloomy, unhappy, eloquent, labo- 
 rious, as compared by Mademoiselle de Watteville to that 
 chubby fat Count, bursting with health, paying compliments, 
 and talking of the fashions in the very face of the splendor of 
 the old counts of Rupt. Amedee had cost her many quarrels 
 and scoldings, and, indeed, she knew him only too well ; while 
 this Albert Savaron offered many enigmas to be solved. 
 
 "Albert Savaron de Savarus," she repeated to herself.
 
 290 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 Now, to see him, to catch sight of him ! This was the de- 
 sire of the girl to whom desire was hitherto unknown. She 
 pondered in her heart, in her fancy, in her brain, the least 
 phrases used by the Abbe de Grancey, for all his words had 
 told. 
 
 "A fine forehead !" said she to herself, looking at the head 
 of every man seated at the table ; "I do not see one fine one. 
 Monsieur de Soulas' is too prominent ; Monsieur de Grancey's 
 is fine, but he is seventy, and has no hair, it is impossible to 
 see where his forehead ends." 
 
 "What is the matter, Eosalie ; you are eating nothing ?" 
 
 "I am not hungry, mamma," said she. "A prelate's hands 
 " she went on to herself. "I cannot remember our hand- 
 some Archbishop's hands, though he confirmed me." 
 
 Finally, in the midst of her coming and going in the 
 labyrinth of her meditations, she remembered a lighted win- 
 dow she had seen from her bed, gleaming through the trees 
 of the two adjoining gardens, when she had happened to wake 
 in the night. . . . "Then that was his light!" thought 
 she. "I might see him ! I will see him." 
 
 "Monsieur de Grancey, is the Chapter's lawsuit quite 
 settled?" said Eosalie point-blank to the Vicar-General, dur- 
 ing a moment of silence. 
 
 Madame de Watteville exchanged rapid glances with th 
 Vicar-General. 
 
 "What can that matter to you, my dear child ?" she said to 
 Eosalie, with an affected sweetness which made her daughter 
 cautious for the rest of her days. 
 
 "It might be carried to the Court of Appeal, but our adver- 
 saries will think twice about that," replied the Abbe. 
 
 "I never could have believed that Eosalie would think about 
 a lawsuit all through a dinner," remarked Madame de Watte- 
 ville. 
 
 "Nor I either," said Eosalie, in a dreamy way that made 
 every one laugh. "But Monsieur de Grancey was so full of it, 
 that I was interested." 
 
 The company rose from table and returned to the drawing-
 
 ALBERT SAVARTJS 291 
 
 room. All through the evening Rosalie listened in case Albert 
 Savaron should be mentioned again; but beyond the congratu- 
 lations offered by each newcomer to the Abbe on having 
 gained his suit, to which no one added any praise of the advo- 
 cate, no more was said about it. Mademoiselle de Watteville 
 impatiently looked forward to bedtime. She had promised 
 herself to wake at between two and three in the morning, and 
 to look at Albert's dressing-room windows. When the hour 
 came, she felt almost pleasure in gazing at the glimmer from 
 the lawyer's candles that shone through the trees, now almost 
 bare of their leaves. By the help of the strong sight of a 
 young girl, which curiosity seems to make longer, she saw 
 Albert writing, and fancied she could distinguish the color 
 of the furniture, which she thought was red. From the 
 chimney above the roof rose a thick column of smoke. 
 
 "While all the world is sleeping, he is awake like God !" 
 thought she. 
 
 The education of girls brings with it such serious problems 
 for the future of a nation is in the mother that the Uni- 
 versity of France long since set itself the task of having noth- 
 ing to do with it. Here is one of these problems : Ought 
 girls to be informed on all points? Ought their minds to be 
 under restraint? It need not be said that the religious sys- 
 tem is one of restraint. If you enlighten them, you make 
 them demons before their time ; if you keep them from think- 
 ing, you end in the sudden explosion so well shown by Moliere 
 in the character of Agnes, and you leave this suppressed mind, 
 so fresh and clear-seeing, as swift and as logical as that of a 
 savage, at the mercy of an accident. This inevitable crisis was 
 brought on in Mademoiselle de Watteville by the portrait 
 which one of the most prudent Abbes of the Chapter of Be- 
 sanqon imprudently allowed himself to sketch at a dinner party. 
 
 Next morning, Mademoiselle de Watteville, while dressing, 
 necessarily looked out at Albert Savaron walking in the garden 
 adjoining that of the Hotel de Rupt. 
 
 "What would have become of me," thought she, "if he had 
 lived anywhere else ? Here I can, at any rate, see him. What 
 i3 he thinking about?"
 
 292 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 Having seen this extraordinary man, though at a distance, 
 the only man whose countenance stood forth in contrast with 
 crowds of Besangon faces she had hitherto met with, Eosalie 
 at once jumped at the idea of getting into his home, of ascer- 
 taining the reason of so much mystery, of hearing that 
 eloquent voice, of winning a glance from those fine eyes. All 
 this she set her heart on, but how could she achieve it ? 
 
 All that day she drew her needle through her embroidery 
 with the obtuse concentration of a girl who, like Agnes, seems 
 to be thinking of nothing, but who is reflecting on things in 
 general so deeply, that her artifice is unfailing. As a result of 
 this profound meditation, Eosalie thought she would go to 
 confession. Next morning, after mass, she had a brief inter- 
 view with the Abbe Giroud at Saint-Pierre, and managed so 
 ingeniously that the hour of her confession was fixed for 
 Sunday morning at half-past seven, before the eight o'clock 
 Mass. She committed herself to a dozen fibs in order to find 
 herself, just for once, in the church at the hour when the 
 lawyer came to Mass. Then she was seized with an impulse of 
 extreme affection for her father; she went to see him in his 
 workroom, and asked him for all sorts of information on the 
 art of turning, ending by advising him to turn larger pieces, 
 columns. After persuading her father to set to work on some 
 twisted pillars, one of the difficulties of the turner's art, she 
 suggested that he should make use of a large heap of stones 
 that lay in the middle of the garden to construct a sort of 
 grotto on which he might erect a little temple or Belvedere in 
 which his twisted pillars could be used and shown off to all 
 the world. 
 
 At the climax of the pleasure the poor unoccupied man de- 
 rived from this scheme, Eosalie said, as she kissed him, "Above 
 all, do not tell mamma who gave you the notion; she would 
 scold me." 
 
 "Do not be afraid !" replied Monsieur de Watteville, who 
 groaned as bitterly as his daughter under the tyranny of the 
 terrible descendant of the Eupts. 
 
 So Eosalie had a certain prospect of seeing ere long a
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 293 
 
 charming observatory built, whence her eye would command 
 the lawyer's private room. And there are men for whose sake 
 young girls can carry out such masterstrokes of diplomacy, 
 while, for the most part, like Albert Savaron, they know it 
 not. 
 
 The Sunday so impatiently looked for arrived, and Rosalie 
 dressed with such carefulness as made Mariette, the ladies'- 
 maid, smile. 
 
 "It is the first time I ever knew mademoiselle to be so 
 fidgety," said Mariette. 
 
 "It strikes me," said Rosalie, with a glance at Mariette, 
 which brought poppies to her cheeks, "that you too are more 
 particular on some days than on others." 
 
 As she went down the steps, across the courtyard, and 
 through the gates, Rosalie's heart beat, as everybody's does 
 in anticipation of a great event. Hitherto, she had never 
 known what it was to walk in the streets; for a moment she 
 had felt as though her mother must read her schemes on her 
 brow, and forbid her going to confession, and she now felt new 
 blood in her feet, she lifted them as though she trod on fire. 
 She had, of course, arranged to be with her confessor at a 
 quarter-past eight, telling her mother eight, so as to have 
 about a quarter of an hour near Albert. She got to church 
 before Mass, and after a short prayer, went to see if the Abbe 
 Giroud were in his confessional, simply to pass the time; and 
 she thus placed herself in such a way as to see Albert as he 
 came into church. 
 
 The man must have been atrociously ugly who did not 
 seem handsome to Mademoiselle de Watteville in the frame of 
 mind produced by her curiosity. And Albert Savaron, who 
 was really very striking, made all the more impression on 
 Rosalie because his mien, his walk, his carriage, everything 
 down to his clothing, had the indescribable stamp which 
 can only be expressed by the word Mystery. 
 
 He came in. The church, till now gloomy, seemed to 
 Rosalie to be illuminated. The girl was fascinated by his 
 slow and solemn demeanor, as of a man who bears a world on
 
 294 ALBERT SAYARUS 
 
 his shoulders, and whose deep gaze, whose very gestures, com- 
 bine to express a devastating or absorbing thought. Eosalie 
 now understood the Vicar-General's words in their fullest 
 extent. Yes, those eyes of tawny brown, shot with golden 
 lights, covered ardor which revealed itself in sudden flashes. 
 Eosalie, with a recklessness which Mariette noted, stood 
 in the lawyer's way, so as to exchange glances with him ; and 
 this glance turned her blood, for it seethed and boiled as 
 though its warmth were doubled. 
 
 As soon as Albert had taken a seat, Mademoiselle de Watte- 
 ville quickly found a place whence she could see him perfectly 
 during all the time the Abbe might leave her. When Mariette 
 said, "Here is Monsieur Giroud," it seemed to Rosalie that the 
 interview had lasted no more than a few minutes. By the 
 time she came out from the confessional, Mass was over. 
 Albert had left the church. 
 
 "The Vicar-General was right," thought she. "He is un- 
 happy. Why should this eagle for he has the eyes of an 
 eagle swoop down on Besangon? Oh, I must know every- 
 thing! But how?" 
 
 Under the smart of this new desire Eosalie set the stitches 
 of her worsted- work with exquisite precision, and hid her 
 meditations under a little innocent air, which shammed 
 simplicity to deceive Madame de Watteville. 
 
 From that Sunday, when Mademoiselle de Watteville had 
 met that look, or, if you please, received this baptism of fire 
 a fine expression of Napoleon's which may be well applied 
 to love she eagerly promoted the plan for the Belvedere. 
 
 "Mamma," said she one day when two columns were turned, 
 "my father has taken a singular idea into his head; he is 
 turning columns for a Belvedere he intends to erect on the 
 heap of stones in the middle of the garden. Do you approve 
 of it ? It seems to me " 
 
 "I approve of everything your father does," said Madame 
 de Watteville drily, "and it is a wife's duty to submit to her 
 husband even if she does not approve of his ideas. Why
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 296 
 
 should 1 abject to a thing which is of no importance in itself, 
 if only it amuses Monsieur de Watteville?" 
 
 ''Well, because from thence we shall see into Monsieur de 
 Soulas' rooms, and Monsieur de Soulas will see us when we 
 are there. Perhaps remarks may be made " 
 
 "Do you presume, Rosalie, to guide your parents, and think 
 you know more than they do of life and the proprieties ?" 
 
 "I say no more, mamma. Besides, my father said that 
 there would be a room in the grotto, where it would be cool, 
 and where we can take coffee." 
 
 "Your father has had an excellent idea," said Madame 
 de Watteville, who forthwith went to look at the columns. 
 
 She gave her entire approbation to the Baron de Watte- 
 ville's design, while choosing for the erection of this monu- 
 ment a spot at the bottom of the garden, which could not be 
 seen from Monsieur de Soulas' windows, but whence they 
 could perfectly see into Albert Savaron's rooms. A builder 
 was sent for, who undertook to construct a grotto, of which 
 the top should be reached by a path three feet wide through 
 the rock-work, where periwinkles would grow, iris, clematis, 
 ivy, honeysuckle, and Virginia creeper. The Baroness de- 
 sired that the inside should be lined with rustic wood-work, 
 such as was then the fashion for flower-stands, with a looking- 
 glass against the wall, an ottoman forming a box, and a table 
 of inlaid bark. Monsieur de Soulas proposed that the floor 
 should be of asphalt. Rosalie suggested a hanging chandelier 
 of rustic wood. 
 
 "The Wattevilles are having something charming done in 
 their garden," was rumored in Besangon. 
 
 "They are rich, and can afford a thousand crowns for a 
 whim " 
 
 "A thousand crowns!" exclaimed Madame de Chavon- 
 court. 
 
 "Yes, a thousand crowns," cried young Monsieur de Soulas. 
 "A man has been sent for from Paris to rusticate the interior, 
 but it will be very pretty. Monsieur de Watteville himself 
 is making the chandelier, and has begun to carve the wood."
 
 296 ALBERT SAYARUS 
 
 "Berquet is to make a cellar under it," said an Abb6. 
 
 "No," replied young Monsieur de Soulas, "he is raising the 
 kiosk on a concrete foundation, that it may not be damp." 
 
 "You know the very least things that are done in that 
 house," said Madame de Chavoncourt sourly, as she looked 
 at one of her great girls waiting to be married for a year past. 
 
 Mademoiselle de Watteville, with a little flush of pride in 
 thinking of the success of her Belvedere, discerned in her- 
 self a vast superiority over every one about her. No one 
 guessed that a little girl, supposed to be a witless goose, had 
 simply made up her mind to get a closer view of the lawyer 
 Savaron's private study. 
 
 Albert Savaron's brilliant defence of the Cathedral Chapter 
 was all the sooner forgotten because the envy of other lawyers 
 was aroused. Also, Savaron, faithful to his seclusion, went 
 nowhere. Having no friends to cry him up, and seeing no 
 one, he increased the chances of being forgotten which are 
 common to strangers in such a town as Besangon. Never- 
 theless, he pleaded three times at the Commercial Tribunal 
 in three knotty cases which had to be carried to the superior 
 Court. He thus gained as clients four of the chief merchants 
 of the place, who discerned in him so much good sense and 
 sound legal purview that they placed their claims in his hands. 
 
 On the day when the Watteville family inaugurated the 
 Belvedere, Savaron also was founding a monument. Thanks 
 to the connections he had obscurely formed among the upper 
 class of merchants in Besangon, he was starting a fortnightly 
 paper, called the Eastern Review, with the help of forty shares 
 of five hundred francs each, taken up by his first ten clients, 
 on whom he had impressed the necessity for promoting the 
 interests of Besangon, the town where the traffic should meet 
 between Mulhouse and Lyons, and the chief centre between 
 Mulhouse and Rhone. 
 
 To compete with Strasbourg, was it not needful that 
 Besangon should become a focus of enlightenment as well as 
 of trade? The leading questions relating to the interests 
 of Eastern France could only be dealt with in a review.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 297 
 
 What a glorious task to rob Strasbourg and Dijon of their 
 literary importance, to bring light to the East of France, 
 and compete with the centralizing influence of Paris ! These 
 reflections, put forward by Albert, were repeated by the ten 
 merchants, who believed them to be their own. 
 
 Monsieur Savaron did not commit the blunder of putting 
 his name in front; he left the finances of the concern to his 
 chief client, Monsieur Boucher, connected by marriage with 
 one of the great publishers of important ecclesiastical works ; 
 but he kept the editorship, with a share of the profits as 
 founder. The commercial interest appealed to Dole, to 
 Dijon, to Salins, to Neufchatel, to the Jura, Bourg, Nantua, 
 Lous-le-Saulnier. The concurrence was invited of the learn- 
 ing and energy of every scientific student in the districts of 
 le Bugey, la Bresse, and Franche Comte. By the influence 
 of commercial interests and common feeling, five hundred 
 subscribers were booked in consideration of the low price ; the 
 Review cost eight francs a quarter. 
 
 To avoid hurting the conceit of the provincials by refusing 
 their articles, the lawyer hit on the good idea of suggesting a 
 desire for the literary management of this Review to Monsieur 
 Boucher's eldest son, a young man of two-and-twenty, very 
 eager for fame, to whom the snares and woes of literary 
 responsibilities were utterly unknown. Albert quietly kept 
 the upper hand, and made Alfred Boucher his devoted adher- 
 ent. Alfred was the only man in Besangon with whom the 
 king of the bar was on familiar terms. Alfred came in the 
 morning to discuss the articles for the next number with 
 Albert in the garden. It is needless to say that the trial 
 number contained a "Meditation" by Alfred, which Savaron 
 approved. In his conversations with Alfred, Albert would 
 let drop some great ideas, subjects for articles of which Alfred 
 availed himself. And thus the merchant's son fancied he was 
 making capital out of the great man. To Alfred, Albert was 
 a man of genius, of profound politics. The commercial world, 
 enchanted at the success of the Review, had to pay up only 
 three-tenths of their shares. Two hundred more subscribers,
 
 298 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 and the periodical would pay a dividend to the share-holders 
 of five per cent., the editor remaining unpaid. This editing, 
 indeed, was beyond price. 
 
 After the third number the Review was recognized for 
 exchange by all the papers published in France, which Albert 
 henceforth read at home. This third number included a tale 
 signed "A. S.," and attributed to the famous lawyer. In 
 spite of the small attention paid by the higher circle of 
 Besangon to the Review, which was accused of Liberal views, 
 this, the first novel produced in the county, came under 
 discussion that mid-winter at Madame de Chavoncourt's. 
 
 "Papa," said Eosalie, "a Review is published in Besangon; 
 you ought to take it in ; and keep it in your room, for mamma 
 would not let me read it, but you will lend it to me." 
 
 Monsieur de Watteville, eager to obey his dear Rosalie, who 
 for the last five months had given him so many proofs of 
 filial affection, Monsieur de Watteville went in person to 
 subscribe for a year to the Eastern Review, and lent the four 
 numbers already out to his daughter. In the course of the 
 night Rosalie devoured the tale the first she had ever read 
 in her life but she had only known life for two months past. 
 Hence the effect produced on her by this work must not be 
 judged by ordinary rules. Without prejudice of any kind 
 as to the greater or less merit of this composition from the 
 pen of a Parisian who had thus imported into the province the 
 manner, the brilliancy, if you will, of the new literary school, 
 it could not fail to be a masterpiece to a young girl abandon- 
 ing all her intelligence and her innocent heart to her first 
 reading of this kind. 
 
 Also, from what she had heard said, Rosalie had by intuition 
 conceived a notion of it which strangely enhanced the interest 
 of this novel. She hoped to find in it the sentiments, and per- 
 haps something of the life of Albert. From the first pages 
 this opinion took so strong a hold on her, that after reading 
 the fragment to the end she was certain that it was no mis- 
 take. Here, then, is this confession, in which, according to 
 the critics of Madame de Chavoncourt's drawing-room, Albert
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 299 
 
 had imitated some modern writers who, for lack of inventive- 
 ness, relate their private joys, their private griefs, or the 
 mysterious events of their own life. 
 
 AMBITION FOR LOVE S SAKE 
 
 In 1823 two young men, having agreed as a plan for a holi- 
 day to make a tour through Switzerland, set out from Lucerne 
 one fine morning in the month of July in a boat pulled by 
 three oarsmen. They started for Fluelen, intending to stop 
 at every notable spot on the lake of the Four Cantons. The 
 views which shut in the waters on the way from Lucerne to 
 Fluelen offer every combination that the most exacting fancy 
 can demand of mountains and rivers, lakes and rocks, brooks 
 and pastures, trees and torrents. Here are austere solitudes 
 and charming headlands, smiling and trimly kept meadows, 
 forests crowning perpendicular granite cliffs, like plumes, 
 deserted but verdant reaches opening out, and valleys whose 
 beauty seems the lovelier in the dreamy distance. 
 
 As they passed the pretty hamlet of Gersau, one of the 
 friends looked for a long time at a wooden house which seemed 
 to have been recently built, enclosed by a paling, and standing 
 on a promontory, almost bathed by the waters. As the boat 
 rowed past, a woman's head was raised against the back- 
 ground of the room on the upper story of this house, to admire 
 the effect of the boat on the lake. One of the young men met 
 the glance thus indifferently given by the unknown fair. 
 
 "Let us stop here/' said he to his friend. "We meant to 
 make Lucerne our headquarters for seeing Switzerland; you 
 will not take it amiss, Leopold, if I change my mind and stay 
 here to take charge of our possessions. Then you can go 
 where you please; my journey is ended. Pull to land, men, 
 and put us out at this village ; we will breakfast here. I will 
 go back to Lucerne to fetch all our luggage, and before you 
 leave you will know in which house I take a lodging, where 
 you will find me on your return."
 
 800 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 "Here or at Lucerne," replied Leopold, "the difference is 
 not so great that I need hinder you from following your 
 whim." 
 
 These two youths were friends in the truest sense of the 
 word. They were of the same age; they had learned at the 
 same school; and after studying the law, they were spending 
 their holiday in the classical tour in Switzerland. Leopold, 
 by his father's determination, was already pledged to a place 
 in a notary's office in Paris. His spirit of rectitude, his 
 gentleness, and the coolness of his senses and his brain, guar- 
 anteed him to be a docile pupil. Leopold could see himself a 
 notary in Paris; his life lay before him like one of the high- 
 roads that cross the plains of France, and he looked along its 
 whole length with philosophical resignation. 
 
 The character of his companion, whom we will call 
 Eodolphe, presented a strong contrast with Leopold's, and 
 their antagonism had no doubt had the result of tightening 
 the bond that united them. Kodolphe was the natural son 
 of a man of rank, who was carried off by a premature 
 death before he could make any arrangements for securing 
 the means of existence to a woman he fondly loved and to 
 Rodolphe. Thus cheated by a stroke of fate, Rodolphe's 
 mother had recourse to a heroic measure. She sold every- 
 thing she owed to the munificence of her child's father for a 
 sum of more than a hundred thousand francs, bought with 
 it a life annuity for herself at a high rate, and thus acquired 
 an income of about fifteen thousand francs, resolving to devote 
 the whole of it to the education of her son, so as to give him 
 all the personal advantages that might help to make his 
 fortune, while saving, by strict economy, a small capital to be 
 his when he came of age. It was bold; it was counting on her 
 own life; but without this boldness the good mother would 
 certainly have found it impossible to live and to bring her 
 child up suitably, and he was her only hope, her future, the 
 spring of all her joys. 
 
 Rodolphe, the son of a most charming Parisian woman, 
 and a man of mark, a nobleman of Brabant, was cursed with
 
 ALBERT SAYARUS 301 
 
 extreme sensitiveness. From his infanc} r he had in everything 
 shown a most ardent nature. In him mere desire became a 
 guiding force and the motive power of his whole being, the 
 stimulus to his imagination, the reason of his actions. Not- 
 withstanding the pains taken by a clever mother, who was 
 alarmed when she detected this predisposition, Eodolphe 
 wished for things as a poet imagines, as a mathematician cal- 
 culates, as a painter sketches, as a musician creates melodies. 
 Tender-hearted, like his mother, he dashed with inconceivable 
 violence and impetus of thought after the object of his desires; 
 he annihilated time. While dreaming of the fulfilment of his 
 schemes, he always overlooked the means of attainment. 
 "When my son has children," said his mother, "he will want 
 them born grown up." 
 
 This fine frenzy, carefully directed, enabled Eodolphe to 
 achieve his studies with brilliant results, and to become what 
 the English call an accomplished gentleman. His mother was 
 then proud of him, though still fearing a catastrophe if ever a 
 passion should possess a heart at once so tender and so 
 susceptible, so vehement and so kind. Therefore, the judi- 
 cious mother had encouraged the friendship which bound Leo- 
 pold to Eodolphe and Eodolphe to Leopold, since she saw in 
 the cold and faithful young notary a guardian, a comrade, 
 who might to a certain extent take her place if by some mis- 
 fortune she should be lost to her son. Bodolphe's mother, 
 still handsome at three-and-forty, had inspired Leopold with 
 an ardent passion. This circumstance made the two young 
 men even more intimate. 
 
 So Leopold, knowing Eodolphe well, was not surprised to 
 find him stopping at a village and giving up the projected 
 journey to Saint-Gothard, on the strength of a single glance 
 at the upper window of a house. While breakfast was pre- 
 pared for them at the Swan Inn, the friends walked round 
 the hamlet and came to the neighborhood of the pretty new 
 house; here, while gazing about him and talking to the in- 
 habitants, Eodolphe discovered the residence of some decent 
 folk, who were willing to take him as a boarder, a verr
 
 302 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 frequent custom in Switzerland. They offered him a bed- 
 room looking over the lake and the mountains, and from 
 whence he had a view of one of those immense sweeping 
 reaches which, in this lake, are the admiration of every 
 traveler. This house was divided by a roadway and a little 
 creek from the new house, where Rodolphe had caught sight 
 of the unknown fair one's face. 
 
 For a hundred francs a month Eodolphe was relieved of 
 all thought for the necessaries of life. But, in consideration 
 of the outlay the Stopfer couple expected to make, they 
 bargained for three months' residence and a month's pay- 
 ment in advance. Rub a Swiss never so little, and you find 
 the usurer. After breakfast, Rodolphe at once made himself 
 at home by depositing in his room such property as be 
 had brought with him for the journey to the Saint-Gothard, 
 and he watched Leopold as he set out, moved by the spirit of 
 routine, to carry out the excursion for himself and his friend. 
 When Rodolphe, sitting on a fallen rock on the shore, could no 
 longer see Leopold's boat, he turned to examine the new house 
 with stolen glances, hoping to see the fair unknown. Alas ! 
 he went in without its having given a sign of life. During 
 dinner, in the company of Monsieur and Madame Stopfer, 
 retired coopers from Neufchatel, he questioned them as to 
 the neighborhood, and ended by learning all he wanted to 
 know about the lady, thanks to his hosts' loquacity ; for they 
 were ready to pour out their budget of gossip without any 
 pressing. 
 
 The fair stranger's name was Fanny Lovelace. This name 
 (pronounced Loveless) is that of an old English family, but 
 Richardson has given it to a creation whose fame eclipses all 
 others ! Miss Lovelace had come to settle by the lake for her 
 father's health, the physicians having recommended him the 
 air of Lucerne. These two English people had arrived with 
 no other servant than a little girl of fourteen, a dumb child, 
 much attached to Miss Fanny, on whom she waited very intel- 
 ligently, and had settled, two winters since, with Monsieur and 
 Madame Bergmann, the retired head-gardeners of His
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 303 
 
 Excellency Count Borromeo of Isola Bella and Isola Madre 
 in the Lago Maggoire. These Swiss, who were possessed of 
 an income of about a thousand crowns a year, had let the 
 top story of their house to the Lovelaces for three years, at 
 a rent of two hundred francs a year. Old Lovelace, a man of 
 ninety, and much broken, was too poor to allow himself any 
 gratifications, and very rarely went out ; his daughter worked 
 to maintain him, translating English books, and writing some 
 herself, it was said. The Lovelaces could not afford to hire 
 boats to row on the lake, or horses and guides to explore the 
 neighborhood. 
 
 Poverty demanding such privation as this excites all the 
 greater compassion among the Swiss, because it deprives them 
 of a chance of profit. The cook of the establishment fed the 
 three English boarders for a hundred francs a month in- 
 clusive. In Gersau it was generally believed, however, that 
 the gardener and his wife, in spite of their pretensions, used 
 the cook's name as a screen to net the little profits of this 
 bargain. The Bergmanns had made beautiful gardens round 
 their house, and had built a hothouse. The flowers, the fruit, 
 and the botanical rarities of this spot were what had induced 
 the young lady to settle on it as she passed through Gersau. 
 Miss Fanny was said to be nineteen years old ; she was the old 
 man's youngest child, and the object of his adulation. About 
 two months ago she had hired a piano from Lucerne, for she 
 seemed to be crazy about music. 
 
 "She loves flowers and music, and she is unmarried !" 
 thought Kodolphe ; "what good luck !" 
 
 The next day Eodolphe went to ask leave to visit the hot- 
 houses and gardens, which were beginning to be soniewhat 
 famous. The permission was not immediately granted. The 
 retired gardeners asked, strangely enough, to see Rodolphe's 
 passport; it was sent to them at once. The paper was not 
 returned to him till next morning, by the hands of the cook, 
 who expressed her master's pleasure in showing him their 
 place. Eodolphe went to the Bergmanns', not without a cer- 
 tain trepidation, known only to persons of strong feelings,
 
 304 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 who go through as much passion in a moment as some men 
 experience in a whole lifetime. 
 
 After dressing himself carefully to gratify the old gar- 
 deners of the Borromean Islands, whom he regarded as the 
 warders of his treasure, he went all over the grounds, looking 
 at the house now and again, but with much caution; the old 
 couple treated him with evident distrust. But his attention 
 was soon attracted by the little English deaf-mute, in whom 
 his discernment, though young as yet, enabled him to recog- 
 nize a girl of African, or at least of Sicilian, origin. The 
 child had the golden-brown color of a Havana cigar, eyes of 
 fire, Armenian eyelids with lashes of very un-British length, 
 hair blacker than black; and under this almost olive skin, 
 sinews of extraordinary strength and feverish alertness. She 
 looked at Eodolphe with amazing curiosity and effrontery, 
 watching his every movement. 
 
 "To whom does that little Moresco belong?" he asked 
 worthy Madame Bergmann. 
 
 "To the English," Monsieur Bergmann replied. 
 
 "But she never was born in England !" 
 
 "They may have brought her from the Indies," said Ma- 
 dame Bergmann. 
 
 "I have been told that Miss Lovelace is fond of music. I 
 should be delighted if, during the residence by the lake to 
 which I am condemned by my doctor's orders, she would allow 
 me to join her." 
 
 "The} r receive no one, and will not see anybody," said the 
 old gardener. 
 
 Rodolphe bit his lips and went away, without having been 
 invited into the house, or taken into the part of the garden 
 that lay between the front of the house and the shore of the 
 little promontory. On that side the house had a balcony 
 above the first floor, made of wood, and covered by the roof, 
 which projected deeply like the roof of a chalet on all four 
 sides of the building, in the Swiss fashion. Rodolphe had 
 loudly praised the elegance of this arrangement, and talked 
 of the view from that balcony, but all in vain. When he had
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 305 
 
 taken leave of the Bergmanns it struck him that he was a 
 simpleton, like any man of spirit and imagination disap- 
 pointed of the results of a plan which he had believed would 
 succeed. 
 
 In the evening he, of course, went out in a boat on the 
 lake, round and about the spit of land, to Brunnen and to 
 Schwytz, and came in at nightfall. From afar he saw the 
 window open and brightly lighted; he heard the sound of a 
 piano and the tones of an exquisite voice. He made the boat- 
 man stop, and gave himself up to the pleasure of listening 
 to an Italian air delightfully sung. When the singing ceased, 
 Eodolphe landed and sent away the boat and rowers. At 
 the cost of wetting his feet, he went to sit down under the 
 water-worn granite shelf crowned by a thick hedge of thorny 
 acacia, by the side of which ran a long lime avenue in the 
 Bergmanns' garden. By the end of an hour he heard steps 
 and voices just above him, but the words that reached his 
 ears were all Italian, and spoken by two women. 
 
 He took advantage of the moment when the two speakers 
 were at one end of the walk to slip noiselessly to the other. 
 After half an hour of struggling he got to the end of the 
 avenue, and there took up a position whence, without being 
 seen or heard, he could watch the two women without being 
 observed by them as they came towards him. What was 
 Rodolphe's amazement on recognizing the deaf-mute as one of 
 them ; she was talking to Miss Lovelace in Italian. 
 
 It was now eleven o'clock at night. The stillness was so 
 perfect on the lake and around the dwelling, that the two 
 women must have thought themselves safe; in all Gersau 
 there could be no eyes open but theirs. Rodolphe supposed 
 that the girl's dumbness must be a necessary deception. From 
 the way in which they both spoke Italian, Rodolphe suspected 
 that it was the mother tongue of both girls, and concluded 
 that the name of English also hid some disguise. 
 
 "They are Italian refugees," said he to himself, "outlaws 
 in fear of the Austrian or Sardinian police. The young 
 lady waits till it is dark to walk and talk in security."
 
 306 4LBERT SAVARUS 
 
 He lay down by the side of the hedge, and crawled like a 
 snake to find a way between two acacia shrubs. At the 
 risk of leaving his coat behind him, or tearing deep scratches 
 in his back, he got through the hedge when the so-called Miss 
 Fanny and her pretended deaf-and-dumb maid were at the 
 other end of the path ; then, when they had come within twenty 
 yards of him without seeing him, for he was in the shadow of 
 the hedge, and the moon was shining brightly, he suddenly 
 rose. 
 
 "Fear nothing," said he in French to the Italian girl, "I 
 am not a spy. You are refugees, I have guessed that. I am 
 a Frenchman whom one look from you has fixed at Gersau." 
 
 Eodolphe, startled by the acute pain caused by some steel 
 instrument piercing his side, fell like a log. 
 
 "Nel lago con pietra!" said the terrible dumb girl. 
 
 "Oh, Gina !" exclaimed the Italian. 
 
 "She has missed me," said Rodolphe, pulling from the 
 wound a stiletto, which had been turned by one of the false 
 ribs. "But a little higher up it would have been deep in my 
 heart. I was wrong, Francesca," he went on, remembering 
 the name he had heard little Gina repeat several times ; "I owe 
 her no grudge, do not scold her. The happiness of speaking 
 to you is well worth the prick of a stiletto. Only show me 
 the way out ; I must get back to the Stopf ers' house. Be easy ; 
 I shall tell nothing." 
 
 Francesca, recovering from her astonishment, helped Ro- 
 dolphe to rise, and said a few words to Gina, whose eyes filled 
 with tears. The two girls made him sit down on a bench and 
 take off his coat, his waistcoat, and his cravat. Then Gina 
 opened his shirt and sucked the wound strongly. Francesca, 
 who had left them, returned with a large piece of sticking- 
 plaster, which she applied to the wound. 
 
 "You can walk now as far as your house," she said. 
 
 Each took an arm, and Rodolphe was conducted to a side 
 gate, of which the key was in Francesca's apron pocket. 
 
 "Does Gina speak French?" said Rodolphe to Francesca. 
 
 "No. But do not excite yourself," replied Francesca with 
 some impatience.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 307 
 
 "Let me look at you," said Eodolphe pathetically, "for it 
 may be long before I am able to come again " 
 
 He leaned against one of the gate-posts contemplating the 
 beautiful Italian, who allowed him to gaze at her for a moment 
 under the sweetest silence and the sweetest- night which ever, 
 perhaps, shone on this lake, the king of Swiss lakes. 
 
 Francesca was quite of the classic Italian type, and such 
 as imagination supposes or pictures, or, if you will, dreams, 
 that Italian women are. What first struck Eodolphe was 
 the grace and elegance of a figure evidently powerful, though 
 so slender as to appear fragile. An amber paleness over- 
 spread her face, betraying sudden interest, but it did not 
 dim the voluptuous glance of her liquid eyes of velvety black- 
 ness. A pair of hands as beautiful as ever a Greek sculptor 
 added to the polished arms of a statue grasped Eodolphe's 
 arm, and their whiteness gleamed against his black coat. 
 The rash Frenchman could but just discern the long, oval 
 shape of her face, and a melancholy mouth showing brilliant 
 teeth between the parted lips, full, fresh, and brightly red. 
 The exquisite lines of this face guaranteed to Francesca per- 
 manent beauty; but what most struck Eodolphe was the 
 adorable freedom, the Italian frankness of this woman, wholly 
 absorbed as she was in her pity for him. 
 
 Francesca said a word to Gina, who gave Eodolphe her arm 
 as far as the Stopfers' door, and fled like a swallow as soon 
 as she had rung. 
 
 "These patriots do not play at killing!" said Eodolphe to 
 himself as he felt his sufferings when he found himself in 
 his bed. " 'Nel lago !' Gina would have pitched me into the 
 lake with a stone tied to my neck." 
 
 Next day he sent to Lucerne for the best surgeon there, 
 and when he came, enjoined on him absolute secrecy, giving 
 him to understand that his honor depended on it. 
 
 Leopold returned from his excursion on the day when his 
 friend first got out of bed. Eodolphe made up a story, and 
 begged him to go to Lucerne to fetch their luggage and letters. 
 Leopold brought back the most fatal, the most dreadful news :
 
 308 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 Rodolphe's mother was dead. While the two friends were on 
 their way from Bale to Lucerne, the fatal letter, written by 
 Leopold's father, had reached Lucerne the day they left for 
 Fluelen. 
 
 In spite of Leopold's utmost precautions, Rodolphe fell ill 
 of a nervous fever. As soon as Leopold saw his friend out 
 of danger, he set out for France with a power of attorney, and 
 Rodolphe could thus remain at Gersau, the only place in the 
 world where his grief could grow calmer. The young French- 
 man's position, his despair, the circumstances which made 
 such a loss worse for him than for any other man, were known, 
 and secured him the pity and interest of every one in Gersau. 
 Every morning the pretended dumb girl came to see him and 
 bring him news of her mistress. 
 
 As soon as Rodolphe could go out he went to the Berg- 
 manns' house, to thank Miss Fanny Lovelace and her father 
 for the interest they had taken in his sorrow and his illness. 
 For the first time since he had lodged with the Bergmanns 
 the old Italian admitted a stranger to his room, where Ro- 
 dolphe was received with the cordiality due to his misfor- 
 tunes and to his being a Frenchman, which excluded all dis- 
 trust of him. Francesca looked so lovety by candle-light that 
 first evening that she shed a ray of brightness on his grieving 
 heart. Her smiles flung the roses of hope on his woe. She 
 sang, not indeed gay songs, but grave and solemn melodies 
 suited to the state of Rodolphe's heart, and he observed this 
 touching care. 
 
 At about eight o'clock the old man left the young people 
 without any sign of uneasiness, and went to his room. When 
 Francesca was tired of singing, she led Rodolphe on to the 
 balcony, whence they perceived the sublime scenery of the 
 lake, and signed to him to be seated by her on a rustic wooden 
 bench. 
 
 "Am I very indiscreet in asking how old you are, cara Fran- 
 cesca?" said Rodolphe. 
 
 "Nineteen," said she, "well past." 
 
 "If anything in the world could soothe my sorrow/' he
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 309 
 
 went on, "it would be the hope of winning you from your 
 father, whatever your fortune may be. So beautiful as you 
 are, you seem to be richer than a prince's daughter. And I 
 tremble as I confess to you the feelings with which you have 
 inspired me; but they are deep they are eternal." 
 
 "Zitto!" said Francesca, laying a finger of her right hand 
 on her lips. "Say no more ; I am not free I have been married 
 these three years." 
 
 For a few minutes utter silence reigned. When the Italian 
 girl, alarmed at Eodolphe's stillness, went close to him, she 
 found that he had fainted. 
 
 "Povero !" she said to herself. "And I thought him cold." 
 
 She fetched some salts, and revived Rodolphe by making 
 him smell at them. 
 
 "Married!" said Rodolphe, looking at Francesca. And 
 then his tears flowed freely. 
 
 "Child !" said she. "But there still is hope. My husband 
 
 "Eighty ?" Rodolphe put in. 
 
 "No," said she with a smile, "but sixty-five. He has dis- 
 guised himself as much older to mislead the police." 
 
 "Dearest," said Rodolphe, "a few more shocks of this kind 
 and I shall die. Only when you have known me twenty 
 years will you understand the strength and power of my heart, 
 and the nature of its aspirations for happiness. This plant," 
 he went on, pointing to the yellow jasmine which covered the 
 balustrade, "does not climb more eagerly to spread itself in 
 the sunbeams than I have clung to you for this month past. 
 I love you with unique passion. That love will be the secret 
 fount of my life I may possibly die of it." 
 
 "Oh ! Frenchman, Frenchman !" said she, emphasizing her 
 exclamation with a little incredulous grimace. 
 
 "Shall I not be forced to wait, to accept you at the hands of 
 time ?" said he gravely. "But know this : if you are in earnest 
 in what you have allowed to escape you, I will wait for you 
 faithfully, without suffering any other attachment to grow up 
 in my heart."
 
 310 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 She looked at him doubtfully. 
 
 "None," said he, "not even a passing" fancy. I have my 
 fortune to make; you must have a splendid one, nature 
 created you a princess ' 
 
 At this word Francesca could not repress a faint smile, 
 which gave her face the most bewitching expression, something 
 subtle, like what the great Leonardo has so well depicted in 
 the Gioconda. This smile made Rodolphe pause. "Ah yes !" 
 he went on, "you must suffer much from the destitution to 
 which exile has brought you. Oh, if you would make me 
 happy above all men, and consecrate my love, you would treat 
 me as a friend. Ought I not to be your friend? My poor 
 mother has left sixty thousand francs of savings ; take half." 
 
 Francesca looked steadily at him. This piercing gaze went 
 to the bottom of Eodolphe's soul. 
 
 "We want nothing ; my work amply supplies our luxuries," 
 she replied in a grave voice. 
 
 "And can I endure that a Francesca should work ?" cried he. 
 "One day you will return to your country and find all you 
 left there." Again the Italian girl looked at Rodolphe. "And 
 you will then repay me what you may have condescended to 
 borrow," he added, with an expression full of delicate feel- 
 ing. 
 
 "Let us drop the subject," said she, with incomparable 
 dignity of gesture, expression, and attitude. "Make a splen- 
 did fortune, be one of the remarkable men of your country; 
 that is my desire. Fame is a drawbridge which may serve 
 to cross a deep gulf. Be ambitious if you must. I believe 
 you have great and powerful talents, but use them rather for 
 the happiness of mankind than to deserve me; you will be 
 all the greater in my eyes." 
 
 In the course of this conversation, which lasted two hours, 
 Rodolphe discovered that Francesca was an enthusiast for 
 Liberal ideas, and for that worship of liberty which had led 
 to the three revolutions in Naples, Piemont, and Spain. On 
 leaving, he was shown to the door by Gina, the so-called mute. 
 At eleven o'clock no one was astir in the village, there was
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 311 
 
 no fear of listeners; Eodolphe took Gina into a corner, and 
 asked her in a low voice and bad Italian, "Who are your 
 master and mistress, child? Tell me, I will give you this 
 fine new gold piece." 
 
 "Monsieur," said the girl, taking the coin, "my master is the 
 famous bookseller Lamporani of Milan, one of the leaders of 
 the revolution, and the conspirator of all others whom Austria 
 would most like to have in the Spielberg." 
 
 "A bookseller's wife! Ah, so much the better," thought 
 he ; "we are on an equal footing. And what is her family ?" 
 he added, "for she looks like a queen." 
 
 "All Italian women do," replied Gina proudly. "Her 
 father's name is Colonna." 
 
 Emboldened by Francesca's modest rank, Eodolphe had an 
 awning fitted to his boat and cushions in the stern. When 
 this was done, the lover came to propose to Francesca to come 
 out on the lake. The Italian accepted, no doubt to carry out 
 her part of a young English Miss in the eyes of the villagers, 
 but she brought Gina with her. Francesca Colonna's lightest 
 actions betrayed a superior education and the highest social 
 rank. By the way in which she took her place at the end 
 of the boat Eodolphe felt himself in some sort cut off from 
 her, and, in the face of a look of pride worthy of an aristo- 
 crat, the familiarity he had intended fell dead. By a glance 
 Francesca made herself a princess, with all the prerogatives 
 she might have enjoyed in the Middle Ages. She seemed to 
 have read the thoughts of this vassal who was so audacious 
 as to constitute himself her protector. 
 
 Already, in the furniture of the room where Francesca had 
 received him, in her dress, and in the various trifles she made 
 use of, Eodolphe had detected indications of a superior char- 
 acter and a fine fortune. All these observations now recurred 
 to his mind ; he became thoughtful after having been trampled 
 on, as it were, by Francesca's dignity. Gina, her half-grown- 
 up confidante, also seemed to have a mocking expression as 
 she gave a covert or a side glance at Eodolphe. This ob- 
 vious disagreement between the Italian lady's rank and her
 
 312 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 manners was a fresh puzzle to Kodolphe, who suspected some 
 further trick like Gina's assumed dumbness. 
 
 "Where would you go, Signora Lamporani ?" he asked. 
 
 "Towards Lucerne," replied Franceses in French. 
 
 "Good !" said Rodolphe to himself, "she is not startled by 
 hearing me speak her name ; she had, no doubt, foreseen that 
 I should ask Gina she is so cunning. What is your quarrel 
 with me ?" he went on, going at last to sit down by her side, 
 and asking her by a gesture to give him her hand, which she 
 withdrew. "You are cold and ceremonious; what, in col- 
 loquial language, we should call short." 
 
 "It is true," she replied with a smile. "I am wrong. It 
 is not good manners; it is vulgar. In French you would 
 call it inartistic. It is better to be frank than to harbor 
 cold or hostile feelings towards a friend, and you have already 
 proved yourself my friend. Perhaps I have gone too far 
 with you. You must have taken me to be a very ordinary 
 woman." Eodolphe made many signs of denial. "Yes," 
 said the bookseller's wife, going on without noticing this 
 pantomime, which, however, she plainly saw. "I have de- 
 tected that, and naturally I have reconsidered my conduct. 
 Well ! I will put an end to everything by a few words of deep 
 truth. Understand this, Eodolphe: I feel in myself the 
 strength to stifle a feeling if it were not in harmony with my 
 ideas or anticipation of what true love is. I could love as 
 we can love in Italy, but I know my duty. No intoxication 
 can make me forget it. Married without my consent to that 
 poor old man, I might take advantage of the liberty he so 
 generously gives me; but three years of married life imply 
 acceptance of its laws. Hence the most vehement passion 
 would never make me utter, even involuntarily, a wish to find 
 myself free. 
 
 "Emilio knows my character. He knows that without 
 my heart, which is my own, and which I might give away, I 
 should never allow anyone to take my hand. That is why 
 I have just refused it to you. I desire to be loved and waited 
 for with fidelity, nobleness, ardor, while all I can give is
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 313 
 
 infinite tenderness of which the expression may not over- 
 step the boundary of the heart, the permitted neutral ground. 
 All this being thoroughly understood Oh !" she went on with 
 a girlish gesture, "I will be as coquettish, as gay, as glad, as a 
 child which knows nothing of the dangers of familiarity." 
 
 This plain and frank declaration was made in a tone, an 
 accent, and supported by a look which gave it the deepest 
 stamp of truth. 
 
 "A Princess Colonna could not have spoken better," said 
 Eodolphe, smiling. 
 
 "Is that," she answered with some haughtiness, "a re- 
 flection on the humbleness of my birth? Must your love 
 flaunt a coat-of-arms ? At Milan the noblest names are 
 written over shop-doors : Sforza, Canova, Visconti, Trivulzio, 
 Ursini; there are Archintos apothecaries; but, believe me, 
 though I keep a shop, I have the feelings of a duchess." 
 
 "A reflection ? Nay, rnadame, I meant it for praise." 
 
 "By a comparison ?" she said archly. 
 
 "Ah, once for all," said he, "not to torture me if my words 
 should ill express my feelings, understand that my love is 
 perfect ; it carries with it absolute obedience and respect." 
 
 She bowed as a woman satisfied, and said, "Then mon- 
 sieur accepts the treaty ?" 
 
 "Yes," said he. "I can understand that in a rich and 
 powerful feminine nature the faculty of loving ought not 
 to be wasted, and that you, out of delicacy, wished to re- 
 strain it. Ah ! Francesca, at my age tenderness requited, 
 and by so sublime, so royally beautiful a creature as you are 
 why, it is the fulfilment of all my wishes. To love you as 
 you desire to be loved is not that enough to make a young 
 man guard himself against every evil folly ? Is it not to con- 
 centrate all his powers in a noble passion, of which in the 
 future he may be proud, and which can leave none but lovely 
 memories ? If you could but know with what hues you have 
 clothed the chain of Pilatus, the Rigi, and this superb lake " 
 
 "I want to know," said she, with the Italian artlessness 
 which has always a touch of artfulness.
 
 314 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 "Well, this hour will shine on all my life like a diamond 
 on a queen's brow." 
 
 Francesca's only reply was to lay her hand on Rodolphe's. 
 
 "Oh dearest ! for ever dearest ! Tell me, have you never 
 loved?" 
 
 "Never." 
 
 "And you allow me to love you nobly, looking to heaven for 
 the utmost fulfilment ?" he asked. 
 
 She gently bent her head. Two large tears rolled down 
 Eodolphe's cheeks. 
 
 "Why ! what is the matter ?" she cried, abandoning her im- 
 perial manner. 
 
 "I have now no mother whom I can tell of my happiness ; 
 she left this earth without seeing what would have mitigated 
 her agony " 
 
 "What?" said she. 
 
 "Her tenderness replaced by an equal tenderness " 
 
 "Povero mio!" exclaimed the Italian, much touched. "Be- 
 lieve me," she went on after a pause, "it is a very sweet thing, 
 and to a woman, a strong element of fidelity to know that she 
 is all in all on earth to the man she loves ; to find him lonely, 
 with no family, with nothing in his heart but his love in 
 short, to have him wholly to herself." 
 
 When two lovers thus understand each other, the heart feels 
 delicious peace, supreme tranquillity. Certainty is the basis 
 for which human feelings crave, for it is never lacking to 
 religious sentiment; man is always certain of being fully 
 repaid by God. Love never believes itself secure but by 
 this resemblance to divine love. And the raptures of that 
 moment must have been fully felt to be understood; it is 
 unique in life ; it can never return no more, alas ! than the 
 emotions of youth. To believe in a woman, to make her your 
 human religion, the fount of life, the secret luminary of all 
 your least thoughts! is not this a second birth? And a 
 young man mingles with this love a little of the feeling he 
 had for his mother. 
 
 Eodolphe and Francesca for some time remained in per-
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 315 
 
 feet silence, answering each other by sympathetic glances full 
 of thoughts. They understood each other in the midst of one 
 of the most beautiful scenes of Nature, whose glories, in- 
 terpreted by the glory in their hearts, helped to stamp on 
 their minds the most fugitive details of that unique hour. 
 There had not been the slightest shade of frivolity in Fran- 
 cesca's conduct. It was noble, large, and without any second 
 thought. This magnanimity struck Rodolphe greatly, for in 
 it he recognized the difference between the Italian and the 
 Frenchwoman. The waters, the land, the sky, the woman, 
 all were grandiose and suave, even their love in the midst of 
 this picture, so vast in its expanse, so rich in detail, where 
 the sternness of the snowy peaks and their hard folds standing 
 clearly out against the blue sky, reminded Rodolphe of the 
 circumstances which limited his happiness; a lovely country 
 shut in by snows. 
 
 This delightful intoxication of soul was destined to be 
 disturbed. A boat was approaching from Lucerne ; Gina, who 
 had been watching it attentively, gave a joyful start, though 
 faithful to her part as a mute. The bark came nearer ; when 
 at length Francesca could distinguish the faces on board, 
 she exclaimed, "Tito !" as she perceived a young man. She 
 stood up, and remained standing at the risk of being drowned. 
 "Tito ! Tito I" cried she, waving her handkerchief. 
 
 Tito desired the boatmen to slacken, and the two boats 
 pulled side by side. The Italian and Tito talked with such 
 extreme rapidity, and in a dialect unfamiliar to a man who 
 hardly knew even the Italian of books, that Rodolphe could 
 neither hear nor guess the drift of this conversation. But 
 Tito's handsome face, Francesca's familiarity, and Gina's 
 expression of delight, all aggrieved him. And indeed no 
 lover can help being ill pleased at finding himself neglected 
 for another, whoever he may be. Tito tossed a little leather 
 bag to Gina, full of gold no doubt, and a packet of letters to 
 Francesca, who began to read them, with a farewell wave of 
 the hand to Tito. 
 
 "Get quickly back to Gersau," she said to the boatmen, "I
 
 316 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 will not let my poor Emilio pine ten minutes longer than he 
 need/' 
 
 "What has happened?" asked Rodolphe, as he saw Fran 
 cesca finish reading the last letter. 
 
 "La liberta!" she exclaimed, with an artist's enthusiasm. 
 
 "E denaro!" added Gina, like an echo, for she had found 
 her tongue. 
 
 "Yes," said Francesca, "no more poverty ! For more than 
 eleven months have I been working, and I was beginning to 
 be tired of it. I am certainly not a literary woman." 
 
 "Who is this Tito ?" asked Eodolphe. 
 
 "The Secretary of State to the financial department of the 
 humble shop of the Colonnas, in other words, the son of 
 our ragionato. Poor boy ! he could not come by the Saint - 
 Gothard, nor by the Mont-Cenis, nor by the Simplon; he 
 came by sea, by Marseilles, and had to cross France. 
 Well, in three weeks we shall be at Geneva, and living at our 
 ease. Come, Eodolphe," she added, seeing sadness overspread 
 the Parisian's face, "is not the Lake of Geneva quite as good 
 as the Lake of Lucerne ?" 
 
 "But allow me to bestow a regret on the Bergmanns' de- 
 lightful house," said Rodolphe, pointing to the little promon- 
 tory. 
 
 "Come and dine with us to add to your associations, povero 
 mio" said she. "This is a great day ; we are out of danger. 
 My mother writes that within a year there will be an amnesty. 
 Oh ! la cara patria!" 
 
 These three words made Gina weep. "Another winter 
 here," said she, "and I should have been dead !" 
 
 "Poor little Sicilian kid !" said Francesca, stroking Gina's 
 head with an expression and an affection which made Ro- 
 dolphe long to be so caressed, even if it were without love. 
 
 The boat grounded ; Rodolphe sprang on to the sand, offered 
 his hand to the Italian lady, escorted her to the door of the 
 Bergmanns' house, and went to dress and return as soon as 
 possible. 
 
 When he joined the librarian and his wife, who were sitting
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 317 
 
 on the balcony, Eodolphe could scarcely repress an exclama- 
 tion of surprise at seeing the prodigious change which the 
 good news had produced in the old'man. He now saw a man 
 of about sixty, extremely well preserved, a lean Italian, as 
 straight as an I, with hair still black, though thin and show- 
 ing a white skull, with bright eyes, a full set of white teeth, 
 a face like Caesar, and on his diplomatic lips a sardonic smile, 
 the almost false smile under which a man of good breeding 
 hides his real feelings. 
 
 "Here is my husband under his natural form," said Fran- 
 cesca gravely. 
 
 "He is quite a new acquaintance/' replied Kodolphe, be- 
 wildered. 
 
 "Quite," said the librarian; "I have played many a part, 
 and know well how to make up. Ah ! I played one in Paris 
 under the Empire, with Bourrienne, Madame Murat, Madame 
 d'Abrantis e tutte quanti. Everything we take the trouble 
 to learn in our youth, even the most futile, is of use. If my 
 wife had not received a man's education an unheard-of thing 
 in Italy I should have been obliged to chop wood to get my 
 living here. Povera Francesca ! who would have told me that 
 she would some day maintain me !" 
 
 As he listened to this worthy bookseller, so easy, so affable, 
 so hale, Eodolphe scented some mystification, and preserved 
 the watchful silence of a man who has been duped. 
 
 "Che avete, signor?" Francesca asked with simplicity, 
 "Does our happiness sadden you ?" 
 
 "Your husband is a young man/' he whispered in her ear. 
 
 She broke into such a frank, infectious laugh that Eodolphe 
 was still more puzzled. 
 
 "He is but sixty-five, at your service," said she ; "but I can 
 assure you that even that is something to be thankful for !" 
 
 "I do not like to hear you jest about an affection so sacred 
 as this, of which you yourself prescribed the conditions." 
 
 "Zitto!" said she, stamping her foot, and looking whether 
 her husband were listening. "Never disturb the peace of 
 mind of that dear man, as simple as a child, and with whom
 
 318 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 I can do what I please. He is under my protection/' she 
 added. "If you could know with what generosity he risked 
 his life and fortune because I was a Liberal ! for he does not 
 share my political opinions. Is not that love, Monsieur 
 Frenchman ? But they are like that in his family. Emilio's 
 younger brother was deserted for a handsome youth by the 
 woman he loved. He thrust his sword through his own heart 
 ten minutes after he had said to his servant, 1 could of 
 course kill my rival, but it would grieve the Diva too deeply/ 5) 
 
 This mixture of dignity and banter, of haughtiness and 
 playfulness, made Francesca at this moment the most fasci- 
 nating creature in the world. The dinner and the evening 
 were full of cheerfulness, justified, indeed, by the relief of 
 the two refugees, but depressing to Eodolphe. 
 
 "Can she be fickle?" he asked himself as he returned to 
 the Stopfers' house. "She sympathized in my sorrow, and I 
 cannot take part in her joy !" 
 
 He blamed himself, justifying this girl-wife. 
 
 "She has no taint of hypocrisy, and is carried away by im- 
 pulse," thought he, "and I want her to be like a Parisian 
 woman." 
 
 Next day and the following days, in fact, for twenty days 
 after, Rodolphe spent all his time at the Bergmanns', watching 
 Francesca without having determined to watch her. In some 
 souls admiration is not independent of a certain penetration. 
 The young Frenchman discerned in Francesca the imprudence 
 of girlhood, the true nature of a woman as yet unbroken, 
 sometimes struggling against her love, and at other moments 
 yielding and carried away by it. The old man certainly be- 
 haved to her as a father to his daughter, and Francesca treated 
 him with a deeply felt gratitude which roused her instinctive 
 nobleness. The situation and the woman were to Rodolphe an 
 impenetrable enigma, of which the solution attracted him 
 more and more. 
 
 These last days wore full of secret joys, alternating with 
 melancholy moods, with tiffs and quarrels even more delight-
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 319 
 
 fid than the hours when Kodolphe and Francesca were of one 
 mind. And he was more and more fascinated by this tender- 
 ness apart from wit, always and in all things the same, an 
 affection that was jealous of mere nothings already ! 
 
 "You care very much for luxury ?" said he one evening to 
 Francesca, who was expressing her wish to get away from 
 Gersau, where she missed many things. 
 
 "I I" cried she. "I love luxury as I love the arts, as I love 
 a picture by Eaphael, a fine horse, a beautiful day, or the 
 Bay of Naples. Emilio," she went on, "have I ever com- 
 plained here during our days of privation ?" 
 
 "You would not have been yourself if you had," replied the 
 old man gravely. 
 
 "After all, is it not in the nature of plain folks to aspire to 
 grandeur ?" she asked, with a mischievous glance at Eodolphe 
 and at her husband. "Were my feet made for fatigue?" she 
 added, putting out two pretty little feet. "My hands" and 
 she held one out to Eodolphe "were those hands made to 
 work ? Leave us," she said to her husband ; "I want to speak 
 to him." 
 
 The old man went into the drawing-room with sublime good 
 faith ; he was sure of his wife. 
 
 "I will not have you come with us to Geneva," she said to 
 Eodolphe. "It is a gossiping town. Though I am far above 
 the nonsense the world talks, I do not choose to be calumniated, 
 not for my own sake, but for his. I make it my pride to be 
 the glory of that old man, who is, after all, my only protector. 
 We are leaving ; stay here a few days. When you come on to 
 Geneva, call first on my husband, and let- him introduce you 
 to me. Let us hide our great and unchangeable affection 
 from the eyes of the world. I love you; you know it; but 
 this is how I will prove it to you you shall never discern 
 in my conduct anything whatever that may arouse your jeal- 
 ousy." 
 
 She drew him into a corner of the balcony, kissed him on 
 the forehead, and fled, leaving him. in amazement. 
 
 Next day Eodolphe heard that the lodgers at the Berg-
 
 320 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 manns' had left at daybreak. It then seemed to him intoler- 
 able to remain at Gersau, and he set out for Vevay by the 
 longest route, starting sooner than was necessary. Attracted 
 to the waters of the lake where the beautiful Italian awaited 
 him, he reached Geneva by the end of October. To avoid the 
 discomforts of the town he took rooms in a house at Eaux- 
 Vives, outside the walls. As soon as he was settled, his first 
 care was to ask his landlord, a retired jeweler, whether some 
 Italian refugees from Milan had not lately come to reside 
 at Geneva. 
 
 "Not so far as I know," replied the man. "Prince and 
 Princess Colonna of Eome have taken Monsieur Jeanrenaud's 
 place for three years ; it is one of the finest on the lake. It 
 is situated between the Villa Diodati and that of Monsieur 
 Lafin-de-Dieu, let to the Vicomtesse de Beauseant. Prince 
 Colonna has come to see his daughter and his son-in-law 
 Prince Gandolphini, a Neapolitan, or if you like, a Sicilian, 
 an old adherent of King Murat's, and a victim of the last 
 revolution. These are the last arrivals at Geneva, and they 
 are not Milanese. Serious steps had to be taken, and the 
 Pope's interest in the Colonna family was invoked, to obtain 
 permission from the foreign powers and the King of Naples 
 for the Prince and Princess Gandolphini to live here. Geneva 
 is anxious to do nothing to displease the Holy Alliance to 
 which it owes its independence. Our part is not to ruffle 
 foreign courts ; there are many foreigners here, Russians and 
 English." 
 
 "Even some Gevenese?" 
 
 "Yes, monsieur, our lake is so fine ! Lord Byron lived here 
 about seven years at the Villa Diodati, which every one goes 
 to see now, like Coppet and Ferney." 
 
 "You cannot tell me whether within a week or so a book- 
 seller from Milan has come with his wife named Lamporani, 
 one of the leaders of the last revolution ?" 
 
 "I could easily find out by going to the Foreigners' Club," 
 said the jeweler. 
 
 Rodolphe's first walk was very naturally to the Villa Dio-
 
 ALBERT SAVARTJS 321 
 
 dati, the residence of Lord Byron, whose recent death added 
 to its attractiveness: for is not death the consecration of 
 genius ? 
 
 The road to Eaux-Vives follows the shore of the lake, and, 
 like all the roads in Switzerland, is very narrow; in some 
 spots, in consequence of the configuration of the hilly ground, 
 there is scarcely space for two carriages to pass each other. 
 
 At a few yards from the Jeanrenauds' house, which he was 
 approaching without knowing it, Eodolphe heard the sound 
 of a carriage behind him, and, finding himself in a sunk road, 
 he climbed to the top of a rock to leave the road free. Of 
 course he looked at the approaching carriage an elegant 
 English phaeton, with a splendid pair of English horses. He 
 felt quite dizzy as he beheld in this carriage Francesca, beau- 
 tifully dressed, by the side of an old lady as hard as a cameo. 
 A servant blazing with gold lace stood behind. Francesca 
 recognized Eodolphe, and smiled at seeing him like a statue 
 on a pedestal. The carriage, which the lover followed with 
 his eyes as he climbed the hill, turned in at the gate of a 
 country house, towards which he ran. 
 
 "Who lives here ?" he asked of the gardener. 
 
 "Prince and Princess Colonna, and Prince and Princess 
 Gandolphini." 
 
 "Have they not just driven in ?" 
 
 "Yes, sir/' 
 
 In that instant a veil fell from Eodolphe's eyes; he saw 
 clearly the meaning of the past. 
 
 "If only this is her last piece of trickery I" thought the 
 thunder-struck lover to himself. 
 
 He trembled lest he should have been the plaything of a 
 whim, for he had heard what a capriccio might mean in an 
 Italian. But what a crime had he committed in the eyes 
 of a woman in accepting a born princess as a citizen's wife ! 
 in believing that a daughter of one of the most illustrious 
 houses of the Middle Ages was the wife of a bookseller ! 
 The consciousness of his blunders increased Eodolphe's desire 
 to know whether he would be ignored and repelled. He
 
 322 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 asked for Prince Gandolphini, sending in his card, and was 
 immediately received by the false Lamparini, who came 
 forward to meet him, welcomed him with the best possible 
 grace, and took him to walk on a terrace whence there was 
 a view of Geneva, the Jura, the hills covered with villas, and 
 below them a wide expanse of the lake. 
 
 "My wife is faithful to the lakes, you see," he remarked, 
 after pointing out the details to his visitor. "We have a 
 sort of concert this evening/' he added, as they returned to 
 the splendid Villa Jeanrenaud. "I hope you will do me and 
 the Princess the pleasure of seeing you. Two months of 
 poverty endured in intimacy are equal to years of friend- 
 ship." 
 
 Though he was consumed by curiosity, Eodolphe dared not 
 ask to see the Princess; he slowly made his way back to 
 Eaux-Vives, looking forward to the evening. In a few hours 
 his passion, great as it had already been, was augmented by 
 his anxiety and by suspense as to future events. He now 
 understood the necessity for making himself famous, that 
 he might some day find himself, socially speaking, on a 
 level with his idol. In his eyes Francesca was made really 
 great by the simplicity and ease of her conduct at Gersau. 
 Princess Colonna's haughtiness, so evidently natural to her, 
 alarmed Rodolphe, who would find enemies in Francesca's 
 father and mother at least so he might expect; and the 
 secrecy which Princess Gandolphini had so strictly enjoined 
 on him now struck him as a wonderful proof of affection. 
 By not choosing to compromise the future, had she not con- 
 fessed that she loved him? 
 
 At last nine o'clock struck; Rodolphe could get into a 
 carriage and say with an emotion that is very intelligible, 
 "To the Villa Jeanrenaud to Prince Gandolphini's." 
 
 At last he saw Francesca, but without being seen by her. 
 The Princess was standing quite near the piano. Her beauti- 
 ful hair, so thick and long, was bound with a golden fillet. Her 
 face, in the light of wax candles, had the brilliant pallor 
 peculiar to Italians, and which looks its best only by artificial
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 323 
 
 light. She was in full evening dress, showing her fascinat- 
 ing shoulders, the figure of a girl and the arms of an antique 
 statue. Her sublime beauty was beyond all possible rivalry, 
 though there were some charming English and Eussian ladies 
 present, the prettiest women of Geneva, and other Italians, 
 among them the dazzling and illustrious Princess Varese, 
 and the famous singer Tinti, who was at that moment sing- 
 ing. 
 
 Eodolphe, leaning against the door-post, looked at the 
 Princess, turning on her the fixed, tenacious, attracting gaze, 
 charged with the full, insistent will which is concentrated in 
 the feeling called desire, and thus assumes the nature of a 
 vehement command. Did the flame of that gaze reach Fran- 
 cesca? Was Francesca expecting each instant to see Eo- 
 dolphe ? In a few minutes she stole a glance at the door, as 
 though magnetized by this current of love, and her eyes, with- 
 out reserve, looked deep into Eodolphe's. A slight thrill quiv- 
 ered through that superb face and beautiful body; the shock 
 to her spirit reacted : Francesca blushed ! Eodolphe felt a 
 whole life in this exchange of looks, so swift that it can only be 
 compared to a lightning flash. But to what could his happi- 
 ness compare ? He was loved. The lofty Princess, in the midst 
 of her world, in this handsome villa, kept the pledge given by 
 the disguised exile, the capricious beauty of Bergmanns' lodg- 
 ings. The intoxication of such a moment enslaves a man for 
 life 1 A faint smile, refined and subtle, candid and triumph- 
 ant, curled Princess Gandolphini's lips, and at a moment 
 when she did not feel herself observed she looked at Eo- 
 dolphe with an expression which seemed to ask his pardon for 
 having deceived him as to her rank. 
 
 When the song was ended Eodolphe could make his way to 
 the Prince, who graciously led him to his wife. Eodolphe 
 went through the ceremonial of a formal introduction to 
 Princess and Prince Colonna, and to Francesca. When this 
 was over, the Princess had to take part in the famous quar- 
 tette, Mi manca la voce, which was sung by her with Tinti, 
 with the famous tenor Genovese, and with a well-known Ital-
 
 324 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 ian Prince then in exile, whose voice, if he had not heen a 
 Prince, would have made him one of the Princes of Art. 
 
 "Take that seat," said Francesca to Kodolphe, pointing to 
 her own chair. "Oime! I think there is some mistake in my 
 name ; I have for the last minute been Princess Rodolphini." 
 
 It was said with an artless grace which revived, in this 
 avowal hidden beneath a jest, the happy days at Gersau. Ko- 
 dolphe reveled in the exquisite sensation of listening to the 
 voice of the woman he adored, while sitting so close to her 
 that one cheek was almost touched by the stuff of her dress 
 and the gauze of her scarf. But when, at such a moment, 
 Mi manca la voce is being sung, and by the finest voices in 
 Italy, it is easy to understand what it was that brought the 
 tears to Rodolphe's eyes. 
 
 In love, as perhaps in all else, there are certain circum- 
 stances, trivial in themselves, but the outcome of a thousand 
 little previous incidents, of which the importance is immense, 
 as an epitome of the past and as a link with the future. A hun- 
 dred times already we have felt the preciousness of the one we 
 love; but a trifle the perfect touch of two souls united during 
 a walk perhaps by a single word, by some unlooked-for proof of 
 affection, will carry the feeling to its supremest pitch. In 
 short, to express this truth by an image which has been pre- 
 eminently successful from the earliest ages of the world, there 
 are in a long chain points of attachment needed where the 
 cohesion is stronger than in the intermediate loops of rings. 
 This recognition between Eodolphe and Francesca, at this 
 party, in the face of the world, was one of those intense mo- 
 ments which join the future to the past, and rivet a real 
 attachment more deeply in the heart. It was perhaps of these 
 incidental rivets that Bossuet spoke when he compared to 
 them the rarity of happy moments in our lives he who had 
 such a living and secret experience of love. 
 
 Next to the pleasure of admiring the woman we love, comes 
 that of seeing her admired by every one else. Eodolphe was 
 enjoying both at once. Love is a treasury of memories, and 
 though Rodolphe's was already full, he added to it pearls of 
 great price; smiles shed aside for him alone, stolen glances,
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 325 
 
 tones in her singing which Francesca addressed to him alone, 
 but which made Tinti pale with jealousy, they were so much 
 applauded. All his strength of desire, the special expression 
 of his soul, was thrown over the beautiful Eoman, who became 
 unchangeably the beginning and the end of all his thoughts 
 and actions. Eodolphe loved as every woman may dream of be- 
 ing loved, with a force, a constancy, a tenacity, which made 
 Francesca the very substance of his heart ; he felt her mingling 
 with his blood as purer blood, with his soul as a more perfect 
 soul ; she would henceforth underlie the least efforts of his life 
 as the golden sand of the Mediterranean lies beneath the 
 waves. In short, Eodolphe's lightest aspiration was now a liv- 
 ing hope. 
 
 At the end of a few days, Francesca understood this bound- 
 less love; but it was so natural, and so perfectly shared by 
 her, that it did not surprise her. She was worthy of it. 
 
 "What is there that is strange?" said she to Kodolphe, as 
 they walked on the garden terrace, when he had been betrayed 
 into one of those outbursts of conceit which come so naturally 
 to Frenchmen in the expression of their feelings "what is 
 extraordinary in the fact of your loving a young and beautiful 
 woman, artist enough to be able to earn her living like Tinti, 
 and of giving you some of the pleasures of vanity ? What lout 
 but would then become an Amadis ? This is not in question 
 between you and me. What is needed is that we both love 
 faithfully, persistently; at a distance from each other for 
 years, with no satisfaction but that of knowing that we are 
 loved/' 
 
 "Alas !" said Eodolphe, "will you not consider my fidelity 
 as devoid of all merit when you see me absorbed in the efforts 
 of devouring ambitior ? Do you imagine that I can wish to 
 see you one day exchange the fine name of Gandolphini for 
 that of a man who is a nobody ? I want to become one of the 
 most remarkable men of my country, to be rich, great that 
 you may be as proud of my name as of your own name of 
 Colonna." 
 
 "I should be grieved to see you without such sentiments in 
 
 22
 
 326 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 your heart/' she replied, with a bewitching smile. "But do 
 not wear yourself out too soon in your ambitious labors. Ee- 
 main young. They say that politics soon make a man old." 
 
 One of the rarest gifts in women is a certain gaiety which 
 does not detract from tenderness. This combination of deep 
 feeling with the lightness of youth added an enchanting grace 
 at this moment to Francesca's charms. This is the key to her 
 character ; she laughs and she is touched ; she becomes enthusi- 
 astic, and returns to arch raillery with a readiness, a facility, 
 which makes her the charming and exquisite creature she is, 
 and for which her reputation is known outside Italy. Under 
 the graces of a woman she conceals vast learning, thanks to 
 the excessively monotonous and almost monastic life she led 
 in the castle of the old Colonnas. 
 
 This rich heiress was at first intended for the cloister, being 
 the fourth child of Prince and Princess Colonna; but the 
 death of her two brothers, and of her elder sister, suddenly 
 brought her out of her retirement, and made her one of the 
 most brilliant matches in the Papal States. Her elder sister 
 had been betrothed to Prince Gandolphini, one of the richest 
 landowners in Sicily ; and Francesca was married to him in- 
 stead, so that nothing might be changed in the position of the 
 family. The Colonnas and Gandolphinis had always inter- 
 married. 
 
 From the age of nine till she was sixteen, Francesca, under 
 the direction of a Cardinal of the family, had read all through 
 the library of the Colonnas, to make weight against her ardent 
 imagination by studying science, art, and letters. But in 
 these studies she acquired the taste for independence and lib- 
 eral ideas, which threw her, with her husband, into the ranks 
 of the revolution. Rodolphe had not yet learned that, besides 
 five living languages, Francesca knew Greek, Latin, and He- 
 brew. The charming creature perfectly understood that, for 
 a woman, the first condition of being learned is to keep it 
 deeply hidden. 
 
 Rodolphe spent the whole winter at Geneva. This winter 
 passed like a day. When spring returned, notwithstanding
 
 ALBERT SAVARTJS 327 
 
 the infinite delights of the society of a clever woman, wonder- 
 fully well informed, young and lovely, the lover went through 
 cruel sufferings, endured indeed with courage, but which were 
 sometimes legible in his countenance, and betrayed themselves 
 in his manners or speech, perhaps because he believed that 
 Francesca shared them. Now and again it annoyed him to 
 admire her calmness. Like an Englishwoman, she seemed 
 to pride herself on expressing nothing in her face ; its serenity 
 defied love; he longed to see her agitated; he accused her of 
 having no feeling, for he believed in the tradition which 
 ascribes to Italian women a feverish excitability. 
 
 "I am a Eoman I" Francesca gravely replied one day when 
 she took quite seriously some banter on this subject from 
 Rodolphe. 
 
 There was a depth of tone in her reply which gave it the 
 appearance of scathing irony, and which set Eodolphe's pulses 
 throbbing. The month of May spread before them the treas- 
 ures of her fresh verdure ; the sun was sometimes as powerful 
 as at midsummer. The two lovers happened to be at a part 
 of the terrace where the rock arises abruptly from the lake, 
 and were leaning over the stone parapet that crowns the wall 
 above a flight of steps leading down to a landing-stage. From 
 the neighboring villa, where there is a similar stairway, a boat 
 presently shot out like a swan, its flag flaming, its crimson 
 awning spread over a lovely woman comfortably reclining on 
 red cushions, her hair wreathed with real flowers; the boat- 
 man was a young man dressed like a sailor, and rowing with 
 all the more grace because he was under the lady's eye. 
 
 "They are happy!" exclaimed Eodolphe, with bitter em- 
 phasis. "Claire de Bourgogne, the last survivor of the only 
 
 house which could ever vie with the royal family of France 
 )> 
 
 "Oh ! of a bastard branch, and that a female line." 
 
 "At any rate, she is Vicomtesse de Beauseant; and she did 
 
 not " 
 
 "Did not hesitate, you would say, to bury herself here with 
 
 Monsieur Gaston de Nueil, you would say," replied the
 
 328 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 daughter of the Colonnas. "She is only a Frenchwoman; I 
 am an Italian, my dear sir !" 
 
 Francesca turned away from the parapet, leaving Ro- 
 dolphe, and went to the further end of the terrace, whence 
 there is a wide prospect of the lake. Watching her as she 
 slowly walked away, Rodolphe suspected that he had wounded 
 her soul, at once so simple and so wise, so proud and so hum- 
 ble. It turned him cold; he followed Francesca, who signed 
 to him to leave her to herself. But he did not heed the warn- 
 ing, and detected her wiping away her tears. Tears! in so 
 strong a nature. 
 
 "Francesca," said he, taking her hand, "is there a single 
 regret in your heart ?" 
 
 She was silent, disengaged her hand which held her em- 
 broidered handkerchief, and again dried her eyes. 
 
 "Forgive me !" he said. And with a rush, he kissed her eyes 
 to wipe away the tears. 
 
 Francesca did not seem aware of his passionate impulse, 
 she was so violently agitated. Rodolphe, thinking she con- 
 sented, grew bolder ; he put his arm round her, clasped her to 
 his heart, and snatched a kiss. But she freed herself by a 
 dignified movement of offended modesty, and, standing a yard 
 off, she looked at him without anger, but with firm determi- 
 nation. 
 
 "Go this evening," she said. "We meet no more till we meet 
 at Naples." 
 
 The order was stern, but it was obeyed, for it was Fran- 
 cesca's will. 
 
 On his return to Paris Rodolphe found in his rooms a por- 
 trait of Princess Gandolphini painted by Schinner, as Schin- 
 ner can paint. The artist had passed through Geneva on his 
 way to Italy. As he had positively refused to paint the 
 portraits of several women, Rodolphe did not believe that the 
 Prince, anxious as he was for a portrait of his wife, would be 
 able to conquer the great painter's objections ; but Francesca, 
 no doubt, had bewitched him, and obtained from him which
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 329 
 
 was almost a miracle an original portrait for Eodolphe, and 
 a duplicate for Emilio. She told him this in a charming 
 and delightful letter, in which the mind indemnified itself 
 for the reserve required by the worship of the proprieties. 
 The lover replied. Thus began, never to cease, a regular cor- 
 respondence between Eodolphe and Francesca, the only in- 
 dulgence they allowed themselves. 
 
 Kodolphe, possessed by an ambition sanctified by his love, 
 set to work. First he longed to make his fortune, and risked 
 his all in an undertaking to which he devoted all his faculties 
 as well as his capital ; but he, an inexperienced youth, had to 
 contend against duplicity, which won the day. Thus three years 
 were lost in a vast enterprise, three years of struggling and 
 courage. 
 
 The Villele ministry fell just when Eodolphe was ruined. 
 The valiant lover thought he would seek in politics what com- 
 mercial industry had refused him; but before braving the 
 storms of this career, he went, all wounded and sick at heart, 
 to have his bruises healed and his courage revived at Naples, 
 where the Prince and Princess had been reinstated in their 
 place and rights on the King's accession. This, in the midst 
 of his warfare, was a respite full of delights; he spent three 
 months at the Villa Gandolphini, rocked in hope. 
 
 Eodolphe then began again to construct his fortune. His 
 talents were already known ; he was about to attain the desires 
 of his ambition ; a high position was promised him as the re- 
 ward of his zeal, his devotion, and his past services, when the 
 storm of July 1830 broke, and again his bark was swamped. 
 
 She, and God ! These are the only witnesses of the brave 
 efforts, the daring attempts of a young man gifted with fine 
 qualities, but to whom, so far, the protection of luck the god 
 of fools has been denied. And this indefatigable wrestler, 
 upheld by love, comes back to fresh struggles, lighted on his 
 way by an always friendly eye, an ever faithful heart. 
 
 Lovers ! Pray for him !
 
 330 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 As she finished this narrative, Mademoiselle de Watteville's 
 cheeks were on fire; there was a fever in her blood. She was 
 crying but with rage. This little novel, inspired by the lit- 
 erary style then in fashion, was the first reading of the kind 
 that Rosalie had ever had the chance of devouring. Love was 
 depicted in it, if not by a master-hand, at any rate by a man 
 who seemed to give his own impressions; and truth, even if 
 unskilled, could not fail to touch a virgin soul. Here lay the 
 secret of Rosalie's terrible agitation, of her fever and her 
 tears; she was jealous of Francesca Colonna. 
 
 She never for an instant doubted the sincerity of this poetical 
 flight; Albert had taken pleasure in telling the story of his 
 passion, while changing the names of persons and perhaps of 
 places. Rosalie was possessed by infernal curiosity. What 
 woman but would, like her, have wanted to know her rival's 
 name for she too loved ! As she read these pages, to her 
 really contagious, she had said solemnly to herself, "I love 
 him!" She loved Albert, and felt in her heart a gnawing 
 desire to fight for him, to snatch him from this unknown rival. 
 She reflected that she knew nothing of music, and that she 
 was not beautiful. 
 
 "He will never love me !" thought she. 
 
 This conclusion aggravated her anxiety to know whether 
 she might not be mistaken, whether Albert really loved an 
 Italian Princess, and was loved by her. In the course of this 
 fateful night, the power of swift decision, which had charac- 
 terized the famous Watteville, was fully developed in his de- 
 scendant. She devised those whimsical schemes, round which 
 hovers the imagination of most young girls when, in the soli- 
 tude to which some injudicious mothers confine them, they 
 are aroused by some tremendous event which the system of 
 repression to which they are subjected could neither foresee 
 nor prevent. She dreamed of descending by a ladder from the 
 kiosk into the garden of the house occupied by Albert ; of tak- 
 ing advantage of the lawyer's being asleep to look through the 
 window into his private room. She thought of writing to him, 
 or of bursting the fetters of Besangon society by introducing
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 331 
 
 Albert to the drawing-room of the Hotel de Rupt. This en- 
 terprise, which to the Abbe de Grancey even would have 
 seemed the climax of the impossible, was a mere passing 
 thought. 
 
 "Ah !" said she to herself, "my father has a dispute pending 
 as to his land at les Rouxey. 1 will go there ! If there is no 
 lawsuit, I will manage to make one, and he shall come into 
 our drawing-room !" she cried, as she sprang out of bed and 
 to the window to look at the fascinating gleam which shone 
 through Albert's nights. The clock struck one; he was still 
 asleep. 
 
 "I shall see him when he gets up; perhaps he will come 
 to his window." 
 
 At this instant Mademoiselle de Watteville was witness to 
 an incident which promised to place in her power the means 
 of knowing Albert's secrets. By the light of the moon she 
 saw a pair of arms stretched out from the kiosk to help 
 Jerome, Albert's servant, to get across the coping of the wall 
 and step into the little building. In Jerome's accomplice 
 Rosalie at once recognized Mariette the lady's-maid. 
 
 "Mariette and Jerome !" said she to herself. "Mariette, 
 such an ugly girl ! Certainly they must be ashamed of them- 
 selves." 
 
 Though Mariette was horribly ugly and six-and-thirty, 
 she had inherited several plots of land. She had been seven- 
 teen years with Madame de Watteville, who valued her highly 
 for her bigotry, her honesty, and long service, and she had no 
 doubt saved money and invested her wages and perquisites. 
 Hence, earning about ten louis a year, she probably had by this 
 time, including compound interest and her little inheritance, 
 not less than ten thousand francs. 
 
 In Jerome's eyes ten thousand francs could alter the laws 
 of optics ; he saw in Mariette a neat figure ; he did not perceive 
 the pits and seams which virulent smallpox had left on her 
 flat, parched face; to him the crooked mouth was straight; 
 and ever since Savaron, by taking him into his service, had 
 brought him so near to the Wattevilles' house, he had laid
 
 332 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 siege systematically to the maid, who was as prim and sancti- 
 monious as her mistress, and who, like every ugly old maid, 
 was far more exacting than the handsomest. 
 
 If the night-scene in the kiosk is thus fully accounted for 
 to all perspicacious readers, it was not so to Rosalie, though 
 she derived from it the most dangerous lesson that can be 
 given, that of a bad example. A mother brings her daughter 
 up strictly, keeps her under her wing for seventeen years, and 
 then, in one hour, a servant girl destroys the long and painful 
 work, sometimes by a word, often indeed by a gesture ! Ro- 
 salie got into bed again, not without considering how she 
 might take advantage of her discovery. 
 
 Next morning, as she went to Mass accompanied by Mari- 
 ette her mother was not well Rosalie took the maid's arm, 
 which surprised the country wench not a little. 
 
 "Mariette," said she, "is Jerome in his master's con- 
 fidence ?" 
 
 "I do not know, mademoiselle." 
 
 "Do not play the innocent with me," said Mademoiselle de 
 Watteville drily. "You let him kiss you last night under the 
 kiosk ; I no longer wonder that you so warmly approved of my 
 mother's ideas for the improvements she planned." 
 
 Rosalie could feel how Mariette was trembling by the shak- 
 ing of her arm. 
 
 "I wish you no ill," Rosalie went on. "Be quite easy; I 
 shall not say a word to my mother, and you can meet Jerome 
 as often as you please." 
 
 "But, mademoiselle," said Mariette, "it is perfectly 
 respectable; Jerome honestly means to marry me " 
 
 "But then," said Rosalie, "why meet at night?" 
 
 Mariette was dumfounded, and could make no reply. 
 
 "Listen, Mariette; I am in love too! In secret and with- 
 out any return. I am, after all, my father's and mother's 
 only child. You have more to hope for from me than from 
 any one else in the world 
 
 "Certainly, mademoiselle, and you may count on us for 
 life or death," exclaimed Mariette, rejoiced at the unexpected 
 turn of affairs.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 333 
 
 "In the first place, silence for silence," said Eosalie. "I will 
 not marry Monsieur de Soulas ; but one thing I will have, and 
 must have; my help and favor are yours on one condition 
 only." 
 
 "What is that?" 
 
 "I must see the letters which Monsieur Savaron sends to the 
 post by Jerome." 
 
 "But what for ?" said Mariette in alarm. 
 
 "Oh ! merely to read them, and you yourself shall post them 
 afterwards. It will cause a little delay ; that is all." 
 
 At this moment they went into church, and each of them, 
 instead of reading the order of Mass, fell into her own train 
 of thought. 
 
 "Dear, dear, how many sins are there in all that ?" thought 
 Mariette. 
 
 Eosalie, whose soul, brain, and heart were completely upset 
 by reading the story, by this time regarded it as history, 
 written for her rival. By dint of thinking of nothing else, 
 like a child, she ended by believing that the Eastern Review 
 was no doubt forwarded to Albert's lady-love. 
 
 "Oh !" said she to herself, her head buried in her hands in 
 the attitude of a person lost in prayer; "oh! how can I get 
 my father to look through the list of people to whom the Re- 
 view is sent?" 
 
 After breakfast she took a turn in the garden with her 
 father, coaxing and cajoling him, and brought him to the 
 kiosk. 
 
 "Do you suppose, my dear little papa, that our Review is 
 ever read abroad ?" 
 
 "It is but just started " 
 
 "Well, I will wager that it is." 
 
 "It is hardly possible." 
 
 "Just go and find out, and note the names of any sub- 
 scribers out of France." 
 
 Two hours later Monsieur de Watteville said to his 
 daughter : 
 
 "I was right; there is not one foreign subscriber as yet.
 
 334 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 They hope to get some at Neuf chatel, at Berne, and at Geneva, 
 One copy, is in fact, sent to Italy, but it is not paid for to a 
 Milanese lady at her country house at Belgirate, on Lago 
 Maggiore. 
 
 "What is her name?" 
 
 "The Duchesse d'Argaiolo." 
 
 "Do you know her, papa ?" 
 
 "I have heard about her. She was by birth a Princess 
 Soderini, a Florentine, a very great lady, and quite as rich 
 as her husband, who has one of the largest fortunes in Lom- 
 bardy. Their villa on the Lago Maggiore is one of the sights 
 of Italy." 
 
 Two days after, Mariette placed the following letter in 
 Mademoiselle de Watteville's hand: 
 
 Albert Savaron to Leopold Hannequin. 
 
 "Yes, 'tis so, my dear friend ; I am at Besangon, while you 
 thought I was traveling. I would not tell you anything till 
 success should begin, and now it is dawning. Yes, my dear 
 Leopold, after so many abortive undertakings, over which I 
 have shed the best of my blood, have wasted so many efforts, 
 spent so much courage, I have made up my mind to do as 
 you have done to start on a beaten path, on the highroad, 
 as the longest but the safest. I can see you jump with sur- 
 prise in your lawyer's chair ! 
 
 "But do not suppose that anything is changed in my per- 
 sonal life, of which you alone in the world know the secret, 
 and that under the reservations she insists on. I did not 
 tell you, my friend; but I was horribly weary of Paris. The 
 outcome of the first enterprise, on which I had founded all 
 my hopes, and which came to a bad end in consequence of the 
 utter rascality of my two partners, who combined to cheat 
 and fleece me me, though everything was done by my energy 
 made me give up the pursuit of a fortune after the loss of 
 three years of my life. One of these years was spent in the 
 law courts, and perhaps I should have come worse out of the
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 335 
 
 scrape if I had not been made to study law when I was twenty. 
 
 "I made up my mind to go into politics solely, to the end 
 that I may some day find my name in a list for promotion to 
 the Senate under the title of Comte Albert Savaron de Sa- 
 varus, and so revive in France a good name now extinct in 
 Belgium though indeed I am neither legitimate nor legiti- 
 mized." 
 
 "Ah! I knew it! He is of noble birth!" exclaimed 
 Rosalie, dropping the letter. 
 
 "You know how conscientiously I studied, how faithful and 
 useful I was as an obscure journalist, and how excellent a 
 secretary to the statesman who, on his part, was true to me in 
 1829. Flung to the depths once more by the revolution of 
 July just when my name was becoming known, at the very 
 moment when, as Master of Appeals, I was about to find my 
 place as a necessary wheel in the political machine, I com- 
 mitted the blunder of remaining faithful to the fallen, and 
 fighting for them, without them. Oh ! why was I but three- 
 and-thirty, and why did I not apply to you to make me 
 eligible? I concealed from you all my devotedness and my 
 dangers. What would you have? I was full of faith. We 
 should not have agreed. 
 
 "Ten months ago, when you saw me so gay and contented, 
 writing my political articles, I was in despair; I foresaw 
 my fate, at the age of thirty-seven, with two thousand francs 
 for my whole fortune, without the smallest fame, just having 
 failed in a noble undertaking, the founding, namely, of a 
 daily paper answering only to a need of the future instead 
 of appealing to the passions of the moment. I did not know 
 which way to turn, and I felt my own value ! I wandered 
 about, gloomy and hurt, through the lonely places of Paris 
 Paris which had slipped through my fingers thinking of 
 my crushed ambitions, but never giving them up. Oh, what 
 frantic letters I wrote at that time to her, my second con- 
 science, my other self! Sometimes I would say to myself, 
 'Why did I sketch so vast a programme of life? Why de- 
 mand everything? Why not wait for happiness while devot- 
 ing myself to some mechanical employment.'
 
 336 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 "I then looked about me for some modest appointment by 
 which I might live. I was about to get the editorship of a 
 paper under a manager who did not know much about it, a 
 man of wealth and ambition, when I took fright. 'Would 
 she ever accept as her husband a man who had stooped so 
 low?' I wondered. 
 
 "This reflection made me two-and-twenty again. But, oh, 
 my dear Leopold, how the soul is worn by these perplexities ! 
 What must not caged eagles suffer, and imprisoned lions ! 
 They suffer what Napoleon suffered, not at Saint Helena, 
 but on the Quay of the Tuileries, on the 10th of August, when 
 he saw Louis XVI. defending himself so badly while he could 
 have quelled the insurrection ; as he actually did, on the same 
 spot, a little later, in Vendemiaire. Well, my life has been a 
 torment of that kind, extending over four years. How many 
 a speech to the Chamber have I not delivered in the deserted 
 alleys of the Bois de Boulogne! These wasted harangues 
 have at any rate sharpened my tongue and accustomed my 
 mind to formulate its ideas in words. And while I was un- 
 dergoing this secret torture, you were getting married, you 
 had paid for your business, you were made law-clerk to the 
 Maire of your district, after gaining the cross for a wound 
 at Saint-Merri. 
 
 "Now, listen. When I was a small boy and tortured cock- 
 chafers, the poor insects had one form of struggle which used 
 almost to put me in a fever. It was when I saw them making 
 repeated efforts to fly but without getting away, though they 
 could spread their wings. We used to say, 'They are mark- 
 ing time.' Now, was this sympathy ? Was it a vision of my 
 own future ? Oh ! to spread my wings and yet be unable to 
 fly ! That has been my predicament since that fine under- 
 taking by which I was disgusted, but which has now made four 
 families rich. 
 
 "At last, seven months ago, I determined to make myself 
 a name at the Paris Bar, seeing how many vacancies had been 
 left by the promotion of several lawyers to eminent positions. 
 But when I remembered the rivalry I had seen among men
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 337 
 
 of the press, and how difficult it is to achieve anything of 
 any kind in Paris, the arena where so many champions meet, 
 I came to a determination painful to myself, but certain in 
 its results, and perhaps quicker than any other. In the course 
 of our conversations you had given me a picture of the society 
 of Besangon, of the impossibility for a stranger to get on there, 
 to produce the smallest effect, to get into society, or to succeed 
 in any way whatever. It was there that I determined to set 
 up my flag, thinking, and rightly, that I should meet with 
 no opposition, but find myself alone to canvass for the election. 
 The people of the Comte will not meet the outsider? The 
 outsider will not meet them ! They refuse to admit him to 
 their drawing-rooms, he will never go there ! He never 
 shows himsalf anywhere, not even in the streets ! But there 
 is one class that elects the deputies the commercial class. I 
 am going especially to study commercial questions, with which 
 I am already familiar ; I will gain their lawsuits, I will effect 
 compromises, I will be the greatest pleader in Besangon. By 
 and by I will start a Review, in which I will defend the 
 interests of the country, will create them, or preserve them, or 
 resuscitate them. When I sliall have won a sufficient number 
 of votes, my name will come out of the urn. For a long time 
 the unknown barrister will be treated with contempt, but some 
 circumstance will arise to bring him to the front some un- 
 paid defence, or a case which no other pleader will under- 
 take. 
 
 "Well, my dear Leopold, I packed up my books in eleven 
 cases, I bought such law-books as might prove useful, and I 
 sent everything off, furniture and all, by carrier to Besangon. 
 I collected my diplomas, and I went to bid you good-bye. The 
 mail coach dropped me at Besangon, where, in three days' 
 time, I chose a little set of rooms looking out over some 
 gardens. I sumptuously arranged the .mysterious private 
 room where I spend my nights and days, and where the por- 
 trait of my divinity reigns of her to whom my life is dedi- 
 cate, who fills it wholly, who is the mainspring of my efforts, 
 the secret of my courage, the cause of my talents. Then, as
 
 338 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 soon as the furniture and books had come, I engaged an in- 
 telligent man-servant, and there I sat for five months like a 
 hibernating marmot. 
 
 "My name had, however, been entered on the list of lawyers 
 in the town. At last I was called one day to defend an un- 
 happy wretch at the Assizes, no doubt in order to hear me 
 speak for once ! One of the most influential merchants of 
 Besangon was on the jury ; he had a difficult task to fulfil ; I 
 did my utmost for the man, and my success was absolute and 
 complete. My client was innocent; I very dramatically se- 
 ! cured the arrest of the real criminals, who had come forward 
 as witnesses. In short, the Court and the public were united 
 in their admiration. I managed to save the examining magis- 
 trate's pride by pointing .out the impossibility of detecting 
 a plot so skilfully planned. 
 
 "Then I had to fight a case for my merchant, and won his 
 suit. The Cathedral Chapter next chose me to defend a 
 tremendous action against the town, which had been going 
 on for four years; I won that. Thus, after three trials, I 
 had become the most famous advocate of Franche-Comte. 
 
 "But I bury my life in the deepest mystery, and so hide my 
 aims. I have adopted habits which prevent my accepting 
 any invitations. I am only to be consulted between six and 
 eight in the morning ; I go to bed after my dinner, and work at 
 night. The Vicar-General, a man of parts, and very in- 
 fluential, who placed the Chapter's case in my hands after they 
 had lost it in the lower Court, of course professed their 
 gratitude. 'Monsieur,' said I, 'I will win your suit, but I 
 want no fee; I want more' (start of alarm on the Abbe's 
 part). 'You must know that I am a great loser by putting 
 myself forward in antagonism to the town. I came here 
 only to leave the place as deputy. I mean to engage only 
 in commercial cases, .because commercial men return the mem- 
 bers; they will distrust me if I defend "the priests" for to 
 them you are simply the priests. If I undertake your de- 
 fence, it is because I was, in 1828, private secretary to such 
 a Minister' (again a start of surprise on the part of my
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 389 
 
 Abbe), 'and Master of Appeals, under the name of Albert 
 de Savarus' (another start). 'I have remained faithful 
 to monarchical opinions; but, as you have not the majority 
 of votes in Besangon, I must gain votes among the citizens. 
 So the fee I ask of you is the votes you may be able secretly 
 to secure for me at the opportune moment. Let us each keep 
 our own counsel, and I will defend, for nothing, every case 
 to which a priest of this diocese may be a party. Not a 
 word about my previous life, and we will be true to each 
 other.' 
 
 "When he came to thank me afterwards, he gave me a note 
 for five hundred francs, and said in my ear, 'The votes are 
 a bargain all the same/ I have in the course of five inter- 
 views made a friend, I think, of this Vicar-General. 
 
 "Now I am overwhelmed with business, and I undertake 
 no cases but those brought me by merchants, saying that 
 commercial questions are my specialty. This line of conduct 
 attaches business men to me, and allows me to make friends 
 with influential persons. So all goes well. Within a few 
 months I shall have found a house to purchase in Besangon, 
 so as to secure a qualification. I count on your lending me 
 the necessary capital for this investment. If I should die, 
 if I should fail, the loss would be too small to be any con- 
 sideration between you and me. You will get the interest 
 out of the rental, and I shall take good care to look out for 
 something cheap, so that you may lose nothing by this mort- 
 gage, which is indispensable. 
 
 "Oh! my dear Leopold, no gambler with the last remains 
 of his fortune in his pocket, bent on staking it at the Cercle 
 des Strangers for the last time one night, when he must come 
 away rich or ruined, ever felt such a perpetual ringing in his 
 ears, such a nervous moisture on his palms, such a fevered 
 tumult in his brain, such inward qualms in his body as I go 
 through every day now that I am playing my last card in 
 the game of ambition. Alas! my dear and only friend, for 
 nearly ten years now have I been struggling. This battle 
 with men and things, in which I have unceasingly poured
 
 340 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 out my strength and energy, and so constantly worn the 
 springs of desire, has, so to speak, undermined my vitality. 
 With all the appearance of a strong man of good health, I 
 feel myself a wreck. Every day carries with it a shred of 
 my inmost life. At every fresh effort I feel that I should 
 never be able to begin again. I have no power, no vigor 
 left but for happiness ; and if it should never come to crown 
 my head with roses, the me that is really me would cease to 
 exist, I should be a ruined thing. I should wish for nothing 
 more in the world. I should want to cease from living. You 
 know that power and fame, the vast moral empire that I 
 crave, is but secondary ; it is to me only a means to happiness, 
 the pedestal for my idol. 
 
 "To reach the goal and die, like the runner of antiquity ! 
 To see fortune and death stand on the threshold hand in hand ! 
 To win the beloved woman just when love is extinct ! To 
 lose the faculty of enjoyment after earning the right to be 
 happy ! Of how many men has this been the fate ! 
 
 "But there surely is a moment when Tantalus rebels, 
 crosses his arms, and defies hell, throwing up his part of the 
 eternal dupe. That is what I shall come to if anything should 
 thwart my plan; if, after stooping to the dust of provincial 
 life, prowling like a starving tiger round these tradesmen, 
 these electors, to secure their votes; if, after wrangling in 
 these squalid cases, and giving them my time the time I 
 might have spent on Lago Maggiore, seeing the waters she 
 sees, basking in her gaze, hearing her voice if, after all, I 
 failed to scale the tribune and conquer the glory that should 
 surround the name that is to succeed to that of Argaiolo ! 
 Nay, more than this, Leopold; there are days when I feel a 
 heady languor; deep disgust surges up from the depths of 
 my soul, especially when, abandoned to long day-dreams, I 
 have lost myself in anticipation of the joys of blissful love ! 
 May it not be that our desire has only a certain modicum of 
 power, and that it perishes, perhaps, of a too lavish effusion 
 of its essence ? For, after all, at this present, my life is fair, 
 illuminated by faith, work, and love.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 341 
 
 "Farewell, my friend ; I send love to your children, and beg 
 you to remember me to your excellent wife. Yours, 
 
 "ALBERT." 
 
 Kosalie read this letter twice through, and its general pur- 
 port was stamped on her heart. She suddenly saw the whole 
 of Albert's previous existence, for her quick intelligence 
 threw light on all the details, and enabled her to take it all 
 in. By adding this information to the little novel published 
 in the Review, she now fully understood Albert. Of course, 
 she exaggerated the greatness, remarkable as it was, of this 
 lofty soul and potent will, and her love for Albert thence- 
 forth became a passion, its violence enhanced by all the 
 strength of her youth, the weariness of her solitude, and the 
 unspent energy of her character. Love is in a young girl the 
 effect of a natural law ; but when her craving for affection is 
 centered in an exceptional man, it is mingled with the en- 
 thusiasm which overflows in a youthful heart. Thus Made- 
 moiselle de Watteville had in a few days reached a morbid 
 and very dangerous stage of enamored infatuation. The 
 Baroness was much pleased with her daughter, who, being 
 under the spell of her absorbing thoughts, never resisted her 
 will, seemed to be devoted to feminine occupations, and 
 realized her mother's ideal of a docile daughter. 
 
 The lawyer was now engaged in Court two or three times a 
 week. Though he was overwhelmed with business, he found 
 time to attend the trials, call on the litigious merchants, and 
 conduct the Review; keeping up his personal mystery, from 
 the conviction that the more covert and hidden was his in- 
 fluence, the more real it would be. But he neglected no 
 means of success, reading up the list of electors of Besangon, 
 and finding out their interests, their characters, their various 
 friendships and antipathies. Did ever a Cardinal hoping 
 to be made Pope give himself more trouble ? 
 
 One evening- Mariette, on coming to dress Eosalie for an 
 evening party, handed to her, not without many groans over 
 this treachery, a letter of which the address made Made-
 
 342 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 moiselle de Watteville shiver and redden and turn pale again 
 as she read the address : 
 
 To Madame la Duchesse d'Argaiolo 
 
 (nee Princesse Soderini) 
 
 At Belgirate, 
 
 Lago Maggiore, Italy. 
 
 In her eyes this direction blazed as the words Mene, Tekel, 
 Upharsin, did in the eyes of Belshazzar. After concealing 
 the letter, Eosalie wen}; downstairs to accompany her mother 
 to Madame de Chavoncourt's ; and as long as the endless even- 
 ing lasted, she was tormented by remorse and scruples. She 
 had already felt shame at having violated the secrecy of 
 Albert's letter to Leopold; she had several times asked her- 
 self whether, if he knew of her crime, infamous inasmuch 
 as it necessarily goes unpunished, the high-minded Albert 
 could esteem her. Her conscience answered an uncompromis- 
 ing "No." 
 
 She had expiated her sin by self-imposed penances; she 
 fasted, she mortified herself by remaining on her knees, her 
 arms outstretched for hours, and repeating prayers all the 
 time. She had compelled Mariette to similar acts of re- 
 pentance; her passion was mingled with genuine asceticism, 
 and was all the more dangerous. 
 
 "Shall I read that letter, shall I not?" she asked herself, 
 while listening to the Chavoncourt girls. One was sixteen, 
 the other seventeen and a half. Eosalie looked upon her 
 two friends as mere children because they were not secretly 
 in love. "If I read it," she finally decided, after hesitating 
 for an hour between Yes and No, "it shall, at any rate, be the 
 last. Since I have gone so far as to see what he wrote to his 
 friend, why should I not know what he says to her? If it 
 is a horrible crime, is it not a proof of love? Oh, Albert! 
 am I not your wife ?" 
 
 When Rosalie was in bed she opened the letter, dated from 
 day to day, so as to give the Duchess a faithful picture of 
 Albert's life and feelings.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 343 
 
 "35th. 
 
 "My dear Soul, all is well. To my other conquests I have 
 just added an invaluable one: I have done a service to one 
 of the most influential men who work the elections. Like 
 the critics, who make other men's reputations but can never 
 make their own, he makes deputies though he never can be- 
 come one. The worthy man wanted to show his gratitude 
 without loosening his purse-strings by saying to me, 'Would 
 you care to sit in the Chamber? I can get you returned as 
 deputy/ 
 
 " 'If I ever made up my mind to enter on a political career/' 
 replied I hypocritically, 'it would be to devote myself to the 
 Comte, which I love, and where I am appreciated.' 
 
 " 'Well,' he said, 'we will persuade you, and through 
 you we shall have weight in the Chamber, for you will dis- 
 tinguish yourself there.' 
 
 "And so, my beloved angel, say what you will, my per- 
 severance will be rewarded. Ere long I shall, from the high 
 place of the French Tribune, come before my country, before 
 Europe. My name will be flung to you by the hundred voices 
 of the French press. 
 
 "Yes, as you tell me, I was old when I came to Besangon, 
 and Besano,on has aged me more ; but, like Sixtus V., I shall 
 be young again the day after my election. I shall enter on 
 my true life, my own sphere. Shall we not then stand in 
 the same line? Count Savaron de Savarus, Ambassador I 
 know not where, may surely marry a Princess Soderini, the 
 widow of the Due d'Argaiolo ! Triumph restores the youth 
 of men who have been preserved by incessant struggles. Oh, 
 my Life ! with what gladness did I fly from my library to my 
 private room, to tell your portrait of this progress before 
 writing to you ! Yes, the votes I can command, those of 
 the Vicar-General, of the persons I can oblige, and of this 
 client, make my election already sure. 
 
 "26th. 
 
 "We have entered on the twelfth year since that blest even- 
 ing when, by a look, the beautiful Duchess sealed the promises
 
 344 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 made by the exile Francesca. You, dear, are thirty-two, I 
 am thirty-five; the dear Duke is seventy-seven that is to 
 say, ten years more than yours and mine put together, and 
 he still keeps well ! My patience is almost as great as my 
 love, and indeed I need a few years yet to rise to the level of 
 your name. As you see, I am in good spirits to-day, I can 
 laugh ; that is the effect of hope. Sadness or gladness, it all 
 comes to me through you. The hope of success always carries 
 me back to the day following that on which I saw you for the 
 first time, when my life became one with yours as the earth 
 turns to the light. Qual pianto are these eleven years, for 
 this is the 26th of December, the anniversary of my arrival 
 at your villa on the Lake of Geneva. For eleven years have 
 I been crying to you, while you shine like a star set too high 
 for man to reach it. 
 
 "27th. 
 
 "No, dearest, do not go to Milan ; stay at Belgirate. Milan 
 terrifies me. I do not like that odious Milanese fashion of 
 chatting at the Scala every evening with a dozen persons, 
 among whom it is hard if no one says something sweet. To 
 me solitude is like the lump of amber in whose heart an insect 
 lives for ever in unchanging beauty. Thus the heart and soul 
 of a woman remain pure and unaltered in the form of their 
 first youth. Is it the Tedeschi that you regret? 
 
 "28th. 
 
 "Is your statue never to be finished ? I should wish to have 
 you in marble, in painting, in miniature, in every possible 
 form, to beguile my impatience. I still am waiting for the 
 view of Belgirate from the south, and that of the balcony; 
 these are all that I now lack. I am so extremely busy that 
 to-day I can only write you nothing but that nothing is 
 everything. Was it not of nothing that God made the world ? 
 That nothing is a word, God's word : I love you !
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 345 
 
 "80th. 
 
 "Ah! I have received your journal. Thanks for your 
 punctuality. So you found great pleasure in seeing all the 
 details of our first acquaintance thus set down ? Alas ! even 
 while disguising them I was sorely afraid of offending you. 
 We had no stories, and a Review without stories is a beauty 
 without hair. Not being inventive by nature, and in sheer 
 despair, I took the only poetry in my soul, the only adventure 
 in my memory, and pitched it in the key in which it would 
 bear telling ; nor did I ever cease to think of you while writing 
 the only literary production that will ever come from my 
 heart, I cannot say from my pen. Did not the transforma- 
 tion of your fierce Sormano into Gina make you laugh ? 
 
 "You ask after my health. Well, it is better than in Paris. 
 Though I work enormously, the peacefulness of the surround- 
 ings has its effect on the mind. What really tries and ages 
 me, dear angel, is the anguish of mortified vanity, the per- 
 petual friction of Paris life, the struggle of rival ambitions. 
 This peace is a balm. 
 
 "If you could imagine the pleasure your letter gives me ! 
 the long, kind letter in which you tell me the most trivial 
 incidents of your life. No ! you women can never know to 
 what a degree a true lover is interested in these trifles. It 
 was an immense pleasure to see the pattern of your new dress. 
 Can it be a matter of indifference to me to know what you 
 wear? If yotfr lofty brow is knit? If our writers amuse 
 you? If Canalis' songs delight you? I read the books you 
 read. Even to your boating on the lake every incident 
 touched me. Your letter is as lovely, as sweet as your soul ! 
 Oh ! flower of heaven, perpetually adored, could I have lived 
 without those dear letters, which for eleven years have upheld 
 me in my difficult path like a light, like a perfume, like a 
 steady chant, like some divine nourishment, like everything 
 which can soothe and comfort life. 
 
 "Do not fail me ! If you knew what anxiety I suffer the 
 day before they are due, or the pain a day's delay can give me ! 
 Is she ill? Is he? I am midway between hell and paradise.
 
 346 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 "0 mia cara diva, keep up your music, exercise your voice, 
 practise. I am enchanted with the coincidence of employ- 
 ments and hours by which, though separated by the Alps, we 
 live by precisely the same rule. The thought charms me and 
 gives me courage. The first time I undertook to plead here 
 *-I forget to tell you this I fancied that you were listening 
 to me, and I suddenly felt the flash of inspiration which lifts 
 the poet above mankind. If I am returned to the Chamber 
 oh ! you must come to Paris to be present at my first ap- 
 pearance there ! 
 
 "30th, Evening. 
 
 "Good heavens, how I love you ! Alas ! I have intrusted 
 too much to my love and my hopes. An accident which 
 should sink that overloaded bark would end my life. For three 
 years now I have not seen you, and at the thought of going 
 to Belgirate my heart beats so wildly that I am forced to stop. 
 To see you, to hear that girlish caressing voice ! To em- 
 brace in my gaze that ivory skin, glistening under the candle- 
 light, and through which I can read your noble mind! To 
 admire your fingers playing on the keys, to drink in your 
 whole soul in a look, in the tone of an Oime or an Alberto! 
 To walk by the blossoming orange-trees, to live a few months 
 in the bosom of that glorious scenery ! That is life. What 
 folly it is to run after power, a name, fortune ! But at Bel- 
 girate there is everything ; there is poetry, there is glory ! I 
 ought to have made myself your steward, or, as that dear 
 tyrant whom we cannot hate proposed to me, live there as 
 favaliere servente, only our passion was too fierce to allow of it. 
 
 "Farewell, my angel, forgive me my next fit of sadness in 
 consideration of this cheerful mood; it has come as a beam 
 of light from the torch of Hope, which has hitherto seemed 
 to me a Will-o'-the-wisp/' 
 
 "How he loves her!" cried Rosalie, dropping the letter, 
 which seemed heavy in her hand. "After eleven years to 
 write like this !"
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 347 
 
 "Mariette," said Mademoiselle de Watteville to her maid 
 next morning, "go and post this letter. Tell Jerome that I 
 know all I wish to know, and that he is to serve Monsieur 
 Albert faithfully. We will confess our sins, you and I, with- 
 out saying to whom the letters belonged, nor to whom they 
 were going. I was in the wrong ; I alone am guilty." 
 
 "Mademoiselle has been crying ?" said Mariette. 
 
 "Yes, but I do not want that my mother should perceive 
 it ; give me some very cold water." 
 
 In the midst of the storms of her passion Kosalie often 
 listened to the voice of conscience. Touched by the beautiful 
 fidelity of these two hearts, she had just said her prayers, 
 telling herself that there was nothing left to her but to be 
 resigned, and to respect the happiness of two beings worthy 
 of each other, submissive to fate, looking to God for every- 
 thing, without allowing themselves any criminal acts or 
 wishes. She felt a better woman, and had a certain sense of 
 satisfaction after coming to this resolution, inspired by the 
 natural rectitude of youth. And she was confirmed in it 
 by a girl's idea : She was sacrificing herself for him. 
 
 "She does not know how to love/' thought she. "Ah! if 
 it were I I would give up everything to a man who loved 
 me so. To be loved ! When, by whom shall I be loved ? 
 That little Monsieur de Soulas only loves my money; if I 
 were poor, he would not even look at me." 
 
 "Rosalie, my child, what are you thinking about? You 
 are working beyond the outline," said the Baroness to her 
 daughter, who was making worsted-work slippers for the 
 Baron. 
 
 Rosalie spent the winter of 1834-35 torn by secret tumults ; 
 but in the spring, in the month of April, when she reached 
 the age of nineteen, she sometimes thought that it would be 
 a fine thing to triumph over a Duchesse d'Argaiolo. In silence 
 and solitude the prospect of this struggle had fanned her 
 passion and her evil thoughts. She encouraged her romantic 
 daring by making plan after plan. Although such characters
 
 348 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 are an exception, there are, unfortunately, too many Rosalies 
 in the world, and this story contains a moral which ought 
 to serve them as a warning. 
 
 In the course of this winter Albert de Savarus had quietly 
 made considerable progress in Besangon. Confident of 
 success, he now impatiently awaited the dissolution of the 
 Chamber. Among the men of the moderate party he had won 
 the suffrages of one of the makers of Besangon, a rich con- 
 tractor, who had very wide influence. 
 
 Wherever they settled the Romans took immense pains, 
 and spent enormous sums to have an unlimited supply of good 
 water in every town of their empire. At Besangon they 
 drank the water from Arcier, a hill at some considerable 
 distance from Besangon. The town stands in a horseshoe 
 circumscribed by the river Doubs. Thus, to restore an aque- 
 duct in order to drink the same water that the Romans drank, 
 in a town watered by the Doubs, is one of those absurdities 
 which only succeed in a country place where the most exem- 
 plary gravity prevails. If this whim could be brought home 
 to the hearts of the citizens, it would lead to considerable out- 
 lay, and this expenditure would benefit the influential con- 
 tractor. 
 
 Albert Savaron de Savarus opined that the water of the 
 river was good for nothing but to flow under a suspension 
 bridge, and that the only drinkable water was that from Ar- 
 cier. Articles were printed in the Review which merely ex- 
 pressed the views of the commercial interest of Besangon. The 
 nobility and the citizens, the moderates and the legitimists, 
 the government party and the opposition, everybody, in short, 
 was agreed that they must drink the same water as the 
 Romans, and boast of a suspension bridge. The question of 
 the Arcier water was the order of the day at Besangon. At 
 Besangon as in the matter of the two railways to Versailles 
 as for every standing abuse there were private interests 
 unconfessed which gave vital force to this idea. The reason- 
 able folk in opposition to this scheme, who were indeed but few, 
 were regarded as old women. No one talked of anything but
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 349 
 
 of Savaron's two projects. And thus, after eighteen months 
 of underground labor, the ambitious lawyer had succeeded in 
 stirring to its depths the most stagnant town in France, the 
 most unyielding to foreign influence, in finding the length 
 of its foot, to use a vulgar phrase, and exerting a preponderant 
 influence without stirring from his own room. He had solved 
 the singular problem of how to be powerful without being 
 popular. 
 
 In the course of this winter he won seven lawsuits for 
 various priests of Besangon. At moments he could breathe 
 freely at the thought of his coming triumph. This intense 
 desire, which made him work so many interests and devise 
 so many springs, absorbed the last strength of his terribly 
 overstrung soul. His disinterestedness was lauded, and he 
 took his clients' fees without comment. But this disinterest- 
 edness was, in truth, moral usury; he counted on a reward 
 far greater to him than all the gold in the world. 
 
 In the month of October 1834 he had bought, ostensibly 
 to serve a merchant who was in difficulties, with money lent 
 him by Leopold Hannequin, a house which gave him a 
 qualification for election. He had not seemed to seek or de- 
 sire this advantageous bargain. 
 
 "You are really a remarkable man," said the Abbe de 
 Grancey, who, of course, had watched and understood the 
 lawyer. The Vicar-General had come to introduce to him 
 a Canon who needed his professional advice. "You are a 
 priest who has taken the wrong turning." This observation 
 struck Savarus. 
 
 Rosalie, on her part, had made up her mind, in her strong 
 girl's head, to get Monsieur de Savarus into the drawing-room 
 and acquainted with the society of the Hotel de Rupt. So 
 far she had limited her desires to seeing and hearing Albert. 
 She had compounded, so to speak, and a composition is often 
 no more than a truce. 
 
 Les Rouxe) r , the inherited estate of the Wattevilles, was 
 worth just ten thousand francs a year; but in other hands it 
 would have yielded a great deal more. The Baron in his in-
 
 350 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 difference for his wife was to have, and in fact had, forty 
 thousand francs a year left the management of les Eouxey 
 to a sort of factotum, an old servant of the Wattevilles named 
 Modinier. Nevertheless, whenever the Baron and his wife 
 wished to go out of the town, they went to les Eouxey, which 
 is very picturesquely situated. The chateau and the park 
 were, in fact, created by the famous Watteville, who in his 
 active old age was passionately attached to this magnificent 
 spot. 
 
 Between two precipitous hills little peaks with bare sum- 
 mits known as the great and the little Eouxey in the heart of 
 a ravine where the torrents from the heights, with the Dent de 
 Vilard at their head, come tumbling to join the lovely upper 
 waters of the Doubs, Watteville had a huge dam constructed, 
 leaving two cuttings for the overflow. Above this dam he 
 made a beautiful lake, and below it two cascades; and these, 
 uniting a few yards below the falls, formed a lovely little 
 river to irrigate the barren, uncultivated valley, hitherto 
 devastated by the torrent. This lake, this valley, and these 
 two hills he enclosed in a ring fence, and built himself a 
 retreat on the dam, which he widened to two acres by accumu- 
 lating above it all the soil which had to be removed to make 
 a channel for the river and the irrigation canals. 
 
 When the Baron de Watteville thus obtained the lake 
 above his dam he was owner of the two hills, but not of th<? 
 upper valley thus flooded, through which there had been at all 
 times a right-of-way to where it ends in a horseshoe under 
 the Dent de Vilard. But this ferocious old man was so 
 widely dreaded, that so long as he lived no claim was urged 
 by the inhabitants of Eiceys, the little village on the further 
 side of the Dent de Vilard. When the Baron died, he left 
 the slopes of the two Eouxey hills .-joined by a strong wall, to 
 protect from inundation the two lateral valleys opening into 
 the valley of Bonxey, to the right and left at the foot of the 
 Dent de Vilard. Thus he died the master of the Dent de 
 Vilard. 
 
 His heirs asserted their protectorate of the village of Eiceys,
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 351 
 
 and so maintained the usurpation. The old assassin, the old 
 renegade, the old Abbe Watteville, ended his career by plant- 
 ing trees and making a fine road over the shoulder of one of 
 the Eouxey hills to join the highroad. The estate belonging 
 to this park and house was extensive, but badly cultivated; 
 there were chalets on both hills and neglected forests of 
 timber. It was all wild and deserted, left to the care of 
 nature, abandoned to chance growths, but full of sublime and 
 unexpected beauty. You may now imagine les Rouxey. 
 
 It is unnecessary to complicate this story by relating all the 
 prodigious trouble and the inventiveness stamped with genius, 
 by which Rosalie achieved her end without allowing it to be 
 suspected. It is enough to say that it was in obedience to 
 her mother that she left Besangon in the month of May 1835, 
 in an antique traveling carriage drawn by a pair of sturdy 
 hired horses, and accompanied her father to les Rouxey. 
 
 To a young girl love lurks in everything. When she rose, 
 the morning after her arrival, Mademoiselle de Watteville 
 saw from her bedroom window the fine expanse of water, from 
 which the light mists rose like smoke, and were caught in the 
 firs and larches, rolling up and along the hills till they reached 
 the heights, and she gave a cry of admiration. 
 
 "They loved by the lakes ! She lives by a lake ! A lake is 
 certainly full of love !" she thought. 
 
 A lake fed by snows has opalescent colors and a trans- 
 lucency that makes it one huge diamond; but when it is 
 shut in like that of les Rouxey, between two granite masses 
 covered with pines, when silence broods over it like that of 
 the Savannas or the Steppes, then every one must exclaim 
 as Rosalie did. 
 
 "We owe that," said her father, "to the notorious Watte- 
 ville." 
 
 "On my word," said the girl, "he did his best to earn for- 
 giveness. Let us go in a boat to the further end ; it will give 
 us an appetite for breakfast." 
 
 The Baron called two gardener lads who knew how to row, 
 and took with him his prime minister Modinier. The lake
 
 352 ALBERT SAVAKUS 
 
 was about six acres in breadth, in some places ten or twelve, 
 and four hundred in length. Eosalie soon found herself at 
 the upper end shut in by the Dent de Vilard, the Jungfrau 
 of that little Switzerland. 
 
 "Here we are, Monsieur le Baron," said Modinier, signing 
 to the gardeners to tie up the boat ; "will you come and look ?" 
 
 "Look at what ?" asked Eosalie. 
 
 "Oh, nothing!" exclaimed the Baron. "But you are a 
 sensible girl ; we have some little secrets between us, and I may 
 tell you what ruffles my mind. Some difficulties have arisen 
 since 1830 between the village authorities of Eiceys and me, 
 on account of this very Dent de Vilard, and I want to settle 
 the matter without your mother's knowing anything about 
 it, for she is stubborn ; she is capable of flinging fire and 
 flames broadcast, particularly if she should hear that the 
 Mayor of Eiceys, a republican, got up this action as a sop to 
 his people." 
 
 Eosalie had presence of mind enough to disguise her de- 
 light, so as to work more effectually on her father. 
 
 "What action ?" said she. 
 
 "Mademoiselle, the people of Eiceys," said Modinier, "have 
 long enjoyed the right of grazing and cutting fodder on 
 their side of the Dent de Vilard. Now Monsieur Chantonnit, 
 the Maire since 1830, declares that the whole Dent belongs 
 to his district, and maintains that a hundred years ago, or 
 more, there was a way through our grounds. You under- 
 stand that in that case we should no longer have them to our- 
 selves. Then this barbarian would end by saying, what the 
 old men in the village say, that the ground occupied by the 
 lake was appropriated by the Abbe de Watteville. That would 
 be the end of les Eouxey ; what next ?" 
 
 "Indeed, my child, between ourselves, it is the truth," 
 said Monsieur de Watteville simply. "The land is an usurpa- 
 tion, with no title-deed but lapse of time. And, therefore, 
 to avoid all worry, I should wish to come. to a friendly un- 
 derstanding as to my border line on this side of the Dent 
 de Vilard, and I will then raise a wall."
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 353 
 
 "If you give way to the municipality, it will swallow you 
 up. You ought to have threatened Riceys." 
 
 "That is just what I told the master last evening," said 
 Modinier. "But in confirmation of that view I proposed that 
 he should come to see whether, on this side of the Dent or on 
 the other, there may not be, high or low, some traces of an 
 enclosure." 
 
 For a century the Dent de Vilard had been used by both 
 parties without coming to extremities; it stood as a sort of 
 party wall between the communes of Riceys and les Rouxey, 
 yielding little profit. Indeed, the object in dispute, being cov- 
 ered with snow for six months in the year, was of a nature to 
 cool their ardor. Thus it required all the hot blast by which 
 the revolution of 1830 inflamed the advocates of the people, 
 to stir up this matter, by which Monsieur Chantonnit, the 
 Maire of Riceys, hoped to give a dramatic turn to his career 
 on the peaceful frontier of Switzerland, and to immortalize 
 his term of office. Chantonnit, as his name shows, was a na- 
 tive of Neuchatel. 
 
 "My dear father," said Rosalie, as they got into the boat 
 again, "I agree with Modinier. If you wish to secure the joint 
 possession of the Dent de Vilard, you must act with decision, 
 and get a legal opinion which will protect you against this 
 enterprising Chantonnit. Why should you be afraid? Get 
 the famous lawyer Savaron engage him at once, lest Chan- 
 tonnit should place the interests of the village in his hands. 
 The man who won the case for the Chapter against the town 
 can certainly win that of Watteville versus Riceys ! Besides," 
 she added, "les Rouxey will some day be mine not for a long 
 time yet, I trust. Well, then, do not leave me with a lawsuit 
 on my hands. I like this place; I shall often live here, and 
 add to it as much as possible. On those banks," and she 
 pointed to the feet of the two hills, "I shall cut flower-beds 
 and make the loveliest English gardens. Let us go to Be- 
 sangon and bring back with us the Abbe de Grancey, Monsieur 
 Savaron, and my mother, if she cares to come. You can then 
 make up your mind; but in your place I should have done
 
 354 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 so already. Your name is Watteville, and you are afraid of a 
 fight ! If you should .lose your case well, I will never re- 
 proach you by a word I" 
 
 "Oh, if that is the way you take it," said the Baron, "I am 
 quite ready; I will see the lawyer." 
 
 "Besides, a lawsuit is really great fun. It brings some in- 
 terest into life, with coming and going and raging over it. 
 You will have a great deal to do before you can get hold of the 
 judges. We did not see the Abbe de Grancey for three weeks, 
 he was so busy !" 
 
 "But the very existence of the Chapter was involved," said 
 Monsieur de Watteville; "and then the Archbishop's pride, 
 his conscience, everything that makes up the life of the priest- 
 hood, was at stake. That Savaron does not know what he did 
 for the Chapter ! He saved it !" 
 
 "Listen to me," said his daughter in his ear, "if you secure 
 Monsieur de Savaron, you will gain your suit, won't you? 
 Well, then, let me advise you. You cannot get at Monsieur 
 Savaron excepting through Monsieur de Grancey. Take my 
 word for it, and let us together talk to the dear Abbe without 
 my mother's presence at the interview, for I know a way of 
 persuading him to bring the lawyer to us." 
 
 "It will be very difficult to avoid mentioning it to your 
 mother !" 
 
 "The Abbe de Grancey will settle that afterwards. But 
 just make up your mind to promise your vote to Monsieur 
 Savaron at the next election, and you will see!" 
 
 "Go to the election! take the oath?" cried the Baron de 
 Watteville. 
 
 "What then!" said -she. 
 
 "And what will your mother say ?" 
 
 "She may even desire you to do it," replied Rosalie, know- 
 ing as she did from Albert's letter to Leopold how deeply the 
 Vicar-General had pledged himself. 
 
 Four days after, the Abbe de Grancey called very early one 
 morning on Albert de Savarus, having announced his visit the 
 day before. The old priest had come to win over the great
 
 ALBERT SAVARTJS 355 
 
 lawyer to the house of the Wattevilles, a proceeding which 
 shows how much tact and subtlety Eosalie must have employed 
 in an underhand way. 
 
 "What can I do for you, Monsieur le Vicaire-General ?" 
 asked Savarus. 
 
 The Abbe, who told his story with admirable frankness, was 
 coldly heard by Albert. 
 
 "Monsieur FAbbe," said he, "it is out of the question that 
 I should defend the interests of the Wattevilles, and you 
 shall understand why. My part in this town is to remain per- 
 fectly neutral. I will display no colors; I must remain a 
 mystery till the eve of my election. Now, to plead for the 
 Wattevilles would mean nothing in Paris, but here ! Here, 
 where everything is discussed, I should be supposed by every 
 one to be an ally of your Faubourg Saint-Germain." 
 
 "What ! do you suppose that you can remain unknown on 
 the day of the election, when the candidates must oppose each 
 other ? It must then become known that your name is Savaron 
 de Savarus, that you have held the appointment of Master of 
 Appeals, that you are a man of the Restoration !" 
 
 "On the day of the election/' said Savarus, "I will be all 
 I am expected to be ; and I intend to speak at the preliminary 
 meetings." 
 
 "If you have the support of Monsieur de Watteville and his 
 party, you will get a hundred votes in a mass, and far more 
 to be trusted than those on which you rely. It is always pos- 
 sible to produce division of interests; convictions are insep- 
 arable." 
 
 "The deuce is in it !" said Savarus. "I am attached to you, 
 and I could do a great deal for you, Father ! Perhaps we may 
 compound with the Devil. Whatever Monsieur de Watteville's 
 business may be, by engaging Girardet, and prompting him, 
 it will be possible to drag the proceedings out till the elections 
 are over. I will not undertake to plead till the day after I am 
 returned." 
 
 "Do this one thing," said the Abbe. "Come to the Hotel 
 de Rupt : there is a young person of nineteen there who, one of
 
 356 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 these days, will have a hundred thousand francs a year, and 
 you can seem to be paying your court to her " 
 
 "Ah ! the youno- lady I sometimes see in the kiosk ?" 
 
 "Yes, Mademoiselle Rosalie," replied the Abbe de Grancey. 
 "You are ambitious. If she takes a fancy to you, you may 
 be everything an ambitious man can wish who knows? A 
 Minister perhaps. A man can always be a Minister who adds 
 a hundred thousand francs a year to your amazing talents." 
 
 "Monsieur 1'Abbe, if Mademoiselle de Watteville had three 
 times her fortune, and adored me into the bargain, it would 
 be impossible that I should marry her 
 
 "You are married?" exclaimed the Abbe. 
 
 "Not in church nor before the Maire, but morally speak- 
 ing," said Savarus. 
 
 "That is even worse when a man cares about it as you seem 
 to care," replied the Abbe. "Everything that is not done, 
 can be undone. Do not stake your fortune and your prospects 
 on a woman's liking, any more than a wise man counts on a 
 dead man's shoes before starting on bis way." 
 
 "Let us say no more about Mademoiselle de Watteville," 
 said Albert gravely, "and agree as to the facts. At your de- 
 sire for I have a regard and respect for you I will appear 
 for Monsieur de Watteville, but after the elections. Until 
 then Girardet must conduct the case under my instructions. 
 That is the most I can do." 
 
 "But there are questions involved which can only be settled 
 after inspection of the localities," said the Vicar-General. 
 
 "Girardet can go," said Savarus. "I cannot allow myself, 
 in the face of a town I know so well, to take any step which 
 might compromise the supreme interests that lie beyond my 
 election." 
 
 The Abbe left Savarus after giving him a keen look, in 
 which he seemed to be laughing at the young athlete's uncom- 
 promising politics, while admiring bis firmness. 
 
 "Ah ! I would have dragged my father into a lawsuit I 
 would have done anything to get him here !" cried Rosalie 
 to herself, standing in the kiosk and looking at the lawyer in
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 357 
 
 his room, the day after Albert's interview with the Abbe, who 
 had reported the result to her father. "I would have com- 
 mitted any mortal sin, and you will not enter the Wattevilles' 
 drawing-room ; I may not hear your fine voice ! You make 
 conditions when your help is required by the Wattevilles and 
 the Eupts ! Well, God knows, I meant to be content with 
 these small joys; with seeing you, hearing you speak, going 
 with you to les Eouxey, that your presence might to me make 
 the place sacred. That was all I asked. But now now I 
 mean to be your wife. Yes, yes ; look at her portrait, at her 
 drawing-room, her bedroom, at the four sides of her villa, 
 the points of view from her gardens. You expect her statue ? 
 I will make her marble herself towards you ! After all, the 
 woman does not love. Art, science, books, singing, music, 
 have absorbed half her senses and her intelligence. She is 
 old, too ; she is past thirty ; my Albert will not be happy I" 
 
 "What is the matter that you stay here, Eosalie?" asked 
 her mother, interrupting her reflections. "Monsieur de 
 Soulas is in the drawing-room, and he observed your attitude, 
 which certainly betrays more thoughtfulness than is due at 
 your age." 
 
 "Then, is Monsieur de Soulas a foe to thought?" asked 
 Eosalie. 
 
 "Then you were thinking ?" said Madame de Watteville. 
 
 "Why, yes, mamma." 
 
 "Why, no ! you were not thinking. You were staring at 
 that lawyer's window with an attention that is neither becom- 
 ing nor decent, and which Monsieur de Soulas, of all men, 
 ought never to have observed." 
 
 "Why?" said Eosalie. 
 
 "It is time," said the Baroness, "that you should know what 
 our intentions are. Amedee likes you, and you will not be 
 unhappy as Comtesse de Soulas." 
 
 Eosalie, as white as a lily, made no reply, so completely 
 
 was she stupefied by contending feelings. And yet, in the 
 
 presence of the man she had this instant begun to hate 
 
 vehemently, she forced the kind of smile which a ballet-dancer 
 
 -24
 
 358 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 puts on for the public. Nay, she could even laugh; she had 
 the strength to conceal her rage, which presently subsided, 
 for she was determined to make use of this fat simpleton to 
 further her designs. 
 
 "Monsieur Amedee," said she, at a moment when her 
 mother was walking ahead of them in the garden, affecting to 
 leave the young people together, "were you not aware that 
 Monsieur Albert Savaron de Savarus is a Legitimist ?" 
 
 "A Legitimist?" 
 
 "Until 1830 he was Master of Appeals to the Council of 
 State, attached to the supreme Ministerial Council, and in fa- 
 vor with the Dauphin and Dauphiness. It would be very good 
 of you to say nothing against him, but it would be better still 
 if you would attend the election this year, carry the day, and 
 hinder that poor Monsieur de Chavoncourt from representing 
 the town of Besangon." 
 
 "What sudden interest have you in this Savaron ?" 
 
 "Monsieur Albert Savaron de Savarus, the natural son of 
 the Comte de Savarus pray keep the secret of my indiscre- 
 tion if he is returned deputy, will be our advocate in the 
 suit about les Rouxey. Les Eouxey, my father tells me, will 
 be my property ; T intend to live there, it is a lovely place ! 
 I should be broken-hearted at seeing that fine piece of the 
 great de Watteville's work destroyed." 
 
 "The devil !" thought Amedee, as he left the house. "The 
 heiress is not such a fool as her mother thinks her." 
 
 Monsieur de Chavoncourt is a Royalist, of the famous 221. 
 Hence, from the day after the revolution of July, he always 
 preached the salutary doctrine of taking the oaths and re- 
 sisting the present order of things, after the pattern of the 
 Tories against the Whigs in England. This doctrine was 
 not acceptable to the Legitimists, who, in their defeat, had the 
 wit to divide in their opinions, and to trust to the force of 
 inertia and to Providence. Monsieur de Chavoncourt was not 
 wholly trusted by his own party, but seemed to the Moderates 
 the best man to choose ; they preferred the triumph of his half- 
 hearted opinions to the acclamation of a Republican who
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 359 
 
 should combine the votes of the enthusiasts and the patriots. 
 Monsieur de Chavoncourt, highly respected in Besangon, 
 was the representative of an old parliamentary family; his for- 
 tune, of about fifteen thousand francs a year, was not an 
 offence to anybody, especially as he had a son and three daugh- 
 ters. With such a family, ?fteen thousand francs a year are 
 a mere nothing. Now when, iinder these circumstances, the 
 father of the family is above bribery, it would be hard if the 
 electors did not esteem him. Electors wax enthusiastic over 
 a beau ideal of parliamentary virtue, just as the audience 
 in the pit do at the representation of the generous sentiments 
 they so little practise. 
 
 Madame de Chavoncourt, at this time a woman of forty, 
 was one of the beauties of Besangon. While the Chamber 
 was sitting, she lived meagrely in one of their country places 
 to recoup herself by economy for Monsieur de Chavoncourt's 
 expenses in Paris. In the winter she received very creditably 
 once a week, on Tuesdays, understanding her business as 
 mistress of the hou'se. Young Chavoncourt, a youth of two- 
 and-twenty, and another young gentlemen, named Monsieur 
 de Vauchelles, no richer than Amedee and his school-friend, 
 were his intimate allies. They made excursions together to 
 Granvelle, and sometimes went out shooting; they were so 
 well known to be inseparable that they were invited to the 
 country together. 
 
 Rosalie, who was intimate with the Chavoncourt girls, knew 
 that the three young men had no secrets from each other. 
 She reflected that if Monsieur de Soulas should repeat her 
 words, it would be to his two companions. Now, Monsieur 
 de Vauchelles had his matrimonial plans, as Amedee had his ; 
 he wished to marry Victoire, the eldest of the Chavoncourts, 
 on whom an old aunt was to settle an estate worth seven thou- 
 sand francs a year, and a hundred thousand francs in hard 
 cash, when the contract should be signed. Victoire was this 
 aunt's god-daughter and favorite niece. Consequently, young 
 Chavoncourt and his friend Vauchelles would be sure to warn 
 Monsieur de Chavoncourt of the danger he was in from Al- 
 bert's candidature.
 
 380 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 But this did not satisfy Eosalie. She sent the Prefet of the 
 department a letter written with her left hand, signed "A 
 friend to Louis Philippe" in which she informed him of the 
 secret intentions of Monsieur Albert de Savarus, pointing 
 out the serious support a Eoyalist orator might give to 
 Berryer, and revealing to him the deeply artful course pur- 
 sued by the lawyer during his two years' residence at Besan- 
 gon. The Prefet was a capable man, a personal enemy of the 
 Eoyalist party, devoted by conviction to the Government of 
 July in short, one of those men of whom, in the Eue de 
 Grenelle, the Minister of the Interior could say, "We have a 
 capital Prefet at Besangon." The Prefet read the letter, and, 
 in obedience to its instructions, he burnt it. 
 
 Eosalie aimed at preventing Albert's election, so as to 
 keep him five years longer at Besangon. 
 
 At that time an election was a fight between parties, 
 and in order to win, the Ministry chose its ground by choosing 
 the moment when it would give battle. The elections were 
 therefore not to take place for three months yet. When a 
 man's whole life depends on an election, the period that 
 elapses between the issuing of the writs for convening the 
 electoral bodies, and the day fixed for their meetings, is an 
 interval during which ordinary vitality is suspended. Eosalie 
 fully understood how much latitude Albert's absorbed state 
 would leave her during these three months. By promising 
 Mariette as she afterwards confessed to take both her and 
 Jerome into her service, she induced the maid to bring her all 
 the letters Albert might send to Italy, and those addressed to 
 him from that country. And all the time she was pondering 
 these machinations, the extraordinary girl was working slip- 
 pers for her father with the most innocent air in the world. 
 She even made a greater display than ever of candor and sim- 
 plicity, quite understanding how valuable that candor and 
 innocence would be to her ends. 
 
 "My daughter grows quite charming !" said Madame de 
 Watteville. 
 
 Two months before the election a meeting was held at the
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 361 
 
 house of Monsieur Boucher senior, composed of the contractor 
 who expected to get the work for the aqueduct for the Arcier 
 waters; of Monsieur Boucher's father-in-law; of Monsieur 
 Granet, the influential man to whom Savarus had done a 
 service, and who was to nominate him as a candidate; of 
 Girardet the lawyer; of the printer of the Eastern Review; 
 and of the President of the Chamber of Commerce. In fact, 
 the assembly consisted of twenty-seven persons in all, men 
 who in the provinces are regarded as bigwigs. Each man 
 represented on an average six votes, but in estimating their 
 value they said ten, for men always begin by exaggerating 
 their own influence. Among these twenty-seven was one who 
 was wholly devoted to the Prefet, one false brother who 
 secretly looked for some favor from the Ministry, either for 
 himself or for some one belonging to him. 
 
 At this preliminary meeting, it was agreed that Savaron 
 the lawyer should be named as candidate, a motion received 
 with such enthusiasm as no one looked for from Besangon. 
 Albert, waiting at home for Alfred Boucher to fetch him, 
 was chatting with the Abbe de Grancey, who was interested 
 in this absorbing ambition. Albert had appreciated the 
 priest's vast political capacities; and the priest, touched 
 by the young man's entreaties, had been willing to become 
 his guide and adviser in this culminating struggle. The 
 Chapter did not love Monsieur de Chavoncourt, for it was his 
 wife's brother-in-law, as President of the Tribunal, who had 
 lost the famous suit for them in the lower Court. 
 
 "You are betrayed, my dear fellow," said the shrewd and 
 worthy Abbe, in that gentle, calm voice which old priests 
 acquire. 
 
 "Betrayed !" cried the lover, struck to the heart. 
 
 "By whom I know not at all," the priest replied. "But 
 at the Prefecture your plans are known, and your hand read 
 like a book. At this moment I have no advice to give you. 
 Such affairs need consideration. As for this evening, take 
 the bull by the horns, anticipate the blow. Tell them all
 
 362 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 your previous life, and thus you will mitigate the effect of the 
 discovery on the good folks of Besangon." 
 
 "Oh, I was prepared for it," said Albert in a broken voice. 
 
 "You would not benefit by my advice; you had the oppor- 
 tunity of making an impression at the Hotel de Eupt; you 
 do not know the advantage you would have gained " 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "The unanimous support of the Royalists, an immediate 
 readiness to go to the election in short, above a hundred 
 votes. Adding to these what, among ourselves, we call the 
 ecclesiastical vote, though you were not yet nominated, you 
 were master of the votes by ballot. Under such circumstances, 
 a man may temporize, may make his way 
 
 Alfred Boucher when he came in, full of enthusiasm, to an- 
 nounce the decision of the preliminary meeting, found the 
 Vicar-General and the lawyer cold, calm, and grave. 
 
 "Good-night, Monsieur 1'Abbe/' said Albert. "We will 
 talk of your business at greater length when the elections are 
 over." 
 
 And he took Alfred's arm, after .pressing Monsieur de 
 Grancey's hand with meaning. The priest looked at the am- 
 bitious man, whose face at that moment wore the lofty ex- 
 pression which a general may have when he hears the first 
 gun fired for a battle. He raised his eyes to heaven, and left 
 the room, saying to himself, "What a priest he would make !" 
 
 Eloquence is not at the Bar. The pleader rarely puts forth 
 the real powers of his soul ; if he did, he would die of it in a 
 few years. Eloquence is, nowadays, rarely in the pulpit ; but 
 it is found on certain occasions in the Chamber of Deputies, 
 when an ambitious man stakes all to win all, or, stung by a 
 myriad darts, at a given moment bursts into speech. But 
 it is still more certainly found in some privileged beings, at 
 the inevitable hour when their claims must either triumph 
 or be wrecked, and when they are forced to speak. Thus at 
 this meeting, Albert Savarus, feeling the necessity of winning 
 himself some supporters, displayed all the faculties of his 
 soul and the resources of his intellect. He entered the room
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 363 
 
 well, without awkwardness or arrogance, without weakness, 
 without cowardice, quite gravely, and was not dismayed at 
 finding himself among twenty or thirty men. The news of 
 the meeting and of its determination had already brought 
 a few docile sheep to follow the bell. 
 
 Before listening to Monsieur Boucher, who was about to 
 deluge him with a speech announcing the decision of the 
 Boucher Committee, Albert begged for silence, and, as he 
 shook hands with Monsieur Boucher, tried to warn him, by 
 a sign, of an unexpected danger. 
 
 "My young friend, Alfred Boucher, has just announced to 
 me the honor you have done me. But before that decision 
 is irrevocable," said the lawyer, "I think that I ought to ex- 
 plain to you who and what your candidate is, so as to leave 
 you free to take back your word if my declaration should 
 disturb your conscience !" 
 
 This exordium was followed by profound silence. Some 
 of the men thought it showed a noble impulse. 
 
 Albert gave a sketch of his previous career, telling them his 
 real name, his action under the Restoration, and revealing 
 himself as a new man since his arrival at Besangon, while 
 pledging himself for the future. This address held his hearers 
 breathless, it was said. These men, all with different interests, 
 were spellbound by the brilliant eloquence that flowed at boil- 
 ing heat from the heart and soul of this ambitious spirit. 
 Admiration silenced reflection. Only one thing was clear 
 the thing which Albert wished to get into their heads ; 
 
 Was it not far better for the town to have one of those men 
 who are born to govern society at large than a mere voting-ma- 
 chine? A statesman carries power with him. A common- 
 place deputy, however incorruptible, is but a conscience. What 
 a glory for Provence to have found a Mirabeau, to return 
 the only statesman since 1830 that the revolution of July had 
 produced ! 
 
 Under the pressure of this eloquence, all the audience be- 
 lieved it great enough to become a splendid political instru- 
 ment in the hands of their representative. They all saw in
 
 84 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 Albert Savaron, Savarus the great Minister. And, reading 
 the secret calculations of his constituents, the clever candidate 
 gave them to understand that they would be the first to enjoy 
 the right of profiting by his influence. 
 
 This confession of faith, this ambitious programme, this 
 retrospect of his life and character was, according to the only 
 man present who was capable of judging of Savarus (he has 
 since become one of the leading men of Besanc,on), a master- 
 piece of skill and of feeling, of fervor, interest, and fascmat ion. 
 This whirlwind carried away the electors. Never had any 
 man had such a triumph. But, unfortunately, speech, a 
 weapon only for close warfare, has only an immediate effect. 
 Eeflection kills the word when the word ceases to overpower 
 reflection. If the votes had then been taken, Albert's name 
 would undoubtedly have come out of the ballot-box. At the 
 moment, he was conqueror. But he must conquer every day 
 for two months. 
 
 Albert went home quivering. The townsfolk had applaud- 
 ed him, and he had achieved the great point of silencing be- 
 forehand the malignant talk to which his early career might 
 give rise. The commercial interest of Besangon had nomi- 
 nated the lawyer, Albert Savaron de Savarus, as its candidate. 
 
 Alfred Boucher's enthusiasm, at first infectious, presently 
 became blundering. 
 
 The Prefet, alarmed by this success, set to work to count 
 the Ministerial votes, and contrived to have a secret inter- 
 view with Monsieur de Chavoncourt, so as to effect a coalition 
 in their common interests. Every day, without Albert's be- 
 ing able to discover how, the voters in the Boucher committee 
 diminished in number. 
 
 Nothing could resist the slow grinding of the Prefecture. 
 Three of four clever men would say to Albert's clients, "Will 
 the deputy defend you and win your lawsuits ? Will he give 
 you advice, draw up your contracts, arrange your compro- 
 mises ? He will be your slave for five years 1 anger, if, instead 
 of returning him to the Chamber, you only hold out the hope 
 of his going there five years hence."
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 365 
 
 This calculation did Savarus all the more mischief, because 
 the wives of some of the merchants had already made it. The 
 parties interested in the matter of the bridge and that of the 
 water from Arcier could not hold out against a talking-to 
 from a clever Ministerialist, who proved to them that their 
 safety lay at the Prefecture, and not in the hands of an am- 
 bitious man. Each day was a check for Savarus, though each 
 day the battle was led by him and fought by his lieutenants 
 a battle of words, speeches, and proceedings. He dared not 
 go to the Vicar-General, and the Vicar-General never showed 
 himself. Albert rose and went to bed in a fever, his brain on 
 fire. 
 
 At last the day dawned of the first struggle, practically 
 the show of hands ; the votes are counted, the candidates esti- 
 mate their chances, and clever men can prophesy their failure 
 or success. It is a decent hustings, without the mob, but for- 
 midable; agitation, though it is not allowed any physical 
 display, as it is in England, is not the less profound. The 
 English fight these battles with their fists, the French with 
 hard words. Our neighbors have a scrimmage, the French 
 try their fate by cold combinations calmly worked out. This 
 particular political business is carried out in opposition to the 
 character of the two nations. 
 
 The Radical party named their candidate; Monsieur de 
 Chavoncourt came forward; then Albert appeared, and was 
 accused by the Chavoncourt committee and the Radicals of 
 being an uncompromising man of the Right, a second Berryer. 
 The Ministry had their candidate, a stalking-horse, useful 
 only to receive the purely Ministerial votes. The votes, thus 
 divided, gave no result. The Republican candidate had 
 twenty, the Ministry got fifty, Albert had seventy, Monsieur 
 de Chavoncourt obtained sixty-seven. But the Prefet's party 
 had perfidiously made thirty of its most devoted adherents 
 vote for Albert, so as to deceive the enemy. The votes for 
 Monsieur de Chavoncourt., added to the eighty votes the 
 real number at the disposal of the Prefecture, would carry 
 the election, if only the Prefet could succeed in gaining over
 
 S66 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 a few of the Radicals. A hundred and sixty votes were not re- 
 corded: those of Monsieur de Grancey's following and the 
 Legitimists. 
 
 The show of hands at an election, like a dress rehearsal at 
 a theatre, is the most deceptive thing in the world. Albert 
 Savarus came home, putting a brave face on the matter, but 
 half dead. He had had the wit, the genius, or the good luck 
 to gain, within the last fortnight, two staunch supporters 
 Girardet's father-in-law and a very shrewd old merchant to 
 whom Monsieur de Grancey had sent him. These two worthy 
 men, his self-appointed spies, affected to be Albert's most 
 ardent opponents in the hostile camp. Towards the end of 
 the show of hands they informed Savarus, through the me- 
 dium of Monsieur Boucher, that thirty voters, unknown, were 
 working against him in his party, playing the same trick that 
 they were playing for his benefit on the other side. 
 
 A criminal marching to execution could not suffer as Al- 
 bert suffered as he went home from the hall where his fate was 
 at stake. The despairing lover could endure no compan- 
 ionship. He walked through the streets alone, between 
 eleven o'clock and midnight. At one in the morning, Albert, 
 to whom sleep had been unknown for the past three days, was 
 sitting in his library in a deep armchair, his face as pale as if 
 he were dying, his hands hanging limp, in a forlorn attitude 
 worthy of the Magdalen. Tears hung on his long lashes, 
 tears that dim the eyes, but do not fall ; fierce thought drinks 
 them up, the fire of the soul consumes them. Alone, he might 
 weep. And then, under the kiosk, he saw a white figure, 
 which reminded him of Francesca. 
 
 "And for three months I have had no letter from her! 
 What has become of her ? I have not written for two months, 
 but I warned her. Is she ill ? Oh my love ! My life ! Will 
 you ever know what I have gone through ? What a wretched 
 constitution is mine! Have I an aneurism?" he asked him- 
 self, feeling his heart beat so violently that its pulses seemed 
 audible in the silence like little grains of sand dropping on a 
 big drum.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 367 
 
 At this moment three distinct taps sounded on his door; 
 Albert hastened to open it, and almost fainted with joy at 
 seeing the Vicar-General's cheerful and triumphant mien. 
 Without a word, he threw his arms round the Abbe de Gran- 
 cey, held him fast, and clasped him closely, letting his head 
 fall on the old man's shoulder. He was a child again; he 
 cried as he had cried on hearing that Francesca Soderini was 
 a married woman. He betrayed his weakness to no one but 
 to this priest, on whose face shone the light of hope. The 
 priest had been sublime, and as shrewd as he was sublime. 
 
 "Forgive me, dear Abbe, but you come at one of those 
 moments when the man vanishes, for you are not to think 
 me vulgarly ambitious." 
 
 "Oh! I know," replied the Abbe. "You wrote 'Ambition 
 for love's sake!' Ah! my son, it was love in despair that 
 made me a priest in 1786, at the age of two-and-twenty. In 
 1788 I was in charge of a parish. I know life. I have re- 
 fused three bishoprics already ; I mean to die at Besangon." 
 
 "Come and see her!" cried Savarus, seizing a candle, and 
 leading the Abbe into the handsome room where hung the 
 portrait of the Duchesse d'Argaiolo, which he lighted up. 
 
 "She is one of those women who are born to reign!" said 
 the Vicar-General, understanding how great an affection Al- 
 bert showed him by this mark of confidence. "But there is 
 pride on that brow ; it is implacable ; she would never forgive 
 an insult ! It is the Archangel Michael, the angel of execu- 
 tion, the inexorable angel 'All or nothing' is the motto of 
 this type of angel. There is something divinely pitiless in 
 that head." 
 
 "You have guessed well," cried Savarus. "But, my dear 
 Abbe, for more than twelve years now she has reigned over 
 my life, and I have not a thought for which to blame my- 
 self " 
 
 "Ah ! if you could only say the same of God !" said the 
 priest with simplicity. "Now, to talk of your affairs. For 
 ten days I have been at work for you. If you are a real poli- 
 tician, this time you will follow my advice. You would not
 
 368 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 be where you are now if you would have gone to the Watte- 
 villes when I first told you. But you must go there to-mor- 
 row; I will take you in the evening. The Eouxey estates are 
 in danger ; the case must be defended within three days. The 
 election will not be over in three days. They will take good 
 care not to appoint examiners the first day. There will be 
 several voting days, and you will be elected by ballot " 
 
 "How can that be ?" asked Savarus. 
 
 "By winning the Kouxey lawsuit you will gain eighty 
 Legitimist votes ; add them to the thirty I can command, and 
 you have a hundred and ten. Then, as twenty remain to you 
 of the Boucher committee, you will have a hundred and thirty 
 in all." 
 
 "Well," said Albert, "we must get seventy-five more." 
 
 "Yes," said the priest, "since all the rest are Ministerial. 
 But, my son, you have two hundred votes, and the Prefectxire 
 no more than a hundred and eighty." 
 
 "I have two hundred votes?" said Albert, standing stupid 
 with amazement, after starting to his feet as if shot up by a 
 spring. 
 
 "You have those of Monsieur de Chavoncourt," said the 
 Abbe. 
 
 "How?" said Albert. 
 
 "You will marry Mademoiselle Sidonie de Chavoncourt." 
 
 "Never !" 
 
 "You will marry Mademoiselle Sidonie de Chavoncourt," 
 the priest repeated coldly. 
 
 "But you see she is inexorable," said Albert, pointing to 
 Francesca: 
 
 "You will marry Mademoiselle Sidonie de Chavoncourt," 
 said the Abbe calmly for the third time. 
 
 This time Albert understood. The Vicar-General would 
 not be implicated in the scheme which at last smiled on the 
 despairing politician. A word more would have compromised 
 the priest's dignity and honor. 
 
 "To-morrow evening at the Hotel de Rupt you will meet 
 Madame de Chavoncourt and her second daughter. You can
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 369 
 
 thank her beforehand for what she is going to do for you, 
 and tell her that your gratitude is unbounded, that you are 
 hers body and soul, that henceforth your future is that of her 
 family. You are quite disinterested, for you have so much 
 confidence in yourself that you regard the nomination as 
 deputy as a sufficient fortune. 
 
 "You will have a struggle with Madame de Chavoncourt; 
 she will want you to pledge your word. All your future life, 
 my son, lies in that evening. But, understand clearly, I have 
 nothing to do with it. I am answerable only for Legitimist 
 voters ; I have secured Madame de Watteville, and that means 
 all the aristocracy of Besangon. Amedee de Soulas and Vau- 
 chelles, who will both vote for you, have won over the young 
 men ; Madame de Watteville will get the old ones. As to my 
 electors, they are infallible." 
 
 "And who on earth has gained over Madame de Chavon- 
 court?" asked Savarus. 
 
 "Ask me no questions," replied the Abbe. "Monsieur de 
 Chavoncourt, who has three daughters to marry, is not capable 
 of increasing his wealth. Though Vauchelles marries the 
 eldest without anything from her father, because her old 
 aunt is to settle something on her, what is to become of the 
 two others ? Sidonie is sixteen, and your ambition is as good 
 as a gold mine. Some one has told Madame de Chavon- 
 court that she will do better by getting her daughter married 
 than by sending her husband to waste his money in Paris. 
 That some one manages Madame de Chavoncourt, and 
 Madame de Chavoncourt manages her husband." 
 
 "That is enough, my dear Abbe. I understand. When 
 once I am returned as deputy, I have somebody's fortune to 
 make, and by making it large enough I shall be released 
 from my promise. In me you have a son, a man who will 
 owe his happiness to you. Great heavens ! what have I done 
 to deserve so true a friend ?" 
 
 "You won a triumph for the Chapter," said the Vicar-Gen- 
 eral, smiling. "Now, as to all this, be as secret as the tomb. 
 We are nothing, we have done nothing. If we were known
 
 370 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 to have meddled in election matters, we should be eaten up 
 alive by the Puritans of the Left who do worse and blamed 
 by some of our own party, who want everything. Madame 
 de Chavoncourt has no suspicion of my share in all this. I 
 have confided in no one but Madame de Watteville, whom we 
 may trust as we trust ourselves." 
 
 "I will bring the Duchess to you to be blessed !" cried Sa- 
 varus. 
 
 After seeing out the old priest, Albert went to bed in the 
 swaddling clothes of power. 
 
 Next evening, as may well be supposed, by nine o'clock 
 Madame la Baronne de Watteville's rooms were crowded by 
 the aristocracy of Besanc,on in convocation extraordinary. 
 They were discussing the exceptional step of going to the poll, 
 to oblige the daughter of the de Eupts. It was known that 
 the former Master of Appeals, the secretary of one of the 
 most faithful ministers under the Elder Branch, was to be 
 presented that evening. Madame de Chavoncourt was there 
 with her second daughter Sidonie, exquisitely dressed, while 
 her elder sister, secure of her lover, had not indulged in any 
 of the arts of the toilet. In countr} r towns these little things 
 are remarked. The Abbe de Grancey's fine and clever head 
 was to be seen moving from group to group, listening to every- 
 thing, seeming to be apart from it all, but uttering those in- 
 cisive phrases which sum up a question and direct the issue. 
 
 "If the Elder Branch were to return," said he to an old 
 statesman of seventy, "what politicians would they find?" 
 "Berryer, alone on his bench, does not know which way to 
 turn ; if he had sixty votes, he would often scotch the wheels 
 of the Government and upset Ministries !" "The Due de 
 Fitz-James is to be nominated at Toulouse." "You will en- 
 able Monsieur de Watteville to win his lawsuit." "If you vote 
 for Monsieur Savarus, the Republicans will vote with you 
 rather than with the Moderates!" etc., etc. 
 
 At nine o'clock Albert had not arrived. Madame de Watte- 
 ville was disposed to regard such delay as an impertinence.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 371 
 
 "My dear Baroness," said Madame de Chavoncourt, "do not 
 let such serious issues turn on such a trifle. The varnish on 
 his boots is not dry or a consultation, perhaps, detains Mon- 
 sieur de Savarus." 
 
 Eosalie shot a side glance at Madame de Chavoncourt. 
 
 "She is very lenient to Monsieur de Savarus," she whispered 
 to her mother. 
 
 "You see," said the Baroness with a smile, "there is a 
 question of a marriage between Sidonie and Monsieur de 
 Savarus." 
 
 Mademoiselle de Watteville hastily went to a window look- 
 ing out over the garden. 
 
 At ten o'clock Albert de Savarus had not yet appeared. 
 The storm that threatened now burst. Some of the gentle- 
 men sat down to cards, finding the thing intolerable. The 
 Abbe de Grancey, who did not know what to think, went to 
 the window where Eosalie was hidden, and exclaimed aloud 
 in his amazement, "He must be dead !" 
 
 The Vicar-General stepped out into the garden, followed by 
 Monsieur de Watteville and his daughter, and they all three 
 went up to the kiosk. In Albert's rooms all was dark ; not a 
 light was to be seen. 
 
 "Jerome!" cried Eosalie, seeing the servant in the yard 
 below. The Abbe looked at her with astonishment. "Where 
 in the world is your master?" she asked the man, who came 
 to the foot of the wall. 
 
 "Gone in a post-chaise, mademoiselle." 
 
 "He is ruined !" exclaimed the Abbe de Grancey, "or he is 
 happy !" 
 
 The joy of triumph was not so effectually concealed on 
 Eosalie's face that the Vicar-General could not detect it- He 
 affected to see nothing. 
 
 "What can this girl have had to do with this business ?" he 
 asked himself. 
 
 They all three returned to the drawing-room, where Mon- 
 sieur de Watteville announced the strange, the extraordinary, 
 the prodigious news of the lawyer's departure, without any
 
 3W ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 reason assigned for his evasion. By half-past eleven only 
 fifteen persons remained, among them Madame de Chavon- 
 court and the Abb6 de Godenars, another Vicar-General, a 
 man of about forty, who hoped for a bishopric, the two Cha- 
 voncourt girls, and Monsieur de Vauchelles, the Abbe de 
 Grancey, Rosalie, Amedee de Soulas, and a retired magistrate, 
 one of the most influential members of the upper circle of 
 Besangon, who had been very eager for Albert's election. The 
 Abbe de Grancey sat down by the Baroness in such a position 
 ts to watch Eosalie, whose face, usually pale, wore a feverish 
 flush. 
 
 "What can have happened to Monsieur de Savarus?" said 
 Madame de Chavoncourt. 
 
 At this moment a servant in livery brought in a letter for 
 the Abbe de Grancey on a silver tray. 
 
 "Pray read it," said the Baroness. 
 
 The Vicar-General read the letter ; he saw Rosalie suddenly 
 turn as white as her kerchief. 
 
 "She recognizes the writing," said he to himself, after 
 glancing at the girl over his spectacles. He folded up the let- 
 ter, and calmly put it in his pocket without a word. In three 
 minutes he had met three looks from Rosalie which were 
 enough to make him guess everything. 
 
 "She is in love with Albert Savarus !" thought the Vicar- 
 General. 
 
 He rose and took leave. He was going towards the door 
 when, in the next room, he was overtaken by Rosalie, who 
 said : 
 
 "Monsieur de Grancey, it was from Albert !" 
 
 "How do you know that is was his writing, to recognize 
 it from so far ?" 
 
 The girl's reply, caught as she was in the toils of her im- 
 patience and rage, seemed to the Abbe sublime. 
 
 "I love him ! What is the matter ?" she said after a pause. 
 
 "He gives up the election." 
 
 Rosalie put her finger to her lip. 
 
 "I ask you to be as secret as if it were a confession," said
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 373 
 
 she before returning to the drawing-room. "If there is an 
 end of the election, there is an end of the marriage with 
 Sidonie." 
 
 In the morning, on her way to Mass, Mademoiselle de 
 Watteville heard from Mariette some of the circumstances 
 which had prompted Albert's disappearance at the most 
 critical moment of his life. 
 
 "Mademoiselle, an old gentleman from Paris arrived yes- 
 terday morning at the Hotel National; he came in his own 
 carriage with four horses, and a courier in front, and a ser- 
 vant. Indeed, Jerome, who saw the carriage returning, de- 
 clares he could only be a prince or a milord." 
 
 "Was there a coronet on the carriage ?" asked Eosalie. 
 
 "I do not know," said Mariette. "Just as two was striking 
 he came to call on Monsieur Savarus, and sent in his card; 
 and when he saw it, Jerome says Monsieur turned as pale as 
 a sheet, and said he was to be shown in. As he himself 
 locked the door, it is impossible to tell what the old gentle- 
 man and the lawyer said to each other; but they were to- 
 gether above an hour, and then the old gentleman, with the 
 lawyer, called up his servant. Jerome saw the servant go out 
 again with an immense package, four feet long, which looked 
 like a great painting on canvas. The old gentleman had in 
 his hand a large parcel of papers. Monsieur Savaron was 
 paler than death, and he, so proud, so dignified, was in a 
 state to be pitied. But he treated the old gentleman so re- 
 spectfully that he could not have been politer to the King 
 himself. Jerome and Monsieur Albert Savaron escorted the 
 gentleman to his carriage, which was standing with the horses 
 in. The courier started on the stroke of three. 
 
 "Monsieur Savaron went straight to the Prefecture, and 
 from that to Monsieur Gentillet, who sold him the old travel- 
 ing carriage that used to belong to Madame de Saint-Vier be- 
 fore she died ; then he ordered post horses for six o'clock. He 
 went home to pack ; no doubt he wrote a lot of letters ; finally, 
 he settled everything with Monsieur Girardet, who went to 
 
 VOL. 10- 25
 
 S74 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 him and stayed till seven. Jerome carried a note to Monsieur 
 Boucher, with whom his master was to have dined ; and then, 
 at half-past seven, the lawyer set out, leaving Jerome with 
 three months' wages, and telling him to find another place. 
 
 "He left his keys with Monsieur Girardet, whom he took 
 home, and at his house, Jerome says, he took a plate of soup, 
 for at half-past seven Monsieur Girardet had not yet dined. 
 When Monsieur Savaron got into the carriage again he looked 
 like death. Jerome, who, of course, saw his master off, heard 
 him tell the postilion 'The Geneva Road !' ' : 
 
 "Did Jerome ask the name of the stranger at the Hotel 
 National ?" 
 
 "As the old gentleman did not mean to stay, he was not 
 asked for it. The servant, by his orders no doubt, pretended 
 not to speak French." 
 
 "And the letter which came so late to Abbe de Gran- 
 cey ?" said Eosalie. 
 
 "It was Monsieur Girardet, no doubt, who ought to have 
 delivered it; but Jerome says that poor Monsieur Girardet, 
 who was much attached to lawyer Savaron, was as much upset 
 as he was. So he who came so mysteriously, as Mademoiselle 
 Galard says, is gone away just as mysteriously." 
 
 After hearing this narra j ve, Mademoiselle de Watteville 
 fell into a brooding and absent mood, which everybody could 
 see. It is useless to say anything of the commotion that arose 
 in Besangon on the disappearance of Monsieur Savaron. It 
 was understood that the Prefect had obliged him with the 
 greatest readiness by giving him at once a passport across the 
 frontier, for he was thus quit of his only opponent. Next day 
 Monsieur de Chavoncourt was carried to the top by a majority 
 of a hundred and forty votes. 
 
 "Jack is gone by the way he came," said an elector on hear- 
 ing of Albert Savaron's flight. 
 
 This event lent weight to the prevailing prejudice at Be- 
 sangon against strangers; indeed, two years previously they 
 had received confirmation from the affair of the Republican 
 newspaper. Ten days later Albert de Savarus was never
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 375 
 
 spoken of again. Only three persons Girardet the attorney, 
 the Vicar-General, and Eosalie were seriously affected by his 
 disappearance. Girardet knew that the white-haired stranger 
 was Prince Soderini, for he had seen his card, and he told the 
 Vicar-General; but Eosalie, better informed than either of 
 them, had known for three months past that the Due 
 d'Argaiolo was dead. 
 
 In the month of April 1836 no one had had any news 
 from or of Albert de Savarus. Jerome and Mariette were to be 
 married, but the Baroness confidentially desired her maid to 
 wait till her daughter was married, saying that the two wed- 
 dings might take place at the same time. 
 
 "It is time that Eosalie should be married," said the 
 Baroness one day to Monsieur de Watteville. "She is nineteen, 
 and she is fearfully altered in these last months." 
 
 "I do not know what ails her," said the Baron. 
 
 "When fathers do not know what ails their daughters, 
 mothers can guess," said the Baroness ; "we must get her mar- 
 ried." 
 
 "I am quite willing," said the Baron. "I shall give her les 
 Eouxey now that the Court has settled our quarrel with the 
 authorities of Eiceys by fixing the boundary line at three hun- 
 dred feet up the side of the Dent de Vilard. I am having a 
 trench made to collect all the water and carry it into the lake. 
 The village did not appeal, so the decision is final." 
 
 "It has never yet occurred to you," said Madame de Watte- 
 ville, "that this decision cost me thirty thousand francs handed 
 over to Chantonnit. That peasant would take nothing else ; he 
 sold us peace. If you give away les Eouxey, you will have 
 nothing left," said the Baroness. 
 
 "I do not need much," said the Baron ; "I am breaking up." 
 
 "You eat like an ogre !" 
 
 "Just so. But however much I may eat, I feel my legs 
 "get weaker and weaker " 
 
 "It is from working the lathe," said his wife. 
 
 "I do not know," said he. 
 
 "We will marry Eosalie to Monsieur de Soulas ; if you give
 
 376 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 her les Rouxey, keep the life interest. I will give them fifteen 
 thousand francs a year in the funds. Our children can live 
 here ; I do not see that they are much to be pitied." 
 
 "No. I shall give them les Rouxey out and out. Rosalie 
 is fond of les Rouxey." 
 
 "You are a queer man with your daughter! It does not 
 occur to you to ask me if I am fond of les Rouxey." 
 
 Rosalie, at once sent for, was informed that she was to 
 marry Monsieur de Soulas one day early in the month of 
 May. 
 
 "I am very much obliged to you, mother, and to you too, 
 father, for having thought of settling me ; but I do not mean 
 to marry; I am very happy with you." 
 
 "Mere speeches !" said the Baroness. "You are not in love 
 with Monsieur de Soulas, that is all." 
 
 "If you insist on the plain truth, I will never marry Mon- 
 sieur de Soulas " 
 
 "Oh ! the never of a girl of nineteen !" retorted her mother, 
 with a bitter smile. 
 
 "The never of Mademoiselle de Watteville," said Rosalie 
 with firm decision. "My father, I imagine, has no intention 
 of making me marry against my wishes?" 
 
 "No, indeed no !" said the poor Baron, looking affectionately 
 at his daughter. 
 
 "Very well !" said the Baroness, sternly controlling the 
 rage of a bigot startled at finding herself unexpectedly defied, 
 "you yourself, Monsieur de Watteville, may take the responsi- 
 bility of settling your daughter. Consider well, mademoiselle, 
 for if you do not marry to my mind you will get nothing out 
 of me!" 
 
 The quarrel thus begun between Madame de Watteville 
 and her husband, who took his daughter's part, went so far 
 that Rosalie and her father were obliged to spend the summer 
 at les Rouxey; life at the Hotel de Rupt was unendurable. 
 It thus became known in Besanc,on that Mademoiselle de 
 Watteville had positively refused the Comte de Soulas. 
 
 After their marriage Mardette and Jerome came to les
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 377 
 
 Eouxey to succeed to Modinier in due time. The Baron re- 
 stored and repaired the house to suit his daughter's taste. 
 When she heard that these improvements had cost about 
 sixty thousand francs,, and that Eosalie and her father were 
 building a conservatory, the Baroness understood that there 
 was a leaven of spite in her daughter. The Baron purchased 
 various outlying plots, and a little estate worth thirty thou- 
 sand francs. Madame de Watteville was told that, away from 
 her, Eosalie showed masterly qualities, that she was taking 
 steps to improve the value of les Eouxey, that she had treated 
 herself to a riding habit and rode about; her father, whom 
 she made very happy, who no longer complained of his health, 
 and who was growing fat, accompanied her in her expedi- 
 tions. As the Baroness' name-day drew near her name 
 was Louise the Vicar-General came one day to les Eouxey, 
 deputed, no doubt, by Madame de Watteville and Monsieur 
 de Soulas, to negotiate a peace between mother and daughter. 
 
 "That little Eosalie has a head on her shoulders," said the 
 folk of Besangon. 
 
 After handsomely paying up the ninety thousand francs 
 spent on les Eouxey, the Baroness allowed her husband a thou- 
 sand francs a month to live on ; she would not put herself in 
 the wrong. The father and daughter were perfectly willing to 
 return to Besangon for the 15th of August, and to remain 
 there till the end of the month.' 
 
 When, after dinner, the Vicar-General took Mademoiselle 
 de Watteville apart, to open the question of the marriage, by 
 explaining to her that it was vain to think any more of Al- 
 bert, of whom they had had no news for a year past, he was 
 stopped at once by a sign from Eosalie. The strange girl 
 took Monsieur de Grancey by the arm, and led him to a seat 
 under a clump of rhododendrons, whence there was a view of 
 the lake. 
 
 "Listen, dear Abbe," said she. "You whom I love as much 
 as rny father, for you had an affection for my Albert, I must 
 at last confess that I committed crimes to become his wife, 
 and he must be my husband. Here; read this."
 
 378 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 She held out to him a number of the Gazette which she had 
 in her apron pocket, pointing out the following paragraph 
 under the date of Florence, May 25th : 
 
 "The wedding of Monsieur le Due de Rhetore, eldest son 
 of the Due de Chaulieu, the former Ambassador, to Madame 
 la Duchesse d'Argaiolo, nee Princess Soderini, was solemnized 
 with great splendor. Numerous entertainments given in 
 honor of the marriage are making Florence gay. The 
 Duchess' fortune is one of the finest in Italy, for the late 
 Duke left her everything." 
 
 "The woman he loved is married," said she. "I divided 
 them." 
 
 "You ? How ?" asked the Abbe. 
 
 Rosalie was about to reply, when she was interrupted by a 
 loud cry from two of the gardeners, following on the sound of a 
 body falling into the water ; she started, and ran off screaming, 
 "Oh ! father !" The Baron had disappeared. 
 
 In trying to reach a piece of granite on which he fancied 
 he saw the impression of a shell, a circumstance which would 
 have contradicted some system of geology, Monsieur de Watte- 
 ville had gone down the slope, lost his balance, and slipped 
 into the lake, which, of course, was deepest close under the 
 roadway. The men had the greatest difficulty in enabling 
 the Baron to catch hold of a pole pushed down at the place 
 where the water was bubbling, but at last they pulled him out, 
 covered with mud, in which he had sunk; he was getting 
 deeper and deeper in, by dint of struggling. Monsieur deWatte- 
 ville had dined heavily, digestion was in progress, and was 
 thus checked. 
 
 When he had been undressed, washed, and put to bed, he 
 was in such evident danger that two servants at once set out on 
 horseback : one to ride to Besangon, and the other to fetch the 
 nearest doctor and surgeon. When Madame de Watteville 
 arrived, eight hours later, with the first medical aid from Be- 
 sanc.on, they found Monsieur de Watteville past all hope, in 
 spite of the intelligent treatment of the Rouxey doctor. The 
 fright had produced serious effusion on the brain, and the 
 shock to the digestion was helping to kill the poor man.
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 379 
 
 This death, which would never have happened, said Madame 
 de Watteville, if her husband had stayed at Besangon, was 
 ascribed by her to her daughter's obstinacy. She took an aver- 
 sion for Rosalie, abandoning herself to grief and regrets that 
 were evidently exaggerated. She spoke of the Baron as "her 
 dear lamb !" 
 
 The last of the Wattevilles was buried on an island in the 
 lake at les Eouxey, where the Baroness had a little Gothic 
 monument erected of white marble, like that called the tomb 
 of Helo'ise at Pere-Lachaise. 
 
 A month after this catastrophe the mother and daughter 
 had settled in the Hotel de Eupt, where they lived in savage 
 silence. Eosalie was suffering from real sorrow, which had no 
 visible outlet; she accused herself of her father's death, and 
 she feared another disaster, much greater in her eyes, and very 
 certainly her own work ; neither Girardet the attorney nor the 
 Abbe de Grancey could obtain any information concerning 
 Albert. This silence was appalling. In a paroxysm of re- 
 pentance she felt that she must confess to the Vicar-General 
 the horrible machinations by which she had separated Fran- 
 cesca and Albert. They had been simple, but formidable. 
 Mademoiselle de Watteville had intercepted Albert's letters to 
 the Duchess as well as that in which Francesca announced her 
 husband's illness, warning her lover that she could write to 
 him no more during the time while she was devoted, as was her 
 duty, to the care of the dying man. Thus, while Albert was 
 wholly occupied with election matters, the Duchess had writ- 
 ten him only two letters; one in which she told him that the 
 Due d'Argaiolo was in danger, and one announcing her wid- 
 owhood two noble and beautiful letters, which Eosalie kept 
 back. 
 
 After several nights' labor she succeeded in imitating Al- 
 bert's writing very perfectly. She had substituted three let- 
 ters of her own writing for three of Albert's, and the rough 
 copies which she showed to the old priest made him shudder 
 the genius of evil was revealed in them to such perfection. 
 Rosalie, writing in Albert's name, had prepared the Duchess
 
 380 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 for a change in the Frenchman's feelings, falsely representing 
 him as faithless, and she had answered the news of the Due 
 d'Argaiolo's death by announcing the marriage ere long of 
 Albert and Mademoiselle de Watteville. The two letters, in- 
 tended to cross on the road, had, in fact, done so. The in- 
 fernal cleverness with which the letters were written so much 
 astonished the Vicar-General that he read them a second time. 
 Francesca, stabbed to the heart by a girl who wanted to kill 
 love in her rival, had answered the last in these four words : 
 "You are free. Farewell." 
 
 "Purely moral crimes, which give no hold to human justice, 
 are the most atrocious and detestable," said the Abbe severely. 
 "God often punishes them on earth ; herein lies the reason of 
 the terrible catastrophes which to us seem inexplicable. Of 
 all secret crimes buried in the mystery of private life, the most 
 disgraceful is that of breaking the seal of a letter, or of read- 
 ing it surreptitiously. Every one, whoever it may be, and 
 urged by whatever reason, who is guilty of such an act has 
 stained his honor beyond retrieving. 
 
 "Do you not feel all that is touching, that is heavenly in the 
 story of the youthful page, falsely accused, and carrying the 
 letter containing the order for his execution, who sets out 
 without a thought of ill, and whom Providence protects and 
 saves miraculously, we say ! But do you know wherein the 
 miracle lies ? Virtue has a glory as potent as that of innocent 
 childhood. 
 
 "I say these things not meaning to admonish you," said 
 the old priest, with deep grief. "I, alas ! am not your spirit- 
 ual director; you are not kneeling at the feet of God; I am 
 your friend, appalled by dread of what your punishment may 
 be. What has become of that unhappy Albert ? Has he, per- 
 haps, killed himself? There was tremendous passion under 
 his assumption of calm. I understand now that old Prince 
 Soderini, the father of the Duchess d'Argaiolo, came here to 
 take back his daughter's letters and portraits. This was the 
 thunderbolt that fell on Albert's head, and he went off, no 
 doubt, to try to justify himself. But how is it that in fourteen 
 months he has given us no news of himself ?"
 
 ALBERT SAVARTTS 381 
 
 "Oh ! if I marry him, he will be so happy !" 
 
 "Happy? He does not love you. Besides, you have no 
 great fortune to give him. Your mother detests you; you 
 made her a fierce reply which rankles, and which will be your 
 ruin. When she told you yesterday that obedience was the 
 only way to repair your errors, and reminded you of the need 
 for marrying, mentioning Amedee 'If you are so fond of 
 him, marry him yourself, mother !' Did you, or did you not, 
 fling these words in her tee-h ?" 
 
 "Yes," said Eosalie. 
 
 "Well, I know her," Monsieur de Grancey went on. "In a 
 few months she will be Comtesse de Soulas ! She will be sure 
 to have children ; she will give Monsieur de Soulas forty thou- 
 sand francs a year; she will benefit him in other ways, and 
 reduce your share of her fortune as much as possible. You 
 will be poor as long as she lives, and she is but eight-and- 
 thirty ! Your whole estate will be the land of les Rouxey, and 
 the small share left to you after your father's legal debts are 
 settled, if, indeed, your mother should consent to forego her 
 claims on les Rouxey. From the point of view of material 
 advantages, you have done badly for yourself ; from the point 
 of view of feeling, I imagine you have wrecked your life. In- 
 stead of going to your mother " Rosalie shook her head 
 
 fiercely. 
 
 "To your mother," the priest went on, "and to religion, 
 where you would, at the first impulse of your heart, have 
 found enlightenment, counsel, and guidance, you chose to act 
 in your own way, knowing nothing of life, and listening only 
 to passion !" 
 
 These words of wisdom terrified Mademoiselle de Watte- 
 ville. 
 
 "And what ought I to do now ?" she asked after a pause. 
 
 "To repair your wrong-doing, you must ascertain its ex- 
 lent," said the Abbe. 
 
 "Well, I will write to the only man who can know any- 
 thing of Albert's fate, Monsieur Leopold Hannequin, a notary 
 in Paris, his friend from childhood."
 
 382 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 "Write no more, unless to do honor to truth," said the 
 Vicar-General. "Place the real and the false letters in my 
 hands, confess everything in detail as though I were the 
 keeper of your conscience, asking me how you may expiate 
 your sins, and doing as I bid you. I shall see for, above all 
 things, restore this unfortunate man to his innocence in the 
 eyes of the woman he had made his divinity on earth. Though 
 he has lost his happiness, Albert must still hope for justifica- 
 tion/' 
 
 Eosalie promised to obey the Abbe, hoping that the steps 
 he might take would perhaps end in bringing Albert back to 
 her. 
 
 Not long after Mademoiselle de Watteville's confession a 
 clerk came to Besangon from Monsieur Leopold Hannequin, 
 armed with a power of attorney from Albert; he called first 
 on Monsieur Girardet, begging his assistance in selling the 
 house belonging to Monsieur Savaron. The attorney under- 
 took to do this out of friendship for Albert. The clerk from 
 Paris sold the furniture, and with the proceeds could repay 
 some money owed by Savaron to Girardet, who on the occasion 
 of his inexplicable departure had lent him five thousand francs 
 while undertaking to collect his assets. When Girardet asked 
 what had become of the handsome and noble pleader, to whom 
 he had been much attached, the clerk replied that no one knew 
 but his master, and that the notary had seemed greatly dis- 
 tressed by the contents of the last letter he had received from 
 Monsieur Albert de Savarus. 
 
 On hearing this, the Vicar-General wrote to Leopold. This 
 was the worthy notary's reply : 
 
 "To Monsieur 1'Abbe de Grancey, 
 
 Vicar-General of the Diocese of Besangon. 
 
 " PAKB. 
 
 "Alas, monsieur, it is in nobody's power to restore Albert to 
 the life of the world ; he has renounced it. He is a novice in 
 the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble. You
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 38? 
 
 know, better than I who have but just learned it, that on the 
 threshold of that cloister everything dies. Albert, foreseeing 
 that I should go to him, placed the General of the Order be- 
 tween my utmost efforts and himself. I know his noble soul 
 well enough to be sure that he is the victim of some odious 
 plot unknown to us; but everything is at an end. The 
 Duchesse d'Argaiolo, now Duchesse de Rhetore, seems to me to 
 have carried severity to an extreme. At Belgirate, which she 
 had left when Albert flew thither, she had left instructions 
 leading him to believe that she was living in London. From 
 London Albert went in search of her to Naples, and from 
 Naples to Rome, where she was now engaged to the Due de 
 Rhetore. When Albert succeeded in seeing Madame d'Ar- 
 gaiolo, at Florence, it was at the ceremony of her marriage. 
 
 "Our poor friend swooned in church, and even when he was 
 in danger of death he could never obtain any explanation 
 from this woman, who must have had I know not what in her 
 heart. For seven months Albert had traveled in pursuit of a 
 cruel creature who thought it sport to escape him; he knew 
 not where or how to catch her. 
 
 "I saw him on his way through Paris ; and if you had seen 
 him, as I did, you would have felt that not a word might be 
 spoken about the Duchess, at the risk of bringing on an attack 
 which might have wrecked his reason. If he had known what 
 his crime was, he might have found means to justify himself ; 
 but being falsely accused of being married ! what could he 
 do ? Albert is dead, quite dead to the world. He longed for 
 rest ; let us hope that the deep silence and prayer into which 
 he has thrown himself may give him happiness in another 
 guise. You, monsieur, who have known him, must greatly 
 pity him ; and pity his friends also. 
 
 "Yours, etc." 
 
 As soon as he received this letter the good Vicar-General 
 wrote to the General of the Carthusian order, and this was 
 the letter he received from Albert Savarus :
 
 884 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 "Brother Albert to Monsieur 1'Abbe de Grancey, Vicar-Gen- 
 eral of the Diocese of Besangon. 
 
 " LA GRANDE CHARTREUSE. 
 
 "I recognized your tender soul, dear and well-beloved Vicar- 
 General, and your still youthful heart, in all that the reverend 
 Father General of our Order has just told me. You have un- 
 derstood the only wish that lurks in the depths of my heart so 
 far as the things of the world are concerned to get justice 
 done to my feelings by her who has treated me so badly ! But 
 before leaving me at liberty to avail myself of your offer, the 
 General wanted to know that my vocation was sincere ; he was 
 so kind as to tell me his idea, on rinding that I was determined 
 to preserve absolute silence on this point. If I had yielded 
 to the temptation to rehabilitate the man of the world, the 
 friar would have been rejected by this monastery. Grace has 
 certainly done her work; but, though short, the struggle was 
 not the less keen or the less painful. Is not this enough 
 to show you that I could never return to the world ? 
 
 "Hence my forgiveness, which you ask for the author of so 
 much woe, is entire and without a thought of vindictiveness. 
 I will pray to God to forgive that young lady as I forgive her, 
 and as I shall beseech Him to give Madame de Ehetore a life 
 of happiness. Ah ! whether it be death, or the obstinate hand 
 of a young girl madly bent on being loved, or one of the blows 
 ascribed to chance, must we not all obey God? Sorrow in 
 some souls makes a vast void through which the Divine Voice 
 rings. I learned too late the bearings of this life on that 
 which awaits us ; all in me is worn out ; I could not serve in 
 the ranks of the Church Militant, and I lay the remains of an 
 almost extinct life at the foot of the altar. 
 
 "This is the last time I shall ever write. You alone, who 
 loved me, and whom I loved so well, could make me break 
 the law of oblivion I imposed on myself when I entered these 
 headquarters of Saint Bruno, but you are always especially 
 named in the prayers of 
 
 "BROTHER ALBERT. 
 
 "November 1836."
 
 ALBEET SAVARUS 885 
 
 "Everything is for the best perhaps/' thought the Abbe de 
 Grancey. 
 
 When he showed this letter to Eosalie, who, with a pious 
 impulse, kissed the lines which contained her forgiveness, he 
 said to her : 
 
 "Well, now that he is lost to you, will you not be reconciled 
 to your mother and marry the Comte de Soulas ?" 
 
 "Only if Albert should order it/' said she. 
 
 "But you see it is impossible to consult him. The General 
 of the Order would not allow it." 
 
 "If I were to go to see him ?" 
 
 "No Carthusian sees any visitor. Besides, no woman but 
 the Queen of France may enter a Carthusian monastery," 
 said the Abbe. "So you have no longer any excuse for not 
 marrying young Monsieur de Soulas." 
 
 "I do not wish to destroy my mother's happiness/' retorted 
 Rosalie. 
 
 "Satan !" exclaimed the Vicar-General. 
 
 Towards the end of that winter the worthy Abbe" de Grancey 
 died. This good friend no longer stood between Madame 
 de Watteville and her daughter, to soften the impact of those 
 two iron wills. 
 
 The event he had foretold took place. In the month of 
 August 1837 Madame de Watteville was married to Monsieur 
 de Soulas in Paris, whither she went by Eosalie's advice, the 
 girl making a show of kindness and sweetness to her mother. 
 Madame de Watteville believed in this affection on the part of 
 her daughter, who simply desired to go to Paris to give her- 
 self the luxury of a bitter revenge; she thought of nothing 
 but avenging Savarus by torturing her rival. 
 
 Mademoiselle de Watteville had been declared legally of 
 age; she was, in fact, not far from one-and-twenty. Her 
 mother, to settle with her finally, had resigned her claims on 
 les Rouxey, and the daughter had signed a release for all the 
 inheritance of the Baron de Watteville. Rosalie encouraged 
 her mother to marry the Comte de Soulas and settle all her 
 own fortune' on him.
 
 386 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 "Let us each be perfectly free," she said. 
 
 Madame de Soulas, who had been uneasy as to her daugh- 
 ter's intentions, was touched by this liberality, and made her 
 a present of six thousand francs a year in the funds as con- 
 science money. As the Comtesse de Soulas had an income 
 of forty-eight thousand francs from her own lands, and was 
 quite incapable of alienating them in order to diminish 
 Eosalie's share, Mademoiselle de Watteville was still a fortune 
 to marry, of eighteen hundred thousand francs; les Eouxey, 
 with the Baron's additions, and certain improvements, might 
 yield twenty thousand francs a year, besides the value of the 
 house, rents, and preserves. So Eosalie and her mother, who 
 soon adopted the Paris style and fashions, easily obtained in- 
 troductions to the best society. The golden key eighteen 
 hundred thousand francs embroidered on Mademoiselle de 
 Watteville's stomacher, did more for the Comtesse de Soulas 
 than her pretensions a la de Eupt, her inappropriate pride, or 
 even her rather distant great connections. 
 
 In the month of February 1838 Eosalie, who was eagerly 
 courted by many young men, achieved the purpose which had 
 brought her to Paris. This was to meet the Duchesse de 
 Ehetore, to see this wonderful woman, and to overwhelm her 
 with perennial remorse. Eosalie gave herself up to the most 
 bewildering elegance and vanities in order to face the Duchess 
 on an equal footing. 
 
 They first met at a ball given annually after 1830 for the 
 benefit of the pensioners on the old Civil List. A young man, 
 prompted by Eosalie, pointed her out to the Duchess, saying : 
 
 "There is a very remarkable young person, a strong-minded 
 young lady too ! She drove a clever man into a monastery 
 the Grande Chartreuse a man of immense capabilities, Al- 
 bert de Savarus, whose career she wrecked. She is Made- 
 moiselle de Watteville, the famous Besanc/m heiress 
 
 The Duchess turned pale. Eosalie's eyes met hers with one 
 of those flashes which, between woman and woman, are more 
 fatal than the pistol shots of a duel. Francesca Soderini. 
 who had suspected that Albert might be innocent, hastily
 
 ALBERT SAVARUS 387 
 
 quitted the ballroom, leaving the speaker at his wits' end to 
 guess what terrible blow he had inflicted on the beautiful 
 Duchesse de Ehetore. 
 
 "If you want to hear more about Albert, come to the Opera 
 ball on Tuesday with a marigold in your hand." 
 
 This anonymous note, sent by Eosalie to the Duchess, 
 brought the unhappy Italian to the ball, where Mademoiselle 
 de Watteville placed in her hand all Albert's letters, with that 
 written to Leopold Hannequin by the Vicar-General, and the 
 notary's reply, and even that in which she had written her own 
 confession to the Abbe de Grancey. 
 
 "I do not choose to be the only sufferer," she said to her 
 rival, "for one has been as ruthless as the other." 
 
 After enjoying the dismay stamped on the Duchess' beau- 
 tiful face, Eosalie went away ; she went out no more, and re- 
 turned to Besangon with her mother. 
 
 Mademoiselle de Watteville, who lived alone on her estate 
 of les Eouxey, riding, hunting, refusing two or three offers 
 a year, going to Besangon four or five times in the course of 
 the winter, and busying herself with improving her land, was 
 regarded as a very eccentric personage. She was one of the 
 celebrities of the Eastern provinces. 
 
 Madame de Soulas has two children, a boy and a girl, and 
 she has grown younger; but young Monsieur de Soulas has 
 aged a good deal. 
 
 "My fortune has cost me dear," said he to young Chavon- 
 court. "Eeally to know a bigot it is unfortunately necessary 
 to marry her!" 
 
 Mademoiselle de Watteville behaves in the most extraor- 
 dinary manner. "She has vagaries," people say. Every 
 year she goes to gaze at the walls of the Grande Chartreuse. 
 Perhaps she dreams of imitating her grand-uncle by forcing 
 the walls of the monastery to find ;i husband, as Watteville 
 broke through those of his monastery to recover his liberty. 
 
 She left Besangon in 1841, intending, it was said, to get
 
 388 ALBERT SAVARUS 
 
 married; but the real reason of this expedition is still un- 
 known, for she returned home in a state which forbids her 
 ever appearing in society again. By one of those chances 
 of which the Abbe de Grancey had spoken, she happened to 
 be on the Loire in a steamboat of which the boiler burst. 
 Mademoiselle de Watteville was so severely injured that she 
 lost her right arm and her left leg; her face is marked with 
 fearful scars, which have bereft her of her beauty ; her health, 
 cruelly upset, leaves her few days free from suffering. In 
 short, she now never leaves the Chartreuse of les Eouxey, 
 where she leads a life wholly devoted to religious practices. 
 
 PABIB, .May 1842.
 
 THE PEASANTRY
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 FEW, I suppose, of the readers of Les Paysans in more recent 
 years have read it without a more or less distinct mental 
 comparison with the corresponding book in the Rougon- 
 Macquart series. And I should hope that this comparative 
 process has had, in the best minds, only one result. Les 
 Paysans (which, by the way, is a very late book, partly post- 
 humous, and is said, though not on positive authority, to 
 have enjoyed the collaboration of Madame de Balzac) is not 
 one of Balzac's best ; but it is as far above La Terre from 
 every conceivable point of view, except that of Holywell 
 Street, as a play of Shakespeare is above one of Monk Lewis. 
 The comparison, indeed, exhibits something more than the 
 difference of genius in Balzac and in M. Zola. It illustrates 
 the difference of their methods. We know how not merely the 
 Eougon-Macquart series in general, but La Terre in par- 
 ticular, was composed. M. Zola, who is a conscientious man, 
 went down to a village (somewhere in the Beauce, if I recol- 
 lect rightly), stayed some time, made his notes, and came 
 back to Paris. There is nothing like the same great gulf 
 fixed between the Londoner and the countryman in England 
 as that which exists between the Parisian and the Pro- 
 vincial in France. But imagine an Englishman, not even 
 English by race, from his youth up an inhabitant of great 
 towns, attempting to delineate the English peasantry after 
 a few weeks' stay in a Wiltshire village 1 
 
 (fc)
 
 Jt INTRODUCTION 
 
 Balzac, on the other hand, a Frenchman of Frenchmen, 
 was born in a French country town, was brought up in the 
 country, and, what is more, was in the constant habit of re- 
 tiring to out-of-the-way country inns and similar places to 
 work. He had the key, to begin with; and he never let it 
 get rusty. To some tastes and judgments his country 
 sketches, if less lively, are more veracious even than his 
 Parisian ones; they have less convention about them; they 
 are less obviously under the dominion of prepossessions and 
 crotchets, less elaborately calculated to form backgrounds 
 and scenery for the evolutions of Rastignacs and Rubempres. 
 
 The result is, in Les Paysans, a book of extraordinary 
 interest and value. In one respect, indeed, it falls short of 
 the highest kind of novel. There is no character in whose 
 fortunes or in whose development we take the keenest in- 
 terest. Blondet is little more than an intelligent chorus or 
 reporter, though he does not tell the story; Montcornet is 
 a good-natured "old silly;" the Countess is a Countess. 
 Not one of the minor characters, not even Rigou, is very 
 much more than a sketch. But then there is such a multi- 
 tude of these sketches, and they are all instinct with such life 
 and vigor ! Although Balzac has used no illegitimate attrac- 
 tions think only of the kind of stuff with which M. Zola, 
 like a child smearing color on a book-engraving, would have 
 daubed the grisly outlines of the Tonsard family! he has 
 not shrunk from what even our modern realists, I suppose, 
 would allow to be "candor ;" and his book is as masterly as 
 it is crushing in its indictment against the peasant. 
 
 Is the indictment as true as it is severe and well urged? 
 I am rather afraid that we have not much farther to look 
 than at certain parts of more than one of the Three Kingdoms
 
 INTRODUCTION Xl 
 
 to see that we need not even limit ourselves to the French 
 peasant in admitting that it is. There are passages in the 
 book which read as if they might be extracts mutatis mu- 
 tandis from a novel on the Irish Land League or the Welsh 
 Anti-Tithe Agitation. To a certain extent, no doubt, the 
 English peasant, at least when he is not Celtic, is rather less 
 bitten with actual "land-hunger" than the Frenchman; and 
 even when he is a Celt, it does not seem to be so much land- 
 hunger proper as a dislike to adopting any other occupation 
 which drives him to crime. Moreover, Free Trade and other 
 things have made land in the United Kingdom very much less 
 an object of positive greed than it was in France eighty years 
 ago, or, indeed, than it is there still. Yet the main and 
 special ingredients of a land agitation the ruthless disregard 
 of life, the indifference to all considerations of gratitude or 
 justice, the secret-society alliance against the upper classes, 
 all these things are delineated here with an almost terrifying 
 veracity. 
 
 For individual and separate sketches of scenes and char- 
 acters (with the limitation above expressed) the book may 
 vie almost with the best. The partly real, partly fictitious, 
 otter-hunting of the old scoundrel Fourchon is quite first- 
 rate; and it is of a kind rarely found in French writers till 
 a time much more modern than Balzac's. The machinations 
 of Gaubertin, Sibilet, and Rigou are a little less vivid; but 
 the latter is a masterly character of the second class, and 
 perhaps the best type in fiction of the intelligent sensualist 
 of the lower rank of the man hard-headed, harder-hearted, 
 and entirely destitute of any merit but shrewdness. The 
 character of Bonnebault is a little, a very little, the- 
 atrical ; the troupier franQais debauched, but not ungenerous,
 
 rll INTRODUCTION 
 
 appears a little too much in his cartoon manner. (C La, 
 Pechina" wants fuller working out ; but she affords one of the 
 most interesting touches of the comparison above suggested 
 in the scene between her, Nicolas, and Catherine. One turns 
 a little squeamish at the mere thought of what M. Zola would 
 have made of it in the effort to make clear to the lowest ap- 
 prehension what Balzac, almost without offence, has made 
 clear to all but the very lowest. Michaud is good and not over- 
 done; and of his enemies the Tonsards enough has been 
 said. They could not be better in their effectiveness; and, 
 I am afraid, they could not be much better in their truth. 
 Here, at least, if the moral picture is grimy enough, Balzac 
 cannot, I think, be charged with having exaggerated it, while 
 he cannot be denied the credit of having presented it in ex- 
 traordinarily forcible and brilliant colors and outlines. 
 
 Les Paysans, owing to the lateness of its appearance, was 
 less pulled about than almost any other of its author's books. 
 It, or rather the first part of it, appeared under the title 
 Qui Terre a guerre a in the Presse for December 1844. Xoth- 
 ing more appeared during the author's life; but in 1855 the 
 Revue de Paris reprinted the previous portion, and finished 
 the book, and the whole was published in four volumes by 
 de Potter in the same year. 
 
 G. S.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 To M. P.-S.-B. Oavault. 
 
 "I have seen the manners of my time, and I publish these 
 letters," wrote Jean Jacques Rousseau at the beginning of his 
 "Nouvelle Helo'ise;" can I not imitate that great writer and tell 
 you that "I am studying the tendencies of my epoch, and I pub- 
 lish this work?" 
 
 So long as society inclines to exalt philanthropy into a principle 
 instead of regarding it as an accessory, this Study will be terribly 
 true to life. Its object is to set in relief the principal types of a 
 class neglected by the throng of writers in quest of new subjects. 
 This neglect, it may be, is simple prudence in days when the 
 working classes have fallen heirs to the courtiers and flatterers 
 of kings, when the criminal is the hero of romance, the heads- 
 man is sentimentally interesting, and we behold something like 
 an apotheosis of the proletariat. Sects have arisen among us, 
 every pen among them swells the chorus of "Workers, arise!" 
 even as once the Third Estate was bidden to "Arise!" It is 
 pretty plain that no Herostratus among them has had the 
 courage to go forth into remote country districts to study the 
 phenomena of a permanent conspiracy of those whom we call 
 "the weak" against those who imagine themselves to be "the 
 strong" of the Peasantry against the Rich. All that can be done 
 is to open the eyes of the legislator, not of to-day, but of to- 
 morrow. In the midst of an attack of democratic vertigo to 
 which so many blind scribes have fallen victims, is it not impera- 
 tively necessary that some one should paint the portrait of this 
 who stultifies the Code by reducing the ownership of
 
 2 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 land to a something that at once is ami is not? Here you shall 
 see this indefatigable sapper at his work, nibbling and gnawing 
 the land into little bits, carving an acre into a hundred scraps, 
 to be in turn divided, summoned to the banquet by the bourgeois, 
 who finds in him a victim and ally. Here is a social dis- 
 solvent, created by the Revolution, that will end by swallowing 
 up the bourgeoisie, which in its day, devoured the old noblesse. 
 Here is a Robespierre, with a single head and twenty million 
 hands, whose very insignificance and obscurity has put him out 
 of the reach of the law; a Robespierre always at his work, 
 crouching in every commune, enthroned in town council cham- 
 bers and bearing arms in the National Guard in every district 
 in France, for in the year 1830 France forgot that Napoleon pre- 
 ferred to run the risks of his misfortunes to the alternative of 
 arming the masses. 
 
 If during the past eight years I have a hundred times taken 
 up and laid down the most considerable piece of work which I 
 have undertaken, my friends, as you yourself, will understand 
 that courage may well falter before such difficulties, and the 
 mass of details essential to the development of a drama so 
 cruelly bloodthirsty, but among the many reasons which induce 
 something like temerity in me, count as one my desire to com- 
 plete a work destined as a token of deep and lasting gratitude 
 for a devotion which was one of my greatest consolations in mis- 
 fortune. DE BALZAC.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 He that hath the Land 
 Must fight for his own Hand. 
 
 THE CHATEAU 
 
 To M. Nathan. 
 
 "THE AIGTTES, 
 "August 6. 1823. 
 
 "Now, my dear Nathan, purveyor of dreams to the public, 
 I will set you dreaming of the actual, and you shall tell me 
 if ever this century of ours can leave a legacy of such dreams 
 to the Nathans and the Blondets of 1923. You shall measure 
 the distance we have traveled since the time when the Florines 
 of the eighteenth century awoke to find such a chateau as the 
 Aigues in their contract. 
 
 "When you get my letter in the morning, dear friend of 
 mine, from your bed will you see, fifty leagues away from 
 Paris, by the side of the highroad on the confines of Bur- 
 gundy, a pair of red brick lodges separated or united by a 
 green-painted barrier? There the coach deposited your 
 friend. 
 
 "A quick-set hedge winds away on either side of the lodge 
 gates; with trails of bramble like stray hairs escaping from 
 it, and here and there an upstart sapling. Wild flowers grow 
 along the top of the bank above the ditch bathed at their roots 
 by the stagnant green water. To right and left the hedges 
 extend as far as the coppice which skirts a double meadow, a 
 bit of cleared forest no doubt.
 
 4 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "From the dusty deserted lodges at the gates there stretches 
 a magnificent avenue of elm-trees, a century old ; the spread- 
 ing tops meet in a majestic green arched roof overhead, and 
 the road below is so overgrown with grass that .you can 
 scarcely see the ruts. The old-world look of the gate, the ven- 
 erable elm-trees, the breadth of the alleys on either side which 
 cross the avenue, prepare you to expect an almost royal 
 chateau. Before reaching the lodge I had had a look at the 
 valley of the Aigues from the top of one of the slopes which 
 we in France have the vanity to call a hill, just above the 
 village of Conches, where we changed horses for the last stage. 
 At the end the highroad makes a detour to pass through the 
 little sub-prefecture of Ville-aux-Fayes, where a nephew of 
 our friend Lupeaulx lords it over the rural population. The 
 higher slopes of the broad ridges above the river are crowned 
 by the forest which stretches along the horizon line, and the 
 whole picture is framed in the setting of the far-off hills of 
 the Morvan that miniature Switzerland. All this dense 
 forest lies in three hands. It belongs partly to the Aigues, 
 partly to the Marquis de Eonquerolles, partly to the Comte 
 de Soulanges, whose country houses, parks, and villages, seen 
 far down below in the valley, seem to be a realization of 
 'Velvet' Breughel landscape fancies. 
 
 "If these details do not put you in mind of all the castles 
 in Spain which you have longed to possess in France, this 
 wonder-struck Parisian's traveler's tale is clean thrown away 
 upon you. Briefly, I have delighted in a country where nature 
 and art blend without spoiling each other, for nature here is 
 an artist, and art looks like nature. I have found the oasis 
 of which we have dreamed so often after reading certain 
 romances; exuberant wildness subordinated to an effect, na- 
 ture left to herself without confusion, and even with a sug- 
 gestion of the wilderness, neglect, mystery ; a certain character 
 of its own. Over the barrier with you, and on we go. 
 
 "When with curious eyes I tried to look down the whole 
 length of the avenue, which the sun only penetrates at sunrise 
 and sunset, drawing zebra markings of shadow across it when
 
 THE PEASANTRY 3 
 
 the light is low, my view was cut short by the outline of a bit 
 of rising ground. The avenue makes a detour to avoid it, 
 and when you have turned the corner, the long row of trees 
 is interrupted again by a little wood ; you enter a square with 
 a stone obelisk standing erect in the midst like an eternal note 
 of admiration. Purple or yellow flowers (according to the 
 time of year) droop from the courses of the masonry, and 
 the monolith itself is surmounted (what a notion!) by a 
 spiked ball. Clearly it was a woman who designed the Aigues, 
 a man does not have such coquettish fancies. The architect 
 acted upon instructions. 
 
 "Beyond the little wood, posted there like a sentinel, I came 
 out into a delicious dip of the land, and crossed a foaming 
 stream by a single span stone bridge covered with mosses of 
 glorious hues, the daintiest of time's mosaics. Then the ave- 
 nue ascends a gentle slope above the course of the stream, and 
 in the distance you see the first set picture a mill with its 
 weir and causeway nestled among green trees. There was 
 the thatched roof of the miller's house, the ducks and drying 
 linen, the nets and tackle, and well-boat, to say nothing of 
 the miller's lad, who had been gazing at me before I set eyes 
 on him. Wherever you may be in the country, sure though 
 you feel that you are quite alone, you are the cynosure of 
 some pair of eyes under a cotton night-cap. Some laborer 
 drops his hoe to look at you, some vine-dresser straightens 
 his bent back, some little maid leaves her goats, or cows, or 
 sheep, and scrambles up a willow tree to watch your move- 
 ments. 
 
 "Before long the elm avenue becomes an alley, shaded by 
 acacias, which brings you to a gate belonging to the. period 
 when wrought iron was twisted into aerial filigree work, not 
 unlike a writing-master's specimen flourishes; this Avenue 
 gate, as it is called, reveals the taste of the Grand Dauphin 
 who built it ; and if the golden arabesques are somewhat red- 
 dened now by the rust beneath, it seemed to me to be none 
 the less picturesque on that account. On either side it is 
 flanked by a porter's lodge, after the manner of the palace
 
 6 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 at Versailles, each surmounted by a colossal urn. A ha-ha 
 fence, bristling with spikes most formidable to behold, ex- 
 tends for some, distance on either side, and when the ha-ha 
 ends a rough unplastered wall begins, a wall of motley-colored 
 stones of the strangest conceivable shapes, embedded in red- 
 dish-colored mortar, the warm yellow of the flints blending 
 with the white chalk and red-brown gritstone. 
 
 "At first sight the park looks sombre, for the walls are 
 hidden by climbing plants, and the trees have not heard the 
 sound of an axe for fifty years. You might think that it had 
 become virgin forest again by some strange miracle known 
 to woods alone. The plants that cling about the tree-trunks 
 have bound them together. Glistening mistletoe-berries 
 hang from every fork in the branches where the rain-water 
 can lie. There I have found giant ivy-stems, and such 
 growths as can only exist at a distance of fifty leagues from 
 Paris, where land is not too dear to afford them ample room. 
 It takes a good many square miles to make such a landscape 
 as this. There is no sort of trimness about it, no sign of the 
 garden rake. The ruts are full of water, where the frogs 
 increase and multiply, and the tadpoles abide in peace; deli- 
 cate forest flowers grow there, the heather is as fine as any 
 that I have seen by the hearth in January in Florine's elabo- 
 rate flower-stand. The mystery of the place mounts to your 
 brain and stirs vague longings. The scent of the forest is 
 adored by all lovers of poetry, for all things in it the most 
 harmless mosses, the deadliest lurking growths, damp earth, 
 water-willows, and balm and wild thyme, and the yellow stars 
 of the water-lilies, all the teeming vigorous growth of the 
 forest yields itself to me in the breath of the forest, and 
 brings me the thought of them all, perhaps the soul of them 
 all. I fell to thinking of a rose-colored dress flitting along 
 the winding alley. 
 
 "It ended abruptly at last in a little wood full of tremulous 
 birches and poplars and their quivering kind, sensitive to the 
 wind, slender-stemmed, graceful of growth, the trees of free 
 love. And then, my dear fellow, I saw a sheet of water cov-
 
 THE PEASANTRY T 
 
 ered with pond-lilies, and a light nutshell of a boat, painted 
 black and white, dainty as a Seine waterman's craft, lying 
 rotting among the leaves of the water-plants, broad and 
 spreading, or delicate and fine. 
 
 "Beyond the water rises the chateau, which bears the date 
 1560. It is a red brick building with stone facings, and 
 string courses and angles all of stone. The casements (oh! 
 Versailles) still keep their tiny square window panes. The 
 stone of the string courses is cut into pyramids alternately 
 raised and depressed, as on the Eenaissance front of the 
 Ducal Palace. The chateau is a straggling building, with 
 the exception of the main body, which is approached by an 
 imposing double stone staircase ascending in parallel lines 
 and turning halfway up at right angles. The round balusters 
 are flattened at the thickest part, and taper towards the bot- 
 tom. To this main body various turrets have been added, 
 covered with lead in floral designs, and modern wings with 
 balconies and urns more or less in the Grecian style. There 
 is no symmetry about it, my dear fellow. The buildings are 
 dotted down quite promiscuously nests sheltered, as it were, 
 by a few trees. Their leafage scatters countless brown needles 
 over the roof, a deposit of soil for the moss to grow in, filling 
 the great rifts, which attract the eyes, with plant life. Here 
 there is stone-pine, with rusty red bark and umbrella-shaped 
 top, there a cedar a couple of centuries old, a spruce-fir, or 
 weeping-willows, or an oak-tree rising above these, and (in 
 front of the principal turret) the 'most outlandish-looking 
 shrubs, clipped yews to set you thinking of some old French 
 pleasance long since swept away, and hortensias and mag- 
 nolias at their feet ; in fact, it is a sort of horticultural pen- 
 sioner's hospital, where trees that have had their day linger 
 on, forgotten like other heroes. 
 
 "A quaintly-carved chimney at the house angle, puffing out 
 volumes of smoke, assured me that this charming view was 
 no scene on the stage. If there was a kitchen, human beings 
 lived there. Can you imagine me, Blondet, the Parisian who 
 thinks he has come to the Arctic regions when he finds himself
 
 8 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 at Saint-Cloud, set down in the midst of that torrid zone of 
 Burgundian landscape? The sun beats down in scorching 
 rays, the kingfisher keeps to the brink of the pool, the cicadas 
 chirp, the grasshoppers cry, the seed-vessels of some plant 
 crack here and there, the poppies distil their opiate in thick 
 tears, everything stands out sharp and clear against the dark- 
 blue sky. Joyous fumes of Nature's punch mount up from 
 the reddish earth on the garden terraces ; insects and flowers 
 are drunk with the vapor that burns our faces and scorches 
 our eyes. The grapes are rounding, the vines wearing a net- 
 work of pale threads so fine that it puts laceworkers to the 
 blush; and (a final touch) all along the terrace, in front of 
 the house, blaze the blue larkspurs, nasturtiums the color of 
 flame, and sweet-peas. The scent of tuberose and orange 
 blossoms comes from a distance. The forest fragrance which 
 stirred my imagination prepared me for the pungent per- 
 fumes burning in this flower-seraglio. 
 
 "Then, at the head of the stone staircase, imagine a woman 
 like a queen of flowers, a woman dressed in white, holding 
 a sunshade lined with white silk above her bare head, a woman 
 whiter than the silk, whiter than the lilies at her feet, or the 
 starry jessamine thrusting itself up boldly through the balus- 
 trade before her; a Frenchwoman born in Eussia, who says, 
 'I had quite given you up !' She had seen me ever since the 
 turning in the path. How perfectly any woman, even the 
 simplest of her sex, understands and adapts herself to a 
 situation. The servants were busy preparing breakfast, evi- 
 dently delayed till the diligence should arrive. She had not 
 ventured to come to meet me. 
 
 "What is this but our dream? the dream of all lovers of 
 Beauty in its many forms beauty as of seraphs in a Luini's 
 Marriage of the Virgin at Sarono, beauty that a Rubens dis- 
 covers in the press of the fight in his Battle of Thermodon, 
 beauty that five centuries have elaborated in the cathedrals 
 of Milan and Seville, beauty of Saracen Granada, beauty of 
 a Louis Quatorze's Versailles, beauty of the Alps beauty of 
 La Limagne?
 
 THE PEASANTRY 9 
 
 "Here there is nothing overmuch of prince or financier, 
 but prince of the blood and farmer-general have dwelt at the 
 Aigues, or it would not include two thousand acres of wood- 
 land, a park nine hundred acres in extent, the mill, three little 
 holdings, a large farm at Conches, and the vineyards belong- 
 ing to the estate, which must bring in seventy-two thousand 
 francs every year. Such is the Aigues, dear boy, whither I 
 have come on an invitation of two years' standing, and here 
 I write at this moment in the Blue Chamber the room kept 
 for intimate friends of the house. 
 
 "At the high end of the park there are a dozen springs 
 of clear and limpid water from the Morvan, flowing in 
 liquid ribbons down through the park in the valley, and 
 through the magnificent gardens to pour into the pool. These 
 have given the Aigues its name ; Jjes Aigues- Vives, the living 
 water, it used to be on old title-deeds, in contradistinction to 
 Les Aigues-Mortes, the dead water, but Vives has been sup- 
 pressed. The pool empties itself into the little river that 
 crosses the avenue, through a narrow, willow-fringed channel. 
 The effect of the channel thus decked is charming. As you 
 glide along it in a boat, you might fancy yourself in the nave 
 of some vast cathedral, with the main body of the house at the 
 further end of the channel to represent the choir; and if the 
 sunset sheds its orange hues, barred with shadow, across the 
 front of the chateau and lights up the panes, it seems to you 
 that you see the fiery stained-glass windows. At the end of 
 the channel you see Blangy, the principal village in the 
 commune, which boasts some sixty houses and a country 
 church ; or, strictly speaking, this is simply an ordinary house 
 in shocking repair, and distinguished from the rest by a 
 wooden steeple roofed with broken tiles. A decent private 
 house and a parsonage are likewise distinguishable. 
 
 "The commune is, for all that, a fairly large one. There 
 are some two hundred scattered hearths in it, besides those 
 in the little market town itself. There are fruit-trees along 
 the wayside, and the land is cut up here and there into gar- 
 dens, regular laborers' gardens, where everything is crowded
 
 10 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 into a little space,, flowers, and onions, and cabbages, and 
 vines, and gooseberry-bushes, and a great many dung-heaps. 
 The village itself has an unsophisticated air; it looks rustic, 
 with that very tidy simplicity which painters prize so highly. 
 And further away, quite in the distance, you see the little 
 town of Soulanges on the edge of a large sheet of water, like 
 an imitation Lake of Thun. 
 
 "When you walk here in the park, with its four gates each 
 in the grand style, you find your Arcadia of mythology grow 
 flat as Beauce. The real Arcadia is in Burgundy, and not 
 in Greece; Arcadia is the Aigues, and nowhere els f e. The 
 little streams have united to make the river that winds along 
 the lowest grounds of the park, hence the cool stillness peculiar 
 to it, and the appearance of loneliness that puts you in mind 
 of the Chartreuse, an idea carried out by a hermitage on an 
 island contrived in the midst ; without, it looks like a ruin in 
 good earnest ; within, its elegance is worthy of the taste of the 
 sybarite-financier who planned it. 
 
 "The Aigues, my dear fellow, once belonged to that Bouret 
 who spent two millions on a single occasion when Louis XV. 
 came here. How many stormy passions, distinguished intel- 
 lects, and lucky circumstances have combined to make this 
 beautiful place what it is. One of Henri IV. 's mistresses 
 rebuilt the present chateau, and added the forest to the estate. 
 Then the chateau was given to Mile. Choin, a favorite of the 
 Grand Dauphin, and she too enlarged the Aigues by several 
 farms. Bouret fitted up the house with all the refinements 
 of luxury to be found in the snug Parisian paradises of 
 operatic celebrities. It was Bouret, too, who restored the 
 ground-floor rooms in the style of Louis XV. 
 
 "The dining-hall struck me dumb with wonder. Your eyes 
 are attracted first to the fantastic arabesques of the ceiling, 
 which is covered with frescoes in the Italian manner. Stucco 
 women terminating in leafage bear baskets of fruit, from 
 which the foliage of the ceiling springs. On the wall spaces 
 between the figures some unknown artists painted wonderful 
 designs, all the glories of the table ; salmon, and boars' heads,
 
 THE PEASANTRY 11 
 
 and shell-fish, and every edible thing that by any strange 
 freak of resemblance can recall the human form man, wo- 
 man, or child; for whimsicality of invention the designer 
 might rival the Chinese, who, to my thinking, best under- 
 stand decorative art. A spring is set under the table in the 
 floor by the chair of the mistress of the house, so that she 
 may touch the bell with her foot to summon the servants 
 without interrupting the conversation or disturbing her pose. 
 Paintings of voluptuous scenes are set above the doors. All 
 the embrasures are of marble mosaic, and the hall is warmed 
 from beneath. From every window there is a delicious view. 
 
 "The dining-hall communicates with a bathroom on the 
 one hand, and a boudoir on the other. The bathroom is lined 
 with Sevres tiles, painted in monochrome, after Boucher's 
 designs; the floor is paved with mosaic; the bath itself with 
 marble. In an alcove, screened by a painting on copper, 
 raised by means of pulleys and a counterpoise, there is a couch 
 of gilded wood in the very height of the Pompadour style. 
 The lapis blue ceiling is spangled with golden stars. In this 
 way the bath, the table, and the loves are brought together. 
 
 "Beyond the salon, in all the glory of the style of Louis 
 XIV., is the splendid billiard-room. I do not know that it 
 has its match in Paris. At the further end of the semi- 
 circular entrance-hall, the finest and daintiest of staircases, 
 lighted from above, leads to the various suites of apartments, 
 built in different centuries. And yet, my dear fellow, they 
 cut off the heads of farmers-general in 1793 ! Good heavens ! 
 why cannot people understand that miracles of art are impos- 
 sible without great fortunes and lordly lives of secure tran- 
 quillity. If the Opposition must needs put kings to death, 
 they might leave us a few petty princes to keep up insignifi- 
 cant great state. 
 
 "At the present day these accumulated treasures are in the 
 keeping of a little woman with an artist's temperament. 
 Not content with restoring the place on a large scale, she 
 makes a labor of love of their custody. Philosophers, falsely 
 so called, who are wholly taken up with themselves, while 
 
 VOL. 10 27
 
 12 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 apparently interested in Humanity, call these pretty things 
 extravagances. They will swoon away before a spinning- 
 jenny, and wax faint with bliss over tiresome modern indus- 
 trial inventions, as if we of to-day were any greater or any 
 happier than they of the time of Henry IV., of Louis XIV., of 
 Louis XVI.,who set their seal upon this chateau of the Aigues. 
 What palace, what royal chateau, what houses, or works of art, 
 or golden brocaded stuffs, shall we leave behind us ? We rum- 
 mage out our grandmothers' petticoats to cover our arm- 
 chairs. Like knavish and selfish life-tenants, we pull every- 
 thing down that we may plant cabbages where marvelous 
 palaces stood. But yesterday the plough went over the do- 
 main of Persan, whence one of the richest families of the 
 Parliament of Paris took its name; Montmorency has fallen 
 under the hammer Montmorency, on which one of the Ital- 
 ians about Napoleon spent incredible sums; then there is Le 
 Val, the work of Eegnaud de Saint- Jean-d'Angely ; and Cas- 
 san, built by the mistress of a Prince of Conti; four royal 
 dwelling-places in all destroyed quite lately in the valley of 
 the Oise alone. We are making ready a Roman Campagna 
 about Paris for the morrow of a coming sack, when the storm- 
 wind from the North shall blow upon our plaster villas and 
 pasteboard ornaments and . . . 
 
 "Now, just see, my dear fellow, what comes of the habit 
 of writing journalists' padding. Here am I, rounding off 
 a sort of article for you. Can it be that the mind, like a 
 highway, has its ruts? I will pull myself up at once, for I 
 am robbing them at the office, and robbing myself, and, prob- 
 ably, to make you yawn. There goes the second bell for one 
 of those abundant breakfasts, long fallen into disuse, in the 
 ordinary way, of course, in Parisian houses. You shall have 
 the rest of this to-morrow. 
 
 "Now for the history of my Arcadia. In 1815 there died 
 at the Aigues one of the most celebrated impures of last cen- 
 tury, an opera singer, overlooked by the guillotine, and for- 
 gotten by the aristocracy, literature, and finance; intimate 
 as she had been with finance, literature, and the aristocracy,
 
 THE PEASANTRY 13 
 
 and on a bowing acquaintance with the guillotine, she had 
 fallen into neglect, like many charming old ladies, who ex- 
 piate the triumphs of youth in the country, and take a new 
 love for a lost love, nature replacing human nature. Such 
 women live with the flowers, the scent of the woods, the open 
 sky, and the light of the sun, with everything that sings, or 
 flutters, or shines, or springs from the earth ; birds, or lizards, 
 or blossoms, or grass. They know nothing about these things ; 
 they do not seek to explain it, but they have a capacity for 
 loving left in age; and so well do they love, that dukes and 
 marshals, old jealousies and bickerings, and farmers-general, 
 and their follies and luxurious extravagance, and paste gems 
 and diamonds, and rouge and high-heeled pantofles, are all 
 forgotten for the sweets of a country life. 
 
 "I am in the possession of valuable information which 
 throws a light on Mile. Laguerre's later life; for I have felt 
 rather uncomfortable now and again about the old age of such 
 as Florine, and Mariette, and Suzanne du Val-Noble, and 
 Tullia, just like any child who puzzles his wits to know where 
 all the old moons go. 
 
 "Mile. Laguerre took fright in 1790 at the turn things were 
 taking, and came to settle down at the Aigues, which Bouret 
 had bought for her (he spent several summers here with her). 
 The fate of the du Barry put her in such a quaking that she 
 buried her diamonds. She was only fifty-three years old at 
 the time, and, according to her woman (who has married a 
 gendarme here, a Mme. Soudry, whom they call Mme. la 
 Mairesse, a piece of brazen-fronted flattery), 'Madame was 
 handsomer than ever.' Nature, my dear fellow, has her rea- 
 sons for what she does, no doubt, when she treats these 
 creatures as pet children ; debauchery does not kill them ; 
 on the contrary, they thrive, and flourish, and renew their 
 youth upon it ; lympathic though they look, they have nerves 
 which sustain their marvelous framework, and bloom peren- 
 nially from a cause which would make a virtuous woman hid- 
 eous. Decidedly, Fate is not a moral agent. 
 
 "Mile. Laguerre's life here was above reproach, nay, might
 
 14 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 it not almost be classed with the Lives of the Saints, after 
 that famous adventure of hers? One evening, driven dis- 
 tracted by hopeless love, she fled from the Opera in her stage 
 costume, and spent the night in weeping by the roadside out 
 in the fields (how we have slandered love in the time of Louis 
 XV. ! ) . The dawn was so unwonted a sight to her, that she 
 sang her sweetest airs to greet it. Some peasants gathered 
 about her, attracted as much by her pose as by her tinsel frip- 
 peries, and amazed by her gestures, her beauty, and her sing- 
 ing, they one and all took her for an angel, and fell upon their 
 knees. But for Voltaire, there would have been another mir- 
 acle at Bagnolet. 
 
 "I know not whether Heaven will give much credit to this 
 sinner for her tardy virtue, for a life of pleasure becomes 
 loathsome to one so palled with pleasure as a wanton of the 
 stage of the time of Louis XV. Mile. Laguerre was born in 
 1740. She was in the full bloom of her beauty in 1760, when 
 
 they nicknamed M. de (the name escapes me) Ministre 
 
 de la guerre, on account of his liaison with her. 
 
 "She changed her name, which was quite unknown in the 
 country, called herself Mme. des Aigues, the better to bury 
 herself in the district, and amused herself by keeping up her 
 estate with extremely artistic taste. When Bonaparte became 
 First Consul, she rounded off her property with some of the 
 Church lands, selling her diamonds to buy them; and as an 
 opera-girl is scarcely fitted to shine in the management of 
 estates, she left the land to her steward, and devoted her per- 
 sonal attention to her park, her fruit-trees, and her flower- 
 garden. 
 
 "Mademoiselle being dead and buried at Blangy, the notary 
 from Soulanges (the little place between Ville-aux-Fayes and 
 Blangy) made an exhaustive inventory, and in course of time 
 discovered the famous singer's next-of-kin; she herself knew 
 nothing about them; but eleven families, poor agricultural 
 laborers, living near Amiens, lay down in rags one night, and 
 woke up next morning in sheets of gold. 
 
 "The Aigues had to be sold, of course, and Montcornet
 
 THE PEASANTRY 15 
 
 bought it. In various posts in Spain and Pomerania he 
 had managed to save the requisite amount, something like 
 eleven hundred thousand francs. The furniture was in- 
 cluded in the purchase. It seems as if the fine place must 
 always belong to some one in the War Department, Doubt- 
 less, the General was not insensible to the luxurious influences 
 of his ground-floor apartments, and in talking to the Count- 
 ess yesterday I insisted that the Aigues had determined his 
 marriage. 
 
 "If you are to appreciate the Countess, my dear fellow, you 
 must know that the General is choleric in temper, sanguine 
 in complexion, and stands five feet nine inches; is round as 
 a barrel, bull-necked, and the owner of a pair of shoulders 
 for which a smith might forge a model cuirass. Montcornet 
 commanded a company of Cuirassiers at Essling (called by 
 the Austrians Gross- Aspern), and did not lose his life when 
 his magnificent cavalry was pushed back into the Danube. 
 Man and horse managed to cross the river on a huge beam of 
 wood. The Cuirassiers, finding that the bridge was broken, 
 turned like heroes when Montcornet gave the word, and stood 
 their ground against the whole Austrian army. They took 
 up more than thirty cartloads of cuirasses next day on the 
 field, and among themselves the Germans coined a special 
 nickname for the Cuirassiers those 'men of iron.'* 
 
 *I set my face on principle against footnotes ; but the present one, the first which 
 I have permitted myself, may be excused on the score of its historical interest. It 
 will show, moreover, that battle scenes have yet to be described in other than the 
 dry technical language of military writers, who, for three thousand years, can speak 
 of nothing but right wings, left wings, and centres more or less routed, but say not 
 a word of the soldier, his heroism, and his hardships. The conscientious manner 
 in which I am setting about the Scenes dela vie militaire has meant a series of visits 
 to every battlefield at home or abroad watered by French blood, so I determined to 
 see the field of Wagram. As I reached the bank of the Danube opposite Lobau, I 
 noticed ribbed marks under the soft grass, something like the furrows in a field of 
 luzern, and asked the peasant, our guide, about this new system of agriculture (for 
 so I took it to be). " That is where the Cuirassiers of the Imperial Guard are lying," 
 he said; " they are buried under those mounds that you see." The words sent a 
 shiver through me; and Prince Friedrich von Schwartzenberg, who interpreted 
 them, added that this very peasant had driven the train of carts full of the cuirasses 
 of the dead, and that by one of the grotesque accidents of war it was the same man 
 who prepared Napoleon's breakfast on the morning of the battle. Poor though he
 
 16 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Montcornet looks like a hero of ancient times. He has 
 strong muscular arms, a broad resonant chest, a head strik- 
 ing from its leonine character, and a voice that can sound 
 the command to 'Charge!' above the din of battle; but his is 
 the courage of a sanguine temperament unreasoning and 
 uncalculating. Montcornet is an awe-inspiring figure at first 
 sight, like many another general whom the soldier's common- 
 sense, the wariness of a man who continually takes his life 
 in his hand, and the habit of command seemingly raise above 
 other men. You take him for a Titan, but he harbors a dwarf 
 in him, like the pasteboard giant who greeted Queen Eliza- 
 beth at the gate of Kenilworth Castle. Choleric and kind, 
 full of the pride of the Empire, he has the caustic tongue 
 of a soldier,, quick with a word, quicker still with a blow. 
 The man who made so grand a figure on the battlefield be- 
 comes unbearable in domestic life, all his ideas of love were 
 learned in the camp, his is that soldiers' love for whom the 
 ancients (ingenious makers of myths) discovered a tutelary 
 deity in Eros offspring of Mars and Venus. Those delicious 
 
 was, he had kept the double napoleon which the Emperor had given him for his 
 eggs and milk. The cure of Gross- Aspern showed us over the famous cemetery 
 where Frenchmen and Austrians foufjht in blood halfway to the knee with courage 
 equally obstinate and equally splendid on either side. But there was a marble tab- 
 let in the place on which we concentrated our whole attention, the cur6 explaining 
 how that it was erected to the memory of the owner of Gross-Aspern, killed on the 
 third day of the fight, and that it was the only return made to the family. Then he 
 said, with deep sadness in his tones, " That was a time of great misery ; a time of 
 great promises; but now to-day is the day of forgetfulness. ..." The words 
 seemed to me to be grandly simple ; but when I had thought the matter over, the 
 apparent ingratitude of the House of Austria seemed to me to be justifiable. Neither 
 peoples nor kings are rich enough to reward all the devotion shown in the hour of 
 supreme struggle. Let those who serve a cause with a lurking thought of reward 
 set a price on their blood, and turn condot fieri .' Those who handle sword or pen for 
 their country should think of nothing but how to "play the man," as our fore- 
 fathers used to say, and accept nothing, not even glory itself, save as a lucky 
 accident. 
 
 Three times they stormed that famous cemetery ; the third time Masse'na made 
 his famous address to his men from the roach-body in which they carried the 
 Wounded hero, " You've five sous a day, you blackguards, and I've forty millions ; 
 and you let me go in front !" Every one knows the order of the day that the 
 Emperor sent to his lieutenant by M. de Sainte-Croix, who swam the Danube three 
 times, " Die, or take the village again ; the existence of the Army is at stake ; thj 
 bridges are broken." THE AUTHOR.
 
 THE PEASANTRY If 
 
 religious chroniclers admit half a score of different Loves. 
 Make a study of the paternity and attributes of each, and you 
 will provide yourself with a social nomenclature of the com- 
 pletest kind. We imagine that we invent this or that, do we ? 
 When the globe, like a dreaming sick man, turns again 
 through another cycle, and our continents become oceans, the 
 Frenchman of the coming time will find a steam-engine, a 
 cannon, a copy of a daily paper, and a charter, lying wrapped 
 about with weeds at the bottom of our present Atlantic. 
 
 "Now, the Countess, my dear boy, is a little woman, fragile 
 and delicate and timid. What say you to this marriage ? Any 
 one who knows the world, knows that this sort of thing hap- 
 pens so often that a well-assorted marriage is an exception. 
 I came here to see how this tiny slender woman holds the 
 leading strings; for she has this huge, tall, square-built Gen- 
 eral of hers quite as well in hand as ever he kept his Cuiras- 
 siers. 
 
 "If Montcornet raises his voice before his Virginie, madame 
 lays her finger on her lips, and he holds his tongue. The old 
 soldier goes to smoke his pipe or cigar in a summer-house 
 fifty paces away from the chateau, and .perfumes himself be- 
 fore he comes back. He is proud of his subjection. If any- 
 thing is suggested, he turns to her, like a bear infatuated for 
 grapes, with 'That is as madame pleases.' He comes to his 
 wife's room, the paved floor creaking like boards under his 
 heavy tread ; and if she cries in a startled voice, 'Do not come 
 in !' he describes a right wheel in military fashion, meekly re- 
 marking, 'You will let me know when I may come and speak 
 to you . . . ' and this from the voice that roared to his 
 cuirassiers on the banks of the Danube, 'Boys, there is noth- 
 ing for it but to die, and to die handsomely, since there is 
 nothing else to be done !' A touching little thing I once heard 
 him say of his wife, 'I not only love her, I reverence her.' 
 Sometimes, in one of his fits of rage, when his wrath knows 
 no bounds, and pours out in torrents that carry all before it, 
 the little woman goes to her room and leaves him to storm. 
 But four or five days later she will say, 'Don't put yourself
 
 18 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 in a passion, you will break a blood-vessel on your lungs, to 
 say nothing of the pain it gives me/ and the Lion of Essling 
 takes to flight to dry the tears in his eyes. If he comes into 
 the salon when we are deep in conversation, 'Leave us,' she 
 says, 'he is reading something to me,' and the General goes. 
 
 "None but strong men, great-natured and hot-tempered, 
 among these thunderbolts of battle, diplomates with Olympian 
 brows and men of genius, are capable of these courses of con- 
 fidence, of generosity for weakness, of constant protection 
 and love without jealousy, of this bonhomie with a woman. 
 Faith ! I rate the Countess' science as far above crabbed and 
 peevish virtues as the satin of a settee above the Utrecht vel- 
 vet of a dingy back parlor sofa. 
 
 "Six days have I spent in this admirable country, dear fel- 
 low, and I am not tired yet of admiring the wonders of this 
 park land with the dark forests rising above it, and the paths 
 beside the streams. Everything here fascinates me Nature, 
 and the stillness of Nature, quiet enjoyment, the easy life 
 which Nature offers. Ah ! here is real literature, there are 
 never defects of style in a meadow; and complete fyappiness 
 would be complete forgetfulness even of the Debats. 
 
 "You ought not to need to be told that we have had two wet 
 mornings. While the Countess slept, and Montcornet 
 tramped over his property, driven to keep the promise so 
 rashly given, I have been writing to you. 
 
 "Hitherto, though I was born in Alengon, the son of an 
 old justice and a prefect (if what they tell me is true), 
 though I am something of a judge of grass land, I had heard 
 of such things as estates that brought in four or five thousand 
 francs a month, but I regarded these as idle tales. Money, 
 for me, has but four hideous convertible terms work, book- 
 sellers, journalism, and politics. When shall we have an es- 
 tate where money grows out of the earth, in some pretty place 
 in the country ? That is what I wish you in the name of the 
 theatre, the press, and literature. Amen ! 
 
 "How Florine will envy the lamented Mile. Laguerre ! Our 
 modern Bourets have lost the old French lordly instinct which
 
 THE PEASANTRY 19 
 
 taught them how to live ; they will club three together to take 
 a box at the Opera, and go shares in a pleasure ; no longer do 
 they cut down magnificently bound quartos to match the 
 octavos on their shelves. It is as much as they will do to buy 
 a book in paper covers. What are we coming to ? Good-bye, 
 children ; keep your benign Blondet in loving remembrance/' 
 
 If this letter, which dropped from the idlest pen in France, 
 had not been preserved by a miraculous chance, it would be all 
 but impossible now to describe the Aigues as it used to be, 
 and without this description the twice tragical tale of the 
 events which took place there would perhaps be less interest- 
 ing. 
 
 Plenty of people expect, no doubt, to see the General's 
 cuirass lighted up by a lightning flash, to see his wrath kin- 
 dled, his fury descend like a waterspout on this little woman, 
 in fact, to find the usual curtain scene of melodrama a trag- 
 edy in a bedroom. How should this modern tragedy .develop 
 itself in the pretty salon beyond the bluish enameled door- 
 ways, garrulous with mythological loves ? Strange bright birds 
 were painted over the ceiling and the shutters; china mon- 
 sters were splitting their sides with laughter on the mantel- 
 shelf; the blue dragons played on the rich vases, twisting 
 their tails in spiral scrolls along the rim which some Japanese 
 artist enameled with a maze of color to please his fancy, and 
 the very chairs, lounges, sofas, console tables, and stands 
 dwelt in an atmosphere of contemplative idleness enervating 
 to body and mind. No; this tragedy extends beyond the 
 sphere of domestic life, it is played out upon a higher or 
 a lower stage. Do not look for passion here ; the bare truth 
 will only be too dramatic. And the historian moreover should 
 never forget that it is his duty to allot to each his part ; that 
 the rich and the poor are equal before his pen; and for him 
 the figure of the peasant has the greatness of his miseries, 
 the rich man the pettiness of his absurdities. After all, the 
 rich have passions, the peasant knows nothing beyond natural 
 cravings, and therefore the peasant's lot is doubly poor ; and if
 
 20 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 it is a political necessity, that his aggressions should be 
 sternly checked, from a human and religious point of view he 
 should be treated reverently. 
 
 II 
 
 A BUCOLIC OVERLOOKED BY VIRGIL 
 
 WHEN a Parisian drops down into some country place, 
 and finds himself cut off from all his accustomed ways, he 
 soon finds time hang heavily on his hands in spite of the ut- 
 most ingenuity on the part of his entertainers. Indeed, your 
 host and hostess being aware that the pleasures of a tete-a- 
 tete (by nature fugitive) cannot endure for ever, will tell 
 you placidly that "you will find it very dull here;" and, in 
 fact, any one who wishes to know the delights of a life in the 
 country must have some interest to keep him in the coun- 
 try, must know its toils and the alternations of pain and pleas- 
 ure that make up harmony the eternal symbol of human 
 life. 
 
 When the visitor has recovered from the effects of the jour- 
 ney, made up arrears of slumber, and has fallen in with coun- 
 try ways of life, a Parisian who is neither a sportsman nor a 
 farmer, and wears thin walking shoes, is apt to discover that 
 the early morning hours pass slowest of all. The women are 
 still asleep or at their toilettes, and invisible until breakfast 
 time; the master of the house went out early to see after his 
 affairs; and from eight o'clock till eleven therefore (for in 
 nearly all chateaux they breakfast at that hour) a Parisian 
 is left to his own society. He seeks amusement in the small 
 details of his toilet, a short-lived expedient; and unless a 
 man of letters has brought down with him some bit of work 
 (which he finds impossible to do, and takes back to town un- 
 touched, and with no added knowledge of it save of the diffi- 
 culties at the outset), he is reduced to pace the alleys in the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 21 
 
 park, to gape and gaze and count the tree trunks. The 
 easier a life is, the more irksome it grows, unless you happen 
 to belong to the Shaker community, or to the worshipful com- 
 pany of carpenters or bird-stuffers. 
 
 If, like the landowners, you were to remain in the country 
 for the rest of your days, you would provide your tedium with 
 some hobby geological, mineralogical, botanical, or what 
 not; but no sensible man will contract a vice that may last 
 through his life for the sake of killing time for a fortnight. 
 The most magnificent country-house soon becomes wearisome 
 to those who own nothing of it but the view; the beauties of 
 nature seem very paltry compared with the theatrical repre- 
 sentations of them, and Parisian life sparkles from every 
 facet. If a man is not under the particular spell which keeps 
 him attached (like Blondet) to spots honored by her footsteps 
 and lighted by her eyes, he is fit to envy the birds their wings, 
 that so he may return to the ceaseless and thrilling dramatic 
 spectacle of Paris, and its harrowing struggles for existence. 
 
 From the length of the journalist's letter, any shrewd ob- 
 server should guess that the writer had mentally and physi- 
 cally reached that peculiar phase of repletion consequent on 
 satisfied desire and glut of happiness, which is perfectly illus- 
 trated by the state of the domestic fowl, when, fattened by 
 force, with head declining upon a too protuberant crop, the 
 victim stands planted on both feet, unable and unwilling to 
 give so much as a glance to the most tempting morsel. When, 
 therefore, Blondet had finished his formidable letter, he felt 
 a longing to go beyond the bounds of this Armida's Garden, 
 to find anything to enliven the deadly dulness of the early 
 hours of the day, for between breakfast and dinner he spent 
 his time with his hostess, who knew how to make it pass 
 quickly. 
 
 Mme. de Montcornet had kept a clever man a whole month 
 in the country, and had not seen the feigned smile of satiety 
 on his face, nor detected the incipient yawn of boredom which 
 can never be concealed. This is one of a woman's greatest 
 triumphs. An affection proof against such tests should last
 
 22 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 for ever. Why women do not put their lovers on a trial which 
 neither fool nor egoist nor narrow nature can abide, is utterly 
 incomprehensible. Philip II. himself, that Alexander of dis- 
 simulation, would have begun to blab his secrets after a 
 month's tete-a-tete in the country. For which reason, kings 
 spend their lives in a perpetual bustle and racket, and never 
 allow anybody to see them for more than a quarter of an hour 
 at a time. 
 
 Yet notwithstanding the delicate attentions of one of the 
 most charming women in Paris, Emile Blondet played truant 
 with a relish long forgotten. The day when his letter was 
 finished he told Frangois (the head-servant, specially ap- 
 pointed to wait upon him) to call him early. He had made 
 up his mind to explore the valley of the Avonne. 
 
 The Avonne at its head is a small river. Many streams that 
 rise round about the Aigues go to swell it below Conches, and 
 at Ville-aux-Fayes it joins one of the largest affluents of the 
 Seine. The Avonne is navigable for rafts for four leagues; 
 Jean Eouvet's invention has given all their commercial value 
 to the forests of Aigues, Soulanges, and Eonquerolles, on the 
 heights above the picturesque river. The park of the Aigues 
 takes up most of the valley between the river that flows below 
 the wooded heights on either side, called the Forest of the 
 Aigues, and the king's highway, mapped out on the horizon 
 by a line of old warped elm-trees running parallel with the 
 hills (so called) of the Avonne, the lowest steps of the grand 
 amphitheatre of the Morvan. 
 
 To use a homely metaphor, the shape of the park was some- 
 thing like a huge fish lying in the valley bottom, with the head 
 at Conches and the tail at Blangy, the length much exceeding 
 the breadth, and the broadest part in the middle full five times 
 the width of the valley at Blangy, or six times the width at 
 Conches. Possibly the lie of the land, thus set among three 
 villages (Soulanges, whence you plunge down into this Eden, 
 being but a league away), may have assisted to foment dis- 
 cord, and suggested the excesses which form the chief subject 
 of this Scene; for if passing travelers look down on the para-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 23 
 
 clise of the Aigues from Ville-aux-Fayes with envious eyes, 
 how should the well-to-do townsfolk of Soulanges and Ville- 
 aux-Fayes feel less covetous when they behold it every day of 
 their lives ? . 
 
 This last bit of topographical detail is needed if the posi- 
 tion is to be understood, as well as the why and wherefore of 
 four park gates at the Aigues; for the whole park was shut 
 in by walls, save where a ha-ha fence had been substituted 
 for the sake of the view. The four gates, called respectively 
 the Conches gate, the Avonne, the Avenue, and Blangy gates, 
 were so full of the character of the different times in which 
 they were built, that they shall be described in their place for 
 the benefit of archaeologists ; but the subject shall receive the 
 concise treatment which Blondet gave to the avenue itself. 
 
 For a week the illustrious editor of the Journal des Debats 
 had taken his walks abroad with the Countess, till he knew by 
 heart the Chinese pavilion, bridges, islands, kiosks, hermit- 
 age, chalet, ruined temple, Babylonish ice-house ; in short, all 
 the ins and outs of the gardens planned by an architect with 
 nine hundred acres at his disposal. Now, therefore, he felt 
 inclined to trace the course of the Avonne, which his host 
 and hostess daily praised to him. Every evening he had 
 planned the excursion, every morning he forgot all about it. 
 And, indeed, above the park the Avonne is like an Alpine tor- 
 rent, hollowing out its rocky bed, and fashioning deep pools, 
 where it sinks underground. Here and there there is a water- 
 fall, when some little stream unexpectedly splashes into it; 
 here and there it broadens out like a miniature Loire, and 
 ripples over sandy shallows, but it is a stream so changeful 
 in its moods that rafts are out of the question. Blondet struck 
 up through the park by the shortest way to the Conches gate, 
 which deserves a few words of description, if only for the sake 
 of the historical associations connected with the property. 
 
 The founder of the Aigues was a cadet -oi the house of 
 Soulanges, who married an heiress, and was minded to snap 
 his fingers at his oldest brother, an amiable sentiment to which 
 we also owe the Isola-Bella, the fairyland on Lake Maggiore.
 
 24 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 In the Middle Ages the castle of the Aigues stood beside the 
 Avonne; but of the whole stronghold only one gateway re- 
 mained, a porched gateway of the kind usual in fortified 
 towns, with a pepper-box turret on either side of.it. The pon- 
 derous masonry above the arch was gay with wallflowers, and 
 pierced by three great mullion windows. A spiral stair- 
 case had been contrived to give access to two dwelling-rooms 
 in the first turret, and to a kitchen in the second. On the 
 roof ridge of the porch, steep pitched, like all such construc- 
 tions in the olden time, stood a couple of weather-cocks, 
 adorned with quaint ironwork. Not many places can boast 
 of a townhall so imposing. 
 
 The scutcheon of the Soulanges family was still visible on 
 the keystone of the arch of a hard stone selected for its pur- 
 pose by the craftsman whose chisel had engraven the arms of 
 Soulanges azure, three palmer's staves per pale argent, five 
 crosslets fitchy sable on a fess gules over all, differenced by a 
 mark of cadency. Blondet spelt out the device Je soule agir 
 It is my wont to act a bit of word-play such as crusaders 
 loved to make on their names, and an excellent maxim which 
 Montcornet to his sorrow neglected, as shall be seen. The 
 heavy old wooden door was heavier yet by reason of the iron 
 studs arranged in groups of five upon it. A pretty girl 
 opened it for Blondet ; and a keeper, awakened by the groan- 
 ing of the hinges, put his head out of the window. The man 
 was in his night-shirt. 
 
 "What is this? Our keepers are still abed at this time of 
 day, are they?" thought the Parisian, who imagined that he 
 knew all about forest customs. 
 
 With a quarter of an hour's walk he reached the springs of 
 the river, and from the upper end of the valley at Conches 
 the whole enchanting view lay before his eyes. A descrip- 
 tion of that landscape, like the history of France, might fill a 
 thousand volumes, or could be condensed into a single book. 
 Let a couple of phrases suffice. 
 
 Picture a bulging mass of rock, covered with the velvet of 
 dwarf shrubs, placed so that it looks like some huge tortoise
 
 THE PEASANTRY 25 
 
 set across the Avonne which wears its way out at the foot, a 
 rock that describes an arch through which you behold a little 
 sheet of water, clear as a mirror, where Avonne seems to sleep 
 before it breaks in waterfalls over the huge boulders where 
 the dwarf willows, supple as springs, perpetually yield to the 
 force of the current, only to fly back again. 
 
 Up above the waterfalls the hillsides are cut sharply away, 
 like some Rhineland crag clad with mosses and heather; they 
 are rifted, too, like the Rhine crag by strata of schist, where 
 springs of white water bubble out here and there, each one 
 above a little space of grass, always fresh and green, which 
 serves as a cup for the spring ; and finally, by way of contrast 
 to the wild solitude of nature, you see the outposts of civiliza- 
 tion : Conches, and the gardens on the edge of the fields, and 
 beyond the picturesque wilderness the assembled roofs of the 
 village and the church spire. 
 
 Behold the two phrases ! But the sunrise, the pure air, the 
 dew crystals, -the blended music of woods and water, these 
 must be divined ! 
 
 "Faith, it is nearly as fine as the Opera !" said Blondet to 
 himself, as he clambered up the torrent bed of the Avonne. 
 The caprices of the higher stream brought out all the depth, 
 stillness, and straightness of the Avonne in the valley, shut in 
 by tall trees and the Forest of the Aigues. He did not, how- 
 ever, pursue his morning walk very far. He was soon brought 
 to a stand by a peasant, one of the subordinate characters so 
 necessary to the action of this drama that it is doubtful 
 whether they or the principal characters play the more im- 
 portant parts. 
 
 Blondet, that clever writer, reached a boulder-strewn spot, 
 where the main stream was pent as if between two doors, when 
 he saw the man standing so motionless that his journalist's 
 curiosity would have been aroused, even if the figure and 
 clothing of the living statue had not already puzzled him not 
 a little. 
 
 In that poverty-stricken figure he saw an old man such as 
 Charlet loved to draw; the strongly-built frame, schooled to
 
 26 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 endure hardship, might have belonged to one of the troopers 
 depicted by the soldier's Homer; the rugged purplish-red 
 countenance gave him kinship with Charlet's immortal scav- 
 engers, unschooled by resignation. An almost bald head was 
 protected from the inclemency of the weather by a coarse felt 
 hat, the brim stitched to the crown here and there, and from 
 under the hat one or two locks of hair straggled out ; an artist 
 would have given four francs an hour for the chance of study- 
 ing from the life that dazzling snow, arranged after the 
 fashion of the Eternal Father of classic art. Yet there was 
 something in the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing 
 the lines of the mouth, that plainly said that this toothless 
 old person went more often to the barrel than to the bread- 
 hutch. The short white bristles of a scanty beard gave an ex- 
 pression of menace to his face. A pair of little eyes, oblique 
 as a pig's, and too small for his huge countenance, suggested 
 a combination of sloth and cunning ; but at that moment, as 
 he pored upon the river, fire seemed to flash frpm them. 
 
 For all clothing the poor man wor,e a blouse, which had 
 been blue in former times, and a pair of trousers of the coarse 
 canvas that they use in Paris for packing material. Any 
 town-dweller would have shuddered at the sight of his broken 
 sabots, without so much as a little straw by way of padding in 
 the cracks. As for the blouse and trousers, they had reached 
 the stage when a textile fabric is fit for nothing but the pulp- 
 ing-trough of a paper-mill. 
 
 Blondet, as he gazed at the rustic Diogenes, was convinced 
 that the typical peasant of old tapestry, old pictures, and 
 carvings was not, as he had hitherto imagined, a purely fancy 
 portrait. Nor did he utterly condemn, as heretofore, the pro- 
 ductions of the School of Ugliness; he began to see that in 
 man the beautiful is but a gratifying exception to a general 
 rule, a chimerical vision in which he struggles to believe. 
 
 "I wonder what the ideas and manner of life of such a 
 human being may be ! What is he thinking about ?" Blondet 
 asked himself, and curiosity seized upon him. "Is that my 
 fellow-man ? We have only our human shape in common, and 
 yet "
 
 THE PEASANTRY 27 
 
 He looked at the hard tissues peculiar to those who lead an 
 out-of-door life, accustomed to all weathers, and to excessive 
 heat and cold, and to hardships, in fact, of every kind, a 
 training which turns the skin to something like tanned 
 leather, and makes the sinews well-nigh pain-proof, like those 
 of the Arabs or Cossacks. 
 
 "That is one of Fenimore Cooper's Kedskins," said Blondet 
 to himself; "there is no need to go to America to study the 
 savage." 
 
 The Parisian was not two paces away, but the old man did 
 not look round ; he stood and stared at the opposite bank with 
 the fixity that glazes a Hindoo fakir's eyes and induces anchy- 
 losis of every joint. This kind of magnetism is more infec- 
 tious than people think ; it was too much for Blondet, he 
 too began at last to stare into the water. 
 
 A good quarter of an hour went by in this way,, and Blondet 
 still found no sufficient motive for the proceeding. "Well, 
 my good man," he asked, "what is there over yonder ?" 
 
 "Hush-sh !" the other said, with a sign to Blondet that he 
 must not disturb the air with his voice. "You will scare 
 her " 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 "An otter, mister. If her hears us, her's just the one to 
 give us the slip and get away under water. There ain't 
 no need to say that her jumped in there. There ! Do you 
 see the water a-bubbling up? Oh, her's lying in wait for a 
 fish; but when her tries to come out, my boy will catch hold 
 of her. It's like this, you see, an otter is the rarest thing. It 
 is a scientific animal to catch, fine and delicate eating, all 
 the same; they will give me ten francs for it at the Aigues, 
 seeing as the lady there doesn't eat meat of a Friday, and to- 
 morrow is Friday. Time was when the lady that's dead and 
 gone has paid me as much as twenty francs for one, and her 
 would let me have the skin back too Mouche," he called in 
 a loud whisper, "keep a good lookout 
 
 On the other side of this branch stream of the Avonne, 
 Blondet saw a pair of eyes gleaming like a cat's eyes from 
 
 VOL. IO 28
 
 28 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 under a clump of alders; then he made out the brown fore- 
 head and shock head of a boy of twelve or thereabouts, who was 
 lying there flat on his stomach; the urchin pointed out the 
 otter, with a sign which indicated that he was keeping the 
 animal in view. The consuming anxiety of the old man and 
 the child got the better of Blondet; he fell a willing victim 
 to the devouring demon of Sport. 
 
 Now that demon has two claws, called Hope and Curiosity, 
 by which he leads you whither he will. 
 
 "You sell the skin to the hatters," the old man went on. 
 "So fine it is and soft. They make caps of it " 
 
 "Do you believe that, my good man ?" 
 
 "Of course, mister, you ought to know a lot more about it 
 than I do, for all I am seventy years old," said the old person 
 meekly and respectfully; then, with unctuous insinuation 
 "and you can tell me, no doubt, why coach-guards and inn- 
 keepers think such a lot of it, sir ?" 
 
 Blondet, that master of irony, had his suspicions ; the word 
 "scientific" had not escaped him; he remembered the 
 Marechal'de Eichelieu, and fancied that this old rustic was 
 laughing at him, but the simplicity of the man's manner and 
 stupid expression dismissed the idea. 
 
 "There were plenty of otters to be seen hereabouts when I 
 was young, the country suits them," the good soul went on; 
 "but they have hunted them down so much, that if we see a 
 tail of one on 'em once in seven years, it is the most you will 
 do. There's the sub-perfect over at Ville-aux-Fayes you 
 know him, mister? He is a nice young man, like you, for 
 all he is a Parisian, and he is fond of curiosities. So, know- 
 ing that I was good at catching otters, for I know them as 
 well as ever you know your alphabet, he just says to me like 
 this, 'Father Fourchon, when you find an otter, you bring it 
 to me,' says he, 'and I'll pay you well for it ; and if her should 
 have white dots on her back,' he says, 'I would give you thirty 
 francs for her.' That is what he says to me on the quay at 
 Ville-aux-Fayes, and that's the truth : true as I believe in 
 God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. There is an-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 2f 
 
 other learned man over at Soulanges, M. Gourdon, our doc- 
 tor he is, they say he is making a cabinet of natural history ; 
 there is not his like in Dijon, he is the learnedest man in these 
 parts in fact, and he would give me a good price for her ! He 
 knows how to stuff man and beast ! And there's my boy here 
 stands me out that this one is white all over! 'If that is 
 so/ I says to him, 'the Lord A'mighty have borne us in mind 
 this morning !' Look at the water a-bubbling, do you see ? 
 Oh ! her's there. Her lives in a kind of a burrow on land, but 
 for all that, her'll stop under water whole days together. 
 Ah ! her heard you, mister, her is suspicious, for there ain't 
 no animile cleverer than that one; her is worse than a 
 woman." 
 
 "Perhaps that is why the otter is called her" suggested 
 Blondet. 
 
 "Lord, mister, being from Paris as you are, you know bet- 
 ter about it than we do. But you would have done us a better 
 turn by lying a-bed of a morning, because do you see 
 that ripple-like over yonder? Her's getting away under- 
 neath. . . . Come along, Mouche ! Her has heard the 
 gentleman, her has, and her is just the one to keep us here 
 cooling our heels till midnight ; let us be going. There's our 
 thirty francs swimming away." 
 
 Mouche got up, but wistfully. He was a touzle-headed 
 youth, with a brown face, like an angel's in some fifteenth 
 century picture. To all intents and purposes, he wore 
 breeches, for his trousers ended at the knee in a jagged fringe 
 ornamented with thorns and dead leaves. This indispensable 
 garment was secured to his person by a couple of strands of 
 tow by way of braces, and a shirt of sacking (originally of the 
 same pattern as his grandsire's trousers, but thickened by raw- 
 edged patches) left a sun-burned chest exposed to view. In 
 the matter of simplicity Mouche's clothes marked a distinct 
 advance on old Fourchon's costume. 
 
 "What good, simple souls they are out here !" said Blondet 
 to himself. "Round about Paris the work-people would cut 
 up rough if a swell came and spoiled sport." And as he
 
 30 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 had never set eyes on an otter, not even in the Museum, he was 
 quite delighted with this episode in his walk. 
 
 "Come, now," he began, feeling touched, for the old man 
 was going away without asking for anything, "you say that 
 you are an expert otter-hunter. If you are sure that the otter 
 is there " 
 
 Mouche, on the opposite bank, pointed to the air-bubbles 
 rising to the surface of the Avonne, to die away in eddies in 
 the middle of the pool. 
 
 "Her has gone back again," said old Fourchon; "her has 
 been to draw a breath of air, the slut ! It is her as has made 
 that fuss there. How do her manage to breathe under water ? 
 But the thing's so cunning, it laughs at science." 
 
 "Very well," said Blondet, deciding that the last pleasantry 
 was a current bucolic witticism, and no product of the brain 
 of the individual before him ; "stop and catch the otter." 
 
 "And how about our day's work, mine and Mouche's ?" 
 
 "What is a day's work ?" 
 
 "For the two of us, me and my apprentice ? . . . Five 
 
 francs " said the old man, looking Blondet in the eyes 
 
 with a hesitation which plainly said that this was a prodigious 
 overstatement. 
 
 The journalist took some coins from his pocket, saying, 
 "Here are ten francs for you, and you shall have at least as 
 much again for the otter." 
 
 "Her'll be cheap to you at that, if her has white dots on 
 her back, for the sub-perfect told me that our museum has 
 only one of that sort. And he knows a good deal, all the 
 same, does our sub-perfect, he is no fool. If I go after otters, 
 Master des Lupeaulx is after Master Gaub.ertin's daughter, 
 who has a fine white dot on her back. Stay, mister, no offence 
 to you, but you go and beat up the water by that stone yon- 
 der in the Avonne. When we have driven out the otter, her 
 will come down with the stream, for that is a trick the ani- 
 mals have; them'll go up stream to fish, and when they have 
 as much as they can carry, they come down to their burrow ; 
 they know it's easier going down stream. Didn't I tell you
 
 THE PEASANTRY 31 
 
 that they are cunning ! If I had learned cunning in their 
 school, I should be living like a gentleman at this day. I 
 found out too late that you have to get up early in the morn- 
 ing to make headway up stream and get the first chance at 
 the booty. There was a spell cast over me when I was born, 
 in fact. Perhaps the three of us together will be too clever 
 for the otter." 
 
 "And how, old necromancer?" 
 
 "Lord, sir, we peasants are such stupid animals ourselves, 
 that we come at last to understand the animals. This is what 
 we will do. When the otter turns to go home, we will scare 
 her here, and you will scare her there, and scared of both 
 sides, her'll make a dash for the bank. If her takes to the 
 land, it is all over with her. The thing can't walk, it's made 
 to swim, with its goose-feet. Oh ! you will have some fun, 
 for it is a regular double game you fish and hunt at the 
 same time. The General at the Aigues, where you are stay- 
 ing, came back three times running, he took such a fancy to 
 the sport." 
 
 Blondet obediently hopped from stone to stone till he 
 reached the middle of the Avonne, where he took his stand, 
 duly provided with a green branch, which the old otter-hunter 
 cut for him, ready to whip the stream at the word of com- 
 mand. 
 
 "Yes, just there, mister," and there Blondet remained, un- 
 conscious of the flight of time, for every moment the old man's 
 gestures kept him on the lookout for a successful issue, and 
 time never passes more quickly than when every faculty is 
 on the alert in expectation of energetic action to succeed to 
 the profound silence of lying in wait. 
 
 "Daddy Fourchon," the boy whispered, when he was alone 
 with the old man, "there really be an otter there " 
 
 "Do you see her?" 
 
 "There her is !" 
 
 The old man was dumfounded. He distinctly saw the 
 brown skin of an otter swimming along under the water. 
 
 "Her is coming along tow'rds me," said the little fellow.
 
 32 THE PEASANTS Y 
 
 "Fetch her a slap on the head, and jump in and hold her 
 down at the bottom, and don't let her go " 
 
 Mouche dived into the Avonne like a scared frog. 
 
 "Quick, quick ! 'mister," old Fourchon shouted, as he like- 
 wise jumped into the Avonne (leaving his sabots on the 
 bank). "Just give her a scare! There! look her is swim- 
 ming tow'rds you !" 
 
 The old man splashed along through the water to Blondet, 
 shouting with the gravity that rustics can preserve through 
 the keenest sense of fun. 
 
 "Look, do you see her, along of those rocks." Blondet, pur- 
 posely placed so that the sun shone into his eyes, thrashed the 
 water in all good faith. 
 
 "There! there! nearer the rocks!" shouted old Fourchon, 
 "that is where her hole is to your left." Carried away by 
 vexation, excited by the long suspense, Blondet took an im- 
 promptu footbath, slipping off the stones into the water. 
 
 "Hold on ! hold on ! mister, you have got her. Oh, heaven 
 and earth ! there she goes, right between your legs ! Her is 
 off! Her is off!" cried the old man in desperation. And 
 like one possessed with the fury of the chase, he splashed 
 across till he confronted Blondet. 
 
 " 'Twas your doing that we lost her," old Fourchon con- 
 tinued; Blondet held out a hand, and he emerged from the 
 water like a Triton a vanquished Triton. "Her is there 
 under the rock, the wench ! Her dropped her fish," he added, 
 pointing to something floating down the stream some distance 
 away. "Anyhow, we shall have the tench, for a tench it 
 
 As he spoke they saw a liveried servant on horseback, gal- 
 loping along the Conches road, holding a second horse by the 
 bridle. 
 
 "There! it looks as if the servants from the chateau were 
 looking for you," he went on. "If you want to get back across 
 the river, I will lend you a hand. Oh ! I would as soon have 
 a soaking as not, it saves you the trouble of washing your 
 things.'"
 
 THE PEASANTRY 33 
 
 "And how about catching cold ?" asked Blondet. 
 
 "Ah, indeed ! Don't you see that the sun has browned our 
 shanks like an old pensioner's tobacco pipe. Lean on me, mis- 
 ter. You are from Paris, you don't know how to get foothold 
 on our rocks, for so many things as you know. If you stop 
 here awhile, you will learn a sight of things out of the book 
 of nature, you that write the news in the papers." 
 
 Blondet, arrived on the opposite banks, encountered the 
 footman Charles. 
 
 "Ah, sir," cried the man, "you cannot imagine madame's 
 anxiety when she heard that you had gone out through the 
 Conches gate. She thinks that you are drowned. Three times 
 they rang the second bell for breakfast with might and main, 
 after shouting all over the park, and M. le Cure is still look- 
 ing for you there." , 
 
 "Why, what time is it, Charles ?" 
 
 "A quarter to twelve !" 
 
 "Help me to mount " 
 
 "Perhaps monsieur has been helping to hunt old Fourchon's 
 otter," said the man, as he noticed the water dripping from 
 Blondet's boots and trousers. 
 
 That question opened the journalist's eyes. 
 
 "Not a word about it, Charles, and I will bear you in 
 mind," cried he. 
 
 "Oh, Lord love you, sir, M. le Comte himself was taken in 
 with old Fourchon's otter. As soon as any one new to the 
 place comes to the Aigues, old Fourchon is on the lookout for 
 him ; and if the town gentleman goes to see the springs of the 
 Avonne, the old boy sells him his otter. He keeps it up so 
 well, that M. le Comte went back three times and paid him 
 six days' wages while they sat and watched the water flow." 
 
 "And I used to think that I had seen the greatest comedians 
 t)f the day in Potier and the younger Baptiste," said Blondet 
 to himself, "and what are they compared with this beggar?" 
 
 "Oh ! he is quite up to that game, is old Fourchon," Charles 
 pursued. "And he has another string to his bow, for he had 
 himself put down on the register as a ropemaker. He has his
 
 34 * THE PEASANTRY 
 
 ropewalk along the wall outside the Blangy gate. If yon 
 take it into your head to meddle with his cord, he comes 
 round you so cleverly, that you begin to want to turn the 
 wheel and make a bit of rope yourself, and then he asks you 
 for a prentice's premium. Madame was caught that way, and 
 gave him twenty francs. He is the king of sly-boots," said 
 Charles, picking his words. 
 
 The man's gossip gave Blondet some opportunity of reflect- 
 ing upon the profound astuteness of the peasantry; he also 
 recalled much that had been said by his father the judge of 
 Alengon. Then as all the malice lurking beneath old Four- 
 chon's simplicity came up in his mind, Charles' confidences 
 put those remarks in a new light; and he confessed to him- 
 self that he had been gulled by the old Burgundian beggar. 
 
 "You would not believe, sir, how wide awake you have to 
 be in the country, and here of all places, for the General is 
 not very popular " 
 
 "Why so?" 
 
 "Lord, I do not know," said Charles, with the stupid look 
 a servant can assume to screen a refusal to his betters, a look 
 which gave Blondet plenty of food for reflection. 
 
 "So here you are, runaway !" said the General, coming out 
 upon the steps at the sound of horse hoofs. "Here he is ! 
 Set your mind at rest," he called to his wife, hearing her pat- 
 tering footsteps. "Now we are all here but the Abbe 
 Brossette. Go and look for him, Charles," he said, turning 
 to the servant. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THE TAVERN 
 
 THE Blangy gate dated from Bouret's time. It consisted of 
 two pilasters with "rustic" bossages, each surmounted by a 
 rampant greyhound holding a scutcheon between its fore- 
 p;i\vs. The steward's house was so close to the gate that the 
 great financier had no occasion to build another for a lodge-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 35 
 
 keeper. An imposing iron grating, of the same style as those 
 made in Buffon's time for the Jardin des Plantes, opened out 
 upon the extreme end of the paved way which led to the cross- 
 road. Formerly the Aigues had combined with the house of 
 Soulanges to maintain this local road which connected 
 Conches and Cerneux and Blangy and Soulanges with Ville- 
 aux-Fayes, as by a flowery chain, so many are the little 
 houses covered with roses and honeysuckle and climbing 
 plants, that are dotted about among the hedge-enclosed do- 
 mains along its course. 
 
 Just outside, along a trim wall, stood a rotten post, a ram- 
 shackle wheel and heckle-boards, the entire "plant" of a vil- 
 lage ropemaker. Further, the wall gave place to a ha-ha 
 fence, so that the chateau commanded a view of the valley as 
 far as Soulanges, and even further. 
 
 About half-past twelve o'clock, while Blondet was taking 
 his place at table opposite the Abbe Brossette, and receiving 
 a flattering scolding from the Countess, old Fourchon and 
 Mouche arrived at their ropewalk. Under pretext of making 
 rope, old Fourchon could keep an eye upon the house and 
 spy the movements of the gentry. Indeed, a shutter could 
 not move, no two persons could stroll away together, no 
 trifling incident could take place at the chateau but the old 
 man knew of it. He had only taken up his position there 
 within the last three years, and neither keepers, nor servants, 
 nor the family had noticed a circumstance so apparently in- 
 significant. 
 
 "Go round to the Avonne gate while I put up our tackle," 
 said old Fourchon ; "and when you have chattered about this, 
 they will come to look for me at the Grand-I-Vert. I will 
 have a drop of something there; it is thirsty work stopping 
 in the water like that. If you do just as I have been telling 
 you, you will get a good breakfast out of them ; try to speak 
 with the Countess, and go on about me, so that they may take 
 it into their heads to give me a sermon, eh ! There will be a 
 glass or two of good wine to tipple down." 
 
 With these final instructions, which, to judge from
 
 36 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Mouche's sly looks, were almost superfluous, the old rope- 
 maker tucked his otter under his arm and disappeared down 
 the road. 
 
 Halfway between this picturesque gateway and the village, 
 at the time of Emile Blondet's visit, stood a house such as 
 may be seen anywhere in France in districts where stone is 
 scarce. Brickbats collected from all sources, and great flints 
 roughly set in stiff clay, made fairly solid walls, though the 
 weather had eaten them away. Stout tree boughs upheld a 
 roof thatched with straw and rushes ; the clumsy shutters and 
 the door, like everything else about the hovel, were either 
 lucky "finds" or had been extorted by hard begging. 
 
 The peasant brings to the making of his dwelling the same 
 instinct that a wild creature displays in the making of its 
 nest or burrow; this instinct shone conspicuously in the ar- 
 rangements of the whole cabin. To begin with, the door and 
 window were on the north side, and the house, situated on a 
 little knoll in the stoniest part of the vineyard, should have 
 been healthy enough. It was reached by three steps, in- 
 geniously contrived out of stakes and planks, and filled in 
 with small stones. The rain-water very soon flowed away; 
 and as in Burgundy rain seldom comes from the north, the 
 foundations, flimsy though they were, did not rot with the 
 damp. At the foot of the steps some rustic palings extended 
 along the footpath, till they were lost to sight in a hedge of 
 hawthorn and wild-brier. A collection of rough benches and 
 rickety tables invited passers-by to seat themselves in the 
 shade of the trellised vine which covered the whole space be- 
 tween the hut and the road. In the enclosed garden, on the 
 top of the knoll, grew roses, and pinks, and violets, and all 
 the flowers which cost nothing; honeysuckle and jessamine 
 trails clung about a roof heavy already with moss, in spite of 
 its recent date. 
 
 The owner had set up a "lean-to" cowshed against the right 
 wall of the house. It was a crazy wooden erection, with a 
 sort of yard of beaten earth in front of it, where a huge dung- 
 hill stood conspicuous in one corner. An outhouse at the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 37 
 
 back, a thatched roof, supported by two tree trunks, did duty 
 as a shed for vinedressers' tools, empty casks, and heaps of 
 faggots piled about the projecting boss of the oven, which in 
 peasants' cottages almost invariably opens just under the 
 chimney shelf. 
 
 About an acre of land belonged to the house, a croft en- 
 closed with a quick-set hedge, full of vines, tended as a peas- 
 ant's vines are tended, so well manured, layered, and trenched, 
 that they came into leaf earlier than any others for three 
 leagues round. The slender tops of a few fruit-trees, almonds, 
 and plums, and apricots, appeared here and there above the 
 hedge. Potatoes or beans were usually growing among the 
 vine stems. Another small wedge-shaped bit of land behind 
 the yard and in the direction of the village was low and 
 damp enough to grow the cabbages and onions dear to the 
 laborer. A latticed gate divided it off from the yard, through 
 which the cows passed, trampling and manuring the earth. 
 
 Inside the house, the two rooms on the ground floor opened 
 on to the vineyard ; on that side of it, a rough wooden stair- 
 case ran up the outer wall under the thatch to a garret lighted 
 by a round window under the roof. Beneath these rustic steps 
 a cellar, built of Burgundian bricks, contained a few hogs- 
 heads of wine. 
 
 A peasant's batterie de cuisine usually consists of a couple 
 of cooking-pots, a frying-pan, and an iron kettle ; but in this 
 cottage, by way of exception to the rule, there were two 
 huge saucepans hanging up under the mantel-shelf above a 
 small portable stove. But in spite of this sign of comfort, 
 the furniture generally was in keeping with the outside of the 
 house. An earthen jar held the water; pewter spoons and 
 wooden ladles did duty for silver plate ; and the crockery ware 
 was cracked, riveted, brown without and white within. A 
 few deal chairs stood about a solid table, and the floor was 
 of beaten earth. The walls were whitewashed once in five 
 years, so were the slender rafters of the ceiling, where bacon 
 and ropes of onions, and bunches of candles, hung among the 
 bags in which the peasant keeps his seeds. Beside the bread-
 
 38 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 hutch stood an old cupboard of black walnut wood, containing 
 such linen as the inmates of the cabin possessed the spare 
 garments and the Sunday clothes of the whole family. 
 
 An antiquated gun shone on the wall above the mantel- 
 shelf, a poacher's weapon, for which you would not have given 
 five francs. The gun-stock was almost charred, nor was there 
 any appearance about the barrel, which looked as if it never 
 was cleaned. Perhaps you may think that as the gate stood 
 open day and night, and the cabin door boasted no fasten- 
 ing but a latch, nothing more efficient in the way of firearms 
 was needed, and ask what earthly use such a weapon might be. 
 But in the first place, rough though the woodwork was, the 
 barrel had been carefully selected; it had belonged to a gun 
 of price, once given, no doubt, to some gamekeeper. And the 
 owner of the gun never missed a shot; between him and his 
 weapon there was the intimate understanding that exists be- 
 tween the craftsman and his tool. If the muzzle must be 
 pointed a millimetre above or below the mark, the poacher 
 knows and obeys the rule accurately, and is never out in his 
 reckoning. And an officer of artillery would see that all the 
 essentials were in good working order, nor more nor less. 
 Into everything that the peasant appropriates to his uses 
 he puts the exact amount of energy required to attain the 
 desired end the necessary labor, and nothing more. He has 
 not the least idea of finish, but he is a perfect judge of the 
 necessities in everything ; he knows all the degrees in the scale 
 of energy; and if he works for a master, knows exactly how to 
 do the least possible amount of work for the utmost possible 
 pay. Finally, this very gun played an important part in the 
 family life, as shall presently be shown. 
 
 Have you realized all the countless details about this hovel, 
 five hundred paces from the picturesque park gates? Can 
 you picture it squatting there like a beggar by a palace wall ? 
 Well, then, beneath all its idyllic rusticity, the velvet mosses 
 of its roof, the cackling hens, the wallowing pig, the lowing 
 heifer, and every sight and sound there lies an ugly signifi- 
 cance.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 39 
 
 A high pole was set up by the front gate, to exhibit to 
 public view a bush made up of three withered branches of pine 
 and oak, tied in a bunch by a bit of rag. Above the door 
 stood a signboard about two feet square, on which an itinerant 
 artist had painted (for a breakfast) a huge green letter I on 
 a white field a pun in ten letters for those who could read 
 the Grand-I-Vert (hiver). A vulgar gaudy-colored adver- 
 tisement on the left-hand side of the door announced "Good 
 March Beer," a crude representation of a woman with an ex- 
 aggeratedly low-necked dress, and a hussar, in uniform, strut- 
 ting on either side of a foaming pint pot. In spite of the 
 scent of flowers and the country air, a stale reek of wine and 
 eatables always clung about the cabin, the same odor that lies 
 in wait for you as you pass by some pothouse in a low quar- 
 ter of Paris. 
 
 The place you know. Now, behold its inmates. Their his- 
 tory contains more than one lesson for the philanthropist. 
 
 The owner of the Grand-I-Vert, one Frangois Tonsard, is 
 not unworthy of the attention of philosophers, in that he 
 contrived to solve the problem of how to lead a life of com- 
 bined industry and idleness, in such a way that his idleness 
 was highly profitable to himself, while no one was a penny 
 the better for his industry. 
 
 He was a jack-of-all-trades. He could dig, but only on his 
 own land. He could also do hedging and ditching, bark trees 
 or fell them, for other people, for in all these occupations the 
 master is at the mercy of the man. Tonsard owed his bit of 
 land to Mile. Laguerre's generosity. While a mere lad he did 
 a day's work now and again for the gardener at the chateau, 
 for he had not his match at clipping trees in garden alleys, 
 and trimmed hornbeams, and thorn-trees, and horse-chest- 
 nuts to admiration. His name Tonsard literally, "the clip- 
 per" is a sufficient indication of an aptitude descended from 
 father to son, and in most country-places such monopolies are 
 secured and maintained with as much cunning as ever city 
 merchants use to the same end. 
 
 One day Mile. Laguerre, strolling in her garden, overheard
 
 40 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Tonsard, a fine strapping young fellow, saying, "All I want to 
 live, and live happily too, is an acre of land !" Whereupon 
 the good-natured creature, accustomed to make others happy, 
 bestowed on Tonsard that bit of vineyard near the Blangy 
 gate in return for a hundred days' work (a piece of delicacy 
 scantily appreciated), and allowed him to take up his quarters 
 at the Aigues, where he lived among the servants, who 
 thought him the best of good fellows in Burgundy. 
 
 "Poor Tonsard" (as everybody called him) did about 
 thirty days' work out of a hundred, the rest of the time he 
 spent in laughing and flirting with the maids at the house, 
 and more particularly with Mile. Cochet, Madame's own 
 woman, though she was as ugly as a charming actress' maid 
 is sure to be. A laugh, with Mile. Cochet, was something so 
 significant, that Soudry (the happy police sergeant of 
 Blondet's letter) still gave Tonsard black looks after five-and- 
 twenty years. The walnut wood press and the four-post bed- 
 stead with curtains, which adorned the bedroom at the Grand- 
 l-Vert, were, no doubt, the fruit of one of those titterings. 
 
 Once in possession of his bit of land, Tonsard replied to the 
 first person who remarked that "Madame had given it to 
 him." 
 
 "By George, it's mine ! honestly bought and honestly paid 
 for. Do the bourgeois ever give you anything for nothing? 
 And a hundred days' work is nothing, is it? That has cost 
 me three hundred francs as it is, and the soil is all stones !" 
 
 The talk never went beyond the circle of the peasantry. 
 
 Tonsard next built the house himself. Finding the ma- 
 terials here and there, asking this one and that to do a hand's 
 turn for him, pilfering odds and ends from the chateau, or 
 asking, and invariably having what he asked for. A rickety 
 gateway pulled down to be removed found its way to his cow- 
 shed. The window came from an old greenhouse. The hut, 
 to prove so fatal to the chateau, was built up of material from 
 the chateau. 
 
 Tonsard escaped military service, thanks to Gaubertin, 
 Mile. Laguerre's steward. Gaubertin's father was the public
 
 THE PEASANTRY 41 
 
 prosecutor of the department, and Gaubertin could refuse 
 Mile. Cochet nothing. When the house was finished and the 
 vines in full bearing, Tonsard took unto himself a wife. A 
 bachelor of three-and-twenty on a friendly footing at the 
 Aigues, the good-for-nothing to whom Madame had given an 
 acre of ground had every appearance of being a hard worker, 
 and he had the wit to make the most of his negative virtues. 
 His 'Wife was the daughter of a tenant on the Eonquerolles 
 estate on the other side of the Forest of the Aigues. 
 
 This farmer farmed half a farm, which was going to wreck 
 and ruin in his hands for want of a housewife. The incon- 
 solable widower had tried to drown his cares in drink, in the 
 English fashion ; but time went on, he thought no more upon 
 his loss, and at last found himself wedded to the winecask, 
 in the jocular village phrase. Then in no time the father-in- 
 law ceased to be a farmer, and became a laborer, an idle, mis- 
 chief-making, quarrelsome sot, sticking at nothing, like most 
 men of his class who fall from a comparatively comfortable 
 position into poverty. He could read and write, his educa- 
 tion and practical knowledge raised him above the level of the 
 ordinary laborer, though his bad habits dragged him down 
 to the level of the tramp; and, as we have seen, he had just 
 been a match for one of the cleverest men in Paris in a Bu- 
 colic overlooked by Virgil. 
 
 At first they made old Fourchon the village schoolmaster 
 at Blangy, but he lost his place, partly by misconduct, partly 
 by his peculiar views of* primary education. His pupils made 
 more progress in the art of making paper boats and chickens 
 out of the pages of their ABC books than in reading ; and his 
 homilies on pilfering orchards were strangely like lessons 
 on the best manner of scaling walls. They still quote one of 
 his sayings at Soulanges, an answer given to some urchin 
 who came late with the excuse, "Lord, sir, I had to take our 
 'orse to the water." 
 
 "jfforse we say, ye dunder'ead." 
 
 From a schoolmaster he became postman. This employ- 
 ment, which is as good as a pension to many an old soldier,
 
 42 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 got Daddy Fourchon into trouble every day of his life. Some- 
 times he left the letters in a tavern, sometimes he forgot to 
 deliver them, sometimes he kept them in, his pocket. When 
 his wits were flustered with liquor, he would leave the corre- 
 spondence of one commune in another; when he was sober 
 he read the letters. He was promptly dismissed. Having 
 nothing to hope in the way of a Government appointment, 
 Daddy Fourchon at length turned his attention to manufac- 
 ture. The very poorest do something in country places, and 
 one and all, if they do not make an honest livelihood, make 
 a pretence of earning it. 
 
 At the age of sixty-eight Fourchon took to ropemaking on 
 a small scale, that being a business in which the least possible 
 amount of capital is needed. The first wall you find (as has 
 been seen) is a sufficient workshop, ten francs will more than 
 pay for your machinery ; and the apprentice, like his master, 
 sleeps in a barn, and lives on what he can pick up. So shall 
 you evade the rapacity of the law which vexes the poor with 
 door and window tax. The raw material you borrow, and re- 
 turn a manufactured article. 
 
 But Daddy Fourchon, and Mouche his apprentice (the 
 natural son of one of his natural daughters), had another 
 resource, in fact,, their mainstay and support in otter-hunt- 
 ing, to say nothing of breakfasts and dinners given to the 
 pair by illiterate folk who availed themselves of Daddy 
 Fourchon's talents when a letter must be written or a bill 
 made out. Finally, the old man could play the clarionet, and 
 in the company of a crony, the fiddler of Soulanges, Ver- 
 michel by name, figured at village weddings and great balls 
 at the Tivoli at Soula"nges. 
 
 Vermichel's real name was Michel Vert ; but the transposi- 
 tion was so much in use, that Brunet, clerk of the justice of 
 the peace at Soulanges, described him in all documents as 
 "Michel-Jean-Jerome Vert, otherwise Vermichel, witness." 
 
 Daddy Fourchon had been of use in past times to Ver- 
 michel, a fiddler held in high esteem by the old Burgundian 
 Regiment ; and Vermichel out of gratitude for those services
 
 THE PEASANTRY 43 
 
 had procured for his friend the post of practitioner (the 
 privilege of appearing before the justice of the peace in the 
 interests of this or that person), for which any man who can 
 sign his name is eligible in out-of-the-way places. So Daddy 
 Fourchon's signature was appended to any judicial documents 
 drawn up by the Sieur Brunet in the communes of Cerneux, 
 Conches, and Blangy; and the names of Vermichel and 
 Fourchon, bound together by a friendship cemented by 
 twenty years of hobnobbing, seemed almost like the style of a 
 firm. 
 
 Mouche and Fourchon, united as closely each to each by 
 malpractices as Mentor and Telemachus of old by virtues, 
 traveled like their anti-types in search of bread; panis an- 
 gelorum, the only words of Latin that linger yet in the memo- 
 ries of gray-headed villagers. The pair negotiated the scraps 
 at Tonsard's tavern, or at the great houses roundabout; for 
 between them in their busiest and most prosperous years their 
 achievement scarcely exceeded an average of some seven hun- 
 dred yards of rope. In the first place, no tradesman for sixty 
 miles round would have trusted either of them with a hank 
 of tow, for this venerable person (anticipating the miracles 
 of modern science) knew but too well how to transform the 
 hemp into the divine juice of the grape. And in the second 
 place, besides being private secretary to three communes, 
 Fourchon appeared for plaintiff or defendant before the jus- 
 tice of the peace, and performed at merrymakings upon the 
 clarionet his public duties were the ruin of his trade, he 
 said. 
 
 So Tonsard's hopes so fondly cherished were nipped in the 
 bud. Those comfortable additions to his property would 
 never be his, and the ordinary luck of life confronted a lazy 
 son-in-law with another do-nothing in the shape of his wife's 
 father. And things wera bound to do much the worse in that 
 La Tonsard, a tall and shapely woman with a kind of broad- 
 blown comeliness, showed no sort of taste for field work. Ton- 
 sard bore his wife a grudge for her father's bankruptcy, and 
 treated her badly, taking his revenge after the fashion 
 
 VOL. IO 29
 
 44 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 familiar to a class that sees the effects, but seldom traces the 
 cause. 
 
 The wife, finding her bondage hard, sought alleviations. 
 She took advantage of Tonsard's vices to govern him. He was 
 an ease-loving glutton, so she encouraged him in idleness and 
 gluttony. She managed to secure for him the goodwill of the 
 servants at the chateau, and he, satisfied with the results 5 
 did not grumble at the means. He troubled himself uncom- 
 monly little about his wife's doings, so long as she did all 
 that he required of her, a tacit understanding in which every 
 second married couple lives. The tavern was La Tonsard's 
 next invention, and her first customers were the servants, 
 gamekeepers, and prickers from the Aigues. 
 
 Gaubertin, Mile. Laguerre's agent, was one of La belle Ton- 
 sard's earliest patrons; he let her have a few hogsheads of 
 good wine to attract custom. The effect of these presents, 
 periodically renewed so long as Gaubertin remained a 
 bachelor, together with the fame of the not too obdurate 
 beauty among the Don Juans of the valley, brought custom 
 to the house. La Tonsard, being fond of good eating, be- 
 came an excellent cook; and though she exercised her talents 
 only on dishes well known in the country, such as jugged 
 hare, game, sauce, sea-pie, and omelettes, she was supposed to 
 understand to admiration the art of cooking a meal served at 
 a table's end, and so prodigiously over-seasoned that it induces 
 thirst. In these ways she managed Tonsard; she gave him 
 a downward push, and he asked nothing better than to aban- 
 don himself and rolled luxuriously down hill. 
 
 The rogue became a confirmed poacher; he had nothing to 
 fear. His wife's relations with Gaubertin, bailiffs, and keep- 
 ers, and the relaxed notions of property of the Revolution, 
 assured him of complete immunity. As soon as the children 
 grew big enough, he made what he could out of them, and was 
 no more scrupulous as to their conduct than he had been 
 with his wife's. He had two girls and two boys. Tonsard 
 lived, like his wife, from hand to mouth, and there would 
 soon have been an end of this merrv life of his if he had not
 
 THE PEASANTRY 45 
 
 /aid down the almost martial law, that every one in his house 
 must contribute to his comfort, in which for that matter the 
 rest of them shared. By the time that the family was reared 
 at the expense of those from whom the wife knew how to ex- 
 tort presents, this is a statement of the finances of the Grand- 
 l-Vert. 
 
 Tonsard's old mother and two girls, Catherine and Marie, 
 were always picking up firewood. Twice a day they would 
 come home bending under the weight of a faggot that reached 
 to the ankle and projected a couple of feet above their heads. 
 The outside of the faggot was made of dead sticks ; the green 
 wood often cut from ypung saplings was hidden away inside 
 it. In the fullest sense of the words, Tonsard took all his 
 winter fuel from the Forest of the Aigues. 
 
 The father and both boys were habitual poachers. From 
 September to March all the game that they did not eat at 
 home they sold. Hares and rabbits, partridges, thrushes, and 
 roebucks they took them all to Soulanges, the little town 
 where Tonsard's girls took milk from door to door every morn- 
 ing and carried back the news, taken in exchange for the gossip 
 of the Aigues, Cerneux, and Conches. When their season 
 was over, the three Tonsards set snares, and if the snares 
 were too successful, La Tonsard made pies and sold them 
 in Ville-aux-Fayes. In harvest-time the whole family the 
 old mother, the two lads (until they were seventeen years 
 old), the two girls, old Fourchon and Mouche, seven in all 
 of the Tonsard clan mustered and went gleaning. They 
 would pick up nearly sixteen bushels a day among them, 
 rye, barley, wheat anything that was grist for the mill. 
 
 At first the youngest girl took the two cows to graze by 
 the side of the road; though the animals, for the most part, 
 broke through the hedges into the fields of the Aigues. But 
 as the rural policeman was bound to take cognizance of any- 
 thing of the nature of flagrant trespass, the slightest mistake 
 on the children's part was always punished by a whipping 
 or by the loss of some dainty, till they had become singularly 
 expert at hearing sounds of an approaching enemy. The
 
 4<S THE PEASANTRY 
 
 keepers at the Aigues and the rural policeman scarcely ever 
 caught them in the act. Moreover, the relations between the 
 aforesaid functionaries and the Tonsards, husband and wife, 
 dimmed their eyes to these things. The cows soon grew obe- 
 dient to a pull at the long cord, or a low peculiar call, when 
 they found that as soon as the danger was past they might 
 leave the roadside to finish their meal in the neighboring 
 field. 
 
 Tonsard's old mother, growing more and more feeble, suc- 
 ceeded to Mouche when old Fourchon took him away under 
 pretence of educating the boy himself. Marie and Catherine 
 made hay in the woods. They kne\w> the patches where the 
 grass grows sweet and delicate, and cut and turned it, and 
 made and stacked the hay. They found two-thirds of the 
 winter fodder in the woods, and on the sunniest winter 
 days took the cows to pasture on spots well known to them 
 where the grass was green even in cold weather; for in cer- 
 tain places round about the Aigues, as in Piedmont and Lom- 
 bardy and every hill country, there are bits of land where 
 the grass grows in winter. Such a meadow, called a marcita 
 in Italy, is a very valuable property there; but in France, 
 to do well, there must be neither too much frost nor too much 
 snow. The phenomenon is doubtless due partly to a par- 
 ticular aspect, partly to the infiltration of the water, which 
 keeps the land at a higher temperature. 
 
 The calves brought in about eighty francs; and the milk, 
 after making deductions for the calves, was worth about a 
 hundred and sixty francs in money, besides the supply for 
 the house and the dairy. Tonsard made some hundred and 
 fifty crowns by doing a day's work for one and another. 
 
 The tavern, all expenses paid, brought in about three hun- 
 dred francs, not more, for merry-makings are essentially 
 short-lived, and confined to certain seasons. La Tonsard and 
 her husband, moreover, usually received notice of a "bean- 
 feast" beforehand, and laid in the small quantity of meat 
 required and the necessary provisions from the town. In 
 ordinary years the wine from the Tonsards' vineyard fetched
 
 THE PEASANTRY 4T 
 
 twenty francs the cask (the cask not included) ; a tavern- 
 keeper at Soulanges, with whom Tonsard had dealings, was 
 the purchaser. In abundant years the vineyard would yield 
 twelve hogsheads, but the average produce was eight, and 
 half of these Tonsard kept for his own trade. In vine- 
 growing districts the grape gleanings are the perquisite 
 of the vintagers, and the grape gleaning was worth three 
 casks of wine annually to the Tonsard family. Sheltered by 
 local customs, they showed little conscience in their proceed- 
 ings, finding their way into vineyards before the vintagers 
 had done their work, just as they hurried into the cornfields 
 where the sheaves stood waiting to be carted away. So, of 
 the seven or eight hogsheads sold, one-half was cribbed, and 
 fetched a better price. There was a certain amount of dead 
 loss to be deducted in the budget, for Tonsard and his wife 
 always ate of the best, and drank better liquor than they sold 
 supplied to them by their Soulanges correspondent in ex- 
 change for their own wines, but altogether, the money made 
 by the united efforts of the family amounted to nine hundred 
 francs or thereabouts, for they fattened a couple of pigs 
 every year one for themselves, and one for sale. 
 
 As time went on the tavern became the favorite haunt of 
 laborers and of all the scamps in the countryside; this was 
 due partly to the talents of the Tonsard family, partly to 
 the good-fellowship existing between them and the lowest 
 class in the valley. Then both the girls were remarkably 
 handsome, and walked in the ways of their mother; and 
 finally, the Grand-I-Vert was such an old-established tavern 
 (dating, as it did, from 1795), that it became an institution. 
 From Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes the laborers came to con- 
 clude their bargains there, and to hear the news gathered 
 by the Tonsard girls and Mouche and Fourchon, retailed 
 by Vermichel or Brunet, the most renowned clerk of Sou- 
 langes, who came thither to find his practitioners. 
 
 The prices of hay and wine, day-work and piece-work, were 
 fixed there ; questions were referred to Tonsard's decision ; 
 and he, a sovereign judge in such matters, gave advice and
 
 48 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 drank with the rest. Soulanges, so the saying ran, was simply 
 a fashionable place where people amused themselves; Blangy 
 was the place for business, albeit eclipsed by the great metrop- 
 olis of Ville-aux-Fayes, which in twenty-five years had come 
 to be the capital of the magnificent valley. The grain and 
 cattle market was held in the square at Blangy; the ruling 
 prices there served as a guide for the whole district. 
 
 La Tonsard, being a keeper-at-home, was still plump and 
 fair and young looking, when women who work in the fields 
 fade as quickly as the field flowers, and are old crones at 
 thirty. Moreover, La Tonsard liked to look her best. She 
 was only neat and tidy, but in a village tidiness and neatness 
 means luxury. The girls were dressed better than befitted 
 their poverty, and followed their mother's example. Their 
 bodices were almost elegant, and the linen beneath was finer 
 than any that the richest peasant's wife wears. On high days 
 and holidays they appeared in fine frocks, paid for heaven 
 only knows how. The servants at the Aigues let them have 
 their cast-off clothing at a price within their reach; and 
 gowns which had swept the pavements in Paris, altered to 
 suit Marie and Catherine, were flaunted at the sign of the 
 Grand-I-Vert. Neither of the girls, the gypsies of the valley, 
 received a farthing from their parents, who merely boarded 
 and lodged them, letting them lie in the loft at night on filthy 
 mattresses, where the grandmother and two brothers slept 
 as well, all huddled together in the hay like brutes. Neither 
 father nor mother thought anything of this promiscuity. The 
 age of iron and the age of gold have more resemblances than 
 we think. Nothing arouses vigilance in the one, everything 
 arouses it in the other, and for Society the result is apparently 
 the same. The old woman's presence, which seemed to be 
 less a safeguard than a necessity, only made matters worse. 
 
 The Abbe Brossette, after a close study of the state of 
 things among his parishioners, made this profound remark 
 to the Bishop : 
 
 "When you see how greatly they rely on their poverty, my 
 lord, you can guess that these peasantry are in terror of 
 losing their great excuse for their dissolute lives."
 
 THE PEASANTRY 4 
 
 Everybody was aware how little the Tonsard family knew 
 of scruples or principles, but nobody found any fault with 
 their way of life. 
 
 At the outset of this Scene it must be explained, once for 
 all, that the peasant's code is not the bourgeois code, and 
 that in family life the peasants have no sort of delicacy. 
 If the daughter is seduced, they do not take a moral tone 
 unless the seducer is rich and can be frightened. Their chil- 
 dren, until the State tears them away from their parents, 
 are so much capital, or are made to conduce to their parents' 
 comfort. Selfishness, more especially since 1789, is the one 
 force that sets them thinking; they never ask whether such 
 a thing is illegal or immoral, but what good it will do them. 
 
 Morality, which must not be confused with religion, begins 
 with a competence, just as in still higher spheres delicacy 
 flourishes in human nature as soon as fortune has gilded the 
 surrounding furniture. An entirely honest and well-con- 
 ducted peasant is an exception to his class. The curious will 
 ask how this is, and here is the principal cause, one of many 
 which might be advanced The peasant's functions in the 
 social scale bring him into close contact with nature; he lives 
 a purely material life, very much like the life of a savage. 
 The toil which exhausts the body leaves the mind stagnant, 
 and this is especially the case with uneducated people. And, 
 finally, their poverty is their raison d'tftat, and their neces- 
 sity is to them a necessity, as the Abbe Brossette said. 
 
 Tonsard was ready to listen to the complaint of every one, 
 and frauds useful to the needy were invented under his direc- 
 tion. The wife, a good-natured woman to all appearance, 
 helped evil-doers with a rancorous tongue, and never with- 
 held her countenance or refused a helping hand when any- 
 thing against "the masters" was afoot. The tavern was * 
 perfect nest of vipers, where the hatred which the proletariat 
 and the peasantry bear to the rich and their employers was 
 nursed and kept alive, venomous and active. 
 
 The Tonsards' prosperity was, in those times, the worst of 
 examples. Every one asked himself why he should not help
 
 50 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 himself to wood as they did in the Forest of the Aigues, and 
 find fuel for the oven and faggots for cold weather. Why 
 should not every one else feed a cow on rich people's pastures, 
 and have game enough to eat and to sell? Why should not 
 they reap without sowing at harvest and vintage? Then the 
 underhand theft, which robbed the woods and took tithes of 
 the cornland, meadows, and vineyards, promptly came to be 
 regarded as a vested interest in the communes of Blangy, 
 Conches, and Cerneux, which encircled the Aigues. This 
 canker, for reasons which will be explained in the proper 
 place, was far worse on the Aigues estate than on the lands 
 of Eonquerolles and Soulanges. Do not imagine that Ton- 
 sard, or his old mother, or wife or children, ever said in so many 
 words, "We will steal our living, and we will do our thieving 
 cleverly.'-' The habits had formed slowly. The family began 
 by mixing a few green boughs with the sticks; then, grown 
 bold with habit, and purposely allowed to go unpunished 
 (part of a scheme to be developed in the course of the story), 
 in twenty years' time they had come to the point of "taking 
 their wood," and making a living almost entirely by pilfering. 
 The right of pasture for their cows, the abuse of the privileges 
 of gleaning and grape-gleaning, had been established little 
 by little in this way; and when once the Tonsards and the 
 rest of the lazy peasants in the valley had felt the benefit of 
 the four rights acquired by the poor in the country, rights 
 pushed almost to spoliation, it may be imagined that they 
 were not likely to relinquish them unless compelled by some 
 force stronger than their audacity. 
 
 At the time when this story begins, Tonsard was about 
 fifty years old. He was a tall, strong man, somewhat inclined 
 to stoutness, with black woolly hair, and face of a startling 
 hue, mottled with purplish streaks like a brick, yellow whites 
 to his eyes, flapping ears with huge rims, a low flattened fore- 
 head, and hanging lip. A deceptive flabbiness of flesh cov- 
 ered the muscles beneath, and the man's true character was 
 hidden under a certain stupidity enlightened by flashes of 
 experience, which seemed the more like wit because, in the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 51 
 
 society of his father-in-law, he had learned a dialect called 
 "chaff" in the dictionary of Messieurs Fourchon and Ver- 
 michel. Tonsard's nose was flattened at the end as if the 
 finger of God had set a mark upon him; he spoke in conse- 
 quence from the roof of the mouth, like those whom disease 
 has disfigured by thickening of the nasal passages through 
 which the breath passes with difficulty. His front teeth over- 
 lapped a defect ominously significant, according to Lavater, 
 and the more conspicuous because they were white as a dog's 
 teeth. There was that in the man, beneath the veneer of an 
 idle fellow's good humor and the easy-going ways of a tip- 
 pling boor, which should have alarmed the least perspicacious. 
 
 Tonsard's portrait, the picture of his cabin, and the sketch 
 of his father-in-law, seemed to occupy a prominent position, 
 but you may be sure that this place is due to the man, the 
 tavern, and the family; for the life which has been so 
 minutely described is a typical life, one of a hundred led by 
 peasants in the valley ; and although Tonsard was only a tool 
 in the hands of a deeply rooted and energetic hate, he per- 
 sonally exercised an immense influence on the fortunes of the 
 battle about to begin ; he was the cave to which all that were 
 discontented among the lowest class betook themselves; his 
 tavern (as will shortly be seen) was over and over again the 
 trysting-place of the party, even as he himself became the head 
 of the movement, by reason of the terror which he inspired, 
 less by what he actually did than by what people expected 
 him to do. The poacher's threats were quite as much dreaded 
 as his action ; he was never obliged to carry out a single one of 
 them. 
 
 Every rebellion, open or covert, has its standard. The flag 
 of marauders, idlers, and sots, therefore, was the redoubtable 
 bush at the top of the pole by the gate of the Grand-I-Vert. 
 People found it amusing in the tavern, and amusement is as 
 much sought after and as hard to find in the country as in 
 the town. There was no other inn, moreover, along twelve 
 miles of road, a journey which loaded vehicles easily made 
 in three hours, so all who came and went between Conches
 
 52 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 and Ville-aux-Fayes stopped at the tavern if only for a rest. 
 Then the miller, the deputy-mayor of the arrondissement, 
 came in now and then, and his lads came too; the General's 
 servants did not despise the little wineshop, for Tonsard's 
 two girls were an attraction, and so it fell out that through 
 this subterranean connection with the chateau, the Tonsards 
 could learn all that they desired. It is impossible, by dint 
 of benefits conferred or expected, to break the permanent 
 alliance between servants and the people. The lackey comes 
 from the people, and to the people he belongs. This ill- 
 omened good-fellowship explains Charles' discreet choice of 
 language at the foot of the flight of steps. 
 
 IV 
 
 ANOTHER IDYLL 
 
 "On ! Lord sakes, dad !" cried Tonsard, at the sight of his 
 father-in-law, who he suspected had come for a breakfast. 
 "You are dry in the throat too early of a morning ! We have 
 nothing for you ! And how about that rope, the rope you 
 were to make for us? It is a marvel how you work at it 
 of an evening, and find so little done next morning. You 
 ought to have twisted enough to twist your own neck with 
 ages ago, for you are growing altogether too dear " 
 
 (The wit of the peasant and laborer is of the exceedingly 
 Attic kind, which consists in saying the thing that you really 
 think with a certain grotesque exaggeration ; nor is the wit of 
 drawing-rooms essentially different ; intellectual subtleties re- 
 place the picturesqueness of coarse, forcible language, that is 
 all the difference.) 
 
 " 'Tisn't a father-in-law," the old man interrupted ; "treat 
 me as a customer. I want a bottle of the best." 
 
 So saying. Fourchon sat down, showing a five-franc piece 
 that shone like a sun through his fingers as he rapped on the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 53 
 
 sorry table a piece of furniture curious to behold by reason 
 of its charred spots, wine stains, and notches covered with a 
 coating of grease. At the sound of silver, Marie Tonsard, 
 like a. privateering corvette on a cruise, gave her grandfather 
 a quick glance, a sly look that gleamed like a yellow spark 
 in her blue eyes; and the jingling of the metal brought La 
 Tonsard out of her room. 
 
 "You are always hard on poor father," said she, looking 
 at Tonsard, "and yet he earns a good deal of money in a year. 
 God grant it is honestly come by ! Let us have a look at 
 this," she added, and she pounced down on the coin, and 
 snatched it out of old Fourchon's hands. 
 
 "Go, Marie," Tonsard said with gravity; "there is still 
 some wine in bottle left under the shelf." 
 
 (In country places there is but one quality of wine, but it 
 is sold under two names wine from the cask, and wine in 
 bottle.) 
 
 "Where did that come from?" La Tonsard demanded of 
 her father, as she slipped the coin into her pocket. 
 
 "Philippine, you will come to a bad end," retorted her 
 parent, shaking his head, without an attempt to recover his 
 money. By this time, doubtless, Fourchon recognized the 
 futility of a struggle between his terrible son-in-law, his 
 daughter, and himself. 
 
 "There's one more bottle of wine for which you get five 
 francs out of me," he added sarcastically, "but that shall be 
 the last. I shall take my custom to the Cafe de la Paix." 
 
 "You be quiet, father," returned the fat, fair mistress of 
 the house, who was rather like a Koman matron. "You want 
 a shirt, a tidy pair of trousers, and another hat, and I should 
 like to see you in a new waistcoat at last." 
 
 "I have told you before that that would be the ruin of me !" 
 the old man shouted. "If people think I am rich, they won't 
 give me anything." 
 
 The entrance of the fair-haired Marie with the bottle cut 
 short old Fourchon's eloquence, for he did not lack that char- 
 acteristic of an outspokenness which permits itself to say
 
 54 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 everything and shrinks from giving no thought expression, 
 however atrocious it may be. 
 
 "Then you have no mind to tell us where you bag so much 
 money ?" asked Tonsard. "Some of us might go there, I sup- 
 pose ? " 
 
 The brutal master of the house, while finishing a snare, was 
 eying his father-in-law. He scanned the old man's trousers, 
 and soon spied the round edge of the second five-franc piece 
 in his pocket. 
 
 "Here's to you ! I am turning capitalist," said old Four- 
 chon. 
 
 "So you could, if you liked," said Tonsard ; "you are clever 
 enough, you are, only the devil made a hole in the bottom of 
 your head, and everything runs down through it." 
 
 "Eh ! I have been playing off the otter dodge on that young 
 fellow from Paris up at the Aigues, that is all !" 
 
 "If many people were to come to see the source of the 
 Avonne, you would be rich, Daddy Fourchon," said Marie. 
 
 "Yes," and he drank off the last glass of his bottle. "But 
 I have played the otter dodge so often, that the otters are 
 growing angry, and one ran between my legs, which will 
 bring me twenty francs or more." 
 
 "You made an otter out of tow, daddy, I'll be bound," 
 said La Tonsard, with a knowing look at the old man. 
 
 "If you give me a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, and a pair 
 of list braces, so as I shan't be too much of a discredit to 
 Vermichel on our platform at The Tivoli (for old Socquard 
 is always grumbling at me), I will let you keep the money, 
 daughter; your idea is quite worth it. I may take in that 
 young fellow again; after this one try, he may very likely 
 take to otter-hunting." 
 
 "Go and find us another bottle," said Tonsard, addressing 
 his daughter. "If your father had an otter, he would let us 
 see it," he added, speaking to his wife. He hoped to rouse 
 Fourchon's vanity. 
 
 "I am too much afraid of seeing her in your frying-pan," 
 the old man said, and one little green eye winked at La Ton-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 55 
 
 sard. "Philippine has just sneaked my five-franc piece, and 
 how much haven't you bullied out of me for clothes and board, 
 forsooth ! And you tell me that I am dry too early in the 
 day, and I never have clothes to my back " 
 
 "Because you sold your last suit to buy spiced wine at the 
 Cafe de la Paix !" said his daughter ; "and, proof of that, 
 Vermichel tried to stop you 
 
 "Vermichel ! After I stood treat ! Vermichel is incapable 
 of treachery to friendship. It will be that hundredweight of 
 stale bacon on two legs that he is not ashamed to call his 
 wife !" 
 
 "He or she," said Tonsard, "or Bonnebault " 
 
 "If it was Bonnebault," retorted Fourchon, "him as is one 
 of the pillars of the Cafe I'll I'll That's enough !" 
 
 "But where's the harm if you did sell your things, old 
 plate-licker ? You sold them because you sold them ; you are 
 of age," returned Tonsard, slapping the old man's knee. 
 "Come, give your custom to my barrels, redden your gullet; 
 the missus' father has a right to do it, and better do that than 
 carry your white silver to Socquard's." 
 
 "To think that you have played tunes for them to dance 
 to at the Tivoli these fifteen years, and cannot find out how 
 Socquard mulls his wine, you that are so cunning !" said his 
 daughter, addressing her parent. "And yet you know quite 
 well that with that secret we should be as rich as Eigou." 
 
 In the Morvan, and that strip of Burgundy which lies on 
 the Paris side of the Morvan, the spiced wine with 'which 
 La Tonsard reproached her father is a somewhat expensive 
 beverage, which plays a great part in the lives of the peasants. 
 Grocers compound it with more or less success, so do lemon- 
 ade-makers where there are cafes. The delectable drink, com- 
 posed of choice wine, sugar, cinnamon, .and other spices, is 
 much to be preferred to the multifarious mixtures and dis- 
 guised forms of brandy known as ratafia, cent-sept-ans, eau- 
 des-braves, cordial, vespetro, esprit-de-soleil, and the like. 
 Spiced wine is to be found even on the very borders of Swit- 
 zerland. In wild nooks in the Jura, where an occasional de-
 
 56 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 termined tourist penetrates, the innkeepers call it Wine of 
 Syracuse, taking the word of commercial travelers. It is 
 not bad in itself; and when mountain-climbing has induced 
 a wolfish hunger, you are only too glad to pay the three or 
 four francs charged for a bottle. In every household in 
 Burgundy or the Morvan any trifling ailment or excitement 
 is an excuse for drinking spiced wine. Women take it before 
 and after a confinement with toast and sugar. Peasants have 
 been known to squander their whole substance on spiced wine, 
 and not unfrequently the too attractive liquor necessitates 
 marital correction. 
 
 "There is no smoking that," said Fourchon. "Socquard 
 always shuts himself up to make his spiced wine. He did not 
 let his wife that's gone into the secret, and he has everything 
 from Paris to make the stuff." 
 
 "Don't you tease your father," cried Tonsard. "He doesn't 
 know well and good, he doesn't know. One can't know 
 everything." 
 
 Fourchon felt uneasy at this affability of speech and coun- 
 tenance on the part of his son-in-law. 
 
 "Be you minded to rob me ?" the old man asked naively. 
 
 ef l've nothing but what lawfully belongs to me," said Ton- 
 Sard ; "and when I take anything away from you, I am only 
 helping myself to the portion you promised I should have." 
 
 The rough words reassured Fourchon. He bowed his head, 
 like a man convicted and convinced. 
 
 "There's a fine springe," Tonsard continued, coming up 
 to his father-in-law, and putting the trap on the old man's 
 knees. "They will want game up at the Aigues, and we will 
 supply them with some of their own, certain sure, or there 
 is no Providence for us poor folk." 
 
 "You have made a good strong job of it," said the old man, 
 surveying the deadly engine. 
 
 "Let us pick up a few pence at any rate, dad," said La 
 Tonsard; "we shall have our slice of the loaf of the 
 Aigues " 
 
 "Babblers !" Tonsard broke in. "If I am hanged, it will
 
 THE PEASANTRY 57 
 
 not be for a gun-shot, but the clack of your daughter's 
 tongue." 
 
 "Then do you think that the Aigues will be sold in lots, 
 for the sake of your ugly phiz? What, old Eigou has been 
 sucking the marrow out of your bones these thirty years, and 
 you don't know that the bourgeois are worse than the sei- 
 gneurs ? When that affair comes off, those nobodies, the Sou- 
 drys, Gaubertins, and Eigous will set you dancing to the tune 
 of 'J'ai du bon tcibac, tu n'en auras pas' the national an- 
 them of the rich, eh? The peasant will always be the 
 peasant. Don't you see (but you know nothing about poli- 
 tics) that Government puts on the wine-dues simply to do us 
 out of our chink and keep us poor? The bourgeois or the 
 Government, it is all one. What would become of them if 
 we were all rich? Would they work in the fields? Would 
 they do the harvesting? They must have poor folk. I was 
 rich for ten years, and I know quite well what I used to think 
 about paupers !" 
 
 "You must hunt with them, all the same," said Tonsard, 
 "because they break up the big estates into lots, and we can 
 turn on Eigou afterwards. He is eating up Courtecuisse ; 
 but if I were in Courtecuisse's place, poor fellow, I would 
 have paid my shot in lead instead of silver, long ago " 
 
 "Eight you are," said Fourchon. "It is as old Niseron says, 
 who kept on being a Eepublican after everybody else left off, 
 'The people die hard, the people don't die, they have time 
 on their side !' '' 
 
 The old man dropped into a kind of dream. Tonsard took 
 advantage of this to take back his springe ; but as he laid his 
 hand upon it, he made a slit with a pair of scissors in the 
 old man's trousers, and just as Fourchon raised his glass to 
 drink, the five-franc piece slid down to a place on the floor 
 that was always damp with the dregs of glasses. Tonsard 
 set his foot on it. It was neatly done; yet the old man might 
 perhaps have found it out if Vermichel had not turned up 
 at that very moment. 
 
 "Tonsard !" called that functionary from the foot of the 
 steps. <r Where is your dad, do you know?"
 
 58 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Vermichel shouted, the coin was stolen, and the glasa 
 emptied simultaneously. 
 
 "Here, captain !" said Fourchon, holding out a hand to 
 help Vermichel up the steps. 
 
 You cannot imagine a type more thoroughly Burgundian 
 than Vermichel. His countenance, not crimson but scarlet, 
 like certain tropical portions of the globe bore several con- 
 spicuous extinct volcanoes, and a greenish eruption, which 
 Fourchon rather poetically called "grog blossoms." The 
 features of this inflamed face had been swollen out of all 
 knowledge through habitual drunkenness; it was a cyclopean 
 visage, with an eye keen and wide awake on one side, but 
 blind on the other, where the sight was obscured by a yellow- 
 ish film. With a shock head of red hair, and a beard of the 
 traditional Judas pattern, Vermichel's appearance was as for- 
 midable as his nature was harmless. His trumpet-like nose 
 was a sort of note of interrogation, to which a huge slit of a 
 mouth seemed to reply even when shut. 
 
 Vermichel was a little man. He wore iron-bound shoes, 
 trousers of bottle-green velveteen, an ancient waistcoat so 
 much mended that it looked like a bit of patchwork quilt, a 
 rough blue cloth coat, and a broad-brimmed gray hat. This 
 splendor of costume demanded of him by his functions in 
 the town of Soulanges, where he combined the offices of hall- 
 porter at the townhall, town-crier, jailer, fiddler, and solic- 
 itor was entirely due to the exertions of Mme. Vermichel, 
 a terrible foe to Eabelaisian philosophy. This moustached 
 virago, a good yard broad, seventeen stone in weight, and ac- 
 tive in proportion to her size, bore rule over Vermichel; she 
 beat him when he was drunk, and when he was sober he al- 
 lowed her to beat him, for which reason old Fourchon cast 
 contemptuous eyes on Vermichel's apparel "The garb of a 
 slave !" he used to call it. 
 
 "Talk of the sun and you see his rays," Fourchon continued, 
 repeating an old joke occasioned by Vermichel's red beaming 
 countenance, and indeed it was not unlike the gilded sun 
 hung out for a sign above country inns. "Did your missus
 
 THE PEASANTRY 59 
 
 see too much dust on your jacket, and are you running away 
 from your four-fifths? (for you can't call that wife of yours 
 your better half) . What brings you here so early, eh, beaten 
 drum?" 
 
 "Politics as usual," said Vermichel; evidently he was used 
 to these jokes. 
 
 "Oh ! Business is flat at Blangy, and we shall have bills 
 protested directly," said old Fourchon, pouring out a glass 
 for his friend. 
 
 "Our ape is on my tracks," said Vermichel, raising his 
 glass. 
 
 In laborers' slang, the ape is the master. This was an- 
 other expression in Messrs. Vermichel and Fourchon's dic- 
 tionary. 
 
 "Why is Master Brunet coming to bother us up here ?" de- 
 manded La Tonsard. 
 
 "Eh, goodness, you people have brought him in more than 
 you are worth yourselves these three years. Oh, the master 
 up at the Aigues is going to pay you out properly. He is 
 coming on well, is the Upholsterer. As old Brunet says, 'If 
 there were three like him in the valley, my fortune would be 
 made ' " 
 
 "What have they been plotting fresh against the poor 
 folk?" asked Marie. 
 
 "My word," answered Vermichel, "he is no fool, he isn't ! 
 You will have to knuckle under in the long run. There is 
 no help for it ! They have been in force for the last two 
 years, with their four gamekeepers and a mounted patrol all 
 running about like ants, and a forester that works like a 
 nigger. And now the police will do anything they like for 
 them. They will grind you down " 
 
 "Not they !" said Tonsard ; "we are too small already. It 
 is not the trees as stands out longest, it's the grass." 
 
 "Don't you believe it," old Fourchon retorted; "you have 
 land of your own ' 
 
 "After all," Vermichel went on, "those folk are very fond 
 of you, for they think of you from morning to night. This 
 
 VOL. IO 30
 
 60 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 is the sort of thing they say 'Those people pasture their 
 cattle on our meadows, so we will take their cattle away from 
 them, and then they cannot eat the grass in our meadows them- 
 selves/ As one and all of you have judgments hanging over 
 you, they have given orders to our ape to seize your cows. We 
 are going to begin with Conches ; this morning we shall seize 
 Mother Bonnebault's cow, Godain's cow, Mitant's cow " 
 
 As soon as Marie heard the name of Bonnebault, she looked 
 knowingly at her father and mother, and darted out of the 
 house and into the vineyard; she was Bonnebault's sweet- 
 heart, and the old woman with the cow was Bonnebault's 
 grandmother. She slipped like an eel through a hole in the 
 hedge, and fled away to Conches with the speed of a hare with 
 the hounds on her track. 
 
 "They will do this much," said Tonsard placidly; "they 
 will get their bones broken, and that will be a pity, for their 
 mothers won't find them new ones." 
 
 "That may very well happen, all the same," assented Four- 
 chon. "But look here, Vermichel, I can't come with you for 
 an hour yet ; I have important business at the chateau." 
 
 "More important than three fees of five sous each? You 
 had better not quarrel with your own bread and butter." 
 
 "My business lies at the Aigues, I tell you, Vermichel," said 
 old Fourchon, with ludicrous self-importance. 
 
 "Besides, suppose that father had better be out of the way," 
 said La Tonsard. "Now, maybe you would mean to look for 
 the cows ?" she queried. 
 
 "M. Brunet is a good soul ; if he finds nothing but the cow- 
 dung, he will ask no better," answered Vermichel. "A man 
 like him, that has to go about the roads of a night, ought to 
 mind what he is about." 
 
 "If he does, he is right," Tonsard said drily. 
 
 "So he talks like this to M. Michaud," Vermichel went 
 on. " 'I shall go as soon as the court rises.' If he really meant 
 to find the cows, he would have gone to-morrow morning at 
 seven o'clock. But there, go he must, M. Brunet. You won't
 
 THE PEASANTRY 61 
 
 catch Michaud napping twice; he is an old dog, and up to 
 everything. Ah, there's a ruffian for you !" 
 
 "A bully like that ought to have stopped in the army/' said 
 Tonsard; "he is only fit to let loose on the enemy. I wish 
 he would come here, I know, and ask me my name; he may 
 call himself a veteran of the Young Guard as much as he 
 pleases, sure am I that after we measured our spurs, I'd pull 
 more feathers out of the old cock than he would have out of 
 me," 
 
 "Oh, by the by," said La Tonsard, turning to Vermichel, 
 "there are the advertisements of the Fete at Soulanges, when 
 will they be out ? Here we are at the 8th of August." 
 
 "I took them yesterday to the printer, M. Bournier at Ville- 
 aux-Fayes/^ said Vermichel. "There was talk at Ma'am 
 iSoudry's of fireworks on the lake." 
 
 "What a lot of people we shall have !" cried Fourchon. 
 
 "And the takingy of days together for Socquard," said Ton- 
 sard enviously. 
 
 "Oh, perhaps it will rain," added his wife, as if to reassure 
 herself. 
 
 The sound of horse v s hoofs came from the direction of Sou- 
 langes, and five minutes later the clerk of the court tied his 
 horse to a stake set for that purpose by the wicket-gate, near 
 the cowshed. He soon showed his face at the door. 
 
 "Come, come, boys, Let us lose no time," cried he, with a 
 pretence of hurry. 
 
 "Ha !" said Vermichel, "here's a deserter for you, M. Bru- 
 net. Daddy Fourchon wants to drop out of this business." 
 
 "He has had a drop too much/' retorted the clerk, "but 
 the law does not require him to be sober." 
 
 "Asking your pardon, M. Brunet," said Fourchon, "I am 
 expected at the Aigues on business; there is a bargain for 
 an otter on hand." 
 
 Brunet was a little dried-up man, dressed in black cloth 
 from head to foot. With his bilious complexion, sly eyes, 
 crisp hair, firm mouth, pinched nose, fidgety manner, and 
 hoarse voice, his whole appearance and character exactly
 
 62 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 suited his profession. So well versed was he in law, or, rather, 
 in chicanery, that he was at once the adviser and the terror of 
 the canton; and, moreover, he did not lack a certain kind of 
 popularity among the peasants, of whom, for the most part, 
 he took payment in kind. All his positive and negative qual- 
 ities, together with his knowledge of their ways, had brought 
 him a practice in the district, to the prejudice of his colleague, 
 Maitre Plissoud, of whom more will be said later on. It not 
 unfrequently happens in country places that one clerk of the 
 peace does all the business, and the other has none. 
 
 "Then is there any hurry ?" asked Tonsard of little Brunet. 
 
 "There is no help for it! You are plundering that man 
 beyond everything, and it's in self-defence," said the clerk. 
 "This whole business of yours will end badly; the Govern- 
 ment will take it up." 
 
 "So we poor wretches are to die like dogs, are we?" asked 
 Tonsard, bringing out a glass of brandy on a saucer for the 
 clerk. 
 
 "The poor may die like dogs, there will always be plenty 
 left," said Fourchon sententiously. 
 
 "And then you do more damage than a little in the woods," 
 pursued the man of law. 
 
 "Don't you believe it, M. Brunet; there is a good deal of 
 noise made about a few miserable faggots, that there is !" said 
 La Tonsard. 
 
 "They did not clear away enough rich people at the time 
 of the Revolution, that is all," said Tonsard. 
 
 As he spoke a sound was heard, alarming in that it was 
 inexplicable. A sound of footsteps at a furious pace, the rat- 
 tle of arms rising above a crackling sound of brushwood 
 dragged along the ground, and a patter of feet that fled 
 faster than the pursuer. Two voices as different as the foot- 
 steps bawled interjections. The group in the tavern knew 
 that it was a man in hot chase and a woman in flight, but 
 why and wherefore ? The suspense did not last long. 
 
 "That's mother," remarked Tonsard, starting up ; "I know 
 her squall."
 
 THE PEASANTRY 63 
 
 And in another moment, after springing up the broken 
 steps with a final effort such as smugglers' legs alone can 
 make, Granny Tonsard fell backwards, sprawling in their 
 midst. The huge mass of wood and sticks in her faggot made 
 a terrific amount of noise as it bent and broke against the 
 lintel and the ceiling. Every one whisked out of her way. 
 Tables, bottles, and chairs were overturned in all directions 
 as the branches fell about ; the whole cabin might have fallen 
 in with a less mighty crash. 
 
 "He has killed me, the scamp! the shock has killed 
 me " 
 
 Then the old woman's shriek, flight, and sudden entrance 
 were all explained by an apparition on the threshold; there 
 stood a man dressed in green cloth from head to foot, his hat 
 bound with a silver cord, a sabre at his side, and the crest of 
 Montcornet and Troisville stamped on his shoulder belt; he 
 wore the regulation red soldier's waistcoat and leather gaiters 
 reaching just above the knee. 
 
 It was a forester. There was a moment's hesitation; then 
 the man exclaimed, as he saw Brunet and Vermichel, "I have 
 witnesses !" 
 
 "Of what ?" asked Tonsard. 
 
 "That woman has an oak ten years old, chopped into billets, 
 in her faggot. Downright stealing !" 
 
 As soon as the word "witness" was pronounced, Vermichel 
 considered that the moment was eminently suitable for going 
 into the croft to take the air. 
 
 "Witnesses of what? Of what?" cried Tonsard, planting 
 himself in front of the forester, while La Tonsard raised her 
 prostrate mother-in-law. "Have the goodness to show me a 
 clean pair of heels, Vatel ! Pounce on people and draw up 
 your reports on the highway where you are on your own 
 ground, you brigand, but get out of this. My house belongs 
 to me, I suppose. A man's house is his castle 
 
 "I caught your mother in the act, and she will come along 
 with me." 
 
 "Arrest my mother in my house ! You have no right to do
 
 64 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 it! My house is inviolable, every one knows that much at 
 least. Have you a magistrate's warrant from M. Guerbet? 
 Ah ! that is what the police must have before they come into 
 the house, and you are not a policeman, though you may have 
 taken your oath at the court to make us die of hunger, you 
 pitiful forest catch-poll." 
 
 The forester's rage rose to such a pitch that he tried to seize 
 on the faggot ; but the old hag, a hideous, dirty bit of parch- 
 ment endowed with life, such as you will not see save in 
 David's picture of the Sabines, yelled, "If you touch that, I'll 
 go for your eyes." 
 
 "Look here, I dare you to undo the faggot before M. Bru- 
 net," said the forester. 
 
 Although the clerk assumed the air of indifference which 
 officials learn to wear in experience of affairs, he looked at the 
 host and his wife, and blinked in a way which meant, "This 
 is a bad business." 
 
 As for old Fourchon, he pointed to the heap of ashes on the 
 hearth, and looked at his daughter. In a moment La Tonsard 
 grasped the situation, her mother-in-law's peril, and her 
 father's mute counsel; she snatched up a handful of ashes, 
 and dashed it full in the forester's eyes. Vatel began to yell. 
 Tonsard, illuminated by all the light of which the other was 
 bereft, pushed him roughly out on to the steps, where a blind 
 man might easily miss his footing. Vatel rolled down into 
 the road, and dropped his gun. In the twinkling of an eye 
 the faggot was unbound, the logs extracted, and hidden with 
 nimbleness which no words can describe. Brunet, having no 
 mind to be a witness to an exploit which he had foreseen, hur- 
 ried out to the forester's assistance, picked him up, set him on 
 the bank, and went to soak his handkerchief in water, so as 
 to bathe the sufferer's eyes ; for, in spite of the pain, the man 
 was trying to drag himself towards the brook. 
 
 "Vatel, you are in the wrong," said the clerk. "You have 
 no right to enter a house, you know " 
 
 On the threshold stood the old woman, a dwarfish, almost 
 hunchbacked figure; lightnings flashed from her eyes, while 
 insults poured from her tongue; the toothless crone foamed
 
 THE PEASANTRY 05 
 
 at the mouth, standing with her hands on her hips, yelling 
 so loud that they might have heard her at Blangy. 
 
 "Ah! scamp, serves you right, it does! Hell confound 
 you! Suspect me of cutting trees, me the honestest wo- 
 man in the place, and hunt me down like vermin ! I should 
 like to see you lose your cursed eyes ! and then there would be 
 peace again in the countryside. You bring bad luck, every 
 one of you, you and your mates, making up shameful stories 
 to stir up strife between your master and us 
 
 The forester submitted while the justice's clerk cleared the 
 ashes from his eyes, and bathed them, demonstrating all the 
 while that his patient had put himself in the wrong as to the 
 law. 
 
 "The harridan ! She had tired us out," Vital said at last ; 
 "she has been in the wood ever since it was light " 
 
 Meanwhile the stolen goods were concealed, the whole 
 family lent a hand, and in a trice everything in the tavern 
 was in its place again. This done, Tonsard came to the door 
 and took a high and mighty tone. 
 
 "Vatel, sonny, the next time you take it into your head to 
 force your way into my house, my gun will have something 
 to say to you. You have had the ashes this time, you may 
 catch a sight of the fire next. You don't know your business. 
 You are feeling warm after this ; if you would like a glass 
 of wine, they'll bring one for you; you can see for yourself 
 if there is a scrap of live wood in my mother's faggot, it is all 
 sticks." 
 
 "Scum of the earth !" ejaculated the forester for Brunei's 
 benefit, more hurt in his mind by that piece of irony than 
 by the ashes in his eyes. 
 
 Just at that moment Charles, the man who had been sent 
 in search of Blondet, appeared at the gate. 
 
 "Why, what is the matter, Vatel ?" cried he. 
 
 "Oh !" answered the forester, drying his eyes, which he had 
 been dipping wide open in the stream for a final cleansing, 
 "I have some debtors up there; I will make them curse the 
 day when they first saw the light."
 
 06 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "If that is the way you take it, Monsieur Vatel," said Ton- 
 sard coolly, "you will find out that we Burgundians are no 
 milksops." 
 
 Vatel went off. Charles, but little curious to know the 
 meaning of the enigma, looked in at the tavern door. 
 
 "Come up to the chateau, you and your otter, if you have 
 one," said he to old Fourchon. 
 
 The old man hastily rose and followed Charles. 
 
 "Look here now, where is that otter of yours?" asked 
 Charles, smiling incredulously. 
 
 "Over here," said the other, turning towards the Thune. 
 The Thune was a little stream formed by the overflow of the 
 millstream and the rivulets in the park at the Aigues. The 
 Thune flows by the side of the road until it reaches the little 
 lake at Soulanges, pouring into it on one side, and out at 
 the other, turning the mills at Soulanges, filling the ponds by 
 the chateau, and finally joining the Avonne again. 
 
 "There she is. I hid her in the bottom of the stream at the 
 Aigues with a stone tied to her neck." 
 
 As the old man stooped and raised himself again, he missed 
 the five-franc piece from his pocket ; such a coin was there so 
 seldom that he missed the novel sensation at once. 
 
 "O v ' the rascals !" he cried, "I snare otters, and they snare 
 their fatht., they do! They take all that I make from me, 
 aw tell me that it is for my benefit. Oh, I believe them, 
 when they talk about my benefit. If it weren't for poor 
 Mouche, the comfort of my old age, I would go and drown 
 myself. Children are the ruin of their fathers. You are 
 not married, are you, Monsieur Charles? Never marry, and 
 then you won't have to repent of breeding bad blood. And I 
 thinking that now I could buy some tow! There's my tow 
 slipped through my fingers. That gentleman, and a nice 
 gentleman he is, gave me ten francs. Well, for one thing, 
 my otter has gone up in value now since this happened." 
 
 Charles put so little belief in Daddy Fourchon, that he took 
 these lamentations, which for once were full of a very real 
 feeling, for part of the preparation of a "try on," as he called 
 it, in the language of the servants' hall, and he made a blun-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 67 
 
 der by betraying his opinion in a smile, which the spiteful old 
 man saw at once. 
 
 "Look here, Daddy Fourchon, you must behave yourself, 
 eh ? You will speak to madame in a moment/' said Charles, 
 who noticed the profusion of brilliant carbuncles on the old 
 man's nose and cheek's. 
 
 "I know what I am about, Charles, as you shall see. And 
 if you will undertake to give me some of the scraps left over 
 from breakfast, and a couple of bottles of Spanish wine in 
 the kitchen, I will tell you in three words how to escape a 
 drubbing " 
 
 "Tell me, and Frangois shall have the master's orders to 
 give you a glass of wine," said the footman. 
 
 "Is it a bargain ?" 
 
 "A bargain." 
 
 "All right. You shall have a word or two with Catherine 
 under the bridge over the Avonne. Godain is in love with 
 her, he has seen you together, and he is stupid enough to be 
 jealous. Stupid, I say, because a peasant has no business 
 with sentiment, that is for rich people. So if you go to Sou- 
 langes for a dance with her at the Tivoli on the fete day, you 
 will be made to dance, more than you think for ! Godain is 
 miserly, and has a nasty temper; he is just the one to break 
 your arm, and you could not summons him for it " 
 
 "Too dear ! Catherine is a fine girl, but she is not worth 
 that'' said Charles. "And what makes Godain take it amiss ? 
 The others don't." 
 
 "Oh ! he is enough in love with her to marry her." 
 
 "There is a woman that will be beaten !" said Charles. 
 
 "That is as may be," returned the grandfather. "Tonsard 
 never lifted a hand against her mother, so frightened he was 
 that she should go off and leave him, and Catherine takes 
 after her mother. A wife that can bestir herself is worth a 
 good deal. And besides, at a game of hot cockles with Cath- 
 erine, Godain, strong though he is, would not come off best." 
 
 "Wait, Daddy Fourchon., here are forty sous for you to 
 drink to my health in case we mayn't be able to get a sup of 
 Alicante."
 
 68 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Old Fourchon looked away as he pocketed the money, lest 
 Charles should see the ironical glee in his eyes, which he could 
 not hide. 
 
 "Catherine is a rare wench for a glass," said the old man ; 
 "she is fond of malaga ; you ought to tell her to come to the 
 Aigues for some, you ninny !" 
 
 Charles looked at old Fourehon with undisguised admira- 
 tion; how should he guess how immensely important it was 
 to the General's enemies to introduce one more spy into the 
 house ? 
 
 "The General must be pleased," the old man went on ; "the 
 peasants are keeping very quiet. What does he say about it ? 
 Is he still satisfied with Sibilet ?" 
 
 "Nobody gives Sibilet any trouble except Michaud; they 
 say he will contrive to make him lose his place." 
 
 "Two of a trade !" commented old Fourchon. "I'll lay to 
 it that you yourself would be glad to see Frangois turned off 
 to step into his place." 
 
 "Lord, Frangois gets twelve hundred francs," said 
 Charles; "but they won't turn him away, he knows the Gen- 
 eral's secrets 
 
 "Just as Ma'am Michaud knew my lady's, eh ?" said Four- 
 chon, eyeing Charles keenly. "Look here, my lad, do you 
 know whether the General and my lady have rooms apart ?" 
 
 ' "Of course, or the master would not be so fond of madame 
 as he is." 
 
 "Don't you know any more ?" asked Fourchon ; but no more 
 could be said, for by this time the pair were under the kitchen 
 windows. 
 
 THE ENEMIES FACE TO FACE 
 
 As soon as breakfast was begun, Francois, the first valet-de- 
 chambre, came to Blondet, saying in a low voice, but quite
 
 THE PEASANTRY 69 
 
 loud enough to be overheard by the Count, "Fourchon's little 
 boy says that they caught the otter at last, sir, and he wants to 
 know if you would like to have the animal before taking it to 
 the sub-prefect at Ville-aux-Fayes." 
 
 ]j5mile Blondet, past master in mystification, flushed red 
 in spite of himself, like a girl who hears an equivocal anec- 
 dote, and understands the drift of it. 
 
 "Aha ! you have been out otter-hunting with old Fourchon 
 this 'morning !" cried the General, bursting into a roar of 
 laughter. 
 
 "What is it ?" asked the Countess, disconcerted by her hus- 
 band's hilarity. 
 
 "When a clever man like Blondet lets old Fourchon take 
 him in, an old Cuirassier need not blush to have gone hunt- 
 ing that same otter, who looks uncommonly like the third 
 horse which you never see and always pay for when you travel 
 post/' 
 
 And in a voice broken by peals of laughter, the General 
 managed to add, "After that, I do not wonder that you 
 changed your boots and trousers, you must have been made 
 to swim. As for me, I was not hoaxed quite so far as you 
 I stopped on the bank but then you are so much cleverer 
 than I am " 
 
 "You forget, dear, that I do not know what you are talk r 
 ing about/' put in Mme. de Montcornet, with a trace of pique, 
 caused by Blondet's confusion. At this the General recovered 
 his gravity, and Blondet himself told the story of his otter 
 hunt. 
 
 "But if they really have an otter," said the Countess, "they 
 are not so much to blame, poor things." 
 
 "Yes ; only no one has seen the otter for these ten years !" 
 returned the -pitiless General. 
 
 "M. le Comte," said Frangois, "the child vows and declares 
 that he has caught one " 
 
 "If they have an otter, I will pay them for it," said the 
 General.
 
 70 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Providence can never have condemned the Aigues to be 
 without otters for ever," put in the Abbe Brossette. 
 
 "Oh, M. le Cure, if you let loose Providence upon us " 
 
 exclaimed Blondet. 
 
 "But who can have come ?" the Countess asked quickly. 
 
 "Mouche, my lady, the little boy that always goes about 
 with old Fourchon," the servant answered. 
 
 "Send him in if madame has no objection," said the Gen- 
 eral. "He will perhaps amuse you." 
 
 "But at any rate we ought to know what to believe, ought 
 we not ?" asked the Countess. 
 
 A few moments later Mouche appeared in his almost naked 
 condition. At this apparition of poverty personified in the 
 splendid dining-room, when the price of a single mirror on 
 the walls would have been a fortune to the barefooted, bare- 
 legged, bare-headed child, it was impossible not to give way 
 to charitable impulses. Mouche's eyes, like glowing coals, 
 gazed from the glories of the room to the riches on the table. 
 
 "You have no mother, of course?" said the Countess, un- 
 able to explain such destitution in any other way. 
 
 "No, my lady ; mammy died of fretting because daddy went 
 for a soldier in 1812, and she never saw him again; he did 
 not marry her with the papers before he went, and he was 
 frozen, saving your presence. But I have my grandad Four- 
 chon, who is very good to me, though he does beat me now and 
 again like a Jesus." 
 
 "How does it happen, dear, that any one on your land is 
 so wretched?" asked the Countess, looking at the General. 
 
 "No one need be wretched here, Madame la Comtesse, un- 
 less they choose," said the Cure. "M. le Comte means well 
 by them, but you have to do with a people without religion, 
 people who have but one idea how to live at your expense." 
 
 "But, my dear cure," said Blondet, "you are here to keep 
 them in order." 
 
 "My lord Bishop sent me here as a missionary among 
 heathen, monsieur," said the Abbe Brossette; "but, as I had 
 the honor of pointing out to him, our heathen in France are
 
 THE PEASANTRY 71 
 
 unapproachable; they make it a rule not to listen to us; now 
 in America you can appeal to the savages." 
 
 "M'sieu le Cure, they do a little for me now, but if I went 
 to your church they would give over helping me altogether. 
 I should have them calling 'shovel hats' after me." 
 
 "But religion ought to begin by giving him trousers, my 
 dear Abbe," said Blondet. "Do not your missions begin by 
 coaxing the savage ?" 
 
 "He would have sold his clothes before long," the Abbe 
 answered, lowering his voice, "and my stipend does not allow 
 me to traffic in souls in that way." 
 
 "M. le Cure is right," said the General, who was looking 
 at Mouche. The urchin's tactics consisted in feigning igno- 
 rance whenever he had the worst of it. 
 
 "The little rascal is evidently intelligent enough to know 
 right from wrong," continued the General. "He is old enough 
 to work, and his one thought is how to transgress and escape 
 punishment. He is well known to the foresters. Before I 
 was mayor he knew, young as he was, that if a man is witness 
 of a trespass on his own land, he cannot lodge a complaint 
 himself, and he would brazenly stay in my meadows grazing 
 his cows under my eyes ; now, he makes off." 
 
 "Oh ! that is very wrong," said the Countess ; "we ought 
 not to take other people's goods, dear child." 
 
 "One must eat, my lad} r . Grandad gives me more cuffs 
 than crusts, and it makes you feel hollow inside, does a hiding. 
 When the cows have milk, I help myself to a little, and that 
 keeps life in me. Is his lordship so poor that he can't spare 
 a little grass so that I may drink ?" 
 
 "Why, perhaps he has had nothing to eat to-day," said .the 
 Countess, touched by such dire poverty. "Just let him have 
 .some bread and the rest of the fowl; give him some break- 
 fast in fact," she said, looking at the servant. "Where do 
 you sleep ?" she added. 
 
 "Anywhere, wherever they will let us sleep in the winter, 
 my lady, and out of doors in the summer/' 
 
 "How old are you?"
 
 72 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Twelve." 
 
 "Then something might be made of him yet/' said the 
 Countess, turning to her husband. 
 
 "Might make a soldier," said the General gruffly; "he is 
 in good training for it. I myself have been through quite as 
 much of that sort of thing as he has, and yet here I am." 
 
 "Asking your pardon, General, I am not on the register," 
 said the child. "I shall not be drawn. My poor mother was 
 not married, and I was born out in the fields ; I am a son of 
 the airih, as grandad says. Mammy saved me from the 
 militia. I don't call myself Mouche any more than anything 
 else. Grandad showed me plainly where I was well off. The 
 Government haven't got me on their papers, and when I am 
 old enough to be drawn I shall go on my travels through 
 France. They won't catch me!" 
 
 "Do you love your grandfather?" asked the Countess, try- 
 ing to read the heart of twelve years old. 
 
 "Lord, he cuffs me whenever the fit takes him, but there is 
 no help for it. He is so funny, such a good sort ! And then 
 he says that he is taking pay for teaching me to read and 
 write." 
 
 "Can you read?" asked the Count. 
 
 "I should think I could, M. le Comte, and fine writing too ! 
 true as it is that we have an otter !" 
 
 "What is this ?" the Count asked, holding out a newspaper. 
 
 "The Cu-o-ti-dienne" pronounced Mouche, without stumb- 
 ling more than three times over the word. Everybody, even 
 the Abbe Brossette, joined in the laugh that followed. 
 
 "Well," cried Mouche sulkily, "you are setting me to 
 read them newspapers, and grandad says that they are written 
 for rich people, but you always get to know later on what 
 there is inside them." 
 
 "The child is right, General; he makes me long to meet 
 the man who got the better of me this morning once again," 
 said Blondet ; "I see that there was a touch of Mouche in his 
 hoax." 
 
 Mouche understood perfectly well that he was there for the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 73 
 
 master's amusement. Old Fourchon's scholar showed him- 
 self worthy of his master ; he began to cry. 
 
 "How can you make fun of a barefooted child ?" asked the 
 Countess. 
 
 "A child who thinks it quite natural that his grandfather 
 should take his pay for his schooling in slaps ?" asked Blon- 
 det. 
 
 "Poor little one, look here/' said the lady; "have you 
 caught an otter ?" 
 
 "Yes, my lady, as true as that you are the prettiest lady I 
 have seen or ever shall see," said the child, wiping away his 
 tears. 
 
 "Just let us see this otter," said the General. 
 
 "Oh, M'sieu le Comte, grandad hid her away; but she was 
 still kicking when we were at the ropewalk. You can send 
 for my grandad, for he wants to sell her himself." 
 
 "Take him to the kitchen and give him his breakfast, and 
 send Charles for old Fourchon meanwhile," the Countess bade 
 Frangois. "And see if you can, find some shoes and trousers 
 and a jacket for the boy. Those who come here naked must 
 go away again clothed 
 
 "God bless you, dear lady," said Mouche as he went. 
 "M'sieu le Cure may be sure that the clothes you give me 
 will be laid up for high days and holidays." 
 
 Fjmile and Mme. Montcornet exchanged glances. This last 
 remark surprised them. "That boy is not so silly," their 
 looks seemed to tell the cure. 
 
 "Certainly, madame," said the cure as soon as the boy had 
 gone, "you cannot call a reckoning with poverty. To my 
 thinking, the poor have justifications which God alone can 
 see and take into account, justifications in physical causes 
 which often produce' baleful results, and other justifications 
 springing from character, produced by tendencies, blame- 
 worthy as we think, but yet the result of qualities which, 
 unfortunately for society, find no outlet. The miracles 
 worked on battlefields have taught us that the lowest scoun- 
 drel may have the makings of a hero in him. . . . But
 
 74 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 here you are placed in a very unusual position ; and if reflec- 
 tion does not keep pace with benevolence, you run the risk 
 of subsidizing your .enemies ' 
 
 "Enemies?" echoed the Countess. 
 
 "Bitter enemies," the General spoke gravely. 
 
 "Old Fourchon and his son-in-law Tonsard represent the 
 whole intelligence of the poorest folk in the valley ; their ad- 
 vice is asked and taken in the most trifling matters. Their 
 Machiavelism reaches an incredible pitch. You may take this 
 for granted, that ten peasants in a wineshop are the small 
 change for a big intrigue " 
 
 As he was speaking, Frangois announced M. Sibilet. 
 
 "This is the minister of finance," said the General, smil- 
 ing; "send him in. He will explain the gravity of the situa- 
 tion to you," he added, glancing from his wife to Blondet. 
 
 "And so much the better in that he will scarcely make the 
 least of it," said the cure, in a scarcely audible voice. 
 
 Blondet saw for the first time a personage whose acquaint- 
 ance he wished to make the steward of the Aigues, of whoTn 
 he had heard much since his arrival. Sibilet was a man of 
 thirty or thereabouts; he was of middle height, with a sullen, 
 unpleasant face, which a laugh seemed to suit ill. The eyes 
 of changing green, under an anxious brow, looked different 
 ways, and thus disguised his thoughts. His long, straight 
 hair gave him a somewhat clerical appearance; he wore a 
 brown greatcoat and a black waistcoat and trousers; he was 
 knock-kneed, and the trousers imperfectly concealed this de- 
 fect. In spite of his unwholesome appearance, sallow com- 
 plexion, and flabby muscles, Sibilet had a strong constitu- 
 tion. The somewhat gruff tones of his voice harmonized with 
 the generally unprepossessing appearance of the man. 
 
 Blondet and the Abbe Brossette exchanged a furtive glance, 
 and in the fleeting expression in the eyes of the young ec- 
 clesiastic Blondet read the confirmation of his own sus- 
 picions. 
 
 "You set down the peasants' thefts at about one-fourth the 
 value of the yearly returns, do you not, my dear Sibilet?" 
 asked the General.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 75 
 
 "At a good deal more than that, M. le CoTnte," returned 
 the steward. "Your paupers take more than the Government 
 asks of you. There is a young rogue called Mouche who 
 gleans his two bushels per day ; and old women, whom any one 
 would think at their last gasp, will recover health and youth 
 and the use of their limbs at harvest-time. That is a phe- 
 nomenon which you can see for yourself," continued Bibilet, 
 turning to Blondet, "for we shall begin in six days' tin^e ; the 
 rain in July has made the harvest late this year. Wu shall 
 be cutting the rye next week. Nobody ought to glean without 
 a certificate of poverty from the mayor of the commune, and 
 a commune ought on no account to allow any but the very 
 poor to glean at all, but all the communes in the district 
 glean over each other without certificates. For sixty poor 
 people in the commune, there are forty more who will not do 
 a day's work ; and, as a matter of fact, even those who have set 
 up for themselves will leave their work to glean in the fields 
 or the vineyards. 
 
 "Here these folk will pick up three hundred bushels a day 
 among them, and the harvest lasts a fortnight four thousand 
 five hundred bushels taken away in the canton. So the glean- 
 ing amounts to about one-tenth of the whole harvest; and as 
 to the abuse of grazing, that makes a hole in our profits, about 
 a sixth of the value of our meadows goes in that way. Then 
 there are the woods, they do incalculable mischief there, cut- 
 ting down the young saplings six years old. The damage 
 done to your estate, M. le Comte, mounts up to twenty and 
 some odd thousand francs per annum." 
 
 "Well, madame," said the General, "do you hear that ?" 
 
 "Is it not exaggerated?" asked Mme. de Montcornet. 
 
 "No, unhappily it is not, madame," said the cure. "There 
 is poor Father Niseron, the white-haired old man who unites 
 in person all the offices of bellringer, beadle, sexton, sacristan, 
 and chanter, in spite of his republican opinions in fact, he 
 is the grandfather of that little Genevieve whom you placed 
 under Mme. Michaud 
 
 "La Pechina !" said Sibilet, interrupting the Abbe. 
 
 "La Pechina ?" asked the Countess. "What do you mean ?" 
 VOL. 1031
 
 76 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Mme. la Comtesse, when you saw little Genevi&ve by 
 the wayside looking so forlorn, you exclaimed in Italian : 
 Piccina! And now it has become a nickname, and so cor- 
 rupted that the whole commune knows your protegee by the 
 name of the Pechina. She is the only one who comes to 
 church, poor little thing, with Mme. Michaud and Mme. Sibi- 
 let," added the cure. 
 
 "Yes, and she is none the better off for that," said the 
 steward. "She is persecuted for her religion." 
 
 "Well," continued the cure, "this poor old man of seventy- 
 two picks up a bushel and a half in a day, and does it hon- 
 estly moreover, but he is too conscientious to sell his gleanings 
 as the rest of them do; he keeps the corn for his own con- 
 sumption. As a favor to me, M. Langlume, your deputy, 
 grinds his corn for nothing, and my servant bakes his bread 
 with mine." 
 
 "I had forgotten my little protegee," said the Countess, 
 startled by Sibilet's remarks. "Your coming has put other 
 things out of my head," she added, turning to Blondet. "But 
 after breakfast we will go to the Avonne gate, and I will show 
 you a living woman like a fifteenth century painter's dream." 
 
 As she spoke, a pair of cracked sabots was put down with 
 a clatter at the kitchen door, and old Fourchon was an- 
 nounced by Frangois. The Countess nodded permission, and 
 Frangois brought the old man into the room, Mouche fol- 
 lowing behind with his mouth full, and holding the otter by 
 a string tied to its yellow paws, ribbed like a duck's foot. Old 
 Fourchon glanced at the gentry seated at table, gave Sibilet 
 the half-defiant, half-servile look that veils a peasant's 
 thoughts ; then he brandished the amphibian triumphantly. 
 
 "Here she is !" he cried, looking at Blondet. 
 
 "That is my otter, though," demurred the Parisian; "I 
 paid plenty for it." 
 
 "Oh, your otter got away, my dear sir !" retorted old Four- 
 chon. "She is in her hole at this minute; she had no mind 
 to come out of it; she was the female, while this here is the 
 male! Mouche saw it come out, a long way off, after you
 
 THE PEASANTRY 77 
 
 had gone. 'Tis as true as that M. le Comte covered himself 
 with glory along with his Cuirassiers at Waterloo ! The otter 
 is as much mine as the Aigues belongs to his lordship the 
 General. . . . But for twenty francs the otter is yours, 
 otherwise I will take it to our sub-perfect. If M. Gourdon 
 thinks it too dear, as we went hunting together this morning, 
 I give the gentleman from Paris the preference, as is but 
 fair." 
 
 "Twenty francs !" put in Blondet. "In plain French, that 
 is not exactly what you might call giving me the preference." 
 
 "Eh ! my dear sir," cried the old man, "I know so little 
 French, that if you like I will ask you for them in Burgun- 
 dian ; it's all one to me so long as I get the francs, I will speak 
 Latin : latinus, latina, latinum. After all, it is only what you 
 promised me yourself this morning ; and besides, my children 
 have taken your mony from me already ; I cried about it as 
 I came along. You ask Charles I don't like to summons 
 them for ten francs and publish their bad doings at the court. 
 As soon as I make a few sous they get them away from me 
 by making me drink. It is hard that I can't go to take a 
 glass of wine in my own daughter's house, but that is what 
 children are in these days ! That is what comes of the Revo- 
 lution ; it's everything for the children now, and their fathers 
 are put upon. Ah ! I am eddicating Mouche here in quite 
 another way. The little rapscallion is fond of me," he re- 
 marked, administering a slap to his grandson. 
 
 "It looks to me as if you were making him into a petty 
 thief, just like the rest of them," said Sibilet, "for he never 
 lies down without something on his conscience." 
 
 "Oh! Master Sibilet, his conscience is easier than what 
 yours is ! . . . Poor child, what does he take ? A trifle 
 of grass, that is better than throttling a man ! Lord, he 
 doesn't know mathematics like you; he doesn't understand 
 subtraction and addition and multiplication. . . . You 
 do a lot of harm, you do ! . You tell people that we are a pack 
 of brigands, and you are at the bottom of the division be-
 
 78 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 tween his lordship there, who is a good man, and the rest of 
 us, who are good folk. There ain't a better place than this is. 
 
 "Look here ! Have we money coming in ? Don't we go 
 without clothes to our backs, as you may say, Mouche and I ? 
 Fine sheets we sleep in, bleached in the dew every morning; 
 and unless you grudge us the air we breathe, and the light 
 of the sun, and our drink, there is nothing that I see that 
 any one can want to take from us ! The bourgeois do their 
 robberies in the chimney corner, and it pays much better than 
 picking up things that lie about in corners of the wood. There 
 are no foresters nor mounted keepers for Master Gaubertin, 
 who came here bare as a worm, and has two million francs 
 this day. 
 
 " 'Thieves !' is soon said ; but there is old Guerbet, as col- 
 lects the taxes, has gone out of our village at night with his 
 receipts these fifteen years, and nobody has ever asked him 
 for two farthings. That is not the way in a country of 
 thieves. We are not much the richer for theft. Just show 
 me this whether it is we or you who live by doing nothing ?" 
 
 "If you had not been idle, you would have something to 
 live on," said the cure. "God blesses work." 
 
 "I don't like to contradict you, Mosieur 1'Abbe, for you 
 know more than I do, and perhaps you can explain this to 
 me. Here am I, am I not? A lazy, idle sot, a good-for-nothing 
 of an old Fourchon, who has had some education, has been a 
 farmer, fell into difficulties, and never got out of them ! 
 . . . Well, now, where is the difference between me and 
 that good, honest old man Niseron, a vinedresser, seventy 
 years old (for he and I are of an age), who has been digging 
 the soil ? up before daylight every morning to go to his work, 
 till he has a body like iron and a noble soul. I see that he 
 is just as poor as I am. There is La Pechina, his grand- 
 daughter, gone out to service with Ma'am Michaud, while 
 my little Mouche is free as the air! Is the poor old man 
 rewarded for his virtues in the same way that I am punished 
 for my vices ? He does not know what a glass of wine is ; he
 
 THE PEASANTRY 79 
 
 is as sober as an apostle; he digs graves for the dead, and 
 I set the living a-dancing. He has dined with Duke Hum- 
 phrey, while I have tippled down the liquor like a rollicking 
 devil-may-care creature. And one has come just as far as 
 the other; we have the same snow on our heads, the same 
 cash in our pockets, he rings the bell, and I make the rope. 
 He is a Republican, and I am a sinner, and not even a publi- 
 can. Let the peasant do ill or well, according to your notions, 
 he will end as he began, in rags, and you in fine linen " 
 
 Nobody interrupted old Fourchon, who seemed to owe his 
 eloquence to the bottled wine; at the outset Sibilet tried to 
 cut him short, but at a sign from Blondet the steward was 
 dumb. The cure, the General, and the Countess gathered 
 from the journalist's glances that he wished to study the 
 problem of pauperism from the life, and perhaps to be quits 
 with old Fourchon. 
 
 "And what do you mean about Mouche's education ? How 
 do you set to work to bring him up to be a better child to you 
 than your daughters?" 
 
 "Does he so much as speak to him of God?" asked the 
 cure. 
 
 "Oh! not I, Mosieur le Cure, I be'ant telling him to fear 
 God, but men. God is good, and has promised, according to 
 you parsons, that we shall have the kingdom of heaven, as 
 the rich keep the kingdom of earth. I say to him 'Mouche ! 
 fear the jail ! for you go out of jail to the scaffold. Never 
 steal anything ; make them give you what you want ! Stealing 
 leads to murder, and murder brings down the justice of men 
 on you. The razor of justice that is to be feared ; it secures 
 the rich man's slumber against the poor man that lies awake. 
 Learn to read. Education will put it in your power to make 
 money under cover of the law, like clever M. Gaubertin. You 
 will be a steward, eh ! like M. Sibilet, whom his lordship the 
 Count allows his rations. The great thing is to keep well with 
 the rich; there are crumbs under rich men's tables/ That 
 is what I call a fine education, and thorough too. So the 
 young whelp keeps on this side of the law. He will be a 
 steady boy ; he will take care of me !"
 
 80 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "And what will you make of him ?" inquired Blondet. 
 
 "A gentleman's servant, to begin with," answered Four- 
 chon, "because seeing the masters from near, his education will 
 be thoroughly finished, that it will ! Good example will teach 
 him to make his way with the law to back him like the rest 
 of you! ... If his lordship will take him into his 
 stables to learn to rub down the horses, the little fellow will 
 be very much pleased seeing that though he fears men, he 
 js not afraid cf animals." 
 
 "You are a clever man, Daddy Fourchon," began Blondet. 
 "You know quite well what you are saying, and there is some 
 sense in what you say." 
 
 "Oh ! my certy ! no, I have left my senses at the Grand-I- 
 Vert along with my two five-franc pieces." 
 
 "How came such a man as you to drift into such poverty? 
 For as things are now, a peasant has only himself to thank 
 if he does badly; he is free, he can become rich. It is not as 
 it used to be any longer. If a peasant can scrape a little 
 money together, he finds a bit of land, he can buy it, and he 
 is his own master." 
 
 "I saw the old times, and I see the new, my dear learned 
 sir," replied Fourchon; "they have put up a new signboard, 
 but the liquor is the same as ever. To-day is only yesterday's 
 younger brother. There ! you put that in your paper ! En- 
 franchised, are we ? We still belong to the same" village, and 
 the seigneur is there still ; I call him Hard Labor. The hoe, 
 which is all our property, has not passed out of our hands. 
 And anyhow, whether we work for the seigneur or for the 
 tax collector, who takes the best part of what we make, we 
 have to sweat our lives out " 
 
 "But why not choose a handicraft and try your luck else- 
 where?" asked Blondet. 
 
 "Are you talking to me of setting out to seek my fortune ? 
 But where should I go? I must have a passport, which 
 costs forty sous, before I can go out of the department. These 
 forty years I have not been able to hear a slut of a two-franc 
 piece jangle with another in my pocket. If you go straight
 
 THE PEASANTRY 81 
 
 before you, for every village you come to you want a three- 
 franc piece, and there are not many of the Fourchon family 
 that have the wherewithal to visit six villages! Nothing 
 drags us from our communes except the conscription. And 
 what does the army do for us ? The colonel lives on the com- 
 mon soldier as the master lives on the laborer. Does one 
 colonel out of a hundred spring from our loins ? In the army, 
 as in the rest of the world, for one that grows rich a hundred 
 drop out. F.or want of what ? God knows so do the money- 
 lenders. 
 
 "So the best thing we can do is to stop in our communes, 
 where we are penned up like sheep by the force of circum- 
 stances, just as we used to be by the seigneurs. And I care 
 not a rap who nails me here. Nailed down by necessity, or 
 nailed down by the nobles, we are condemned for life to 
 labor on the soil. Wherever we are, we turn up the 
 soil, and dig it and dung it, and work for you that 
 are born rich, as we are born poor. The mass will always 
 be the same ; what it is, it p.lways is. Those of us who go up 
 in the world are fewer than those of you who come down. 
 We know this very well, if we haven't book learning, that it 
 won't do to be down upon us at every moment. We leave 
 you in peace ; let us live. Otherwise, if this goes on, you will 
 be forced to feed us in your prisons, where we are far more 
 comfortable than on our straw. You are our masters, and 
 you mean to remain so ; we shall always be enemies, to-day as 
 for these last thirty years. You have everything, we have 
 nothing, so you cannot expect us to be your friends yet." 
 
 "That is what is called a declaration of war," said the Gen- 
 eral. 
 
 <r When the Aigues belonged to the poor lady that is gone 
 (the Lord have mercy on her. soul, for she was a wanton singer 
 in her youth) we were well off, your lordship. Her let us pick 
 up a living in her fields, and take our firing in her forests ; her 
 was none the poorer for that! And you, that are at least 
 as rich as she was, hunt us down like wild beasts, nor more 
 nor less, and drag the poor people before the magistrate. Ah,
 
 82 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 well ! no good will come of that. You will have some ugly 
 doings laid at your door. I have just seen your forester, that 
 curmudgeon of a Vatel, all but kill a poor old woman about 
 a stick of firewood. They will make an enemy of the people 
 of you; they will grow bitter against you at 'up-sittings' as 
 they work and talk; they will curse you as heartily as they 
 used to bless madame that is gone. The poor man's curse 
 grows, your lordship; it grows higher than the biggest of 
 your oak-trees, and the oak-tree grows into the gallows-tree. 
 . . . Nobody here tells you the truth; this is truth that 
 I am telling you ! Death may come to me any morning ; I 
 have not much to lose by letting you have the truth for less 
 than market price. ... I play tunes along with Ver- 
 michel for the peasants ho dance ho at the Cafe de la Paix 
 at Soulanges; I hear their talk. Well, then, there is a bad 
 feeling towards you ; they will make, the country too hot to 
 hold you. If your damned Michaud doesn't turn over a new 
 leaf, they will force you to turn him away ! There, now ! the 
 advice and the otter are cheap at twenty francs " 
 
 As old Fourchon delivered himself of these final remarks, 
 a man's footsteps sounded outside, and the object of his men- 
 aces suddenly appeared unannounced. It was easy to see 
 that the threat had reached Michaud's ears from the look 
 which he gave the orator of the poor. Old Fourchon's im- 
 pudence forsook him; he looked like a thief confronted with 
 the policeman. He knew that he had made a mistake, and 
 that Michaud had, as it were, a right to call him to account, 
 for an outpouring evidently meant to intimidate the dwellers 
 at the Aigues. 
 
 "Behold the minister of war," said the General, addressing 
 Blondet, with a gesture that indicated Michaud. 
 
 "I beg your pardon, madame, for coming into the room 
 without asking your leave," remarked the minister, "but I 
 must speak to the General on urgent business." 
 
 While Michaud made his apologies he watched Sibilet. The 
 joy of the man's heart at Fourchon's bold tone expanded over 
 his visage, unnoticed by any of those who sat at the table,
 
 THE PEASANTRY 83 
 
 who were interested in no small degree by the otter hunter. 
 But Michaud, who, for reasons of his own, was always on the 
 watch with Sibilet, was struck with the expression of the 
 steward's face. 
 
 "He has certainly earned his twenty francs, as he says, 
 M. le Comte," cried Sibilet ; "the otter is not dear." 
 
 "Give him twenty francs," said the General, addressing 
 his valet. 
 
 "Are you really taking it from me ?" Blondet asked him. 
 
 "I will have the animal stuffed," cried the Count. 
 
 "Oh ! your lordship, that kind gentleman would have let 
 me have the skin !" protested old Fourchon. 
 
 "Very well," said the Countess. "You shall have five 
 francs for the skin, but you can go now ' 
 
 The strong, rank odor of the two dwellers on the highroad 
 tainted the air of the room, and so offended Mme. de Mont- 
 cornet's delicate senses, that if the pair had stayed there much 
 longer the lady would have been obliged to go. It was solely 
 to this inconvenient quality that Fourchon owed his twenty- 
 five francs. He went out, still eying Michaud fearfully, 
 and making him obeisances without end. 
 
 "What I have been telling his lordship, Mosieur Michaud," 
 said he, "was for your good." 
 
 "Or for the good of them that you take pay of," said Mi- 
 chaud, looking him through and through. 
 
 "Bring coffee and leave us," the General ordered; "and 
 before all things, shut the doors." 
 
 Blondet had not yet seen the head-forester at the Aigues; 
 his first impression was very different from that just made 
 upon him by Sibilet. Michaud inspired confidence and es- 
 teem as great as the repulsion excited by Sibilet. 
 
 The head-forester's face caught your attention at once by 
 its shapely outlines the oval contours were as delicately 
 moulded as the profile, a regularity of feature seldom found 
 in an ordinary Frenchman. Yet, in spite of this regularity 
 of feature, the face was not lacking in character, perhaps 
 by reason of its harmonious coloring, in which red and tawny
 
 84 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 tints prevailed, indications of physical courage. The clear, 
 brown eyes were bright and keen, unfaltering in the expres- 
 sion of thought, and looked you straight in the face. The 
 broad, open brow was set still further in relief by thick, black 
 hair. There was a wrinkle here and there, traced by the pro- 
 fession of arms, on the fine face lit up by loyalty, decision, 
 and self-reliance. If any doubt or suspicion entered his mind, 
 it could be read there at once. His figure, still slender and 
 shapely, as is the case with the men picked out for a crack 
 regiment of cavalry, was such that the head-forester might 
 be described as a strapping fellow. Michaud kept his mous- 
 taches, whiskers, and a beard beneath the chin ; altogether, he 
 recalled a military type which a deluge of patriotic prints and 
 pictures has made almost ridiculous. The defect of the type 
 is its over-abundance in the French army; but perhaps this 
 uniformity of physiognomy has its origin in the continuity of 
 emotions, the hardships of camp life, from which no rank is 
 exempt, and the fact that the same efforts are made on the 
 field of battle by officers and men alike. 
 
 Michaud was dressed in dark blue from head to foot; he 
 still wore the black satin stock and soldiers' boots, just as 
 he held himself somewhat stiffly, with his shoulders set back 
 and chest expanded, as if he still bore arms. The red ribbon 
 of the Legion of Honor adorned his buttonhole. And (to 
 add a final trait of character to a sketch of the mere outside 
 of the man) while the steward, since he had come into office, 
 had never omitted the formula "Monsieur le Comte" in ad- 
 dressing his patron, Michaud had never called his master by 
 any name but "the General." 
 
 Once again Blondet exchanged a significant glance with 
 the Abbe Brossette. "What a contrast !" he seemed to say, 
 as he looked from the steward to the head-forester. Then, 
 that he might learn whether the man's character, thoughts, 
 and words were such as his face and stature might lead you 
 to expect, he looked full at Michaud, saying: 
 
 "I say ! I was out early this morning, and found your for- 
 esters still abed !"
 
 THE PEASANTRY 85 
 
 "At what time ?" asked the old soldier uneasily. 
 
 "At half-past seven." 
 
 Michaud gave his General an almost mischievous glance. 
 
 "And through which gate did you go out ?" asked Michaud. 
 
 "The Conches gate. The keeper in his shirt took a look 
 at me from the window/' answered Blondet. 
 
 "Gaillard had just gone to bed, no doubt," replied Michaud. 
 "When you told me that you had gone out early, 1 
 thought that you were up before sunrise, and if my forester 
 had gone home so early, he must have been ill; but at half- 
 past seven he would be going to bed. We are up all night," 
 Michaud added, after a pause, by way of answer to a look of 
 astonishment from the Countess; "but this vigilance of ours 
 is always at fault. You have just given twenty-five francs 
 to a man who a few minutes ago was quietly helping to hide 
 the 'traces of a theft committed on your property this very 
 morning. In fact, as soon as the General is ready, we must 
 talk it over, for something must be done 
 
 "You are always full of your rights, my dear Michaud, and 
 summum jus, summa injuria. If you do not concede a point, 
 you will make trouble for yourself," said Sibilet. "I could 
 have liked you to hear old Fourchon talking just now when 
 wine had loosened his tongue a little." 
 
 "He frightened me !" exclaimed the Countess. 
 
 "He said nothing that I have not known for a long time," 
 said the General. 
 
 "Oh ! the rascal was not drunk, he played a part, for whose 
 benefit? Perhaps you know?" Michaud suggested, looking 
 steadily at Sibilet. The steward reddened under his gaze. 
 
 "0 rus!" cried Blondet, looking out of the corner of his eye 
 at the Abbe. 
 
 "The poor people suffer," said the Countess; "there was 
 some truth in what old Fourchon has just shrieked at us, for 
 it cannot be said that he spoke." 
 
 "Madame," answered Michaud, "do you think that the Em- 
 peror's soldiers lay in roses for fourteen years? The General 
 is a count, he is a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, he
 
 86 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 has had grants of land made him; do I show any jealousy 
 of him, I that have fought as he has? Have I any wish tc 
 cavil at his fame, to steal his land, or to refuse him the honor 
 due to his rank? The peasant ought to obey as the soldier 
 obeys ; he should have a soldier's loyalty, his respect for privi- 
 leges won by other men, and try to rise to be an officer, by 
 fair means, by his own exertions, and not by knavery The 
 sword and the ploughshare are twin brothers. And in the 
 soldier's lot there is one thing that the peasant has not : death 
 hovering overhead at every hour." 
 
 "That is what I should like to tell them from the pulpit," 
 cried the Abbe Brossette. 
 
 "Concessions?" the head-forester went on, in answer to 
 Sibilet's challenge. "I would concede quite ten per cent 
 on the gross returns from the Aigues, but the way things go 
 now, the General loses thirty per cent; and if M. Sibilet is 
 paid so much per cent on the receipts, I do not understand 
 his concessions, for he pretty benevolently submits to a loss 
 of ten or twelve hundred francs a year." 
 
 "My dear M. Michaud," retorted Sibilet in a surly tone, 
 "I have told M. le Comte that I would rather lose twelve hun- 
 dred francs than my life. Think it seriously over ; I keep on 
 telling you ' 
 
 "Life!" cried the Countess; "can it be a question of any 
 one's life?" 
 
 "We ought not to discuss affairs of the State here," said the 
 General, laughing. "All this means, madame, that Sibilet, 
 in his quality of finance minister, is timid and cowardly, while 
 my minister of war is brave, and, like his General, fears 
 nothing." 
 
 "Say prudent, M. le Comte ?" cried Sibilet. 
 
 "Come, now, are we really surrounded by snares set for us 
 by savages like the heroes of Fenimore Cooper's novels in the 
 backwoods of America ?" 
 
 "Come ! your statesmanship, gentlemen, consists in under- 
 standing how to govern without alarming us by the creaking 
 of- the machinery of Government," said Mme. de Montcornet.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 87 
 
 "Ah! Mme. la Comtesse, perhaps it is a needful thing 
 that you should know what one of your pretty caps costs in 
 sweat here," said the cure. 
 
 "No, for then I might very well do without them, look re- 
 spectfully at a five-franc piece, and grow a miser, as all coun- 
 try people do, and I should lose too much by it," said the 
 Countess, laughing. "Here, my dear Abbe, give me your 
 arm; let us leave the General with his two ministers, and go 
 to the Avonne gate to see Mme. Michaud. I have not made 
 a call upon her since I came; it is time to look after my little 
 protegee." 
 
 And the pretty woman went for thick shoes and a hat; 
 Sibilet's fears, Mouche and Fourchon, their rags, and the hate 
 in their eyes, were already forgotten. 
 
 The Abbe Brossette and Blondet, obedient to the mistress 
 of the house, followed her out of the room, and waited for her 
 on the terrace in front of the chateau. 
 
 "What do you think of all this?" Blondet asked his com- 
 panion. 
 
 "I am a pariah. I am watched by spies as the common 
 enemy. Every moment I am obliged to keep the ears and 
 eyes of prudence wide open, or I should fall into some of the 
 snares they set so as to rid themselves of me," said the officiat- 
 ing priest. "Between ourselves, it has come to this, I ask 
 myself whether they will not shoot me down " 
 
 "And you stay on ?" asked Blondet. 
 
 "A man no more deserts the cause of God than the cause 
 of the Emperor!" the priest answered with a simplicity 
 which impressed Blondet. He grasped the priest's hand cor- 
 dially. 
 
 "So you must see," the Abbe continued, "that I am not in 
 a position to know anything of all that is brewing. Still it 
 seems to me that the people here have 'a spite against' the 
 General, as they say in Artois and Belgium." 
 
 Something must here be said about the cure of Blangy. 
 
 The Abbe", the fourth son of a good middle-class family 
 in Autun, was a clever man, carrying his head high on the
 
 88 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 score of his cloth. Short and thin though he was, he re- 
 deemed the insignificance of his appearance by that air of 
 hard-headedness which sits not ill on a Burgundian. He had 
 accepted a subordinate position through devotion, for his re- 
 ligiouj conviction had been backed by political conviction. 
 There was something in him of the priest of other times ; he 
 had a passionate belief in the Church and his order ; he looked 
 at things as a whole, his ambition was untainted by selfishness. 
 Serve was his motto, to serve the Church and the Monarchy 
 at the point where danger threatens most, to serve in the 
 ranks, like the soldier who feels within himself that his desire 
 to acquit himself well and his courage must bring him sooner 
 or later a General's command. He faltered in none of his 
 vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, acquitting himself 
 in these respects, as in all the other duties of his position, 
 with a simplicity and cheerfulness that is the unmistakable 
 sign of an upright nature, in which natural instincts make for 
 right as well as strong and'earnest religious conviction. 
 
 This remarkable churchman saw at the first glance that 
 Blondet was attracted to the Countess, saw also that with a 
 daughter of the house of Troisville, and a man of letters, who 
 supported the Monarchy, it behooved him to show himself a 
 man of the world, for the dignity of the cloth. He came 
 to make a fourth at whist almost every evening. Emile Blon- 
 det was able to appreciate the Abbe Brossette, and paid him 
 marked deference, so that the two men felt attracted to each 
 other ; for every clever man is delighted to meet with an equal, 
 or, if you prefer it, an audience, and there is a natural affinity 
 between sword and scabbard. 
 
 "But now, M. 1'Abbe, you whose earnestness has placed 
 you below your propel level, what, in your opinion, has 
 brought about this state of things ?" 
 
 "I do not like to give you platitudes after that flattering 
 parenthesis," said the Abbe, smiling. "The things that are 
 happening in this valley are happening everywhere in France. 
 It is all the outcome of the hopes and tendencies of 1789; 
 they have filtered clown, sc to speak, into the peasants' minds. 
 The Revolution affected some districts much more deeply than
 
 THE PEASANTRY 89 
 
 others ; and in this strip of Burgundy lying so near to Paris, 
 the significance of that movement was felt to be the triumph 
 of the Gaul over the Frank. Historically, the peasants are 
 still on the morrow of the Jacquerie; their defeat sank 
 deeply into their minds. The facts have been long for- 
 gotten, but the idea has become instinctive in them. It is as 
 much in the blood of the peasant as pride of birth was once 
 in the blood of the noble. So the Devolution of 1789 was 
 the revenge of the vanquished. The peasants have entered 
 upon the ownership of the soil, a possession forbidden to them 
 by feudal law for twelve hundred years. Hence their love 
 of the land ; they divide it up among them till a single furrow 
 is cut in half. It not seldom happens that they pay no taxes, 
 for the property is so exceedingly small that it will not cover 
 the costs of prosecution for arrears." 
 
 "Their wrongheadedness, their suspiciousness, if you will," 
 Blondet broke in upon the Abbe, "in this respect is so great 
 that in a thousand cantons out of three thousand in France, 
 it is impossible for a rich man to buy land of a peasant. They 
 will let or sell their bits of ground among themselves, but 
 they will not give it up to a well-to-do farmer on any consider- 
 ation whatever. The more the great landowner offers, the more 
 their vague suspicions increase. Expropriation is the only 
 means by which the peasant's holdings can be bought under 
 the common law of the land. Plenty of people have noticed 
 this fact, but they see no reason for it." 
 
 "This is the reason," said the Abbe Brossette, rightly con- 
 sidering that with Blondet a pause was a sort of interrogation. 
 "Twelve centuries are as nothing to a caste which has never 
 been diverted from its principal idea by the historical specta- 
 cle of civilization, a caste which still proudly wears the noble's 
 broad-brimmed silk-bound hat since the day when it fell out 
 of fashion and was abandoned to the peasants. The enthu- 
 siasm in the depths of the hearts of the people, which cen- 
 tered itself passionately on the figure of Napoleon (who never 
 understood the secret of it as thoroughly as he imagined), 
 sprang solely from this idea, which may perhaps explain the 
 portent of his return in 1815 Napoleon, bound to the people
 
 90 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 by a million of common soldiers (first and last), is even yet, 
 in their eyes, the king of the people, sprung from the loins 
 of the Ee solution, the man who confirmed them in the pos- 
 session of the National lands. The oil at his coronation 
 was saturated with this idea " 
 
 "An idea which the year 1814 disturbed with unfortunate 
 results, an idea which the Monarchy should regard as sacred," 
 Blondet said quickly; "for the people may find beside the 
 throne a prince to whom his father left the head of Louis 
 XVI. as part of his inheritance." 
 
 "Hush, here comes the Countess," said the Abbe Brossette. 
 "Fourchon frightened her, and we must keep her here in the 
 interests of religion, of the throne, nay, of the country itself." 
 
 Michaud, as head-forester, had doubtless come to report the 
 injury done to Vatel's eyes. But before reporting the delib- 
 erations of the Council of State, the reader must be put in 
 possession of a sequence of facts, a concise account of the cir- 
 cumstances under which the General bought the Aigues, and 
 of the weighty reasons which determined Sibilet's appoint- 
 ment to the stewardship of the fine estate, together with an 
 explanation of Michaud's installation as head-forester; in 
 short, of all the antecedent facts that have brought people's 
 minds into their present attitude, and given rise to the fears 
 expressed by Sibilet. 
 
 There will be a further advantage in this rapid sketch, in 
 that it will introduce several of the principal actors of the 
 drama, give an outline of their interests, and set forth the 
 dangers of the Comte de Montcornet's position. 
 
 VI 
 
 A TALE OF ROBBERS 
 
 IN 1791, or thereabouts, Mile. Laguerre came on a visit to 
 her country house, and accepted as her new agent the son of 
 an ex-steward of the neighboring manor of Soulanges.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 91 
 
 The little town of Soulanges at this day is simply the 
 market-town of the district, though it was once the capital of 
 a considerable county in the days when the House of Bur- 
 gundy waged war against the House of France. Ville-aux- 
 Fayes, now the seat of the sub-prefecture, was a mere petty 
 fief in those days, a dependency of Soulanges like the Aigues, 
 Eonquerolles, Cerneux, Conches, and fifteen hamlets besides; 
 but the Soulanges still bear a count's coronet, while the Ron- 
 querolles of to-day styles himself "Marquis," thanks to the 
 intrigues of a court which raised the son of a Captain du 
 Plessis to a dukedom over the heads of the first families of 
 the Conquest. Which shows that towns, like families, have 
 their vicissitudes. 
 
 The ex-steward's son, a penniless bachelor, succeeded an 
 agent enriched by the spoils of thirty years of office. The 
 agent had decided that a third share in the firm of Minoret 
 would suit him better than the stewardship of the Aigues. 
 The future victualler had recommended as his successor a 
 young man who had been his responsible assistant for five 
 years. Frangois Gaubertin should cover his retreat, and, in- 
 deed, his pupil undertook (out of gratitude for his training) 
 to obtain the late agent's discharge from Mile. Laguerre, when 
 he saw how the lady went in terror of the Eevolution. 
 
 Gaubertin senior, ex-steward of the manor of Soulanges, 
 and public accuser of the department, took the timorous 
 operatic singer under his protection. She was "suspect" on 
 the face of it, after her relations with the aristocracy ; so the 
 local Fouquier-Tinville got up a little comedy, an explosion of 
 feeling against the stage-queen, in order to give his son a 
 chance to play the part of deliverer. By these means, the 
 young man obtained his predecessor's discharge, and cito- 
 yenne Laguerre made Frangois Gaubertin her prime minister, 
 partly out of gratitude, partly from policy. 
 
 The future victualler of the armies of the Republic had 
 not spoiled Mademoiselle. He annually remitted about thirty 
 thousand livres to her in Paris, whereas the Aigues must have 
 brought in forty thousand at the very least. When, therefore, 
 
 VOL. 10 32
 
 92 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Frangois Gaubertin promised her thirty-six thousand francs, 
 the ignorant opera-girl was amazed. 
 
 If the fortune subsequently amassed by Francois Gaubertin 
 is to be justified before the tribunal of probability, its history 
 must be traced from the beginning. First of all, young Gau- 
 bertin obtained the post of mayor of Blangy through his 
 father's influence ; and thenceforward, in spite of the law, he 
 demanded that all payments should be made to him in coin. 
 It was in his power to strike any one down by the ruinous 
 requisitions of the Eepublic, and he used his power to "ter- 
 rorize" his debtors (to use the language of the time). Then 
 the steward punctually remitted his mistress' dues in as- 
 signats, so long as assignats were legal tender. If the finances 
 of the country were the worse for the paper currency, at any 
 rate it laid the foundation of many a private fortune. 
 
 In three years, between 1792 and 1795, young Gaubertin 
 made a hundred and fifty thousand francs out of the Aigues, 
 and speculated on the Paris money market. Mile. Laguerre, 
 embarrassed with her assignats, was obliged to coin money 
 with her diamonds, hitherto useless. She sent them to Gau- 
 bertin, who sold them for her, and punctually remitted the 
 money in coin. Mile. Laguerre was so much touched by this 
 piece of loyalty, that from that time forth her belief in Gau- 
 bertin was as firm as her belief in Piccini. 
 
 In 1796, at the time of his marriage with cityonne Isaure 
 Mouchon (a daughter of one of his father's old friends of 
 the Convention), young Gaubertin possessed three hundred 
 and fifty thousand francs in coin; and as the Directory 
 seemed to him to be likely to last, he determined that Mile. 
 Laguerre should pass the accounts of his five years' steward- 
 ship before he married, finding an excuse in that event in his 
 life for the request. 
 
 "I shall be the father of a family," he said ; "you know the 
 sort of character an agent gets ; my father-in-law is a Repub- 
 lican of Roman probity, and a man of influence moreover; 
 I should like to show him that I am not unworthy of him."
 
 THE PEASANTRY 93 
 
 Mile. Laguerre expressed her satisfaction with Gaubertin's 
 accounts in the most flattering terms. 
 
 At first the steward tried to check the peasants' depreda- 
 tions, partly to inspire confidence in Mile. Laguerre, partly 
 because he feared (and not without reason) that the returns 
 would suffer, and that there would be a serious falling of! 
 in the timber merchant's tips. But by that time the sovereign 
 people had learned to make pretty free everywhere; and the 
 lady of the manor, beholding her kings at such close quarters, 
 felt somewhat overawed by majesty, and signified to her Eich- 
 elieu that, before all things, she most particularly desired to 
 die in peace. The prima donna's income was so far too large 
 for her needs, that she suffered the most disastrous precedents. 
 For instance, rather than take law proceedings, she allowed 
 her neighbors to enqroach upon her proprietor's rights. She 
 never looked beyond the high walls of her park; she knew 
 that nothing would pass them to trouble her felicity; she 
 wished for nothing but a quiet life, like the true philosopher 
 that she was. What were a few thousand livres of income, 
 more or less, or rebates on sales of wood demanded by the 
 merchants, on the ground that the peasants had spoiled the 
 trees, in the eyes of a thriftless, reckless opera-girl, whose 
 income of a hundred thousand francs had cost her nothing 
 but pleasure, who had just submitted without a murmur 
 to lose forty out of sixty thousand francs a year? 
 
 "Eh !" cried she, with the easy good-nature of an impure 
 of the bygone eighteenth century, "every one must live, even 
 the Republic !" 
 
 Mile. Cochet, terrible power, her woman and female vizier, 
 had tried to open her mistress' eyes when she saw what an 
 ascendency Gaubertin had gained over "my lady," as he 
 called her from the first, in spite of revolutionary laws of 
 equality; but Gaubertin (in his turn) opened the waiting- 
 maid's eyes by producing a document purporting to be a 
 "denunciation" sent to his father, the public accuser, wherein
 
 94 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Mile. Cochet was vehemently accused of being in correspond- 
 ence with Pitt and Cobourg. 
 
 Thenceforward the two powers ruled with divided sway, 
 but a la Montgomery under the rose. La Cochet praised 
 Gaubertin to Mile. Laguerre, just as Gaubertin extolled La 
 Cochet to his mistress. Moreover, the woman knew that her 
 nest was feathered, and that she could sleep securely on her 
 mistress' legacy of sixty thousand francs. Madame was so 
 used to La Cochet that she could not do without her. The 
 maid knew all about the secrets of "dear mistress' " toilet ; 
 she had the knack of sending "dear mistress" to sleep of an 
 evening with endless stories, and could waken her in the 
 morning with flattering words. In fact, La Cochet never saw 
 any change in "dear mistress" till the day of her death, and 
 when "dear mistress" lay in her coffin, probably thought that 
 she looked better than ever. 
 
 The annual gains made by this pair, together with their 
 salaries and perquisites, grew to be so considerable, that the 
 most affectionate relatives could not have been more attached 
 than they to the excellent creature their mistress. Does any 
 one yet know how well a knave can lull his dupe ? No mother 
 is so tender or so thoughtful for an idolized daughter as a 
 practitioner of tartufferie for his milch cow. What limits are 
 there to the success of Tartuffe played on many a private 
 stage? What is friendship in comparison? Moliere died all 
 too soon, he should have shown us the sequel Orgon's de- 
 spair, Orgon bored by his family and worried by his children, 
 Orgon regretting Tartuffe and his flatteries, muttering to 
 himself, "Those were good times !" 
 
 During the last eight years of Mile. Laguerre's life she only 
 received thirty out of the fifty thousand francs brought in by 
 the Aigues. Gaubertin's reign ended in much the same way 
 as the reign of his predecessor, though rents were higher and 
 prices had risen notably between 1791 and 1815, and Mile. 
 Laguerre's estate increased by continued purchases. But it 
 was part of Gaubertin's plan to inherit the estate on his mis- 
 tress' approaching death, and therefore he was obliged to in-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 95 
 
 vent and maintain a chronic state of bad times. La Cochet, 
 initiated into this scheme, was to share in the benefits. 
 
 Now the stage queen in exile possessed a supplementary 
 income of twenty thousand livres from investments in con- 
 solidated government stock (note how admirably the lan- 
 guage of politicians adapts itself to the humors of politics), 
 and scarcely spent the aforesaid twenty thousand francs in a 
 year, but she was amazed at the continual purchases of land 
 made by the steward out of the surplus funds at his disposal. 
 Never in her life before had she lived within her income ; and 
 now that her needs had shrunk with age, she mistook the 
 symptoms, and credited Gaubertih and La Cochet with hon- 
 esty. 
 
 "Two treasures!" she assured every one who came to see 
 her. 
 
 Gaubertin, moreover, was careful of appearances; his ac- 
 counts looked straightforward. All the rents were duly posted 
 in the ledger; anything that could not fail to strike the ac- 
 tress' slender intelligence was definite, accurate, and precise, 
 so far as figures went. But the steward' took a percentage 
 on all outgoing expenses, bargains about to be concluded, ex- 
 ploitations, contracts for repairs, and lawsuits which he de- 
 vised. His mistress never looked into these details, and so it 
 not seldom happened that an arrangement was made by which 
 the buyers paid double the prices entered, and were bound 
 over to silence by receiving a share of the spoils. This easi- 
 ness on Gaubertin's part won general popularity for himself, 
 and every one praised his mistress; for besides being fleeced 
 all round, she gave away a great deal of money. 
 
 "God preserve her, dear lady !" was the cry. 
 
 As a matter of fact, Mile. Laguerre gave directly or indi- 
 rectly to every one that asked of her. As a sort of Nemesis of 
 youth, the" opera singer was plundered in her age, so deftly 
 and so systematically that her pillagers kept within certain 
 bounds. Jest her eyes should be opened to all that went on, 
 and she should be frightened into selling the Aigues and going 
 back to Paris.
 
 96 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 It was (alas!) in the interest of such plunderers as these 
 that Paul-Louis Courier was murdered. He had made the 
 blunder of announcing beforehand that he meant to take Ms 
 wife away and sell his estate, on which many a Tourangeau 
 Tonsard was living. With this fear before their eyes, the 
 marauders at the Aigues only cut down young tree? when 
 driven to extremities, when, for instance, there were no 
 branches left which they could reach with a bill-hook tied to 
 a pole. For the sake of their own ill-gotten gains, they did 
 not go out of their way to do damage; and yet, during the 
 last years of Mile. Laguerre's life, the abuse of wood-cutting 
 reached most scandalous proportions. On certain moonlit 
 nights no less than two hundred faggots would be bound in 
 the woods; and as for gleaning in fields and vineyards, the 
 Aigues lost (as Sibilet had just pointed out) about one-fourth 
 of its produce in such ways. 
 
 Mile. Laguerre forbade La Cochet to marry during her 
 own lifetime, a piece of selfishness where dependants are con- 
 cerned that may be remarked all the world over, and in its 
 absurdity about on a par with the mania of those who clutch 
 till their latest sigh at possessions which have long ceased 
 to contribute to their enjoyment, at imminent risk of being 
 poisoned by their impatient next-of-kin. So three weeks after 
 Mile. Laguerre was laid in the earth, Mile. Cochet married a 
 police sergeant at Soulanges, Soudry by name, a fine-looking 
 man of forty-two, who had come to the Aigues almost every 
 day to see her since the creation of the police force in 1800, 
 and dined at least four days a week with Gaubertin and La 
 Cochet. 
 
 All through Madame's life she had had her meals served 
 apart and alone when she had no visitors. In spite of the 
 familiar terms on which she lived with La Cochet and Gau- 
 bertin, neither of them was permitted to sit at table with the 
 first pupil of the Academic royale de musique et de danse, 
 and to the very end she preserved her etiquette, her manner 
 of dress, her rouge, her high-heeled pantofles, her carriage and 
 servants, and divinity of the goddess. A goddess on the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 91 
 
 stage, a goddess of the town, though buried away in the 
 country she was a goddess still ; her memory is held in vener- 
 ation there, dividing the honors very evenly with the court 
 of Louis XVI. in the estimation of the "best society" of 
 Soulanges. 
 
 The aforesaid Soudry, who paid court to La Cochet from 
 the very first, was the owner of the nicest house in Soulanges 
 and about six thousand francs, with a prospect of a retiring 
 pension of four hundred francs. La Cochet, now Mme. 
 Soudry, was a person of no little consequence in Soulanges. 
 The retired lady's-maid was generally supposed to possess 
 one of the largest fortunes in the little town of some twelve 
 hundred inhabitants; but she never said a word about her 
 savings, which were placed, together with Gaubertin's capital, 
 in the hands of a wine merchant's commission agent in Paris, 
 one Leclercq, who belonged to that part of the country, Gau- 
 bertin being his sleeping partner. 
 
 Great was the general astonishment when M. and Mme. 
 Soudry, by their marriage-contract, legitimized a natural 
 son of the bridegroom ; to this boy, therefore, Mme. Soudry's 
 fortune would in due course descend. On the day when he 
 officially received a mother, he had just finished his law 
 studies, and proposed to keep his terms so as to become a mag- 
 istrate. 
 
 It is almost superfluous to add that there was a firm friend- 
 ship between the Gaubertins and the Soudrys, a friendship 
 which had its source in a mutual intelligence of twenty years' 
 standing. Both sides were in duty bound till the end of their 
 days to give each other out urbi et orbi for the salt of the 
 earth. This interest, based on a knowledge on either side 
 of secret stains on the white garment of conscience, is one of 
 the most indissoluble of all bonds. You who read this social 
 drama are so sure of this, that given the phenomenon of a 
 lasting devotion which puts your egoism to the blush, you 
 will say of the pair "that those two must have committed 
 some crime together."
 
 98 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 After twenty-five years' of stewardship, the steward found 
 that he could command six hundred thousand francs in coin, 
 and La Cochet possessed about two hundred and fifty thou- 
 sand. Dexterous and continual changes of investment did 
 not a little to swell the capital deposited with the firm of 
 Leclercq & Company on the Quai de Bethune in the He Saint- 
 Louis (rivals of the famous house of Grandet), and helped to 
 build up fortunes for the commission agent and Gau- 
 bertin. After Mile. Laguerre's death, Leclercq, the head 
 of the firm on the Quai de Bethune, asked for the 
 steward's eldest daughter, Jenny, in marriage, and then it 
 was that Gaubertin flattered himself that he saw how to make 
 himself master of the Aigues. Twelve years previously a 
 notary had set up at Soulanges through Gaubertin's influ- 
 ence, and in Maitre Lupin's office the plot was hatched. 
 
 Lupin, a son of the Comte de Soulanges' late agent, had 
 lent himself to all the various manoeuvres, unhappily too com- 
 mon in out-of-the-way country places, by which important 
 pieces of property change hands in a hole-and-corner sort 
 of way (to use a popular expression) such methods, for ex- 
 ample, as under-valuations of real estate, or putting up prop- 
 erty for sale and fixing the reserve bid at one-half the actual 
 value, or distributing unauthorized placards. Lately, so it is 
 said, he has formed a society in Paris for blackmailing 
 weavers of such schemes with threats of running prices up 
 against them; but in 1816 the scorching glare of publicity, 
 in which we live to-day, had not yet been turned on France, 
 so those in the plot might fairly reckon upon dividing the 
 Aigues among them. It was a job arranged by La Cochet, 
 the notary, and Gaubertin; the latter reserving in petto his 
 own further scheme of buying out his confederates so soon 
 as the land should be purchased in his name. Lupin chose 
 the attorney, whom he instructed to make application to 
 the court for leave to sell. This man had agreed to make 
 over his practice to Gaubertin's son, and was waiting to re- 
 ceive payment, so that he had an interest in the spoliation, if 
 indeed those eleven labnrors in Picardy, who came in for such 
 an unexpected windfall, could regard themselves as despoiled
 
 THE. PEASANTRY 99 
 
 But on the eve of the auction, at the moment when all con- 
 cerned thought themselves secure of doubling their fortunes 
 at a stroke, there came down a solicitor from Paris, who 
 went to a solicitor at Ville-aux-Fayes (an old clerk of his, 
 as it turned out), and the former empowered the latter to 
 buy the Aigues, which he accordingly did, for eleven hundred 
 and fifty thousand francs. Gaubertin was convinced that 
 Soudry was at the bottom of this, and Lupin and Soudry were 
 equally sure that Gaubertin had outwitted them both; but 
 when the purchaser's name was declared, a reconciliation 
 took place. 
 
 The country solicitor had his own suspicions of the plans 
 formed by Gaubertin, Lupin, and Soudry, but he was very 
 careful not to enlighten his sometime employer, and for the 
 following excellent reason : Unless the newcomer kept his own 
 counsel, the ministerial official would have the country made 
 too hot to hold him. The wisdom 6f his taciturnity was, 
 moreover, amply justified by the subsequent course of events 
 to be related in this Etude. If the provincial is crafty, it is 
 in self-defence ; his excuse lies in the danger of a position ad- 
 mirably depicted by the popular adage, "One must howl with 
 the wolves," a doctrine which finds its concrete expression in 
 the character of Philinte. 
 
 So when General de Montcornet took possession of the 
 Aigues, Gaubertin was not rich enough to resign his post. If 
 his eldest daughter was to marry the rich banker of the En- 
 trepot, her portion of two hundred thousand francs must be 
 forthcoming; then there was his son's practice, which would 
 cost thirty thousand francs ; and out of the three hundred and 
 seventy thousand which still remained to him, he must sooner 
 or later find a dowry for his youngest girl Elisa, who, he 
 hoped, would make a match as brilliant as that of her older 
 sister. The steward determined to study Montcornet's char- 
 acter, possibly he might contrive to disgust the General with 
 the place, and to reap the benefit of his abortive schemes. 
 
 With the peculiar shrewdness of those who have made their
 
 100 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 way by cunning, Gaubertin put faith in a not ill-grounded 
 belief in a general resemblance between the character of an 
 old soldier and an aged actress. An opera girl, and one of 
 Napoleon's old generals what could you expect of either but 
 the same thriftlessness, the same careless ways? To the 
 adventuress and to the soldier fortune comes capriciously and 
 through peril. There may be astute, shrewd, and politic mil- 
 itary men, but they surely are not the ordinary stamp. The 
 typical soldier is supposed to be simple and unsuspecting, a 
 child in matters of business, and but little fitted to cope with 
 the thousand and one details of the management of a great 
 estate, and this more particularly in the case of such a fire- 
 eater as Montcornet. Gaubertin flattered himself that he 
 could take and hold the General in the net in which Mile. 
 Laguerre had ended her days. But it so happened that, in 
 the time of the Emperor, Montcornet had himself been in 
 very much such a position in Pomerania as Gaubertin held 
 at the Aigues, and the General had had practical experience 
 of the opportunities of a stewardship. 
 
 When the old Cuirassier took to "planting cabbages," to 
 use the expression of the first Due de Biron, he wanted some 
 occupation to divert his mind from his fall. Although he had 
 carried his corps over to the Bourbons, his share of a service 
 performed by several generals, and christened the "Disband- 
 ing of the Army of the Loire," could not redeem his blunder 
 of the following year, when Montcornet had followed the Man 
 of the Hundred Days to his last field of battle at Waterloo. 
 During the occupation of the Allies it was impossible for the 
 peer of 1815 to remain on the muster-roll of the army, and 
 still more impossible to retain his seat at the Luxembourg. 
 So Montcornet acted on the advice of the old marechal in dis- 
 grace, and went to cultivate carrots in sober earnest. The Gen- 
 eral was not wanting in the shrewdness of an old war-wolf. 
 During the very first days spent in investigating his posses- 
 sions, he soon found out the sort of man that he had to do 
 with in Gaubertin; for the typical steward under the old 
 noblesse was a variety of rogue familiar to almost all of Na-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 101 
 
 poleon's mushroom nobility of dukes and marshals sprung 
 from beds of straw. 
 
 The shrewd old Cuirassier likewise saw how useful Gau- 
 bertin's profound experience of agricultural administration 
 and the manners and customs of misdemeanants would be 
 to him ; so he appeared to be a continuation of Mile. Laguerre, 
 with an assumption of carelessness which deceived the 
 steward. The period of ineptitude lasted until the General 
 had time to find out the strong and weak points of the Aigues, 
 the ins and outs of the receipts, the manner in which rents 
 were collected, the necessary improvements and economies, 
 and the ways in which he was robbed. 
 
 Then one fine day, catching Gaubertin with his hand in 
 the bag (to use the time-honored expression), the General took 
 occasion to fly into one of the fearful passions to which the 
 conquering hero is peculiarly subject. Therein he committed 
 a capital error. It was one of those blunders which would 
 have shaken the future of a man who had not his great wealth 
 or firmness of purpose, and there, in fact, was the origin of 
 the whole tissue of disasters, great and small, with which this 
 story teems. Montcornet had been trained in the Imperial 
 school, he slashed his wa} r through difficulties, and deep was 
 his scorn of civilians. Montcornet could not see that there 
 was any need to mince matters when a rascally steward was 
 to be sent about his business. The General knew nothing of 
 civil life and its countless precautions, his temper was not 
 improved by his disgrace, so he inflicted a deep mortification 
 on Gaubertin, who, moreover, drew it upon himself by a cyn- 
 ical retort that infuriated the General. 
 
 "So you are living on my land !" the Count had remarked 
 with grim hilarity. 
 
 "Did you suppose that I could live on what falls from 
 heaven?" Gaubertin retorted with a grin. 
 
 "Get out of this, you scamp, or I'll make you !" roared 
 the General, accompanying the words with several cuts of a 
 horse-whip, though the steward always denied a thrashing 
 that no one witnessed.
 
 102 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "I shall not go till I have my discharge," Gaubertin 
 exclaimed coolly, as soon as he had put a distance between 
 himself and the truculent Cuirassier. 
 
 "We shall see what they think of you in a court of law," 
 returned Montcornet, with a shrug. 
 
 At the threat of prosecution, Gaubertin looked the Count 
 in the face and smiled ; it was a smile of peculiar efficacy, for 
 the General's arm dropped to his side as if the sinews had been 
 cut. Let us go into the explanation of that smile. 
 
 Two years ago Gaubertin's brother-in-law Gendrin had been 
 appointed to the presidency of the Court of First Instance, 
 where he had long been a judge. He owed the appointment to 
 the Comte de Soulanges, who had been made a peer of France 
 in 1814, and had kept staunch to the Bourbons during the 
 Hundred Days. M. de Soulanges had asked the Keeper of 
 the Seals to nominate Gendrin. Such kinship as this gave 
 Gaubertin a certain importance in the country. A president 
 of a Court of First Instance in a small town is, relatively 
 speaking, a much greater person than the president of a 
 Court-Eoyal in a city where there are rival luminaries in the 
 shape of the commander, the bishop, prefect, and receiver- 
 general; a simple president of a Court of First Instance 
 shines alone, for neither the public prosecutor nor the sub- 
 prefect is a permanent official. Young Soudry and Gauber- 
 tin's son had been friends as lads at the Aigues, and after- 
 wards in Paris, and now young Soudry had just received the 
 appointment of public-prosecutor's substitute in the chief 
 town of the department. 
 
 Soudry senior, once a quartermaster in an artillery regi- 
 ment, had been wounded in an action in defence of M. de 
 Soulanges, then adjutant-general. Since those days the 
 gendarmerie had been established, and M. de Soulanges (now 
 a colonel) asked for a police-sergeant's *post for the man who 
 had saved his life, and, at a later time, obtained a post for 
 Sou dry's son. And finally, when Mile. Gaubertin's marriage 
 had been definitely arranged at the Quai de Bethune, the un- 
 just steward felt that ho had a stronger position in the district 
 than an unattached lieutenant-general.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 103 
 
 If this story were nothing but a chronicle of the rupture 
 between the General and his steward, it would even then be 
 well worth serious attention, as a guide to the conduct of life. 
 Those who can profit by the perusal of Machiavelli's treatise 
 will find it demonstrated therein that, in dealing with human 
 nature, it is a prudent course to refrain from menaces, to 
 proceed to act without talking about it, to leave a way of es- 
 cape open to a defeated enemy, to be very careful, as the say- 
 ing is, not to tread on a serpent's tail, and to avoid, like mur- 
 der, any mortification to an inferior. A deed, once done, is 
 forgiven sooner or later, injurious though it may have been 
 to other people's interests (a fact which may be explained in 
 ways too numerous to mention), but a wound dealt to self- 
 love is never staunched, and never pardoned. Our mental sus- 
 ceptibilities are keener and, in a sense, more vital than our 
 physical susceptibilities, and the heart and arteries are less 
 sensitive than the nerves. In everything that we do, in fact, 
 it is this inmost ego who rules us. Civil war will quench an 
 ancestral blood-feud, as has been seen in the history of Breton 
 and Vendean families; but between the spoiler and the 
 spoiled, the slanderer and his victim, no reconciliation is pos- 
 sible. People should refrain from insulting each other, except 
 in epic poems, before a general and final slaughter. 
 
 The savage and his near relation, the peasant, never make 
 use of articulate speech, except to lay traps for their enemies. 
 Ever since 1789 France has been trying to persuade man- 
 kind, against all evidence to the contrary, that all men are 
 equal; you may tell a man that he is a rascal, and it passes 
 for a harmless joke ; but once proceed to bring it home to him 
 by detecting him in the act, and enforcing your conclusion 
 by a horsewhip, once threaten him with prosecution and fail 
 to execute your threat, and you set up the old conditions of 
 inequality again. And if the people cannot suffer any su- 
 periority, how should any rogue forgive an honest man ? 
 
 Montcornet should have parted with his steward on some 
 pretext of old obligations to fulfil, some old soldier to put 
 in his place ; and both Gaubertin and the General would have
 
 104 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 known the real reason perfectly well. If the latter had been 
 more careful of the former's self-love, he would have left an 
 open door for the man's retreat, and Gauhertin would have 
 left the great landowner in peace; he would have forgotten 
 his defeat at the auction, and very likely would have looked 
 for an investment for his capital in Paris. But now that he 
 was ignominiously driven from his post, he nursed a ran- 
 corous hatred of his employer, one of those hatreds which are 
 an element of provincial life; so lasting and so pertinacious 
 are they, that their intricate meshes amaze diplomatists, 
 whose cue it is to be astonished at nothing. A burning thirst 
 for vengeance counseled retirement to Ville-aux-Fayes ; there 
 he would put himself in a position which gave him power to 
 annoy Montcornet, and raise up enemies in sufficient force to 
 compel him to sell the Aigues. 
 
 Everything combined to deceive the General. Nothing in 
 Gaubertin's appearance was calculated to warn or alarm him. 
 The steward had always made it a rule to pose not exactly 
 as a poor man, but as a man who found it difficult to make 
 both ends meet a tradition which was handed down by his 
 predecessor. Therefore for the last twelve years he put his 
 wife and three children forward on all occasions, and talked 
 about the heavy expenses of so large a family. It was Mile. 
 Laguerre who paid for his son's education in Paris ; Gaubertin 
 told her that he himself was too poor to afford the expense ; 
 and she, Claude Gaubertin's godmother, had allowed her dear 
 godson a hundred louis per annum. 
 
 The next day Gaubertin appeared accompanied by one of 
 the keepers, Courtecuisse by name, and held his head high, 
 and asked for his discharge. He laid before the General the 
 discharges given him by the late Mile. Laguerre, all couched 
 in flattering terms, and begged, with ironical humility, that 
 the General would discover and point out any instances of 
 misappropriation on his, Gaubertin's part. If he received a 
 bonu,e from the timber merchants and farmers on the renewal 
 of contracts or leases, Mile. Laguerre had always authorized
 
 THE PEASANTRY 105 
 
 it (he said), and she had actually been a gainer by so doing; 
 and not only so, by these means she had lived in peace. Any 
 one in the countryside would have died for Mademoiselle; 
 but if the General went on in this way, he was laying up 
 trouble in plenty for himself. 
 
 Gaubertin believed and this last trait is very common in 
 most professions where men exercise their wits to take their 
 neighbor's goods in ways unprovided for by the Code 
 Gaubertin believed that he was a perfectly honest man. In 
 the first place, there was the old affair of the coin wrung 
 from the tenants during the Terror ; it was so long now since 
 he remitted the rents to Mile. Laguerre in assignats and 
 pocketed the difference, that he had come to regard the money 
 as lawful acquired gain. It was simply a matter of exchange. 
 Before he had done, he began to think that he had even run 
 some risk in taking silver crowns, and besides, legally, made- 
 moiselle had no right to anything but assignats. Legally is 
 a robust adverb; it carries the weight of many ill-gotten 
 gains ! Finally, ever since great landowners and stewards 
 have existed, which is to say, ever since the first beginnings of 
 civilization, the steward has fabricated for his personal use 
 a chain of reasoning that finds favor with cookmaids at the 
 present day, and which may be concisely stated as follows : 
 
 "If my mistress went to market herself" (so the handmaid 
 privately argues), "she perhaps would buy dearer than I do; 
 so she is a gainer, and the profit that I make had better go 
 into my pocket than to the shopkeepers." 
 
 "If Mile. Laguerre were to manage the Aigues for herself, 
 she would not make thirty thousand francs out of it ; the peas- 
 ants, and timber merchants, and laborers would rob her of the 
 difference; it is more natural that I should keep it, and I 
 spare her a deal of trouble," said Gaubertin to himself. 
 
 No influence save the Catholic religion has power to prevent 
 such capitulation of conscience; but since 1789 religion in 
 France has lost its hold on two-thirds of the population. Pov- 
 erty induces uniformity, and in the valley of the Aigues, 
 where the peasants were mentally very wide awake, they had
 
 106 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 sunk to a frightful degree of moral degradation. They cer- 
 tainly went to mass of a Sunday, but they stopped outside 
 the church, and had fallen into a habit of meeting there regu- 
 larly to conclude bargains and discuss business. 
 
 The reader should by this time have an idea of the extent 
 of the mischief done by the easy-going ways of the first pupil 
 of the Academie royale de musique. Mile. Laguerre's selfish- 
 ness had injured the cause of those who have, always an ob- 
 ject of hatred to those who have not. Since 1792 all the 
 landowners of France must show a compact front, and stand 
 or fall tugether. Alas ! if the families of feudal nobles, less 
 numerous than bourgeois families, could not understand the 
 unity of their interests in 1400 in the time of Louis XI., nor 
 yet agaia in 1600 under Eichelieu, how should the bour- 
 geoisie of this nineteenth century (in spite of its boasted 
 progress-) be more united than the old noblesse? An oli- 
 garchy cf a hundred thousand rich men has all the drawbacks 
 of a democracy with none of its advantages. Each for him- 
 self! Let each man mind his own business! Family selfish- 
 ness is stronger than the class selfishness so much needed by 
 society in these days, that oligarchical selfishness of which 
 England has exhibited such a striking example for the past 
 three hundred years. No matter what is done, the landowners 
 will never see any necessity for a discipline through which 
 the Church has come to be such an admirable model of gov- 
 ernment, until the moment when the threatened danger comes 
 home to them, and then it will be too late. Communism, that 
 living force and practical logic of democracy, is already at- 
 tacking society in the domain of theory, whence it is evident 
 that the proletarian Samson, grown prudent, will henceforth 
 sap the pillars of society in the cellar, instead of shaking them 
 in the banqueting hall.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 107 
 
 VII 
 
 OF EXTINCT SOCIAL SPECIES 
 
 THE Aigues must have a steward, for the General had no idea 
 of giving up the pleasures of the winter season in Paris, where 
 he had a splendid mansion in the Eue Neuve-des-Mathurins. 
 So he looked out for a successor to Gaubertin; but, in truth, 
 he was at less pains to find a steward than Gaubertin to put 
 a man of his own choosing into the place. 
 
 Of all responsible posts, there is not one which demands 
 greater experience and more activity than the stewardship of 
 a great estate. The difficulty of finding the man is only ap- 
 preciated by great landowners, and becomes acute only at a 
 distance of say forty leagues from the capital. That is the limit 
 of the area which supplies the Paris markets, the limit also 
 of steady rents and of long leases, and of tenants with capital 
 in competition for them. Tenants of this class come into 
 town in cabriolets and pay their rent with cheques, if indeed 
 their salesman at the Great Market does not make their pay- 
 ments for them. There is such brisk competition for farms 
 in the departments of Seine-et-Oise, Seine-et-Marne, Oise, 
 Eure-et-Loire, Seine-Inferieure, and Loiret, that capital does 
 not always return one and a half per cent. Even compared 
 with the returns of land in Holland, Belgium, and England, 
 this produce is enormous; but beyond a limit of fifty leagues 
 from Paris, a large estate means so many different forms of 
 cultivation, so many and such different crops, that farming 
 becomes an industry, with a manufacturer's risks. A great 
 landowner under these circumstances is nothing but a mer- 
 chant, who must find a market for his produce like any iron- 
 master or cotton-spinner. Nor is he without competitors; 
 the peasants and the small proprietors cut down his profits 
 remorselessly by descending to transactions in which no gen- 
 tleman will engage. 
 
 A steward should know the system of land measurement, 
 VOL. 1033
 
 108 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 the customs of the countryside, the methods of sale and ex- 
 ploitation, and must be able to sail pretty near the wind in 
 his employer's interest. He must understand book-keeping; 
 and, besides enjoying the best of health, must have a decided 
 taste for equitation and an active life. He is the master's rep- 
 resentative, and always in communication with him, and can- 
 not be a man of the people. And as few stewards' salaries 
 exceed a thousand crowns per annum, the problem of discov- 
 ering the model steward would appear to be insoluble. How 
 should a man combining so many precious qualities be found 
 at such a moderate price, where any employment is open 
 to him in this country? . . . Send for a man who does 
 not know the district, and you shall pay dear for the expe- 
 rience he requires. Train up a youth who belongs to the 
 neighborhood, and in all likelihood you cocker ingratitude. 
 So you are left to choose between honest ineptitude, so slow 
 or so short-sighted as to injure your interests, and self-seek- 
 ing cleverness. Wherefore the classification and natural his- 
 tory of stewards was thus summed up by a great Polish land- 
 owner, "There are two varieties here," said he ; "the first kind 
 of steward thinks of no one but himself; the second thinks 
 of us as well as of himself ; happy the landowner who can put 
 his hand on the second ! As for the steward who only thinks 
 of your interests, he has never been seen here up to the pres- 
 ent time !" 
 
 An example of a steward who bears his employer's interests 
 in mind, as well as his own, has been given elsewhere;* Gau- 
 bertin is the steward who thinks of nothing but his own for- 
 tune ; as for the third term of the problem, any representation 
 of him would probably be regarded as a fancy portrait; he 
 was known to the old noblesse; but the type vanished with 
 them.f The continual subdivision of fortunes inevitably 
 brings about a change in the way of life of the aristocracy. 
 If there are not at present twenty fortunes administered by 
 a steward, in fifty years' time there will not be a hundred 
 
 * See Vn D/but dam fa Vie. t Le Cabinet des Antiques.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 109 
 
 great estates left for stewards to administer, unless some 
 change is made meanwhile in the law. Every rich landowner 
 will be obliged to look closely to his own interests himself. 
 This process of transformation, even now begun, suggested 
 the remark made by a witty old lady, who was asked why she 
 had spent the summer in Paris since 1830 : "Since the 
 chateaux became farmhouses I have ceased to visit them," she 
 said. 
 
 But what will be the end of a dispute which waxes hotter 
 and hotter between man and man, between rich and poor? 
 This Etude has been undertaken to throw light upon this 
 terrible social question, and for no other reason. 
 
 The General had dismissed Gaubertin, and the General's 
 awkward predicament may be imagined. While saying 
 vaguely to himself, like all persons who are free to act or no, 
 "I will get rid of that rogue," he had not reckoned with fate, 
 nor with his own furious outbursts of anger, the anger of a 
 choleric fire-eater, ready to break out as soon as some flagrant 
 misdeed should force him to raise the eyelids which he de- 
 liberately closed. 
 
 Montcornet, a Parisian born and bred, was a landowner for 
 the first time in his life, and his preliminary studies of the 
 country had convinced him that some intermediary between 
 a man in his position and so many peasants was absolutely 
 necessary; but he had omitted to provide himself beforehand 
 with a steward. 
 
 Gaubertin in the course of an exchange of courtesies, 
 which lasted for a couple of hours, discovered the General's 
 predicament ; so on leaving the house, the ex-steward bestrode 
 his cob, and galloped off to take counsel with Soudry at Sou- 
 langes. 
 
 No sooner had he said, "The general and I have parted 
 company; how can we fit him with a steward of our own 
 choosing?" than the Soudrys saw what their friend had in 
 mind. It must not be forgotten that Police-Sergeant Soudry 
 had been in office in the canton for seventeen years, and that
 
 110 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 to back him he had a wife endowed with the cunning peculiai 
 to an opera-singer's waiting-maid. 
 
 "He will go a long way before he will find any one as good 
 as poor Sibilet," said Mme. Soudry. 
 
 "His goose is cooked !" cried Gaubertin, still red with the 
 humiliations he had been through. 
 
 "Lupin," he went on, turning to the notary who was pres- 
 ent, "just go down to Ville-aux-Fayes and prime Mare- 
 chal, in case our fine Cuirassier goes to ask him for informa- 
 tion." 
 
 Marechal was the local solicitor who had bought the Aigues, 
 and had naturally been recommended to Montcornet by his 
 own family solicitor in Paris after the happy conclusion of 
 the bargain. 
 
 The Sibilet to whom they alluded, the oldest son of the 
 clerk of the court at Ville-aux-Fayes, was a notary's clerk 
 without a penny to bless himself with. He had fallen madly 
 in love at the age of twenty-five with the daughter of the 
 justice of the peace at Soulanges. 
 
 That worthy magistrate, Sarcus by name, having a stipend 
 of fifteen hundred francs, had married a penniless girl, the 
 oldest sister of the Soulanges apothecary, M. Vermut. Mile. 
 Sarcus was an only daughter, but her beauty was all her 
 dowry, and she could not be said to live on the salary of a 
 country notary's clerk. Young Sibilet was related to Gauber- 
 tin (his precise degree of relationship would have been rather 
 difficult to trace among the family ramifications of a small 
 town where all the middle-class people were cousins) ; but, 
 thanks to his father and to Gaubertin, he had a modest place 
 in the Land Eegistration Department. To this luckless 
 young man's lot fell the alarming blessing of two children in 
 three years' time. His own father had a family of five, and 
 could do nothing to help his son ; his father-in-law, the jus- 
 tice of the peace, had nothing but his house in Soulanges, 
 and a thousand crowns of income, so Mme. Sibilet, the 
 younger, and her two children, lived for the most part under 
 her father's roof ; and Adolphe Sibilet, whose duties took him
 
 THE TEASANTKY 111 
 
 all over the department, only saw his Adeline at intervals, 
 an arrangement which perhaps explains the fruitfulness of 
 some marriages. 
 
 Gaubertin's exclamation will he easily understood by the 
 light of this summary of Sibilet's history, but a few explana- 
 tory details must be added. Adolphe Sibilet, surpassingly ill- 
 favored, as has been seen in a preceding sketch, belonged to 
 that class of men whose only way to a woman's heart lies 
 through the mayor's office and the church. With something 
 of the suppleness of a steel spring, he would relinquish his 
 idea to seize on it again at a later day, a shifty disposition 
 of mind closely resembling baseness; but in the course of an 
 apprenticeship served in a country notary's office, Sibilet 
 had learned to hide this defect beneath a gruff manner, which 
 simulated a strength which he did not possess. Plenty of 
 hollow natures mask their emptiness in this way; deal their 
 own measure to them, and you shall see them collapse like a 
 balloon at a pin-prick. This was the clerk's son. But as 
 men, for the most part, are not observers, and as among ob- 
 servers three-fourths observe after the fact, Adolphe Sibilet's 
 grumbling manner was taken for the result of an honest, out- 
 spoken nature, a capacity much praised by his employer, and 
 an upright integrity which had never been put to the proof. 
 Sometimes a man's defects are as useful to him as better 
 qualities to his neighbor. 
 
 Adeline Sarcus, a nice-looking young woman, had been 
 brought up by a mother (who died three years before her mar- 
 riage), as carefully as only daughters can be educated in a 
 little out-of-the-way place. Adeline was in love with the 
 handsome Lupin, only son of the Soulanges notary. But her 
 romance was still in its early chapters when Lupin senior 
 (who intended his son to marry Mile. Elise Gaubertin) sen' 
 young Amaury Lupin to Paris into the office of Maitre Grot 
 tat, notary; and under the pretence of studying the art of 
 conveyancing and drawing up contracts, Amaury led a wild 
 life, and got into debt under the auspices of another clerk 
 in the same office, one George Marest, a wealthy young fellow,
 
 112 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 who initiated Lupin into the mysteries of Parisian life. By 
 the time that Maitre Lupin came to fetch his son home again, 
 Adeline had changed her name, and was Mme. Sibilet. In 
 fact, when the amorous Adolphe presented himself, Sarcus, 
 the old justice of the peace, acting on a hint from Lupin 
 senior, hastened on a marriage, to which Adeline resigned 
 herself in despair. 
 
 An assessor's place is not a career. Like many other de- 
 partments which offer no prospects, it is a sort of hole in the 
 administrative colander. The men who start in life through 
 one of these holes (say in the Ordnance Survey, Department 
 of Eoads and Bridges, or the teaching profession) always 
 discover a little late that cleverer men than they, seated beside 
 them, are "kept moist by the sweat of the people" (in the lan- 
 guage of Opposition writers) every time that the colander 
 is dipped into the taxes by means of the machinery called the 
 Budget. Adolphe, working early and late, and earning little, 
 very soon discovered the bottomless barrenness of his hole; 
 so as he trotted from commune to commune, spending his 
 salary on traveling expenses and shoe leather, his thoughts 
 were busy with schemes for finding a permanent and profit- 
 able situation. 
 
 No one can imagine, unless indeed he happens to squint 
 and to have two children born in lawful wedlock, how three 
 years of struggle and love had developed ambition in this 
 young fellow, who had a mental squint resembling his phys- 
 ical infirmity, and whose happiness halted, as it were. Per- 
 haps an incomplete happiness is the chief cause of most scoun- 
 drelly actions and untold basenesses committed in secret; 
 it may be that we can more easily endure hopeless misery than 
 steady rain, with brief glimpses of sunshine and love. Just as 
 the body contracts diseases, the soul contracts the canker of 
 envy. In little natures envy becomes a base and brutal cov- 
 etousness, shrinking from sight, but from nothing else; in 
 cultivated minds it fosters subversive doctrines, which a 111:111 
 uses as a stepping-stone to raise himself above his superiors. 
 Might not the situation be summed up in an aphorism, "Tell 
 me what you have, and I will tell you your opinions?"
 
 THE PEASANTRY 113 
 
 Adolphe was fond of his wife, but he constantly said to 
 himself, "I have made a mistake ; I have three sets of shackles, 
 and only one pair of legs; I ought to have made my way 
 before I married. I might have found an Adeline any day; 
 but now Adeline stands in my way." 
 
 Adolphe had gone to see his relative Gaubertin three times 
 in as many years. A few words that he let fall told Gaubertin 
 that here in his relative's soul was the mud which hardens 
 under the fiery heat of the temptation of legalized robbery. 
 Warily he probed this nature, which seemed plastic to his pur- 
 pose, provided it were worth while to yield. Adolphe Sibilet 
 grumbled on each occasion. 
 
 "Just find me something to do, cousin," he said. "Take 
 me on as your clerk, and make me your successor. I would 
 remove mountains to give my Adeline, I will not say luxury, 
 but a modest competence. You made M. Leclercq's fortune; 
 why should you not start me in the banking line in Paris ?" 
 
 "We will see. Some day I will find a place for you," his 
 ambitious relative would reply. "Meantime, make acquaint- 
 ances, everything helps." 
 
 In this frame of mind a letter from Mme. Soudry, bidding 
 him "come at once," brought Adolphe in hot haste to Sou- 
 langes through a region of castles in the air. 
 
 The Soudrys explained to Sarcus that on him devolved the 
 duty of calling on the General on the morrow to put in a 
 word for his son-in-law, and suggest Adolphe for the vacant 
 position. Acting on the advice of Mme. Soudry, the local 
 oracle, the old man had taken his daughter with him, and 
 the sight of her had disposed Montcornet in their favor. 
 
 "I shall not decide until I have made inquiries," the Gen- 
 eral said, "but I will not look out for any one else until I 
 have seen whether or no your son-in-law is in all respects 
 the man for the place. The desire of settling so charming 
 a young lady at the Aigues 
 
 "The mother of two children, General," said Adeline 
 adroitly, to turn off the old soldier's compliments. 
 
 All the General's inquiries were cleverly anticipated by the
 
 114 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Soudrys, with Gaubertin and Lupin, who skilfully obtained 
 for their candidate the influence of the leading men in the 
 principal town of the canton Councillor Gendrin of the 
 Court-Royal (a distant relation of the president at Ville-aux- 
 Fayes) ; Baron Bourlac, attorney-general, and young Soudry's 
 chief; and Sarcus, councillor of the prefecture, third cousin 
 to Adeline's father. Everybody, from the General's solicitor 
 to the prefect (to whom the General went in person), had 
 a good word for the underpaid official, "so interesting" he 
 was said to be. Sibilet's marriage made him as irreproachable 
 as one of Miss Edgeworth's novels, and marked him out as 
 a man above mercenary motives. 
 
 The time which the steward spent perforce at the Aigues 
 was turned to profit. He did all that in him lay to make 
 trouble and annoyance for his old employer, but a single little 
 scene will give a sufficient idea of the rest. The day after 
 his dismissal he made an opportunity of finding Courtecuisse, 
 the one forester employed under his rule at the Aigues, which 
 really required three at the least. 
 
 "Well, M. Gaubertin," remarked the other, "so you have 
 had words with the master, have you?" 
 
 "You know that already!" exclaimed Gaubertin. "Well, 
 yes. The General takes it upon himself to order us about like 
 his Cuirassiers; he does not know us Burgundians. M. le 
 Comte was not satisfied with my services, and as I was not 
 satisfied with his ways, we dismissed each other; we almost 
 came to blows over it, for he is a perfect tempest. Look out 
 for yourself, Courtecuisse ! Ah ! old boy, I once thought to 
 have given you a better master " 
 
 "I know you did," said the keeper, "and I would have 
 served you well. Lord ! after knowing each other these twenty 
 years. You took me on here in poor dear sainted Madame's 
 time ! Ah ! a kind woman she was ; they don't make such as 
 her now ! The place has lost a mother in her." 
 
 "I say, Courtecuisse, if you are willing, you can do us a 
 fine good turn."
 
 THE PEASANTRY 115 
 
 "Then are you going to stop in the place ? We heard you 
 were going to Paris." 
 
 "No. I shall find something to do at Ville-aux-Fayes, and 
 see how things turn out. The General does not know the 
 people he is dealing with; he will be hated, do you see? I 
 must wait and see if anything turns up. Go softly about 
 your business here ; he will tell you to carry things with a high 
 hand, for he can see well enough where the waste goes on. 
 But do not you be so thick-headed as to lay yourself open to a 
 drubbing, and maybe worse than a drubbing, from the people 
 round about for the sake of his timber." 
 
 "Dear M, Gaubertin, he will turn me away, and you know 
 how very well off I am at the Avonne gate." 
 
 "The General will be sick of his property before long," said 
 Gaubertin; "it will not be long before you come back if he 
 does turn you off. And besides, do you see these woods 
 here?" he added, waving his hand towards the landscape, 
 "I am stronger there than the masters." 
 
 They were talking out in the field. 
 
 "These Arminacs from Paris ought to keep to their gutters 
 in Paris," said the keeper. 
 
 That word Arminacs has come down from the fifteenth 
 century, when the Armagnacs, the Parisians, were hostile to 
 the Duke of Burgundy. It is a word of abuse to-day on the 
 outskirts of Upper Burgundy, where it is mispronounced in 
 various ways in different districts. 
 
 "He shall go back, but not before he has had a thrashing !" 
 said Gaubertin. "Some of these days we will turn the park 
 at the Aigues into ploughed land, for it is robbing the people 
 to keep nine hundred acres of the best land in the valley for 
 the pleasure of an upstart." 
 
 "Lord ! that would keep four hundred families !" put in 
 Courtecuisse. 
 
 "Well, if you want two acres for yourself out of it, you 
 must help us to make an outlaw of that cur " 
 
 While Gaubertin was fulminating his sentence of excom- 
 munication, the worthy justice of the peace was introducing
 
 116 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 his son-in-law, Adolphe Sibilet, to the General. Adeleine had 
 come with the two children in the basket-chaise borrowed 
 of Sarcus' registrar, a M. Gourdon, brother of the Soulanges 
 doctor, and a richer man than the justice. This kind of thing, 
 which suits but ill with the dignity of the magistrate's office, 
 is to be seen everywhere; every justice's clerk is richer than 
 the justice himself; every clerk of a Court of First Instance 
 is better paid than the president ; whereas it would seem only 
 natural to pay the subordinate, not by fees, but by a fixed 
 salary, and so to cut down the expenses of litigation. 
 
 The General was well pleased with the worthy functionary's 
 character and straightforwardness, and with Adeline's charm- 
 ing appearance; and, in fact, these two made their promises 
 in all good faith, for neither father nor daughter knew of the 
 diplomatic part cut out for Sibilet by Gaubertin; so M. de 
 Montcornet at once made to the young and interesting couple 
 proposals which would make the position of steward of the 
 manor equal to that of a sub-prefect of the first class. 
 
 A lodge built by Bouret, partly as a feature of the land- 
 scape, partly as a house for the steward, was assigned to the 
 Sibilets. It was a picturesque building in the same style as 
 the Blangy gate, which has been sufficiently described already ; 
 Gaubertin had previously lived there. The General showed 
 no intention of putting down the riding-horse which Mile. 
 Laguerre had allowed Gaubertin for his own use, on account 
 of the size of the estate, and the distance he was obliged to 
 go to markets and on other necessary business. The new 
 steward was allowed a hundred bushels of wheat, three hogs- 
 heads of wine, as much firewood as he required, oats and 
 barley in abundance, and three per cent upon the receipts. 
 If Mile. Laguerre had drawn more than forty thousand livres 
 of income from the estate in 1800, the General thought, and 
 with good reason, that after all her numerous and important 
 purchases it should bring in sixty thousand in 1818. The 
 new steward, therefore, might look to make nearly two thou- 
 sand francs in money some day. He would live rent free 
 and tax free, with no expenses for food, or fuel, or horse,
 
 THE PEASANTRY 117 
 
 or poultry-yard; and besides all this, the Count allowed him 
 a kitchen garden, and promised not to consider a day's work 
 done in it hy the gardener now and again. Such advantages 
 were certainly worth a good two thousand francs. The stew- 
 ardship of the Aigues after the assessorship was a transition 
 from penury to wealth. 
 
 "If you devote yourself to my interests," said the General, 
 "I may do more for you. For one thing, I shall have it in 
 my power to appoint you to collect the taxes in Conches, 
 Blangy, and Cerneux, separating those three places from the 
 Soulanges division. In short, as soon as you bring the net 
 receipts up to sixty thousand francs, you shall have your re- 
 ward." 
 
 Unluckily, the worthy Sarcus and Adeline, in the joy of 
 their hearts, were so imprudent as to tell Mme Soudry about 
 the Count's promise. They forgot that the receiver at Sou- 
 langes was one Guerbet, brother of the postmaster at Conches, 
 and a connection, as will be seen later, of the Gendrins and 
 Gaubertins. 
 
 "It will not be easy to do, my child," said Mme. Soudry, "but 
 do not hinder the Count from setting about it ; no one knows 
 how easily the hardest things are done in Paris. I have seen 
 the Chevalier Gluck down on his knees to Madame that's gone, 
 and she sang his part for him she that would have cut herself 
 in pieces for Piccini, and Piccini was one of the most agree- 
 able men of those days. He never came to Madame's house, 
 dear gentleman, but he would put his arm round my waist 
 and call me his 'pretty rogue.' ' ; 
 
 "Oh, indeed !" cried the sergeant, when his wife retailed 
 this piece of news, "so he thinks that he will do as he 
 likes with the place, turn things upside down, and order 
 people about right and left as if they were men in his regi- 
 ment. These officers have domineering ways ! But wait a 
 while, we have M. de Soulanges and M. de Ronquerolles 
 on our side. Poor old Guerbet, how little he suspects that 
 they mean to pluck the finest roses off his tree." 
 
 The lady's maid had this piece of Dorat phraseology from
 
 118 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Mile. Laguerre, who learned it of Bouret, who had it from 
 some editor of the Mercure. And now Soudry used it so often 
 that it became a current saying at Soulanges. 
 
 Now "old Guerbet," receiver of taxes at Soulanges, was a 
 local wit, the stock comic character of the little town, and one 
 of the notables in Mme. Soudry's set. The sergeant's out- 
 burst exactly expressed the general feeling towards the master 
 of the Aigues. From Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes the whole 
 district had been poisoned against him by Gaubertin's efforts. 
 
 Sibilet's installation took place towards the end of the 
 autumn of 1817. The year 1818 came and went, and the 
 General never set foot on the estate. He was occupied by his 
 own approaching marriage, which took place early in 1819, 
 and he spent most of the summer in paying court to his be- 
 trothed in his future father-in-law's chateau near Alengon. 
 Besides the Aigues and his splendid townhouse, General de 
 Montcornet possessed an income of sixty thousand francs in 
 the Funds, and drew the pay of a lieutenant-general on the 
 reserve. Yet, although Napoleon had made the brilliant sol- 
 dier a Count of the Empire, granting him for arms a shield 
 bearing four coats quarterly; the first, azure, on a desert or 
 three pyramids argent; the second, sinople, three bugles ar- 
 gent; the third, gules, a cannon or, mounted on a gun carriage 
 sable, in chief a crescent of the second; the fourth, or a crown 
 sinople, with the mediaeval sounding motto, Sonnez la charge, 
 Montcornet was conscious that his father had been a cabinet- 
 maker in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a fact which he was 
 perfectly willing to forget. Wherefore, consumed with a de- 
 sire to be a peer of France, he counted as naught his grand 
 cordon of the Legion of Honor, his cross of Saint-Louis, and 
 a hundred and forty thousand francs of income. The demon 
 of titles had bitten him, the sight of a blue ribbon drove him 
 distracted, and the heroic fighter on Essling field would have 
 lapped all the mud on the Pont Royal to gain an entrance 
 into the set of the Navarreins, Lenoncourts, Maufrigneuses, 
 d'Espards, and Vandenesses, the families of Grandlieu, Ver- 
 neuil, d'Herouville, Chaulieu, and so forth. 
 
 In the year 1818, when it became plain to him that there
 
 THE PEASANTRY 11$ 
 
 was no hope of a return of the Bonapartes, Montcornet 
 availed himself of the friendly offices of his friends' wives. 
 Those ladies advertised in the Faubourg Saint-Germain that 
 the General was ready to give heart and hand and fortune 
 and a house m town as the price of an alliance with any great 
 family whatsoever. 
 
 It was the Duchesse de Carigliano who succeeded after un- 
 told efforts in finding a suitable match in one of the three 
 branches of the Troisville family, to wit, that of the Viscount 
 who had been in the Russian service since 1789, and came 
 back with the emigres in 1815. The Viscount had only a 
 younger brother's share when he married a Princesse Scher- 
 bellof with near a million to her fortune; but his estate had 
 been burdened since by two sons and three daughters. His 
 ancient and powerful family numbered among its members 
 a peer of France, the Marquis de Troisviile, head of the oldest 
 branch; as well as two deputies, each with a numerous pro- 
 geny all busy in getting their share out of the taxes, hangers- 
 on attached to the ministry and the court like goldfishes about 
 a crust. So soon as Montcornet was introduced into this 
 family by one of the most zealous Bourbon partisans among 
 Napoleon's duchesses, he was well received. Montcornet 
 asked, in return for his money and a blind affection for his 
 wife, for a post in the Garde Royale, a marquis' patent, and 
 to be in time a peer of France, but all that the Troisvilles 
 promised him was the influence and support of their three 
 branches. 
 
 "Y"ou know what that means," said the Marechale to her 
 old friend, complaining that the promise was rather vague. 
 "No one can answer for the King; we can only prompt the 
 Royal will." 
 
 Montcornet made Virginie de Troisville his residuary lega- 
 tee in the marriage-contract. Completely subjugated by his 
 wife, as explained by Blondet's letter, he was still without 
 other heirs, but he had been presented at the court of Louis 
 XVIII., and his Majesty had conferred the ribbon of Saint- 
 Louis upon the old Bonapartist, and allowed him to quarter
 
 120 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 his preposterous scutcheon with the arms of Troisville; the 
 marquisate and peerage were 'promised as rewards to future 
 devotion. 
 
 But, a few days after the audience, the Due de Berri was 
 murdered, the Pavilion Marsan carried all before it, Villele 
 came into power, and all the Troisvilles' threads of diplo- 
 macy were broken off; new points of attachment must be 
 found for them among the ministry. 
 
 "We must wait," said the Troisvilles, and Montcornet, over- 
 whelmed as he was with civilities in the Faubourg Saint- 
 Germain, waited. This was how the General came to stay 
 away from the Aigues in 1818. 
 
 In his happiness (ineffable bliss for the shopkeeper's son 
 from the Faubourg Saint- Antoine) with this young wife, 
 highly bred, lively, and sweet-natured, he must shower all 
 the delights of Paris upon the daughter of the Troisvilles, 
 who had opened all doors in the Faubourg Saint-Germain to 
 him; and these diverse joys so completely effaced the un- 
 pleasant scene with the steward from his mind, that Gau- 
 bertin and his doings and his very name were quite forgotten. 
 
 In 1820 the General brought the Countess into the country 
 to show her the Aigues, and passed Sibilet's accounts and 
 ratified his actions without looking too closely into them. 
 Happiness is no haggler. The Countess was delighted to find 
 the steward's wife such a charming woman, and made presents 
 to her and to the children, with whom she played for a little 
 while. She also commanded some alterations in the house, 
 and an architect was summoned from Paris ; for she proposed 
 (and the General was wild with joy at the thought) to spend 
 six months out of the twelve in such a splendid abode. All 
 the General's savings were spent on carrying out the archi- 
 tect's scheme and on the dainty furniture from Paris; and 
 the Aigues received that final touch which stamped it as 
 unique a monument to the tastes of four different centuries. 
 
 In 1821 the General was almost summoned by Sibilet before 
 the month of May. Weighty matters were at stake. The 
 nine years' lease of the woods to a timber merchant, con-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 121 
 
 eluded by Gaubertin in 1812 at thirty thousand francs, ex- 
 pired on May 15th of that year. So, at first, Sibilet would 
 not meddle in the matter of renewing the lease ; he was jeal- 
 ous of his reputation for honesty. "You know, M. le Comte," 
 he wrote, "that I have no finger in that pie." But the timber 
 merchant wanted the indemnity which he had shared with 
 Gaubertin, an exaction to which Mile. Laguerre had sub- 
 mitted in her dislike of lawsuits. The excuse for the in- 
 demnity was based on the depredations of the peasantry, who 
 behaved as if they had an established right to cut wood for 
 fuel in the forest. Messrs. Gravelot Brothers, the timber 
 merchants in Paris, declined to pay for the last quarter, and 
 offered to bring experts to prove that the woods had fallen off 
 one-fifth in their annual value; they argued from the bad 
 precedent established by Mile. Laguerre. 
 
 "I have already summoned these gentlemen to appear in 
 the Court at Ville-aux-Fayes," so Sibilet's letter ran, "for 
 on account of this lease, they have appointed their domicile 
 with my old employer, Maitre Corbinet. I am afraid we shall 
 lose the day." 
 
 "Here is a matter in which our income is involved, fair 
 lady," said the General, showing the letter to his wife ; "do you 
 mind going sooner than last year to the Aigues ?" 
 
 "Do you go, and I will come down as soon as the summer 
 begins," said the Countess, rather pleased with the prospect 
 of staying behind in Paris by herself. 
 
 So the General set out alone. He was fully determined to 
 take strong measures, for he knew the treacherous disease 
 which was eating into the best of his revenues ; but, as remains 
 to be seen, the General reckoned without his Gaubertin. 
 
 VIII 
 
 THE GREAT REVOLUTIONS OP A LITTLE VALLEY 
 
 "WELL, now, Lawyer Sibilet," began the General on the morn- 
 ing after his arrival, addressing his steward by a familiar
 
 122 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 nickname, which showed how much he appreciated the legal 
 knowledge of the quondam notary's clerk. "Well, Lawyer 
 Sibilet, and so, in Ministerial language, we are 'passing 
 through a crisis,' are we?" 
 
 "Yes, M. le Comte," replied Sibilet, following in the Gen- 
 eral's wake. 
 
 The happy proprietor of the Aigues was walking up and 
 down before his steward's house, in a space where Mme. Sibi- 
 let's flowers were growing on the edge of the wide stretch 
 of grass watered by the broad channel spoken of in Blondet's 
 letter. The Aigues itself lay in full view of the garden, even 
 as from the chateau you saw the steward's house, which had 
 been, built for the sake of its effed; in the landscape. 
 
 "But where is the difficulty?" pursued the General. "I 
 shall go through with the Gravelots' case; a wound in the 
 purse is not mortal. And I will have the contract well ad- 
 vertised; we shall soon find out the real value of the lease 
 by comparing the bids of the competitors." 
 
 "Things will not go off that way, M. le Comte," Sibilet an- 
 swered. "If you have no offers, what will you do then ?" 
 
 "Fell my timber, and sell it myself." 
 
 "You turn timber merchant !" cried Sibilet, and saw that 
 the General shrugged his shoulders. "I am quite willing. 
 Let us say no more about your affairs here. Let us look at 
 Paris. You would have to take a timber-yard on lease there, 
 take out a license, pay taxes, pay lighterage, city dues, wharf- 
 ingers and workmen, in short, you must have a responsible 
 agent " 
 
 "Quite out of the question !" the General hastily broke in 
 in alarm. "But why should I have no bidders?" 
 
 "M. le Comte, you have enemies in the place." 
 
 "And who are they?" 
 
 "M. Gaubertin, first and foremost " 
 
 "Oh ! Is that the scamp who was here before your time?" 
 
 "Not so loud, M. le Comte!" entreated Sibilet in terror; 
 "for pity's sake, do not speak so loud ! My servant girl may 
 overhear "
 
 THE PEASANTRY 123 
 
 "What !" returned the General, "cannot I talk on my own 
 property of a scoundrel who robbed me?" 
 
 "If you value a quiet life, M. le Comte, come further away ! 
 . . . Now; M. Gaubertin is mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes." 
 
 "Aha ! I wish Ville-aux-Fayes joy of him with all my heart. 
 Thunder of heaven ! He is a nice mayor for a place ! " 
 
 "Do me the honor of listening to me, M. le Comte, and, 
 believe me, we have a most serious matter in hand, the ques- 
 tion of your future here." 
 
 "I am listening. Let us sit down on this bench." 
 
 "When you dismissed Gaubertin, M. le Comte, he had 
 to do something, for he was not rich " 
 
 "Not rich ! and he was helping himself here to twenty thou- 
 sand francs a year !" 
 
 "M. le Comte, I am not setting out to justify his conduct," 
 .Sibilet resumed. "I should like to see the Aigues prosper, 
 if it were only to establish the fact of Gaubertin's dishonesty ; 
 but we must not abuse him, he is the most dangerous rascal 
 in all Burgundy, and he is in a position to do you a mischief." 
 
 "How?" asked the General, grown thoughtful. 
 
 "Gaubertin, such as you see him, is the general agent of 
 the wood merchants, and controls one-third of the Paris tim- 
 ber trade; he directs the whole business in wood the 
 growth, felling, storage, canal-transport, and salvage. He 
 is a constant employer of labor, and can dictate his own terms. 
 It has taken him three years to make this position, but he has 
 fortified himself in it by now ; he is the man of all the timber 
 merchants, and he treats them all alike. He has the whole 
 thing cut and dried for their benefit; their business is done 
 more smoothly and with less working expense than if each 
 man employed a separate agent, as they used to do. For one 
 thing, he has weeded out competition so thoroughly that 
 he has a monopoly of contracts for timber, and the' Crown 
 forests are his preserves. The right of cutting timber in the 
 Crown forests is put up periodically to auction, but practically 
 it is in the hands of Gaubertin's clique of timber merchants, 
 
 for by this time nobody is big enough to bid against them. 
 VOL. 10 34
 
 124 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Last year M. Mariotte of Auxerre, egged on by the Crown 
 ranger, tried to outbid Gaubertin. Gaubertin let him have 
 the trees at the ordinary price to begin with; then when it 
 came to felling the woods the local wood-cutters wanted such 
 wages that M. Mariotte had to send over to Auxerre for men, 
 and when they came the Ville-aux-Fayes men set upon them. 
 Then the ringleader of the union men and the leader of the 
 brawl got into the police court. The proceedings cost money, 
 and M. Mariotte had to pay all the costs, for the men had 
 not a brass farthing. And let me tell you this, by the by 
 (for you will have all the poor in the canton set against you) 
 you take nothing by taking the law of poor folk except ill- 
 will, if you happen to live among them. 
 
 "And that was not the end of it. When poor old Mariotto 
 (a decent soul) came to reckon it all over, he was out of 
 pocket by the contract. He had to pay money down for every- 
 thing, and to sell for credit ; Gaubertin delivered timber at 
 unheard-of prices to ruin his competitor; he actually gave it 
 away at five per cent below cost price, and poor old Mariotte's 
 credit was badly shaken. In fact, Gaubertin is still after him 
 at this day, and pesters him to that degree, that he is going to 
 leave not merely Auxerre, they say, but the department too, 
 and he is doing wisely. So, at one blow, the growers were 
 sacrificed for a long time to come to the timber merchants, 
 who settle the prices among themselves, like brokers and fur- 
 niture dealers in the Paris Sale Rooms. But Gaubertin saves 
 the growers so much bother, that it is worth their while to 
 employ him." 
 
 "And how so ?" asked the General. 
 
 "In the first place," said Sibilet, "anything that simplifies 
 business is sooner or later to the interest of all concerned. 
 Then the owners of forests are sure of their money. That is 
 the great thing, as you will find out, in all sales of produce. 
 And, lastly, M. Gaubertin is like a father to the laborers; 
 he pays them good wages, and finds them constant work ; and 
 as the wood-cutters' families live in the neighborhood, there 
 is no damage done to the woods which belong to Gaubertin's
 
 THE PEASANTRY 125 
 
 timber merchants, or on the estates of Messieurs de Soulanges 
 and de Konquerolles and others who confide .their interests 
 to him. The peasants pick up the dead wood, and that is all." 
 
 "That rogue Gaubertin has not wasted his time !" cried the 
 General. 
 
 "Oh ! he is a sharp man !" said Sibilet. "He is, as he puts 
 it, steward of the best half of the department now, instead 
 of steward of the Aigues. He charges every one a trifling 
 percentage, but that mere trifle on a couple of million francs 
 brings him forty or fifty thousand francs a year. 'The 
 hearths of Paris pay for all,' says he. That is your enemy, 
 M. le Comte. So my advice to you is to come to terms with 
 him. He is hand and glove, as you know, with Soudry, the 
 police sergeant at Soulanges, arid with M. Eigou, our mayor 
 at Blangy; the rural police are his tools, so that it will be 
 hard to put down the pilfering which is eating you up. Your 
 woods have been ruined, more particularly during the last 
 two years ; so Messieurs Gravelot have a chance in their favor, 
 for they say that, 'by the terms of the lease, you were to pay 
 the expenses of protecting your property; you are not pro- 
 tecting it, so you are doing us an injury, and you must make 
 good our damages.' Which is fair enough, but it is no reason 
 why they should gain the day." 
 
 "You must resign yourself to a lawsuit and to a loss of 
 money over it to prevent other lawsuits in future," said the 
 General. 
 
 "You will delight Gaubertin," retorted Sibilet. 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "If you go to law with the Gravelots, you will measure 
 yourself man to man with Gaubertin, who represents them; 
 he would like nothing so much as that lawsuit. As he says, 
 he flatters himself that he will trail you on to the Court of 
 Appeal." 
 
 "Ah ! the scoundrel ! the " 
 
 "Then if you fell and sell your own timber," pursued Sibi- 
 let, turning the dagger in the wound, "you will be in the 
 hands of the laborers, who will ask you 'fancy prices/ instead
 
 126 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 of 'trade wages ;' they will 'overweight' you, which means that 
 they will put you in such a position that, like poor old Mari- 
 otte, you will have to sell at a loss. If you try to find a lessee, 
 no one will make you an offer, for it stands to reason that 
 no one will run the risk for a private estate that Mariotte 
 ran for the Crown forest. Moreover, suppose that the old 
 man goes to complain about his losses to the Department. 
 There is an official there, much such a man as your humble 
 servant used to be in his assessor days, a worthy gentleman 
 in a threadbare coat, who sits and reads a newspaper at a 
 table. He is neither more nor less soft-hearted, whether they 
 pay him twelve hundred or twelve thousand francs. Talk 
 to the Inland Eevenue Department, in the person of this 
 gentleman, of allowances and reductions ! He will answer 
 you, 'Fiddle-de-dee!' while he cuts his pen. You are an 
 outlaw, M. le Comte." 
 
 "What is to be done ?" cried the General. His blood boiled ; 
 he strode up and down before the bench. 
 
 "M. le Comte," said Sibilet with brutal frankness, "what 
 I am about to say is not in my own interests you should 
 sell the Aigues and leave the neighborhood." 
 
 At these words the General started back as if a bullet had 
 struck him. He looked at Sibilet with a diplomatic expres- 
 sion. 
 
 "Is a General of the Imperial Guard to run away from such 
 rogues ; and after Mme. la Comtesse has taken a liking to the 
 Aigues? Before I would do that I would force Gaubertin 
 to fight me, give him a box on the ears in the market-place 
 of Ville-aux-Fayes, and kill him like a dog." 
 
 "Gaubertin is not such a fool as to come into collision with 
 you. And besides, so important a person as the mayor of 
 Ville-aux-Fayes cannot be insulted with impunity." 
 
 "I will make a beggar of him ; the Troisvilles will back me 
 up ; my income is involved." 
 
 "You will not succeed in that, M. le Comte ; Gaubertin has 
 very long arms. You would only put yourself in an awkward 
 predicament with no possible way out "
 
 THE PEASANTRY 127 
 
 *And how about this lawsuit?" said the General. "We 
 must think of the present." 
 
 "M. le Comte, I will insure that you shall gain it," said 
 Sibilet, with something knowing in his air. 
 
 "Well done, Sibilet !" said the General, gripping the stew- 
 ard's hand. "And how?" 
 
 "You would gain the day in the Court of Appeal in the 
 ordinary course of events. In my opinion, the Gravelots are 
 in the right, but that is not enough, the case is not decided 
 upon its merits ; you must be technically in the right as well. 
 The Gravelots have not observed the proper formalities, and 
 a case always turns upon a question of that kind. The 
 Gravelots ought to have given you notice to look after your 
 woods better. Then you cannot come down upon people for 
 allowances extending over a period of nine years at the ex- 
 piration of a lease; there is a guarding clause inserted in 
 the lease to prevent that. You will lose your case at Ville- 
 aux-Fayes ; perhaps you will lose it again in the higher court, 
 but you will gain the day in Paris. You will be put to ruin- 
 ous expense ; there will be valuations which will cost a great 
 deal. If you gain the case, you will spend twelve or fifteen 
 thousand francs at least over it; but you will gain the day 
 if you are bent upon so doing. The lawsuit will not mend 
 matters with the Gravelots ; it will cost them even more. You 
 will be a bugbear to them, you will get a name for being liti- 
 gious, you will be slandered, but you will gain the day 
 
 "What is to be done?" repeated the General. If Sibilet's 
 remarks had touched upon the most heart-burning questions, 
 they could not have produced more effect on Montcornet. He 
 bethought himself of that thrashing administered to Gau- 
 bertin, and heartily wished that he had laid the horsewhip 
 about his own shoulders. He turned a face on fire to Sibilet, 
 who could read all his torments plainly there. 
 
 "What is to be done, M. le Comte?" echoed the other. 
 "There is only one thing to be done. Compound with the 
 Gravelots, but you cannot do it in person. I must act as if 
 I were robbing you. Now, when all our comfort and ail our
 
 128 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 prospects lie in our integrity, it is rather hard for us poor 
 devils to submit to appear dishonest. We are always judged 
 by appearances. Gaubertin, in his time, saved Mile. La- 
 guerre's life, and he to all appearance robbed her; but she 
 rewarded him for his devotion by putting him down in her 
 will for a jewel worth ten thousand francs, which Mine. Gau- 
 bertin wears on her forehead at this day." 
 
 The General gave Sibilet a second glance, at least as diplo- 
 matic as the first, but the steward did not seem to feel the sus- 
 picion lurking beneath smiling good nature. 
 
 "My dishonesty will put M. Gaubertin in such high good 
 humor that I shall gain his goodwill," continued Sibilet. "He 
 will listen with all his ears, too, when I come to lay this be- 
 fore him 'I can get twenty thousand francs out of the Count 
 for the Gravelots, provided that they will go halves with me/ 
 If your opponents consent to that, I will bring you back the 
 ten thousand francs. You only lose ten thousand, you save 
 appearances, and there is an end of the lawsuit." 
 
 "You are a good fellow, Sibilet," said the General, grasping 
 the steward's hand. "If you can arrange for the future as 
 well as for the present, I consider that you are a jewel of a 
 land-steward 
 
 "As to the future, you will not starve if the wood is not 
 felled for the next two or three years. Begin by looking after 
 your woods. Between then and now a good deal of water will 
 have flowed down the Avonne, Ganbertin may die, or he may 
 have made enough to retire upon. In short, you will have 
 time to find a competitor; the loaf is big enough to divide; 
 you will find another Gaubertin to match him." 
 
 "Sibilet," said the old warrior, amazed at the variety of 
 solutions, "I will give you a thousand crowns if you bring the 
 matter to an end in this way; and then we will think things 
 over." 
 
 "Look after your woods before all things, M. le Comte. 
 Go and see for yourself what the peasants have done there 
 during the two years while you have been away. What could 
 I do? I am a steward, not a keeper. You want three for- 
 esters and a mounted patrol to look after the Aigues."
 
 THE PEASANTRY 129 
 
 "We will defend ourselves. If war it is to be, we will fight. 
 That does not frighten me," said Montcornet, rubbing his 
 hands. 
 
 "It is a money war/' said Sibilet, "and that will seem 
 harder to you than the other kind. You can kill men, but 
 there is no killing men's interests. You will fight it out on 
 a battlefield where all landowners' must fight called realiza- 
 tion. It is nothing to grow this and that ; you must sell your 
 produce; and if you mean to sell it, you must keep on good 
 terms with everybody." 
 
 "I shall have the country people on my side." 
 
 "How so ?" queried Sibilet. 
 
 "By treating them kindly." 
 
 "Treat the peasants kindly and the townspeople at Sou- 
 langes !" cried Sibilet, squinting hideously, for one eye seemed 
 to gleam more than the other with the irony in his words. 
 "You do not know, sir, what you are setting about. Our Lord 
 Jesus Christ would be crucified there a second time. If you 
 want a quiet life, M. le Comte, do as the late Mile. Laguerre 
 did and let them rob you, or else strike terror into them. 
 The people, women and children, are all governed in the same 
 way by terror. That was the grand secret of the Convention 
 and of the Emperor." 
 
 "Oh, come now ! have we fallen among thieves here ?" cried 
 Montcornet. 
 
 Adeline came out to them. 
 
 "Your breakfast is waiting, dear," she said to Sibilet. "I 
 beg your pardon, M. le Comte, but he has had nothing this 
 morning, and he has been as far as Eonquerolles with some 
 corn." 
 
 "Go, by all means, Sibilet." 
 
 Montcornet was up and out before day next morning. He 
 chose to return by the Avonne gate to have a chat with his 
 one forester, and to sound the man's disposition. 
 
 Some seven or eight acres of forest lay beside the Avonne; 
 a fringe of tall forest trees had been left along the bank on
 
 130 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 either side, that a river which flowed almost in a straight line 
 foi three leagues might preserve its stately character. 
 
 The Aigues had once belonged to a mistress of Henri IV., 
 who loved the chase as passionately as the Bearnais. It was 
 she who built, in 1793, the steep, single-span bridge over the 
 Avonne to cross over to the much larger forest purchased for 
 her on the other side of the* river. The Avonne gate had been 
 built at the same time as a rendezvous for the hunt, and every 
 one knows that architects in those times lavished all magnifi- 
 cence upon edifices reared for this greatest pleasure of kings 
 and princes. Six avenues met before it in a semicircular 
 space, and in the centre of the crescent rose an obelisk sur- 
 mounted by a sun once gilded, with the arms of Navarre on 
 the one side, and those of the Comtesse de Moret on the 
 other. 
 
 A corresponding crescent-shaped space by the Avonne com- 
 municated with the first by a broad, straight walk, whence 
 you saw the angular crown of the Venetian-looking bridge. 
 Between two handsome iron railings (resembling the mag- 
 nificent ironwork which used to surround the Jardin de la 
 Place Koyale in Paris, now, alas! destroyed) stood a hunting- 
 lodge built of brick, with stone string courses of the same 
 depressed-pyramid pattern as at the chateau, stone facings 
 likewise ornamented, and a high-pitched roof. 
 
 This bygone style, that gave the house the look of a royal 
 hunting-lodge, is only suitable in towns for prisons, but here 
 the background of forest trees set off its peculiarly grandiose 
 character. The kennels, pheasant-houses, and the old quar- 
 ters of falconers and prickers were screened by a blind wall. 
 The place had once been the pride of Burgundy; row it lay 
 almost in ruins. 
 
 In 1595 a royal train set out from that princely hunting- 
 lodge, preceded by the great hounds beloved of Eubens and 
 Paul Veronese; the horses that pawed the ground are now 
 only seen in Wouvermans' wonderful pictures mighty white 
 beasts with a bluish shade on the heavy plo^y hindquarters. 
 After these followed footmen in gorgeous array, and the fore-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 131 
 
 ground was enlivened by the huntsmen in yellow breeches 
 and high topboots who fill Van de Meulen's great canvases. 
 The stone obelisk was reared to commemorate that day when 
 the Bearnais went hunting with the beautiful Comtesse de 
 Moret, and bore the date beneath the arms of Navarre. 
 Navarre, not France ; for the jealous mistress, whose son was 
 declared to be a prince of the blood, could not endure that the 
 arms of France should meet her eyes to reproach her. 
 
 But in 1823, when the General saw the splendid monument, 
 the roof was green with moss on every side. The octagonal 
 glass panes were dropping out of the loosened leads, the win- 
 dows looked half-blind. The stones of the weather-worn 
 string-courses seemed to cry out, with countless gaping 
 mouths, against such desecration. Yellow wallflowers blos- 
 somed among the balusters; the ivy stems slipped pale down- 
 covered claws into every cranny. 
 
 Everything spoke of a mean neglect. Selfishness, regard- 
 less of those who come after it, leaves its stamp on all its 
 present possessions. Two -windows above were stopped up 
 with hay; one window on the ground floor gave a glimpse of 
 a room full of tools and firewood, and a cow's muzzle thrust 
 from another informed the beholder that, to save himself 
 the trouble of going to and fro between the pheasant-house 
 and the lodge, Courtecuisse had made a cowhouse of the great 
 hall, where the armorial bearings of every owner of the Aigues 
 were painted on the paneled ceiling. 
 
 The whole approach to the house was disfigured by a col- 
 lection of dirty black palings marking the limits of pig-sties 
 roofed with planks, and little square pens for poultry and 
 ducks. Every six months the accumulated filth was cleared 
 away. Sundry rags were drying on the brambles, which had 
 thrust themselves up here and there. 
 
 As the General came up the avenue from the bridge, he 
 saw Courtecuisse's wife scouring the earthen pipkin in which 
 she had just made coffee. The keeper himself was sitting on 
 a chair in the sun looking on, much as a savage might watch
 
 132 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 his squaw. He turned his head at the sound of footsteps, 
 saw the Count his master, and looked fooli-sli. 
 
 "Well, Courtecuisse, my boy, I don't wonder that some one 
 else cuts down my wood before the Messrs. Gravelot can get 
 it. Do you take your place for a sinecure ?" 
 
 "Upon my word, M. le Comte, I have been out in your 
 woods for so many nights that I have got a chill. I was feel- 
 ing so bad this morning that my wife has been warming a 
 poultice for me ; she is cleaning the pipkin now/' 
 
 "My good fellow," remarked the General, "I only know of 
 one complaint which needs poulticing with hot coffee, and 
 that is hunger. Listen, you rogue ! Yesterday I went 
 through the woods belonging to Messrs, de Ronquerolles and 
 de Soulanges, and then through my own. Theirs are properly 
 looked after, and mine is in a pitiable state/' 
 
 "Ah ! M. le Comte, they have been here this ever so long, 
 they have; people let them alone. Would you have me fight 
 with half-a-dozen communes? I value my life even more 
 than your woods. Any man who tried to look after your 
 woods properly would get a bullet .through his head by way of 
 wages in some corner of the forest/' 
 
 "Coward!" cried the General, choking down the wrath 
 kindled by Courtecuisse's insolence. "It has been a splendid 
 night, but it has cost me three hundred francs at this mo- 
 ment, and a thousand francs in claims for damages to come. 
 Things must be done differently, or you shall go out of this. 
 All past offences should be forgiven. Here are my condition- : 
 you shall have all the fines and three francs for each convic- 
 tion. If I do not find that this plan pays me better, you shall 
 go about your business ; while if you serve me well, and man- 
 age to put down the pilfering, you shall have a hundred 
 crowns a year. Think it over. Here are six ways," he went 
 on, pointing to the alleys, "like me, you must take one; I 
 am not afraid of bullets. Try to find the right one." 
 
 Courtecuisse, forty-six years of age, a short man with a 
 full-moon countenance, dearly loved to do nothing. He rerk- 
 oned upon spending the rest of his days in the hunting lodge
 
 THE PEASANTEY 133 
 
 his lodge. His two cows grazed in the forest, he had fuel 
 for his needs; he worked in his garden instead of running 
 about after delinquents. His neglect of his duties suited 
 Gaubertin, and Courtecuisse and Gaubertin understood each 
 other. So he never harassed the wood-stealers except to 
 gratify his own petty hatreds. He persecuted girls who would 
 not accede to his wishes, and people whom he disliked; but 
 it was a long while now since he had borne any one a grudge, 
 his easy ways had won popularity for him. 
 
 At the Grand-I-Vert a knife and fork was always set for 
 Courtecuisse, the faggot-stealers were no longer recalcitrant. 
 Both he and his wife received tribute in kind from the ma- 
 rauders. This wood was stacked for him, his vines were lay- 
 ered and pruned. He had vassals and tributaries in all the 
 delinquents, in fact. 
 
 Almost reassured as he had been as to his future by the 
 words that Gaubertin let fall about those two acres to be his 
 when the Aigues should be sold, he was rudely awakened from 
 his dream by the General's dry remarks. After four years he 
 stood revealed at last; the nature of the bourgeois had come 
 out ; he was determined to be cheated no longer. Courtecuisse 
 took up his cap, his game-bag and gun, put on his gaiters, 
 his belt stamped with the brand-new arms of Montcornet, and 
 went forth to Yille-aux-Fayes, with the careless gait which 
 hides the countryman's deepest thoughts. He looked along 
 the woods as he went and whistled to his dogs. 
 
 "You complain of the Upholsterer," said Gaubertin, when 
 Courtecuisse had told his tale ; "why, your fortune is made ! 
 What ! the ninny is giving you three francs for each prose- 
 cution and all the fines into the bargain, is he? If you can 
 come to an understanding with your friends, he can have 
 them, and as many as he likes. Prosecutions ! let them have 
 them by the hundred. When you have a thousand francs, 
 you will be able to buy the Bachelerie, Rigoii's farm; you 
 can be your own master and work on your own land, or rather, 
 you can live at ease and set others to work. Only, mind this, 
 you must arrange to prosecute nobody but those who are as
 
 134 , THE PEASANTRY 
 
 poor as Job. You cannot shear those that have no wool. Take 
 the Upholsterer's offer; let him pile up costs for himself if 
 lie has a liking for them. Tastes differ, and it takes all sorts 
 to make a world. There was old Mariotte, in spite of all I 
 could say, he liked losses better than profits." 
 
 Courtecuisse went home again, profoundly impressed by 
 Gaubertin's wisdom and consumed with a desire to have a bit 
 of land for himself and to be a master like the rest at last. 
 
 General Montcornet likewise returned, and on his way gave 
 Sibilet on account of his expedition. 
 
 "Quite right, quite right, M. le Comte," said the steward, 
 rubbing his hands, "but there must be no stopping short now 
 you are on the right track. The rural policeman who allowed 
 the spoliation to go on in our fields ought to be changed. It 
 would be easy for M. le Comte to obtain the appointment of 
 mayor of the commune, and to put some one else in Vau- 
 doyer's place some old soldier who would not be afraid to 
 carry out orders. A great landowner should be master on his 
 own property; and see what trouble we have with the present 
 mayor !" 
 
 The mayor of the commune of Blangy, one Eigou, had been 
 a Benedictine monk, but in the year 1 of the Kepublic he 
 had married the servant-maid of the late cure of Blangy. A 
 married monk was not likely to find much favor at the pre- 
 fecture after the Eestoration, but there was no one else to 
 fill his post, and in 1815 Eigou was still mayor of Blangy. 
 In 1817, however, the bishop had sent the Abbe Brossette to 
 act as officiating priest of the parish. Blangy had done with- 
 out a priest for twenty-five years, and, not unnaturally, a vio- 
 lent feud broke out between the apostate and the young 
 churchman whose character has been previously sketched. 
 
 People had looked down upon Eigou, but the war between 
 the mayor and the parson brought the former popularity. 
 Eigou had Been hated by the peasants for his usurious 
 schemes, but now he was suddenly identified with their inter- 
 ests, political and financial, which were threatened (as they 
 imagined) by the Eestoration and the clergy.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 135 
 
 Socquard of the Cafe de la Paix was the nominal subscriber 
 to the Constitutlonnel, the principal Liberal paper, but all the 
 local functionaries joined in the subscription, and the journal 
 circulated through a score of hands after it left the Cafe till, 
 at the end of the week, it came to Eigou, who passed it on to 
 Langlume, the miller, who gave the tattered fragments to 
 any one who could read. The leading articles, written for 
 Paris, and the anti-religious canards, were seriously read and 
 considered in the valley of the Aigues. Kigou became a hero 
 after the pattern of the "venerable" Abbe Gregoire; and as 
 in the case of certain Parisian bankers, the purple oloak of 
 popularity served to hide a multitude of sins. 
 
 At this particular moment, indeed, Eigou, the perjured 
 monk, was looked upon as a local Frangois Keller and a 
 champion of the people, though at no very remote period he 
 would not have dared to walk in the fields after dark lest he 
 should be trapped and die an accidental death. Persecution 
 for political opinion has such virtue that not merely does it 
 increase a man's present importance, but it restores innocence 
 to his past. Liberalism worked many miracles of this kind. 
 But the unlucky paper, which had the wit to find the level of 
 its readers in those days, and to be as dull, scandalous, gulli- 
 ble and besottedly disloyal as the ordinary public, of which 
 the ordinary rank and file of mankind is composed, did, it 
 may be, as much damage to private property as to the Church 
 which it attacked. 
 
 Eigou flattered himself that a son of the people, reared by 
 the Eevolution, a Bonapartist general, in disgrace to boot, 
 would be a sworn enemy of Bourbons and clericals. But the 
 General had his own ideas, and had managed to avoid a visit 
 from M. and Mme. Eigou when he first came to the Aigues. 
 
 The enormity of the General's blunder, afterwards made 
 worse by a piece of insolence on the part of the Countess (the 
 story will be related in its place) can only be recognized 
 after a better acquaintance with the terrible figure of Eigou 
 the vampire of the valley. 
 
 If Montcornet had set out to win the mayor's goodwill,
 
 136 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 and courted his friendship, Kigou's influence might have neu- 
 tralized Gaubertin's power. But far from making the over- 
 tures, Montcornet had brought three several actions against 
 the ex-monk in the court at Ville-aux-Fa)'es ; Rigou had al- 
 ready gained one case, but the other two were still in suspense. 
 Then Montcornet's mind had been so busy over schemes for 
 the gratification of his vanity, so full of his marriage, that he 
 had forgotten Rigou; but now when Sibilet advised him to 
 take Rigou's place himself, he called for post-horses and went 
 straight to the prefect. 
 
 The General and the prefect, Count Martial de la Roche- 
 Hugon, had been friends since the year 1804. The purchase 
 of the Aigues had been determined by a hint let fall in Paris 
 by the Councillor of State. La Roche-Hugon had been a pre- 
 fect under Napoleon, and remained a prefect under the Bour- 
 bons, paying court to the Bishop so as to keep his place. Xow 
 his lordship had asked for Rigou's removal not once but many 
 times, and Martial, who knew perfectly well how matters 
 stood in the commune, was only too delighted by the General's 
 request. In a month's time, Montcornet was mayor of Blangy. 
 
 While Montcornet was staying with his friend at the pre- 
 fecture, it happened naturally enough that one Groison, a 
 subaltern officer of the old Imperial Guard, came thither 
 about his pension, which had been stopped on some pretext. 
 The General had once already done the man a service, and, 
 recollecting this, the gallant cavalry officer poured out the 
 story of his woes. He had nothing whatever. Montcornet 
 undertook to obtain the pension, and offered Groison the post 
 of rural policeman at Blangy, and a way at the same time of 
 repaying the obligation by devotion to his patron's interests. 
 So the new mayor and the new rural policeman came into 
 office together, and, as may be imagined, the General gave 
 weighty counsel to his lieutenant. 
 
 Vaudoyer, whose bread was thus taken out of his mouth, 
 vas a peasant born on the Ronquerolles estate. He was the 
 ordinary rural policeman, fit for nothing but to dawdle about 
 and to make use of his position, so that he was made much of
 
 THE PEASANTRY 131 
 
 and cajoled by the peasants, who ask no better than to bribe 
 subaltern authority and outpost sentinels of property. Vau- 
 doyer knew Soudry ; for a police-sergeant in the gendarmerie 
 fulfils quasi-judicial functions, and the rural police naturally 
 act as detectives if required. Soudry sent his man to Gau- 
 bertin, who gave a warm welcome to an old acquaintance, and 
 the pair discussed Vaudoyer's wrongs over a friendly glass. 
 "My dear fellow," said the mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes, who 
 could suit himself to his company, ''the thing that has hap- 
 pened to you is in store for us ail. The nobles have come 
 back again, and the Emperor's nobles are making common 
 cause with them. They mean to grind the people down, to 
 establish the old customs and to take away our property; but 
 we are Burgundians, we must defend ourselves and send those 
 Arminacs back to Paris. You go back to Blangy; you can 
 be watchman there for M. Polissard. who has taken the lease 
 of the Eonquerolles woods. Never mind, ray lad, I will find 
 you plenty of work all the year round. But there is to be 
 no trespassing there, mind you; the woods belong to us, and 
 that would spoil it all. Send on all 'wood-cutters' to the 
 Aigues. And lastly, if there is any sale for faggots, te)] the 
 people to buy of us and not of the Aigues. You will be rural 
 policeman again; this won't last long. The General will 
 soon be sick of living among thieves. Did you know that 
 yonder Upholsterer called me a thief ? And I the son of one 
 of the most honest Republicans ! and the son-in-law of 
 Mouchon, the famous representative of the people, who died 
 without leaving a penny to pay for his funeral !" 
 
 The General raised his rural policeman's salafy to three 
 hundred francs a year. He had a mairie built in Blangy, and 
 installed Groison in the premises. Then he found a wife foi 
 that functionary in the orphan daughter of one of his own 
 little tenants who owned three acres of vineyard. Groison 
 felt a doglike affection for his master. His fidelity was ad- 
 mitted on all sides, and Groison was feared and respected, 
 but much as an unpopular captain is respected and feared
 
 138 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 by his crew. The peasantry shunned him as if he had been 
 a leper. They were silent when he came among them, or 
 they disguised their dislike under an appearance of banter. 
 Against such numbers he was powerless. 
 
 The delinquents amused themselves by inventing misde- 
 meanors of which no cognizance could be taken, and the old 
 warrior chafed at his impotence. For Groison his functions 
 united the attractions of guerilla warfare with the pleasures 
 of the chase. He hunted down offenders. But war had in- 
 stilled into him the sportsmanlike instinct of acting openly 
 and above-board, as it were, and he loathed the underhand 
 schemings and thievish dexterity which caused him continual 
 mortification. He very soon found out that the property of 
 other landlords was respected, that it was only at the 
 Aigues that this pilfering went on, and he felt sincere con- 
 tempt for a peasantry ungrateful enough to rob a general of 
 the Empire, a man so essentially kind-hearted and generous. 
 Hate was soon added to contempt. But in vain did he try to 
 be omnipresent ; he could not be everywhere at once ; and the 
 delinquencies went on all over the woods at the same time. 
 Groison made it plain to the General that he must organize 
 a complete system of defence; his utmost zeal, he said, was 
 insufficient to cope with the ill-will of the population of the 
 valley, and he revealed its extent. 
 
 "There is something behind this, General," he said ; "these 
 people are too bold, they are afraid of nothing; it is as if they 
 reckoned on Providence." 
 
 "We shall see," said the Count. 
 
 Unlucky words ! A great statesman does not conjugate the 
 verb "to see" in the future tense. 
 
 At that time Montcornet had something else on his mind, 
 a difficulty more pressing, as it seemed to him. He must find 
 an alter ego to take his place as mayor while he was absent 
 in Paris, and a mayor must of necessity be able to read and 
 write. Looking over the whole commune, he found but one 
 man to answer this description this was Langlume, the 
 miller. He could not well have made a worse choice.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 139 
 
 In the first place, the interests of the General-mayor and 
 ihe miller-deputy-mayor were diametrically opposed; and in 
 the second, Langlume was mixed up in several shady transac- 
 tions with Eigou, who lent him money in the way of busi- 
 ness. The miller used to buy the right of pasture for his 
 horses in the fields ; thanks to his machinations indeed he had 
 a monopoly, for Sibilet could not find another purchaser. All 
 the grazing land in the valley commanded good prices, but 
 the fields at the Aigues, the best land of all, was left to the 
 last and fetched the least. 
 
 So Langlume was appointed deputy-mayor for the time 
 being, but in France "for the time being" practically means 
 "once for all," though Frenchmen are credited with a love of 
 change. Langlume, counseled by Bigou, feigned devotion to 
 the General's interests, and became deputy-mayor about the 
 time selected by the omnipotent chronicler for the beginning 
 of the drama. 
 
 As soon as the new mayor had turned his back, Eigou, who 
 of course was on the Council, had it all his own way at the 
 Board, and the resolutions which he passed there were by 
 no means in the General's interest. He voted money for 
 schemes purely for the benefit of the peasants, though the 
 Aigues must pay most of the rates, and indeed paid two-thirds 
 of the taxes, or he refused grants of money which were really 
 needed for supplementing the Abbe's stipend, for rebuilding 
 the parsonage, or wages (sic) for a schoolmaster. 
 
 "If the peasants knew how to read and write, what would 
 become of us?" said Langlume, with ingenuous frankness. 
 The Abbe Brossette had tried to induce a brother of the Order 
 of the Doctrine chretienne to come to Blangy, and the miller 
 was endeavoring to justify to the General the anti-Liberal 
 course taken by the Council. 
 
 The General returned from Paris, and so delighted was he 
 with Groison's behavior that he began to look up old soldiers 
 of the Imperial Guard. He meant to organize his defence 
 of the Aigues and put it on a formidable footing. By dint 
 of looking about him, and making inquiries among his frienda 
 
 VOL. 10 jj
 
 140 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 and officers on half-pay, he unearthed Michaud, an old quar- 
 termaster in the cuirassiers of the Guard, "a tough morsel," 
 in soldier's language, a simile suggested by camp cookery, 
 when a bean here and there resists the softening influences 
 of the boiling pot. Michaud picked out three of his acquaint- 
 ances to be foresters, without fear or blame. 
 
 The first of these, Steingel by name, was a thorough Alsa- 
 tian, an illegitimate son of the General. Steingel who fell dur- 
 ing the time of Bonaparte's early successes in Italy. Steingel 
 the younger was tall and strong, a soldier of a type accus- 
 tomed, like the Eussians, to complete and passive obedience. 
 Nothing stopped him in his duty. If he had had his orders, 
 he would have laid hands coolly on Emperor or Pope. He 
 did not know what danger meant. He had served in the 
 ranks with undaunted courage for sixteen years, and had 
 never received a scratch. He slept out of doors or in his 
 bed with stoical indifference; and at any aggravation of dis- 
 comfort merely remarked, "That is how things are to-day, it 
 seems !" 
 
 Vatel, the second, was the child of his regiment ; a corporal 
 of light infantry, gay as a lark, a trifle light with the fair sex, 
 utterly devoid of religious principle, and brave to the verge 
 of rashness, the man who would laugh as he shot down a com- 
 rade. He had no future before him, no idea of a calling, he 
 saw a very amusing little war in the functions proposed to 
 him; and as the Emperor and the Grand Army were his sole 
 articles of faith, he swore to serve the brave Montcornet if 
 the whole world were against him. His was a nature essen- 
 tially combative; life without an enemy lost all its savor for 
 him; he would have made an excellent attorney; he was a 
 born detective. Indeed, as has been seen, but for the presence 
 of the justice's clerk, he would have haled Granny Tonsard, 
 faggot and all, out of the Grand-I-Vert, and the law in his 
 person would have violated the sanctuary of the hearth. 
 
 The third, one Gaillard, a veteran promoted to be sub- 
 lieutenant, and covered with scars, belonged to the laboring 
 class of soldiers. Everything seemed to him to be alike in-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 141 
 
 different after the Emperor's fate ; but his indifference would 
 carry him as far as Vatel's enthusiasm. He had a natural 
 daughter to suppport, the place offered him a means of sub- 
 sistence, and he took it as he would have enlisted in a regi- 
 ment. 
 
 When the General went to the Aigues to dismiss Courte- 
 cuisse before his old soldiers eame, he was amazed beyond 
 expression at the man's impudent audacity. There are ways 
 of obeying an order which supply a most cuttingly sarcastic 
 commentary upon it, on the part of the slave who carries it 
 out to the letter. Every relation between man and man can 
 be reduced to an absurdity, and Courtecuisse had overstepped 
 the limits of absurdity. 
 
 One hundred and twenty-six summonses had been taken 
 out at the tribunal of the peace at Soulanges, which took 
 cognizance of misdemeanors ; and almost every one of the de- 
 linquents had an understanding with Courtecuisse. In sixty- 
 nine cases judgment had been given, and duly registered and 
 notices served upon the defendants. Whereupon Brunet, de- 
 lighted at such a fine windfall, did all that was necessary to 
 arrive at the dreary point beyond which the arm of the law 
 cannot reach, whence execution warrants return bearing the 
 superscription "Xo effects," a formula by which the sheriff's- 
 officer acquaints you with the fact that the person herein de- 
 scribed, being in the direst poverty, is already stripped bare 
 of all possession, and where there is nothing to be had, the 
 creditor, like the crown, loses his rights of suing. In the 
 present instance the poverty-stricken individuals had been 
 selected with discernment. They lived scattered over five 
 communes round about ; and when the sheriff's-oflficer and his 
 two assistants, Vermichel and Fourchon, had duly gone to 
 find each one, Brunet returned the warrants to Sibilet to- 
 gether with a statement of costs amounting to five thousand 
 francs, and an intimation that he awaited the Comte de Mont- 
 cornet's further instructions. 
 
 Provided with this file of documents, Sibilet waited on his 
 employer, calmly pointed out that these were the results of a
 
 142 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 too summary order given to Courtecuisse, and was looking on, 
 an unconcerned spectator of one of the most tremendous ox- 
 plosions of wrath ever seen in a French cavalry officer, when 
 Courtecuisse came in at that particular moment to pay his re- 
 spects and to ask for some eleven hundred francs, the prom- 
 ised bonus on these unlucky convictions. Then temper fairly 
 got the upper hand of the General. He forgot his rank in the 
 army, he forgot his count's coronet and became a plain 
 trooper again, and poured out a torrent of insulting invective 
 of which he would feel heartily ashamed a little later. 
 
 "Oh ! eleven hundred francs ?" cried he. "Eleven hundred 
 thousand drubbings ! Eleven hundred thousand kicks ! 
 . . . Do you suppose that I am not up to your games? 
 . . . Show me a clean pair of heels or I will break every 
 bone in your skin !" 
 
 At the sight of the General grown purple in the face, at 
 the sound of the first word he uttered, Courtecuisse fled away 
 like a swallow. 
 
 "M. le Comte," said Sibilet, in the mildest accents, "you 
 are wrong." 
 
 "Wrong! . . . I?" 
 
 "Good gracious, M. le Comte, mind what you are about; 
 that rogue will prosecute you " 
 
 "I do not care a rap. . . . Look here ! that scoundrel 
 goes this very moment. See that he takes nothing of mine 
 away with him, and pay him his wages." 
 
 Four hours later, every tongue in the neighborhood was 
 wagging, as might be expected, over the news. It was said 
 that the General had refused to pay Courtecuisse's wages, 
 poor fellow; had kept two thousand francs belonging to him, 
 and knocked him down. 
 
 Queer stories began to circulate. According to the latest 
 reports, the master up at the Aigues had gone out of his mind. 
 Next day Brunet, who had drawn up the execution warrants 
 for the General, served him with a summons to appear before 
 the tribunal. The lion had many fly-pricks in store for him, 
 and this was but the beginning of his troubles.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 143 
 
 There are various forms to be gone through before a for- 
 ester can be installed; for one thing, he must take the oath 
 in a Court of First Instance. Several days elapsed, therefore, 
 before the three new foresters were properly qualified of- 
 ficials. The General had written to Michaud. He and his 
 newly married wife must come at once, though the lodge was 
 not yet ready for them ; but the future head-forester was too 
 busy to leave Paris, his wife's relations had come for the wed- 
 ding, and it was impossible for him to get away for another 
 fortnight. All through that fortnight, and while the formali- 
 ties were being completed, with no good grace, at Ville-aux- 
 Fayes, the wood-stealing was in full swing, there was no one 
 in charge of the forest, and the marauders made the utmost 
 of their opportunities. 
 
 The sudden portent of three new foresters made a great 
 sensation in the valley from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes. 
 There was that in the appearance of the three stalwart figures, 
 clad in a grand green uniform (the Emperor's color) which 
 plainly said that these were stout fellows, active and sturdy- 
 legged, the sort of men who might be expected to spend their 
 nights in the forest. 
 
 There was but one in the whole canton to give the veterans 
 a welcome, and that one was Groison the rural policeman. 
 In his delight at such reinforcements he let drop a few 
 threatening hints, how that before long the thieves should find 
 themselves in a tight place, and unable to do any mischief. 
 So the formal declaration of war was not omitted in this 
 covert but fierce struggle. 
 
 Then Sibilet called the Count's attention to another fact, 
 to wit, that the gendarmerie at Soulanges in general and 
 Pol ice- Sergeant Soudry in particular were in reality his un- 
 compromising foes, and pointed out how useful a brigade 
 might be, if imbued with the proper spirit. 
 
 "With the right kind of corporal and gendarmes devoted 
 to your interests, you could do as you liked with the neighbor- 
 hood," said he. 
 
 The Count hurried to the prefecture, and at his instance
 
 144 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 the divisionary commandant put Soudry on the retired list, 
 and replaced him by one Viollet, a gendarme from the market 
 town. The man bore an excellent character, and both com- 
 mandant and prefect commended him highly. The whole 
 Soulanges brigade was broken up and distributed over the 
 department by the colonel of gendarmerie (one of Mont- 
 cornet's old chums), and a new brigade was reconstructed of 
 picked men, who received secret instructions to see that Mont- 
 cornet's property was not attacked in future, together with, a 
 particular caution not to allow the inhabitants of Soulanges 
 to gain them over. 
 
 This last resolution was accomplished so quickly that it 
 was impossible to thwart it; it spread dismay through Ville- 
 aux-Fayes and Soulanges. Soudry regarded himself as ab- 
 solutely destitute, and bitter were his complaints, till Gau- 
 bertin contrived to carry his appointment as mayor, so that 
 the control of the gendarmerie might still be in his hands. 
 
 Great was the outcry against this tyranny. Montcornet 
 was generally hated. It was not merely that he had changed 
 the course of half-a-dozen human lives, he had wounded the 
 vanity of several fellow-creatures; and the peasantry, excited 
 by hints dropped by the townspeople at Soulanges and Ville- 
 aux-Fayes, or uttered by Eigou, Langlume, or Guerbet (the 
 postmaster at Conches), imagined that they were about to lose 
 their "rights," as they called them. 
 
 The General hushed up the dispute with his sometime for- 
 ester by paying all claims in full ; and as for Courtecuisse, he 
 gave two thousand francs for a little bit of land that lay by 
 a cover side, within the Montcornet estate. Old Eigou, who 
 could never be persuaded to part with the Baclielerie (as it 
 was called), took a malicious pleasure in selling it now to 
 Courtecuisse at a profit of fifty per cent. The ex-forester, 
 moreover, became one of Eigou's many creatures, for he only 
 paid down half the purchase-money, and the unpaid half 
 gave the old money-lender a hold upon him. 
 
 Then began a life of guerilla warfare for Michaud, his 
 three foresters, and Groison. Unweariedly they tramped
 
 THE PEASANTRY 145 
 
 through the woods, lay out in them of nights, and set them- 
 selves to acquire that intimate knowledge which is the forest- 
 keeper's science, and economizes his time. They watched 
 the outlets, grew familiar with the localities of the timber, 
 trained their ears to detect the meaning of every crash of 
 boughs, of every different forest sound. Then they studied 
 all the faces of the neighborhood, the different families of the 
 various villages were all passed in review, the habits and 
 characters of the different individuals were noted, together 
 with the ways in which they worked for a living. And all 
 this was a harder task than you may imagine. The peasants 
 who lived on the Aigues, seeing how carefully these new 
 measures had been concerted, opposed a dumb resistance, a 
 feint of acquiescence which baffled this intelligent police 
 supervision. 
 
 Michaud and Sibilet took a dislike to each other from the 
 very first. The steward's discontented looks, his combined 
 sleekness and gruff manner were hateful to the straightfor- 
 ward, outspoken soldier, the flower of the Young Guard. At 
 first sight of his colleague he called him "a queer fish" in 
 his own mind. It was not lost upon him that Sibilet always 
 raised objections whenever any measure was proposed which 
 went to the root of the mischief, and invariably advocated 
 courses where success was doubtful. Instead of calming the 
 General, Sibilet continually irritated him, as this brief sketch 
 must have shown already ; he was always urging him to take 
 strong measures, always trying to frighten him by multiply- 
 ing trouble, by making the most of trifles, by confronting 
 him with old difficulties which sprang up again unconquered. 
 Michaud did not guess the Sibilet deliberately accepted the 
 part of spy on Montcornet and evil genius; that ever since 
 his installation he had made up his mind to serve two masters, 
 and finally to choose the one that best suited his interests 
 Montcornet or Gaubertin; but the soldier saw very plainly 
 the steward's grasping and base nature, and could in no wise 
 square this with honesty of purpose. Nor was the deep- 
 seated aversion which separated the pair altogether displeas-
 
 148 THC PEASANTRY 
 
 ing to Montcornet. Midland's personal dislike led him to 
 watch the steward as he would never have condescended to do 
 had the General asked him. And as for Sibilet, he fawned on 
 the head-forester and cringed to him, yet could not induce 
 the true-hearted soldier to lay aside the excessive civility 
 which he set as a barrier between them. 
 
 After these explanatory details the position of the General's 
 various enemies, and the drift of his conversation with his 
 two ministers ought to be perfectly intelligible. 
 
 IX 
 
 OF MEDIOCRACT 
 
 "WELL, Michaud, is it anything new?" asked Montcornet, 
 after the Countess had left the dining-room. 
 
 "If you will take my advice, General, we will not talk of 
 business here; walls have ears, and I should like to feel sure 
 that what we are going to say will fall into none but our 
 own." 
 
 "Very well," said the General; "then let us go out and 
 walk along the field-path towards Sibilet's house; we may be 
 sure that no one will overhear us there." 
 
 A few minutes later, while the Countess went to the 
 Avonne gate with the Abbe Brossette and Blondet, the Gen- 
 eral strolled through the fields with Sibilet and Michaud, and 
 heard the history of the affair in the Grand-I-Vert. 
 
 "Vatel was in the wrong," was Sibilet's comment. 
 
 "They made him see that pretty clearly by blinding him," 
 returned Michaud. "But that is nothing. You know our 
 plan of taking the cattle of the convicted delinquents, Gen- 
 eral? Well, we shall never succeed. Brunet and his colleague 
 Plissoud likewise will never co-operate loyally with us. They 
 will always contrive to warn the people beforehand. Ver- 
 michel, Brunei's assistant bailiff, went to find old Fourchon 
 at the Grand-I-Vert. Marie Tonsard is Bonnebault's sweet-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 14T 
 
 heart, so as soon as she, heard about it she went to give the 
 alarm at Conches. As a matter of fact the depredations are 
 beginning again." 
 
 "Some very decided step is more and more called for every 
 day," said Sibilet. 
 
 "What did I tell you?" cried the General. "Those judg- 
 ments which condemned the offender to imprisonment in 
 lieu of a fine must be enforced. If they do not pay me dam- 
 ages and costs they shall go to prison instead." 
 
 "They think that the law cannot touch them, and say 
 among themselves that no one will dare to arrest them," Sibi- 
 let answered. "They fancy that they can frighten you ! Some 
 one backs them at Ville-aux-Fayes, for the public prosecutor 
 seems to have forgotten the matter of the condemnations." 
 
 "I believe," said Michaud, seeing that the General looked 
 thoughtful, "that by going to a good deal of expense you may 
 still save your property." 
 
 "Better spend money than proceed to extreme measures," 
 said Sibilet. 
 
 "Then what is your plan?" Montcornet asked, turning to 
 his head-forester. 
 
 "It is quite simple," said Michaud ; "it is a question of en- 
 closing your park. We should be left in peace then, for any 
 trifling damage done to the woods would be a criminal of- 
 fence, and as such would be sent to the court of assize for 
 trial." 
 
 Sibilet laughed. "At nine francs per rod the building ma- 
 terials alone would cost one-third of the actual value of the 
 property," he said. 
 
 "There, there !" Montcornet broke in. "I shall go at once, 
 and see the attorney-general." 
 
 "The attorney-general may be of the same opinion as the 
 public prosecutor," Sibilet remarked suavely; "such negli- 
 gence looks as if there was an understanding between the 
 two." 
 
 "Very good, that remains to be found out!" cried Mont- 
 cornet. "If everybody has to be sent packing, judges, public
 
 148 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 prosecutor, and the rest of them, attorney-general and all; 
 I shall go if need be to the Keeper of the Seals ahout it, or 
 to the King himself !" 
 
 A piece of energetic pantomime on Midland's part made 
 the General turn round upon Sibilet with a "Good-day, my 
 dear sir." The steward took the hint. 
 
 "Is it M. le Comte's intention as mayor," he said as he took 
 leave, "to take the necessary steps towards putting a stop to 
 the abuse of gleaning? The harvest is about to begin, and 
 if public notice is to be given that no one will be allowed to 
 glean unless they belong to the commune, and are duly pro- 
 vided with a certificate, we have no time to lose." 
 
 "You and Groison settle it between you !" answered the 
 General. "In dealing with such people as these, the law must 
 be carried out to the letter." 
 
 And so in a moment of vexation the system which Sibilet 
 had vainly urged for a fortnight gained the day, and found 
 favor in Montcornet's eyes during the heat of anger caused by 
 Vatel's mishap. 
 
 When Sibilet was a hundred paces away, the Count spoke 
 in a low voice to his head-forester. 
 
 "Well, Michaud, my good fellow, what is the matter ?" 
 
 "You have an enemy in your own household, General, 
 and you trust him with plans that you ought not to tell to 
 your own foraging cap." 
 
 "I share your suspicions, my good friend," Montcornet an- 
 swered, "but I will not make the same mistake twice. I am 
 waiting till you understand the management to put you in 
 Sibilet's place, and Vatel can take yours. And yet, what fault 
 have I to find with Sibilet? He is accurate and honest; so 
 far he has not appropriated a hundred francs, and he has 
 been here for five years. His nature is as odious as it can pos- 
 sibly be, and all is said. Besides, what object has he to gain ?" 
 
 "He most certainly has one, General/*'" Michaud said 
 gravely, "and if you give me leave I will find it out. A purse 
 with a thousand francs in it will loosen that old rogue 
 Fourchon's tongue, though after this morning's performance
 
 THE PEASANTRY 149 
 
 I suspect that old Fourchon trims his sails to suit every wind. 
 They mean to force you to sell the Aigues, so that old scoun- 
 drel of a ropemaker told me. You may be sure of this : there 
 is not a peasant, a small tradesman, farmer or publican, be- 
 tween Conches and Ville-aux-Fayes but has his money ready 
 against the day of spoil. Fourchon let me know that his son- 
 in-law, Tonsard, has fixed his choice already. The notion 
 that you will sell the Aigues prevails in the valley; it is like 
 a pestilence in the air. Very probably the steward's lodge and 
 a few acres of land round about it will be the price of Sibilet's 
 services as spy. Not a thing do we say among ourselves here, 
 but it is known in Ville-aux-Fayes. Sibilet is related to your 
 enemy Gaubertin. The remark that you let fall just now 
 about the attorney-general will, as likely as not, reach him 
 before you can be at the prefecture. You do not know the 
 people hereabouts !" 
 
 "Know them? I know that they are the scum of the 
 earth. To think of giving way before such blackguards ! Oh ! 
 I would a hundred times sooner set fire to the Aigues my- 
 self," cried the General. 
 
 "Let us not set fire to it ; let us plan out a line of conduct 
 which will baffle their Lilliputian stratagems. To hear them 
 talk, they have made up their minds to go all lengths against 
 you; and, by the by, General, speaking of fire, you ought to 
 insure all your houses and farm buildings." 
 
 "Oh ! Michaud, do you know what they mean by 'the Up- 
 holsterer?" Yesterday as I came along by the Thune the 
 little chaps called out 'There is the Upholsterer!' and ran 
 away." 
 
 "Sibilet would be the one to tell you that," said Michaud 
 down-heartedly ; "he likes to see you in a passion. But since 
 you ask me well, it is a nickname those blackguards have 
 given you, General." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Why, on your your father's account, General." 
 
 "Ah ! the curs !" shouted the General, turning white with 
 rage. "Yes, Michaud., my father was a furniture dealer, H
 
 150 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 cabinet-maker. The Countess knows nothing about it. Oh ! 
 that ever ! Eh, though, after all, I have set queens and em- 
 presses dancing. I will tell her everything this evening," he 
 exclaimed after a pause. 
 
 "They say that you are a coward," Michaud went on. 
 
 "Ha !" 
 
 "They want to know how it was that you got off safely at 
 Essling when you left nearly all your regiment there " 
 
 This accusation drew a smile from the General. 
 
 "Michaud, I am going to the prefecture," he said, still 
 under some kind of strong excitement, "if it is only to take 
 out insurance policies. Tell the Countess that I have gone. 
 They want war, do they? They shall have it. I will amuse 
 myself by upsetting their schemes for them these Soulanges 
 tradesmen and their peasants. We are in the enemy's coun- 
 try; we must mind what we are about. Impress it upon the 
 foresters that they must keep well within the law. Poor 
 Vatel, look after him. The Countess has been frightened; 
 she must know nothing of all this ; if she did she would never 
 come here again !" 
 
 Yet neither the General nor Michaud himself knew the 
 real nature of their peril. Michaud had too lately come to 
 this Burgundian valley; he had no idea of the enemy's 
 strength, although he saw the influences at work; and as for 
 the General, he put too much faith in the power of legisla- 
 tion. 
 
 The laws, as fabricated by the modern legislator, have not 
 all the virtue with which they are credited. They are not 
 even carried out equally all over the country ; they are modi- 
 fied in application until the practice flatly contradicts the 
 spirit in which they were framed ; and this is a patent fact in 
 every epoch. What historian would be so benighted as to lay 
 down the statement that the decrees of the strongest govern- 
 ments have been equally enforced all over France at once? 
 or that in the time of the Convention, the requisitions of 
 men, stores, and money, pressed as heavily upon Provence, 
 or Lower Normandy, or the borders of Brittany, as upon
 
 THE PEASANTRY 151 
 
 the population of the great centres of civil life? Where is 
 the philosopher who will deny that two men in two neighbor- 
 ing departments may commit the same crime, and one will 
 lose his head, and the other, and perhaps the worse villain of 
 the two, keeps his upon his shoulders ? We must have equality 
 in life, forsooth, and we have inequality in the administration 
 of the law, and in the penalty of death. 
 
 As soon as the population of a city reaches a certain limit, 
 the administrative methods are no longer the same. There 
 are about a hundred cities in France in which the intelli- 
 gence of the citizens is capable of looking beyond the expe- 
 diency of the present moment, and discerning the wider prob- 
 lems which the law attempts to solve ; there the law is intelli- 
 gently enforced, but in the rest of France, where people un- 
 derstand nothing but their own immediate interests, any- 
 thing which may interfere with these is a dead letter. Over 
 one-half of France, roughly speaking, the vis inertia neutral- 
 izes the action of legislation of every description. Let it be 
 clearly understood, however, that this passive resistance does 
 not extend to certain essentials of political existence, such 
 as the payment of imperial taxes, the conscription, the pun- 
 ishment of heinous crime ; but every attempt in legislation to 
 deal with other than broadly recognized necessities, to touch 
 ways of life, private interests or certain forms of abuse, is 
 frustrated by a common consent of reluctance. Even now, 
 while this work is passing through the press, it is easy to 
 discern the signs of this resistance, the same with which 
 Louis XIV. came into collision in Brittany. Seeing the 
 deplorable state of things caused by the game laws, there are 
 those who will make an annual sacrifice of some twenty or 
 thirty human lives to preserve a few animals. 
 
 For a French population of twenty millions the law is noth- 
 ing but a sheet of white paper nailed to the church door or 
 pinned up in the mayor's office. Hence Mouche's words "the 
 papers," an expression for authority. Many a mayor of a 
 canton (putting simple mayors of communes out of the ques- 
 tion) makes paper bags for seeds or raisins out of sheets of
 
 152 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 the Bulletin des Lois. And as to the mayors of communes, 
 one would be afraid to say how many there are of them that 
 can neither read nor write, or to ask how the registers are 
 kept up in their districts. Every serious administration is 
 no doubt perfectly aware of the gravity of the situation; 
 doubtless, too, it will diminish; but there is something else 
 which Centralization so much declaimed against in France, 
 where we declaim against any great thing which has any use 
 or strength in it which Centralization will never reach, and 
 this power against which it is shattered is the same power 
 with which General Montcornet was about to come into col- 
 lision for want of a better name it may be called Mediocracy. 
 
 Great was the outcry against the tyranny of the nobles; 
 and to-day we shriek against the capitalist and abuses of 
 power which perhaps after all are only the inevitable chafings 
 of that social yoke, styled the Contract by Rousseau ; we hear 
 of constitutions here and charters there, of king and czar 
 and the English Parliament; but the leveling process which 
 began in 1789 and made a fresh start in 1830 has in reality 
 paved the way for the muddle-headed domination of the 
 bourgeoisie and delivered France over to them. The present- 
 ment of a fact seen unhappily but too often in these days, 
 to wit, the enslavement of a canton, a little town, or a sub- 
 prefecture by a single family, the history of the manner in 
 which a Gaubertin contrived to gain this local ascendency 
 when the Restoration was in full swing, will give a better idea 
 of the crying evil than any quantity of flat assertions. Many 
 an oppressed district will recognize the truth of the picture, 
 and many an obscure down-trodden victim will find in this 
 brief hie jacet a publicity given to his private griefs which 
 sometimes soothes them. 
 
 When the General concluded a purely imaginary truce for 
 renewed hostilities, his ex-steward had pretty much completed 
 the network of threads in which he held Ville-aux-Fayes and 
 the whole district roui:d it. It will be better to give, in as 
 few words as possible, an account of the various ramifica- 
 tions of the Gaubertin family, for by means of his kin he had
 
 THE PEASANTRY 153 
 
 involved the whole country in his toils, something as the boa 
 constrictor winds itself about a tree-trunk so cunningly that 
 the passing traveler mistakes the serpent for some Asiatic 
 vegetable product. 
 
 In the year 1793 there were three brothers of the name of 
 Mouchon in the Avonne valley. (It was about that time 
 that the name of the valley was changed ; hitherto it had been 
 the valley of the Aigues; now the hated name of the old 
 manor fell out of use and it became the Avonne valley.) 
 
 The oldest of the brothers, a steward of the manor of 
 Konquerolles, became a deputy of the department under the 
 Convention. He took a hint from his friend Gaubertin senior 
 (the public accuser who saved the Soulanges family), and in 
 like manner saved the lives and property of the Ronquerolles. 
 This brother had two daughters; one of them married Gen- 
 drin the barrister, the other became the wife of Frangois 
 Gaubertin. Finally, he died in 1804. 
 
 The second brother obtained the post-house at Conches 
 gratis, thanks to the elder's influence. His daughter, his 
 sole offspring and heiress, married a well-to-do farmer in the 
 neighborhood, Guerbet by name. He died in 1817. 
 
 But the youngest of the Mouchons took holy orders. He 
 was cure of Ville-aux-Fayes before the Revolution, cure again 
 after the restoration of the Catholic religion, and now the 
 year 1823 still found him cure of the little metropolis. He 
 had formerly declined the oath, and in consequence for a long 
 time had kept out of sight and lived in the "hermitage" at the 
 Aigues, protected by the Gaubertins, father and son ; and now, 
 at the age of sixty-seven, he enjoyed the affection and esteem 
 of his whole parish, for all his characteristics were common 
 to his flock. He was parsimonious to the verge of avarice, 
 was reported to be very rich, and these rumors of wealth 
 strengthened the respect which he met with on all sides. His 
 lordship the bishop thought very highly of the Abbe 
 Mouchon, usually spoken of as "the venerable cur of Ville- 
 aux-Fayes;" it was well-known there that the bishop had 
 pressed him more than once to accept a superb living at the
 
 154 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 prefecture, and his repeated refusals, no less than his reputa- 
 tion for riches, had endeared the cure Mouchon to fellow-in- 
 habitants. 
 
 At this time Gaubertin, mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes, found 
 a solid supporter in his brother-in-law, M. Gendrin, president 
 of the Court of First Instance, while his own son now the 
 busiest solicitor in the place, and a by-word in the arrondisse- 
 ment talked already of selling his practice after five years. 
 He meant to be a barrister, and to succeed to his uncle Gen- 
 drin when the latter retired. President Gendrin's only son 
 was registrar of mortgages. 
 
 Soudry junior, who had fulfilled the functions of public 
 prosecutor for two years, was one of Gaubertin's zealous ad- 
 herents. Clever Mme. Soudry had done her part. She had 
 strengthened her husband's son's present position by immense 
 expectations when she married him to Rigou's only daughter. 
 One day the public prosecutor would inherit a double fortune, 
 the ex-monk's money would come to him as well as Soudry's 
 savings, and the young fellow would be one of the wealthiest 
 and most important men in the department. 
 
 The sub-prefect of Ville-aux-Fayes was a M. des Lupeaulx, 
 a nephew of the secretary of a State department. He was 
 meant to marry Mile. Elise Gaubertin, the mayor's youngest 
 daughter. Like her eldest sister, she had a portion of two 
 hundred thousand francs, besides expectations. Young <l<s 
 Lupeaulx had unwittingly done a clever thing on first coming 
 to the place in 1819 when he fell straightway in love with 
 Elise; but for his eligibility as a suitor, he would long since 
 have been compelled to ask for an exchange, but as it was, he 
 belonged prospectively to the Gaubertin clan, whose chief- 
 tain's eyes were fixed less upon the nephew than upon the 
 uncle in Paris. For all the uncle's influence, in his nephew's 
 interest, was at Gaubertin's disposition. 
 
 And so the church, the magistracy, permanent and remov- 
 able, the municipality and the administration, the four feet 
 of power, walked at the mayor's will. 
 
 This power was strengthened in regions above and below ita 
 immediate sphere of action by the following means :
 
 THE PEASANTRY 156 
 
 The department in which Ville-aux-Fayes is situated is 
 sufficiently populous to nominate six deputies. Ever since 
 the creation of the Left-Centre in the Chamber, Ville-aux- 
 Fayes had been represented by Leclercq, who, it may be re- 
 membered, was Gaubertin's son-in-law and the agent in 
 charge of the city wine-cellars, and since had become a gov- 
 ernor of the Bank of France. The number of electors which 
 this well-to-do valley furnished to the grand electoral college 
 was sufficiently considerable to ensure the election of M. de 
 Ronquerolles (the patron acquired, as explained, by the 
 Mouchon family), even if an arrangement had to be made. 
 The electors of Ville-aux-Fayes gave their support to the pre- 
 fect on condition that the Marquis de Ronquerolles should 
 continue to be elected by the grand college. So Gaubertin, 
 the first to hit upon this electioneering expedient, was in good 
 odor at the prefecture, which he saved many disappointments. 
 The prefect managed to return three out-and-out Ministerial- 
 ists, as well as two deputies for the Left-Centre, and as one of 
 these two last was a governor of the Bank of France, and the 
 other the Marquis de Ronquerolles, the Comte de Serizy's 
 brother-in-law, there was little to alarm the Cabinet. So the 
 Ministry of the Interior looked upon the elections in this par- 
 ticular department as very well regulated. 
 
 The Comte de Soulanges, a peer of France, a Marshal- 
 designate, and a faithful adherent of the House of Bourbon, 
 knew that his estates and woods were well managed and prop- 
 erly guarded by Soudry and Lupin the notary. He might be 
 considered to be Gendrin's patron, for he had successively 
 procured for him the posts of judge and president, with the 
 co-operation of M. de Ronquerolles. 
 
 MM. Leclercq and de Ronquerolles took their seats in the 
 Left- Centre, and towards the Left rather than to the Centre 
 side, a position in politics which presents numerous advan- 
 tages f.o those who can change their political conscience like 
 a suit of clothes. 
 
 M. Leclercq's brother had obtained the post of tax-collector 
 at Ville-aux-Fayes, and Leclercq himself, the banker-deputy 
 
 VOL. 10 36
 
 156 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 of the arrondissement, had recently purchased a fine estate, 
 bringing in thirty thousand francs a year, together with a 
 park and a chateau, the whole lying just outside the town 
 a position which enabled him to influence the whole canton. 
 
 In these ways Gaubertin had power in the higher regions 
 of the State, in the two Chambers, and in the Cabinet; he 
 could count upon influence both potent and active, and as yet 
 he had not weakened it by asking for trifles, nor strained it 
 by too many serious demands. 
 
 Councillor Gendrin, appointed vice-president by the Cham- 
 ber, was the real power in the Court-Eoyal. The First Presi- 
 dent, one of the three Ministerialist deputies returned by the 
 department, and an indispensable orator of the Centre, was 
 away for half the year, and left his court to Vice-president 
 Gendrin. 
 
 The prefect himself was another deputy, and the prefect's 
 right hand was a member of his council, a cousin of Sarcus 
 the justice, called Money-Sarcus by way of distinction. But 
 for the family considerations which bound Gaubertin and 
 young des Lupeaulx, Mme. Sarcus' brother would have been 
 "put forward" as sub-prefect of the arrondissement of Ville- 
 aux-Fayes. Mme. Sarcus (wife of Money-Sarcus) was a 
 Vallat of Soulanges, and related to the Gaubertins. It was 
 said of her that she had shown a preference for the notary 
 Lupin when he was a young man ; and now, though she was a 
 woman of five-and-forty, with a grown-up son, an assistant- 
 surveyor, Lupin never went to the prefecture but he paid his 
 respects to Mme. Money-Sarcus, or dined with her. 
 
 The nephew of Guerbet, the postmaster, was, as we have 
 seen, the son of the Soulanges tax-collector, and filled the im- 
 portant post of examining magistrate at the tribunal of Ville- 
 aux-Fayes. The third magistrate was a Corbinet, son of the 
 notary of that name, and, of course, belonged body and soul 
 to the all-powerful mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes, and (to close 
 the list of legal functionaries) the deputy magistrate was 
 Vigor junior, son of the lieutenant of gendarmerie. 
 
 Now Sibilet's father, who had been clerk of the court ever
 
 THE PEASANTRY 157 
 
 since there had been a court at all, had married his sister to 
 M. Vigor, the aforesaid lieutenant of gendarmerie at Ville- 
 aux-Fayes. Sibilet himself, good man, was a father of six, 
 and a cousin of Gaubertin's father through his wife, a Gau- 
 bertin- Vallat. 
 
 Only eighteen months ago the united efforts of both depu- 
 ties, of M. de Soulanges and President Gendrin, had success- 
 fully created a post of commissary of police and filled it. 
 The elder Sibilet's second son had the appointment. Sibi- 
 let's eldest daughter had married M. Herve, a schoolmas- 
 ter; within a year of the marriage his establishment was 
 transformed, and Ville-aux-Fayes received the boon of a head- 
 master of a grammar school. 
 
 Another Sibilet, Maitre Corbinet's clerk, looked to the 
 Gaubertins, Leclercqs, and Soudrys to be his sureties when 
 the time should come for buying his employer's practice ; and 
 the youngest found employment in the Inland Revenue De- 
 partment for the time being, with a prospect of succeeding to 
 the position of Registrar when the present occupant should 
 reach the limit of service prescribed for obtaining a pension. 
 
 Sibilet's youngest daughter, a girl of sixteen, was engaged 
 to be married to Captain Corbinet, Maitre Corbinet's brother, 
 master of the post-office, and this completes the history of the 
 Sibilet family. 
 
 The postmaster at Ville-aux-Fayes was Vigor senior, 
 brother-in-law of Leclercq of the city cellars. He commanded 
 the National Guard. Mme. Sibilet's sister, an elderly spin- 
 ster and a Gaubertin-Vallat, held the office of stamp dis- 
 tributor. 
 
 Look where you liked in Ville-aux-Fayes, you found some 
 member of the invisible coalition, headed avowedly (for the 
 fact was openly recognized by great and small) by the mayor, 
 the general agent of the timber trade Monsieur Gaubertin ! 
 
 If you left the seat of the sub-prefecture and went further 
 down the Avonne valley, you found Gaubertin again ruling 
 Soulanges through the Soudrys, and Lupin the deputy-mayor, 
 the steward of the manor of Soulanges, in constant communi-
 
 158 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 cation with the Count ; through Sarcus, justice of the peace, 
 and his son's wife's father ; through Guerbet the tax-collector 
 and Gourdon the doctor, who had married a Gendrin-Vatte- 
 bled. Gaubertin governed Blangy through Rigou, and 
 Conches through the postmaster, whose word was law in his 
 own commune. And by the way in which the ambitious mayor 
 of Ville-aux-Fayes spread his influence far and wide in the 
 Avonne valley, it may be imagined how far he made himself 
 felt in the rest of the arrondissement. 
 
 The head of the firm of Leclercq was put forward as prin- 
 cipal deputy. It had been agreed upon from the very first 
 that he would relinquish his place to Gaubertin so soon as 
 he himself should obtain the post of receiver-general of the 
 department. Young Soudry, the public prosecutor, was to 
 become attorney-general to the Court-Royal; while the rich 
 examining-magistrate Guerbet was to be one of the coun- 
 cillors. This general promotion, far from being oppressive, 
 was to ensure the advancement of others, such for instance 
 as Vigor the deputy-magistrate, or Francois Yallat, Money- 
 Sarcus' wife's cousin, at present only prosecutor-substitute. 
 In fact, all the ambitious young men in the valley, and every 
 family which had anything to gain, were so many supporters 
 of the coalition. 
 
 Gaubertin's influence was so serious and so powerful in 
 the district that its secret springs of wealth, the savings 
 hoarded up by the Rigous, Soudrys, Gendrins, Guerbets, and 
 Lupins, nay, by Money-Sarcus himself, were all controlled by 
 him. Ville-aux-Fayes, moreover, believed in its mayor. Gau- 
 bertin's ability was not more cried up than his honesty and 
 his readiness to oblige. He was at the service of all his rela- 
 tions; there was not one of his constituents but could claim 
 his help ; but it was a game of give and take. His town coun- 
 cil looked up to him. Wherefore the whole department 
 blamed M. Mariotte of Auxerre for crossing good M. Gau- 
 bertin's path. 
 
 The Ville-aux-Fayes townspeople took their abilities for 
 granted, since nothing had ever occurred to put them to the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 159 
 
 test; they prided themselves simply and solely on having no 
 outsiders among them, and thought themselves excellent pa- 
 triots. Thus nothing escaped this tyranny, so carefully 
 thought out that it was scarcely recognized as tyranny, for 
 the spectacle of natives filling every high place struck the 
 ordinary mind as a triumph of native intellect. For instance, 
 when the Liberal Opposition declared war against the Bour- 
 bons of the elder branch, Gaubertin saw an opening for a 
 natural son of his, for whom he was at a loss to provide. His 
 wife did not know of the existence of this Bournier, as he was 
 called, who for a long time had been kept in Paris. Leclercq 
 had looked after him till he became a foreman in a printing 
 office, but now Gaubertin set him up as a printer in the 
 town of Ville-aux-Fayes. Acting on the prompting of his 
 protector, the young fellow brought out a newspaper three 
 times a week, and the Courrier de I'Avonne began by taking 
 away the official announcements from the paper of the pre- 
 fecture. This local sheet, while supporting the Ministry, in- 
 clined to the Centre-Left, and obtained a large circulation 
 by publishing a summary of the market reports of Burgundy ; 
 but in reality it was worked in the interests of the Rigou- 
 Gaubertin-Soudry triumvirate. Young Bournier, the head 
 of a fairly large establishment which already hegan to 
 pay very well, paid court, to one of Attorney Marechal's 
 daughters, and appeared to be well received. 
 
 There was one outsider in the great Avonnaise family in 
 the person of the district surveyor; but the greatest efforts 
 were being made to exchange the stranger for a native Sar- 
 cus, Money-Sarcus' son, and in all likelihood this broken 
 thread in the mesh would very shortly be repaired. 
 
 The formidable league which filled every public and pri- 
 vate position with its own members, draining the wealth of 
 the neighborhood, and clinging to power as the remora clings 
 to the ship's keel, was not visible at first sight. General Mont- 
 cornet had no suspicion of it, and the prefecture congratu- 
 lated itself upon the flourishing condition of Ville-aux-Fayes. 
 At the Home Office it was said: "There is a model sub-pre
 
 IflO THE PEASANTRY 
 
 fecture for you, everything there goes on wheels ! If all ai- 
 rondissements were like that one, how happy we should be !" 
 And family cliques came so effectually to the aid of local 
 feeling, that here as in many another little town, nay, pre- 
 fecture, any outsider appointed to an official position would 
 have been forced to leave the district within the year. 
 
 The victim of all-powerful bourgeois clannishness is so 
 thoroughly entangled and gagged that he does not dare to 
 complain; like the intruding snail in a beehive, he is sealed 
 up, be-waxed and be-glued. There are great inducements 
 to this course of invisible, intangible tyranny; there is the 
 strong desire to be among one's own people, to see after one's 
 own bits of property ; there is the mutual help which relatives 
 can afford, and the guarantees given to the administration 
 by the fact that its agent is working under the eyes of his 
 fellow-citizens and amenable to local public opinion. More- 
 over, nepotism is not confined to little country towns; it is 
 quite as common in higher branches of the civil service. But 
 what is the actual outcome? Local interests triumph over 
 wider and larger considerations; the intentions of the cen- 
 tral government in Paris are completely defeated, the real 
 facts of the case are twisted out of all knowledge, the prov- 
 ince laughs in the face of the central authority. Great na- 
 tional necessities once supplied, in fact, the remaining laws 
 generally speaking, instead of modifying the character of the 
 people are modified by them, and the masses, instead of adapt- 
 ing themselves to the law, adapt the law to themselves. 
 
 Any one who has traveled in the south or west of France, 
 or in Alsace (unless indeed he travels simply for the sake of 
 seeing landscapes and public monuments and sleeping in the 
 inns), must admit that these observations are just. As yet 
 the effects of bourgeois nepotism only appear as isolated symp- 
 toms, but the tendencies of recent legislation will aggravate 
 the disease, and this domination of dulness may cause fear- 
 ful evils, as will be abundantly evident in the course of this 
 drama in the Aigues valley. 
 
 Under old systems, overturned more rashly than is gep -
 
 THE PEASANTRY 161 
 
 erally thought, under the Monarchy and the Empire, this kind 
 of abuse was kept in check by an upper hierarchy; a coun- 
 terpoise was found in class distinctions which were senselessl}' 
 denominated "privilege." But as soon as a general scramble 
 up the soaped pole of authority begins, "privilege" ceases to 
 exist. Would it not be wise, moreover, to recognize at once 
 that since there must be a "privileged class," it had better 
 consist of those who are openly and avowedly privileged ? that 
 those who have taken their position by stratagem and in- 
 trenched themselves in it by cunning, private self-seeking, 
 and fraudulent imitations of public spirit, are only doing the 
 work of despotism over again on a fresh foundation and a 
 notch lower in the social scale ? Shall we not have overthrown 
 a race of noble tyrants who had the interests of their country 
 at heart, only to create a race of self-seeking tyrants in their 
 stead? Shall authority issue from cellars instead of spread- 
 ing its influence from its natural place ?' These things should 
 be borne in mind. The Parochialism just portrayed will gain 
 ground in the Chamber of Deputies. 
 
 Montcornet's friend, the Comte de la Roche-Hugon, had 
 been dismissed a short time before the General's last visit. 
 This dismissal drove the statesman into the Liberal Opposi- 
 tion; he became one of the leading lights of the Left, and 
 then promptly deserted his party for an embassy. To him 
 succeeded, luckily for Montcornet, a son-in-law of the Mar- 
 quis de Troisville, the Comte de Casteran, Mme. de Mont- 
 cornet's uncle, who received him as a relation, and graciously 
 begged him to renew his acquaintance with the prefecture. 
 The Comte de Casteran listened to Montcornet's complaints, 
 and asked the bishop, the colonel of gendarmerie, the at- 
 torney-general, Councillor Sarcus, and the commandant of 
 the division, to meet him at breakfast on the following day. 
 
 Baron Bourlac, the attorney-general, first brought into 
 prominence by the trials of La Chanterie and Rifoel, was a 
 man of a kind invaluable to a government, by reason of his 
 staunch support of any party in power. He owed his eleva- 
 tion to a fanatical worship of the Emperor, and his con-
 
 1B THE PEASANTRY 
 
 tinuance in his judicial rank partly to an inflexible nature, 
 partly to the professional conscience which he brought to 
 the performance of his duties. As a public prosecutor he had 
 once ruthlessly hunted out the remnants of Chouannerie. now 
 he prosecuted Bonapartists with equal zeal. But time and 
 storms had softened him down, and, as most frequently hap- 
 pens, the hero of terrific legends had grown charming in his 
 ways and manner. 
 
 The Comte de Montcornet set forth his position, and men- 
 tioned his head-forester's fears. Then he began to talk about 
 the necessity of making examples and of maintaining the 
 cause of property. 
 
 His audience of high officials heard him out with solemn 
 faces, giving him vague generalities by way of answer. "Oh, 
 /)f course, of course, force should be on the side of the law. 
 Your cause is the cause of every landowner. We will give 
 the matter our attention, but in our position we are obliged 
 to be very careful. A monarchy is bound to do more for the 
 people than the people would do for themselves if they were 
 sovereign rulers as in 1793. The people have heavy burdens; 
 our duty to them is as clear as our duty to you." 
 
 Then the inexorable attorney-general suavely set forth va- 
 rious thoughtful and benevolent views touching the lower or- 
 ders, which would have convinced future constructors of 
 Utopias that the higher ranks of the officialdom of that day 
 were not unacquainted with the knotty points of the problem 
 to be solved by modern society. 
 
 It may not be out of place to say here, that at this very 
 time, during the Epoch of the Restoration, sanguinary col- 
 lisions were very common all over the kingdom, and upon this 
 very point in question. Wood-stealing and other peasants' 
 encroachments were regarded as vested interests. The 
 Court and the Ministry strongly objected to all disturbances 
 of this kind and to the bloodshed consequent upon forcible 
 repression, successful and unsuccessful. It was felt that 
 severity was needed, but the local authorities were made to 
 feel that they had blundered if the peasants were put down 
 harshly, and if on the other hand they showed any weakness
 
 THE PEASANTRY 163 
 
 ihey were cashiered. So prefects were apt to equivocate when 
 these deplorable accidents happened. 
 
 At the very outset Money-Sarcus had made a sign (unseen 
 by Montcornet) which the prefect and public-prosecutor both 
 understood, a sign which changed the tone of the conversa- 
 tion that followed. The attorney-general knew pretty much 
 how things were in the Aigues valley through his assistant, 
 young Soudry. 
 
 "I can see that there will be a terrible struggle," the public- 
 prosecutor had told his chief (he had corne over from Ville- 
 aux-Fayes on purpose to see him). "We shall have gen- 
 darmes killed I know that from my spies ; and the trial will 
 be an ugly business. No jury will be got to convict with a 
 prospect of the hatred of twenty or thirty families before 
 them; they will not give us the heads of the murderers, nor 
 the amount of penal servitude which we shall require for the 
 accomplices. The utmost we should obtain, if you conducted 
 the prosecution in person, would be a few years' imprison- 
 ment for the worst offenders. It is better to shut our eyes, 
 for if we keep them open the end of it all will be a collision 
 which will cost lives, and perhaps six thousand francs to the 
 Government, to say nothing of the expense of keeping the men 
 in the hulks. That is paying dear for a victory which will 
 make the weakness of justice apparent to all eyes." 
 
 Montcornet was incapable of suspecting the influence of 
 "mediocracy" in the valley, so he never so much as mentioned 
 Gaubertin, who stirred up and rekindled the smouldering 
 flames. 
 
 When breakfast was over, the Baron took Montcornet's 
 arm and carried him off to the prefect's study. When they 
 issued from this conference Montcornet wrote to his wife 
 that he was setting out for Paris, and should not return for 
 a week. The wisdom of the measures advised by Baron 
 Bourlac will be seen later on, when they were carried into 
 execution. If a way yet remained to the Aigues of escaping 
 the "ill-will," it was only through the policy which Bourlac 
 privately recommended to Montcornet.
 
 164 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 These explanations will seem tedious to those who care for 
 nothing but the interest of the story, but it is worth while 
 to observe here that the historian of manners is bound by 
 rules even more stringent than those which control the his- 
 torian of fact. The historian of manners is bound to make 
 everything appear probable even truth itself, while, in the 
 domain of history proper, the impossible requires no apology ; 
 these facts actually happened, and the writer simply records 
 them. The ups and downs of family and social life are 
 created by a host of small causes, and every one of these has a 
 bearing on the event. 
 
 The man of science must clear away the masses of an 
 avalanche which swept away whole villages, to show you the 
 fallen fragments of stone on the mountain side where the 
 mass of snow first began to gather. If this were merely the 
 story of a man's suicide there are five hundred suicides in 
 Paris every year it is a hackneyed melodrama, and every 
 one is content with- the briefest account of the victim's mo- 
 tives; but that Property should commit suicide! who will 
 believe it, in these days when wealth appears to be dearer 
 than life itself? De re vestra agitatur, wrote the fabulist 
 this story touches the interests of all owners of property. 
 Let it be borne in mind that if a canton and a little country 
 town are in league, in the present instance, against an old 
 General who, despite his reckless courage, had escaped the 
 hazards of countless previous battles, the same kind of con- 
 spiracy is set on foot, in more than one department, against 
 men who are striving for the general good. Every man of 
 genius, every great statesman, every great agricultural re- 
 former, every innovator in short, is continually threatened by 
 this kind of coalition. 
 
 This last indication of what may be called the political 
 bearing of the story not only brings out every actor in his 
 true aspect, and gives significance to the most trifling details 
 of the drama : it turns a searching light upon a Scene where 
 all social interests form the stage mechanism.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 165 
 
 X 
 
 A HAPPY WOMAN'S PRESENTIMENTS 
 
 As THE General stepped into his carriage and drove away co 
 the prefecture, the Countess reached the Avonne gate, where 
 Michaud and Olympe had taken up their abode some eigh- 
 teen months ago. 
 
 Any one who remembered the hunting-lodge in its pre- 
 vious condition, described above, might have thought that the 
 place had been rebuilt. The bricks that had dropped out or 
 suffered from the weather had been replaced and the walls 
 had been pointed; the white balusters stood out against a 
 bluish background of clean slates, and the whole house looked 
 cheerful once more. The labyrinth of pig-sties had been 
 cleared away, new gravel had been laid down, and the paths 
 were rolled by the man who had charge of the alleys in the 
 park. The window-facings, entablatures, and cornices, in- 
 deed all the carved stonework, had been restored, and the 
 monument of the past shone in all its ancient glory. 
 
 The poultry-yard, stable, and cowsheds had been removed 
 to the precincts by the pheasant-house hidden away behind 
 the wall; all the unsightly details had disappeared, but the 
 sounds, the low cooing, and the flapping of wings mingled 
 with the ceaseless murmur of the forest trees a most delicate 
 accompaniment to the endless song of Nature. There was 
 something of the wildness of lonely forests about the spot, 
 something too of the trim grace of an English park. And 
 the hunting-lodge looked indescribably stately, fair, and pleas- 
 ant a dwelling, now that its surroundings were in keeping 
 with the exterior, just as a happy young housewife's care had 
 entirely transformed the lodge within since the days of 
 Courtecuisse's brutish slovenliness. 
 
 It was in the height of summer. The scent of flowers in 
 the garden beds blended with the wild scent of the woods and 
 of mown grass from the meadows in the park.
 
 166 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 The Countess and her two guests, coming along a wind- 
 ing footpath that led to the hunting-lodge, saw Olympe 
 Michaud sitting in the doorway at work upon baby clothes. 
 The woman's figure, and her work as she sat there sewing, 
 gave the touch of human interest, the final touch which the 
 landscape lacked; a kind of interest which appeals to us in 
 real life so strongly that there are painters who have tried, 
 and tried mistakenly, to introduce it into landscape pictures, 
 forgetting that if they really render the spirit of the land- 
 scape upon their canvas its grandeur reduces the human figure 
 into insignificance. The scene, as we actually see it, is al \vays 
 circumscribed; the spectator's power of vision can only in- 
 clude sufficient of the background to place the figure in its 
 proper setting. Poussin, the Kaphael of France, when he 
 painted his Arcadian Shepherds subordinated the landscape 
 to the figures ; his insight told him how pitiable and poor man 
 becomes in a canvas where Nature takes the chief place. 
 
 Here was August in all its glory among fields ready for the 
 harvest, a picture to arouse simple and strong emotion. It 
 was like a realization of the dream of many a man who has 
 come to long for rest after a storm-tossed existence and a life 
 of change made up of good and evil fortune. 
 
 Let us give the history of this household in a few words. 
 When Montcornet had first talked of the head-forester's place 
 at the Aigues, Justin Michaud had not responded very 
 warmly to the gallant cavalry officer's advances. He was 
 thinking at the time of going into the army again, but in 
 the thick of the conference, which brought him frequently to 
 the Hotel Montcornet, Michaud set eyes on Madame's own 
 woman, and his ideas underwent a change. 
 
 The girl came of honest farmers in Alenc,on, and was 
 something of an heiress, for she had expectations twenty or 
 thirty thousand francs would be hers sooner or later; but her 
 father and mother, finding themselves in difficulties (a not 
 uncommon case with tillers of the soil who have married 
 young, and whose parents are still living), and consequently 
 unable to give their daughter any education, had entrusted
 
 THE PEASANTRY 167 
 
 her to the young Countess, who placed her about her person. 
 Mile. Olympe Charel was not allowed to take her meals at the 
 servants' table. The Countess had her instructed in dress- 
 making and plain needlework, and was rewarded by the 
 whole-hearted fidelity of which a Parisian stands in need. 
 
 Olympe Charel was a pretty, rather plump Normande, with 
 a shade of gold in her fair hair, and bright eyes that lighted 
 up her face, but a delicate, haughtily curved nose was perhaps 
 one of her most striking characteristics, and a certain maid- 
 enliness, in spite of the Spanish curves of her figure. She 
 had all the air of distinction which a young girl, of extrac- 
 tion somewhat above the laboring class, can acquire from 
 contact with a mistress who admits her to a certain degree 
 of intimacy. She was well-mannered and becomingly dressed, 
 expressed herself well, and carried herself with ease. Mi- 
 chaud soon fell in love, and the more readily when he learned 
 that his fair one would have a prett}^ fortune some day. 
 
 It was the Countess who made difficulties. She was Tin- 
 willing to lose a maid so useful to her; but when Montcornet 
 unfolded his, plans for the Aigues, nothing was wanting but 
 the parents' consent for the marriage to take place, and that 
 consent was promptly given. 
 
 Michaud, like his master, regarded his wife as a superior 
 being, to be obeyed without reservation. He saw before him 
 all the happiness for which a soldier longs when he leaves the 
 army a quiet life, plenty of out-door occupation, and just 
 sufficient bodily weariness to make rest delightful. Midland's 
 courage was established beyond cavil, yet he had never re- 
 ceived any serious wound, and had had no experience of the 
 physical suffering which sours many a veteran's temper. 
 Like all really strong natures he was equable, and his wife 
 gave him unbounded love. Their life at the lodge had been 
 one long honeymoon, with no discordant note in their sur- 
 roundings to break in upon their happiness. Kare fortune ! 
 Not always do the circumstances of our outward life har- 
 monize with the life of the inner self. 
 
 The scene was so picturesque that the Countess stopped
 
 168 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Blondet and the Abbe Brossette. As they stood, they could 
 see the charming Mme. Michaud without being seen by her. 
 
 "I always come this way when I walk in the park," the 
 Countess said in a whisper; "I like to look at the hunting-- 
 lodge and its pair of turtle-doves; it is like some favorite 
 beautiful view for me." She leant on Emile Blondet's arm, 
 that he might feel the meaning underlying her words, that 
 where speech fell short touch might convey a subtle signifi- 
 cance which women will divine. 
 
 "I wish I were a gate-keeper at the Aigues !" exclaimed 
 Blondet, with a smile. . . . "Why, what is it ?" he added, 
 as a shade of sadness crossed the lady's face at those words. 
 
 "Nothing." 
 
 Whenever womankind have something weighing on their 
 minds, they will tell you hypocritically that it is nothing. 
 
 "But possibly the thought that preys upon us would seem 
 very trifling to you, though to us it is terrible. I, for my own 
 part, envy Olympe her lot " 
 
 "Wishes are heard in heaven!" said the Abbe Brossette, 
 with a smile that relieved the solemnity of his words. 
 
 Something in Olympe's attitude and expression told Mme. 
 de Montcornet of anxiety and fears, and she too grew anxious. 
 A woman can read another woman's thoughts from the way 
 she draws the needle in and out, and, indeed, the head-for- 
 ester's wife, in her pretty pink dress, her hair coiled daintily 
 about her head, seemed to be turning over sad thoughts in 
 her mind, thoughts but little in keeping with her dress, her 
 work, and the sunny day. Now and again she looked up and 
 fixed unseeing eyes on the gravel paths or the green thickets, 
 and the anxious expression on her fair forehead was the more 
 artlessly displayed because she thought herself unobserved. 
 
 ''And I was envying her ! What can darken her thoughts ?" 
 the Countess said, looking at the cure. 
 
 "Can you explain, madame," said the Abb6, speaking softly, 
 "how it is that our most perfect bliss is always troubled by 
 dim forebodings ?" 
 
 "Cure," said Blondet, smiling, "you permit yourseh* Del-
 
 She "eaut ou Emile Bloudet's arm
 
 THE PEASANTRY 169 
 
 phic answers. 'Nothing is stolen, everything is paid for,' 
 so Napoleon said." 
 
 "Such a saying in the Emperor's mouth becomes a gener- 
 alization wide as humanity," said the Abbe. 
 
 "Well, Olympe, what is the matter, child?" asked the 
 Countess, stepping in front of the others towards her ex- 
 waiting-maid. "You look dreamy and thoughtful. Is it 
 possible that there has been a tiff at home ?" 
 
 Mme. Michaud rose to her feet. Her face wore a different 
 expression already. 
 
 "I should dearly like to know what has brought the shadow 
 over that brow, my child," said Emile Blondet paternally, 
 "when we are almost as nicely housed here as the Comte 
 d'Artois at the Tuileries. This is like N a nightingale's nest 
 in a thicket. And have we not the bravest man of the Young 
 Guard for a husband, a fine fellow, who loves us to distrac- 
 tion? If I had known the advantages Montcornet offers you 
 here, I would have left off writing padding for newspapers, 
 and turned head-keeper myself!" 
 
 "Oh, this is not the place for any one with your genius, 
 sir !" said Olympe, smiling back at him, as if he and she were 
 old acquaintances. 
 
 "Why, my dear little woman, what is the matter?" asked 
 the Countess. 
 
 "Well, then, my lady, I am afraid " 
 
 "Afraid! of what?" the Countess asked quickly. The 
 words put her in mind at once of Mouche and Fourchon. 
 
 "Afraid of the wolves ?" suggested Emile, making a warn- 
 ing sign which Olympe failed to understand. 
 
 "No, sir, it is the peasants. In Perche, where I was born, 
 there certainly were a few bad characters. But I could not be- 
 lieve that there would be such bad people, and so many of them 
 in a place, as there are here. I do not pretend to meddle in 
 Michaud's business, but he trusts the peasants so little that 
 he goes armed in broad daylight if he is going through the 
 forest. He tells his men to be always on the lookout. Now 
 and again there are figures prowling about here; they mean
 
 170 . THE PEASANTRY 
 
 no good. The other day I was going along by the wall to the 
 spring at the head of the little stream with the sandy bed, 
 which flows through the wood and out into the park through 
 the grating five hundred paces away. They call it the Silver 
 Spring, because Bouret (so they say) strewed silver spangles 
 in it. Do you know it, my lady ? Very well, then, there were 
 two women there washing clothes, just where the stream 
 crosses the footpath to Conches. I heard them talking; 
 they did not know that I was near. You can see our house 
 from the spot. The two old creatures were looking at it and 
 one said to the other, 'What a lot of expense they are going to 
 for him that has taken old Courtecuisse's place !' Then the 
 other one said, 'Wouldn't you have to pay a man well for 
 plaguing poor folk, #s he does ?' 'He will not plague them 
 long,' answered the first one ; 'this sort of thing must be put 
 a stop to. After all, we have a right to cut wood. Madame 
 des Aigues, that's gone, allowed us to take faggots. We have 
 done it these thirty years ; so it is an established right.' 'We 
 shall see how things go this winter,' the second one went on. 
 'My man has sworn, I know, by all that's sacred, that we shall 
 get our firewood, and that all the gendarmerie on earth shall 
 not hinder us, and that he will do it himself, and so much the 
 worse for them.' 'Lord sakes ! we must not die of cold, and 
 we must certainly bake our bread,' said the first woman. 
 'They don't want for nothing, they don't ! That blackguard 
 Michaud's little wife will be well taken care of !' In fact, my 
 lady, they said shocking things about me, and you, and M. 
 le Comte. Then at last they said that first the farm buildings 
 would be fired, and then the chateau " 
 
 "Pooh !" said Emile, "old wives' gossip. They used to rob 
 the General ; now they will not rob him any longer ; and they 
 are furious : that is all. Just bear in mind that the Govern- 
 ment is always the strongest everywhere, even in Burgundy; 
 and they would soon have a regiment of horse down here if 
 there was any occasion for it." 
 
 The cure behind the Countess was making signals to 
 Olympe to cut short the tale of fears, due surely to the second-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 171 
 
 sight of strong love. When a soul finds its all in all in an- 
 other soul, it scans the whole horizon about that central figure 
 to discern the elements of the future. Love brings a woman 
 the presentiments which at a later day become the second- 
 sight of motherhood. Hence the melancholy and unaccount- 
 able moods of sadness which bewilder men. The great cares 
 and constant stir of life prevent this concentration in a man, 
 but for a woman all strong love becomes an active contempla- 
 tion more or less lucid, more or less profound, according to 
 individual character. 
 
 "Come, child, show M. Emile over your house," said the 
 Countess. These new thoughts had put La Pechina out of 
 her mind, and she had quite forgotten the purpose of her 
 visit. 
 
 The inside of the house had been restored and brought into 
 harmony with the imposing exterior. An architect and work- 
 men had come from Paris (a slight warmly resented by Ville- 
 aux-Fayes), and the original partition walls were restored, 
 so that now there were, as at first, four rooms on the ground 
 floor. An old-fashioned balustraded wooden staircase rose 
 at the further end of the lobby, behind it lay the kitchen, and 
 on either side of it the two oak-paneled parlors with coats-of- 
 arms painted on the ceilings. The furniture had been chosen 
 to match these old-fashioned decorations by the artist who 
 had restored the rooms at the Aigues. 
 
 In those days it was not the custom to set an exaggerated 
 value on the wreckage of bygone centuries. The lumber 
 rooms of furniture-shops at Ville-aux-Fayes were full of old 
 high-backed tapestry-covered chairs in carved walnut wood, 
 console tables, old timepieces, tables, sconces, and woven 
 hangings, solid furniture worth half as much again as the 
 flimsy stuff turned out by the Faubourg Saint- Antoine. Two 
 or three cartloads of this old lumber, carefully chosen by the 
 aforesaid architect, and some disused furniture from the cha- 
 teau, had transformed the parlor at the Avonne gate into 
 something like an artist's creation. The dining-room had 
 been painted the color of the natural wood, a paper of the kind 
 known as Highland plaid covered the walls. Mme. Michaud 
 VOL. 10 37
 
 172 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 had hung white green-fringed dimity curtains in the win- 
 dows, the mahogany chairs were covered with green stuff, and 
 two huge mahogany sideboards and a mahogany dining-table 
 completed the furniture. Prints of soldiers adorned the 
 walls. The keeper's guns were stacked on either side of the 
 porcelain stove. Eumor exaggerated these inexpensive glories 
 until they became the last word of oriental luxury. Strange 
 it was ! These things aroused Gaubertin's covetousness, and 
 when, in his own mind, he pulled the Aigues to pieces, he 
 reserved that palatial lodge for himself. 
 
 The three principal bedrooms occupied the first floor. Here 
 you beheld those muslin curtains associated in a Parisian's 
 mind with the peculiar notions and mental attitude of those 
 who conform to bourgeois standards. Here, if Mme. Michaud 
 had been left to herself, she would have had satin wall-papers. 
 Her own room contained a four-post bedstead, with a curving 
 head and coronal from which the embroidered muslin curtains 
 hung. The rest of the furniture was of the ordinary ma- 
 hogany, TJtrecht-vel vet-covered kind to be seen everywhere; 
 but the chimney-piece displayed an alabaster clock flanked 
 by two gauze-shrouded candlesticks and vases of artificial 
 flowers beneath glass shades the quartermaster's marriage- 
 gifts to his bride. The rooms in the roof where La Pechina, 
 the cook, and the man belonging to the establishment were 
 lodged, had also shared in the benefits of the restoration. 
 
 "Olympe, child, there is something else," said the Countess 
 (she had gone into Mme. Michaud's room, leaving Umile and 
 the cure, who went downstairs together, when they heard the 
 bedroom door close). 
 
 The Abbe Brossette had managed to get a word with Mme. 
 Michaud. So now, to avoid mentioning the fears which were 
 far more serious than her words had led them to suppose, she 
 made a mysterious communication which reminded Mme. de 
 Montcornet of the purpose of her visit. 
 
 "I love Michaud, my lady, as you know. Very well then, 
 would you be pleased to have a rival always with you in the 
 house?" 
 
 "A rival!"
 
 THE PEASANTRY 173 
 
 "Yes, my lady. That little gypsy you gave me to look 
 after has fallen in love with Michaud. She does not know it 
 herself, poor child ! . . . For a long while her behavior 
 was a mystery to me, but the mystery was cleared up a few 
 days ago." 
 
 "A girl of thirteen !" 
 
 "Yes, my lady. And you will admit that a woman three 
 months advanced in pregnancy, who means to nurse her child 
 herself, may have fears. I could not tell you that before those 
 gentlemen, so I said things that meant nothing," the generous 
 woman added adroitly. 
 
 Olympe Michaud's anxiety on Genevieve Niseron's account 
 was exceedingly small, but she went in mortal terror for her 
 husband, and the peasants who had roused her fears took a 
 malicious delight in keeping them alive. 
 
 "And what opened your eyes ?" 
 
 "Nothing and everything !" Olympe answered, looking full 
 at the Countess. "Poor little thing, she is as slow as a tor- 
 toise over everything that I tell her to do, and as quick as a 
 lizard if Justin asks her for the least trifle. She quivers like a 
 leaf at the sound of my husband's voice; her face, when she 
 looks at him, is like the face of a saint rising up to heaven; 
 but she does not know what love is ; she does not suspect that 
 she is in love." 
 
 "Poor child !" said the Countess, unconscious that her smile 
 and tone revealed her thoughts. Mme. Michaud smiled an 
 answer to her young mistress' smile. 
 
 "Genevieve is glum, for instance, when Justin is out of the 
 house; if I ask her what she is thinking about, she says that 
 she is afraid of M. Eigou all rubbish ! She thinks that 
 every one is after her and she as black as the chimney flue ! 
 When Justin is making his round of a night in the woods, the 
 child is every bit as nervous as I am. If I open the window 
 when I hear my husband's horse coming I can see a' light 
 in her room, which shows that La Pechina (as they call her) 
 is sitting up, waiting for him to come in. Like me, she does 
 not go to bed till he comes home."
 
 1T4 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Thirteen years old!" said the Countess; "unfortunate 
 girl " 
 
 "Unfortunate?" echoed Olympe. "Oh! no. Her child's 
 passion will save her." 
 
 "From what?" 
 
 "From the fate of almost every girl of her age hereabouts. 
 She is not so plain-looking now since I have polished her up, 
 and there is something uncommon about her, something wild, 
 that men find taking. She has altered so much that you 
 would not know her, my lady. There is Nicolas, the son of 
 that abominable man at the Grand-I-V 'ert, and one of the 
 worst rogues in the place; he bears the child a grudge and 
 hunts her like game. You could scarcely believe that a rich 
 man like M. Eigou, who changes his servant every three years, 
 could persecute an ugly little girl of twelve, but it really 
 seems as if Mcolas Tonsard was after La Pechina; Justin 
 told me as much. It would be a shocking thing, for the 
 people here live just like beasts, but Justin and the two serv- 
 ants and I watch over the child; so be easy, my lady; she 
 never goes out except in broad daylight, and then she only 
 goes from here to the Conches gate. If by chance she should 
 fall into a trap, her feeling for Justin would give her strength 
 and will to resist, as a woman who cares about another can 
 resist a man she detests." 
 
 "I came here on her account," said the lady; "I had no 
 idea how much the visit was needed for your sake, for she 
 will not always be thirteen. The child will grow handsomer." 
 
 "Oh! I am quite sure of Justin, my lady," Olympe said, 
 smiling. "What a man! what a heart! If you only knew 
 how deep his gratitude is to the General, to whom (he says) 
 he owes his happiness ! He is only too devoted ; he would risk 
 his life as if he were in the army still ; he forgets that now he 
 may be a father." 
 
 "Well," said the Countess, with a glance that brought the 
 color into Olympe's face, "I was sorry to lose you; but now 
 that I see your happiness I have no regrets left. How sub- 
 lime and noble married love is !" she added, thinking aloud
 
 THE PEASANTRY 175 
 
 the thought which she had not dared to utter in the Abbe's 
 presence. Virginie de Troisville stood lost in musings, and 
 Olympe Michaud respected her mistress' mood. 
 
 "Let us see," the Countess said, speaking like one who 
 awakes from a dream. "Is this little one honest ?" 
 
 "As honest as I am myself, my lady/' 
 
 "Discreet?" 
 
 "As a tomb." 
 
 "Has she a grateful nature ?" 
 
 "Oh, my lady, she has fits of humility, signs of an angelic 
 nature, she comes and kisses my hands and says things that 
 would amaze you. 'Is it possible to die of love?' she asked 
 me the day before yesterday. 'What makes you ask me that ?' 
 said I. 'I wanted to know if it was a disease.' " 
 
 "Did she say that ?" exclaimed the Countess. 
 
 "If I could remember all that she says, I could tell you 
 much stranger things than that," said Olympe. "It looks 
 as if she knows more about it than I do." 
 
 "Do you think, my dear, that she might take your place? 
 for I cannot do without an Olympe," said the Countess, with 
 something like sadness in her smile. 
 
 "Not yet, my lady, she is too young; in two years' time 
 she might. Then, if she must go away, I will let you know. 
 She must be trained first; she knows nothing of the world. 
 Genevieve's grandfather, old Niseron, is one of those men 
 who would have his throat cut sooner than tell a lie ; he would 
 die of hunger sooner than touch anything entrusted to him. 
 He holds to his opinions, and his granddaughter has been 
 brought up in the same way of thinking. La Pechina would 
 think herself your equal, for the good man has made a Eepub- 
 lican of her, as he puts it; just as old Fourchon has made a 
 vagabond of Mouche. I myself laugh at these flights, but 
 you might be annoyed by them. She would worship you for 
 your kindness, but she would not look up to you as above her 
 in station. How can it be helped ! She is as wild as a swal- 
 low. The mother, too, counts for something in all this." 
 
 ''Then who was the mother?"
 
 176 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Do you not know the story, my lady ? Oh, well, old Nise- 
 ron, the sacristan at Blangy, had a son, a fine strapping 
 young fellow he was, they say, and he was drawn by the great 
 requisition. iToung Niseron was still only a gunner in 1809, 
 in a regiment stationed in the heart of Illyria and Dalmatia. 
 Then there came orders to march at once through Hungary 
 to cut off the retreat of the Austrians if the Emperor should 
 win the battle of Wagram. Michaud was in Dalmatia, and he 
 told me all about it. While they were at Zahara, young Nise- 
 ron, being a very handsome young fellow, won the heart of a 
 Montenegrin girl from the hills, who looked not unkindly 
 on the French garrison. After they left the place the girl 
 found it impossible to stay in it, she had lowered herself so 
 much in her people's eyes; so Zena Kropoli 'the French- 
 woman,' as they scornfully called her followed the regiment. 
 After the peace she came to France. Auguste Niseron asked 
 for leave to marry the Montenegrin a little while before Gene- 
 vieve was born, but the poor thing died at Yincennes shortly 
 after the birth of the child in January 1810. The papers 
 which you must have, if a marriage is to be valid, came a few 
 days too late, so Auguste Niseron wrote to ask his father to 
 come for the child, to bring a wet-nurse with him, and to take 
 charge of it ; and it was very well he did so, for he was killed 
 soon after by a shell at Montereau. The child was baptized 
 Genevieve at Soulanges. Mile. Laguerre was much touched 
 by the case and took an interest in the child; it seems as if 
 it were decreed that Genevieve should be adopted by the gen- 
 try at the Aigues. Time was when Niseron had all the baby- 
 clothes from the chateau, and he was helped with money 
 too." 
 
 The Countess and Olympe, standing by the window, saw 
 Michaud come up to Blondet and the Abbe Brossette, who 
 were chatting as they walked up and down in the sanded 
 semi-circular space which corresponded to the crescent outside 
 the park palings. 
 
 'Where can she be?" asked the lady; "you have made me 
 extremely curious to see her." 
 
 "She has gone to take the milk to Mile. Gaillard at the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 177 
 
 Conches gate. She cannot he far away, for she has been gone 
 for more than an hour." 
 
 "Oh, well, I will go to meet her with these gentlemen/' said 
 Mme. de Montcornet, and she went downstairs. She was just 
 opening her sunshade when Michaud came up to tell her that 
 her husband would probably be away for two days. 
 
 "M. Michaud," the Countess began quickly, "tell me the. 
 plain truth. Something serious is afoot. Your wife is nerv- 
 ous ; and really, if the place is full of such people as old Four- 
 chon, no one could live in it " 
 
 "If it were like that, we should not be on our legs, my lady," 
 said Michaud laughing, "for it would be very easy to get rid 
 of us keepers. The peasants call out, that is all. But as for 
 proceeding from squalling to acting, from petty theft to 
 crime, they set too much store on their own lives and the 
 open air for that. Olympe must have been repeating some 
 gossip that frightened her but a dream would frighten her 
 just now," he added, taking his wife's arm and laying it on 
 his own in a way that bade her say no more of her fears. 
 
 "Cornevin ! Juliette !" called Mme. Michaud. The old 
 servant's face soon appeared at the window. "I am going out 
 for a minute or two. Look after the house." 
 
 Two huge dogs began to bark; evidently the lodge by the 
 Avonne gate was not ill garrisoned. The barking of the dogs 
 brought out Cornevin from behind the wall Cornevin, a 
 Percheron and Olympe's foster-father, with a face such as 
 Perche alone can produce. Cornevin must surely have been 
 a Chouan in '94 and '99. 
 
 The whole party went with the Countess along that one of 
 the six graveled ways which went by the side of the Silver 
 Spring towards the Conches gate. Mme. de Montcornet and 
 Blondet walked ahead of the others. The cure, the head- 
 forester, and Olympe talked with lowered voices over this 
 revelation which had been made to the lady. 
 
 "Perhaps it is all for the best," concluded the cure, "for 
 if Mme. de Montcornet chooses we may work a change in 
 these people by kindness and gentleness."
 
 178 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 They had come about a couple of hundred yards from the 
 lodge by this time, and had passed the point where the stream 
 flowed in, when the Countess saw the broken shards of a red 
 earthen pitcher on the path; milk had been spilt. 
 
 "What has happened to the child?" she asked, calling to 
 Michaud and his wife, who had turned back. 
 
 "The same little mishap that befell the milkmaid in the 
 fable," said Blondet. 
 
 "No," said the Abbe, looking about him, "some one sprang 
 out upon the child and chased her." 
 
 "Yes. Those are certainly La Pechina's footprints," said 
 Michaud. The footmarks turned so sharply that evidently 
 the whole thing had happened suddenly. The little girl, in 
 her terror, must have made a dash for the lodge and tried 
 to reach home. 
 
 The whole party followed the track pointed out by the head- 
 forester, and saw that the footmarks came to an abrupt end 
 in the middle of the path, about a hundred paces from the 
 broken pitcher. 
 
 "There she turned off towards the Avonne," said Michaud. 
 "Perhaps some one cut off her retreat." 
 
 "Why, she has been away for more than an hour!" cried 
 Mme. Michaud. 
 
 The same dismay was visible in all faces. The cure hurried 
 towards the lodge, looking along the path ; and Michaud, with 
 the same idea in his mind, went in the other direction towards 
 Conches. 
 
 "Good heavens ! she had a fall here," said Michaud, return- 
 ing from the point where the footprints ceased in the direc- 
 tion of the Silver Spring to the other point, where they came 
 to an end in the middle of the path. "Look here!" He 
 pointed to a spot where every one saw at once the marks of 
 a headlong fall. 
 
 "Those footprints that point toward the woods are marks 
 of stocking-soles," said the cure. 
 
 "Of a woman's foot," said the Countess. 
 
 "But down there, where the pitcher was broken, there are 
 a man's footprints," added Miehaud.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 179 
 
 "There is only one set of footmarks that I can see," said 
 the cure, who had returned from following the woman's track 
 as far as the wood. 
 
 "Some one has caught her up and carried her off into the 
 wood !" cried Michaud. 
 
 "If the footmarks are made by a woman the thing is in- 
 explicable," added Blondet. 
 
 "That abominable Nicolas must have been at his games," 
 said Michaud ; "he has been lying in wait for La Pechina for 
 several days past. I waited for two hours this morning under 
 the Avonne bridge to catch my gentleman; perhaps he has 
 got some woman to help him." 
 
 "It is shocking !" cried the Countess. 
 
 "They look upon it as a joke," said the cure, half sadly, 
 half bitterly. 
 
 "Oh, La Pechina would not let them hold her!" said Mi- 
 chaud, "she is just the one to swim the Avonne. I will go 
 and look along the river. Olympe, dear, you must go home. 
 And perhaps you, gentlemen, will go with my lady along 
 the way to Conches." 
 
 "0 what a neighborhood !" said the Countess. 
 
 "There are blackguards everywhere," Blondet suggested. 
 
 "M. le Cure, is it true that my interference saved this child 
 from old Rigou's clutches?" asked Mme. de Montcornet. 
 
 "Any girl under the age of fifteen whom you take to the 
 chateau will be rescued from that monster," said the Abbe 
 Brossette. "When the apostate tried to get hold of the child, 
 he meant to slake his thirst for vengeance as well as his licen- 
 tious desires. When I took old Niseron as sacristan, I made 
 him understand what Rigou meant; Rigou used to talk of 
 making reparation for the injuries done him by his uncle M. 
 Mseron, my predecessor. The ex-mayor bore me a grudge for 
 that, it swelled his hate. Old Niseron gave Rigou solemn 
 warning that if any harm came to Genevieve, he would kill 
 him, and that he held Rigou responsible for any attempt upon 
 the child. I should not be very far wrong if I saw some in- 
 fernal plot of his in Nicolas 'Tonsard's behavior. He thinks 
 he ean do as he likes here."
 
 180 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "But is he not afraid of the law ?" asked Blondet. 
 
 "In the first place, Rigou is the public prosecutor's father- 
 in-law," the cure began. There was a pause; then he went 
 on. "You would not imagine how utterly indifferent the 
 divisional police and the criminal department are here with 
 regard to such things. So long as the peasants refrain from 
 arson and murder, so long as they pay the taxes and do not 
 poison people, they may do as they please among themselves, 
 and as they have not a vestige of religious principle, the state 
 of things is shocking. On the other side of the valley there 
 are helpless old men, past work, who are afraid to stay in 
 their homes lest they should be starved to death ; they are out 
 in the fields as long as their legs will carry them ; they know 
 that if they once take to their beds they will die of sheer 
 hunger. M. Sarcus, the justice of the peace, says that if all 
 criminals were brought to justice, the government would be 
 bankrupt through expenses of prosecution." 
 
 "Well, there is a magistrate who sees things as they are !" 
 exclaimed Blondet. 
 
 "Ah, his lordship the bishop knew quite well how things 
 were in this valley, and more especially in this commune," 
 the cure continued. "Religion is the only remedy for such 
 evils; legislation seems to me to be powerless, restricted as 
 it is " 
 
 The cure was interrupted by shrieks from the wood. Emile 
 Blondet and the Abbe, followed by the Countess, plunged 
 boldly in the direction from which the cries came. 
 
 XI 
 
 THE OARISTYS, THE EIGHTEENTH ECLOGUE OF THEOCRITUS, 
 LITTLE APPRECIATED IN A COURT OF ASSIZE 
 
 SOMETHING of the sagacity of the savage, developed in Mi- 
 chaud by his new calling, together with a newly-acquired 
 knowledge of the state of feeling and affairs in the commune 
 of Blangy, had just explained, in part, a third idyl, modeled
 
 THE PEASANTRY 181 
 
 on the Greek. Impecunious swains like Nicolas Tonsard and 
 well-to-do seniors of the stamp of old Eigou make liberal 
 translations of such Idyls (in school phrase) for the use of 
 remote country districts. 
 
 Nicolas, Tonsard's second son, had drawn an unlucky num- 
 ber in the last conscription. Two years previously, thanks 
 to the united efforts of Soudry, Gaubertin, and Money-Sarcus, 
 Nicolas' older brother had been pronounced unfit for military 
 service, on account of some imaginary affection of the muscles 
 of the right arm. Jean-Louis' subsequent dexterity in hand- 
 ling the heaviest implements of husbandry had been much re- 
 marked, and had caused some talk in the district. 
 
 So Soudry, Eigou, and Gaubertin, who watched over the 
 family, warned Tonsard that Nicolas, a big tall fellow, must 
 not attempt to evade the law of conscription. At the same 
 time, however, both the worthy mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes 
 and Eigou had so lively a sense of thie necessity of keeping 
 on good terms with a bold man who might be a useful engine 
 if properly directed against the Aigues, 'that Eigou held out 
 some hope to the Tonsards, father and son. 
 
 Catherine, that devoted sister, paid the unfrocked monk 
 an occasional visit, and was advised to apply to the General 
 and the Countess. 
 
 "He maybe would not be sorry to do it to make things 
 sweet, and anyway it would be so much out of the enemy," 
 said the public-prosecutor's terrible father-in-law to Cath- 
 erine, demanding counsel. "If the Upholsterer refuses well, 
 we shall see." 
 
 In Eigou's forecasts the General's refusal was one more 
 wrong to swell the account of injuries done to the peasants 
 by the great landowner, as well as a fresh cause for gratitude 
 to bind Tonsard to the coalition if the ex-mayor's crafty brain 
 should hit upon some way of liberating Nicolas. 
 
 Nicolas, bound to present himself for medical examination 
 in a few days' time, founded little hope on the General's in- 
 fluence, for the Aigues had several grievances against the 
 Tonsards. Nicolas' passion, or, more properly speaking, his
 
 182 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 fancy or whim for La Pechina was so heated by the notion 
 of an approaching departure which left him no time to carry 
 out his projects concerning her that he determined to try 
 violence. 
 
 The contempt that the child showed her persecutor, to- 
 gether with her energetic resistance, had kindled in the Love- 
 lace of the Grand-I-Vert a fury of hate that equaled his 
 frenzy of desire. For three days he had lain in wait for La 
 Pechina, and she, poor child, knew of this. Between the 
 girl and Nicolas there was the same mutual recognition that 
 there is between the sportsman and the game. La Pechina 
 could not go beyond the great iron gates but Nicolas would 
 show his face in one of the paths under the park walls, or 
 he was waiting about on the bridge over the Avonne. She 
 could soon have put herself beyond reach of this hateful per- 
 secution by speaking to her grandfather, but a strange fear, 
 perhaps a natural instinct, leads even the simplest-natured 
 girls to shrink from confiding in their natural protectors in 
 matters of this kind. 
 
 Genevieve, moreover, had heard old Niseron solemnly swear 
 that he would kill any man whatsoever who should dare (his 
 own expression) "to lay a finger on her." (The old man im- 
 agined that the white aureole of his own seventy blameless 
 years of life would be a protection to his little grand- 
 daughter.) The prospect of a tragedy positively appalling 
 to a girl's lively imagination is quite sufficient to seal her lips ; 
 there is no need to explore the recesses of her heart for a 
 multiplication of curious reasons for her silence. 
 
 The cow at the Conches gate had calved, and Mme. Mi- 
 chaud was daily sending milk to Gaillard's daughter. Before 
 La Pechina set out on this errand, she always made a survey 
 like a cat about to venture forth from the house. She saw no 
 sign of Nicolas ; she "listened to the silence," as the poet says, 
 and hearing nothing, thought that the scoundrel must have 
 gone to his work. The peasants had begun to cut their rye ; 
 they always finish their own little patches early, so as to be 
 ready to earn the extra wages paid to harvesters. But Nicolas
 
 THE PEASANTRY 183 
 
 was not the man to make much ado over the loss of a couple 
 of days' wages, and he was the less likely to grudge them 
 just now because he was going away after the Soulanges fair, 
 and to "go for a soldier" means the beginning of a new life 
 for the peasant. 
 
 But when La Pechina, with her pitcher on her head, had 
 come half-way, Nicolas scrambled like a wildcat down the 
 elm-tree, where he lay in hiding among the leaves, and drop- 
 ped like a thunderbolt at her feet. La Pechina flung away 
 her pitcher, and trusted to her speed to reach the lodge. But 
 Catherine, lying in ambush a hundred paces away, sprang out 
 of the wood and ran up against the little girl with such force 
 that La Pechina fell over. Catherine picked her up still dazed 
 with the violent shock, and carried her off into an open space 
 among the trees where the Silver Spring bubbled up in the 
 grass. 
 
 Catherine was tall and strong. In all respects she recalled 
 the models selected by painters and sculptors for figures of 
 Liberty and the ideal Eepublic. Her beauty, which found 
 favor in the eyes of the youth of the valley, was of the same 
 full-blossomed type, she had the same strong pliant figure, 
 the same muscular lower limbs, the plump arms, the eyes that 
 gleamed with a spark of fire, the proud expression,' the hair 
 grasped and twisted in thick handfuls, the masculine fore- 
 head, the red mouth, the lips that curled back with a smile 
 that had something almost ferocious in it such a smile as 
 Delacroix and David (of Angers) caught and rendered to ad- 
 miration. A glowing brunette, the image of the people, the 
 flames of insurrection seemed to leap forth from her clear 
 tawny eyes; there was a soldierly insolence in their piercing 
 gaze. Catherine had inherited from her father a temper so 
 violent that every other member of the family at the tavern 
 feared her, Tonsard excepted. 
 
 "Well, how do you feel, old girl ?" she asked of La Pechina. 
 Catherine, for her own ends, had set her victim down on a 
 little knoll beside the spring, and had brought her to her 
 senses by splashing cold water in her face.
 
 184 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Where am I ?" asked the little girl, opening her beautiful 
 dark eyes. It was as if a ray of sunlight shone from them. 
 
 "Ah ! if it hadn't been for me, you would be dead by now," 
 returned Catherine. 
 
 "Thank you/' said the child, still quite dizzy with her fall. 
 "What can have happened to me ?" 
 
 "You stumbled over a tree root, and down you went as if a 
 bullet had struck you. Oh ! didn't you run too ! You bolted 
 away like a mad thing !" 
 
 "It was your brother's fault, he caused the accident," said 
 La Pechina, recollecting the sight of Nicolas. 
 
 "My brother ? I did not see him," said Catherine. "Poor 
 Nicolas, what may he have done that you are as frightened of 
 him as if he were a bogey ? Isn't he better-looking than your 
 M. Michaud?" 
 
 "Oh !" said La Pechina disdainfully. 
 
 "Come, child, you are laying up trouble for yourself by 
 being so fond of those who persecute us! Why are you not 
 on our side?" 
 
 "Why do you never set foot in a church ? And why do you 
 steal night and day?" the younger girl inquired. 
 
 "So you believe what the masters tell you, do you?" re- 
 torted Catherine scornfully, and without suspicion of La 
 Pechina's attachment. "The bourgeois are fond of us, as they 
 are fond of their food; they must have a plateful of some- 
 thing new every day. Where may you have seen the bourgeois 
 that would marry one of us .peasant girls? Just you see 
 whether Money-Sarcus will allow his son to marry pretty 
 Gatienne Giboulard of Auxerre, though her father is a rich 
 man and a cabinet-maker! You have never been to the 
 Tivoli at Soulanges, Socquard's place. You ought to come. 
 You would see the bourgeois, there, that you would! Then 
 you would begin to see that they are hardly worth the money 
 that we make out of them when we get hold of them. Just 
 you come to the fair this year." 
 
 "People say that the fair at Soulanges is very fine!" La 
 Pechina cried childishly.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 185 
 
 "I will just tell you what it is in two words," Catherine 
 went on. "If you are pretty, they make eyes at you. What 
 is the good of being as pretty as you are if it is not to have 
 the men admire you ? Oh ! the first time I heard some one 
 say, 'What a fine girl !' the blood in my veins turned to fire. 
 That was at Socquard's, when the dancing was in full swing; 
 grandfather was playing the clarinette, and he smiled, and 
 I thought the Tivoli as big and as fine as heaven. Why, child, 
 it is all lighted up with Argand lamps and looking-glasses: 
 you might think you were in paradise. And all the gentlemen 
 from Soulanges and Auxerre and Ville-aux-Fayes are there. 
 Ever since that night I have loved the place where those words 
 sounded in my ears like military music. You would bargain 
 away your eternity to hear that said of you, child, by the man 
 you have a liking for !" 
 
 "Why, yes ; perhaps," said La Pechina dreamily. 
 
 "Just come and hear that benediction from a man's lips; 
 you are sure to have it !" cried Catherine. "Lord, a girl as 
 smart as you are stands a good chance of making a fine match ! 
 There is M. Lupin's son, Amaury, he has coats with gold but- 
 tons all down them; he would be very likely to ask for you 
 in marriage ! And that is not all, by any means ! If you but 
 knew what a cure for care they keep there ! Look here Soc- 
 quard's spiced wine would make you forget the biggest trou- 
 bles. Only imagine it, it puts fancies into your head, you feel 
 lighter ! You have never drunk spiced wine, have you ? Oh, 
 well then, you do not know what life is !" 
 
 The grown-up person's privilege of moistening the throat 
 now and again with a glass of spiced wine excites the curiosity 
 of a child under twelve to such a pitch that Genevi&ve once 
 had put to her lips a glass that the doctor ordered for her 
 grandfather when the old man was ill. That experiment, and 
 a sort of magical memory which it had left in the poor child's 
 mind, may explain the attentive hearing which she gave to 
 Catherine. That wicked creature had counted upon making 
 an impression, to carry out in full a plan which so far had 
 met with success. Doubtless she meant that her victim, half*
 
 186 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 stunned by her fall, should reach a stage of mental intoxica- 
 tion particularly dangerous for a country girl whose seldom- 
 stirred imagination is so much the more ardent when once 
 heated. The spiced wine, kept in reserve, was to complete 
 the task of turning the victim's head. 
 
 "Then what is there in it ?" asked La Pechina, 
 
 "All sorts of things !" said Catherine, glancing sideways 
 to see whether her brother was coming. "Thing-um-bobs 
 from the Indies, to begin with, cinnamon and herbs that 
 change you by enchantment. In fact, you feel as if you have 
 everything you want. It makes you happy ! You do not care 
 a straw for anything." 
 
 "I should be afraid to drink spiced wine while I was danc- 
 ing!" put in La Pechina. 
 
 "Afraid of what?" asked Catherine. "There is not the 
 least thing to be afraid of. Just remember what a lot of 
 people there are about. And all the bourgeois looking on at 
 us ! Ah ! one day of that kind will help you bear up against 
 lots of troubles. See it and die, one would be content." 
 
 "If only M. and Mme. Michaud would come too " be- 
 gan La Pechina, her eyes on fire. 
 
 "Why, there is your grandfather Niseron, you Haven't given 
 him up, have you? Poor dear man, he would feel flattered 
 to see ) r ou queening it ! Do you really like those arminacs, 
 Michaud and the rest of them, better than your grandfather 
 and us Burgundians? It is not nice to forsake your own 
 kith and kin. And then, besides, what could the Michauds 
 say if your grandfather were to take you to the fair at Sou- 
 langes ? Oh ! if you only knew what it is to reign over a man, 
 to have him . wild about you, to be able to tell him to 'Go 
 there !' as I tell Godain, and he goes, or 'Do this !' and he does 
 it ! And rigged out as you are, child, you see, you would 
 completely turn some gentleman's head ; M. Lupin's son, for 
 instance. To think that M. Amaury is sweet upon Marie, 
 my sister, because she has fair hair; and he is afraid of me, 
 as you may say. But as for you, now that those people at 
 the lodge have smartened you up, you look like an empress."
 
 THE PEASANTRY 187 
 
 While Catherine cleverly turned the girl's thoughts away 
 from Nicolas, the better to dispel suspicion in that simple 
 mind, she cunningly distilled the nectar of flattery. Unwit- 
 tingly she had found the weak spot in her victim's heart. 
 La Pechina, though neither more nor less than a poor peasant 
 girl, was an appalling instance of precocious development, 
 like many a nature destined to end even as they blossom, pre- 
 maturely. She was a strange freak, produced by crossing the 
 Montenegrin and Burgundian strains, begotten and born 
 amid the turmoil of war, and all these circumstances had 
 doubtless gone to the moulding of her. Thin, slender, and 
 brown as a tobacco-leaf, she possessed incredible physical 
 strength; but her low height was deceptive to the eyes of 
 peasants who know nothing of the mysteries of the nervous 
 system. Nerves do not come within the ken of rural pa- 
 thology. 
 
 Genevieve at thirteen was scarce as tall as other girls of her 
 age, but she had come to her full height. Did she owe to her 
 extraction, or to the sun of Burgundy, the dusky but glowing 
 topaz-tint of her face? the glow of the blood through the 
 dusky transparent tissues, a color that adds years to a girl's 
 apparent age? Medical science would perhaps decline to de- 
 cide. The premature age of La Pechina's features was atoned 
 for by the brightness the splendid blaze of light in the 
 eyes that shone like two stars. Perhaps it is because such 
 eyes are so full of sunlight that they are always shaded by 
 long thick lashes ; hers were almost exaggerated in length. 
 
 Thick tresses of blue-black hair, fine and long and abun- 
 dant, rose above a forehead carved like the brows of an an- 
 tique Juno, but the splendid crown of hair, the great dark 
 eyes, the goddess' brow eclipsed the lower part of the face. 
 The upper part of the nose was regular in shape and slightly 
 aquiline, but below it terminated in blunted nostrils, with 
 something equine about them. In moments of vehement ex- 
 citement they turn up, a trick of facial expression that gave 
 her a look of fierce frenzy. Like the nose, the rest of the face 
 
 seemed to have been left unfinished ; it was as if clay had been 
 VOL. 1038
 
 188 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 wanting to the hand of the Great Sculptor. The space be- 
 neath the mouth was so narrow that any one who should take 
 La Pechina by the chin must have touched her lips; but her 
 teeth diverted attention from this defect. You could almost 
 have credited each one of those little, glistening, enameled, 
 shapely-cut, translucent bones with intelligent life, and a 
 mouth somewhat too wide made it easy to see them. This last 
 defect was further emphasized by the sinuous curving lines 
 of lips, that bore a resemblance to the fantastic branchings 
 of coral. 
 
 The shell-like convolutions of her ears were so translucent 
 that they turned to a rose-red in the light. Sunburned 
 though she was, the skin revealed the marvelous fineness of 
 the tissues beneath. If love lies in the sense of touch, as Buf- 
 fon avers, such a silken skin must have been as subtle and as 
 penetrating as the scent of daturas. Her chest, indeed her 
 whole body was appallingly thin, but the little hands and feet 
 were bewitchingly small, a sign of unusual nervous power 
 and of an organization capable of endurance. 
 
 A fierce pride blended these diabolical imperfections and 
 divine beauties into harmony, in spite of discords; the un- 
 daunted spirit housed in the feeble body looked forth from 
 her eyes. Once having seen the child, it was impossible to 
 forget her. Nature had meant to fashion a woman, but the 
 circumstances of conception had given her a boy's face and 
 figure. At sight of the strange girl, a poet would have given 
 her Yemen for her native land and Arabian efreets and 
 genii for her kin. NOT was La Pechina's outward appearance 
 misleading. She had a spirit which matched her eyes of fire, 
 the quick wit suggested by the lips set with the brilliants of 
 bewitching teeth; she had thoughts that fitted her queenly 
 brow, the equine fury of the nostrils that seemed ready to 
 neigh at any moment. Love, as it springs into being amid 
 burning sands and the deserts, shook the pulses of the heart 
 of twenty years in the thirteen-year-old Montenegrin girl ; it 
 was with her as with her snowy mountain ranges, summer 
 had come upon her before the spring flowers had had time to 
 bloom.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 189 
 
 By this time observing minds will understand how it was 
 that La Pechina, breathing out passion at every pore, should 
 stir the sluggish fancies of depraved natures. At table your 
 month waters at the sight of certain fruits, pitted, contorted, 
 covered with dark specks ; the gourmet knows that under such 
 a rind Nature has hidden her cunningest savors and perfume. 
 Why, when every one else in the valley pitied La Pechina for 
 an ill-grown weakling, should a clod-pate like Nicolas Ton- 
 sard have set his choice on a creature worthy of a poet ? Why 
 should Eigou, in his old age, desire her with the heat of 
 youth? Which of these two was young or old? Was the 
 young peasant as sated as the old money-lender? How was it 
 that both extremes of life united in one sinister caprice? Is 
 exhausted vigor like the first beginnings of strength ? Men's 
 vices are unfathomable depths guarded by sphinxes, and ques- 
 tions to which there are no answers almost always stand at 
 the beginning and end of devious ways. 
 
 It may now be imagined how it was that the exclamation 
 Piccina! broke from the Countess when she first saw Gene- 
 vieve by the roadside in the previous year, a child in a maze 
 of wonder at the sight of the carriage and a lady inside it 
 dressed like Mme. de Montcornet. And it was this girl, so 
 nearly one of Nature's failures in the making, who now loved 
 with all the energy of her Montenegrin nature. She loved the 
 tall, handsome, noble-hearted forester, as children of her age 
 can love when they love, that is to say with a frenzy of child- 
 ish desire, with all the force of their youth, with the devotion 
 which sows the seeds of divine romance in a virgin soil. Cath- 
 erine's coarse hand had smitten the most responsive strings 
 of a harp strained to breaking. To dance under Michaud's 
 eyes ! To go to the saloon at Soulanges ! To engrave herself 
 upon the memory of this idolized master ! What thoughts 
 were these to drop into that volcanic brain? What was this 
 but to fling live coals upon straw lying out in the August sun ? 
 
 "No, Catherine," said La Pechina. "No, I am an ugly, 
 puny thing. I shall have to sit in a corner and be an old maid 
 all alone in the world ; that is my fate." 
 
 "Men like peaked-looking girls," Catherine declared. "Look
 
 190 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 here at me!" she went on, holding out both arms. "There 
 is Godain, a regular shrimp, has taken a fancy to me ; so has 
 that little fellow Charles that goes ahout with the Count. But 
 young Lupin is shy of me. I tell you again, it is the little 
 men that fall in love with me and say 'What a fine girl !' at 
 Ville-aux-Fayes or Soulanges. Now all the tall, fine-looking 
 men will fall in love with you." 
 
 "Oh, Catherine, really ? is that true ?" cried La Pechina in 
 an ecstasy. 
 
 "Why, it is as true as this, that Nicolas, the finest fellow 
 in the neighborhood, is over head and ears in love with you. 
 He dreams of you, and gets low about you, and all the girls 
 in the place are in love with him. He is a mettled lad ! If 
 you put on a white frock and yellow ribbons, you will be the 
 handsomest girl in the room at Socquard's, at the feast of 
 Our Lady, when all the grand folk of Ville-aux-Fayes are 
 there ! Look here, will you come ? Wait a bit, I was cutting 
 grass yonder for our cows. I have a drop of spiced wine in 
 my gourd; Socquard gave it me this morning," she went 
 on, seeing in La Pechina eyes the excited look that every wo- 
 man understands; "I am a good-natured one, we will go 
 shares at it. You will fancy that some one is in love with 
 you." 
 
 As they talked Nicolas came stealing towards them, picking 
 out patches of thick grass to step upon, creeping noiselessly 
 till he reached the trunk of a huge oak-tree near the place 
 where his sister had deposited La Pechina. Catherine's eyes, 
 always looking about her, lighted at last on Nicolas as she 
 went for the spiced wine. 
 
 "There ! you taks the first pull," said she. 
 
 "It burns !" exclaimed Genevieve, handing back the gourd 
 after a couple of sips. 
 
 "There, you silly !" retorted Catherine, as she emptied the 
 rustic flask, "that is the way ! It is as if a ray of sunlight 
 shone in your inside." 
 
 "And here am I that ought to have taken the milk to Mile. 
 Gaillard !" cried La Pechina. "Nicolas scared me "
 
 THE PEASANTRY 191 
 
 "So you don't like Nicolas?" 
 
 "No, I don't/' answered La Pechina. "What makes him 
 hunt me about? There are plenty of creatures that would 
 be glad of him." 
 
 "But suppose that he likes you better than any one else in 
 the valley, child " 
 
 "I am sorry for him," said La Pechina. 
 
 "It is plain that you do not know him/' returned the older 
 girl. 
 
 The ominous words were hardly uttered before Catherine 
 Tonsard sprang upon La Pechina, caught her by the waist, flung 
 her flat upon the grass and held her down, so that she had no 
 power to extricate herself from her perilous position. At 
 the sight of her loathed persecutor, Genevieve. shrieked with 
 all her might, and directed a kick in the stomach at Nicolas 
 which sent him reeling five paces back; then like an acrobat 
 she wriggled round so deftly that she defeated Catherine's 
 calculations and got up to run away. But Catherine, still on 
 the ground, reached out an arm and clutched her by the foot, 
 and La Pechina fell heavily headlong forwards. This ugly 
 fall put a stop to the brave girl's incessant cries. Nicolas, 
 who had recovered himself in spite of the violence of the 
 blow, came up in a towering rage and tried to seize his victim. 
 The child's head was heavy with the wine, but in this strait 
 she caught Nicolas by the throat and held him in an iron 
 grip. 
 
 "She is choking me ! . . . Catherine ! help !" cried 
 Nicolas, with difficulty making his voice audible. 
 
 La Pechina shrieked aloud. Catherine tried to stop the 
 sounds by putting a hand over her mouth, but the child bit 
 her till the blood came. At that very moment Blondet and 
 the Countess and the cure appeared on the outskirts of the 
 wood. 
 
 "Here come the gentry from the Aigues," said Catherine, 
 helping Genevieve to rise. 
 
 "Do you want to live ?" said Nicolas Tonsard hoarsely. 
 
 "And if I do?" said La Pechina.
 
 192 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Tell them that we were romping and I will forgive you," 
 said Nicolas with a scowl. 
 
 "Are you going to say that, you cat ?" insisted Catherine, 
 with a glance more terrific than Nicolas' murderous threat. 
 
 <f Yes, if you will let me alone," said La Pechina. "Anyhow 
 I shall not go out again without my scissors." 
 
 "You hold your tongue or I will chuck you into the 
 Avonne," said Catherine savagely. 
 
 "You are wretches !" cried the cure. "You deserve to be 
 arrested and sent up for trial for this." 
 
 "Oh, as to that, what do some of you do in your drawing- 
 rooms ?" asked Nicolas, staring at the Countess and Blondet, 
 who quailed. "You play there, don't you? All right, the 
 fields are our playground, and you cannot always be at work ; 
 we were playing. You ask my sister and La Pechina." 
 
 "What can you da when it comes to blows if this is the way 
 you play?" exclaimed Blondet. 
 
 Nicolas looked at Blondet with deadly hate in his eyes. 
 
 "Speak up !" said Catherine, taking La Pechina by the 
 forearm and gripping it till she left a blue bracelet of 
 bruises round it. "We were having a game, weren't we? " 
 
 "Yes, my lady, we were having a game," said La Pechina. 
 The child's whole strength was exhausted; she stood limp 
 and drooping as if she were about to faint. 
 
 "You hear that, my lady," said Catherine brazenly, with 
 a glance that between woman and woman is like a stab. 
 
 She took her brother's arm and the pair walked off to- 
 gether. They knew quite well what ideas they had given the 
 three personages behind them. Twice Nicolas looked round; 
 twice he encountered Blondet's eyes. The literary man was 
 scanning the tall, broad-shouldered rascal. Nicolas stood five 
 feet eight inches high; he had crisp black hail, a high color, 
 his face was good-tempered enough, but there was significant 
 lines about the lips and mouth that suggested the cruelty 
 peculiar to lust and idleness. Catherine swayed her white- 
 and- blue-striped skirts as she went with a sort of vicious 
 coquetry.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 193 
 
 "Cain and his wife," said Blondet, turning to the cure. 
 
 "You do not know how well your words have hit the mark," 
 returned the Abbe Brossette. 
 
 "Oh! M. le Cure, what will they do to me?" cried La 
 Pechina, as soon as the brother and sister were out of ear-shot. 
 
 The Countess' face was as white as her handkerchief. The 
 whole thing had been a great shock to her, so great that she 
 heard neither La Pechina, nor the cure, nor Blondet. 
 
 "This would drive one from an earthly paradise," she said 
 at last; "but of all things let us save this little one from 
 their clutches." 
 
 "You were right," Blondet said in a low voice meant only 
 for the Countess. "The child is a whole romance a romance 
 in flesh and blood." 
 
 The Montenegrin girl had reached a point when body and 
 soul seem to smoke with the unquenched fires of wrath which 
 have put the utmost strain on every faculty, physical and 
 mental. 
 
 There is an inexpressible and supreme human splendor 
 which only breaks forth under the pressure of some high- 
 wrought mood of struggle or of victory, of love or martyrdom. 
 She had left home that morning in a frock of a material of 
 narrow brown-and-yellow stripes, with a little frill at the 
 throat that she had risen early to pleat into her dress; and 
 now she stood as yet unconscious of the disorder of her earth- 
 stained garments or her torn frill. Her hair swayed down 
 over her face, she felt for her comb ; but with that first dawn 
 of dismay Michaud appeared upon the scene; he also- had 
 heard the cries. All La Pechina' s energy returned at once at 
 the sight of her god. 
 
 "He did not so much as lay a finger on me, M. Michaud !" 
 
 That cry and its accompanying glance and gesture, which 
 spoke more eloquently than the words, told Blondet and the 
 cure in one moment more than Mme. Michaud had told the 
 Countess of the strange girl's passion for the head-forester, 
 who was blind to it. 
 
 "The wretch !" exclaimed Michaud ; and acting on an inv
 
 194 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 pulse of impotent wrath which takes the fool and the wise 
 alike at unawares, he shook his fist in the direction of Nicolas, 
 whose tall figure darkened the wood-paths into which he had 
 plunged with his sister. 
 
 "Then you were not playing after all/' commented the 
 Abbe Brossette, with a keen glance at La Pechina. 
 
 "Do not tease her," said the Countess. "Let us go home." 
 
 La Pechina, spent though she was, drew from the force of 
 her passion sufficient strength to walk under the eyes of her 
 adored master. The Countess followed immediately behind 
 Michaud, along a footpath known only to keepers and poach- 
 ers, and so narrow that two could not walk abreast in it. It 
 was a short cut to the Avonne gate. 
 
 "Michaud," the lady began, when they had come halfway 
 through the wood, "the neighborhood must be rid somehow 
 or other of this good-for-nothing scamp. This child is per- 
 haps in danger of her life." 
 
 "To begin with," returned Michaud, "Genevieve shall never 
 leave the lodge. My wife shall take Vatel's nephew into the 
 house; he keeps the walks in order in the park. We will re- 
 place him by a young fellow who comes from near my wife's 
 home, for after this we ought to have no one about the Aigues 
 whom we cannot trust. With Gounod in the house, and Cor- 
 nevin, Olympe's old foster-father, the cows will be well looked 
 after, and La Pechina shall never go out by herself again." 
 
 "I shall ask the Count to make good the extra expense to 
 you," said the lady ; "but this will not rid us of Nicolas. How 
 can it be done?" 
 
 "Oh, that is quite simple ; there is a way ready made. Nic- 
 olas will have to go before the examining committee directly. 
 Instead of interfering to get him off, as the Tonsards expect 
 the General to do, he has only to give the authorities a 
 hint " 
 
 "I will go myself if need be to see my cousin Casteran at 
 the prefecture," said the Countess, "but meanwhile, I am 
 afraid- 
 
 These few wprds were exchanged at the point where several
 
 THE PEASANTRY 195 
 
 paths met in a circle. The Countess climbed the bank by the 
 ditch side, and, in spite of herself, a cry broke from her. 
 Michaud went to her assistance, thinking that she had re- 
 ceived a scratch from a bit of dead thorn, but he too shud- 
 dered at the sight that met his eyes. 
 
 Marie and Bonnebault, sitting on the bank side, were ap- 
 parently chatting together ; but evidently the pair had hidden 
 themselves for purposes of eavesdropping. They had heard 
 people come up in the forest, had recognized the voices of the 
 gentry, and left their sentinel's post. 
 
 Bonnebault, a thin lanky youth, had served six years in a 
 cavalry regiment. Some few months ago he had been dis- 
 charged for good from the army for bad conduct; he was 
 enough to spoil the best of regiments ; and since then he had 
 been hanging about Conches. With a pair of moustaches, a 
 tuft of beard on the chin, a certain presence and carriage 
 that a soldier learns in barracks and drill, he had turned the 
 heads of all the peasant girls in the valley. Bonnebault vore 
 his hair, soldier fashion, clipped close to the back of the head, 
 frizzed about the face, and brushed up jauntily behind on 
 the temples. He tilted his foraging cap knowingly over one 
 ear. Indeed, compared with peasants in rags and tatters 
 like Mouche and Fourchon, he was a glorious creature in his 
 linen trousers, leather boots, and short jacket. This attire, 
 assumed since his discharge, smacked somewhat of half-pay 
 and a countryman's life ; but the cock of the valley had better 
 clothes for high days and holidays. He lived, it may be said 
 at once, on his sweethearts, and found his means barely suf- 
 ficient for his amusement, potations, and various methods 
 of going to the devil, a necessary consequence of hanging 
 about the Cafe de la Paix. 
 
 There was something indescribably sinister in the rascal's 
 round, featureless countenance, though at first sight he looked 
 not unpleasing. He was cross-eyed; that is, he did not ex- 
 actly squint, but his eyes sometimes "went different ways," to 
 borrow a phrase from the studio, and this optical defect, slight 
 though it was, gave him an underhand expression which made 
 you feel uncomfortable; and the more so because a twitch of
 
 196 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 the forehead and eyebrows accompanied these movements of 
 the eyes a revelation of a certain inherent baseness and an 
 innate tendency to go to the bad. 
 
 Of cowardice, as of courage, there be many kinds. Bonne- 
 bault, who would have fought on the field with the bravest, 
 was pusillanimous before his vices and unable to resist his 
 fancies. He was as lazy as a lizard, though he could be active 
 enough when he chose; he had no sense of shame, he was 
 proud and yet base, and the man who could do anything and 
 did nothing, the "breaker of heads and hearts," to use a sol- 
 dier's phrase, found his sole delight in mischief and worse. 
 A character of this kind is as dangerous an example in a 
 quiet country place as in a regiment. 
 
 Bonnebault's aim, like Tonsard's and Fourchon's, was to 
 live in comfort and to do nothing; and to that end he had 
 "laid himself out," as Vermichel and Fourchon would say. 
 By exploiting his figure, with increasing success, and his skill 
 at billiards, with varying fortune, he flattered himself that in 
 his quality of prop and pillar of the Cafe de la Paix he should 
 one day marry Mile. Aglae Socquard, only daughter of the 
 proprietor thereof. Socquard's cafe (making due allowance 
 for relative position) was to Soulanges much what Ranelagh 
 is to the Boia de Boulogne. To adopt the career of a bar- 
 keeper, to be proprietor of a dancing-saloon 'twas a fine 
 prospect, a very marshal's baton, for a man who hated work. 
 
 Bonnebault's habits, life, and nature were written in such 
 foul characters on his face that the Countess started at the 
 sight of him and his companion as if she had seen a couple 
 of snakes. It was this shock that had made her cry out. 
 
 Marie Tonsard was so infatuated with Bonnebault that for 
 him she would have stolen outright. That moustache, that 
 lounging military swagger, that low bully's air, went to her 
 heart as the manners, bearing, and air of a De Marsay fasci- 
 nate Parisian fair. Every social sphere has its bright partic- 
 ular stars. Marie was uneasy, she dismissed Amaury, the 
 rival coxcomb of the little town. She meant to be Mme. Bon- 
 nebault.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 197 
 
 "Hallo there! hallo! are you coming?" shouted Catherine 
 and Nicolas in the distance; they had caught sight of the 
 other pair. 
 
 The shrill cry rang through the woods like a savage's signal. 
 
 Michaud shuddered at the sight of the two creatures and 
 bitterly repented his hasty speech. If Bonnebault and Marie 
 had overheard the conversation nothing but mischief would 
 come of it. Some such apparently infinitely trifling matter 
 was enough in the present exasperated condition of parties to 
 bring about a decisive result even as upon some battlefield 
 victory and defeat have been decided by the course of some 
 little stream which balks the advance of the battery, though 
 a shepherd's lad can cross it at a running jump. 
 
 Bonnebault took off his cap gallantly to the lady, took 
 Marie's arm, and swaggered off in triumph. 
 
 "That is the Clef-des-Cceurs of the valley," Michaud whis- 
 pered, using a nickname of the French camp which means 
 a Don Juan. "He is a very dangerous character. He has only 
 to lose a score of francs at billiards and he would be ready to 
 murder Eigou. He is as ready for a crime as for pleasure." 
 
 "I have seen more than enough for one day," said the 
 Countess, taking Emile's arm. "Let us turn back." 
 
 She watched La Pechina go into the house, and made Mme. 
 Michaud a sad farewell sign ; Olympe's dejection had infected 
 the Countess. 
 
 "What is this, madame?" said the Abbe Brossette. "Do 
 the difficulties of doing good here really turn you away from 
 making the attempt? For five years I have slept on a mat- 
 tress and lived in a bare unfurnished parsonage-house, saying 
 mass without a flock to listen to it, preaching to an empty 
 church, officiating without fees or supplementary stipend; I 
 have the State allowance of six hundred francs; I give away 
 one-third of it, and have asked nothing of his lordship the 
 bishop and after all I do not despair. If you but knew what 
 it is like in the winter here you would feel all the force of 
 those words. I have nothing to warm me but the thought of 
 saving this valley and winning it back to God, It is not a
 
 198 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 question of ourselves alone, madame ; the future time is con- 
 cerned. If we cures are put here to say to the poor, 'Know 
 how to be poor !' that is to say, 'Bear your lot in patience and 
 work/ it is no less our duty to bid the wealthy 'Know how to 
 be rich/ which means, 'Be intelligently beneficent, fear God, 
 be worthy of the post He has assigned to you !' 
 
 "Well, madame, you are only depositaries of wealth and 
 the power that wealth gives; if you fail to fulfil your trust 
 you will not transmit that which you received to your chil- 
 dren. You are robbing those that shall come after you ! If 
 you follow in the selfish ways of the cantatrice, whose supine- 
 ness most surely caused the evils which have startled you by 
 their extent, you will see yet again the scaffolds on which your 
 predecessors died for the sins of their fathers. To do good 
 obscurely in some out-of-the-way nook, just as this Eigou, 
 for example, is doing harm. . . . Ah! God in Heaven 
 delights to hear the prayer that takes the form of such deeds 
 as these ! If, in every commune, there were three human 
 beings determined to do good, this fair France of ours would 
 be saved from the depths towards which we are hurrying, 
 dragged down as we are by a creed of indifference to all that 
 does not directly concern ourselves ! First of all change your 
 lives ; change them and you will change your laws." 
 
 Although the Countess was deeply moved by this outpour- 
 ing of truly catholic charity, her only answer was the rich 
 man's fatal formula, "We shall see," a put-off that contains 
 sufficient promise in it to repel any immediate call upon the 
 purse, while it leaves the speaker free in future to fold his 
 arms when the mischief is done, and to plead that now it is 
 too late. 
 
 Upon this the Abbe Brossette took leave of Mme. de Mont- 
 cornet, and went by the nearest way to the Blangy gate. 
 
 "Is Belshazzar's Feast to be throughout all ages the symbol 
 of the last days of a doomed class, oligarchy, or ruling 
 power ?" he asked himself when he had made ten paces on his 
 way. "0 God, if it be Thy holy will to let loose the poor like 
 a deluge that there may be a new world, then I can under-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 199 
 
 that Thou wouldst abandon the rich man to his blind- 
 ness." 
 
 XII 
 
 SHOWS HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE'S PARLIAMENT 
 
 MEANWHILE, by screaming at the top of her voice, Granny 
 Tonsard had brought several people from Blangy, curious to 
 know what could have happened at the Grand-I-Vert. Blangy 
 itself was about as near to the tavern as the Blangy gate of 
 the park. Among those attracted thus, who should be there 
 but old Niseron La Pechina's grandfather, who had just 
 rung the second Angelus, and was on his way back to train the 
 last vine-stems on his last bit of ground. 
 
 All the honesty left in the commune had taken up its abode 
 in the old vinedresser, whose back was bent with toil, whose 
 features were blanched and hair whitened with age. During 
 the Eevolution he had been the president of the Ville-aux- 
 Fayes Jacobin Club and a sworn member of the local Revo- 
 lutionary Committee. Jean-Frangois Niseron was composed 
 of the stuff of which Apostles are made. In years gone by he 
 had been the very image of Saint Peter, the saint whose por- 
 trait never varies with any painter's brush ; he had the square 
 forehead of the man of the people; the stiff crisped hair of 
 the toiler, the proletarian's muscles, the fisherman's bronzed 
 face, the powerful nose, the half-satirical mouth that laughs 
 at ill-luck, and (a final characteristic) the shoulders of the 
 strong man who will cut his faggots in the neighboring wood 
 and cook his dinner while doctrinaires are talking about it. 
 
 This was Niseron as a man of forty at the time when the 
 Eevolution broke out, a man as hard as iron and as honest as 
 the day. He took the side of the people, he put his faith in 
 the Republic with the first mutterings of a word perhaps even 
 more to be dreaded than the idea behind it. He believed in 
 the Republic of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the brotherhood of 
 man, the exchange of noble sentiments, the public recognition
 
 200 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 of merit, in a fair field and no favor, in a great many things 
 in fact, which, though quite practicable in a district no bigger 
 than ancient Sparta, became Utopian visions when the area 
 in question is expanded into an empire. He subscribed to 
 his theories with his blood ; his only son went to the frontier : 
 he did more ; for them he made the sacrifice of his pecuniary 
 interests, that final immolation of self. He was the nephew 
 and sole heir of the old ure of Blangy, who died and left all 
 his money to pretty Arsene, his servant-girl; and though 
 Niseron, as a tribune, was all-powerful in the district and 
 might have helped himself to his heritage, he respected the 
 wishes of the dead, and accepted the poverty which came upon 
 him as swiftly as the decadence on his Republic. 
 
 Not a groat, not a branch of a tree belonging to another 
 passed into his hands. If this sublime Republican could have 
 founded a school the Republic would have been accepted. He 
 declined to buy the National lands, denying the Republic the 
 right of confiscation. In response to the demands of the Com- 
 mittee of Public Safety he was determined that the manhood 
 of the citizens should work for the holy fatherland the mira- 
 cles that political jugglers tried to effect with gold coin. The 
 man of antiquity publicly upbraided Gaubertin senior with 
 his treacherous double-dealing, with winking at corruption, 
 with picking and stealing. He roundly rated the virtuous 
 Mouchon, that Representative of the People, whose virtue 
 mainly consisted in his incapacity, as was the case with plenty 
 of his like who, strong with the might of a whole nation, with 
 absolute command of the most enormous political resources 
 that ever nation put at the disposition of its rulers, attained 
 fewer great achievements with the strength of a people, than 
 a Richelieu with the weakness of a king. For these reasons 
 Citizen Niseron became. a living reproach to everybody else, 
 and before long the good soul was overwhelmed and buried 
 under the avalanche of oblivion by the terrible formula, 
 "Nothing pleases him !" a catchword in favor with those 
 who have grown fat on sedition. 
 
 This "peasant of the Danube" returned under his own roof
 
 THE PEASANTRY 2&1 
 
 at Blangy. He watched his illusions vanish one by one, saw 
 his Kepublic become an appendage of the Emperor, and sank 
 into penury under the eyes of Eigou, who deliberately ruined 
 him with hypocritical regret. Do you ask why ? Jean-Fran- 
 gois Niseron would not take a penny of Eigou. Eeiterated 
 refusals had taught the wrongful inheritor of old Niseron's 
 goods the depth of the scorn with which the rightful heir 
 regarded him. And, to crown all, the icy contempt had just 
 been succeeded by the fearful threat as to the little grand- 
 daughter when the Abbe Brossette mentioned her to the 
 Countess. 
 
 The old man had written a history of the twelve years of 
 the Eepublic. It was a history written to suit his own no- 
 tions; it was full of the grandiose traits for which those 
 heroic times will be remembered for ever. The good man 
 shut his eyes to all the scandals, slaughter, and spoliation; 
 he always dwelt admiringly on the self-sacrifice, the Vengeur, 
 the "patriotic gifts," the enthusiasm of the people on the 
 frontiers ; he went on with his dream the better to sleep. 
 
 The Eevolution made many poets like old Niseron, poets 
 who sang their songs within our borders or in our armies, in 
 their inmost souls, in the broad light of day, in many a deed 
 done unseen amid the storm-clouds of those times ; even as in 
 the days of the Empire the wounded left forgotten on the 
 field would cry "Long live the Emperor !" before they died. 
 This sublimity is a part of the very nature of France. 
 
 The Abbe Brossette respected Niseron's harmless convic- 
 tions. The old man in the simplicity of his heart had been 
 won by a chance phrase : "The true Eepublic," the priest had 
 said, "is to be found in the Gospel." And the old Ee- 
 publican carried the crucifix ; and he wore the vestment, half- 
 black, half-red; and he wa decorous and serious in church, 
 and he lived by the triple functions which he fulfilled, thanks 
 to the Abbe Brossette, who tried to give the good man not 
 a living, but enough to keep him from starving. 
 
 The old Aristides of Blangy said but little, like all noble 
 dupes who wrap themselves round in the mantle of resigna- 
 tion ; but he never failed to reprove evil-doing, and the peas-
 
 202 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 ants feared him as thieves fear the police. At the Grand-I- 
 Vert they always made much of him, but he did not go there 
 half-a-dozen times in a year. He would execrate the lack of 
 charity in the rich, their selfishness revolted him, and the 
 peasants always took this fibre in his nature for something 
 that he had in common with them. They used to say, "Old 
 Niseron is no friend to the rich folk, so he is one of us ;" and 
 a noble life received by way of civic crown the comment, 
 "Good Daddy Niseron ; there is not a better man !" He was 
 not seldom called in to settle disputes, and in person realized 
 the magic words, "the village elder." 
 
 In spite of his dire poverty he was exceedingly tidy in per- 
 son. He always wore breeches, thick striped stockings, iron- 
 bound shoes, the coat with big buttons that once was almost 
 a national costume, and the broad-brimmed felt hat such as 
 old peasants wear even now. On working days he appeared 
 in .a short blue jacket so threadbare that you could see the 
 manner of its weaving. There was a noble something that 
 cannot be described in his face and bearing, the pride of a 
 man who feels that he is free and worthy of his freedom. 
 In short, he wore clothes, and did not go about in rags. 
 
 "What has been happening out of the common, granny? 
 I heard you from the steeple," he remarked. 
 
 Then the old man heard the whole story of Vatel's frus- 
 tiated attempt; every one spoke at once after the fashion of 
 country folk. 
 
 "If you did not cut the tree, Vatel was in the wrong; but 
 if you did cut the tree, you have done two bad things," pro- 
 nounced Father Niseron. 
 
 "Just take a drop of wine!" put in Tonsard, offering a 
 brimming glass. 
 
 "Shall we set off?" asked Vermichel, looking at Brunei 
 
 "Yes. We can do without Daddy Fourchon; we can 
 take the deputy-mayor from Conches with us instead," 
 said Brunet. "Go on ahead, I have a paper to leave at the 
 chateau; Daddy Rigou has gained his case, and I must give 
 notice of judgment." And Brunet, fortified by a couple
 
 THE PEASANTRY 303 
 
 of nips of brandy, remounted his gray mare, with a good-day 
 to Father Niseron, for everybody in the valley looked up to 
 the old man. 
 
 No science, nay, no practised statistician, can obtain 
 statistics of the more than telegraphic speed with which news 
 spreads through country districts, no account of the ways by 
 which it crosses waste wildernesses (the standing reproach 
 of French administrators and French capital). It is a bit of 
 well-known contemporary history that a banker prince rode 
 his horses to death between the field of Waterloo and Paris 
 (for he, needless to say, was gaining what the Emperor had 
 lost to wit, a kingdom), yet after all he only reached the 
 capital a few hours ahead of the disastrous tidings. So 
 within an hour of the time when Granny Tonsard fell out 
 with Vatel a good many regular customers had dropped in 
 at the Grand-I-Vert. 
 
 The first to come was Courtecuisse. You would have found 
 it hard to recognize in him the jolly gamekeeper, the fat 
 Friar John, for whom it may be remembered his wife had 
 boiled the coffee and milk on a certain morning not so very 
 long back. He looked years older, he had grown thin and 
 wan, a dreadful object-lesson to eyes that took no heed of the 
 warning. 
 
 "He had a mind to go up higher than the ladder," so it 
 was said when anybody pitied the ex-keeper and blamed 
 Rigou ; "he wanted to turn master." 
 
 And, indeed, when Courtecuisse bought the Bdchelerie he 
 had meant to "turn master," and had boasted as much. His 
 wife went out collecting manure. Before daybreak she and 
 Courtecuisse were at work digging their richly-manured gar- 
 den plot, which brought in several successive crops in the 
 year, and yet they only just managed to pay Rigou the in- 
 terest due on the balance of the purchase-money. Their 
 daughter in service at Auxerre sent her wages to her father 
 and mother; but do what they might, and in spite of this 
 help, the balance was now due, and they had not a brass 
 
 farthing. 
 
 VOL. 1039
 
 204 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Mme. Courtecuisse had been used to indulge now and again 
 in a bottle of spiced wine and sugared toast. Now she drank 
 nothing but water. Courtecuisse scarcely trusted himself in- 
 side the Grand-I-Vert lest he should be drawn into laying out 
 three-halfpence. He was no longer a person to be courted. 
 He had lost his free nips at the tavern, and like all fools he 
 whined about ingratitude. In fact he was going the way of all 
 peasants bitten with the wish to own land; he was ill-nour- 
 ished, and found the work heavier and heavier, as the food 
 grew less. 
 
 "Courtecuisse has put too much in bricks and mortar," said 
 the envious. "He should have waited till he was master be- 
 fore he began to plant wall-fruit." 
 
 The simpleton had made improvements, brought the three 
 acres sold by Kigou into high cultivation, and lived in fear 
 of being turned out ! The man who once wore leather shoes 
 and sportsman's gaiters now went about in sabots, and 
 dressed no better than old Fourchon. And he laid the blame 
 of his hard life on the gentry at the Aigues ! Gnawing care 
 had made the once chubby, jovial little man so dull and sullen 
 that he looked like a victim of slow poison or some incurable 
 disease. 
 
 "What can be the matter with you, M. Courtecuisse ? Has 
 some one cut your tongue out?" asked Tonsard, when the 
 tale of the recent encounter had been told and the newcomer 
 was silent. 
 
 "That would be a pity," said La Tonsard; "he has no call 
 to complain of the midwife who cut his tongue-string; she 
 made a good job of it." 
 
 "Thinking of ways to pay off M. Rigou freezes your gab," 
 complained the old man, grown so much older in so short a 
 time. 
 
 "Pooh !" said Granny Tonsard. "You have a good-looking 
 girl; she will be seventeen now; if she behaves wisely you will 
 easily settle with that old scribbler yonder 
 
 "We sent her away to old Mme. Mariotte at Auxerre two 
 years ago on purpose to keep her out of harm's way. I would 
 sooner die than let her "
 
 THE PEASANTRY 205 
 
 "What a fool !" put in Tonsard. "Look at my girls : are 
 they dead? Any one who should say that they were not as 
 steady as stone images would have to answer for it to my 
 gun." 
 
 "It would be very hard to have to go out of the place yon- 
 der !" cried Courtecuisse, shaking his head. "I had sooner 
 some one paid me for shooting down one of those arminacs!" 
 
 "Oh, a girl would do better to save her father than to keep 
 her virtue till it mildews," retorted Tonsard. He felt a little 
 sharp tap on his shoulder as he spoke. It was Father Nise- 
 ron. 
 
 "That was not well said," began the old man. "A father 
 is the guardian of the honor of his family. It is just such 
 doings that draw down contempt on us, and they say that 
 the people are not fit to have liberty. The people ought to set 
 the rich an example of honor and civic virtues. You all sell 
 yourselves to Eigou for gold ; every one of you ! When you 
 do not give him your daughters, you sell your own manhood ! 
 That is bad." 
 
 "Just see what Short Boots has come to !" said Tonsard. 
 
 "Just see what I have come to !" returned old Niseron. "I 
 sleep in peace ; there are no thorns in my pillow." 
 
 "Let him talk, Tonsard," said La Tonsard in her husband's 
 ear. "You know very well that that is his crotchet, poor 
 dear !" 
 
 Bonnebault and Marie, and Catherine and her brother all 
 came in at that moment. All four were in a bad humor 
 over the failure of Nicolas' scheme, and Michaud's proposal 
 overheard by them had been the last straw. So Nicolas, 
 once under the paternal roof, broke into a frightful outburst 
 against the Aigues and the whole Michaud establishment. 
 
 "Here is the harvest beginning ! Well, now, I am not go- 
 ing away until I have lighted my pipe at their ricks," he 
 shouted, bringing down his fist with a bang on the table at 
 which he sat. 
 
 "There is no need to yelp like that before anybody and 
 everybody/' said Godain, pointing to old Niseron.
 
 206 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "If he were to tell tales, I would wring his neck like a 
 chicken's," put in Catherine. "He has had his day : a meddle- 
 some old fault-finder! Virtuous they call him! It is his 
 temperament, that is all !" 
 
 It was a strange and curious sight to see all the upturned 
 faces of the folk gathered together in that den, while Granny 
 Tonsard stood sentinel at the door, lest any one should over- 
 hear the talk over the liquor. 
 
 But the most alarming among all those faces belonged to 
 Godain, Catherine's wooer; the most alarming and yet the 
 least striking face in the tavern. Godain was a miser who 
 lacked gold a miser, that is, of the most pitiless kind; does 
 not the hoardless miser take precedence of the miser who 
 broods over his treasure? The latter looks within himself, 
 but the other gazes into the future with a dreadful fixity. 
 This Godain was a type which seemed to represent the most 
 numerous class among the peasantry. Godain was short, so 
 short that he had been exempted from military service. He 
 was naturally thin, and toil and the dull frugality which 
 saps the life of such insatiable workers as Courtecuisse had 
 still further dried him up. His little meagre face was lighted 
 by two yellow eyes, streaked with green threads, and specked 
 with brown. The greed of gain, of gain at any price, which 
 shone in them, was steeped in a cold-blooded sensuality; de- 
 sires once hot and vehement had cooled and hardened like 
 lava. The skin was strained tightly over the brown, mummy- 
 like temples, the hairs of a scanty beard grew here and there 
 among the wrinkles like cornstalks among the furrows. Noth- 
 ing wrung sweat from Godain; he reabsorbed his substance. 
 The sinewy, indefatigable hands like hairy claws might have 
 been made of old seasoned wood. He was barely seven-and- 
 twenty, yet there were white threads already among the rusty 
 black hair. 
 
 As to dress, he wore a blouse, which gave glimpses through 
 the fastening of a coarse linen shirt, which to all appearance 
 he only changed once a month, and washed himself in the 
 Thune. His sabots were mended with scraps of old iron. It
 
 THE PEASANTRY 207 
 
 was impossible to pronounce on the original material of his 
 trousers, for the darns and patches which covered it were 
 infinite. Finally, he wore a shocking cap, evidently picked 
 up on the doorstep of some tradesman's house in Ville-aux- 
 Fayes. 
 
 Godain was clear-sighted enough to see the value of tha 
 elements of latent fortune in Catherine. He meant to suc- 
 ceed Tonsard at the Grand-I-Vert, and with that end in view 
 he put forth all his cunning, all his power, to capture her. 
 He promised her that she should be rich, he promised 
 that she should have all the license which her mother had 
 taken; before he had finished he had promised his future 
 father-in-law a heavy rent for his tavern, five hundred francs 
 a year until the place was paid for ; Godain had had an inter- 
 view with Brunet, and on the heads of that interview he 
 hoped to pay in stamped paper. As a journeyman agricul- 
 tural implement maker, this gnome would work for the 
 plow-wright when work was plentiful; but he took the 
 highly-paid overtime jobs. He had invested some eighteen 
 hundred francs with Gaubertin, but not a soul knew of the 
 money, and he lived like a miserably poor man, lodging in 
 a garret in his master's house, and gleaning at harvest-time, 
 but he carried Gaubertin's receipt about him, sewn into the 
 band of his Sunday trousers, and saw it renewed each year; 
 each year the amount was a little larger, swelled by his sav- 
 ings and the interest. 
 
 "Eh! what's that to me?" shouted Nicolas, in reply to 
 Godain's prudent observation. "If I am to go for a soldier, 
 I would sooner that the sawdust drank my blood at once, 
 than give it drop by drop. And I will rid the neighborhood 
 of one of these arminacs which the devil has let loose upon 
 us." And with that he told the tale of the so-called plot which 
 Michaud had woven against him. 
 
 "Where would you have France look for her soldiers?" the 
 old man asked gravely. During the silence that followed on 
 Nicolas' hideous threat he had risen and faced the young 
 man.
 
 208 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "A fellow serves his time in the army and comes back 
 again," said Bonnebault, curling his moustache. 
 
 Old Niseron saw that all the black sheep of the district 
 had come together; he shook his head and went out, leaving 
 a farthing with Mme. Tonsard to pay for his glass of wine. 
 There was a general stir of satisfaction among those who sat 
 drinking as soon as the good man had set foot on the steps. 
 It would have been plain to any onlooker that they all felt 
 constraint in the presence of this embodiment of their con- 
 science. 
 
 "Well; now, what do you say to all this, hey ! Short Boots ?" 
 asked Vaudoyer, who suddenly appeared and heard the tale 
 of Vatel's exploit from Tonsard. 
 
 Courtecuisse (short shanks), whose name was nearly al- 
 ways transformed in this way into "short boots," clicked his 
 tongue against the roof of his mouth, and set down his glass 
 on the table. 
 
 "Vatel is in the wrong," he answered. "In the old mother's 
 place, I should bruise my ribs and take to my bed, I would 
 say I was ill, and I would summon the Upholsterer and his 
 keeper for sixty francs of damages. M. Sarcus would give 
 them to you." 
 
 "Anyhow, the Upholsterer would give the money to avoid 
 the fuss that might be made about it," said Godain. 
 
 Vaudoyer, ex-policeman, five feet six inches in height, 
 with a face pitted by the smallpox, and hollowed out after 
 the nutcracker pattern, held his peace, and looked dubious at 
 this. 
 
 "Well, what now?" asked Tonsard, whose mouth watered 
 for those sixty francs. "What is ruffling you now, great 
 noodle ? Sixty francs to my mother would put me in the way 
 of making something out of it ! We will raise a racket for 
 three hundred francs, and M. Gourdon might as well go up 
 to the Aigues and tell them that mother's hip has been put 
 out." 
 
 "And they would put it out for her," his wife went on; 
 "these things are done in Paris."
 
 THE PEASANTRY 209 
 
 "That would cost too much," objected Godain. 
 
 "I have heard too much talk about the lawyers to feel sure 
 that things will go as you wish," Vaudoyer said at last; he 
 had often been present in court, and had assisted Ex-Ser- 
 geant Soudry. "At Soulanges it would be all right even now; 
 M. Soudry represents the Government, and there is no love 
 lost between him and the Upholsterer. But if you attack 
 Vatel, they will be sharp enough to defend the case ; and they 
 will say, 'The woman was in the wrong; she had a sapling 
 in her bundle, or she would have let the forester look into 
 her faggots on the road; she would not have run away; and 
 if anything happened to her, she has only her own misdoings 
 to blame for it.' No, it is not a case to be sure of." 
 
 "Did the master defend the case when I summoned him?" 
 said Courtecuisse. "Not he. He paid me." 
 
 "I will go to Soulanges if you like," said Bonnebault, "and 
 ask M. Gourdon, the registrar, what he thinks, and I will let 
 you know this evening if there is anything in it." 
 
 "You only want an excuse for going to see that great goose, 
 Socquard's girl," said Marie Tonsard, slapping Bonnebault 
 on the shoulder as if she meant to sound his lungs. 
 
 Just at that moment came a fragment of an old Bur- 
 gundian Christmas carol: 
 
 "A brave deed once He did, I wot, 
 
 Whenas our Lord did dine, 
 The water in the waterpot 
 He turned to Malmsey wine." 
 
 Everybody recognized Daddy Fourchon's voice, raised in a 
 ditty which must have been peculiarly pleasing to the old 
 man. Mouche piped an accompaniment in childish treble. 
 
 "Oh, they have had a blow-out!" Granny Tonsard called 
 out to her daughter; "your father is as red as a gridiron, 
 and the child is dyed the color of a vine-stem." 
 
 "Hail !" cried the old man, "you rascals are here in full 
 force ! Hail !" he added, turning suddenly on his grand-
 
 210 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 daughter, who had her arms about Bonnebault. "Hail, Mary ! 
 full of vices, Satan be with thee, cursed be thou above all 
 women, and the rest of it. Hail, fellows! You are caught 
 now ! You may say good-bye to your sheaves ! Here is news 
 for you! I told you so, I told you that the master yonder 
 would be one too many for you! Well, then, he will have 
 the law of you, and make you smart for it ! Ah ! see what 
 comes of measuring yourselves with the bourgeois ! The 
 bourgeois have made so many laws, that they have a law for 
 
 every little thing " 
 
 j Here an alarming hiccough suddenly gave a new direction 
 to the venerable orator's ideas. 
 
 "If Vermichel were here, I would blow down his throat; 
 he should know what Alicante means ! Ah ! that is a wine ! 
 If I were not a Burgundian, I would be a Spaniard ! A wine 
 of God ! The Pope says mass with it, I know ! What a wine ! 
 I am young again ! I say, Short Boots, if your wife were 
 here I think she would be young too ! Spanish wine beats 
 spiced wine ; no question about it ! There ought to be an- 
 other Revolution, only to clear out the cellars " 
 
 "But what is the news, dad?" asked Tonsard. 
 
 "There will be no harvest for the like of you. The Up- 
 holsterer will put a stop to the gleaning !" 
 
 "Stop the gleaning!" Every voice in the tavern went up 
 as one voice, dominated by the shrill notes of four women. 
 
 "Yes," piped Mouche ! "and he will issue a proclamation 
 by Groison, and have notices stuck up all over the canton; 
 and no one is to glean except those who have paupers' cer- 
 tificates." 
 
 "And, get hold of the meaning of this" said Fourchon, 
 "other communes will not be allowed to sneak in." 
 
 ''What's up?" said Bonnebault. "Neither my grand- 
 mother nor I, nor your mother, Godain, are to be allowed to 
 glean here? Pretty tricks these of the authorities! 
 Plague take them ! Why this General, your mayor, is a per- 
 fect heli-broke-loose " 
 
 "Are you going to glean all the same, Godain?" asked
 
 THE PEASANTRY 211 
 
 Tonsard, turning to the plow-wright's assistant, who was 
 talking aside with Catherine. 
 
 "If asked Godain. "I have nothing; so I am a pauper, 
 and I shall ask for a certificate." 
 
 "Just tell me what they gave daddy for his otter, honey?" 
 said the comely mistress of the house. Mouche, sitting on 
 his aunt's knee, was quite overcome by the effort to digest 
 his late meal; his eyes were heavy with the two bottles of 
 wine consumed therewith, but he laid his head on his aunt's 
 neck, and murmured cunningly: 
 
 "I do not know ; but he has gold ! Keep me like a fight- 
 ing-cock for a month, and I might find out for you where he 
 hides his money, for he has a hoard somewhere." 
 
 "Father has gold !" said La Tonsard in low tones, meant 
 only for her husband, whose voice rose above the storm of 
 heated discussion in which the whole tavern joined. 
 
 "Hush !" cried the old sentinel. "Here's Groison !" 
 
 Deep silence prevailed in the tavern. When Groison might 
 be supposed to be out of earshot, Granny Tonsard gave the 
 signal, and again the discussion broke out : Would it be pos- 
 sible to glean as heretofore without a pauper's certificate? 
 
 "You will be made to obey, that is certain," said old Four- 
 chon, "for the Upholsterer has gone to see the prefect and 
 ask him to call the soldiers out to keep order. They will 
 shoot you down like dogs which we are !" wailed the old 
 man, struggling with the torpid influence which the Alicante 
 exerted on his tongue. 
 
 This second announcement made by Fourchon, preposter- 
 ous though it was, produced an effect. The audience grew 
 thoughtful; they quite believed that the Government was ca- 
 pable of massacring them without mercy. Bonnebault spoke : 
 
 "There was this sort of trouble round about Toulouse when 
 I was stationed there," said he. "We marched out, the peas- 
 ants were cut down and arrested. It was a joke to see them 
 trying to make a stand against regular troops. Ten of them 
 were sent off to the hulks afterwards and eleven more went 
 to jail, and it all came to nothing, ay ! A soldier is a soldier, 
 and has a right to cut you civilians down, gee whoa ! "
 
 212 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "What is the matter with you all," asked Tonsard; "you 
 are as scared as wild goats? Perhaps they will catch my 
 mother or my girls with something, will they? Some one is 
 going to be locked up, eh? Well, then, they will go to jail. 
 The Upholsterer will not put the whole neighborhood in jail. 
 And if he does, the King will feed them better than they feed 
 themselves; and they warm the cells in winter." 
 
 "You are simpletons !" bellowed old Fourchon. "It is bet- 
 ter to lie low, it is, than to fly in the man's face. If you do, 
 you will be paid out for it. If you like the hulks that is 
 another thing ! The work is not so hard there as it is in the 
 fields, it is true, but you have not your liberty." 
 
 "Perhaps, after all," began Vaudoyer, who was one of the 
 boldest in counsel, "it would be better that one of us should 
 risk his skin to rid the country of the Beast of Gevaudan, 
 that has his lair by the Avonne gate " 
 
 "Settle Michaud !" said Nicolas. "That is what I think." 
 
 "Things are not ripe yet," said Fourchon, "We should lose 
 too much, children. What we ought to do is to make a poor 
 mouth, and cry out that we are starving ; the master and his 
 wife up at the Aigues will be for helping us, and you will 
 make more that way than by the gleaning." 
 
 "You are a chuckle-headed lot," shouted Tonsard. "Sup- 
 pose that there is a racket with the police and the soldiers, 
 they will not clap a whole countryside in irons, and there are 
 the old seigneurs, and the folk at Ville-aux-Fayes ; they are 
 well disposed to back us up." 
 
 "That is true," said Courtecuisse. "Nobody complains ex- 
 cept the Upholsterer. M. de Soulanges and M. de Ron- 
 querolles and the rest are content ! When one thinks that if 
 that cuirassier had been man enough to be killed with the 
 rest of them, I should be snug at my Avonne gate at this 
 day, and that he has turned me topsy-turvy till I don't know 
 whether I am on my head or my heels " 
 
 "They will not call the soldiers out for a beggarly bour- 
 geois who is at loggerheads with the whole neighborhood 
 round," said Godain. "It is his own fault. He must needs
 
 THE PEASANTRY 213 
 
 upset everything and everybody here; Government will tell 
 him to go and hang himself." 
 
 "That is just what Government will say ; Government can't 
 help itself poor Government I" said Fourchon, smitten with 
 a sudden tenderness for the Government. "I am sorry for 
 Government ; 'tis a good Government. It is hard up and has 
 not a sou, like us which is a stupid thing for a Government 
 when it coins the money itself. Ah! if I were Govern- 
 ment " 
 
 "But they told me over at Ville-aux-Fayes that M. de 
 Eonquerolles had said something in the Assembly about our 
 rights/' cried Courtecuisse. 
 
 "Yes, I saw that in M'sieu Eigou's paper," said Vaudoyer, 
 who could read and write, in his quality of ex-policeman. 
 
 In spite of his maudlin tenderness, old Fourchon had been 
 following the discussion, as well as the by-play which made 
 it interesting, with close and intelligent attention. Suddenly 
 he contrived to get on his feet and take up his position in the 
 midst of the tavern. 
 
 "Listen to the old one, he is tipsy," said Tonsard; "he 
 has twice as much mischief in him, his own and the 
 wine " 
 
 "Spanish wine ! that makes three !" broke in Fourchon, 
 laughing like a satyr. "Children, you must not take the bull 
 by the horns, you are not strong enough ; take him in flank ! 
 Sham dead, lie like sleeping dogs ! The little woman has 
 had a good frightening by now; things will not go on like 
 this much longer, you will see. Her will leave the place, and 
 if her goes the Upholsterer will go too, for he dotes upon her. 
 That is the way to do it. But to hurry them away, I advise 
 you to take their counselor from them, their stronghold, our 
 spy, our ape." 
 
 "Who is that?" 
 
 "Eh! why, 'tis the cursed cure!" said Tonsard, "he that 
 rakes up sins and would like to feed us on holy wafers." 
 
 "Eight you are !" cried Vaudoyer, "we did very well with- 
 out the cure. Something ought to be done to rid us of the 
 wafer-eater. He is the common enemy."
 
 214 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "The whipper-snapper," said Fourchon (this was a nick- 
 name given to the cure on account of his shabby appearance), 
 "may he fall into the hands of some sly hussy, for he keeps 
 every fast day. Then if he were caught on the spree there 
 would be a fine hubbub, and his bishop would have to send 
 him somewhere else. Old Rigou, good soul, would be mightily 
 pleased. If Courtecuisse's girl would leave her place at 
 Auxerre, she is so pretty that if she turned pious she would 
 save the country. Ta, ran, tan ti !" 
 
 "And why should it not be you?" whispered Godain to 
 Catherine. "There would be a basketful of crowns to be made 
 out of it for hush-money, and you would be mistress here at 
 once." 
 
 "Are we going to glean or are we not?" cried Bonnebault. 
 "Much I care for your Abbe. I am from Conches, and we 
 have no parson there to harrow our consciences with his 
 
 "Wait a bit," opined Vaudoyer. "Some one ought to go 
 to old Eigou (he knows the law) and ask him if the Up- 
 holsterer can stop our gleaning. He will tell us if we are in 
 the right. If the Upholsterer is within the law, then we will 
 see about taking him in flank, as the old one says." 
 
 "There will be blood shed," said Nicolas, rising to his feet 
 (he had finished oft 8 the bottle of wine which Catherine had 
 set before him to keep him quiet). "If you will listen to me, 
 some one will bring down Michaud; but you are a sappy lot 
 of dawdlers !" 
 
 "Not me!" said Bonnebault. "If you are the friends to 
 keep mum about it, I will undertake to bring down the Up- 
 holsterer myself ! What fun to lodge a bullet in his bread- 
 basket ! I should have my revenge on all my stuck-up of- 
 ficers." 
 
 "There, there f" cried Jean-Louis Tonsard, who had come 
 in since old Fourdion entered. Some said that Gaubertin was 
 Jean-Louis' father. The young fellow had succeeded to Ton- 
 sard's occupation of clipping hedges and arbors and the like 
 offices. He went to well-to-do houses, chatted with masters
 
 THE PEASANTRY 215 
 
 and servants, and by dint of picking up ideas in this way he 
 became the man of resource and most knowing member of 
 the family. For the last few months Jean-Louis had paid 
 court to Eigou's pretty servant girl, and in this matter, as 
 will very shortly be seen, he justified the high opinion en- 
 tertained of his shrewdness. 
 
 "Well, prophet, what is the matter?" asked his parent. 
 
 "You are playing the bourgeois' game, I tell you," said 
 Jean-Louis. "Frighten the gentry at the Aigues so as to 
 maintain your rights, well and good ; but as for driving them 
 out of the place and having the Aigues put up for auction, 
 that is what the bourgeois want in the valley, but it is not 
 to our interest to do it. If you help to divide up the big 
 estates, where are the National lands to come from in the 
 revolution that's coming ? You will get the land for nothing 
 then, just as old Kigou did; but once let the bourgeois chew 
 up the land, they will spit it out in much smaller and dearer 
 bits. You will work for them, like all the others who are 
 working for Rigou. Look at Courtecuisse !" 
 
 The policy set forth in this harangue was too profound for 
 wine-flustered wits. Every one present, Courtecuisse ex- 
 cepted, was putting money by. Every one meant to have his 
 share of the loaf of the Aigues. So they allowed Jean-Louis 
 to talk on, and kept up private conversations among them- 
 selves, after the manner of the Chamber of Deputies. 
 
 "Well, now, you hear that ! You will be Eigou's cat's- 
 paws," cried Fourchon, the only one who caught the drift of 
 the speech made by his grandson. 
 
 Just at that moment Langlume, the miller from the Aigues, 
 happened to pass. La Tonsard hailed him. 
 
 "So it is true, is it, that they are going to stop the gleaning, 
 Mister Deputy Mayor ?" 
 
 Langlume, a jovial-looking little man with a floury counte- 
 nance and whitish-gray suit of clothes, came up the steps, 
 and immediately every peasant looked serious. 
 
 "Lord, boys, yes and no. The really poor will glean; but 
 the steps that will be taken will be greatly to your inter- 
 ests "
 
 216 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "How so?'"' inquired Godain. 
 
 "Why, if they prevent all the poor folk from pouring in 
 on us," said the miller, with a shrewd Norman wink, "that 
 will not hinder the rest of you from going to glean elsewhere ; 
 unless all the mayors copy the mayor of Blangy." 
 
 "So, it is true?" asked Tonsard, with menace in his looks. 
 
 "For my own part," said Bonnebault, as he tilted his forag- 
 ing cap over one ear, and twirled his hazel switch till ic 
 whistled about him; "I am going back to Conches to give 
 warning to friends there." And with that the Lovelace of 
 the valley went out, whistling the tune of the martial ditty : 
 
 "You know the Hussars of the Guard, 
 And you don't know the Trombone in the Band?" 
 
 "I say, Marie !" the old grandmother called, "your sweet- 
 heart is going a droll way round to Conches." 
 
 Marie sprang to the door. "He is going to see Aglae !" she 
 cried. "That goose of a girl yonder wants a good basting, 
 once for all." 
 
 "Here, Vaudoyer," said Tonsard, "just go and see old 
 Rigou. Then we shall know what to be at. He is your oracle ; 
 what he spouts out costs nothing." 
 
 "Here is another piece of folly," exclaimed Jean-Louis 
 under his breath. "He does nothing for nothing. Annette 
 spoke truth ; he is a worse counselor than anger." 
 
 "I recommend you to be careful," added Langlume, "for 
 the General went to the prefecture about your misdoings, and 
 Sibilet said that he vowed on his honor that he would go to 
 Paris if need was, to speak with the Chancellor of France, 
 the King, and the whole shop, but he would have the law of 
 his peasants." 
 
 "His peasants !" 
 
 "Oh, indeed ! then perhaps we are not our own masters 
 now ?" asked Tonsard. 
 
 At this inquiry, Vaudoyer went in search of the ex-mayor, 
 and Langlum, who had already gone out out, returned a
 
 THE PEASANTRY 217 
 
 step or two, and called back, "You pack of do-nothings ! have 
 you incomes of your own that you have a mind to be your own 
 masters ?" 
 
 The words were spoken in jest, but the profound truth in 
 them was felt something in the way that a horse feels a flick 
 of the lash. 
 
 "Tra, la, la! you masters! I say, sonny, after what you 
 did this morning, you are more like to play a tune on the 
 rifle than to have my clarinette in your fingers." 
 
 "Don't, you worry him ; he is just the one to make you 
 bring up our wine by punching your stomach," said Cathe- 
 rine, turning savagely on her grandfather. 
 
 XIII 
 
 THE PEASANTS' MONEY-LENDER 
 
 STRATEGICALLY speaking, Eigou at Blangy was a sentinel 
 at an outpost in time of war. He kept watch over the Aigues, 
 and thoroughly he did his work ! No police spy is comparable 
 with an amateur detective in the service of hate. 
 
 When the General first came to the Aigues, Eigou must 
 have had his own ideas concerning the newcomer, and plans, 
 which came to nothing on Montcornet's marriage with a 
 Troisville; at first he appeared to be well-disposed towards 
 the great landowner. He had shown his intentions so plainly 
 that Gaubertin judged it expedient to offer him a share of the 
 spoil so as to involve him in the conspiracy against the Aigues. 
 But before Eigou committed himself and accepted the part 
 for which he was cast, he meant to force the General "to show 
 his hand," as he put it. 
 
 One day after the Countess was installed, a tiny green- 
 painted basket-chaise drove up to the main entrance of the 
 Aigues. In it sat his worship the mayor, with the mayoress 
 at his side. The pair stepped out of it and ascended the 
 flight of steps on the terrace. But the Countess was a de- 
 voted partisan of the bishop, the clerical party, and the Abbe
 
 218 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Brossette; and Francois reported that "her ladyship was not 
 at home." The piece of impertinence, which might have been 
 expected of a woman born in Russia, brought a yellow flush 
 to the Benedictine's visage. 
 
 If the lady had felt any curiosity to see the man of whom 
 the cure had said "that he was a soul in hell who plunged 
 into sin as into a bath to refresh himself," she might per- 
 haps have avoided that blunder. She would have been care- 
 ful not to arouse in the mayor that cold-blooded hatred which 
 Liberals bore Royalists, a hatred that could not fail to in- 
 crease, when the near neighborhood kept the memory of a 
 mortification ever fresh. 
 
 A few explanatory details concerning this man will have 
 the double advantage of throwing light on Rigou's share of 
 the "big business," as his two partners called it, and of por- 
 traying, at the same time, an extremely curious type. It is 
 a rural product peculiar to France, and undiscovered as yet 
 by any pencil. And more than this : every single detail is of 
 immense importance considered in its bearing on the history 
 of this valley; Rigou's house, his fashion of blowing his fire, 
 his habits at table, his opinions and way of life none of 
 these things are insignificant from this point of view. In 
 fact, the renegade illustrates in person democracy in theory 
 and practice; he is its alpha and omega and summum. 
 
 Possibly you may remember the portraits of other Mas- 
 ters of Avarice, painted in preceding Scenes. The Provincial 
 Miser, first and foremost Goodman Grandet of Saumur, 
 whose avarice was as much a part of his nature as the tiger's 
 thirst for blood ; next follows old Gobseck the bill-discounter, 
 the Jesuit of Gold for him the relish of money lay in the 
 sense of power over others which it gave him, tears for him 
 were as wine, and he was a connoisseur; then comes the 
 Baron de Nucingen, who raised commercial cheating to the 
 height of statecraft; and lastly, surely you recollect a study 
 of the household miser old Hochon of Issoudun or that 
 other, grown avaricious through family ambition, little La 
 Baudraye of Sancerre?
 
 THE PEASANTRY 21 
 
 And yet, so diverse are the shades of the same human affec- 
 tions, so different the color they take up in passing through v 
 each human medium, and this is so especially the case with 
 avarice, that there is another distinct type still left on the 
 dissecting slab of the amphitheatre of the study of contem- 
 porary human nature. Eigou was Eigou, the Selfish Miser, 
 or, to be more precise, a miser full of tender cares for hi3 
 own comfort, but hard and indifferent where others were con- 
 cerned. He was, to be brief, the ecclesiastical miser, the 
 monk who remained a monk so long as he could squeeze the 
 juice of the lemon called Good Living, and took the secular 
 habit the better to dip in the public purse. Let us begin 
 by explaining how he had come to lead a life of unbroken 
 ease and comfort under his own roof. 
 
 Blangy, to wit the cluster of some sixty houses described 
 in Blondet's letter to Nathan, stands on rising ground on the 
 left bank of the Thune. Each house is surrounded by its 
 own garden, and in consequence Blangy is an extremely pretty 
 village. Some few of the houses are down by the waterside, 
 at the very top of the knoll stands the village church, and 
 beside it the house that used to be the parsonage, the church- 
 yard lying round about the apse end, after the country 
 fashion. 
 
 Eigou took the opportunity of laying his sacrilegious hands 
 on the parsonage-house, built in bygone days by that good 
 Catholic, Mile. Choin, on a bit of ground bought by her for 
 the purpose. The church was only separated from the par- 
 sonage by the width of a terraced garden, whence there was 
 a view over the lands of Blangy, Soulanges, and Cerneux ; for 
 the house stood between the parks of the two manors. A field 
 lay on the side furthest from the church, a bit of land pur- 
 chased by the previous cure a short time before his death. 
 Eigou, by nature suspicious, had put up a wall about it. 
 
 As in due time the mayor declined to give up the parsonage- 
 house for the purposes for which it was intended, the com- 
 mune was obliged to buy a cottage for the cure near the 
 
 church, and to lay out five thousand francs in setting it in 
 VOL. 10 40
 
 220 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 order, enlarging it, and adding a bit of garden to it undef 
 the wall of the sacristy, so that there might be direct com- 
 munication as heretofore between the cure's house and the 
 church. 
 
 Both houses, therefore, being built on the alignment of 
 the church, with which their gardens apparently connected 
 them, looked out upon a square space, which might be con- 
 sidered as the market-place of Blangy, and this more particu- 
 larly of late years, since the Count had built a communal 
 hall, which served as a mayor's office, just opposite the cure's 
 house, and had lodged the rural policeman in it. Further- 
 more, he had erected a schoolhouse for the brothers of the 
 Doctrine chretienne, for which the Abbe Brossette had for- 
 merly pleaded in vain. The sometime Benedictine's house and 
 the parsonage where the young cure lived, being both contigu- 
 ous to the church, were as much united as separated by the 
 edifice, and furthermore, they overlooked each other, and con- 
 sequently the whole village knew all that went on in the Abbe 
 Brossette's household. 
 
 The village street wound uphill from the Thune to the 
 church, and the knoll of Blangy was crowned by strips of 
 vineyard and peasants' gardens and a patch of copse. 
 
 Rigou's house was the best in the village; it was built of 
 the large flints peculiar to Burgundy, laid in yellowish mortar 
 smoothed out in squares the size of the width of the trowel, 
 which produced a series of wavy lines with a flint surface, 
 usually black, protruding here and there from the mortar. 
 Bands of yellow mortar, unspotted by flints, did duty for 
 stone facings round the windows, the surface (in course of 
 time) being covered with fine meandering cracks, such as 
 you behold in old ceilings. The clumsy outside shutters were 
 conspicuous by reason of thick coats of dragon-green paint. 
 Scales of lichen concealed the joints of the slates on the roof. 
 It was a typical Burgundian house, such as the traveler may 
 see by thousands as he crosses this part of France. 
 
 The house door opened upon a corridor, in the middle of 
 which the wooden staircase rose. As soon as you entered you
 
 THE PEASANTRY 221 
 
 /aw the door of a large sitting-room lighted by three win- 
 dows, which looked out into the square. The kitchen, con- 
 trived underneath the staircase, looked into a yard neatly 
 paved with cobble-stones, with a large double-leaved gate on 
 the side of the street. So much for the ground floor. 
 
 There were three rooms on the first story, and a little attic 
 filled the space in the roof above. 
 
 Outside, in the yard, a woodshed, stable and coach-house 
 occupied the side at right angles to the house ; and on a floor 
 above the rickety erection there was a fruit-loft and a ser- 
 vant's bedroom. Opposite the house stood the cowshed and 
 the pig-sties. 
 
 The garden was about an acre in extent and enclosed by 
 walls. It was a cure's garden, full of espaliers, fruit-trees, 
 and trellis vines, and sanded garden walks with pyramid 
 fruit-trees on either side, and squares of pot-herbs manured 
 with stable litter. The croft above the house had also been 
 planted with trees and enclosed within walls; it was a space 
 large enough to keep a couple of cows all the year round. 
 
 Inside the house the sitting-room was wainscoted to elbow- 
 height and hung with old tapestry. The furniture of wal- 
 nut wood, brown with age, and covered with needlework, was 
 in keeping with the old-fashioned rooms and ceiling. The 
 three main beams were visible and painted, but the interven- 
 ing spaces were plastered. Above the walnut-wood chimney- 
 piece stood a grotesque mirror, its sole ornament with the 
 exception of two brass eggs mounted on marble pedestals. 
 These objects split in half; you turned back the upper part 
 on its hinge and it did duty as a candle-sconce. This kind 
 of convertible candle-stick with its little ornamental chains 
 is an invention of the days of Louis XV., and is beginning 
 to grow scarce. 
 
 On a green and gold bracket set in the wall opposite the 
 windows stood a clock, an excellent time-keeper in spite of 
 its cheap case. The curtains, suspended from rings on an 
 iron curtain-rod, were fifty years old at least, and made of 
 a cotton material, of a checked pattern, very similar to the
 
 2TJ2 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 cottons printed in pink and white squares that used to come 
 from the Indies. A sideboard and a table completed the list 
 of furniture, which was kept spotlessly clean. 
 
 By the hearth stood a huge easy-chair, dedicated to Eigou's 
 sole use; and in the corner above the low what-not, which 
 he used as a desk, hung a pair of bellows from a brass- 
 headed nail of the commonest kind. To that pair of bellows 
 Bigou owed his prosperity. 
 
 From this bald description, which rivals an auctioneer's 
 sale-catalogue for brevity, the reader might easily be led to 
 imagine that the furniture of M. and Mme. Eigou's re- 
 spective chambers was limited to strict necessaries, which 
 would be a delusion. Eigou's parsimony was not of the kind 
 that denies itself any material comfort. Wherefore the most 
 fastidious fine lady could have slept luxuriously in the bed 
 made for Eigou; the mattresses were of the best, the sheets 
 fine and soft, the down bed had once been the gift of some 
 devout woman to a reverend churchman. Ample curtains 
 shut out cold draughts. And, as will be seen, it was the same 
 with everything else. 
 
 At the outset the miser had reduced his wife, who could 
 neither read, write, nor cipher, to slavish obedience. She, 
 poor creature, had ruled her late master, only to become her 
 husband's servant and drudge. She cooked and washed for 
 him with little or no help from the young person named An- 
 nette, a very handsome girl of nineteen, as much a slave 
 to Eigou as her mistress, with thirty francs a year for her 
 wage. 
 
 Mme. Eigou was tall, gaunt, and wizened-looking; all the 
 red in her sallow face was gathered on the cheek-bones; her 
 head was always tied up in a handkerchief, and she wore the 
 same skirt all the year round. She did not pass a couple of 
 hours out of her house in a month, and spent her consuming 
 energy on household work, in a way which only the most 
 zealous domestic could or would have done. It would have 
 puzzled the keenest observer to discover in the woman a trace 
 of the splendid figure, the fresh Eubens coloring, the full-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 223 
 
 blown comeliness, the superb teeth, the maiden glances that 
 first attracted Cure ISTiseron's attention to the girl. A single 
 confinement (she had one daughter, Mme. Soudry junior) 
 had decimated her teeth, bleared her eyes, and withered her 
 complexion; her eyelashes had fallen out. It seemed as if 
 the hand of God had been heavy on the priest's wife. 
 
 Yet, like every well-to-do farmer's wife, she loved to look 
 through her stores of silk, in the piece and unworn dresses. 
 
 Her drawers were full of laces and trinkets, which only 
 caused Eigou's young servant-girls to commit the sin of envy, 
 and to wish her death ; her finery had never served any other 
 purpose. She was one of those half-animal creatures who 
 are born to live instinctively. As the once lovely Arsene had 
 been no schemer, the late Niseron's disposition of his prop- 
 erty would be an insoluble mystery but for the clue. An odd 
 circumstance had inspired him with the notion of disinherit- 
 ing his kin. The story ought to be told for the benefit of that 
 vast proportion of mankind who have expectations. 
 
 There had been a time Avhen Mme. Niseron, the Kepub- 
 lican's wife, had overwhelmed her husband's uncle with atten- 
 tions, for there was an imminent prospect of succeeding to the 
 property of an old man of seventy-two, and some forty and 
 odd thousand francs would be enough to keep the family of his 
 only relation and heir-at-law in very tolerable comfort. The 
 late Mme. Mseron was somewhat impatiently expecting this 
 desirable increase of fortune, for, beside her son. she was the 
 happy mother of a sweet little girl, a mischievous, innocent 
 child. Perhaps it is because such children are doomed to die 
 in childhood, that in their childhood they are so complete, 
 for the little one died at fourteen of "pale color," as chlorosis 
 is popularly called. She was the will-o'-the-wisp of the par- 
 sonage, and as much at home in her great-uncle's house as 
 in her own. She had it all her own way there. She was fond 
 of Mademoiselle Arsene, the handsome servant-maid whom 
 the cure took into his house in 1789. Eevolutionary storms 
 had even then relaxed ecclesiastical discipline. Hitherto he 
 had had an elderly housekeeper, but old Mile. Pichard felt
 
 224 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 that she was failing, and sent her niece Arsene, thinking, 
 no doubt, to hand over her rights to that comely damsel. 
 
 In 1791, soon after the old cure offered an asylum to Dom 
 Eigou and Frere Jean, little Genevieve took it into her head 
 to play a very innocent childish prank. One day at the par- 
 sonage Arsene and several children were playing at the game 
 in which each child in turn hides some object which the others 
 try to find, and calls out, "Burning !" or "Freezing !" as the 
 seekers are nearer or further from the object. Little Gene- 
 vieve, seized with a sudden whim, hid the bellows in Arsene's 
 bed. The bellows could not be found, the children gave .up 
 the game, Genevieve's mother came to bring her home, and the 
 child quite forgot to hang the bellows from the nail again. 
 
 For a whole week Arsene and her aunt looked for the bel- 
 lows, then they too "gave it up;" it is possible to live with- 
 out a pair of bellows, the old cure blew up his fire with an 
 old ear-trumpet, made in times when everybody had one, 
 which proves beyond a doubt that the cure's ear-trumpet 
 had belonged to some courtier of the time of Henry III. But 
 at length, about a month before the aunt died, the Abbe 
 Mouchon, the cure from Soulanges, and the whole Niseron 
 family came to dinner at the parsonage, and the housekeeper 
 broke out into renewed jeremiads over the bellows which had 
 so mysteriously disappeared. 
 
 "Eh!" cried little Genevieve Mseron, bursting out laugh- 
 ing. "Why, I hid them in Arsene's bed a fortnight ago; if 
 she had made her bed, the great lazy thing, she would have 
 found them." 
 
 In 1791 every one was free to laugh; but the deepest silence 
 followed the laughter. 
 
 "There is nothing to laugh at," said the old housekeeper; 
 "Arsene has been sitting up with me since my illness began." 
 
 In spite of this explanation, the cure of Blangy looked dag- 
 gers at Mme. Niseron and her husband, such a look as a 
 priest can give when he thinks that a trap has been laid for 
 him. 
 
 Then the housekeeper died, and Dom Eigou managed to
 
 Copyright, 1900, by J. D. A. 
 
 -? C-Ov* 
 
 
 Grgoire Rigou.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 225 
 
 exasperate the Abbe Niseron against his nephew to such pur- 
 pose that Frangois Niseron was disinherited by a will made 
 in Arsene Pichard's favor. 
 
 All this had happened long ago, but in 1823 grateful senti- 
 ment still led Eigou to blow the fire with the ear-trumpet, 
 and the pair of bellows still hung from the nail. 
 
 Mme. Mseron doted on her little girl, and when the child 
 died in 1794, the mother followed her within the year. When 
 the cure died, Citizen Eigou took the burden of Arsene's con- 
 cerns upon himself by taking her to wife. The sometime 
 lay brother from the abbey attached himself to Eigou as a 
 dog does to a master, and in his own person combined the 
 offices of groom, dairyman, gardener, body-servant, and stew- 
 ard to this sensual Harpagon. 
 
 Eigou's daughter Arsene was married (without a portion) 
 to the public-prosecutor, Soudry junior; she inherited some 
 share of her mother's good looks, together with her father's 
 cunning. 
 
 Eigou had reached the age of sixty-seven. For thirty years 
 he had not known illness; nothing seemed to shake health 
 that might well be called insolent. He was tall and spare. 
 There were brownish circles about his eyes, and the eyelids 
 were almost black. In the morning, when he exhibited a 
 red, wrinkled, morocco-grained throat, his resemblance to 
 a condor was but the more strikingly complete by reason of 
 a nose of sanguine hue, immensely long, and very sharp at 
 the tip. He was almost bald, the curious conformation of 
 the back of his head would have alarmed any one who under- 
 stood its significance ; for that long ridge-shaped prominence 
 indicates a despotic will. The grayish eyes, half veiled by 
 membranous webs of eyelids, were made to play a hypocrite's 
 part. Two locks of hair, of no particular color, and so scanty 
 that they failed to hide the skin beneath, hung about the 
 large, pointed, rimless ears : f a noticeable defect this last, for 
 it is a certain sign of cruelty that is, a love of inflicting 
 mental (not physical) pain when it does not indicate men- 
 tal unsoundness. An exaggeratedly wide mouth and thin
 
 226 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 lips betrayed their owner for an undaunted trencherman 
 and a valiant drinker by a certain droop at the corners, where 
 two comma-shaped slits slobbered perpetually while he ate or 
 talked. Heliogabalus must have looked like that. 
 
 His dress never varied. He always wore a long blue over- 
 coat with a military collar, a black stock, a pair of trousers 
 and a roomy waistcoat of black cloth. He had hobnails put 
 in the heavy soles of his walking shoes, and in cold weather 
 he wore additional soles, knitted by his wife in winter even- 
 ings. Annette and her mistress also knitted their master's 
 socks. 
 
 Rigou's baptismal name was Gregoire, a circumstance 
 which suggested puns that his circle of acquaintance still 
 found irresistibly amusing, in spite of thirty years of hard 
 wear. He was usually saluted as "Grig" or "Rigadoon/' or 
 (and most, frequently of all) as Grigou (G. Rigou) cur- 
 mudgeon. 
 
 Want of opposition and absence of any public opinion had 
 favored the old Benedictine's favorite pursuits. No one 
 would imagine from the brief outline sketch of his character 
 how far he had advanced in the science of selfishness, of ma- 
 terial comfort, and sensual enjoyment of every kind. In the 
 first place, he took his meals apart. His wife and Annette 
 waited upon him, and then sat down to table in the kitchen 
 with Frere Jean while the master of the house digested his 
 meal, slept off his wine, and read the paper. 
 
 In the country no periodical is known by a specific name ; 
 it is always spoken off as "the paper." 
 
 Dinner, breakfast, and supper were alike composed of 
 dishes exquisitely prepared with the culinary skill in which 
 a cure's housekeeper excels the rest of her sisterhood. Mme. 
 Rigou herself, for instance, churned twice a week. Cream 
 entered into every sauce. Vegetables, gathered at the last 
 moment, were transferred as it were straight from the gar- 
 den into the pot. Parisians are so accustomed to garden 
 stuff which has lain sweltering in a shop exposed to the genial 
 influences of the sun, the tainted air of city streets, and the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 227 
 
 greengrocer's watering-can, all promotive of a specious fresh- 
 ness, that they have no idea of the delicate, fugitive flavors 
 of vegetable products when eaten in some sort "alive." 
 
 The Soulanges butcher supplied his best meat, under pen- 
 alty of losing the redoubtable Eigou's custom. The poultry 
 were reared at the house, to ensure superlative excellence. 
 
 A kind of hypocritical care was likewise expended on 
 everything that conduced to Eigou's comfort. The deeply- 
 versed Thelemist might wear slipppers of coarse-looking 
 leather, but within they were lined with the softest lamb's- 
 wool. His coat might be rough and coarse, for it never 
 touched his skin, but his shirts (always washed at home) 
 were of the finest Frisian lawn. The wine of the country 
 was good enough for his wife, Annette, and Frere Jean 
 Eigou kept some of his own vintage for this purpose but 
 his own private cellar was stocked like a Fleming's; the 
 noblest wines of Burgundy were tightly packed among wines 
 from the Ehone, and Bordeaux, Champagne, and Eoussillon, 
 and Spain. All these were purchased ten years in advance, 
 and bottled by Frere Jean. The liqueurs from the Indies 
 bore the name of Mme. Amphoux ; the money-lender had laid 
 in sufficient of these from the wreckage of a Burgundian 
 chateau to last him the term of his natural life. 
 
 Eigou ate and drank like Louis XIV., one of the largest 
 consumers on record; the wear and tear of a life more than 
 voluptuous betrayed itself in this constant demand for re- 
 pairs. Yet while he denied himself nothing, he was a keen 
 and hard bargain-driver; he would haggle over every trifle 
 as only a churchman can haggle. He did not trouble himself 
 overmuch, shrewd monk that he was, with precautions 
 against cheating; he provided himself with a sample before- 
 hand, and had the agreement made out in writing, but when 
 the wine or the provisions were despatched he gave the senders 
 notice that if the bulk did not correspond in every way with 
 the sample he should refuse delivery. 
 
 Frere Jean, who looked after the fruit, had set himself to 
 acquire the art of keeping the finest "orchard stuff" in the
 
 228 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 department through the winter. Eigou had pears and apples, 
 and occasionally grapes, at Easter. 
 
 Never was prophet on the borderland of deity more blindly 
 obeyed than Eigou in every smallest whim. At a twitch of 
 those heavy eyelids, his wife, Annette, and Frere Jean quaked 
 for mortal fear, and of the very multiplicity of his demands 
 he forged the chains that bound his three slaves. At every 
 moment of their lives those hapless creatures felt conscious 
 that they were watched, that they were under an overseer's 
 lash ; and at length they had come to take a kind of pleasure 
 in the incessant round of toil ; they were too hard-worked to 
 feel bored, and this man's comfort was the one all-absorbing 
 thought that filled their lives. 
 
 Annette was the tenth in a succession of comely maid- 
 servants since the year 1795. Eigou hoped and meant that 
 similar relays should mark his passage to the tomb. Annette 
 was sixteen years old when she came; at the age of nineteen 
 she must go. Every one of these damsels, chosen from 
 Auxerre, Clamecy and the Morvan with fastidious care, had 
 been beguiled by bright prospects. But Mme. Eigou clung 
 obstinately to life, and invariably when the three years were 
 out some squabble brought about by the girl's insolence to 
 her unhappy mistress made it imperatively necessary to part 
 with her. Annette was a masterpiece of delicate beauty, 
 bright and piquante, worthy to wear a ducal coronet. She 
 was a clever girl moreover. Eigou knew nothing of the un- 
 derstanding between Annette and Jean-Louis Tonsard, 
 which proves that he was smitten with the one pretty dam- 
 sel to whom ambition had suggested the idea of flattering the 
 lynx by way of throwing dust in his eyes. 
 
 The uncrowned Louis XV. on his side was not wholly 
 faithful to the pretty Annette. The peasants borrow to buy 
 land beyond their means; Eigou held oppressive mortgages 
 on these properties, and the result of it was that he made a 
 harem of the whole valley from Soulanges to a distance of 
 fifteen leagues beyond Conches in the direction of Brie, and
 
 THE PEASANTRY 229 
 
 this at no cost to himself. He needed only to grant stay of 
 proceedings as the price of the fleeting pleasures on which age 
 often wastes its substance. 
 
 This sybarite's life, therefore, cost him almost nothing, 
 and Bouret himself could scarce have surpassed it. Eigou's 
 white slaves cut his hay and gathered his harvests, and 
 brought and stacked his firewood. A peasant thinks little of 
 giving his labor, especially if he can put off the evil day of 
 payment of interest in that way; and though Eigou always 
 demanded small money payments as well for a few months' 
 grace, he squeezed some manual service out of his debtors 
 into the bargain. They submitted to this forced labor, this 
 corvee in all but name, and thought that it cost them noth- 
 ing because they had not to put their hands into their pockets. 
 It sometimes happened that a peasant paid more than the 
 original sum as interest on the capital lent. 
 
 Deep as a monk, silent as a Benedictine in travail of his 
 chronicle, astute as a priest, shifty as every miser is bound 
 to be, yet always keeping on the windward side of the law, 
 Eigou might have made a Tiberius in ancient Eome, a Eiche- 
 lieu in the days of Louis XIII., or a Fouche if he had had am- 
 bition enough to assist the Convention; but in his wisdom 
 he chose to be a Lucullus in private life, a miser-sensualist. 
 Hatred gave zest to this occupation of harassing the Count; 
 he had every means of doing it thoroughly, and it found him 
 mental employment. He could move the peasants at his 
 will by secret wires, and he enjoyed the game that he played. 
 It was like a living chess-tournament, all the pawns were 
 alive; knights rode about on horseback, bishops babbled like 
 old Fourchon, the towers of a feudal castle glittered in the 
 sun, and the queen was maliciously giving check to the king. 
 
 Every day as Eigou rose he looked out of his window at 
 the stately roof of the Aigues ; he could see the smoke rising 
 from the lodges by those lordly gateways, and to himself he 
 would mutter, "All this shall be pulled down, I will dry up 
 the streams, and cut down the shady forest." And while he 
 hunted his large quarry he had a more insignificant prey.
 
 230 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 The chateau was to fall, but the renegade flattered himself 
 that he would murder the Abbe Brossette by pin-pricks. 
 
 It is only necessary to add, by way of a final touch to the 
 portrait, that the sometime monk made a practice of going 
 to mass, regretting that his wife continued to live, and mani- 
 festing a desire to be reconciled with the Church so soon as 
 he should be a widower. He greeted the Abbe Brossette defer- 
 entially when they met, speaking suavely, never allowing his 
 temper to get the better of him. Indeed, generally speaking, 
 every man who has been- connected with the Church appears 
 to possess the long-suffering of an insect. To her discipline 
 her servants owe a sense of decorum which has been signally 
 lacking among the Frenchmen of the last twenty years, and 
 which those who look upon themselves as well-bred men do 
 not always possess. When the Revolution shook ecclesiastics 
 out of their convents and threw them upon the world, the 
 children of the Church gave proof of their superior training 
 by a coolness and reticence which never forsook them even in 
 apostasy. 
 
 That little matter of the will in 1792 had opened Gau- 
 bertin's eyes to the depths of guile concealed by that face, 
 with its taint of guileful hypocrisy, and from that time forth 
 he made a confidant of the fellow-worshiper of the Golden 
 Calf. When the firm of Leclercq was founded he gave Eigou 
 a hint to invest fifty thousand francs in the venture and 
 guaranteed the undertaking. Rigou became a sleeping part- 
 ner of so much the more consequence because he left his 
 money at compound interest. At the present time his in- 
 terest in the house amounted to a hundred thousand francs, 
 although in 1816 he had drawn out about eighty thousand 
 to put into the funds, an investment which brought him in 
 seventeen thousand francs per annum. Lupin knew of his 
 own knowledge that Rigou had at least a hundred and fifty 
 thousand francs lent out in mortgages for small amounts 
 on large bits of property. Ostensibly the money-lender de- 
 rived a net income of fourteen thousand francs or thereabouts 
 from land. Altogether, it was pretty plain that Rigou's in-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 231 
 
 come must amount to something like forty thousand francs, 
 but his capital was an unknown x, a fourth term in a propor- 
 tion sum which baffled arithmetic, and the devil alone knew 
 the ins and outs of the jobbery in which Eigou and Langlume 
 were concerned. 
 
 The terrible money-lender reckoned on another score of 
 years of life, and had invented a set of hard-and-fast rules 
 for his guidance in business. He never lent a farthing to 
 a peasant unless the man was a purchaser of seven acres at the 
 least, and had actually paid down one-half of the purchase- 
 money. Clearly Eigou was well aware of the weak spot in 
 our legislation with regard to the expropriation of small par- 
 cels of land, and of the danger to the Inland Eevenue De- 
 partment and the land-owning interest arising from the ex- 
 cessive sub-division of property. Where is the sense of suing 
 a peasant for the value of a single furrow when the man has 
 but five furrows altogether? The eyes of individual interest 
 will always see twenty-five years ahead of the furthest vision 
 of any legislative assembly. What a lesson for a nation! A 
 law that is not a dead letter always springs from the mighty 
 brain of a single man of genius, it is not made by laying nine 
 hundred heads together; no matter how able the men may 
 be, taken apart, they dwarf each other in a crowd. After all, 
 in Eigou's rule is there not the right principle ? What better 
 means have we of putting a stop to the present state of things, 
 when land-owning is reduced to an absurdity, and a square 
 yard of soil is divided into halves and thirds, and quarters 
 and tenths, as in the commune of Argenteuil, which numbers 
 thirty thousand parcels of land? 
 
 Such reforms, however, demand co-operation as wide- 
 spread as the arrangement which oppressed this arrondisse- 
 ment. As Eigou found Lupin about one-third of the total 
 amount of legal business which he transacted, it was natural 
 that the Soulanges notary should be Eigou's faithful ally. 
 In this way the pirate could add the amount of illegal interest 
 to the capital in the bond, and if the borrower was a married 
 man he was careful to make husband and wife jointly and
 
 232 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 severally responsible. The peasant, overjoyed to have but 
 five per cent to pay, so long as the loan was undischarged, 
 always hoped to rid himself of the debt by unsparing toil, 
 and by high farming which raised the value of Eigou's se- 
 curity. 
 
 This is the real secret of the wonders worked by the "spade 
 husbandry" that deludes superficial economists, a political 
 blunder which sends French money into Germany to pay for 
 horses. That animal is in process of extinction in France, 
 while the grazing and breeding of horned cattle has fallen off 
 to such an extent that butcher meat will soon be beyond the 
 reach, not merely of the working population, but also of the 
 class above them.* 
 
 So sweat poured for Eigou from many a brow between 
 Conches and Ville-aux-Fayes, and Eigou was respected by 
 everybody; while the General, who paid his workers well 
 and was the one man- who brought money into the country, 
 was cursed for his pains and hated as the rich man is hated 
 of the poor. Would such a state of things be comprehensible 
 but for the foregoing bird's-eye view of Mediocracy ? 
 
 Fourchon had spoken truth when he said that the bourgeois 
 had taken the place of the seigneurs. Peasant-proprietors 
 of the Courtecuisse type were the serfs- of a modern Tiberius 
 in the valley of the Avonne, just as, in Paris, the manufac- 
 turer without capital must slave for the large capitalist's 
 benefit. 
 
 Soudry followed Eigou's example. His area extended from 
 Soulanges to Ville-aux-Fayes, and five leagues beyond; the 
 two money-lenders had divided the district between them. 
 
 Gaubertin's greed was on a grander scale. N"ot merely did 
 he himself avoid competition with his associates, but he di- 
 verted the capital of Ville-aux-Fayes from these profitable 
 local investments. The power exercised at elections by this 
 triumvirate may be imagined when nearly every voter's for- 
 tunes depended upon his complacence. 
 
 Hatred, ability, and command of money this was the for- 
 
 * See Le Curt de Village,
 
 THE PEASANTRY 233 
 
 midable triangular array of the enemy entrenched by the 
 Aigues, an enemy who watched all the General's movements, 
 an enemy in constant communication with sixty to eighty 
 small proprietors, each of whom had relatives or connections 
 among the peasantry, who feared one and all of them as 
 debtors fear a creditor. 
 
 Eigou was a Tonsard of a larger growth. Tonsard lived 
 by plain theft. Eigou grew fat on legalized robbery. Both 
 were fond of good living; both men were essentially of the 
 same species, but the one was nature uncultivated, the other, 
 nature submitted to the sharpening discipline of the cloister. 
 
 It was about four o'clock that afternoon when Vaudoyer 
 left the Grand-I-Vert to ask counsel of the ex-mayor, and 
 Eigou dined at four. Vaudoyer, finding the house door shut, 
 peered in between the window-curtains. 
 
 "M. Eigou !" he called. "It is I Vaudoyer/' 
 
 Frere Jean came out of the yard gate in another moment, 
 and bade him come in with him. 
 
 "Come into the garden," said he, "the master has com- 
 pany." 
 
 The "company" was none other than Sibilet, who had come 
 under the pretext of arriving at an understanding with 
 regard to Brunei's recent notice of judgment ; but as a matter 
 of fact the pair were discussing a very different matter. He 
 had come in just as the usurer was finishing his dessert. 
 
 A dazzling white cloth was spread on the square table 
 (Eigou insisted on clean table-linen every day, caring little 
 for the trouble given to his wife 'and Annette), and the visitor 
 beheld the arrival of a bowl heaped up with strawberries and 
 apricots, peaches, figs, almonds, and all the fruits in season, 
 served, almost as daintily as at the Aigues, upon green vine- 
 leaves, laid on white porcelain plates. 
 
 When Sibilet came into the room, Eigou bade him bolt the 
 double doors (an arrangement adapted to every room in the 
 house, with the double object of keeping out draughts and 
 deadening sounds). Then he inquired what urgent business
 
 234 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 had brought the steward in broad daylight, when it was sa 
 much simpler and safer to come after dark. 
 
 "It is this," said Sibilet. "Here is the Upholsterer talking 
 of going to Paris to see the Keeper of the Seals. He is capa- 
 ble of doing you a lot of harm ; he may ask to have your son- 
 in-law displaced, or for a change of judges and president too 
 at Ville-aux-Fayes, more particularly when he comes to read 
 the notice of this new decision in your favor. He is in a 
 towering rage. He is shrewd too, and the Abbe Brossette who 
 advises him is one that can enter the lists against you and 
 Gaubertin. The priests are in power just now, and his lord- 
 ship the bishop is very friendly with the Abbe Brossette. The 
 Countess said something about speaking to her cousin (the 
 Comte de Casteran) concerning Nicolas. Then Michaud is 
 beginning to see how the land lies." 
 
 "You are afraid," said Rigou. The words were spoken 
 quite blandly, but the glance that accompanied them was ap- 
 palling; suspicion brought something like a gleam into the 
 dull eyes. "Are you calculating whether it would pay you 
 better to throw in your lot with M. le Comte de Monteornet ?" 
 
 "I don't exactly see how I am to come honestly by four 
 thousand francs every year to put by, as I have been doing 
 these last five years," said Sibilet bluntly. "M. Gaubertin 
 has promised me all sorts of fine things, but matters are com- 
 ing to a head, there will certainly be a collision, and it is one 
 thing to promise, and another to keep your promise after the 
 battle is won." 
 
 "I will speak to him," said Rigou quietly, "and in the 
 meantime this is what I should say if it were any business 
 of mine. Tor the last five years you have been taking four 
 thousand francs a year to M. Rigou, and he, worthy man, 
 is paying you seven and a half per cent per annum. At this 
 present moment you have twenty-seven thousand francs stand- 
 ing to your credit, for the money has been accumulating at 
 compound interest ; but as there is a certain document under 
 private seal extant, and M. Rigou has a duplicate copy, the 
 steward of the Aigues will be dismissed on the day when the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 235 
 
 Abbe Brossette lays that document before the Upholsterer, 
 more especially if an anonymous letter is sent beforehand to 
 warn him that his steward is playing a double game. So 
 you would do better to hunt with us, without asking for your 
 bone in advance, and so much the more so since that M. 
 Kigou is not legally bound to pay you either compound in- 
 terest or seven and a half per cent on your money; and if 
 you tried to recover, he would let you sue him and pay the 
 money into court; and before you could touch your twenty 
 thousand francs the matter would be spun out with delays 
 till judgment was given in the court of Ville-aux-Fayes. 
 If you behave yourself discreetly, when M. Eigou is owner 
 of your house at the Aigues property, you might keep on there 
 with thirty thousand francs of your own, and thirty thousand 
 more which he might feel disposed to lend you; and that 
 would be so much the better for you, because as soon as the 
 Aigues is split up into little lots, the peasants will be down 
 upon them like poverty upon the world.' That is what M. 
 Gaubertin might say to you; but for my own part I have 
 nothing to say, it is no business of mine. Gaubertin and I 
 have our grounds for complaint against this child of the 
 people who beats his own father, and we are carrying out our 
 own ideas. If friend Gaubertin needs you, I myself have need 
 of nobody, for every one is very much at my service. As to the 
 Keeper of the Seals, 'tis an office that changes hands pretty 
 often, while some of us are always here." 
 
 "At any rate, you have had warning," said Sibilet, feeling 
 that he had been a consummate ass. 
 
 "Of what?" demanded Eigou, with artful subtlety. 
 
 "Of the Upholsterer's intentions," said the steward meekly ; 
 "he has gone to the prefecture in a towering rage." 
 
 "Let him go. If Montcornet and his like did not wear 
 out carriage-wheels, what would become of the coach- 
 builders ?" 
 
 "I will bring you three thousand francs to-night at eleven 
 o'clock," said Sibilet; "but you might help me on a little 
 
 by making over one of your mortgages to me ; one where the 
 VOL. 10 41
 
 236 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 man is getting behind-hand one that might bring me one 
 or two nice little bits of land " 
 
 "There is Courtecuisse's mortgage. I want to handle him 
 carefully, for he is the best shot in the department. If I 
 transferred him to you, it would look as though the Uphol- 
 sterer were harassing the rascal through you, and that would 
 kill two birds with one stone. He would be ready for any- 
 thing when he saw that he was sinking lower than old Four- 
 chon. Courtecuisse is wearing his life out at the Bachelerie ; 
 he has been putting in espaliers along the garden walls, and 
 altogether the place has improved very much. The little farm 
 is worth four thousand francs; the Count would give you 
 that much for the three acres of land behind his stables. If 
 Courteeuisse were not a gormandizing rogue, he would have 
 paid the interest with the game killed there." 
 
 "Very well. Transfer the mortgage to me; it will put 
 butter on my bread. I shall have the house and garden for 
 nothing, and the Count will buy the three acres." 
 
 "What am I to have ?" 
 
 "Good Lord ! you would draw blood from a stone !" cried 
 Sibilet. "And here have I just got an order out of the Up- 
 holsterer to set the law in motion to regulate the gleaning." 
 
 "You have gained that point, have you, my lad?" asked 
 Eigou, who had himself suggested the idea to Sibilet a few 
 days previously, and recommended him to pass it on in the 
 shape of advice to the General. "We have him now! It is 
 all over with him ! But it is not enough simply to have a hold 
 on him ; he must be twisted up like a quid of tobacco. Just 
 draw the bolts, my lad, and tell my wife to bring in coffee 
 and liqueurs for me, and tell Jean to put the horse in. I am 
 going over to Soulanges. See you again in the evening! 
 Good-day, Vaudoyer," the ex-mayor beheld his former rural 
 policeman. "Well, what is it?" 
 
 Vaudoyer gave a full account of the day's events at the 
 Grand-I-Vert, and ended by asking Eigou whether the Gen- 
 eral had the law on his side. 
 
 "He has a right to do so," said Eigou decisively. "We have
 
 THE PEASANTRY 237 
 
 a hard lord of the manor, and the Abbe Brossette is a shrewd 
 fellow. Your cure put these notions into his head, because 
 you don't go to mass, you pack of heretics ! / am careful to 
 go myself. There is a God, you see ! You will have to drink 
 to the dregs, the Upholsterer will always be beforehand with 
 you " 
 
 "Very good. We will glean," said Vaudoyer, in the dogged 
 tone of a Burgundian. 
 
 "Without a pauper's certificate?" queried the usurer. 
 "They say that he has gone to the prefecture to ask for the 
 soldiers so as to make you return to your duty 
 
 "We will glean as we have done in the past," Vaudoyer re- 
 peated. 
 
 "Glean! M. Sarcus will see if you are right," said the 
 money-lender, and his manner seemed to promise that the 
 justice of the peace would protect the gleaners. 
 
 "We will glean, and we shall be there in force or Bur- 
 gundy will no longer be Burgundy," said Vaudoyer. "If the 
 gendarmes have swords, we have scythes, and we shall see !" 
 
 At half -past four the great green-painted yard-gates of the 
 old parsonage turned on their hinges, Frere Jean appeared 
 leading the bay horse by the bridle, and the chaise turned out 
 into the square. Mme. Eigou and Annette stood on the step 
 in front of the house door watching the little green basket- 
 chaise and the master ensconced on the snug cushions under 
 the leather hood. 
 
 "Don't stay out late, sir," said Annette, with a little pout 
 of the lips. 
 
 By this time all the village had heard of the mayor's threat- 
 ened proclamation, and the folk came to their doors, or stop- 
 ped short in the main street, to watch Kigou pass. They 
 thought that he was going to Soulanges to defend their rights. 
 
 "Well, well, Mme. Courtecuisse, our old mayor will be going 
 to take our part, no doubt," said an old woman with a spindle 
 in her hands; she was deeply interested in the question of 
 forest rights, for her husband sold the stolen faggots in Sou- 
 langes.
 
 238 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Dear me ! yes ; it makes his heart bleed to see such things 
 going on, he is as sorry about it as any of you," answered 
 Courtecuisse's wife. Poor woman, she quaked at the bare 
 mention of the money-lender's name, and praised him from 
 sheer fear and trembling. 
 
 "Ah ! I don't want to make too much of it ; but he has been 
 badly treated, he has ! Good-day, M. Eigou," said the old 
 woman as she span, for Eigou gave a greeting to her as well 
 as to his creditor's wife. 
 
 The money-lender crossed the Thune (never impassable in 
 the worst of weather), and Tonsard, stirring abroad, spoke 
 to Eigou on the road. "Well, Father Eigou, so the Uphol- 
 sterer means to make slaves of us, does he ?" 
 
 "We shall see about that," returned Eigou, touching up his 
 horse. 
 
 "He will find a way of defending us, he will !" said Tonsard 
 to a group of women and children who had gathered about 
 him. 
 
 "Oh ! he has you in mind ; an innkeeper has his gudgeons 
 in mind as he cleans his frying-pan," remarked Fourchon. 
 
 "You just keep your clapper quiet when you are drunk," 
 said Mouche, with a tug at his grandfather's blouse, which 
 sent the old man over onto the mound at the foot of a poplar. 
 "If the rascally monk heard what you said, he would not give 
 so much for your words " 
 
 As a matter of fact, the real cause of Eigou's hasty visit 
 to Soulanges was the weighty news which Sibilet had brought, 
 news that seemed to threaten the secret coalition among the 
 bourgeoisie of the Avonne valley.
 
 A tug at his grandfather's blouse, which sent the old man over 
 on the mound
 
 BOOK II 
 I 
 
 THE BEST SOCIETY OF SOULANGES 
 
 Six kilometers from Blangy, "be the same more or less''' 
 (to borrow the legal formula), and at a like distance from 
 Yille-aux-Fayes, the little town of Soulanges rises amphi- 
 theatre-fashion up a hillside, a spur of the long cote which 
 runs parallel to the other ridge above the Avohne. Soulanges 
 the Picturesque, as they call it, has a better claim to the title 
 than Mantes itself. 
 
 Under this long low hill the Thune widens out over a bed 
 of clay into a sheet of water some thirty acres in extent, with 
 all the mills of Soulanges dotted over the little cluster of 
 islands at the end, composing a picture as charming as any 
 that the landscape gardener's art can devise. Further yet 
 the Thune feeds all the rivers and artificial water in Sou- 
 langes park, and flows at last through a stately channel to join 
 the Avonne. 
 
 Opposite the town stands the chateau of Soulanges, one of 
 the finest manor houses in Burgundy, built in the reign of 
 Louis XIV. from Mansard's designs. The local road winds 
 between the town and the aforesaid sheet of water, vainglori- 
 ously dubbed "the Lake of Soulanges" by the townspeople. 
 
 The picturesqueness of the little place is Swiss rather than 
 French in character; you shall scarcely find such another 
 town in France. Blondet, it may be remembered, compared 
 it in his letter to Swiss scenery, and, in fact, it reminds you 
 of the charming outskirts of Neuchatel, the gay vineyards 
 that engirdle Soulanges heightening a resemblance which 
 would be complete but for the absence of Alps or Jura range. 
 The streets rise one above another on the hillside ; the houses 
 stand apart in separate gardens, so that the general effect 
 
 (239)
 
 240 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 of the town is not the usual one of a crowd of dwellings 
 packed together, but of masses of greenery and blue or red 
 roofs among the flowers and trees, pleached alleys, and ter- 
 raced walks, of many-colored detail blended into a picturesque 
 whole. 
 
 In the Middle Ages the lords of Soulanges, in their munifi- 
 cence, built the church of stone, reserving for themselves a 
 chapel in the choir and another chapel in the crypt for their 
 family vault. A border of richly ornamented circles filled 
 with small carved figures follows the outline of the great arch 
 of the doorway (as at the church of Longjumeau), and a 
 shaft terminating in a pinnacle stands in a niche on either 
 side. Up above, in a triglyph, sits a sculptured Virgin with 
 the Infant Saviour in her arms. It is a kind of doorway 
 common enough among such little churches of that date as 
 have had the luck to escape the ravages of the Calvinists. 
 The outer walls of the aisles consist of five arches, outlined 
 by mouldings, and filled with masonry pierced here and there 
 by windows. The flying buttresses of the apse are worthy of a 
 cathedral. The square-based belfry tower, built over one of 
 the chancels, is a landmark in the countryside, for the church 
 stands at the upper end of the great market-place at Sou- 
 langes, through which the road passes on its lowest side. 
 
 This market-place at Soulanges is a fair-sized open space 
 surrounded by a collection of quaint-looking houses built 
 about it at various times. A good few of them are built half 
 of brick, half of timber, with a waistband of slates about their 
 middles to protect the principal beams. These have stood 
 there since the Middle Ages. Others, built of stone and 
 adorned with balconies, display the gable beloved of our 
 grandsires, which dates back as far as the twelfth century. 
 Several attract your eyes by their quaint jutting beams cov- 
 ered with grotesque figures, which call up memories of the 
 times when every burgher was a merchant and lived above 
 his shop. But most magnificent of all is the sculptured facade 
 of the ancient mansion-house of the Bailiwick, standing in a 
 line with the church, to which it furnishes a worthy com-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 241 
 
 panion building. This old house was sold by the nation and 
 bought by the commune, to do duty as town hall, mayor's 
 office, and court-house, for M. Sarcus had sat there since the 
 institution of justices of the peace. 
 
 This outline sketch will give the reader some idea of the 
 market-square of Soulanges, where the charming central 
 fountain stands which the Marechal de Soulanges brought 
 from Italy in 1520. No great city need blush to own such a 
 monument. A jet of water, brought from a spring high up 
 on the hillside, plays perpetually over a group of four white 
 marble Cupids, who wear a basket full of grapes on their 
 heads, and distribute the water from the conch shells in their 
 hands. 
 
 Perhaps Emile Blondet is the last lettered traveler who 
 will pass that way ; but if in the coming time another should 
 penetrate to Soulanges, he will at once recognize in the 
 market-square, the "public place" of Spanish drama and 
 Moliere's plays, an old familiar piece of stage scenery, and 
 abiding witness to the fact that comedy is the invention of 
 a warm climate, where the business of life is largely carried 
 on out of doors and in public. The market-place at Sou- 
 langes resembles the conventional square of the stage the more 
 closely in that the two principal streets of the town enter it 
 from either side just opposite the fountain, furnishing an 
 exact equivalent of the wings whence masters and servants 
 issue to meet, and whither they fly to avoid each other. 
 
 At the corner of one of these streets, Maitre Lupin's 
 scutcheon hung, gloriously conspicuous. The square is the 
 aristocratic quarter of Soulanges; Sarcus, Guerbet the re- 
 ceiver of taxes, Brunet, Gourdon the registrar, and his brother 
 the doctor, and old M. Gendrin-Vattebled, Crown Agent of 
 Woods and Forests, all lived round about it, and being mind- 
 ful of the name given their town, all made a point of keeping 
 their houses in handsome repair. 
 
 "Mme. Soudry's house," as it was called (for the first per- 
 son in the commune was totally eclipsed by the potent per- 
 sonality of the late Mile. Laguerre's waiting- woman) Mme.
 
 242 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Soudry's house was entirely modern. It had been built by 
 a wealthy wine merchant, a Soulanges man who had made 
 money in Paris and returned in 1793 to buy corn for his 
 native town. The mob massacred him for a "regrater," a 
 miserable stonemason (Godain's uncle) having raised the cry 
 after a dispute which arose out of the building of the fine new 
 house. 
 
 The next-of-kin quarreled so long and heartily over the 
 property, that when Soudry came back in 1798 he was able 
 to buy the wine merchant's palace for one thousand crowns 
 in coin. He let it at first to the department for a police- 
 station; but in 1811 Mile. Cochet (whom he consulted on all 
 points) warmly opposed a renewal of the lease; it was impos- 
 sible to live in a house "in concubinage with the barracks," 
 she said. So a police-station was built in a side street close to 
 the townhall for the gendarmerie, at the expense of the town 
 of Soulanges, and the police-sergeant's house, being relieved 
 of the defiling presence of the gendarmerie and their horses, 
 was forthwith swept and garnished. 
 
 It is a single-story house, with attics in the mansard roof. 
 On three sides it looks out over a wide view ; to wit, over the 
 market-place, the "lake," and the garden; but the fourth 
 gives upon the yard which lies between it and the neighboring 
 house of a grocer Wattebled by name a man who did not 
 move in the "best society" in Soulanges. He was the father 
 of the "beautiful Mme. Plissoud," of whom more must pres- 
 ently be said. 
 
 Every little town has its "beautiful Madame Such-an-one," 
 just as it boasts its Socquard and its Cafe de la Paix. 
 
 It is easy to guess that the side of the house which over- 
 looks the lake likewise looks out upon the terraced garden, 
 sloping, not over steeply, down to the stone balustrade, which 
 borders it along the roadside. On every step of the flight 
 which descends from the terrace to the garden stands a 
 myrtle, or pomegranate, or an orange-tree, visible justifica- 
 tions of a small conservatory below a preservatory, as Mme. 
 Soudry persistently miscalls it. The house door on the side
 
 THE PEASANTRY 243 
 
 of the market-place is approached by a short flight of steps. 
 The great gateway is seldom used, except on great occasions, 
 after the usual habit of a country town, or to admit the 
 trades-people or the master's horse. The friends of the family 
 paid their calls on foot, and climbed the flight of steps to the 
 street door. 
 
 The Soudry mansion is a dreary-looking house. Every 
 course of masonry is marked cut by "channel joints," as 
 masons call them; the mouldings round the windows are al- 
 ternately thick and thin, after the style of the Gabriel and 
 Perronnet wings of the Tuileries. Such architectural orna- 
 ment in a very small town gives a monumental look to a house 
 already grown famous in the district. 
 
 In the opposite corner of the market-place stood Socquard's 
 celebrated Cafe de la Paix, which, with the too enchanting 
 Tivoli, deserves a more detailed description in its place than 
 the Soudry mansion. 
 
 Eigou very seldom came to Soulanges; for everybody, Lu- 
 pin the notary, Gaubertin, Soudry, and Gendrin alike went to 
 Blangy to call on him such fear men had of Eigou. But 
 any experienced person, and the ex-Benedictine was experi- 
 enced, would have imitated his reserve. In order to make 
 this clear, it is necessary to give a sketch of the personages 
 who were spoken of in the neighborhood as belonging to the 
 "best society of Soulanges." 
 
 The oddest figure among them all was, as you may imagine, 
 Mme. Soudry herself. Hers is a portrait that demands an 
 infinity of minute touches, if it is to do justice to the original. 
 
 Mme. Soudry permitted herself "a suspicion of rouge," in 
 imitation of Mile. Laguerre; but that suspicion, by sheer 
 force of habit, had become an unmistakable patch of ver- 
 milion on either cheek, such as our grandsires picturesquely 
 described as "carriage wheels." As the wrinkles deepened 
 and multiplied on the mayoress' countenance, she fondly tried 
 to fill them up with paint ; then finding that her brow grew 
 too sallow by far, and her temple's showed time's polish, she 
 laid on ceruse, and traced out a network of youthful veins
 
 244 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 in a delicate blue. The painting enhanced the liveliness of 
 eyes that were bold enough already, insomuch that the mask 
 would have struck a stranger as something passing strange; 
 but Soulanges, being accustomed to this brilliant display of 
 art, regarded Mme. Soudry as a great beauty. 
 
 With a clumsy shapeless figure she wore her gowns cut low 
 at the throat, displaying shoulders and bosom whitened and 
 enameled to match her face; but, luckily, a desire to flaunt 
 her magnificent laces induced her to partially veil these chem- 
 ical products. She always wore a stiff corset bodice of pro- 
 digious depth, bedizened with knots even down to the extreme 
 point, and her skirts rustled with silk and furbelows. 
 
 Her apparel justified the use of the word attire, which will 
 soon be inexplicable. This evening she wore brocade of price, 
 for she had a hundred dresses, each one richer than the last, 
 all from Mme. Laguerre's vast and splendid wardrobe, and 
 all remodeled by her in the height of the fashion of the year 
 1808. Mme. Soudry's gorgeous cap, adorned with loops of 
 cherry-colored satin to match the ribbons on her gown, seemed 
 to ride triumphant on the powdered waves of her yellow wig. 
 
 Try to imagine beneath that too fascinating headgear a 
 monkey face of monstrous ugliness; a snub nose, meagre 
 enough for a Death's head, separated by a broad space of 
 bristles from a mouthful of artificial teeth in which the 
 sounds were entangled as in a hunting-horn and though it 
 may puzzle you to discover how the best society, and, in fact, 
 the whole town of Soulanges, could regard Mme. Soudry as 
 a beauty, the mental process may recall to your mind a recent 
 succinct treatise ex professo by one of the wittiest women of 
 our day on the art of acquiring a reputation for beauty by 
 the judicious selection and management of accessories. 
 
 Mme. Soudry had, in the first place, surrounded herself 
 vith the splendid presents which had been heaped upon her 
 mistress fructus belli, as the sometime Benedictine called 
 them. And, in the second, she had turned her ugliness to 
 account by emphasizing it and carrying it with a certain air 
 which can only be acquired in Paris, a knack known to the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 245 
 
 vulgarest Parisienne, who is always more or less of a mimic. 
 Mme. Soudry's figure, much restricted round the waist, was 
 enormous about the hips ; she wore diamonds in her ears, and 
 loaded her fingers with rings ; and, by way of final adornment, 
 a cockchafer, twin topazes with a diamond head, blazed from 
 the height of her bodice in a cleft between two mountains 
 besprinkled with pearl powder. This jewel, a gift from "dear 
 mistress," was the talk of the department. Mme. Soudry's 
 arms were invariably bare (another practice copied from 
 Mile. Laguerre), and she fluttered an ivory fan painted by 
 Boucher with two tiny roses by way of stud-pins. 
 
 When Mme. Soudry walked abroad she carried a real eigh- 
 teenth century parasol above her head, a bamboo frame cov- 
 ered with green silk, and bordered with a green fringe ; thus 
 equipped, any passer-by who should have seen her on the ter- 
 race might have taken her (at a sufficient distance) for a 
 figure out of one of Watteau's pictures. 
 
 In that drawing-room, hung with crimson brocade and 
 crimson curtains lined with white silk, where the chimney 
 piece was covered with knick-knacks and souvenirs of the 
 palmy days of Louis Quinze, with the fire-dogs and andirons 
 on the hearth (lily stems born aloft by infant Cupids), .where 
 the furniture, a pieds de biche, was covered with gilding, it 
 was conceivable how the mistress of the mansion had come 
 by the title of "the beautiful Mme. Soudry." The house came 
 to be a kind of local superstition in the principal town in the 
 district. 
 
 And if the best society of Soulanges believed in its queen, 
 that queen had no less belief in herself. In the space of seven 
 years La Cochet had so completely succeeded in sinking the 
 lady's-maid i % n the mayoress, that not merely had Soulanges 
 forgotten her late employment, but she herself had begun to 
 believe that she was a gentlewoman. So well did she remem- 
 ber her mistress' ways, her manner, her gestures, her falsetto 
 voice, the little movements of her head, that when she sur- 
 rounded herself with that mistress' opulence she reproduced 
 her insolence. Mme. Soudry knew her eighteenth century;
 
 246 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 she had anecdotes of great nobles, like their inter-relation- 
 ships, e,t her fingers' ends, and her back-stairs erudition pro- 
 vided her with a stock of conversation which smacked of 
 familiarity with (Eii-de-bceuf. Her waiting-woman's wit 
 passed current in her circle for the most refined esprit. In- 
 trinsically, if you will, the mayoress was a counterfeit gem, 
 but how should barbarians know the difference between the 
 diamond and its paste imitation? 
 
 She, too, in her own circle was a divinity, as her mistress 
 had been in her day ; she was flattered by those who were sure 
 of a dinner at her house once a week, and of coffee and liqueurs 
 if (as not seldom happened) they dropped in of an evening 
 about the time of dessert. No woman's head could have stood 
 the powerful intoxicating influence of that never-failing in- 
 cense. In the winter-time, when the cozy drawing-room was 
 bright with the light of wax-candles, she saw it filled with the 
 wealthiest men in the place, who repaid her in compliments 
 for delicate liqueurs and exquisite wines from "dear mis- 
 tress' " cellars. The friends of the house and their wives 
 had to all intents and purposes the usufruct of this luxury, 
 while they economized in fuel and candle-light. For which 
 reasons it was proclaimed for five leagues round about, nay, 
 at Ville-aux-Fayes itself, when the notables of the department 
 were passed in review, that "Mme. Soudry makes an admi- 
 rable hostess; she keeps open house, and it is a wonderfully 
 pleasant house. She understands how to live up to her for- 
 tune. She can enjoy a joke. And. what handsome plate ! 
 There is not such another house out of Paris !" 
 
 Bouret had given that plate to Mile. Laguerre. It was 
 a splendid service, the work of the great Germain, and, in 
 plain language, La Soudry had stolen it ; when Mile. Laguerre 
 died, the woman simply took it up to her own room, and the 
 next-of-kin, who knew nothing about their property, could 
 never put in a claim for missing items. 
 
 For some little time it had been the fashion among the 
 twelve or fifteen persons of whom the "best society" in Sou- 
 langes was composed to speak of Mme. Soudry as of an "in-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 247 
 
 timate friend of Mile. Laguerre," and to fight shy of the word 
 "waiting-woman." To hear them talk, La Cochet might have 
 sacrificed herself by becoming the great actress' companion. 
 
 Strange, but true it is, that all these confirmed illusions 
 spread and grew in Mme. Soudry, till they invaded the reality- 
 requiring region of the heart. She ruled her husband des- 
 potically. 
 
 The gendarme being constrained to show fondness for a 
 wife, older than himself by ten years, who kept the purse- 
 strings in her own hands, encouraged her in the notions 
 which she entertained of her beauty. Nevertheless, r,t times, 
 when this one or that envied him his good fortune, he would 
 wish that they could exchange places with him ; and he was at 
 as great pains to hide his peccadilloes as if a young and idol- 
 ized wife were in the case. Only within the last few days had 
 he contrived to introduce a pretty housemaid into the estab- 
 lishment. 
 
 Does the portrait of the queen of Soulanges seen? to be 
 something of a caricature? The type might still be found 
 here and there in the provinces in those days, among women 
 on the outskirts of nobility or the higher regions of finance ; 
 witness the widow of a farmer-general in Touraine, who still 
 applied fillets of veal to her face in the interests of her com- 
 plexion. But the present portrait, painted to the life though 
 it is, is incomplete without its setting of brilliants, and the 
 queen's principal courtiers must be sketched, were it only to 
 explain how formidable such Lilliputians may become, and 
 to throw light upon the dissemination of opinion in out-of- 
 the-way places. 
 
 Lest any should be deceived,, it may be said that there are 
 places like Soulanges which cannot be described as either 
 city, town, or village, yet partake of the nature of all three. 
 In such places the faces of the people are quite different from 
 those which you shall see in the heart of our good, overgrown, 
 dirty provincial cities; for the townsman is half a country- 
 man, and this blend produces some of the queerest of queer 
 characters.
 
 248 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Mme. Soudry disposed of, Notary Lupin, steward of the 
 manor of Soulanges, ranks second in importance; for it is 
 scarcely worth while to mention old Gendrin-Vattebled, the 
 Crown Agent of Woods and Forests, a nonogenarian on the 
 brink of the grave, who had never left his house since the 
 advent of Mme. Soudry. Gendrin-Vattebled had reigned 
 over Soulanges in his quality of a man who had held the 
 same post since the time of Louis XV., and in his lucid in- 
 tervals he still spoke of the jurisdiction of the Table de Mar- 
 bre. 
 
 Five-and-forty springs had bloomed for Lupin, but he was 
 still fresh and pink-complexioned, thanks to the full habit 
 of body which grows inevitably upon a man of sedentary life ; 
 he still sang his ballad, and wore the elegant costume of the 
 drawing-room performer. In his carefully varnished boots and 
 waistcoat of brimstone yellow, his tight coats, rich silk stocks, 
 and trousers in the latest fashion, Lupin looked almost like 
 a Parisian. He had his hair curled by the hairdresser, who 
 fulfilled the functions of the Gazette in Soulanges, and alto- 
 gether lived up to the character of lady-killer, earned by an 
 intimacy with Mme. Money-Sarcus ; for, to compare small 
 things with great, that conquest had been in his life pretty 
 much what the Campaigns of Italy were in the career of 
 Napoleon. Lupin was the only one of the circle who went 
 to Paris, where he paid visits to the Soulanges family in. 
 town. He had only to open his mouth, and the supremacy of 
 his sway exercised in his double character of coxcomb and 
 man of taste was at once apparent. He pronounced judgment 
 on all things by three words, the positive, comparative, and 
 superlative of dispraise rusty, out-of-date, and obsolete. 
 
 A man or a woman or a piece of furniture might be 
 "rusty;" then, to mark the comparative degree of futility, 
 "out-of-date;" and finally, by way of superlative and third 
 term, "obsolete." Obsolete! 'twas the critic's "dead-and-done- 
 with," the domdaniel of contempt. Mere "rust" might be 
 rubbed off, "out-of-date" was past praying for; but "ob- 
 solete!" oh, better never to have issued from nothingness!
 
 THE PEASANTRY 249 
 
 For praise, Lupin was reduced to the word "charming," 
 redoubled, if required. "Charming !" that was the positive 
 term of admiration ; "charming ! charming !" you might set 
 your mind at rest. "Charming! charming! charming!" 
 you might throw down the ladder, for the heaven of perfec- 
 tion had been scaled. 
 
 This scrivener he was wont to speak of himself as 
 scrivener, quill-driver, and petty attorney, jestingly put- 
 ting himself above his calling this scrivener carried on 
 a flirtation with the mayoress, who felt a certain weakness 
 for Lupin, although he had fair hair and wore spectacles, and 
 La Cochet had always admired -dark men with moustaches, 
 and tufts upon their finger-joints the Hercules type, in 
 short. But now she made an exception in Lupin's favor on 
 account of his elegance, feeling, besides, that her social tri- 
 umph in Soulanges would be incomplete without an adorer; 
 though as yet, to Soudry's disgust, none of the queen's 
 adorers had dared to overstep the limits of respectful homage. 
 
 Lupin was a baritone, somewhat given to sample-singing 
 in corners or upon the terrace, by way of reminding the world 
 of this social gift, a reef upon which the socially-gifted and, 
 alas! sometimes even men of genius are apt to make ship- 
 wreck. 
 
 He had married an heiress in sabots and blue stockings, 
 the only daughter of a salt merchant who made his fortune 
 during the Kevolution, when the reaction against the gabelle 
 put enormous sums into the pockets of salt smugglers. Lupin 
 prudently kept his wife in the background, and Bebelle was 
 sustained by a Platonic passion for his very handsome head- 
 clerk, one Bonnac, who had nothing but his salary, and 
 played upon a lower stage the part taken by his employer 
 in the "best society." 
 
 Mme. Lupin's education had been prodigiously neglected. 
 She only appeared in public on state occasions, in the form 
 of an enormous tun of Burgundy draped with velvet, and 
 surmounted by a little head deeply sunk in a pair of shoulders 
 of uncertain hue. By no effort could her girdle be induced
 
 250 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 to stay in its natural place, and Bebelle candidly admitted 
 that prudence forbade her to wear corsets. It would 
 have -out-tasked the imagination of a poet, nay, of an in- 
 ventor, to discover in Bebelle's back any trace of the bewitch- 
 ing curves of the vertebral outline of any woman who is a 
 woman. 
 
 Bebelle, as round as a tortoise, belonged to some inverte- 
 brate feminine order. Her appalling development of cellular 
 tissue must, however, have been not a little reassuring for 
 Lupin whenever he thought of the portly Bebelle's little fancy 
 for "Bebelle" he unblushingly called her, and nobody 
 thought of laughing. 
 
 "What do you call your wife ?" Money-Sarcus inquired one 
 day. He could not digest the "out-of-date" applied to a new 
 piece of furniture which he had bought as a bargain. 
 
 "My wife, unlike yours, is still undefined," retorted Lupin 
 
 A subtle brain lurked beneath Lupin's coarse exterior; he 
 had the sense to hold his tongue about wealth at least as con- 
 siderable as Rigou's fortune. 
 
 "Young Lupin," Amaury Lupin, was an affliction to his 
 parent. He refused to follow the paternal calling, he became 
 one of the Don Juans of the valley, and abused the privileges 
 of an only son by enormous drains on the cash-box; yet he 
 never exceeded his father's indulgence, for after each fresh 
 escapade Lupin senior remarked, "After all, I was just the 
 same in my time." Amaury never went near Mme. Soudry, 
 who "plagued him" (sic). Some memory had inspired the 
 waiting-woman with the notion of "forming" a young man 
 who sought his pleasures in the billiard-room at the Cafe de 
 la Paix. Amaury Lupin frequented low company, and even 
 the society of such as Bonnebault. He was having his fling 
 (as Mme. Soudry put it), and his one answer to his father's 
 remonstrances was the cry of "Send me to Paris, I am tired 
 of this !" 
 
 Lupin's fate, alas ! was that of most bucks, a quasi-conjugal 
 entanglement. It was well known that he was passionately 
 attached to Mme. Euphemie Plissoud, whose husband was
 
 THE PEASANTRY 251 
 
 Brunei's fellow clerk of the peace, and that he had no secrets 
 from her. The fair Euphemie, the daughter of Wattebled 
 the grocer, reigned, like Mme. Soudry, in a lower social 
 sphere. Plissoud, who was understood to authorize his wife's 
 conduct, was despised on this account by the "best society/' 
 and regarded as second-rate. 
 
 If Lupin was the vocalist, Dr. Gourdon was the man of 
 science in the "best society." It was said of him that, "We 
 have here a man of science of the first rank;" and Mme. 
 Soudry, a competent critic in matters musical (in that she 
 had announced Messieurs Gluck and Piccini when they came 
 to call of a morning upon her mistress, and had dressed Mile. 
 Laguerre at the Opera at night) Mme. Soudry, who had 
 persuaded every one, including Lupin himself, that he would 
 have made a fortune with that voice, would deplore the fact 
 that the doctor had given none of his ideas to the world. 
 
 Dr. Gourdon, who took all his ideas straight from Buff on 
 and Cuvier, could scarcely have set himself up for a man of 
 science in the eyes of Soulanges with such an outfit, but he 
 was making a collection of shells and a hortus siccus, and 
 could stuff birds to boot in fact, he coveted the distinction 
 of leaving a Natural History Museum to the town, and on 
 these grounds he was accepted all over the department as a 
 second Buffon. 
 
 In appearance Dr. Gourdon was not unlike a Genevese 
 banker. He had the same air of pedantry, the same chilly 
 manner and puritanical meekness ; but in his case the money, 
 like the business shrewdness, had been omitted. He was wont 
 to exhibit with exceeding complacency his famous natural 
 history collection, comprising a stuffed bear and a marmot 
 (deceased on their passage through the town), a very com- 
 plete collection of the local rodents, shrew mice, field mice, 
 house mice, rats, and the like, together with all the rare 
 birds shot in that part of Burgundy, and conspicuous among 
 these last an Alpine eagle caught among the Jura. Gourdon 
 also possessed a good many specimens of lepidoptera a word 
 
 which raised hopes of monstrosities, so that the reality was 
 VOL. 10 42
 
 252 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 usually greeted with, "Why, they are butterflies !" a very 
 pretty collection of fossil shells, which for the most part 
 had come to him by way of bequest ; and, to conclude the list, 
 a quantity of specimens of the minerals of the Jura and Bur- 
 gundy. 
 
 The whole first floor of Dr. Gourdon's house was occupied 
 by these treasures which were established behind glass doors 
 in cupboards, above rows of drawers full of insects. Nor did 
 they fail to produce a certain impression, due partly to the ec- 
 centricities of the labels, partly to the magic charm of color, 
 and partly also to the vast number of objects which no one 
 notices out of doors, though they become wonderful as soon 
 as they are set behind a sheet of glass. There was a day set 
 apart for going to see Dr. Gourdon's collection. 
 
 "I have five hundred ornithological specimens," he would 
 announce to the curious, "two hundred mammals, five thou- 
 sand insects, three thousand shells, and seven hundred speci- 
 men minerals." 
 
 "What patience you must have had !" the ladies would ex- 
 claim, and Gourdon would reply, "A man ought to do some- 
 thing for his native place." 
 
 Gourdon's vanity drew a prodigious toll from his dead 
 beasts and birds by the remark, "All this has been left to the 
 town in my will;" and how his visitors admired his "philan- 
 thropy !" They talked of devoting the whole second floor of 
 the townhall (after the doctor's death) to the housing of 
 the Gourdon Museum. 
 
 "I count on the gratitude of my fellow-townsmen to as- 
 sociate my name with my collection," he would say in reply 
 to this suggestion, "for I do not dare to hope that they will 
 set my bust there in marble " 
 
 "Why, surely that would be the least that they could do 
 for you !" would be the answer, "are you not the glory of 
 Soulanges ?" And in the end the man came to look upon him- 
 self as one of the great men of Burgundy. 
 
 The safest investments are not the public funds, but those 
 which are inscribed in the name of self-love, and the learned
 
 THE PEASANTRY 253 
 
 naturalist, on Lupin's grammatical system, might be de- 
 scribed as a "happy, happy, happy man!" 
 
 Gourdon, his brother, the registrar of the court, was a little 
 weasel-faced man. All his features seemed to have crowded 
 themselves together in the neighborhood of his neck, in such 
 a sort that his nose was a kind of starting-point whence the 
 various lines of forehead, cheek, and mouth went their various 
 ways, much as all the ravines on a mountain side begin at its 
 summit. He was one of the great poets of Burgundy, a sec- 
 ond Piron, so it was said. The double merit of the brothers 
 attracted notice in the chief town of the department. 
 
 "We have the two brothers Gourdon at Soulanges," it was 
 said, "two very remarkable men, men who would more than 
 hold their own in Paris." 
 
 The poet was an exceedingly dexterous player at cup-and- 
 ball, a mania which bred another mania, for it inspired him 
 with the idea of celebrating in verse a game which had so 
 great a vogue in the eighteenth century. (The manias of 
 mediocracy are apt to appear in pairs.) Gourdon junior was 
 delivered of his poem during the time of Napoleon, so it is 
 needless to mention the sound and sensible school to which he 
 belonged. Luce de Lancival, Parny, Saint-Lambert, Koucher, 
 Vigee, Andrieux, and Berchoux were his heroes, and Delille 
 was his idol until the day when the best society in Soulangea -, 
 raised the question whether Gourdon did not surpass Delille. 
 From that time forth the registrar spoke of his model as 
 Monsieur I' Able Delille with unnecessary courtesy. 
 
 Poems achieved between the years 1780 and 1814 were all 
 modeled on the same pattern; and the great poem on the bil- 
 lioquet, or cup-and-ball, may be taken as a representative 
 specimen. Boileau's Lutrin is the Saturn of a whole abortive 
 progeny of playful pieces, most of them limited to four cantos, 
 for it was 'generally recognized that the subject-matter was 
 apt to grow thin in six. 
 
 Gourdon's poem on the cup-and-ball the bilboqueide 
 obeyed the rules of poetical composition invariably observed 
 in such cases, for all these departmental compositions are
 
 254 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 made from the same pattern. The first canto describes the 
 subject of the poem, and begins, like Gourdon's effort, with 
 an invocation much on this wise : 
 
 I sing the Sport which suits with every age 
 The Small and Great, the Simple and the Sage; 
 When our deft Hand the boxwood Spike extends 
 To catch the transpierced Globe as it descends, 
 Delightful Pastime, sovran cure for Spleen, 
 If Palamedes had this Toy foreseen, 
 How had he longed another Wreath to claim, 
 And envied us the invention of the Game! 
 Muse of the Loves of Laughter and of Glee 
 Descend upon my roof and visit me, 
 A votary of Themis striving still 
 Official paper with my Rhymes to fill, 
 Descend and charm. . . . 
 
 Then followed a description of the game itself, and of the 
 most eloquent bilboquets known to history, an account of the 
 part they played in the prosperity of the Green Monkey and 
 other toy-shops, a digression touching statistics in this con- 
 nection, and finally Gourdon brought his first canto to an 
 end with three lines which recall the conclusion of every sim- 
 ilar production : 
 
 Thus do the Arts, nay, even Science' self, 
 Taking the Object into their employ, 
 Turn to their profit Pleasure's trifling Toy. 
 
 The second canto (as usual) described diverse manners of 
 using the "object" and the ways in which it might serve its 
 owner in society and with the fair sex. It will suffice to 
 quote a single passage in which the player goes through his 
 exercises beneath the eyes of the '^beloved object," and the 
 rest may be left to the imaginations of amateurs of this 
 serious literature:
 
 THE PEASANTRY 255 
 
 Watch yonder Player 'mid the gazers all, 
 
 His eye fixed fondly on the iv'ry Ball, 
 
 How heedfully he spies with caution nice 
 
 Its Movement in parabola precise. 
 
 Thrice has the Globe described its curve complete, 
 
 He lays his Triumph at his Idol's feet, 
 
 When lo! the Disc its destiny has missed, 
 
 And hits the careless Player on the fist! 
 
 He lifts his martyred digits to his lips, 
 
 A flying Kiss consoles his Finger-tips. 
 
 How canst thou, Ingrate, of thy luck complain? 
 
 A smile o'erpays thee for the trifling pain! 
 
 It was this piece of description (worthy of Virgil) which 
 raised the question whether Gourdon had not surpassed 
 Delille. The matter-of-fact Bnmet objected to the word disc, 
 which provided society with matter for discussion during the 
 best part of a twelvemonth. But one evening when both sides 
 had argued themselves red in the face, Dr. Gourdon, the man 
 of science, completely crushed the antidisc-ites. 
 
 "The moon," said he, "stvled a 'disc' by the poets, is a 
 globe." 
 
 "How do you know?" retorted Brunet. "We have never 
 seen the other side of it." 
 
 The third canto contained the inevitable anecdote, a story 
 of a famous minister of Louis XVI., which everybody knows 
 by heart; but, to quote the formula hallowed by constant 
 use in the Debats between 1810 and 1814, "it had borrowed 
 novel graces from poesy and from the charm which the author 
 had infused into his verse." 
 
 The fourth canto, which summed up the work, concluded 
 with the following audacious lines of the kind written for pri- 
 vate circulation from 1810 to 1814; lines which first saw the 
 light in 1824, after the death of Napoleon : 
 
 Thus have I dared to sing 'mid War's alarms, 
 Ah! would that Monarchs bore no other Arms,
 
 256 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Ah! would that Nations in their Hours of ease 
 Beguiled the time with Pleasures such as these! 
 To Burgundy, too long, alas! forlorn, 
 Saturn's and Rhea's days again were born. 
 
 These elegant verses were incorporated in the first and only 
 edition, the editio princeps, which issued from the press of 
 Bournier, the printer at Ville-aux-Fayes. 
 
 One hundred subscribers, by an offering of three francs 
 apiece, insured immortality to the poem, and established a 
 dangerous precedent; and this was the more handsome of 
 them, for that every one of the subscribers had heard every 
 line of the verses a hundred times. 
 
 Mme. Soudry had but recently suppressed the cup-and- 
 ball which used to lie on a console table in her drawing- 
 room, a pretext for frequent quotations; she found out at 
 last that she had a rival in the toy. 
 
 As for the poet himself, who bragged of his works in manu- 
 script, it will be a sufficient description of him to record the 
 way in which he announced to the "best society" of Soulanges 
 that a rival poet had appeared. 
 
 "Have you heard the strange news?" he had said (two years 
 before the story begins). "There is another poet in Bur- 
 gundy. Yes," he went on, seeing the astonishment expressed 
 in all faces, "he comes from Macon. But you would never 
 imagine what he is at work upon. He is putting the clouds 
 into rhyme 
 
 "They did very well, left blank," said Guerbet the punster. 
 
 "It is the queerest rigmarole! Lakes and stars and bil- 
 lows! Not a single rational image, not a trace of didactic 
 intention; he is ignorant of the very sources of poetry. He 
 calls the sky by its proper name ; he calls the moon, the moon, 
 plump and plain, instead of calling it the 'orb of night !' 
 See what lengths you may go by straining after originality !" 
 cried Gourdon dolorously. "Poor young follow ! A born 
 Burgundian, and he takes to singing the praise of water, it 
 makes you sorry to see it ! If he had but come and consulted
 
 THE PEASANTRY 257 
 
 me, I would have given him the finest subject in the world, 
 a poem on wine The Bacchiad which I myself feel too old 
 to undertake now." 
 
 The great poet* is still ignorant of his greatest triumph 
 (due, it is true, to his Burgundian extraction). He was once 
 the talk of Soulanges, where the very names of the modern 
 Pleiade were unknown. 
 
 Scores of Gourdons lived and sang under the Empire, which 
 some have blamed, forsooth, for the neglect of letters ! Turn 
 to your booksellers' catalogues, and behold poem after poem 
 on the Turning-lathe, the Game of Draughts, Backgammon... 
 Geography, Typography, Comedy, and what not, to say noth- 
 ing of masterpieces so much cried up as Delille on Pity, Im- 
 agination, and Conversation, or Berchoux on Gastronomy, 
 Dansomanie, and the like. Very probably in another fifty 
 years readers will laugh at our thousand and one poems, 
 modeled on the Meditations and Orientates. Who can foresee 
 the changes of taste, the caprices of fashion, the transforma- 
 tions of man's mind ? Each generation sweeps away all before 
 it, even down to the traces of the idols which it finds upon its 
 way; each generation sets up new gods to be worshiped and 
 thrown down in turn by the next. 
 
 Sarcus, a nice, little, dapple-gray, elderly man, divided 
 his time between Themis and Flora which is to say, between 
 the Court and his hothouse. For the past twelve years he 
 had been meditating a book to be entitled "The History of the 
 Institution of Justices of the Peace." The political and ju- 
 dicial aspects of these functionaries, he was wont to observe, 
 had already undergone several changes. Justices of the peace 
 existed in virtue of the Code of Brumaire of the year IV., 
 but an office so important, so invaluable to the country, had 
 lost its prestige, because the emoluments attached to an ap- 
 pointment which ought to be made for life were out of all 
 proportion to the dignity of the office. It was laid to Sar- 
 cus' charge that he was a Freethinker ; and he was considered 
 to be the politician of the set, which, in plain language, as 
 you will guess, means that he was the most tiresome person 
 
 *Lamartine.
 
 258 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 in it. He was said "to talk like a book." Gaubertin promised 
 him the Cross of the Legion of Honor, but postponed fulfil- 
 ment until the day when he (Gaubertin) should succeed 
 Leclercq and take his seat in the Centre Left. 
 
 Guerbet, the local wit and receiver of taxes, was a stout, 
 heavy man, with a butter face, a false toupet, and gold rings 
 in the ears, which lived in a state of continual friction with 
 his shirt collar. Guerbet dabbled in pomology. He prided 
 himself on the possession of the finest fruit-trees in the dis- 
 trict; he forced early vegetables, which appeared about a 
 month after their advent in Paris, and grew the most trop- 
 ical products in his hotbeds; pineapples, to wit, and nec- 
 tarines, and green peas; and when a pottle of strawberries 
 was sold at ten sous in Paris, he would bring Mme. Soudry 
 a handful with no little pride. 
 
 In M. Vermut the druggist Soulanges possessed a chemist 
 who had a little more right to his title than Sarcus the states- 
 man, or Lupin the singer, or Gourdon senior, the man of 
 science, or his brother the poet. Yet the best society of Sou- 
 langes held Vermut rather cheap, and beyond that society 
 he was not known at all. Perhaps the circle felt instinctively 
 the real superiority of the thinker among them who never said 
 a word, and listened to nonsense with a satirical smile; so 
 they threw doubts on his learning, and questioned it sotto 
 voce. Outside the circle no one troubled their heads about it. 
 
 Vermut was the butt of Mme. Soudry's salon. No society 
 is complete without a victim; there must be somebody to 
 compassionate, and bantej, and patronize, and scorn. In the 
 first place, Vermut, with his head full of scientific problems, 
 used to come to the house with his cravat untied and his waist- 
 coat unfastened, and wore a green jacket, usually stained. 
 Furthermore, he was a fair mark for jokes on account of a 
 countenance so babyish that old Guerbet used to say that he 
 had taken it from his patients. In places behind the times 
 like Soulanges, country apothecaries are still employed as 
 they used to be in the days when Poureenngnac fell a victim 
 to a practical joke, and these respectable practitioners, the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 259 
 
 better to establish their calling, demand an indemnity of dis- 
 placement. 
 
 The little man, endowed with the patience of a chemist, 
 could not "enjoy" his wife, to use the provincialism which 
 signifies the abolition of the marital rule. Mme. Vermut, 
 a charming lively woman, a woman of spirit moreover, who 
 could lose two whole francs at cards without a word, railed 
 at her spoiise, pursued him with epigrams, and held him up 
 for an idiot only fit to distil dulness. She was one of those 
 women whose mission it is to keep a little town lively; she 
 was the salt of this corner of the earth, kitchen salt, it is 
 true, but what salt it was ! She indulged in boisterous jokes, 
 but these were overlooked. She thought nothing of telling 
 M. Taupin, a white-haired man of seventy, to "shut up, 
 monkey !" 
 
 The miller of Soulanges had fifty thousand francs a year 
 and an only daughter, whom Lupin had in his mind for 
 Amaury, for he had given up all hope by this time of Mile. 
 Gaubertin, and President Gaubertin thought of the same girl 
 for his own son, the registrar of mortgages. Here again in- 
 terests clashed. The miller, a Sarcus-Taupin, was the IsTu- 
 cingen of the town. He was said to have three million francs, 
 but he would not join any combination. He thought of noth- 
 ing but his flour-mill, and of how to get all the trade into 
 his own hands, and was chiefly remarkable for the signal 
 absence of courtesy or civility in his manner. 
 
 Old Guerbet, the brother of the postmaster at Conches, 
 had about ten thousand francs a year of his own besides his 
 professional income. The Gourdons were well-to-do men. 
 The doctor had married the only daughter of the very old M. 
 Gendrin-Vattebled, Crown Agent of Woods and Forests, who 
 could not be expected to last much longer ; while the registrar 
 had wedded the Abbe Taupin's niece and sole heiress. The 
 Abbe Taupin, cure" of Soulanges, was a fat priest, ensconced 
 in his living like a rat in a cheese. 
 
 The pliant ecclesiastic was very popular in Soulanges; he 
 was quite at home in the best society, kindly and good-natured
 
 260 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 with the "second-rate," and apostolic with the unfortunate. 
 Cousin to the miller, and related to both the Sarcus families, 
 he belonged to the district, and was part of the system of 
 Mediocracy. Taupin was thrifty, never dined at home, went 
 to weddings and came away before the dancing began, and 
 never meddled with politics; he demanded and obtained out- 
 ward conformity to the requirements of religion, urging his 
 pleas "in my professional capacity." And he was allowed to 
 have his way. "We have a good cure," people used 
 to say of him. The Bishop, who knew Soulanges well, 
 was not deceived as to the merit of the ecclesiastic; but it 
 was something to find a man who could induce such a town 
 to accept the forms of religion, a man who could fill the 
 church of a Sunday and preach a sermon to a slumbering con- 
 gregation. 
 
 The Gourdons' ladies for at Soulanges, as in Dresden and 
 some other German capitals, those who move in the best so- 
 ciety greet each other with the inquiry, "How is yoiir lady? : ' 
 and people say, "He was not there with his lady," or "I saw his 
 lady and the young ladies." A Parisian who should say "his 
 wife" or "womenkind" would create a sensation, and be set 
 down for a man of the worst style. At Soulanges, as at Ge- 
 neva, Dresden, and Brussels, these words are never used ; Brus- 
 sels shopkeepers may put "wife of such an one" above their 
 shop doors, but at Soulanges "your good lady," is the only 
 permissible formula. To resume the Gourdons' ladies can 
 only be compared to the luckless supernumeraries of second- 
 rate theatres known to Parisian audiences, who frequently 
 take the artistes for a laughing-stock ; it will suffice to say that 
 they belonged to the order of "nice little things," and their 
 portraits will be complete, for the most unlettered bourgeois 
 can look about him and find examples of these necessary be- 
 ings. 
 
 It is scarcely worth while to remark that Guerbet under- 
 stood finance admirably well, and that Soudry would have 
 made a minister of war, for every worthy townsman was 
 equipped with the imaginary specialty necessary to the exist-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 261 
 
 ence of a provincial; and not only so, each one was free to 
 cultivate his own private plot in the domain of human vanity 
 without fear of rivalry or disturbance from his neighbor. 
 
 If Cuvier, traveling incognito, had passed through the 
 town, the best society of Soulanges would have felt convinced 
 that his knowledge was a mere trifle compared with Dr. Gour- 
 don's scientific attainments. Nourrit and his "fine thread of 
 voice," as the notary called it with patronizing indulgence, 
 would have been thought scarce worthy to accompany the 
 nightingale of Soulanges ; and as for the versifier whose works 
 were just passing through Bournier's press, it was incredible 
 that a poet of equal merit should be found in Paris now that 
 Delille was dead. 
 
 This provincial bourgeoisie, in its sleek self-satisfaction, 
 could take precedence of all social superiority. Only those 
 who have spent some portion of their lives in a small country 
 town of this kind can form any idea of the exceeding com- 
 placency which overspread the countenances of these folk who 
 took themselves for the coelic plexus of France. Gifted as 
 they were with incredible perverse ingenuity, they had decided 
 in their wisdom that one of the heroes of Essling was- a 
 coward, Mme. de Montcornet a woman of scandalous life, and 
 the Abbe Brossette a petty intriguer, and within a fortnight 
 of the purchase of the Aigues they discovered the General's 
 origin, and dubbed him the "Upholsterer." 
 
 If Eigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin had all of them lived at 
 Ville-aux-Fayes, there would have been a quarrel ; their pre- 
 tensions must inevitably have come into collision ; but Fate or- 
 dained that the Lucullus of Blangy should feel that solitude 
 was a necessity if he was to combine usury and sensuality in 
 peace; while Mme. Soudry had sense enough to see that she 
 could only reign in such a place as Soulanges, and Gaubertin 
 found Ville-aux-Fayes a central position for his business. 
 Those who find amusement in the study of social intricacies 
 will admit that Montcornet had a run of ill luck when he fell 
 among such foes, all living sufficiently far apart to revolve in 
 their separate spheres of power and vanity. The malignant
 
 262 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 planets were but ten times the more potent for mischief be- 
 cause they never crossed each other's paths. 
 
 Yet, though the worth}' Soulangeois were proud of their 
 leisured lives, and regarded their society as distinctly more 
 agreeable than that of Ville-aux-Fayes, repeating with ludi- 
 crous pomposity that "Soulanges is the place for pleasure and 
 society" (a saying current in the valley), it would scarcely be 
 prudent to suppose that Ville-aux-Fayes admitted this su- 
 premacy. The Gaubertin salon laughed in petto at the 
 Soudry salon. Gaubertin would say, "Ours is a busy town, 
 a great business place, and some of us are fools enough to 
 plague ourselves with money-making," and from his manner 
 it was easy to discern a slight antagonism between the earth 
 and the moon. The moon believed that she was useful to the 
 earth, and the earth controlled the moon. 
 
 Both earth and moon lived, however, on terms of the 
 closest intimacy. At Carnival-tide the best society of Sou- 
 langes went in a body to the four dances given in turn by 
 Gaubertin, Gendrin, Leclercq, and Soudry junior, the public 
 prosecutor. Every Sunday the public prosecutor and his wife, 
 with M., Mme., and Mile, filise Gaubertin, came over to 
 Soulanges to dine with the Soudrys. When the sub-prefect 
 was invited, and the postmaster, Guerbet from Conches, came 
 to take potluck, Soulanges beheld the spectacle of four official 
 carriages stopping the way before the Soudry mansion. 
 
 II 
 
 THE QUEEN'S DRAWING-ROOM 
 
 "Riaou timed his arrival for half-past five, knowing that he 
 should find every one at his post at that hour. The mayor, 
 like everybody else in the town, dined at three o'clock, 
 following the eighteenth century usage ; so from five till nine 
 in the evening the Soulanges notables exchanged news, de-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 263 
 
 livered political speeches, commented on all the gossip of the 
 valley, and discussed the doings of the folk at the Aigues. 
 This last topic found them in conversation for an hour daily. 
 Every one made a point of learning something on that head, 
 and it was well known besides that to bring news of the 
 Aigues was a way of recommending yourself to your host and 
 hostess. 
 
 After this indispensable review of things in general, the 
 company betook themselves to boston, the only game which 
 the queen could play. The stout old Guerbet would mimic 
 Madame Isaure (Gaubertin's wife), ridiculing her finical 
 airs, her thin voice, prim mouth, and missish manners; the 
 Cure Taupin would retail some bit of news from Ville-a,ux- 
 Fayes; Mme. Soudry was saturated with fulsome compli- 
 ments; and then came the final, "We have had a delightful 
 game of boston." 
 
 Kigou was too selfish to take the trouble to come a dis- 
 tance of twelve kilometres to hear the trash talked in Mme. 
 Soudry's drawing-room, and to see a monkey masquerading 
 as an elderly woman. He was greatly the superior of the 
 company by ability and education, and never showed himself 
 in Soulanges save on the rare occasions when he went thither 
 to consult his notary, Lupin. Rigou was not expected to be 
 neighborly ; his habits and business occupations absolved him ; 
 and his health (he said) did not permit him to return at 
 night along the road by the river, when "the damp was ris- 
 ing" from the Thune. 
 
 The tall, gaunt usurer, moreover, overawed Mme. Soudry's 
 drawing-room. Instinctively it was felt that in this man 
 there was a tiger with claws of steel ; that the malignance of 
 a savage was combined with the wisdom implanted in the 
 cloister and matured by the sun of gold, wisdom in which 
 Gaubertin had never willingly trusted. 
 
 Urbain, Soudry's man, sitting on a bench under the dining- 
 room windows, looked up and saw the little basket-chaise as 
 it passed the Cafe de la Paix. He shaded his eyes to watch 
 it, while he chatted with Socquard the saloon-keeper.
 
 264 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "That is old Rigou .' The gate will have to be opened. You 
 hold his horse, Socquard," he said familiarly. Urbain had 
 been in a cavalry regiment, and when he failed to obtain a 
 transfer into the gendarmerie he took service with Soudry 
 instead. He now went in to open the great gate into the 
 courtyard. 
 
 The great Socquard, as you see, was paying an informal 
 call; but so it is with many illustrious personages, they con- 
 descend to walk, and sneeze, and eat, and sleep for all the 
 world like ordinary mortals. 
 
 Socquard was by birth a Hercules. He could carry eleven 
 hundredweight, he could break a man's back with one blow 
 of his fist, twist an iron bar, or stop a cart with a horse har- 
 nessed to it. He was the Milo of Crotona of the valley, his 
 fame spread all over the department, and absurd fables were 
 told of him, as of most celebrities. It was said, for instance, 
 in the Morvan that one day he picked up a poor woman, 
 donkey, and bundles, and all, and carried her to market, that 
 he had eaten an ox at a sitting, and drunk a quarter cask of 
 wine in a day, and the like. Socquard. a short, thickset man 
 with a placid countenance, was as meek as any maid, he was 
 broad in the shoulders, and deep-chested; and though his 
 lungs heaved like the bellows in a smithy, his voice was so 
 thin and clear that it startled any one who heard it for the 
 first time. 
 
 Like Tonsard, whose reputation for ferocity saved him the 
 trouble of giving proof of it, like every man who is hedged 
 about by a reputation of any kind, Socquard never displayed 
 his triumphant powers, except at the particular request and 
 prayer of his friends. Just now he held the horse's head while 
 the public prosecutor's father-in-law dismounted and turned 
 to apply himself to the flight of steps. 
 
 "All well at home, M. Rigou?" inquired the illustrious 
 Socquard. 
 
 "Pretty well, old chap," returned Rigou. "And are M. 
 Plissoud and Bonnebault, Viollet, and Amaury still the props 
 of your establishment ?"
 
 THE PEASANTRY 265 
 
 This inquiry, apparently prompted by a good-natured in- 
 terest, was no random question flung down by a superior to 
 an inferior. When Eigou had nothing else to do, he thought 
 over every trifle, and Fourchon had already pointed out that 
 there was something suspicious in an intimacy between 
 Bonnebault, Plissoud, and Corporal Viollet. 
 
 For a few francs lost at play, Bonnebault was quite capable 
 of selling the peasant's secrets to the corporal ; or two or three 
 extra bowls of punch might set him babbling when he did not 
 know the importance of his maudlin utterances. But, on the 
 other hand, the old otter-hunter's information might have 
 been counseled by thirst, and Kigou would have paid no at- 
 tention to it save for the mention of Plissoud. Plissoud was 
 in a position which might inspire him with a notion of thwart- 
 ing the Aigues conspiracy, if it were merely to make some- 
 thing for himself out of either side, 
 
 Plissoud, the clerk of the court, eked out his income with 
 various unremunerative occupations; he was a life insurance 
 agent (these companies having just been started in France), 
 agent likewise for a society which insured against the chances 
 of conscription ; but an unfortunate predilection for billiards 
 and spiced wine was the principal obstacle in his way to for- 
 tune. Like Fourchon, he cultivated the art of doing nothing, 
 and waited for a problematical fortune to turn up. Plissoud 
 hated the "best society" of Soulanges profoundly, having 
 measured its power, and Plissoud knew all the ins and outs 
 of Gaubertin's bourgeois tyranny. He scoffed at the moneyed 
 men of Soulanges and Ville-aux-Fayes, and represented the 
 Opposition in a minority of one. As he had neither cash nor 
 credit, he scarcely seemed to be formidable; and Brunet,,only 
 too glad to have so contemptible a rival, protected Plissoud 
 for fear that he should sell his practice to some energetic 
 young fellow like Bonnac, for instance, who would compel 
 him to yield up an equal share of the business of the district. 
 
 "Business is all right, thanks to them," answered Socquard, 
 "but my spiced wine is being imitated."
 
 266 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "You ought to follow the matter up," said Eigou sen- 
 tentiously. 
 
 "I might be led on too far," said the saloon-keeper, inno- 
 cent of any jocular intention. 
 
 "And do your customers get on well together ?" 
 
 "There is a row now and again; but that is only natural 
 when they play for money." 
 
 All heads by this time were looking out of the drawing- 
 room window; Soudry, seeing the father of his daughter-in- 
 law, came out upon the steps to greet him. 
 
 "Well, compere," cried the ex-sergeant, using the word in 
 its old sense, "is Annette ill that you vouchsafe your presence 
 here of an evening?" 
 
 A survival of the gendarme in the mayor prompted him to 
 go straight to the point. 
 
 "No," said Rigou, touching the palm which Soudry held 
 out with his own right forefinger; "there is a row on, we 
 will have a talk about it, for our children are con- 
 cerned " 
 
 Soudry, a fine-looking man, wore a blue suit as though he 
 still belonged to the force, and a black stock and spurs to his 
 boots. He took Rigou's arm and led him up to his imposing 
 better-half. 
 
 The glass door opened on to the terrace, where the family 
 party were walking up and down enjoying the summer 
 evening. The imaginative reader who has read the previous 
 sketch can picture the glory of the wonderful stretch of coun- 
 try below. 
 
 "It is a very long time since we last saw you, my dear 
 Rigou," said Mme. Soudry, taking Rigou's arm to walk out 
 upon the terrace. 
 
 "I am so troubled with indigestion," said the old money- 
 lender. "Just look at me, my color is almost as high as 
 yours." 
 
 Rigou's appearance on the terrace was, as might be ex- 
 pected, the signal for a salvo of jovial greetings. 
 
 "Epicu-rigou ! . . . I've found another name for
 
 THE PEASANTRY 267 
 
 you !" cried the receiver of taxes, holding out a hand, in 
 which Eigou inserted a forefinger. 
 
 "Not bad ! not bad !" said Sarcus, the little justice of the 
 peace ; "he is a bit of a glutton is our lord of Blangy." 
 
 "Lord of Blangy!" said Eigou bitterly; "I have not been 
 the cock of my village this long while." 
 
 "That is not what the hens say, you rogue you !" said La 
 Soudry, giving Eigou a playful little tap with her fan. 
 
 "Are we going on well, my dear sir?" asked the notary, 
 bowing to his principal client. 
 
 "Pretty well," said Eigou, and again he held out a fore- 
 finger for the lawyer to take. 
 
 This habit of Eigou's, which reduced a handshake to the 
 chilliest of demonstrations, was enough in itself to depict the 
 man's whole character to a stranger. 
 
 "Look for a corner where we can have a quiet talk," said 
 the monk, singling out Lupin and Mme. Soudry by a glance. 
 
 "Let us go back to the drawing-room," said the queen of 
 Soulanges. "These gentlemen," she added, indicating Dr. 
 Gourdon and Guerbet, "are having a discussion on the Q. T." 
 
 Mme. Soudry had asked them what they were talking about, 
 and old Guerbet, witty as ever, had replied that they were 
 "having a discussion on the Q. T." Mme. Soudry took this 
 for some scientific expression, and repeated the word with a 
 pretentious air. 
 
 "What is the latest news of the Upholsterer ?" asked 
 Soudry, and sitting down beside his wife, he put his arm 
 about her waist. Like most elderly women, La Soudry would 
 forgive much for a public demonstration of affection. 
 
 "Why, he has gone to the prefecture to demand the enforce- 
 ment of the penalties, and to ask for support," said Eigou, 
 lowering his voice to set an example of prudence. 
 
 "It will be the ruin of him," said Lupin, rubbing his hands. 
 "There will be fighting !" 
 
 "Fighting!" repeated Soudry, "that is as may be. If the 
 prefect and the general, who are friends of his, send over a 
 squadron of horse, there will be no fighting. With the gen- 
 
 VOL, 1043
 
 268 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 darmes from Soulanges they might, at a pinch, get the best 
 of it; but as for trying to stand against a charge of cav- 
 alry! " 
 
 "Sibilet heard him say something still more dangerous, and 
 that brings me here," Eigou continued. 
 
 "Oh ! my poor Sophie !" cried Mme. Soudry, taking a sen- 
 timental tone, "into what hands the Aigues has fallen ! This 
 is what the Eevolution has done for us; it has given silk 
 epaulettes to low ruffians ! Any one might have known that 
 if you turn a bottle upside down the dregs will come to the 
 top and spoil the wine." 
 
 "He means to go to Paris and bring influence to bear on 
 the Keeper of the Seals, so as to make sweeping changes in 
 the Court here." 
 
 "Ah !" said Lupin, "then he has seen his danger." 
 
 "If they give my son-in-law the appointment of avocat 
 general, there is nothing to be said, and the Upholsterer will 
 replace him by some Parisian of his own," Rigou continued. 
 "If he asks for a seat in the Court for M. Gendrin, and has 
 our examining magistrate Guerbet appointed to be president 
 at Auxerre, he will knock down our ninepins ! He has the 
 gendarmerie for him as it is ; if he has the Court to boot, and 
 has counselors like the Abbe Brossette and Michaud at his 
 side, we shall be nowhere ; he might make things very unpleas- 
 ant for us." 
 
 "What ! in these five years have you not managed to rid 
 yourselves of the Abbe Brossette?" asked Lupin. 
 
 "You do not know him," returned Eigou; "he is as sus- 
 picious as a blackbird. That priest is not a man, he never 
 looks at a woman ; I cannot see that he has any passion, he is 
 impregnable. Now the General's hot temper lays him open to 
 attack. A man with a weakness is always the servant of his 
 enemies when they can use the handle he gives them. The 
 really strong are those who can keep their vices well in 
 hand, and do not suffer themselves to be mastered by them. 
 The peasants are all right, everything is in working order, 
 but so far we can do nothing against the Abbe. He is like
 
 THE PEASANTRY 269 
 
 Michaud. Such men are too good to live, the Almighty 
 ought to take them to Himself 
 
 "We ought to find them servant girls who would put plenty 
 of soap on their stairs/' said Mme. Soudry. Rigou gave the 
 almost imperceptible start which a very crafty man makes 
 when he learns a new stratagem. 
 
 "The Upholsterer has another weak side ; he loves his wife. 
 We might reach him in that way ' 
 
 "Let us see/' said Mme. Soudry. "We must see first if he 
 carries out his notions." 
 
 "What ?" cried Lupin ; "why, there is the rub !'* 
 
 "Lupin/' said Rigou, taking an authoritative tone, "just 
 go to the prefecture and see the fair Mme. Sarcus this very 
 evening. Arrange matters with her so that her husband shall 
 tell her all that the Upholsterer said and did at the pre- 
 fecture." 
 
 "I should have to spend the night there," returned Lupin. 
 
 "So much the better for Money-Sarcus, he will be the 
 gainer," remarked Rigou, "and Mme. Sarcus is not exactly 
 'out-of-date' yet." 
 
 "Oh ! M. Rigou," simpered Mrne. Soudry, "is a woman ever 
 'out-of-date?'" 
 
 "You are right as far as that one is concerned. She does 
 not paint before the glass," said Rigou. The exhibition 
 of Mme. Soudry's antiquated charms always filled him with 
 disgust. 
 
 Mme. Soudry, who firmly believed that she only wore a 
 mere "suspicion" of rouge, did not feel the sting of the epi- 
 gram, and asked, "Is it really possible that there are women 
 who paint themselves ?" 
 
 "As for you, Lupin/' Rigou continued, without taking any 
 notice of this artless speech, "go to see friend Gaubertin to- 
 morrow morning when you come back. Tell him that I and 
 my crony here" (slapping Soudry on the thigh) "shall come 
 and eat a crust with him, and ask him for breakfast about 
 noon. Let him know how things are going, so that each of 
 us may turn his ideas over in his mind, for it is a question
 
 270 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 now of making an end of that accursed Upholsterer. As I 
 was coming here to find you, I said to myself that we must 
 get the Upholsterer into some mess or other, so that the 
 Keeper of the Seals may laugh in his face when he asks for 
 any changes in the Court at Ville-aux-Fayes " 
 
 "Hurrah for the Church!" cried Lupin, slapping Eigou 
 on the shoulder. 
 
 An idea struck Mme. Soudry at that very moment, an 
 idea which could only have occurred to an opera girl's wait- 
 ing-maid. 
 
 "If we could only attract the Upholsterer over to the Sou- 
 langes fair," said she, "and let loose some bewitchingly pretty 
 girl upon him, he might perhaps take up with her, and we 
 could make trouble between him and his wife; she could be 
 told that the cabinetmaker's son had gone back to his old 
 loves " 
 
 "Ah! my beauty," exclaimed Soudry, "there is more sense 
 in your head than in the whole prefecture of police at Paris !" 
 
 " 'Tis an idea which proves that Mme. Soudry is as much 
 our queen by intelligence as by beauty," said Lupin, and was 
 rewarded by a grimace which was accepted without protest 
 as a smile by the best society of Soulanges. 
 
 "It would be better yet," said Eigou, who had remained 
 thoughtful for some time, "if the thing might be turned to a 
 scandal." 
 
 "To have him brought before a magistrate on a criminal 
 charge !" cried Lupin. "Oh, that would be fine !" 
 
 "How delightful !" said Soudry artlessly, "to see, for in- 
 stance, the Comte de Montcornet, Grand Cross of the Legion 
 of Honor, Commander of the-. Order of St. Louis, and Lieu- 
 tenant- General, in the Police Court on a charge of inde- 
 cent " 
 
 "He is too fond of his wife," pronounced Lupin judi- 
 ciously; "he would never be made to go that length." 
 
 "That is no hindrance," suid Eigou, "but there is no girl 
 in the district that I see who is fit to turn a saint into a sin- 
 ner. I am looking out for one for my Abbe."
 
 THE PEASANTRY 2rJ 
 
 "What do you say to the beautiful Gatienne Giboulard of 
 Auxerre? Sarcus' son has lost his head over her," suggested 
 Lupin. 
 
 "She would be the very one," said Eigou, "only she is of 
 no use for our purpose ; she imagines that she has only to show 
 herself to be admired; she is not wily enough. We want a 
 minx with a head on her shoulders. . . . It is all one, 
 she shall come." 
 
 "Yes," said Lupin, "the more pretty girls he sees, . the 
 greater the chances." 
 
 "It will be a very difficult matter to bring the Upholsterer 
 over to the fair. And suppose that he comes, would he go to 
 a dancing saloon like the Tivoli ?" queried the ex-sergeant. 
 
 "The reason for not going does not hold good this year, 
 dearie," said Mme. Soudry. 
 
 "What reason, my beauty ?" inquired her spouse. 
 
 "The Upholsterer wanted to marry Mile, de Soulanges," 
 said Lupin; "he was told that she was too young, and he 
 took offence. That is the reason of the coolness between M. 
 de Soulanges and M. de Montcornet, two -old friends who 
 both served in the Imperial Guard. They never see each 
 other now. The Upholsterer did not feel inclined to meet 
 them at the fair after that ; but they are away from home this 
 year." 
 
 As a rule, the Soulanges family spent July, August, Sep- 
 tember, and October at their country house; but at this par- 
 ticular time the General was in command of the artillery in 
 Spain, under the Due d'Angouleme, and the Countess had 
 accompanied her husband. At the siege of Cadiz the Count 
 won, as all the world knows, the marshal's baton which was 
 given him in 1826. 
 
 So Montcornet's enemies might well believe that the Aigues 
 would not always stand aloof at the Feast of Our Lady in Au- 
 gust, and that it would be easy to induce the Count to come 
 to the Tivoli. 
 
 "That is so !" added Lupin. "Very well, Daddy," he went
 
 272 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 on, turning to Eigou ; "it rests with you to manoeuvre matters 
 so that he comes to the fair, and we will bamboozle him 
 nicely." 
 
 The Soulanges fair on the loth of August is one of the 
 special attractions of the town. It is the most important 
 fair for thirty leagues round, eclipsing even those held at the 
 chief town of the department. Yille-aux-Fayes has no fair, 
 for the day of its patron, Saint Sylvester, falls at the end of 
 December. 
 
 In August Soulanges is full of hawkers, and from the 12th 
 to the 15th of August two parallel lines of stalls, wooden 
 framework booths covered with canvas, enliven the usually 
 empty market-place. The fair and festival, which lasts a 
 fortnight, is as good as a harvest for the little place. It has 
 the authority and prestige of a tradition. Peasants leave 
 the communes, where they are nailed down by their toil, as 
 old Fourchon put it, to go to the fair at Soulanges. The 
 tempting display of wares and gauds heaped up in the 
 booths on a fair green exercises a periodically renewed fas- 
 cination over the -minds of women and children and peasants 
 all over France. It is the one great spectacle of the year. 
 
 So about the 12th of August, the mayor issued placards, 
 countersigned Soudry, which were posted all about the dis- 
 trict, in order to secure patronage for the salesmen, acrobats, 
 and prodigies of all kinds, by announcing the duration of the 
 fair and enumerating its principal attractions. These pla- 
 cards, the subject of La Tonsard's inquiries, always ended 
 with the same formula: 
 
 "The Tiwli will be illuminated with colored lamps. 1 ' 
 
 The town of Soulanges had, in fact, adopted the flinty gar- 
 den of the Tivoli as its public ballroom. Soulanges is built 
 upon a rock, and almost all the soil for its gardens is im- 
 ported. 
 
 The stony nature of the soil determines the peculiar flavor 
 of the wine of the district, which is never met with except 
 in thfi penartment. Soulanges produces a dry, white, liqueur*
 
 THE PEASANTRY 273 
 
 like wine, something like Madeira, Vouvray, or Johannis- 
 berg, those three crus with a strong family resemblance. 
 
 Socquard's ball made a prodigious impression on the na- 
 tive imagination, and the whole valley took a pride in its 
 Tivoli. Those who had adventured so far away as Paris 
 said that the Tivoli there was no finer, and only rather 
 larger than the Tivoli of Soulanges ; and as for Gaubertin, he 
 boldly avowed that he preferred Socquard's ball to the ball at 
 Paris. 
 
 "Let us think all these things over," said Rigou. "That 
 Parisian newspaper editor will very soon weary of his amuse- 
 ments, and, by means of the servants, we might induce the 
 whole party to come over. I will bear the matter in mind. 
 Sibilet (though his credit is falling shockingly low) might 
 put it into his master's head that this would be a way to curry 
 favor with the multitude." 
 
 "Just find out if the fair Countess is cruel to monsieur," 
 said Lupin, for Eigou's benefit. "The trick we are to play off 
 upon him at the Tivoli altogether depends on that." 
 
 "That little woman is too much of a Parisienne not to 
 know how to hold with the hare and run with the hounds," 
 said Mme. Soudry. 
 
 "Fourchon set his granddaughter Catherine Tonsard on 
 Charles at the Aigues, the Upholsterer's second footman; we 
 shall soon have a pair of ears in the rooms there," said Rigou. 
 "Are you sure of the Abbe Taupin," he added, as he saw the 
 cure enter the room. 
 
 "He and the Abbe Moucheron are as much ours as Soudry 
 is mine," said Mme. Soudry, stroking her husband's chin 
 with "And you are not unhappy, are you pet?" 
 
 "I am counting upon them for a scheme for involving that 
 hypocrite Brossette in a mess," said Rigou in a whisper, as 
 he rose to his feet, "but I am not sure that the fellow-feel- 
 ing of the cloth will not be too strong for patriotism. You 
 do not know how strong it is. I, for instance, am no fool, 
 but I will not answer for myself if I fall ill. I shall make 
 my peace with the Church no doubt."
 
 274 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Permit us to hope so/' said the cure, for whose benefit 
 Eigou had raised his voice. 
 
 "Alas I" said Eigou, "the blunder which I made by my mar- 
 riage stands in the way of the reconciliation ; I cannot murder 
 Mme. Kigou." 
 
 "Meanwhile, let us think of the Aigues/' said Mmt, 
 Soudry. 
 
 "Yes," replied the Benedictine. "Do you know, I think 
 that our crony yonder at Ville-aux-Fayes is more than a 
 match for us? It is in my mind that Gaubertin means to 
 have the Aigues to himself, and that he will take us in," added 
 Eigou. 
 
 On his way to Soulanges he had tapped various dark re- 
 cesses of the plot with the baton of prudence, and Gaubertin's 
 portion of it rang hollow. 
 
 "Why, the Aigues is not to belong to one, but to all three 
 of us," cried Soudry; "the house must be pulled down from 
 top to bottom." 
 
 "I should not be surprised to find a hoard of gold in it, 
 which is all the more reason for pulling it down," said Eigou 
 cunningly. 
 
 "Pooh!" 
 
 "Yes. During the wars in old times, when the seigneur? 
 were often besieged and surprised, they used to bury thei? 
 money where they could find it again ; and you know that the 
 Marquis of Soulanges-Hautemer, in whom the younger branch 
 expired, was one of the victims of the Biron conspiracy. The 
 lands were confiscated and given to the Comtesse de Moret.' ; 
 
 "What a thing it is to know the history of France !" said 
 Soudry. "You are right. It is time that we came to an un- 
 derstanding with Gaubertin." 
 
 "And if he tries to play fast and loose," added Eigou, "we 
 will see about putting him in a stew." 
 
 "He is rich enough to be honest," remarked Lupin. 
 
 "I would answer for him as I would for myself; there is 
 not an honester man in the kingdom," said Mme. Soudry. 
 
 "Oh, we believe in his honesty," Eigou began, "but between
 
 THE PEASANTRY 275 
 
 friends there should be no oversights. By the by, I suspect 
 somebody in Soulanges of trying to put a spoke in our 
 wheel." 
 
 "And whom ?" inquired Soudry. 
 
 "Plissoud." 
 
 "Plissoud!" cried Soudry ,"a poor stick ! Brunet has him by 
 the leg, and his wife keeps his head in the manger. You ask 
 Lupin !" 
 
 "What can he do?" asked Lupin. 
 
 "He means to open Montcornet's eyes," said Eigou; "he 
 means to use Montcornet's influence to get himself a 
 place 
 
 "It would never bring him in as much as his wife does at 
 Soulanges," said Mme. Soudry. 
 
 "He tells his wife everything when he is drunk," remarked 
 Lupin; "we should know in time." 
 
 "The fair Mme. Plissoud has no secrets from you," said 
 Eigou in reply to this ; "we can be easy, never mind." 
 
 "Besides," said Mme. Soudry, "she is as stupid as she is 
 handsome. I would not change places with her. If I were 
 a man, I should prefer a woman who was plain, but clever, 
 to a pretty woman who could not say 'Two.' r ' 
 
 The notary bit his lips. "Oh ! she can set other people say- 
 ing 'Three,' " said he. 
 
 "Coxcomb !" called Eigou, on his way to the door. 
 
 "Well," said Soudry, as he went out with his crony, "we 
 shall meet again early to-morrow morning." 
 
 "I will call for you. Oh! by the by, Lupin," he added, 
 turning to the notary, who had left the room to order his 
 horse, "try to find out through Mme. Sarcus anything that 
 our Upholsterer may contrive against us at the prefecture." 
 
 "If she cannot find out, who will ?" asked Lupin. 
 
 Eigou looked at Lupin with a knowing smile. "Pardon 
 me," he said, "they are such a lot of noodles in there that I 
 was forgetting that there was one clever man among them." 
 
 "Indeed, I wonder myself how it is that I have not grown 
 rusty," said Lupin artlessly. 
 
 -, i
 
 276 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Is it true that Soudry has engaged a housemaid ?" 
 
 "Why, yes," said Lupin, "a week ago. His worship the 
 mayor had a mind to bring out his wife's merits by force 
 of contrast with a little chit of a Burgundian peasant, the 
 age of an old ox. How he manages with Mme. Soudry we 
 cannot guess as yet, for he has the impudence to go very early 
 to bed." 
 
 "I will see into that to-morrow," said the village Sardan- 
 apalus, forcing a smile, and with that the two profound 
 schemers shook hands and parted. 
 
 Eigou, cautious soul, had no wish to be benighted on his 
 way home, in spite of his new-born popularity. "Get along, 
 citizen !" he called to his horse, a joke which this son of the 
 Eevolution never forgot to cut at the expense of the Kevolu- 
 tion. The bitterest reactionaries are always to be found 
 among those raised on high by a popular upheaval. 
 
 "Old Rigou pays short visits," said Gourdon the registrar, 
 addressing Mme. Soudry. 
 
 "Short but sweet," the lady replied. 
 
 "Like his life," said the doctor, "that man is immoderate 
 in all things." 
 
 "So much the better," said Soudry. "My son will come 
 into his property the sooner." 
 
 "Did he bring any news from the Aigues ?" asked the cure. 
 
 "Yes, my dear Abbe," said Mme. Soudry. "Those people 
 are the scourge of the countryside. How Mme. de Mont- 
 cornet, who is at any rate a lady by birth, should not under- 
 stand her interests better, I cannot conceive !" 
 
 "And yet they have a model before their eyes," said the 
 cure. 
 
 "Who can you mean ?" simpered Mme. Soudry. 
 
 "The Soulanges " 
 
 "Oh ! Yes/' added the queen, after a pause. 
 
 "Here am I, worse luck !" cried Mme. Vermut, as she came 
 into the room, "and without my neutralizing agent ; though 
 Vermut is too neutral where I am concerned to be called an 
 'agent' of any kind "
 
 THE PEASANTRY 277 
 
 % 
 
 Soudry, standing beside Guerbet, saw the basket-chaise 
 stop before the Tivoli. "What the devil is that blessed Rigou 
 after?" he exclaimed. "The old tiger-cat never takes a step 
 in vain." 
 
 "Blessed is just the word for a Benedictine," said the stout 
 receiver of taxes. 
 
 "He is going into the Cafe de la Pcdx!" cried Dr. Gourdon. 
 
 "Keep cool/' said his brother; "he is distributing benedic- 
 tions with closed fists, for you can hear them yelping inside 
 at this distance." 
 
 "That Cafe," began the cure, " is like the temple of Janus. 
 It used to be called the Cafe de la Guerre in the time of the 
 Emperor, and the place was as peaceful as could be ; the most 
 respectable people used to go there for a friendly chat 
 
 "He calls that chatting !" broke in Sarcus. "Ye gods ! what 
 conversation was it that produced a little Bournier !" 
 
 " But. since the house was called the Cafe de la Paix, 
 
 in honor of the Bourbons, there is a brawl there every day," 
 pursued the Abbe, finishing the sentence which the justice 
 took the liberty of interrupting. The cure's joke, like quota- 
 tions from the Bilboqueide, came up very frequently. 
 
 "Which is as much as to say that Burgundy will always be 
 the land of fisticuffs," said Guerbet. 
 
 "That remark of yours is not so far wrong," said the cure ; 
 "it is pretty much the history of our country." 
 
 "I do not know the history of France," cried Soudry ; "but 
 before I begin upon it, I should dearly like to know why Eigou 
 went into the Cafe just now with Socquard." 
 
 "Oh," said the cure, "it was on no charitable errand, you 
 may rest assured of that." 
 
 "It makes my flesh creep to look at that man," said Mme. 
 Vermut. 
 
 "He is so much to be feared," the doctor said, "that I 
 should not feel safe even after he were dead if he had a grudge 
 against me ; he is just the man to get up out of his coffin to 
 play you some ugly trick." 
 
 "If there is any one on earth who can send the Upholsterer
 
 278 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 
 
 over here on the loth and take him in s*ome trap, Rigou is 
 the man to do it," said the mayor in his wife's ear. 
 
 "Especially if Gaubertin and you, dearie, have a hand in 
 it too " she began aloud. 
 
 "There ! what was I saying just now," exclaimed Guerbet, 
 nudging M. Sarcus' elbow ; "he has picked up some pretty girl 
 at Socquard's, and is putting her into his chaise " 
 
 "Until " put in the poet. 
 
 "There is one for you, whose speech is without ill intent," 
 cried Guerbet, interrupting him. 
 
 "You are wrong, gentlemen," said Mme. Soudry. "M. 
 Eigou is thinking only of our interests ; for, if I am not mis- 
 taken, that girl is one of Tonsard's daughters." 
 
 "Laying in a stock of vipers, like an apothecary," cried 
 Guerbet. 
 
 "Any one would think, to hear you talk, that you had seen 
 our apothecary, M. Vermut," said Dr. Gourdon, indicating 
 the little man as he crossed the market place. 
 
 "Poor old boy !" said the doctor's brother (suspected of dis- 
 tilling the volatile elixir of wit in the company of the apothe- 
 cary's wife). "Just see how he waddles along ! . . . And 
 he is supposed to be a scientific man !" 
 
 "But for him," said the justice, "it would be a puzzle to 
 know what to do about post-mortems. He discovered the 
 traces of poison in poor Pigeron's body so cleverly that the 
 chemists from Paris said in the Court at Auxerre that they 
 could not have done it better 
 
 "He found nothing at all," said Soudry ; "but, as President 
 Gendrin says, it is just as well that people should believe 
 that poison is always found out." 
 
 "Mme. Pigeron did wisely to leave Auxerre," said Mme. 
 Vermut. "She is a weak-minded thing, and a wicked wo- 
 man," she added. "As if there were not sure and harmless 
 methods of keeping a husband in order without having re- 
 course to drugs to get rid of the genus. I should very much 
 like any man to say anjihing against my conduct. M. Ver- 
 mut, worthy man, is scarcely ever in my way, and he has never
 
 THE PEASANTRY 279 
 
 been ill; and look at Mme. de Montcornet, how she goes on, 
 in her chalets and hermitages and what not, with that jour- 
 nalist whom she brought from Paris at her own charges; she 
 fondles him under the General's nose." 
 
 "At her own charges?" cried Mme. Soudry. "Is that a 
 fact ? If we could have proof of that, what a pretty subject 
 for an anonymous letter to the General " 
 
 "The General " said Mme. Vermut, "why, you would 
 
 put a stop to nothing, the Upholsterer follows his calling." 
 
 "What is that, dear?" inquired Mme. Soudry. 
 
 "Why he furnishes the bedroom." 
 
 "If Pigeron, poor fellow, instead of worrying his wife, had 
 had the sense to do the same, he would be living yet," said the 
 registrar. 
 
 Mme. Soudry leant towards her neighbor, M. Guerbet of 
 Conches, and administered to him one of the monkey's gri- 
 maces, inherited (as she imagined) from her late mistress; as 
 if that mistress' smiles, like her silver-plate, were hers now by 
 right of conquest. She redoubled her dose as she indicated 
 Mme. Vermut, who was flirting with the poet of the Bilbo- 
 queide. 
 
 "How vulgar that woman is! What things she says, and 
 what a way to behave ! I do not know whether I can allow 
 her to frequent our society any longer especially when M. 
 Gourdon the poet is here." 
 
 "There is social morality summed up for you!" said the 
 cure, who hitherto had not spoken. He had watched the 
 whole scene, and none of it was lost upon him. 
 
 After this epigram, or rather this social satire, so pithy and 
 so true that it went home to every one present, a game of 
 boston was proposed. 
 
 Is not this a true picture of life in every latitude of the 
 "world," as we agree to call it? The language is different, 
 it is true, but are not the very same things, nor more nor 
 less, said in the most richly gilded salons in Paris ?
 
 280 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 III 
 
 THE CAFE DE LA PAIX 
 
 IT was about seven o'clock in the evening when Rigou passed 
 by the Cafe de la Paix. The slanting rays of the sunset 
 steeped the whole picturesque village in glorious red, and 
 raised a riot of flaming color in its window-panes, calling up 
 the strangest and most improbable hues to contrast with the 
 clear mirror surface of the lake. 
 
 The deep schemer, brooding over the plots that he was 
 weaving, allowed his horse to go at a foot-pace ; so that as he 
 went slowly past the cafe, he heard his own name hurled at 
 somebody in the course of one of the brawls which had, ac- 
 cording to the Cure Taupin, produced a violent contrast be- 
 tween the name of the house and ^the chronic condition of 
 strife within it. 
 
 It is necessary, for the sake of clearness, to enter into detail 
 concerning the topography of this land of Cocagne. It lay 
 in the angle formed by the road with the market place; on 
 this latter side it was bounded by the cafe itself, and along the 
 eide of the road by the famous Tivoli, which was intended to 
 be the scene of one of the episodes in the conspiracy against 
 Montcornet. 
 
 The house was built after the fashion of Rigou's parsonage. 
 Three ground-floor windows looked upon the road, and in the 
 front, a glass entrance-door, with a window on each side of 
 it, gave upon the market-place. There was another door at 
 the side which gave admittance to the backyard, by way of 
 a narrow passage which separated the cafe from the next 
 house, where Vallet, the Soulanges haberdasher, lived. The 
 whole building, the green shutters only excepted, was painted 
 a bright yellow. It w~s OT1 of +he few houses in the little 
 town which could boast of two stories and an attic floor, and 
 had been so built for the following reasons.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 281 
 
 In days before Ville-aux-Fayes attained its present amazing 
 prosperity, and Soulanges was the principal place in the baili- 
 wick, people who came on judicial business, or visitors for 
 whom there was no room at the chateau, used to occupy the 
 first-floor rooms, four apartments provided with a bed apiece, 
 and just sufficient necessaries to justify the appellation of 
 "furnished lodgings ;" but for the past twenty-five years their 
 only occupants had been acrobats, itinerant quacks, hawkers, 
 and commercial travelers. At fair-time the rooms let for 
 four francs a day, and Socquard's four apartments brought 
 him some three hundred francs, to say nothing of the in- 
 crease of custom to his cafe. 
 
 The front of the house in the market-place was adorned 
 with paintings specially designed for it. In the wall space on 
 either side of the door you beheld billiard cues intertwined 
 with love-knots, and, above the loops of ribbon, steaming 
 punch-bowls shaped like Greek drinking-cups. The words 
 CAFE" DE LA PAIX blazed in yellow on a green background, 
 with a pyramid of billiard-balls, red, white, and blue, at 
 either end. The window-sashes, painted green, contained 
 small squares of cheap glass. 
 
 Half a score of arbor vitas shrubs in boxes (some one ought 
 to rename the plants the "Cafe tree") stood on either side 
 the entrance door, a row of pretentious failures in vegetable 
 life. The awnings, such as shopkeepers use in Paris and other 
 great cities to screen their wares from the sun, were luxuries 
 unknown in Soulanges ; so each bottle in the window fulfilled 
 the functions of a chemist's flask, for its contents were peri- 
 odically recooked inside it. The lens-shaped bosses on the 
 window panes caught the rays of the sun like burning-glasses, 
 set the wines, liqueurs, and syrups boiling, and stewed the 
 plumbs and cherries in the brandy. So great was the heat 
 that Aglae, her father, and the waiter were driven of an after- 
 noon to take refuge on the benches outside, under the feeble 
 shadow of the luckless shrubs which Mile. Socquard sprinkled 
 with tepid water. There were days when all three father, 
 daughter, and waiter lay stretched out like domestic ani- 
 mals, fast asleep.
 
 282 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 The interior of the cafe had been papered in 1804 with 
 scenes from the romance of Paul et Virginie, then in vogue. 
 You beheld negroes cultivating coffee, which thus, at any 
 rate, could be found on the wall-paper, if nowhere else, in an 
 establishment where scarce a score of cups were called for 
 in a month. Colonial products entered so little into ordinary 
 life at Soulanges, that Socquard would have been at its wits' 
 end if a stranger had asked for chocolate. The beverage 
 would, however, have been forthcoming, and the customer 
 would have been supplied with a nauseous brown broth pro- 
 duced by boiling one of the tablets sold for two sous by coun- 
 try grocers, an adulterated compound containing more starch, 
 raw sugar, and pounded almonds than either genuine cocoa 
 or sugar, and fabricated to ruin the trade in Spanish choco- 
 late. 
 
 As to the coffee, Father Socquard simply boiled it in a 
 large pipkin known in most households as "the big brown 
 pot." He dropped in the mixture of powder and chicory, and, 
 with intrepidity which a Parisian waiter might have envied, 
 served up the decoction forthwith in an earthenware cup 
 which had nothing to dread from a fall on the floor. 
 
 Sugar was still regarded in Soulanges with a reverence 
 which dated from the days of the Empire; Aglae Socquard 
 courageously brought out four whole lumps of sugar as large 
 as hazel nuts, with a cup of coffee for an itinerant hawker 
 who had taken it into his head to call for that beverage of 
 the man of letters. 
 
 There had been no change in the cafe since the day when 
 all Soulanges flocked to admire the new bewitching wall deco- 
 ration of gilt-framed mirrors alternating with brass hat-pegs, 
 the counter painted to resemble mahogany, the reddish marble 
 slab, with its gleaming plated vessels, and Argand lamps, 
 stated by rumor to be Gaubertin's gift to that fine woman 
 Mme. Socquard. Everything was besmeared with a soft, 
 sticky compound, which can only be compared to the surface 
 of old pictures which have lain forgotten in a lumber room. 
 
 Suspended by a chain from the ceiling hung an Argand
 
 THE PEASANTRY 283 
 
 lamp adorned with cut-glass drops, and provided with a globe- 
 shaped oil reservoir which fed two separate wicks ; the tables 
 were painted to resemble marble, the seats upholstered with 
 crimson Utrecht velvet, all these things had contributed to 
 make the reputation of the Cafe de la Guerre. 
 
 Thither, from 1802 till 1804, the townspeople of Soulanges 
 repaired to play at dominoes or ~brelan, and to partake of 
 glasses of liqueur or spiced wine, with brandied fruits and bis- 
 cuits; for colonial produce was so dear that coffee, chocolate, 
 and sugar were out of the question. Punch, like bavaroise, 
 was a great delicacy, and compounded with some strange, 
 ropy, sweetening substance not unlike treacle. The name has 
 been lost, but the substance made the inventor's fortune. 
 
 This concise account will suffice to conjure up similar pict- 
 ures in the memories of those who have traveled in the prov- 
 inces; and others who have never left Paris can form some 
 dim idea of the smoke-begrimed ceiling of the Cafe de la Paix, 
 and its mirrors dimmed with myriads of dark specks to bear 
 witness to the independence of the dipterous tribes of Bur- 
 gundy. 
 
 Socquard's wife, a beauty, who in the matter of gallant 
 adventures surpassed La Tonsard of the Grand-I-Vert, had 
 once queened it there, dressed in the latest fashion. She af- 
 fected the sultana's turban, for in the days of the Empire the 
 "sultana" enjoyed the vogue of the "angel" of the present 
 day. 
 
 The whole feminine world of the valley repaired to Sou- 
 langes to copy the beauty's turbans, poke-bonnets, furred caps, 
 and coiffures chinoises. All the bigwigs of Soulanges were 
 laid under contribution for these splendors. During the 
 period of the short-waisted gowns which our mothers wore in 
 the pride of their Imperial graces, Junie (for her name was 
 Junie!) founded the house of Socquard; her husband owed 
 to her a vineyard, the house in which they lived, and the 
 Tivoli. It was said that M. Lupin's father did reckless 
 things for handsome Junie Socquard ; it was certain that she 
 
 presented Gaubertin (his successor) with little Bournier. 
 VOL. 10 44
 
 284 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 These little matters, and the mysterious skill with which 
 Socquard compounded his spiced wine, would be sufficient in 
 themselves to account for the popularity of the cafe ; but there 
 were, besides, plenty of contributory causes. Wine, and wine 
 only, could be obtained at the Grand-I-Vert or at any of the 
 little taverns in the valley, but at Socquard's cafe there were 
 liqueurs and foreign wines and fruits in brandy. It was the 
 only place between Conches and Ville-aux-Fayes, and for six 
 leagues round, where you could play a game of billiards, and 
 nowhere else would you find such admirable punch. So the 
 valley rang almost daily with the fame of a cafe associated 
 with every idea of the utmost refinement of luxury for those 
 people whose sensibility resided in their stomachs rather than 
 in their hearts. Add to these reasons yet another. All who 
 frequented the place felt that it was a privilege to form an 
 integral part of the Soulanges festival. 
 
 The Cafe de la Palx fulfilled the same end as the Grand-I- 
 Vert, but in a town and in a sphere immediately above that 
 of the tavern. It was a storehouse of poison, a half-way house 
 for gossip between Ville-aux-Fayes and the valley. The 
 Grand-I-Vert supplied the cafe with milk and cream, and 
 Tonsard's daughters were in constant communication with 
 the latter establishment. 
 
 For Socquard the market square of Soulanges was an ap- 
 purtenance of his cafe. Hercules-Socquard went from door 
 to door, chatting with one and another, wearing for all cos- 
 tume a pair of trousers and an imperfectly buttoned waist- 
 coat, after the manner of country bar-keepers. The folk with 
 whom he chatted gave him warning if any one happened to 
 enter his establishment, and he returned thither laggingly 
 and, as it were, reluctant. 
 
 These details should suffice to convince the Parisian who 
 has never stirred from Paris that it would be difficult let us 
 go further, and say that it would be impossible to conceal 
 the most trifling matter in the whole valley of the Avonne 
 from Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes. There is no breach of con- 
 tinuity in country districts. There are taverns like the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 283 
 
 Grand-I-Vert and Cafe de la Paix dotted about from place to 
 place to catch and echo every sound. Matters which possess 
 absolutely no interest for anybody, accomplished, to boot, in 
 the strictest privacy, are bruited abroad by a sort of witch- 
 craft. Gossip fulfils the functions of the electric telegraph, 
 and by such apparatus evil tidings are borne prodigious dis- 
 tances in the twinkling of an eye. 
 
 Eigou checked his horse, alighted, and made the bridle fast 
 to one of the door-posts at the Tivoli. Next he discovered a 
 plausible pretext for listening to the dispute by seating him- 
 self between two of the windows, in such a position that if 
 he stretched his neck a little, he could see the persons within 
 and watch their movements, while at the same time he could 
 hear the coarse words which shook the windows, and remain 
 outside in perfect quiet. 
 
 "And if I were to tell old Eigou that your brother Nicolas 
 has a grudge against La Pechina, and is always on the watch 
 for her," shouted a shrill voice, "and that she will slip away 
 under your seigneur's hands, he would soon tear the tripes 
 out of the lot of you such as you are ; a pack of scoundrels at 
 the Grand-I-Vert!" 
 
 "And if you play us such a trick, Aglae," yelled Marie Ton- 
 sard, "I'll do that to you which you will never tell to any 
 but the worms in your coffin. Don't you meddle in Nicolas' 
 affairs, nor yet in mine with Bonnebault !" 
 
 Marie, urged by her grandmother, had followed Bonne- 
 bault on a spy's errand. Through the window at which Eigou 
 had stationed himself, she had seen Bonnebault displaying 
 his airs and graces for Mile. Socquard, who felt bound to 
 smile on a customer in return for his sufficiently agreeable 
 compliments. That smile had brought on the tempestuous 
 scene and a lightning flash of a revelation of no small value 
 to Eigou. 
 
 "Well, Father Eigou, are you helping to wear out my prem- 
 ises?" It was Socquard's voice, and he clapped the money- 
 lender on the shoulder. 
 
 The saloon-keeper had just returned from an outhouse at
 
 286 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 the end of the garden, whence such machinery as whirligigs, 
 see-saws, and weighing machines were being brought out to 
 be put in their places in the Tivoli for the delectation of the 
 public. Socquard had come up noiselessly, for he was shod 
 with the cheap yellow leather slippers which are sold in such 
 quantities in the provinces. 
 
 "If you had fresh lemons, I would take a glass of lemon- 
 ade," said Rigou in answer ; "it is hot this evening." 
 
 "But who is there squalling inside in such a way?" asked 
 Socquard, and looking through the window, he beheld his 
 daughter and Marie at close quarters. 
 
 "They are fighting for Bonnebault," said Rigou, with a 
 sardonic glance. 
 
 Socquard choked down a father's annoyance in the interests 
 of the saloon-keeper. The saloon-keeper thought it the more 
 prudent course to follow Rigou's example and listen to the 
 sounds from without; while the father in him yearned to 
 enter and declare that Bonnebault, though full of estimable 
 qualities as a customer, was absolutely worthless considered 
 as the son-in-law of a Soulanges notable. Yet, Father Soc- 
 quard had received but few offers of marriage for his daugh- 
 ter. The girl was twenty-two years old, and in height, weight, 
 and size she rivaled Mme. Vermichel, whose activity was a 
 standing marvel. A life behind a counter appeared to have 
 developed a tendency to corpulence, which Aglae inherited 
 from her father. 
 
 "What the devil has got the girls?" inquired Socquard of 
 his neighbor. 
 
 "Oh," said the Benedictine, " 'tis a devil which the Church 
 has caught more often than any other." 
 
 For all answer Socquard fell to examining the painted bill- 
 iard cues on the wall between the windows. Patches of plas- 
 ter had dropped away, till the beholder was puzzled to un- 
 derstand how they had once been bound together. 
 
 At that very moment Bonnebault issued from the billiard- 
 room, cue in hand, and struck Marie smartly on the shoulder. 
 
 "You have made me miss my stroke," he cried, "but I shall
 
 THE PEASANTRY 287 
 
 not miss you, and I shall keep on until you clap a stopper on 
 your gab." 
 
 Socquard and Rigou thought it time to interfere. Both 
 of them went inside, and immediately, with a sound as of the 
 distant practice of a drum corps, there arose such a swarm 
 of flies that the room was darkened. After the first alarm, 
 however, the cloud of huge blue-bottles and bloodthirsty 
 smaller brethren, with a gadfly or two among them, settled 
 down again among a regiment of sticky-looking bottles on a 
 triple row of shelves so black with specks that the paint be- 
 neath was quite invisible. 
 
 Marie was crying. To be beaten by the man she loves be- 
 neath the eyes of a rival is a humiliation which no woman 
 will endure, no matter what her position in the social scale. 
 Indeed, the lower her rank, the more violent the expression 
 of her hatred. Marie Tonsard saw neither Socquard nor 
 Rigou. She sank upon a seat in gloomy and ferocious silence. 
 The old Benedictine eyed her euriously. 
 
 "Aglae," said Socquard, "go and find a fresh lemon, and 
 rinse a wineglass yourself." 
 
 "You did wisely to send your daughter away," said Rigou 
 in a low voice ; "she might perhaps have been killed in another 
 moment," and he glanced significantly at Marie Tonsard's 
 hand. She had caught up a stool, and was about to hurl it at 
 Aglae's head. 
 
 "Come, come ! Marie," said old Socquard, stepping in front 
 of her, "people do not come here to fling stools about, and if 
 you were to break my glasses there would be a bill which you 
 would not pay me in cow's milk 
 
 "Father Socquard, your daughter is a reptile. I am every 
 bit as good as she is, do you hear ! If you do not want Bonne- 
 bault for a son-in-law, it is time that you told him to go and 
 play billiards somewhere else; he is losing five francs every 
 minute " 
 
 At the first outburst of a flood of words, which were 
 shrieked aloud rather than spoken, Socquard took Marie by 
 the waist and flung her out at the door in spite of her cries
 
 288 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 and struggles. He was not a moment too soon; Bonnebault 
 came out of the billiard-room for the second time, his eyes 
 ablaze. 
 
 "It shall not end like this !" screamed Marie Tonsard. 
 
 "You ! bow yourself out !" yelled Bonnebault ( Viollet had 
 thrown his arms about him to prevent violence). "Be off! or 
 I will never speak to you nor look at you again." 
 
 "You!" cried Marie, glancing at Bonnebault with fury in 
 her eyes. "Give me back my money first, and I will leave 
 you to Mademoiselle Socquard, if she is rich enough to keep 
 
 you " 
 
 At this point Marie was frightened, for she saw that 
 Hercules-Socquard could scarcely master Bonnebault, and 
 with a tigress' spring she fled out into the road. 
 
 Kigou put Marie into his chaise to hide her from the furious 
 Bonnebault, whose voice reached the Soudry house across the 
 square; then, when Marie was hidden away, he returned for 
 his glass of lemonade, examining meanwhile the group formed 
 by Plissoud, Amaury, Viollet, and the waiter, who were all 
 endeavoring to calm Bonnebault. 
 
 "Come, hussar ! it is your turn," said Amaury, a short, fair- 
 haired, blear-eyed young man. 
 
 "And besides, she has gone away," said Viollet. 
 
 If ever surprise was expressed on human countenance, it 
 was visible in Plissoud's face when he discovered that the 
 usurer of Blangy, sitting at one of the tables while the quar- 
 rel went on, was paying more attention to him, Plissoud, 
 than to the two girls. The Clerk of the Court was thrown 
 off his guard, his face wore the peculiar startled look that 
 a man wears when he comes suddenly on another man against 
 whom he is plotting. He went abruptly back to the billiard- 
 room. 
 
 "Good-day, Father Socquard," said Eigou. 
 
 "I will bring your carriage round," said Socquard; "take 
 your time." 
 
 "How could one get to know what they say over their bill- 
 iards?" said Rigou to himself; and just then he saw the 
 waiter's face in the looking-glass.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 289 
 
 The waiter was a man-of-all-work. He pruned Socquard's 
 vines, swept out the cafe and billiard saloon, kept the garden 
 in order, and watered the floor of the Tivoli, and all for the 
 sum of sixty francs per annum. He never wore a jacket save 
 on great occasions; his costume consisted of a pair of blue 
 linen trousers, heavy shoes, and a striped velvet waistcoat, 
 with the addition of a coarse homespun apron when on duty 
 in the cafe or billiard-room. Those apron-strings were hip 
 insignia of office. Socquard hired the young fellow at the 
 last fair; for in that valley, and all over Burgundy for that 
 matter, servants are hired by the year, and come to the hiring 
 fair exactly like horses. 
 
 "What is your name?" asked Eigou. 
 
 "Michel, at your service," the lad answered. 
 
 "Does Daddy Fourchon come here now and again?" 
 
 "Two or three times a week with M. Vermichel. M. Ver- 
 michel gives me a few sous for letting him know when his 
 wife is going to pounce in upon him." 
 
 "He is a good man, is Daddy Fourchon; he has had some 
 education, and has plenty of common-sense," said Eigou, and 
 he paid for his lemonade, and left the stale-smelling room as 
 Socquard brought the chaise round to the door. 
 
 Eigou had just taken his seat when he saw the apothecary, 
 and hailed him with, "Hallo ! M. Vermut !" Vermut looked 
 upj and seeing Eigou, hastened towards him. Eigou stepped 
 down again, and said in Vermut's ear, "Do you know whether 
 there is an irritant which can destroy the skin and induce 
 disease say a whitlow on the finger, for instance?" 
 
 "If M. Gourdon undertakes it, yes," said the man of drugs. 
 
 "Vennut, not a word of this to any one, if you do not want 
 us to fall out. But tell M. Gourdon about it, and tell him to 
 come to see me, the day after to-morrow, and I will give him 
 a forefinger to amputate it will be rather a delicate job." 
 
 And with that the ex-mayor stepped into his chaise beside 
 Marie Tonsard, leaving the little apothecary dumfounded. 
 
 "Well, little viper," said Eigou, laying a hand on the 
 girl's arm, after fastening the reins to a ring on the leather
 
 290 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 apron which covered them in. "So you think you will keep 
 Bonnebault by giving way to temper like this, do you? If 
 you were wise, you would help on his marriage with that big 
 lump of stupidity, and then you could take your revenge." 
 
 Marie could not help smiling as she answered, "Oh ! what a 
 bad man you are ! You are our master, and that is the truth.'* 
 
 "Listen, Marie ; I am a friend to the peasants, but I cannot 
 have one of you come and put himself between my teeth and 
 a mouthful of game. Your brother Nicolas, as Aglae said, is 
 waylaying La Pechina. It is not right, for the child is under 
 my protection; she is down in my will for thirty thousand 
 francs, and I mean her to make a good match. I know that 
 Nicolas, with your sister Catherine to help him, all but killed 
 the poor child this morning; you will see your brother and 
 sister, tell them this 'If you let La Pechina alone, Father 
 Bigou will save Nicolas from the conscription ' " 
 
 "You are the Devil himself," cried Marie. "People say 
 that you have signed a compact with him. Is it possible ?" 
 
 "Yes," said Bigou, with gravity. 
 
 "They used to say so at 'up-sittings/ but I did not believe 
 them." ' 
 
 "The Devil promised that no attempts upon my life should 
 succeed; that I should never be robbed; that I should live for 
 a hundred years without an illness; that I should succeed 
 in everything that I undertook, and until the hour of my 
 death I should be as young as a two-year cockerel " 
 
 "As you certainly are," said Marie. "Well, then, it is 
 devilish easy for you to save my brother from the army 
 
 "If he has a mind ; for he will have to lose a finger, that is 
 all," said Bigou. "I will tell him how." 
 
 "Why, you are taking the upper road !" said Marie. , 
 
 "I never go the other way of a night," said the unfrocked 
 monk. 
 
 "Because of the Crucifix?" queried Marie artlessly. 
 
 "That is just it, cunning girl !" returned the diabolical 
 personage. 
 
 They were reaching a spot where the road lay in a hollow,
 
 THE PEASANTRY 291 
 
 a cutting through a furrow in the land, with a tolerably 
 steep bank rising on either side such as you often see on 
 French cross-country roads. On the hither side of this hollow 
 the road forked to Cerneux and Eonquerolles, and in the 
 angle of the fork a Crucifix stood. Any one standing on 
 either bank might fire on his man to a certainty, for he could 
 almost clap the muzzle in the passenger's face; and this was 
 the more easy, since that the slopes behind were covered with 
 vines, and there were chance-sown brambles and bushes on 
 the bank which afforded cover. It may be guessed, therefore, 
 why the usurer, with unfailing prudence, never went that 
 way at night. The Thune flows round the base of the little 
 hill which they call the Cross Green. Never was there a 
 spot better adapted for murder and vengeance, for the Eon- 
 querolles road runs down to the bridge over the Avonne by 
 the hunting-lodge, and the road to Cerneux crosses the high 
 road in such a sort that the murderer would practically have 
 a choice of four roads, and might fly in the direction of the 
 Aigues, or Ville-aux-Fayes, or Ronquerolles, or Cerneux, and 
 leave his pursuers in perplexity as to the way he had taken. 
 
 "I will set you down just outside the village," said Eigou, 
 when they came in sight of the first houses of Blangy. 
 
 "Because of Annette, you old coward !" cried Marie. "Are 
 you going to send that girl away soon? You have had her 
 for three years. . . . What amuses me is that your old 
 woman is so well. God avenges Himself." 
 
 IV 
 
 THE TRIUMVIRATE OF VILLE-AUX-FAYES 
 
 THE prudent money-lender had made a law that his wife and 
 Jean should sleep between sunset and sunrise, proving to 
 them that the house would never be robbed while he himself 
 sat up till midnight and lay late. Not only had he secured 
 the house to himself between the hours of seven in the even-
 
 292 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 ing and five in the morning, but he accustomed both wife and 
 man to respect his slumbers and those of the Hagar whose 
 room lay beyond his own. 
 
 So the next morning about half-past six, Mme. Kigou came 
 and knocked timidly at her husband's door. (With Jean's 
 aid she had already looked after the poultry.) "M. Bigou," 
 she said, "you asked me to call you." 
 
 The sound of the woman's voice, her bearing, and the way 
 in which she obeyed an order, quaking all the while lest her 
 very obedience should be taken amiss, showed the utter im- 
 molation of the poor creature to her ingenious petty tyrant 
 and her affection for him. 
 
 "All right !" cried Eigou. 
 
 "Is Annette to be wakened too?" 
 
 "No. Let her sleep on. She has been up all night," he an- 
 swered bravely. The man was always seridus even when he 
 indulged in a joke. As a matter of fact, Annette had secretly 
 opened the door to Sibilet, Fourchon, and Catherine Tonsard, 
 all of whom came at different times between eleven and one 
 o'clock that morning. 
 
 Ten minutes later Eigou came downstairs. He was dressed 
 more carefully than usual, and greeted his wife with a "Good- 
 morning, old woman," which made her prouder than she 
 would have been to see a Montcornet at her feet. 
 
 "Jean," said Eigou, addressing the lay-brother, "don't leave 
 the house. Don't let them rob me ; you would lose more by 
 it than I." 
 
 It was by mingling kindness, and rebuffs, and hope, and 
 hard words, in this way, that the learned egotist had broken 
 in his three slaves to a dog-like fidelity and attachment. 
 
 Again Eigou took the upper road to avoid the Cross Green, 
 and reached the market-place of Soulanges about eight 
 o'clock. He had just made the reins fast to the nearest post 
 by the flight of steps, when a shutter was put back, and Sou- 
 dry exhibited his countenance. Two small, black eyes gave 
 a cunning expression to a face seamed by the smallpox. 
 
 "Let us begin by breaking a crust together," he said, "for
 
 THE PEASANTRY 293 
 
 we shall not get breakfast at Ville-aux-Fayes before one 
 o'clock." 
 
 He called under his breath to a damsel as young and 
 pretty as Eigou's servant. The girl came noiselessly down 
 the stairs ; he bade her bring a piece of ham and some bread, 
 and went himself to the cellar for wine. 
 
 For the thousandth time Eigou contemplated 'the parlor; 
 the oak wainscot that rose to elbow height, the mouldings on 
 the ceiling, the spacious handsomely painted cupboards, the 
 neat stove, and the magnificent timepiece which once belonged 
 to Mile. Laguerre. The backs of the chairs were lyre-shaped ; 
 the woodwork painted white and varnished; the seats were 
 of green morocco with gilded nail-heads. The massive ma- 
 hogany table was covered with green oilcloth, scored with 
 dark lines, and bound with green binding. The pains which 
 Urbain bestowed on the polishing of the parquetry floor at- 
 tested the fact that his mistress had herself been a domestic 
 servant. 
 
 "Pshaw !" said Eigou to himself. "This kind of thing costs 
 too much. One can eat just as comfortably in my room at 
 home, and I save the interest on the money laid out in this 
 useless show. Why, where is Mme. Soudry?" he inquired, 
 as the mayor of Soulanges came in with a venerable bottle in 
 his hand. 
 
 "She is asleep." 
 
 "And you do not disturb her slumbers much," said Eigou. 
 
 The old gendarme winked facetiously, and indicated the 
 ham which the pretty Jeannette was bringing in. 
 
 "A nice morsel like that wakes you up," he said, "home 
 cured ! We only cut into it yesterday." 
 
 "I would not have thought it of you, old chum; where did 
 you pick her up ?" asked the old monk, lowering his voice for 
 Soudry's ear. 
 
 "Like the ham," said the gendarme, with another wink, 
 "she has been in the house for a week." 
 
 Jeannette still wore her night-cap, and had thrust her bare 
 feet into her slippers. She wore a short petticoat, and the 
 straps of her bodice were passed over her shoulders in peasant
 
 294 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 fashion; the crossed folds of a bandana handkerchief could 
 not altogether hide her fresh and youthful charms ; altogether 
 she looked no less appetizing than the ham vaunted by Sou- 
 dry. She was plump and short. The mottled red of the bare 
 arms that hung by her side, the large dimpled hands and 
 short fingers shapely fashioned at the tips, all spoke of high 
 health. Add to this a face of a thoroughly Burgundian type, 
 ruddy, but white at the temples, ears, and throat; chestnut 
 hair, eyes which turned slightly upwards at the outer corners ; 
 wide nostrils, a sensual mouth, and a trace of down upon the 
 cheeks. With a lively expression tempered by a deceptive 
 demureness, she was the very model of a roguish servant girl. 
 
 '"'Upon my word, Jeannette is like the ham/' declared 
 Eigou. "If I had not an Annette, I should like a Jeannette." 
 
 "One is as good as the other," said Soudry, "for your An- 
 nette is fair, and soft, and delicate. How is Mme. Eigou? 
 Is she asleep ?" Soudry resumed abruptly, to show Eigou that 
 he understood the jest. 
 
 "She wakes at cock-crow," said Eigou, "but she goes to 
 roost with the hens. I stay up myself and read the Constitu- 
 tionnel. Evening and morning my wife lets me dose; she 
 would not come into the room for the world " 
 
 "Here it is just the other way," put in Jeannette. "The 
 mistress sits up with company and plays at cards; there are 
 sometimes fifteen of them in the drawing-room. The master 
 goes off to bed at eight, and we get up at daybreak " 
 
 "It looks different to you," said Eigou, "but it comes to 
 the same thing in the end. Well, my dear, you come to me, 
 and I will send Annette here. It will be the same thing, with 
 a difference " 
 
 "Old scoundrel," said Soudry, "you will make her blush !" 
 
 "Eh, gendarme ! so you only want one horse in your stable ? 
 After all, every one takes his luck where he finds it." 
 
 Jeannette, in obedience to her master's order, went to put 
 out his clothes. 
 
 ''Tou promised to marry her when your wife dies, I sup- 
 pose?" asked Eigou. 
 
 "It is the only way at our age," said Soudry.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 295 
 
 "If the girls had ambition, it would be a short cut to wid- 
 ower's estate," returned Kigou; "more particularly, if Jean- 
 nette heard Mme. Soudry mention her way of soaping the 
 stairs." 
 
 Both husbands grew thoughtful at this. When Jeannette 
 came to announce that all was in readiness, Soudry took her 
 away with him, with a "Come and help me," which drew 
 a smile from the unfrocked monk. 
 
 "There is a difference after all," said he ; "I should not be 
 afraid to leave him with Annette." 
 
 Fifteen minutes after, Soudry, dressed in his best, stepped 
 into the basket-chaise, and the pair went round by the lake 
 on the way to Ville-aux-Fayes. 
 
 "And how about yonder chateau?" asked Kigou, as they 
 caught a glimpse of the end of the manor-house. The stress 
 which the old Jacobin gave to the word "chateau" revealed the 
 hatred of the great chateaux and great estates which small 
 proprietors cherish in their souls. 
 
 "Why, I am sure, I hope it will stand for my lifetime," said 
 Soudry. "The Comte de Soulanges was my general; he has 
 done me a good turn; he managed my pension nicely, and 
 then he allows Lupin to manage his estate, and Lupin's father 
 made a fortune by managing it. There will be another to 
 come after Lupin, and so long as there are Counts of Sou- 
 langes the place will be respected. They are a good sort, they 
 live and let live " 
 
 "Ah ! but the General has three children, and perhaps after 
 his death they will not agree. Some day or other the sons and 
 the son-in-law will sell the place, and that mine of lead and 
 old iron will be sold to shopkeepers, whom we will contrive 
 to squeeze." 
 
 The chateau of Soulanges seemed to defy the unfrocked 
 monk. 
 
 "Ah! yes, they used to build solidly in those times!" ex- 
 claimed Soudry. "But M. de Soulanges is economizing at this 
 moment so as to entail the Soulanges estate; it is to go with 
 the title "
 
 296 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "Entails fall through," said Rigou. 
 
 When the theme was exhausted, the pair fell to discussing 
 the merits of their respective domestics in a Burgundian dia- 
 lect, a trifle too broad to print. This never-failing topic lasted 
 them till they reached Gaubertin's headquarters. Even the 
 most impatient reader may perhaps feel sufficient curiosity 
 on the subject of Ville-aux-Fayes to excuse a brief digression. 
 
 It is an odd-sounding word, but it is easily explained. It is 
 a corruption of the Low Latin villa-in-fago, the manor in 
 the woods. The name is sufficient to tell us that a forest for- 
 merly covered the delta of the Avonne which flows five leagues 
 away into the Yonne. Doubtless, it was a Frank who built 
 a stronghold on the ridge which thereabouts makes a detour, 
 and slopes gradually down into the strip of plain where Le- 
 clercq the deputy had bought an estate. The conqueror made 
 a broad and long moat, and so entrenched himself in the delta. 
 His was a strong position, and, for a feudal lord, an extremely 
 convenient one for the collection of tolls and pontage on the 
 bridges by which all wayfarers must pass, and grinding dues' 
 at the water-mills. 
 
 Such is the history of the first beginnings of Ville-aux- 
 Fayes. Every feudal stronghold or religious settlement at- 
 tracted residents about it, to form the nucleus of a town at a 
 later day when the place was in a position to create or de- 
 velop an industry, or to attract business. Jean Eouvet's 
 invention of water-carriage for timber, requiring wharves in 
 places suitable for intercepting the floating piles, was the 
 making of Ville-aux-Fayes, then a mere village in comparison 
 with Soulanges. Ville-aux-Fayes became the headquarters 
 of the trade in the timber which was grown along both streams 
 for a distance of twelve miles. Workmen flocked to Ville- 
 aux-Fayes, for many hands were needed to build up the piles 
 which the Yonne carries into the Seine, besides the salvage 
 and recovery of "stray" rafts. This working population sup- 
 plied consumers of produce and stimulated trade. So it came 
 to pass that Ville-aux-Fayes, which numbered scarce six hun- 
 dred inhabitants at the end of the sixteenth century, in 1790
 
 THE PEASANTRY 29Y 
 
 had a population of two thousand, which had doubled since 
 Gaubertin came to the place. This is how it was brought 
 about. 
 
 When the Legislative Assembly reconstituted the electoral 
 divisions, Ville-aux-Fayes, on account of its geographical po- 
 sition, was selected as the seat of local government, to the 
 exclusion of Soulanges. The position of Ville-aux-Fayes 
 marked it out for a sub-prefecture, and a sub-prefecture en- 
 tailed a Court of First Instance, and the hierarchy of officials 
 required by both institutions. With the increase of popula- 
 tion in Paris there began to be an increase in the demand 
 for fuel, prices rose, and Ville-aux-Fayes grew more impor- 
 tant with the development of its trade. Gaubertin's second 
 start in life had been determined by foresight; he felt sure 
 that Paris would grow with the peace ; and, in fact, the popu- 
 lation increased by one-third between 1815 and 1825. 
 
 The configuration of Ville-aux-Fayes is determined by the 
 lie of the land. Wharves line either side of the promontory. 
 Above the town and below the hillside covered with the Forest 
 of Soulanges, a bar has been made across the river to stop 
 the floating timber ; and here the outskirts of Ville-aux-Fayes 
 begin. The lower town lies in the broadest part of the delta, 
 along the brink of a sheet of water a lake formed by the 
 Avonne ; but the upper town, consisting of some five hundred 
 houses and gardens, is built on the higher ground which sur- 
 rounds the promontory on three sides. This elevation, which 
 was cleared of forest three centuries ago, looks down on the 
 ever-changing picture of the Avonne lake, a sparkling surface 
 covered with rafts built of timber taken from the great piles 
 on the wharves at the water's edge. The streams loaded with 
 floating wood, the picturesque waterfalls on the Avonne, 
 which flows down from a higher level into the river, turning 
 mill-wheels, and furnishing water-power to several factories 
 on its way, all combine to form a busy scene, which is the 
 more unusual on account of its background of green masses 
 of forest; while the distant view up the valley- of the Aigues 
 stands out in glorious contrast to the sombre setting of the 
 forest-clad hillsides above the town of Ville-aux-Fayes.
 
 298 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 On the side of the valley opposite this vast curtain of trees 
 the king's highway crosses the river by a bridge, and pursues 
 its course till it reaches a row of poplars within a quarter 
 of a league of Ville-aux-Fayes, where a little hamlet lies 
 about a post-station situated there on a large farm. The 
 cross-road from Soulanges likewise curves away round to the 
 bridge, where it joins the king's highway. 
 
 Gaubertin had built himself a house in the delta, with a 
 view of making such a place that the lower town should be as 
 handsome as the upper. It was a modern stone house, a single 
 story high, with attics in the slate-covered roof, and the usual 
 cast-iron balconies, Venetian blinds, much-painted window- 
 sashes, and no ornament save a fretwork under the cornice. 
 There was a spacious courtyard attached to the house, and 
 an "English garden" at the back, on the brink of the Avonne. 
 The sub-prefecture could not be allowed to fall short of such 
 elegance; and at the instance of the deputies, Messieurs 
 Leclercq and Konquerolles, it was transferred from its 
 wretched temporary quarters to a brand new mansion built 
 opposite Gaubertin's house. There also the townhall was 
 built, and quite recently a Palais de Justice had been erected 
 for the houseless Court of First Instance ; in fact, Ville-aux- 
 Fayes owed a whole series of imposing modern edifices to the 
 spirited example set by its mayor. A police-station completed 
 the outline of the market-square. 
 
 These changes, of which the inhabitants were not a little 
 proud, were due to Gaubertin's influence. And he, but a 
 few days before, had received the Cross of the Legion of 
 Honor on the occasion of the approaching Birthday. In a 
 mushroom town thus constituted there is an aristocracy and 
 no old noblesse; and the citizens, proud of their independence, 
 took up the quarrel of the peasants against a Count of the 
 Empire who had gone over to the Bourbons. To their think- 
 ing, the real oppressors were the oppressed. The attitude of 
 the trading town was so well known at the Home Office, that 
 the sub-prefect had been specially chosen; he was a concil- 
 iatory spirit, educated by his uncle the famous des Lupeaulx ;
 
 THE PEASANTRY 299 
 
 a man of compromises, familiar with the expedients by which 
 men are governed, the sort of man who is dubbed a time- 
 server by puritanical politicians capable themselves of doing 
 worse. 
 
 Gaubertin's house was adorned within with all the tasteless 
 inventions of modern luxury. In the dining-room you beheld 
 expensive paper-hangings with gilt borders, bronze chande- 
 liers, mahogany furniture, chairs covered with crimson 
 leather, astral lamps, round tables with marble tops, a white 
 gilt-edged porcelain dessert service, and colored lithographs ; 
 the drawing-room was upholstered in blue cashmere; the 
 whole house looked dreary and commonplace to the last de- 
 gree; but at Ville-aux-Fayes it was looked upon as the last 
 extreme of the luxury of a Sardanapalus. Mme. Gaubertin 
 played the part of a lady of fashion with great effect; she 
 adopted sundry small affectations, and minced and simpered 
 at forty-five in her quality of mayoress who has an established 
 position and a little court of her own. 
 
 Do not the three houses belonging respectively to Kigou, 
 Soudry, and Gaubertin reflect the country village, the little 
 town, and the sub-prefecture to perfection for those who know 
 France ? 
 
 Gaubertin was neither a clever man nor a man of talent, 
 but to all appearance he possessed both talent and cleverness. 
 He owed the unfailing justice of his forecasts, like his cun- 
 ning, to an excessive greed of gain. He coveted fortune, not 
 for his wife's sake, not for his two daughters, .not for his son, 
 nor for himself, nor yet for family considerations and the 
 consequence which money brings; even when the quickening 
 impulse of vengeance was set aside, he loved money-getting; 
 he loved the game for its own sake, like Fucingen the banker, 
 of whom it was said that he was always fingering the gold 
 in both pockets at once. 
 
 The round of business was this man's whole life ; and now 
 that he was full to repletion, he worked as hard as though he 
 wanted daily bfead. All the schemes, and trickery, and crafts 
 of business as a fine art, all the clever strokes to be made, 
 
 VOL. 1045
 
 300 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 statements of accounts and receipts, all the clash of conflict- 
 ing interests put Gaubertin in spirits, they set the blood in 
 circulation, and distributed the bile equally over his system. 
 He came and went, rode and drove, and went by boat, and at- 
 tended sales and auctions in Paris; nothing escaped his at- 
 tention, and he held countless threads in his hands without 
 confusion. 
 
 Gaubertin was quick and decided in his movements and 
 ideas; short, small, and compact, with his sharply cut nose, 
 bright eyes, and .erect ears; there was a suggestion of the 
 hunting-dog about him. The perfectly round and sunburned 
 face, from which the brown ears stood out (for he habitually 
 wore a cap), was in perfect agreement with his character. 
 His nose turned up at the end ; the hard lips looked as though 
 they could never unclose to speak a kindly word. A pair of 
 eleek, bushy, black whiskers under the high-colored cheek- 
 bones disappeared in his stock. His frizzled iron-gray hair 
 arranged itself naturally in a succession of rolls like an old- 
 fashioned magistrate's wig; it looked as though it had been 
 crimped by the scorching heat of the fire which burned within 
 that dark head, and flashed in sparks from the little gray 
 eyes. The wrinkles circling their rims were doubtless caused 
 by screwing them up to gaze across country in full sunlight, 
 a characteristic which completed his face. In person he was 
 spare, muscular, and slight ; he had the claw-like horny hands 
 covered with hair peculiar to those who take a practical part 
 in their work. His manner usually pleased those who dealt 
 with him, for he could assume a deceptive gaiety; he could 
 talk a great deal without saying anything which he did not 
 intend to say ; and he wrote but little, so that he might deny 
 anything not in his favor which might escape him at una- 
 wares. He had an honest cashier to keep his books; men of 
 Gaubertin's stamp can always unearth an honest subordinate, 
 and in their own interests they make of him their first dupe. 
 
 When Eigou's little basket-chaise appeared towards eight 
 o'clock in the poplar avenue by the post-house near the bridge, 
 Gaubertin in cap, jacket, and boots was already returning
 
 THE PEASANTRY 301 
 
 from his wharves. He quickened his pace at the sight of the 
 chaise, for he rightly guessed that Rigou would only put him- 
 self out for "the big business." 
 
 "Good-day, Daddy Nab ; good-day, stomach full of gall and 
 wisdom," said he, tapping either visitor on the chest. "We 
 are going to talk business, and we will talk glass in hand, by 
 George, that is the way to do it." 
 
 "You ought to grow fat at that trade," said Rigou. 
 
 "I am working too hard ; I do not keep indoors like the rest 
 of you, who have the bad habit of staying at home like an old 
 pensioner. Oh ! you are well off, upon my word, you can do 
 business in an easy-chair, sit at the table with your back to the 
 fire business comes to find you. Just come in, the house is 
 yours, by George, so long as you stop in it." 
 
 A man in a blue livery, faced with red, came to take the 
 horse away to the stables in the yard. 
 
 Gaubertin left his guests in the garden for a moment, while 
 he gave orders concerning breakfast. Then he came out to 
 them. 
 
 "Well, my little wolves," he said, rubbing his hands, "the 
 gendarmerie of Soulanges were on their way to Conches at 
 daybreak this morning; they are about to arrest the wood- 
 stealers, no doubt. They are in a hurry, by George, they are !" 
 (He looked at his watch.) "By this time those fellows ought 
 to be formally and duly arrested." 
 
 "Probably they are," said Rigou. 
 
 "Well, what do people say in the village, have they made 
 up their minds ?" 
 
 "What should they make up their minds to do?" demanded 
 Rigou. "This is no concern of ours," he added, giving Soudry 
 a look. 
 
 "How is it no concern of yours ? If our concerted measures 
 force them to sell the Aigues, who will make five or six 
 hundred thousand francs by it? Shall I, all by myself? I 
 cannot fork out two millions, my purse is not long enough. 
 I have three children to set up in life, and a wife who will 
 not listen to reason on the score of expense. I want, and must
 
 302 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 have partners. Daddy Nab has the money ready, has he not ? 
 He has not a single mortgage which will not have expired; 
 he has bonds for which I am answerable now for his money. 
 I put myself down for eight hundred thousand francs, and 
 my son the judge for two hundred thousand ; we are counting 
 on Daddy Nab for another two hundred thousand. How 
 much do you mean to put in, reverend father ?" 
 
 "The rest," said Eigou coolly. 
 
 "The deuce ! I should like to have my hand where you have 
 your heart ! And what are you going to do ?" 
 
 "Why, I shall do as you do. Tell us your plan." 
 
 "My own plan," said Gaubertin, "is to take double quantity, 
 so as to sell half to those in Conches, Cerneux, and Blangy 
 who want land. Soudry will have customers at Soulanges, 
 and you have yours here. That is not the difficulty. How 
 shall we arrange among ourselves ? How shall we divide the 
 big lots?" 
 
 "Dear me," said Eigou, "nothing more simple. Each will 
 take what suits him best. I, in the first place, shall give no- 
 body any trouble. I will take the woods with my son-in-law 
 and Soudry. There has been so much damage done in them 
 that they will not tempt you. We will leave you the rest for 
 your share, faith ! you will have your money's worth." 
 
 "Will you sign an agreement to that effect ?" asked Soudry. 
 
 "The agreement would be worth nothing," Gaubertin an- 
 swered. "Besides, you see that I am acting on the square; 
 I am trusting implicitly to Eigou, for the purchase will be 
 made in his name." 
 
 "That is good enough for me," said Eigou. 
 
 "I make one stipulation ; I am to have the hunting- lodge 
 and the outbuildings and fifty acres round about it. I will 
 pay you for the land. I shall make the lodge into a country- 
 house; it will be near my woods. Mme. Gaubertin Mme. 
 Isaure, as she chooses to be called will make her 'villa* of 
 it, she says." 
 
 "I have no objection," said Eigou. 
 
 Gaubertin looked round on all sides; and having made
 
 THE PEASANTRY 303 
 
 quite certain that by no possibility could any one overhear 
 them, he continued "Eh ! now, between ourselves, do you 
 think they are likely to play us some scurvy trick?" 
 
 "For instance?" asked Eigou, who was determined not to 
 understand till Gaubertin should speak out. 
 
 "Why, suppose that one of the wildest of the lot, and a 
 handy man with a gun into the bargain, should send a bullet 
 whistling about the Count's ears just by way of bluster?" 
 
 "The Count is the man to run up and collar him." 
 
 "Michaud then ? " 
 
 "Michaud would keep it quiet ; he would bide his time, and 
 play the spy, and find out the man at last and those who had 
 set him on." 
 
 "You are right," said Gaubertin. "Thirty of them ought 
 to rise at once. Some of them would be sent to the hulks. 
 . . . After all, they would pick out the scamps, and we 
 would rather be rid of them when they have served our turn. 
 We have two or three good-for-nothings yonder the Ton- 
 sards and Bonnebault, for instance " 
 
 "Tonsard might do some queer stroke of work," said 
 Soudry ; "I know him. . . . We will egg him on further 
 through Vaudoyer and Courtecuisse." 
 
 "I have Courtecuisse," said Eigou. 
 
 "And I have Vaudoyer in the hollow of my hand." 
 
 "Let us be cautious !" said Eigou. "Caution, above all 
 things !" 
 
 "Come, your reverence, can it be that you imagine that 
 there is any harm in talking about things that are going on 
 about us ? Is it we who are taking out warrants, locking peo- 
 ple up, stealing wood, and gleaning? If the Count goes the 
 right way to work, if he arranges with some farmer-general 
 to exploit the Aigues, it will be good-bye to the baskets, the 
 vintage is over. And you will lose more by it than I. ... 
 What we say is said between ourselves, and for our own 
 benefit, for I certainly shall not say a word to Vaudoyer 
 which I could not repeat before God and men. . . . But 
 there is no harm in looking forward and profiting by events
 
 304 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 as they arise. The peasants hereabouts are a hotheaded race ; 
 the General's regulations and Michaud's severity and perse- 
 cutions have driven them to the end of their patience. To- 
 day they have made a mess of the business, and I will wager 
 that there has been a scuffle with the gendarmerie. Let us 
 have breakfast." 
 
 Mme. Gaubertin came out into the garden to find her 
 guests. She was a somewhat pale-faced woman, with long 
 ringlets drooping on either side of her face. She played the 
 passionate-virtuous role, the woman who has never known 
 love. She cultivated Platonic affection with the officials, and 
 had for cavaliere servente the public prosecutor, her patito, 
 as she called him. Mme. Gaubertin was addicted to caps with 
 top-knots (though preferably she wore nothing to hide her 
 hair), and overdid blue and pale rose-color. She danced. 
 At forty-five she had all the affectations of a young miss, in 
 spite of large feet and alarming hands. She desired to be 
 called Isaure, for amid her many oddities and absurdities 
 she had the good taste to consider that the name of Gaubertin 
 was unpresentable. Her eyes were pale, her hair of some un- 
 decided tint resembling dingy nankeen; and, let it be added, 
 a goodly number of young ladies took her for their model, 
 stabbed the sky with their eyes, and posed as angels. 
 
 "Well, gentlemen," she said, as she greeted them, "I have 
 strange news for you. The gendarmes have come back " 
 
 "Have they brought any prisoners ?" 
 
 "None whatever! The General asked for their pardon in 
 advance and it was granted in honor of the happy anni- 
 versary of the accession of our King." 
 
 The three associates stared at each other. 
 
 "That big Cuirassier is cleverer than I thought him," said 
 Gaubertin. "Let us sit down to table; we need consolation 
 after this. After all, the game is not lost, it is only drawn 
 out. It lies with you now, Rigou." 
 
 Soudry and Eigou went home again out of spirits. None 
 of them could think of any expedient for bringing about a 
 catastrophe for their own advantage, so they trusted, as Gau- 
 bertin had suggested, that something might turn up.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 305 
 
 There were certain Jacobins, in the early days of the Revo- 
 lution, who were furious when the clemency of Louis XVI. 
 defeated their purposes, and deliberately provoked the 
 severity of the Court that they might find an excuse for 
 bringing about the anarchy which meant both power and for- 
 tune for them. In the same manner, the Comte de Mont- 
 cornet's formidable enemies put their last hope in the future 
 rigorous methods of Michaud and the keepers. Gaubertin 
 promised his support in general terms ; he had no wish that his 
 understanding with Sibilet should be known. Nothing can 
 equal the discretion of a man of Gaubertin's stamp, unless, 
 indeed, it is the discretion of an ex-gendarme or an unfrocked 
 monk. In the hands of three such men, each steeped to the 
 lips in cupidity and hatred, the plot could only end well, or, 
 more properly speaking, ill. 
 
 HOW A VICTORY WAS WON WITHOUT A BLOW 
 
 MME. MICHAUD'S fears had come of the second-sight of pas- 
 sionate love. When a soul finds its all-in-all in another soul, 
 it comprehends in the end the whole world in which that 
 other dwells, and sees clearly in that atmosphere. Love 
 brings to a woman the presentiments which, at a later day, 
 become the second-sight of motherhood. While the poor 
 young wife fell into the habit of listening to the confused 
 voices which reach us across the mysterious tracts of space, 
 a scene in which her husband's life was actually threatened 
 took place at the Grand-I-Vert. 
 
 Those who had been first astir that morning, before five 
 o'clock, had seen the Soulanges gendarmerie go by on the 
 way to Conches. The news spread quickly; and those inter- 
 ested were astonished to learn from the people who lived on 
 the higher road that a detachment of gendarmerie, under the 
 Lieutenant of Ville-aux-Fayes, had gone through the Forest
 
 306 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 of the Aigues. It happened to be a Monday, which in itself 
 was a sufficient reason why the laborers should go to the wine- 
 shop, and it was likewise the eve of the anniversary of the 
 return of the Bourbons; not that those who frequented that 
 den of thieves, the Grand-I-Vert, required that "august 
 cause" (as it used to be called) to justify their presence in the 
 tavern, though they would have urged the plea loudly enough 
 if they had seen the shadow of an official of any sort or de- 
 scription. 
 
 The Tonsards, with Godain, who was in a manner one of 
 the family, and Vaudoyer, and an old vinedresser named 
 Laroche, were all assembled there. Laroche lived from hand 
 to mouth; he was one of the Blangy delinquents who had 
 been pressed into the service to cure the General of his taste 
 for prosecutions. Blangy had likewise furnished three other 
 men, twelve women, eight girls, and five boys ; the women and 
 children had husbands or parents to be responsible for them ; 
 but all of them were paupers ; in fact, they composed the en- 
 tire pauper population of Blangy. The vinegrowers did well 
 in 1823, and the large quantity of wine in 1826 was sure to 
 mean another good year for them ; the General had employed 
 a good deal of labor, and had set money circulating in the 
 neighboring communes, so that it had been no easy task to 
 find a hundred and twenty proletarians in Blangy, Conches, 
 and Cerneux. It had, however, been done. Mothers and 
 grandmothers who had not a sou of their own, like Granny 
 Tonsard, had been put forward. This Laroche, the old la- 
 borer, possessed absolutely nothing; he was unlike Tonsard, 
 he had no hot and vicious blood in his veins; it was a dumb, 
 cold hatred that sustained him ; he worked in sullen silence, 
 detesting work, and unable to live without it. His features 
 were hard, his expression repellent; his vigor had not failed 
 him, despite his sixty years, but his back was weakened and 
 bowed ; he saw no future before him, he would have no bit of 
 field to call his own, and he envied those who had land. So 
 he ravaged the Forest of the Aigues without mercy, and de- 
 lighted in doing wanton damage.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 307 
 
 "Shall we let them take us away?" asked Laroche. 
 "After Conches, they will come to Blangy; this is my second 
 offence, they will give me three months for it." 
 
 "And what can you do against the gendarmerie, you old 
 sot ?" retorted Vaudoyer. 
 
 "Do? Could not we slash their horses' legs with our 
 scythes? They would soon come down, their guns are not 
 loaded, and when they found themselves outmatched by ten 
 to one, they would soon be obliged to take themselves off. 
 Suppose that the three villages rose, and two or three gen- 
 darmes were killed, would they guillotine everybody? They 
 would soon be obliged to give it up, as they did once before 
 on the other side of Burgundy when they called the soldiers 
 out for another affair like this. Bah ! the soldiers went, and 
 the peasants kept on cutting wood; they had done it for 
 years and years, just as we have here." 
 
 "Life for life," said Vaudoyer; "it would be better to kill 
 just one of them; and to do it without running risks, so as 
 to disgust those arminacs with the place." 
 
 "Which of the brigands?" demanded Laroche. 
 
 "Michaud," said Courtecuisse. "Vaudoyer is right, right 
 ten times over. You will see that when a keeper has been 
 turned off into the dark, it will not be so ea"sy to find others 
 to stay in the sun and keep a lookout. It is not so much 
 that they are there in the daytime, but they are there all 
 night as well. They are fiends, that they are !" 
 
 "Wherever you go," said Granny Tonsard (and the old 
 woman of seventy showed her parchment face, pitted with 
 countless holes, pierced with two green slits of eyes, and gar- 
 nished with locks of dingy white hair, which straggled out 
 from beneath a red handkerchief), "wherever you go, you 
 come upon them, and they stop you. They look into your 
 faggot, and if there is a single green branch in it, if there 
 is so much as a miserable hazel switch, they will take away 
 the faggot and take out a summons ; they are as good as their 
 word. Ah ! the blackguards ! there is no way of getting at 
 them; and if they suspect you, they will soon make you undo
 
 308 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 your faggot. They are three curs yonder that are not worth 
 two farthings ; if they were put out of the way, it would not 
 ruin France, at any rate." 
 
 "Little Vatel has not so much harm in him," said her 
 daughter-in-law. 
 
 "Him!" said Laroche; "he does his work like the rest of 
 them. He will joke right enough and laugh with you; but 
 you stand none the better with him for that. He is the worst 
 of the three; like M. Michaud, he has no heart for the poor 
 people " 
 
 "M. Michaud has a pretty wife, all the same," said Mcolas 
 Tonsard. 
 
 "She is with young," said the old grandmother; "but if 
 things go on like this, there will be a queer christening when 
 she calves." 
 
 "Oh !" cried Marie Tonsard, "it is impossible to joke with 
 any of those arminacs of Parisians. They would take out a 
 summons against you if it came to it, and no more care about 
 you than if they had never joked 
 
 "So you have tried to come round them, have you?" said 
 Courtecuisse. 
 
 "Lord love you !" 
 
 "Well," said Tonsard, looking like a man who has made 
 up his mind, "they are men like others, we may get round 
 them." 
 
 "My word, no," Marie went on, following out her thought, 
 "they do not laugh at all. What they give them, I do not 
 know; for, after all, if that swaggerer at the hunting-lodge is 
 married, Steingel, and Vatel, and Gaillard are not ; and there 
 is nobody else there is not a woman in the country who 
 would have anything to say to them." 
 
 "We shall see directly how things go at harvest and the 
 vintage," said Tonsard. 
 
 "They will not stop the gleaning," said the grandmother. 
 
 "But I am not so sure of that," replied her daughter-in- 
 law. "That Groison of theirs said plainly that M. le Maire 
 was about to give notice that no one should glean without a
 
 THE PEASANTRY 303 
 
 pauper's certificate, and who will give them but he himself, 
 and you may be sure that he will not give many. He is 
 going to forbid us to go into the fields until the last sheaf 
 is carted " 
 
 "Why, he has you every way, that Cuirassier," shouted 
 Tonsard, transported with rage. 
 
 "I only heard this yesterday," said his wife; "I offered 
 Groison a nip of brandy to get news out of him." 
 
 "There is one that is well off!" cried Vaudoyer. "They 
 have built him a house, and found him a good wife, he has 
 money coming in, he is dressed like a king. I myself was a 
 rural policeman for twenty years, and I got nothing by it 
 but colds." 
 
 "Yes, he is well off," said Godain ; "he has property " 
 
 "And we stop here like the idiots we are !" cried Vaudoyer ; 
 "let us go to Conches, at any rate, and see what is going on 
 there; they have no more patience than the rest of us 
 
 "Let us go," said Laroche, who was none too steady on his 
 feet. "If I do not put an end to one or two of them, I wish 
 I may lose my name." 
 
 "You!" said Tonsard, "you would let them carry off the 
 whole commune ; but, for my own part, if any one were to lay 
 a finger on the old woman, there is my gun, and it would not 
 miss." 
 
 "Well," said Laroche, turning to Vaudoyer, "if they take 
 a single one from Conches, there will be a gendarme stretched 
 out/' 
 
 "Daddy Laroche has said it !" cried Courtecuisse. 
 
 "He has said it," said Vaudoyer, "but he has not done it, 
 and he will not do it. What good would you get by it unless 
 you happen to want a drubbing? Life for life it would be 
 better to kill Michaud." 
 
 While this scene took place, Catherine Tonsard had been 
 standing sentinel at the tavern door, to warn the drinkers 
 to be quiet if any one went by. In spite of their vinous gait, 
 they dashed rather than went out of the door, and in their 
 bellicose ardor took the road which lies for three-quarters of 
 a mile under the park walls of the Aigues.
 
 310 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 Conches was a thoroughly Burgundian hamlet, a collec- 
 tion of squalid-looking cottages, built some of brick and 
 some of clay, along the highroad which formed its single 
 street. The hamlet looked fairly presentable when ap- 
 proached from the opposite side by the cross-road from Ville- 
 aux-Fayes, for a little river flowed between the highroad 
 and the Ronquerolles woods, which succeeded to those of the 
 Aigues along the heights, and the view was enlivened by two 
 or three houses rather picturesquely grouped. The church 
 and parsonage house stood apart, a principal feature in the 
 view from the adjacent Conches gate of the park. 
 
 The conspirators from the Grand-I-Vert caught sight of 
 the gendarmerie through the trees in the square in front of 
 the church, and sped along with redoubled haste. Even as 
 they came up, three horsemen issued from the Conches gate 
 of the park, and the peasants recognized the General, his ser- 
 vant, and Michaud the head-forester, who galloped off to- 
 wards the square. Tonsard and his party reached the spot 
 a few minutes later. 
 
 The delinquents, male and female, had made no sort of 
 resistance; there they stood, encircled by five gendarmes from 
 Soulanges and fifteen from Ville-aux-Fayes. The whole vil- 
 lage had turned out. The prisoners' children or mothers and 
 fathers came and went, bringing them such things as they 
 should need while they were in prison. The scene was curious 
 enough; the population were evidently indignant, but they 
 scarcely said a word, like people who had made up their 
 minds that the thing must be. The women, old and young, 
 were the only speakers. The children and the little girls 
 were perched on piles of logs the better to see. 
 
 "Those hussars of the guillotine have chosen their time 
 well ! They have come on a holiday," the women were say- 
 ing. 
 
 "So you let them take away your husband like that, do 
 you ? What will become of you during the next three months, 
 the three best in the whole year, when wages are high?"
 
 THE PEASANTEY 311 
 
 "They are the real thieves !" retorted the woman, with a 
 menacing glance at the gendarmes. 
 
 "What makes you squint at us in that way?" asked the 
 quartermaster. "You may be sure of this, that if you indulge 
 yourself in insults, it will not take long to settle your busi- 
 ness." 
 
 "I didn't say anything," the woman hastily remarked, with 
 a meek and piteous countenance. 
 
 "I might make you repent of some words that I overheard 
 just now." 
 
 "Come, children, be quiet," said the mayor of Conches, the 
 postmaster. "The devil ! the men must do as they are told !" 
 
 "That is true, it is all the doing of the master at the Aigues. 
 But, patience !" 
 
 At that moment the General came out into the square; his 
 arrival produced some murmurs, but he troubled himself very 
 little about them. He went straight to the lieutenant of gen- 
 darmerie from Ville-aux-Fayes ; a few words were spoken, 
 and a paper handed over, then the officer turned to his men : 
 
 "Eelease your prisoners, the General has obtained their par- 
 don from the King." 
 
 While he spoke, General de Montcornet talked with the 
 mayor of Conches in low tones, and after a moment the lat- 
 ter raised his voice and addressed the delinquents, who had 
 looked to sleep that night in prison, and were all bewildered 
 at finding themselves at liberty. 
 
 "You must thank M. le Comte, my friends," he said ; "you 
 owe the remission of the penalties to him, he went to Paris 
 to ask pardon for you, and obtained it in honor of the an- 
 niversary of the King's return to France. ... I hope 
 that you will behave better in future towards the General, 
 who has behaved so kindly towards you, and that you will 
 respect his property henceforth. . . . Long live the 
 King." 
 
 And the peasants shouted, "Long live the King," with en- 
 thusiasm, to avoid shouting, "Long live the Count." 
 
 This scene had been planned by the General in concert
 
 312 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 with the prefect and attorney-general with a deliberate pur- 
 pose. While showing firmness to stimulate the local authori- 
 ties and impress the minds of the country people, the peas- 
 ants were to be treated gently ; so delicate did these crises ap- 
 pear to be. And, indeed, if any resistance had been offered, 
 the Government would have been placed in a very awkward 
 position. As Laroche had said, it was impossible to send a 
 whole commune to the guillotine. 
 
 The General had asked the mayor of Conches, the lieuten- 
 ant, and the quartermaster to breakfast with him. The con- 
 spirators of Blangy stayed in the tavern at Conches. The 
 released offenders were spending the money which would 
 otherwise have supported them in prison on drink, and 
 naturally the Blangy folk were asked to the "wedding." 
 Country people call every rejoicing a "wedding," and they eat 
 and drink and quarrel and fight and go home again drunk 
 and disabled, and this is called a "wedding." 
 
 The General took his guests, not by the Conches gate, 
 whence he had issued, but by the forest, in order to show them 
 the damage that had been done, so that they might judge of 
 the importance of the question. 
 
 At noon, when Eigou was returning home to Blangy,, the 
 Count and Countess and their guests were finishing break- 
 fast in the splendid room described in Blondet's letter to 
 Nathan, the room on which Bouret's luxurious tastes had left 
 its impress. 
 
 "It would be a great pity to give up such a place," said 
 the lieutenant. He had been over the Aigues, and had seen 
 it all for the first time ; and now, looking about him over the 
 rim of a glass of champagne, he observed the admirable series 
 of unclad nymphs who supported the ceiling. 
 
 "Wherefore we shall defend ourselves to the death," said 
 Blondet. 
 
 The lieutenant gave his quartermaster a glance which 
 seemed to recommend silence to that officer. "Suppose that 
 I say that the General's enemies are not all among the fields," 
 he began.
 
 THE PEASANTRY 313 
 
 The gallant lieutenant was softened by the splendid break' 
 fast, the magnificent plate, the imperial luxury which had 
 replaced the luxury of the opera girl ; and Blondet's wit had 
 been as stimulating as the soldierly bumpers which they had 
 drained. 
 
 "How is it that I have enemies?" asked the astonished 
 General. 
 
 "So kind as he is," added the Countess. 
 
 "He and our mayor, M. Gaubertin, parted in anger, and, 
 for the sake of a quiet life, he should be reconciled with 
 him." 
 
 "With him I" cried the Count ; "then you do not know that 
 he was my steward, and a dishonest scamp ? v 
 
 "He is not a scamp now," said the lieutenant; "he is the 
 mayor of Ville-aux-Fayes." 
 
 "Our lieutenant is a clever man," said Blondet ; "it is plain 
 that a mayor is by nature honest." 
 
 The lieutenant, seeing from the Count's remark that it 
 was impossible to open his eyes, said no more on that sub- 
 ject. 
 
 VI 
 
 THE FOREST AND THE HARVEST 
 
 THE scene at Conches had a good effect; the Count's faith- 
 ful keepers saw that no green wood was taken out of the 
 forest of the Aigues; but the forest had been so thoroughly 
 exploited by the peasants for twenty years, that there was 
 nothing but young growth left, and, dead wood being scarce, 
 they were busy killing the trees against the coming winter. 
 The means used were extremely simple, and could only be 
 discovered some time afterwards. 
 
 Tonsard sent his mother into the forest, the keeper used 
 to see her come in, and knowing the way by which she would 
 go out, would lie in wait to inspect her faggot. As a mat- 
 ter of fact, he always found nothing in it but sear brush-
 
 314 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 wood, fallen branches, and withered and broken boughs, and 
 Granny Tonsard used to groan and pity herself because at her 
 age she had to go so far to pick up such a miserable bundle of 
 sticks. But she did not say that she had been in the dense 
 thickets, where the saplings grew, grubbing at the base of the 
 young trees, and stripping off a ring of bark close to the 
 ground, covering up her work with moss and leaves, and 
 leaving all apparently as it was before. It was impossible 
 to detect this ring-shaped incision, made not with a billhook, 
 but by tearing away the bark in such a manner that the dam- 
 age seemd to be the work of a cockchafer grub, a wood-gnaw- 
 ing insect pest known by the various names of "the Turk," 
 the wood-worm, and wood-maggot in different parts of the 
 country. This grub lives upon bark, lodging itself between 
 the bark and the wood to gnaw its way underneath. If the 
 tree is large enough, and the grub fails to make the circuit 
 before its transformation into the chrysalis stage, it is safe, 
 for so long as the bark is not ringed round, the tree can 
 grow. To show the intimate connection between entomology^ 
 agriculture, horticulture, and vegetable production generally, 
 it is sufficient to point out that Latreille, the Comte Dejean, 
 and Klug of Berlin, Gene of Turin, and other great natural- 
 ists have discovered that nearly all insects feed on vegetable 
 growths. There are twenty-seven thousand species of plant- 
 eating coleoptera in M. Dejean's published catalogue; and 
 in spite of the eager research of entomologists of all coun- 
 tries, there are still an enormous number of species un- 
 identified in their triple transformations. Not only has every 
 wild plant its particular insect pest, but every vegetable prod- 
 uct, however modified by human industry, has its special in- 
 sect. The hemp and flax which clothes human creatures and 
 goes to the making of ropes to hang them, after covering 
 the backs of an army, is transformed into writing-paper, and 
 those who read or write much are familiar with the habits of 
 the "silver fish/' an insect marvelous in its appearance and 
 genesis, which passes through its mysterious transformations 
 in a ream of carefully kept white paper. You behold the
 
 THE PEASANTRY 315 
 
 creature skip nimbly in his splendid raiment, glittering like 
 talc or spar ; it is a flying "silver fish." 
 
 The wood-maggot is the despair of the cultivator. In its 
 earlier stages it hides below ground, safe out of reach of ad- 
 ministrative circulars; so that the authorities can only order 
 a series of Sicilian vespers when it emerges as a full-grown 
 cockchafer. If people knew the whole extent of the damage 
 done by cockchafers and caterpillars, they would pay more at- 
 tention to the prefect's injunctions. Holland all but per- 
 ished because the teredo burrowed in their dykes, and science 
 has not yet discovered the final transformation of the teredo, 
 nor the earlier metamorphoses of the cochineal insect. In 
 all probability the ergot of rye is a seething insect population, 
 though scientific genius can only discern slight movement in 
 its particles. 
 
 So as the peasants waited for harvest and vintage some 
 fifty old women imitated the work of the cockchafer grub at 
 the foot of five or six hundred trees which should never bear 
 leaves again and stand up, dead and stark, in the spring. All 
 the trees were purposely chosen in out-of-the-way spots, so 
 that the peasants might the better secure the spoil of dead 
 branches. Who told them the secret? No one in so many 
 words; but Courtecuisse had complained one day at the tav- 
 ern that an elm-tree in his garden was dying at the top; 
 there was something the matter with the tree ; and he, Courte- 
 cuisse, suspected that it was a wood-maggot, he knew well 
 what a wood-maggot was, and he knew that when a tree had 
 a wood-maggot in it, that tree was as good as dead. Then 
 he showed his audience in the tavern how the maggot went 
 round the tree. 
 
 The old women did their work of destruction as mys- 
 teriously and as deftly as pixies, urged on by the exasperat- 
 ing measures taken by the mayor of Blangy. Other mayors 
 had received instructions to follow the example set them. 
 The rural police made public proclamation that no one would 
 be allowed to glean in cornfields or vineyards without a cer- 
 tificate from the mayor of each commune; the prefect sent 
 
 VOL. IO '4<J
 
 316 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 down an example of the certificate required to the sub-pre- 
 fecture, and the sub-prefect supplied the mayors with a pat- 
 tern copy apiece. The great landowners of the district ad- 
 mired Montcornet's behavior, and the prefect said that if 
 other great personages would do likewise, and live on their 
 estates, the results would be of the happiest; for such meas- 
 ures as these, added the prefect, ought to be taken all over 
 the country; they should be uniformly adopted and modified 
 by benevolence and such enlightened philanthropy as that 
 of General de Montcornet. 
 
 And the General and the Countess, with the help of the 
 Abbe Brossette, were, in fact, endeavoring to help the peo- 
 ple. They had thought out their plans carefully; they de- 
 sired to show in a practical and unmistakable fashion that 
 those who were plundering them would do better for them- 
 selves by earning an honest livelihood. They gave out hemp 
 to be spun, and paid for the work, and the Countess had the 
 thread woven into hessian for kitchen cloths, dusters, and 
 aprons, and shirts for the very poor. The Count undertook 
 improvements, drawing all his laborers from the neighboring 
 communes. The details were left to Sibilet, and the Abbe 
 Brossette informed the Countess of cases of poverty, and 
 brought them under her notice. Mme. de Montcornet held 
 her Assizes of Mercy in the great hall above the steps. It was 
 a beautiful vestibule, paved with marble red and white; an 
 ornamental majolica stove stood in it, and the long benches 
 were covered with red velvet. 
 
 Thither one morning before the harvest came old Granny 
 Tonsard with her granddaughter Catherine; she had a ter- 
 rible confession to make touching the honor of a poor but 
 honest family. While she spoke, Catherine stood like a 
 guilty thing, and then in her turn she told of her "strait." 
 Nobody knew of it but her grandmother, she said; her 
 mother would drive her out the house; her father, a man of 
 honor, would kill her. If she had but a thousand francs, 
 there was a poor laborer named Godain who was willing to 
 marry her; he knew all, and he loved her like a brother. He
 
 THE PEASANTRY 317 
 
 would buy a bit of waste land and build a cottage upon it. 
 It was touching. The Countess promised to set aside a sum 
 of money, the price of a sacrificed whim, for a marriage por- 
 tion. The two happy marriages of Michaud and Groison 
 had encouraged her in match-making ; and besides, this wed- 
 ding was to set a good example to the peasants, and a higher 
 standard of conduct. So a marriage was arranged between 
 Godain and Catherine by means of Mme. de Montcornet's 
 money. 
 
 Another time it was Granny Bonnebault, a horrible old 
 woman, who lived in a cabin between the Conches gate and 
 the village, who came with a load of hanks of spun hemp. 
 
 "The Countess has worked miracles," said the Abbe, full 
 of hope for the moral improvement of these savages. "That 
 woman used to do a great deal of damage in your woods ; but 
 now, why should she go ? She spins from morning to night ; 
 she is busy, and earning money." 
 
 The country was quiet. Groison brought in satisfactory re- 
 ports, the wood-stealing seemed to be almost at an end; per- 
 haps, indeed, a real transformation might have been wrought, 
 but for Gaubertin's rancorous greed, but for the petty cabals 
 of the "best society" of Soulanges, but for Rigou's intrigues, 
 which fanned the flames of hate and crime smouldering in 
 the minds of the peasants of the valley. 
 
 The foresters, however, complained that they found many 
 branches gashed with the billhook in the forest; evidently 
 somebody intended to find dead wood for winter fuel. But 
 their efforts to discover those persons were fruitless. The 
 Count with Groison's assistance had given pauper's certificates 
 to the thirty or forty who really needed them ; but other com- 
 munes had been less particular. The Count was determined 
 that after his late clemency in the matter of the arrests at 
 Conches, the regulations as to the harvest must be strictly 
 enforced, for gleaning had degenerated into robbery. With 
 the three farms which he had let on lease he did not concern 
 himself; but he had half a dozen smaller farms which 
 paid rent in kind on the system of division of produce be-
 
 318 THE PBASANTR1 
 
 tween landlord and tenant, and on these he meant to take his 
 stand. He had given notice that any one who should enter a 
 field before the last sheaf had been carted away should be 
 prosecuted; an order which interested no other farmer in 
 the commune; for Kigou, who knew the country well, used 
 to let his arable land in little plots and on short leases to men 
 who reaped their own crops themselves ; he stipulated that his 
 rents should be paid in grain, the abuse of gleaning did not 
 affect him. Nor did it affect the remaining farmers, for 
 peasant proprietors let each other alone. 
 
 The Count had instructed Sibilet to see that his tenants 
 cut their corn in succession, and to put all the harvesters to 
 work at once on the same farm, so that it might be easier to 
 keep a watch upon them. This plan had been suggested by 
 Groison, who was to superintend the influx of gleaners into 
 every field. The Count went in person with Michaud to see 
 it in operation. 
 
 Town-dwellers would never imagine what the gleaning 
 means to country people; indeed, the French peasant's pas- 
 sion for gleaning is quite inexplicable, for women will leave 
 well-paid work to pick up stray ears in the fields. The corn 
 gleaned in this way appears to have peculiar virtue in it, 
 and the provision thus made for the more substantial part 
 of their daily food has an immense attraction for them. 
 Mothers bring toddling children with their older girls and 
 boys; the most decrepit old people drag themselves to the 
 fields; and, as might be expected, those who are not really 
 poor will feign poverty and go a-gleaning in r,ags. 
 
 The Count and Michaud had ridden out to watch the on- 
 slaught of the tattered crowd upon the first field of the first 
 farm. 
 
 It was ten o'clock on a hot August morning, the cloudless 
 sky above was blue as periwinkle blossoms, the earth was 
 burning, the wheat fields blazed like flame, the sun beat down 
 on the hard soil which reflected the heat up in waves to 
 scorch the faces of the reapers who, with shirts wet with 
 perspiration, toiled in silence, only stopping now and again
 
 THE PEASANTRY 319 
 
 to drink from their round, loaf-shaped stone water-hottles, 
 cruses with two ears, and a rough spout stoppered by a peg 
 of willow. 
 
 At the edge of the stubble-field, where the last sheaves were 
 being piled on the wagons, stood a hundred human beings, 
 who, in their wretchedness, surely left the most hideous con- 
 ceptions of a Murillo or a Teniers far behind. Here were 
 the most daring pictures of beggary, and faces such as a 
 Callot, the poet of misery in its most fantastic phases, has 
 drawn to the life. Here were the limbs of bronze, the bald 
 heads, the strangely degraded tints, the tattered greasy rags 
 darned, patched, stained, discolored, worn down to the bare 
 threads. Here, in short, the painter's ideal of the trappings 
 of misery was overtopped, even as those faces, in their 
 anxiety, greed, imbecility, idiocy, and savagery surpassed the 
 immortal creations of the princes of color, in that they pos- 
 sessed the immortal advantage of Nature over Art. There 
 stood old crones, with red lashless eyelids, stretching out their 
 turkey throats like pointers putting up a partridge; there 
 stood children mute as sentinels on guard, and little girls 
 stamping with impatience like animals waiting to be let out 
 of pasture; every characteristic of infancy and age was ob- 
 literated by a common frenzy of greed in all faces ; all coveted 
 their neighbor's goods, which long abuse had made their own. 
 Their eyes glared, they made threatening gestures, but none 
 of them spoke in the presence of the Count, the policeman, 
 and the head-forester. The landowner, the farmer, the 
 worker, and the pauper were all represented there, and the 
 social problem behind the scene was outlined very clearly, 
 for hunger had summoned those threatening figures. Every 
 hard feature, every hollow in their faces was brought into re- 
 lief by the sunlight which scorched their bare dusty feet; 
 some of the children had no clothing but a ragged blouse, and 
 their flaxen curls were full of bits of wood, straw, and hay, 
 and here and there a woman held by the hand a mere baby 
 which could scarcely toddle, to be put down presently to crawl 
 along the furrows.
 
 320 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 This dreadful picture was intolerable to an old soldier with 
 a kind heart. The General spoke to Midland. 
 
 "It hurts me to see them. If we did not know all that was 
 involved in these measures, it would be impossible to persist." 
 
 "If every landowner were to follow your example, General, 
 and live on his estate, and do good as you are doing, I do 
 not say that there would be no poor, for we have the poor 
 always with us, but there would be no one who could not make 
 an honest living." 
 
 "The mayors of Conches, Cerneux, and Soulanges have sent 
 us their paupers/' said Groison, who had been verifying the 
 certificates ; "they ought not to do that." 
 
 "No," said the Count; "but our paupers will go to glean 
 in their communes; it is enough for the present if they do 
 not help themselves from the sheaves. We must take one 
 step at a time," and he went away. 
 
 "Did you hear that?" asked Granny Tonsard, turning to 
 Bonnebault's mother. The Count happening to raise his 
 voice a little over the last words, they reached the ears of one 
 of the two old crones who were posted on the road by the edge 
 of the field. 
 
 "Yes, that is not all ; a tooth to-day, an ear to-morrow, if 
 they could invent a sauce for it, they would eat us up; a 
 calf's liver or a Christian's would be all the same to them," 
 said Granny Bonnebault. 
 
 She lifted up her malignant features as the General passed ; 
 but in the twinkling of an eye a hypocritical expression of 
 honeyed amiability overspread her face, and with an ingra- 
 tiating grin she made a deep courtesy. 
 
 "What ! are you gleaning too, when my wife has put you 
 in the way of earning plenty of money ?" 
 
 "Eh ! God keep you in health, my dear gentleman ! But, 
 you see, that lad of mine eats everything up, and I be forced 
 to hide away this little mite of corn to have bread to eat in 
 the winter. So I be gleaning again for a bit it all helps !" 
 
 The gleaners made little that year. When the farmers and 
 crofters knew that they would be supported, they cut their
 
 THE PEASANTRY 321 
 
 corn carefully and looked after the sheaves, and saw that the 
 fields were clear, in such a sort that there was, at any rate, 
 less of the open robbery of previous harvests. 
 
 This year, too, the gleaners looked in vain for the wheat 
 which always made a certain proportion of their bundles; 
 and impostors and paupers, who had forgotten their pardon 
 at Conches, cherished in consequence a smothered feeling 
 of discontent, embittered in tavern talk by the Tonsards, by 
 Courtecuisse, Bonnebault, Laroche, Vaudoyer, Godain, and 
 their following. Matters grew worse after the vintage, for 
 no one was allowed to go into the vineyards until the grapes 
 were all cut, and the vines had been very closely picked over ; 
 Sibilet had seen to that. This exasperated the peasants to 
 the last degree ; but when there is so great a gulf set between 
 the class which rises in menace and the class which is threat- 
 ened, words are not carried across it ; deeds are the only sign 
 of the matters which are brewing, and the malcontents be- 
 take themselves to work underground like moles. 
 
 The fair at Soulanges went off quietly enough save for 
 some amenities that passed between the best society and the 
 second-rate, thanks to the queen's uneasy despotism. It was 
 intolerable to her that the fair Euphemie Plissoud should 
 reign over the brilliant Lupin's heart, when his fickle affec- 
 tions should have been centered upon herself. 
 
 The Count and Countess had appeared neither at the fair, 
 nor at the Tivoli, and this was counted as a crime by the 
 Soudrys and Gaubertins and their adherents. It was all pride 
 and superciliousness, so they said in Mme. Soudry's drawing- 
 room. 
 
 Meanwhile the Countess was filling up the blank left by 
 Emile's absence by the great interest which noble natures 
 take in the good which they try to do; and the Count threw 
 no less zeal into the improvements on his estate, which he 
 intended to effect a corresponding improvement both material 
 and moral in the people of the district. Little by little, 
 with the help of the Abbe Brossette, Mme. de Montcornet 
 came to have an accurate knowledge of the circumstances of
 
 322 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 the poor families, of their requirements and their means of 
 subsistence, and learned how much thoughtful care was 
 needed to give them assistance by helping them to work, lest 
 they should be encouraged in lazy or idle habits. 
 
 The Countess had placed Genevieve Niseron in a convent, 
 under the pretext of having her taught to do needlework suf- 
 ficiently well to be employed in her household; but in real- 
 ity Genevieve was sent out of reach of Nicolas Tonsard, 
 whom Eigou had managed to exempt from military service. 
 The Countess thought, moreover, that a devout education, 
 and the guarded seclusion of the convent, would sooner or 
 later quell the ardent passions of a precocious child whose 
 fiery Montenegrin blood seemed to her at times to threaten 
 to break into a flame which might consume her faithful 
 Olympe Michaud's happiness. 
 
 So there was tranquillity at the Aigues. The Count, re- 
 assured by Michaud, and lulled into security by Sibilet, con- 
 gratulated himself upon his firmness, and thanked his wife 
 for contributing by her beneficence to the great result of 
 their tranquillity. As for the sale of the timber, the General 
 held the question over till he could return to Paris and ar- 
 range in person with wood merchants. He had not the 
 slightest idea of the way in which the business was carried on, 
 and was far from suspecting the extent of Gaubertin's in- 
 fluence along the Yonne, or that the mayor of Ville-aux- 
 Fayes supplied the larger part of Paris with fuel. 
 
 VII 
 
 THE GREYHOUND 
 
 ABOUT the middle of September, Emile came back to the 
 Aigues. He had gone to Paris to arrange for the publication 
 of a book, and now he meant to rest and to think over the 
 work which he was planning for the winter. At the Aigues
 
 THE PEASANTRY 323 
 
 the wearied journalist disappeared, and Emile Blondet be- 
 came once more frank, fresh-hearted, as in the days of his 
 early manhood. 
 
 <r What a beautiful nature !" said the Count and Countess 
 when they spoke of him. 
 
 Men accustomed to knock about in the world, to see the 
 seamy side of life, and to gather in experience of all kinds 
 without restrain, make an oasis in their hearts, and leave 
 their own evil tendencies and those of others outside it. 
 Within a narrow charmed circle they become saints in minia- 
 ture; they have a woman's sensitiveness, with their whole 
 souls they strive for a momentary realization of their ideal, 
 and for the one soul in the world who worships them they 
 raise themselves to angelic heights. Nor are they playing a 
 comedy. They turn the inner self out to grass, as it were; 
 they crave to have the stains of mud brushed off, J:heir 
 bruises healed, and their wounds bound. When Emile 
 Blondet came to the Aigues he left malice behind, and with 
 it most of his wit, not an epigram did he utter, he was as 
 mild as a lamb, and suavely Platonic. 
 
 "He is such a good young fellow that I miss him when he 
 is not here," the General used to say. "I should dearly like 
 him to make his fortune and give up that Paris life." 
 
 Never had the glorious landscape and the park at the 
 Aigues been more luxuriantly beautiful than in those Sep- 
 tember days. In the earliest autumn weather, when earth is 
 weary of bringing forth her fruits, and fills the air in the 
 empty fields and orchards with the delicious scent of leaves, 
 the forests are the most wonderful sight of all, for then they 
 begin to take bronze-green hues and warm ochre tints, to 
 blend in the fair tapestry beneath which they hide, as if to 
 defy the coming cold of winter. 
 
 Earth in the spring looks gay and joyous, a dark-haired 
 maid who hopes and looks forward ; Earth in the autumn, 
 grown melancholy and mild, is a fair-haired woman who re- 
 members. The grass grows golden, the heads of the autumn 
 flowers are crowned with pale petals, the white daisies look
 
 324 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 up seldom now from the lawn, and you see the purplish-green 
 calices instead. There is yellow color everywhere. The trees 
 cast thinner and darker shadows; the sun, slanting lower 
 already, steals under them to leave faint gleams of orange 
 color, and long luminous shafts, which vanish swiftly over the 
 ground like the trailing robes of women departing. 
 
 On the morning of the second day after his arrival, Emile 
 stood at the window of his room, which gave upon one 
 of the terraces, from which there was a beautiful view. The 
 Countess' apartments were likewise upon the terrace; and 
 faced the view towards Blangy and the forests. The pond 
 (which nearer Paris would have been styled a lake) and its 
 long channel were almost- out of sight, but the silver spring 
 which rose in the wood near the hunting-lodge crossed the 
 lawn like a silken ribbon covered with bright spangles of sand. 
 
 Beyond the park palings lay fields where cattle were graz- 
 ing, and little properties, full of walnut and apple-trees, en- 
 closed by hedges, stood out against the hillside, covered with 
 the walls and houses and cultivated land of Blangy, and 
 higher yet, ridges covered with tall forest trees rose up step- 
 wise to the heights which framed the whole picture. 
 
 The Countess had come out upon the terrace to see her 
 flowers, which filled the air with their morning fragrance. 
 She wore a loose cambric wrapper, through which her pretty 
 shoulders sent a faint rose flush; a dainty cap sat piquantly 
 on her hair, which strayed rebelliously from beneath it; her 
 little foot shone through the transparent stocking ; and when- 
 ever the wind stirred, it fluttered her thin dressing-gown, 
 giving glimpses of an embroidered cambric petticoat care- 
 lessly fastened over her corset. 
 
 "Oh, are you there ?" asked she. 
 
 "Yes " 
 
 "What are you looking at?" 
 
 "What a question to ask ! You have snatched me from the 
 contemplation of nature. Tell me, Countess, will you take 
 a walk in the woods this morning before breakfast ?"
 
 THE PEASANTRY 325 
 
 "What an idea! You know that I hold walks in abhor- 
 rence." 
 
 "We will only walk a very short way. I will drive you 
 in the tilbury, and Joseph can come with us to look after 
 it. You never set foot in your forest, and I notice some- 
 thing odd in it : little groups of trees here and there have 
 turned the color of Florentine bronze; the leaves are wither- 
 ing " 
 
 "Very well, I will dress at once." 
 
 "We should not start for two hours ! No. Take a shawl 
 and a hat and thick shoes, that is all that is neces- 
 sary." 
 
 "'You must always have your way I will come back 
 
 in one moment." 
 
 "General, we are going out, will you come with us ?" called 
 Blondet, going away to waken the Count, who replied by the 
 grunt of a man still locked in morning slumber. 
 
 Fifteen minutes later the tilbury was moving slowly along 
 one of the broad avenues through the park, followed at a dis- 
 tance by a stalwart servant on horseback. 
 
 It was a true September morning. Spaces of dark-blue 
 sky shone in a cloud-dappled heaven, as if they, and not the 
 clouds, were flitting over the ether of space. Long streaks of 
 ultra-marine blue, alternating with folds of cloud, lay like ribs 
 of sand low down on the horizon, and higher up, above the for- 
 est, a greenish tint overspread the sky. Earth lay warm under 
 the cloudy covering, like a woman just awakened. The forest 
 scents were mingled with the scent of the ploughed land, a 
 wild savor in the steaming fragrance of the soil. The bell 
 was ringing for the Angelus at Blangy; the notes, blended 
 with the mysterious sound of the wind in the woods, made 
 harmony with the silence. Here and there thin white mists 
 were rising. 
 
 Olympe Michaud, seeing these fair preparations for the 
 day, took it into her head to go out with her husband, who 
 was obliged to give an order to one of the keepers who lived 
 a short distance away. The Soulanges doctor had recom-
 
 326 TJTE FEASAINTKY 
 
 mended her to take walks without overtiring herself, hut she 
 was afraid of the heat at noon, and did not care to venture 
 out in the evening. Michaud went with her, and took his 
 favorite dog, a mouse-colored greyhound spotted with white; 
 greedy, like all greyhounds, and full of faults, like all animals 
 who know they are loved and have the gift of pleasing. 
 
 So it happened that when the tilbury reached the hunting- 
 lodge and the Countess inquired after Mme. Michaud's health, 
 she was told that Olympe had gone into the forest with her 
 husband. 
 
 "This weather inspires the same. thought in every one," said 
 Blondet, turning the horse into one of the six roads at ran- 
 dom. "By the by, Joseph, do you know the forest ?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 And away they went. The avenue which they had chosen 
 was one of the loveliest in the forest ; after a little while it 
 swerved round, and became a narrow winding track. The sun 
 shone down into it through the chinks in the leafy roof, which 
 closed it in like a green bower; the breeze brought the scent 
 of thyme and lavender and wild peppermint, and sounds of 
 dead branches and leaves falling to earth with a rustling 
 sigh; the drops of dew scattered over the leaves and grass 
 were shaken and fell as the light carriage went past. The 
 further the two travelers went, the deeper they penetrated 
 into the mysterious fantasies of the forest; into cool depths 
 where the leaves grew in the damp and darkness, and the 
 light that enters turns to velvet as it dies away; through 
 clearer spaces of graceful birch-trees gathered about their 
 over-lord, the Hercules of the forest, a hundred-year-old 
 beech; through assemblies of grand tree trunks, knotted, 
 mossy, pale-colored, riven with deep furrows, tracing gigantic 
 blurred shadows over the ground. Along the side of the way 
 they took grew a border of thin grass and delicate flowers. 
 The streams had singing voices. Surely it is an unspeakable 
 delight to drive along forest tracks, slippery with moss, when 
 the woman by your side clings to you in real or simulated 
 terror at every up and down of the road. You feel the fresh
 
 THE PEASANTRY 327 
 
 warmth, the involuntary or deliberate pressure, of her arm, 
 the weight of a soft white shoulder, she begins to smile if you 
 tell her that she is bringing you to a standstill, and the horse 
 seems to understand these interruptions, and looks to right 
 and left. 
 
 The Countess grew dreamy. The sight of the forest world, 
 so vigorous in its effects, so unfamiliar and so grand, was 
 new to her. She leaned back in the^ tilbury and gave herself 
 up to the pleasure of being beside Emile. His eyes were oc- 
 cupied, his heart spoke to hers, and a voice within her gave 
 response. Emile stole a glance at her, and enjoyed her mood 
 of meditative dreaming. The ribbon-strings of her hood had 
 come unfastened, and given to the morning wind the silken 
 curls of her fair hair in luxuriant abandonment. They drove 
 on as chance directed, and in consequence were confronted 
 by a closed gate across the road. They had not the key ; and 
 Joseph, when summoned, proved to be likewise unpro- 
 vided. 
 
 "Very well, let us walk. Joseph shall stay here with the til- 
 bury ; we shall easily find our way back." 
 
 Simile and the Countess plunged into the forest, and 
 reached a spot whence they saw a little landscape set in the 
 woods, such a scene as you often see in a great forest. Twenty- 
 years ago the charcoal-burners had cleared the space for their 
 charcoal kiln, burning everything for a considerable area 
 round about, and the trees had not grown again. But in 
 twenty years Nature had had time to make a flower garden 
 there; and even as a painter will paint some one picture for 
 himself, she had made a garden of her own. Tall trees grew 
 round about that delicious pleasance, their crests drooped over 
 it in a deep fringe, like a great canopy above the couch where 
 the goddess reposes. 
 
 The charcoal-burners had beaten a path to the edge of a 
 pool of water, always clear and full to the brim. The path 
 still existed, tempting you to follow it by a coquettish bend, 
 till suddenly it was. rent across, displaying a sheer surface 
 of earth, where myriads of tree roots, exposed to the air, grew
 
 328 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 interwoven like canvas for tapestry work. Short green turf 
 surrounded the lonely pool, a few willows and an aspen here 
 and there spread a light veil of shadow over a bank of soft 
 grass, laid down by some meditative or ease-loving charcoal- 
 burner. Frogs leap and tadpoles swim undisturbed, moor- 
 hens and water- fowl come and go, a hare flies from your pres- 
 ence, the delightful bathing-place, decked with the tallest of 
 green rushes, is at your disposal. The trees above your head 
 take many shapes; here a trunk raises its head like a boa 
 constrictor, there the beeches shoot up straight and tall as 
 Grecian columns, to their green crests. Slugs and snails 
 promenade in peace, a tench shows its nose above the surface 
 of the pool, a squirrel eyes you curiously. 
 
 When fimile and the Countess sat down to rest at last, 
 some bird broke the silence with an autumn song a song of 
 farewell to which all the other birds listened, one of those 
 songs which awaken passionate response in the listener, and 
 appeal to all the senses. 
 
 "How silent it is !" said the Countess ; she felt moved, and 
 lowered her voice as if she feared to trouble that peace. 
 
 They gazed at the green patches on the water, little worlds 
 of growing and living organisms, and bade each other see 
 the lizard basking in the sun ; at their approach it fled, justify- 
 ing its nickname the "friend of man." "Which proves how 
 well he knows man !" commented Emile. They watched the 
 bolder frogs return to the bed of cresses by the water's edge, 
 and show their eyes sparkling like carbuncles. The sense of 
 the simple and tender mystery of nature passed little by little 
 into these two souls, on whom the artificialities of the world 
 had palled, and steeped them in a mood of contemplative emo- 
 tion when, suddenly, Blondet shuddered and leant to- 
 wards the Countess to whisper: 
 
 "Do you hear that ?" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "A strange souna/ 5 
 
 "Just like these literary people, who stay in their studies 
 and know nothing of the country. That is a woodpecker
 
 THE PEASANTRY 329 
 
 making a hole in a tree. I will wager that you do not even 
 know the most curious thing about the woodpecker. Every 
 time that he gives a tap (and he gives hundreds of taps to 
 hollow out an oak twice as thick as your body), he goes 
 round to the back of it to see if he has pierced a hole through." 
 
 "That noise, dear lecturer on natural history, was not made 
 by a bird ; there was that indescribable something in it which 
 reveals a human intelligence at work." 
 
 The Countess was seized with a panic of fear. She fled 
 across the little wild garden, reached the path again, and 
 seemed bent on flight from the forest. 
 
 "What is the matter?" cried Blondet, hurrying after her 
 anxiously. 
 
 "I thought that I saw eyes," she said, when they had gained 
 one of the paths by which they had come to the clearing made 
 by the charcoal-burners. 
 
 Even as she spoke, they both heard another sound the 
 dying moan of some creature, a stifled sound, as if its throat 
 had been suddenly cut. The Countess' fears were redoubled ; 
 she fled so swiftly that Blondet could scarcely keep pace with 
 her. On and on she fled, like a will-o'-the-wisp ; she did not 
 hear Emile's cry "It is a mistake!" Still she ran, and 
 Blondet, instead of overtaking her, fell more and more be- 
 hind. 
 
 At length they came upon Michaud walking with his wife 
 on his arm. Emile was panting, and the Countess so much 
 out of breath that it was some time before they could speak 
 and explain what had happened. Michaud, like Blondet, 
 scoffed at the lady's fears, and put the straying pair in the 
 way to find the tilbury. When they reached the bar across 
 the road, Olympe Michaud called to the dog. 
 
 "Prince ! Prince !" shouted the forester. He whistled and 
 whistled again, but no dog appeared. Then Emile mentioned 
 the mysterious sounds with which the adventure began. 
 
 "My wife heard the sound," said Michaud, "and I laughed 
 at her." 
 
 "Some one has killed Prince !" cried the Countess. "I am
 
 330 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 sure of it now; they must have cut his throat at a stroke, 
 for the sound which I heard was the dying groan of some 
 animal." 
 
 "The devil!" said Michaud; "this is worth looking into." 
 
 Emile and the forester left the two women with Joseph 
 and the horses, and turned back into the cleared space. They 
 went down to the pond, searched among the knolls, and found 
 not a sign nor a trace of the dog. Blondet was the first to 
 climb the bank again; and noticing a tree with withered 
 leaves, he called Michaud's attention to it, and determined 
 to examine it for himself. The two men struck out a straight 
 line through the forest, avoiding the fallen trunks, dense 
 holly thickets, and brambles in their way, and reached the 
 tree in question. 
 
 "It is a fine elm," said Michaud, "but there is a wood- 
 worm at the root of it a worm has ringed the bark at the 
 foot." He stooped down and lifted up the bark: "There, 
 only see what work !" 
 
 "There are a good many wood-worms in this forest of 
 yours," said Blondet. 
 
 As he spoke, Michaud saw a red drop a few paces away, 
 and further yet, his greyhound's head. He heaved a sigh. 
 "The rascals ! my lady was right." 
 
 Blondet and Michaud went up to the body. The Countess 
 was right. The dog's throat had been cut. Prince had been 
 coaxed by a bit of pickled pork to prevent him from barking, 
 for the morsel lay half swallowed between the tongue and the 
 palate. 
 
 "Poor brute, his weakness caused his death." 
 
 "Exactly the way with princes," said Blondet. 
 
 "Some one was here who did not want to be found here, 
 and made off," said Michaud, "so there is something seriously 
 wrong. And yet I see no branches broken nor trees cut 
 down." 
 
 Blondet and the forester began a careful investigation, 
 looking over every inch of ground before setting down their 
 feet. At last fimile found that some one had been kneeling
 
 THE PEASANTRY 831 
 
 under a tree a few paces away, the grass was trodden down 
 and bent, and there were two hollow dints in the moss. 
 
 "Some one has been kneeling here," he said, "and it was a 
 woman, for a man's legs would not have crushed so much 
 grass below the knees ; look at the outline of the petticoat." 
 
 The forester scanned the foot of the tree, and saw that a 
 wood-maggot had begun its work; but there was no trace of 
 the grub itself, with the tough glistening skin, the brown- 
 tipped scales, the tail already something like that of the cock- 
 chafer, and the head provided with antennae and two strong 
 jaws with which the insect cuts the roots of plants. 
 
 "Now, my dear fellow, I can understand why there are 
 such a quantity of dead trees in the forest. I noticed them 
 this morning from the terrace at the chateau, and came here 
 on purpose to discover the cause of that phenomenon. The 
 worms are stirring, but it is your peasants who creep out of 
 the woods." 
 
 The head forester let fly an oath. Then, followed by 
 Blondet, he hurried to find the Countess, and begged her to 
 take his wife home. He himself took Joseph's horse, leaving 
 the man to walk back to the chateau, and galloped off to in- 
 tercept the woman who had killed his dog, and if possible to 
 surprise her with the blood-stained billhook and the tool with 
 which she made the holes in the trees. Blondet took his place 
 between Mme. de Montcornet and Olympe Michaud, and told 
 them of Prince's end, and of the miserable discovery to which 
 it had led. 
 
 "Oh dear!" cried the Countess, "let us tell the General 
 about it before breakfast, or anger may kill him." 
 
 "I will break the news to him," said Blondet. 
 
 "They have killed the dog!" cried Olympe, drying her 
 tears. 
 
 "You must have been very fond of Prince, dear child, to 
 shed tears for a dog like this," said the Countess. 
 
 "I look upon Prince's death simply as a warning of trouble 
 to come ; I am afraid lest anything should happen to my hus- 
 band." 
 
 VOL. 10-47
 
 382 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "How they have spoiled this morning for us!" said the 
 Countess, with an adorable little pout. 
 
 "How they are spoiling the country!" Olympe said sadly. 
 
 At the park gates they came upon the General. 
 
 "Where can you have been ?" asked he. 
 
 "You shall hear directly," said Blondet mysteriously, as he 
 helped Mme. Michaud to alight. The General was struck by 
 the sadness in Olympe's face. 
 
 A few minutes later, Blondet and the General stood on the 
 terrace. 
 
 "You have plenty of moral courage," said Emile Blondet ; 
 "you will not fly into a passion, will you ?" 
 
 "No," said the General, "but out with it, or I shall think 
 that you want to laugh at me." 
 
 "Do you see those trees with the dead leaves on them ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And those others that are turning a lighter color ?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Very well, those are so many dead trees; so many trees 
 killed by the peasants whom you thought that you had won 
 over by your kindness;" and Blondet told the tale of that 
 morning's adventures. 
 
 The General grew so pale that Blondet was alarmed. 
 
 "Come," he cried, "curse and swear, fly into a rage! re- 
 pression may perhaps be even worse for you than an outbreak 
 of anger." 
 
 "I shall go and smoke," said the Count, and off he went to 
 his summer-house. 
 
 Michaud came as they sat at breakfast; he had found no- 
 body. The Count had sent for Sibilet, and he also appeared. 
 
 "Monsieur Sibilet and Monsieur Michaud, let it be known 
 in the right quarters that I will give a thousand francs to 
 anybody who will enable me to detect those who injure my 
 trees at their work. The tool with which they work must be 
 discovered, and the place where it was purchased, and I 
 have a plan ready/*
 
 THE PEASANTRY 333 
 
 "Those people never sell themselves when a crime has Been 
 deliberately committed for their own profit," said Sibilet; 
 "for there is no denying that this diabolical invention has 
 been deliberately planned ; 
 
 "Yes. But a thousand francs means one or two acres of 
 land." 
 
 "We will try," said Sibilet. "For fifteen hundred francs 
 we shall find a traitor, I will answer for it, more particularly 
 if we keep his secret." 
 
 "But we must all, and I most of all, act as though we 
 knew nothing about it," said the Count. "It should rather 
 be you who discover it without my knowledge; they must 
 not know that I know, or we may fall victims to some new 
 combination. More caution is needed with these brigands 
 than with the enemy in time of war." 
 
 "Why, this is the enemy," said Blondet. Sibilet gave him 
 a quick furtive glance; he evidently understood the remark, 
 and he went. 
 
 "I do not like that Sibilet of yours," Blondet continued, 
 when he had heard the man go out of the house; "he is not 
 to be trusted." 
 
 "I have had no reason to complain of him so far," said the 
 General. 
 
 Blondet went to write some letters. He had quite lost the 
 careless high spirits of his first visit, and looked anxious and 
 preoccupied. He had no vague forebodings like Mme. 
 Michaud, his was a clear vision of inevitable troubles. To 
 himself he said : 
 
 "All this will come to a bad end; and if the General does 
 not make up his mind at once to retire from a battlefield 
 where he is outnumbered, there will be many victims. Who 
 knows whether he himself or his wife will come out safe and 
 sound ? Good heavens ! to think that she should be exposed 
 to such risks, so adorable, so devoted, so perfect as she is. 
 And he thinks that he loves her! Well, I will share their 
 peril, and if I cannot save them, I will perish with them."
 
 334 THE PEASANTRY. 
 
 VIII 
 
 BUSTIO VIRTUES 
 
 AT nightfall Marie Tonsard was sitting on the edge of a cul- 
 vert on the Soulanges road, waiting for Bonnebault, who, 
 according to his usual custom,, had spent the day at the cafe. 
 She heard him while he was yet some distance away, and 
 knew from his footsteps that he was drunk, and that he had 
 lost at play, for he used to sing when he had been winning. 
 
 "Is that you, Bonnebault?" 
 
 "Yes, little girl." 
 
 "What is the matter?" 
 
 "I have lost twenty-five francs, and they may wring my 
 neck twenty-five times before I shall find them. M 
 
 "Well, now, there is a way for us to make five hundred," 
 she said in his ear. 
 
 "Oh! yes, somebody to be killed; but I have a mind to 
 live " 
 
 "Just hold your tongue. Vaudoyer will give us the money 
 if yon will let them catch your mother at a tree " 
 
 "I would rather kill a man than sell my mother. There is 
 your own grandmother Tonsard; why don't you give her 
 up?" 
 
 "If I tried it, father would be angry, he would put a stop 
 to the game." 
 
 '"That is true. All the same, my mother shall not go to 
 prison. Poor old soul ! she finds me clothes and victual, how, 
 I do not know. Send her to prison, and by my own doing ! 
 I should have neither heart nor bowels. No, no. I shall tel I 
 her this evening to leave off barking the trees, lest some one 
 else should sell her." 
 
 "Well, father will do as he pleases; I shall tell him that 
 there are five hundred francs to be made, and he will ask 
 grandmother whether she will or no. They would never put
 
 THE PEASANTRY 335 
 
 an old woman of seventy in prison; and if they do, she will 
 be more comfortable there than in the garret." 
 
 "Five hundred francs! I will speak to mother about it," 
 said Bonnebault. "After all, if that arrangement gives me 
 the money, I will let her have some of it to live upon in 
 prison. She can spin to amuse herself, she will be well fed 
 and have a sound roof over her, and much less trouble than 
 she has at Conches. Good-bye till to-morrow, little girl I 
 have not time to talk to you." 
 
 Next morning at five o'clock, as soon as it was light, 
 Bonnebault and his mother rapped at the door of the Orand- 
 I-Vert; old Granny Tonsard was the only person out of bed. 
 
 "Marie !" shouted Bonnebault, "it is a bargain !" 
 
 "Is that yesterday's affair about the trees?" asked Granny 
 Tonsard. "That is all settled, they are going to catch me." 
 
 "You, indeed ! My boy has M. Eigou's promise for an acre 
 of land for the money;" and the two old women quarreled 
 as to which of them should be sold by their children. The 
 sound of the dispute roused the house; Tonsard and Bonne- 
 bault each took the part of his parent. 
 
 "Pull straws for it," suggested La Tonsard, the daughter- 
 in-law. 
 
 The straws decided in favor of the Grand-I-Vert. 
 
 Three days later, at daybreak, the gendarmes arrested 
 Granny Tonsard in the depths of the forest, and took her 
 away to Ville-aux-Fayes. She was caught in the act by the 
 head-forester, the keepers, and the rural policeman. In her 
 possession they found a cheap file, with which she made an 
 incision in the tree, and a brad-awl, with which she made the 
 ring-shaped gash to imitate the insect's track. In the indict- 
 ment it was stated that this treacherous operation had been 
 perfoimed upon no fewer than sixty trees within a radius of 
 five hundred paces, and Granny Tonsard was committed for 
 trial at the Assizes at Auxerre. 
 
 When Michaud saw the old crone at the foot of the tree, 
 he could not help exclaiming : 
 
 "These are the people on whom M. le Comte and Mme. la 
 Comtesse heap kindnesses ! My word, if my lady would listen
 
 336 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 to me, she would not portion that Tonsard girl, who is even 
 more worthless than the grandmother." 
 
 The old woman turned her gray eyes on Michaud with a 
 viperous glance. And, in fact, when the Count knew the 
 author of the crime, he forbade his wife to give anything to 
 Catherine Tonsard. 
 
 "And so much the better, M. le Comte," said Sibilet, "for 
 it has come to my knowledge that Godain bought 'that field 
 of his three days before Catherine came to speak to my lady. 
 The pair of them evidently counted on the effect of the scene 
 and on her ladyship's compassion. Catherine is quite capa- 
 ble of putting herself in her present case on purpose to ask 
 for the money, for Godain counts for nothing in the busi- 
 ness " ' 
 
 "What people !" said Blondet ; "our black sheep in Paris are 
 saints in comparison 
 
 "Ah, sir," Sibilet broke in, "all sorts of horrible things are 
 done from mercenary motives hereabouts. Do you know who 
 it was that betrayed the Tonsard?" 
 
 "No " 
 
 "Her granddaughter Marie. Her sister is going to be mar- 
 ried, and she is jealous, and so, to settle herself " 
 
 "It is shocking !" said the Count. "Then would they com- 
 mit a murder?" 
 
 "Yes," said Sibilet, "and for a mere nothing. That sort of 
 people set little value on life ; they are tired of continual toil. 
 Ah ! sir, in out-of-the-way country places things are no better 
 than in Paris, but you would not believe it." 
 
 "Then be kind and benevolent to them," said the Countess. 
 
 On the evening after Granny Ton sard's arrest, Bonnebault 
 looked in at the Grand-I-Vert, and found the whole Tonsard 
 family in great jubilation. 
 
 "Yes, yes," said he, "you may rejoice ! I have just heard 
 from Vaudoyer that the Countess is going back on her prom- 
 ise of Godain's thousand francs. Her husband will not allo\r 
 her to give the money."
 
 THE PEASANTRY 337 
 
 "It is that rascal Michaud who gave the advice," said 
 Tonsard; "mother overheard him. She told me about it at 
 Ville-aux-Fayes when I went over to take all her things and 
 some money. Well and good, let her keep her thousand 
 francs; our five hundred francs will go part of the way 
 towards paying for Godain's land, and we will have our re- 
 venge, Godain, you and I. Aha ! so Michaud interferes in our 
 little affairs, does he ? He will get more harm than good that 
 way. What does it matter to him, I ask you ? Did it happen 
 in his woods? And besides, it was he that raised all this 
 racket. That is as true as 'tis that he found out the trick 
 that day when mother slit the dog's gullet. And how if I in 
 my turn begin to meddle in matters at the chateau? How if 
 I bring the General word that his wife goes out walking in 
 the woods of a morning with a young man, no matter for the 
 dew ; one had need to have warm feet to do that " 
 
 "The General! the General!" broke in Courtecuisse, "any 
 one can do as they like with him; it is Michaud who puts him 
 up to things, a fussy fellow who does not understand his own 
 trade. Things went quite otherwise in my time." 
 
 "Ah!" said Tonsard, "those were fine times for us all, 
 Vaudoyer, were they not?" 
 
 "The fact is," replied Vaudoyer, "that if an end was made 
 of Michaud, we should live in peace." 
 
 "That is enough prattle," said Tonsard; "we will talk 
 about this seriously later on, by moonlight, out in the open." 
 
 Towards the end of October the Countess went back to town 
 and left the General at the Aigues. He was not prepared to 
 follow for some time to come, but she was unwilling to lose 
 the opening of the opera season at the Theatre-Italien ; and, 
 moreover, she felt lonely and dull now that lilmile had left 
 them, for his society had helped her to pass the time while 
 the General went about the country and saw to his affairs. 
 
 Winter set in in earnest with November, the weather was 
 gray and gloomy, with spells of cold thaw, rain, and snow. 
 Granny Tonsard's trial came on, witnesses must make the 
 journey to Auxerre, and Michaud went to make his deposi-
 
 338 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 tion. M. Rigou was seized with pity for the old woman, and 
 found her counsel, a barrister who dwelt in his defence on the 
 fact that all the witnesses for the prosecution were interested 
 parties, while there were no witnesses for the defence, but the 
 evidence given by Michaud and the keepers was corroborated 
 by the rural policeman and two of the gendarmes. This de- 
 cided the day, and Tonsard's mother was sentenced to five 
 years' imprisonment. 
 
 "Michaud's evidence did it all/' the barrister told Tonsard. 
 
 IX 
 
 THE CATASTROPHE 
 
 THE Saturday evening, Courtecuisse, Bonnebault, Godain, 
 Tonsard, and his wife and daughters, Daddy Fourchon, Vau- 
 doyer, and a few laborers sat at supper at the Grand-I-Vert. 
 Outside there was a dim. moon, and a frost of the kind that 
 dries the ground. The first fallen snow had melted and 
 frozen, so that a man walking over the land left no tell-tale 
 footprints to put the pursuit of justice on his track. The 
 hares for the stew off which they were supping had been 
 caught in traps. The whole party were laughing and drink- 
 ing, for it was the morrow of Catherine Godain's wedding, 
 and they were going to bring the bride home. Godain's new 
 house was not far from Courtecuisse's little farm ; for when 
 Eigou sold an acre of land, he took care to sell an isolated 
 plot somewhere on the edge of the woods. 
 
 Courtecuisse and Vaudoyer had come with their guns to 
 escort the bride. The whole countryside was sleeping; there 
 was not a light to be seen. Only the wedding party were 
 awake, and their boisterous mirth was at its loudest when 
 Bonnebault's old mother came in. At that hour of night 
 every one looked up in surprise at her, but she spoke in a low 
 voice to Tonsard and her own son. 
 
 "It looks as if the wife's time had come," she said. "He
 
 THE PEASANTRY 339 
 
 has just had his horse saddled ; he is going to Soulanges for 
 Dr. Gourdon." 
 
 "Sit you down, mother," said Tonsard, and, resigning his 
 seat at the table, he laid himself at full length on a bench. 
 
 As he did so, they heard a horse pass by at full gallop along 
 the road. Tonsard, Courtecuisse, and Vaudoyer went at once 
 to the door, and saw Michaud riding through the village. 
 
 "How well he understands his business !" said Courtecuisse; 
 "he went round past the front of the cblteau, he is taking 
 the Blangy road, it is the safest " 
 
 "Yes," said Tonsard, "but he will bring Dr. Gourdon back 
 with him." 
 
 "Perhaps he will not find him at home," objected Courte- 
 cuisse; "Dr. Gourdon was expected at Conches for the post- 
 mistress, who is putting people out at this time of night." 
 
 "Why, then he will go by the highroad from Soulanges 
 to Conches, that is the shortest way." 
 
 "And the surest for us," said Courtecuisse; "there is a 
 bright moonlight just now. There are no keepers along the 
 highroad as there are in the woods; you can hear anybody 
 a long way off; and from the lodge gates there, behind the 
 hedges, just where the coppice begins, you can hit a man in 
 the back, as if he were a rabbit, at five hundred paces " 
 
 "It will be half -past eleven before he goes past the place," 
 said Tonsard. "It will take him half an hour to reach Sou- 
 langes, and another half hour to come back. . . . Look 
 here though, boys, suppose that M. Gourdon was on the 
 road " 
 
 "Don't trouble yourself," said Courtecuisse ; "I shall be ten 
 minutes' distance away from you on the direct road to Blangy, 
 on the Soulanges side, and Vaudoyer will be ten minutes 
 away on the Conches side. If anybody comes along, a post- 
 chaise, the mail coach, or the gendarmes, or anything what- 
 ever, we will fire into the earth, a smothered shot." 
 
 "And if I miss him ?" 
 
 "He is right," said Courtecuisse. "I am a better shot than 
 you are ; Vaudoyer, I will go with you. Bonnebault will take
 
 340 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 my post ; he can call out, a shout is easier to hear, and not so 
 suspicious." 
 
 The three men went back into the tavern, and they kept 
 up the festivity ; but at eleven o'clock Vaudoyer, Courtecuisse, 
 Tonsard, and Bonnebault turned out with their guns, none 
 of the women paying any attention to this. Three-quarters 
 of an hour later, moreover, they came in again, and sat drink- 
 ing until one o'clock in the morning. Catherine and Marie, 
 with their mother and Bonnebault, had plied the rest of the 
 party with drink, until the miller, the laborers, and the two 
 peasants, like Daddy Fourchon, lay snoring on the floor, when 
 the four set out on their errand. When they came back they 
 shook the sleepers, whom they found as they left them, each 
 in his place. 
 
 While this orgy went on, Michaud's household endured the 
 most cruel anxiety. Olympe had been taken with false labor- 
 pains, and her husband had started in all haste to summon 
 the doctor. But the poor woman's pains ceased as soon as 
 Michaud was out of the house. Her mind was full of the 
 possible risks which her husband might be running at that 
 late hour in a hostile country full of determined scoundrels ; 
 and so strong was her anguish of soul, that for the time being 
 it quelled physical suffering. In vain did her servant tell 
 her again and again that her fears were imaginary; she did 
 not seem to understand the words, and sat by the fireside 
 in her room, listening to every sound without. In an agony 
 of terror, which grew from second, to second, she called up 
 the man to give him an order which she did not give. The 
 poor little woman walked to and fro in feverish agitation. 
 She went to the windows and looked out, she threw them 
 open in spite of the cold, then she went downstairs, opened 
 the door into the yard, and looked out into the distance and 
 listened. 
 
 "Nothing ," she said, "nothing jet," and she went up 
 
 to her room again in despair. 
 
 About a quarter-past twelve she cried out, "Here he is; I
 
 THE PEASANTKY 341 
 
 hear his horse," and went downstairs, followed by the man, 
 who went to open the great gate. 
 
 "It is. strange," she said; "he has come back by way of 
 Conches and the forest." 
 
 She stood like one horror-struck, motionless and dumb. 
 The man shared her dismay; for in the frantic gallop of the 
 horse, and the clank of the empty stirrups, there had been a 
 mysterious sound, which told of something wrong, accom- 
 panied by the significant neighing which a horse only gives 
 when alone. Soon, too soon for the unhappy wife, the horse 
 reached the park gate, panting and covered with foam, but 
 the horse was riderless, and the bridle, which doubtless had 
 hindered his flight, was broken. Olympe watched with hag- 
 gard eyes as the man opened the gate, saw the empty saddle, 
 and without a word turned and fled to the chateau like one 
 distraught. She reached the house and fell beneath the Gen- 
 eral's windows with the cry : 
 
 "Monsieur ! they have murdered him !" 
 
 Her shriek was so terrible that it woke the Count ; he rang 
 the bell and roused the household. The moans of Mme. Mi- 
 chaud, who was delivered of a stillborn child as she lay on 
 the earth, brought out the General and the servants. They 
 raised up the unhappy dying woman. "They have killed 
 him !" she said when she saw the General, and died with the 
 words on her lips. 
 
 "Joseph !" the Count called to his man, "run and fetch 
 the doctor ! Perhaps it is not too late. No ; you had better 
 go for M. le Cure, she is dead, poor woman, and the child is 
 dead. Great heavens ! what a mercy that my wife is not "here ! 
 Go and see what has happened," he added, turning to the gar- 
 dener. 
 
 "This has happened," said the man from the hunting-lodge, 
 "M. Michaud's horse has come back without him, the bridle 
 is cut, there is blood on his legs. There is a drop of blood 
 on the saddle." 
 
 "What can we do to-night?" said the Count. "Go and call 
 up Groison, find the keepers, saddle the horses, and we will 
 beat up the country."
 
 342 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 In the gray light of the morning, eight men the Count, 
 Groison, the three keepers, and two gendarmes, who had come 
 over from Soulanges with the quartermaster were out 
 searching the country; but it was midday before they found 
 the dead body of the head-forester in a coppice about five 
 hundred paces from the Conches gate, in the corner of 
 the park between the highroad and the road to Ville-aux- 
 Fayes. 
 
 Two gendarmes were dispatched one to Ville-aux-Fayes 
 for the public prosecutor, and the other to the justice of the 
 peace at Soulanges and meanwhile the General drew up a 
 report with the assistance of the quartermaster. There were 
 marks in the road opposite the park gates where the horse had 
 swerved and reared, and deep dints made by the hoofs of the 
 runaway continued as far as the first footpath into the wood 
 beyond the hedge. The animal had taken the shortest way 
 back to the stable. A bullet was lodged in Michaud's back, 
 and the spine was broken. 
 
 Groison and the quartermaster went all over the ground 
 round about the spot where the horse had reared, the "scene 
 of the murder," as it is called in criminal reports, but with all 
 their sagacity they could discover no clue. The ground was 
 frozen so hard that there was not a sign of the footprints of 
 Michaud's murderer, and a spent cartridge was the only thing 
 which they found. 
 
 When the public prosecutor arrived with the examining 
 magistrate and Dr. Gourdon, and the body was removed for 
 the post-mortem examination, it was ascertained that the ball, 
 which corresponded with the waste cartridge, was a regulation 
 bullet discharged from a rifle, and that there was not a single 
 rifle in the commune of Blangy. That evening at the chateau 
 the examining magistrate and M. Soudry, the public prose- 
 cutor, were of the opinion that these facts should be put in 
 the form of a report, and that they had better wait. The 
 lieutenant from Ville-aux-Fayes and the quartermaster were 
 of the same mind. 
 
 "The shot must have been fired by somebody belonging
 
 THE PEASANTRY 343 
 
 to the neighborhood," said the quartermaster, "but there are 
 two communes in the case, and there are five or six men in 
 Conches and Blangy who are quite capable of the act. Ton- 
 sard, whom I should suspect the most, spent the night in 
 drinking. Why, Langlume the miller, your deputy, General, 
 was of the wedding party ; he was there the whole time. They 
 were so drunk that they could not stand upright, and they 
 brought the bride home at half-past one, while it is evident 
 from the return of Michaud's horse that he was murdered be- 
 tween twelve and eleven o'clock. At a quarter-past ten Groi- 
 son saw the whole party at table, and Michaud went that way 
 to Soulanges, and he was in Soulanges by eleven o'clock. His 
 horse swerved and pawed the ground on the road by the lodge 
 gates, but Michaud might have received the shot before he 
 reached Blangy, and have held on for some time afterwards. 
 Warrants must be issued for twenty persons at the least, and 
 every one under suspicion must be arrested ; but these gentle- 
 men know the peasants as well as I do ; you may keep them in 
 prison for a year, and you will get nothing out of them but 
 denials. What do you mean to do with the party in Tonsard's 
 place?" 
 
 Langlume, the miller and deputy mayor, was summoned, 
 and he gave his version of the evening's events. They were 
 all in the tavern, he said, no one left it except to go into the 
 yard for a few minutes. He himself had gone out with Ton- 
 sard about eleven o'clock ; something was said about the moon 
 and the weather ; they had heard nothing. He gave the names 
 of all the party, not one of them had left the place, and to- 
 wards two o'clock in the morning they had gone home with 
 the newly-married couple. 
 
 The General and the public prosecutor, taking counsel with 
 the lieutenant and the quartermaster, determined to send to 
 Paris for a clever detective, who should come to the chateau 
 as a workman, and be turned away for bad conduct. He 
 should drink and assiduously frequent the Grand-I-Vert, and 
 hang about the country in discontent with the General. It was 
 the best way of lying in wait to catch a chance indiscretion.
 
 344 THE PBA8ANTBT 
 
 <C L will discover poor Midland's murderer in the end if I 
 should have to spend twenty thousand francs over it !" Gen- 
 eral Montcornet never wearied of repeating those words. 
 
 He went to Paris with this idea in his head, and returned 
 in the month of January with one of the cleverest detectives 
 in the force, who came ostensibly as foreman of the work at 
 the chateau, and took to poaching. Formal complaints were 
 made by the keepers, and the General turned him away. In 
 February the Comte <le Montcornet returned to Paris. 
 
 THE VICTORY OF THE VANQUISHED 
 
 ONE evening in May, when summer weather had come, and 
 the Parisians had returned to the Aigues, M. de Troisville, 
 whom his daughter had brought with her, Blondet, the Abbe 
 Brossette, the General, and the sub-prefect from Ville-aux- 
 Fayes, who had come on a visit, were playing at whist and 
 chess. It was half-past eleven o'clock when Joseph came in 
 to tell his master that the bad workman who had been dis- 
 missed wished to speak with him ; the man said that the Gen- 
 eral still owed him money. He was very drunk, the valet re- 
 ported. 
 
 "All right, I will go out to him," said the General, and he 
 went out on the lawn at some distance from the house. 
 
 "M. le Comte, there is nothing to be made of these people," 
 said the detective. "All that I can find out is simply this 
 that if you stay here and persist in trying to break the people 
 of the bad habits which they were allowed to contract in Mile. 
 Laguerre's time, the next shot will be fired at you. I can do 
 nothing more here after this ; they suspect me even more than 
 your keepers." 
 
 The Count paid the detective, and the man took his leave ; 
 his departure only confirmed previous suspicions of the per- 
 petrators of the crime. When the General went back to join 
 the party in the drawing-room, his face bore traces of such
 
 THE PEASANTRY 845 
 
 deep and keen emotion, that his wife came to him anxiously 
 asking for news. 
 
 "Dearest," he said, "I do not want to frighten you, and 
 yet it is right that you should know that Michaud's death was 
 meant for an indirect warning to us to quit " 
 
 "For my own part," said M. de Troisville, "I should not 
 think of going. I had these same difficulties in Normandy 
 under another form; I persisted, and now everything goes 
 well." 
 
 "Normandy and Burgundy are two different countries, my 
 lord Marquis," said the sub-prefect. "The fruit of the vine is 
 more heating to the blood than the fruit of the apple-tree. 
 We are not so learned here in legal quibbles, and we are sur- 
 rounded by forests; we have as yet few industries; we are 
 savages, in fact. If I have any advice to give to M. le Comte, 
 it is this to sell his land and invest the money in the funds. 
 He would double his income, and he would not have the slight- 
 est trouble. If he has a liking for a country life, he can have 
 an estate near Paris, a chateau as fine as the chateau of the 
 Aigues, a park enclosed by walls which no one will climb, and 
 farms which he can let to tenants who will come in a cab- 
 riolet to pay their rents with bank-notes. He will not need -to 
 make out a single summons in twelve months. He can go 
 and come in three or four hours. And, then, Mme. la Comt- 
 esse, M. Blondet and my lord Marquis would visit you more 
 frequently " 
 
 "Shall / fly before the peasants, I, who stood my ground 
 on the Danube ?" 
 
 "Yes, but where are your Cuirassiers ?" asked Blondet. 
 
 "Such a fine estate " 
 
 "It will fetch more than two million of francs to-day." 
 
 "The chateau alone must have cost as much," said M. de 
 Troisville. 
 
 "One of the finest properties for twenty leagues round," 
 said the sub-prefect, "but you will find better near Paris." 
 
 "What would two million francs bring in, invested ill 
 the funds ?" inquired the Countess.
 
 346 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "At the present time, about forty thousand francs," said 
 Blondet. 
 
 "The Aigues would not bring you in more than thirty 
 thousand, all told," said the Countess, "and then of late years 
 you have spent an immense amount upon it, you have had 
 ditches made round the woods." 
 
 "You can have a royal chateau just now on the outskirts of 
 Paris for four hundred thousand francs. You reap the bene- 
 fit of other people's follies." 
 
 "I thought that you were fond of the Aigues," the Count 
 said to his wife. 
 
 "But do you not feel that your life is a thousand times more 
 to me than the Aigues?" said she. "And besides, since the 
 death of poor Olympe and Michaud's murder, the country has 
 grown hateful to me. I seem to see threats and a sinister 
 expression in every face." 
 
 The next morning, when the sub-prefect came into M. 
 Gaubertin's drawing-room at Ville-aux-Fayes, the mayor 
 greeted him with "Well, M. des Lupeaulx, have you come 
 from the Aigues ?" 
 
 "Yes," said the sub-prefect, with a shade of triumph in his 
 manner. He shot a tender glance at Mile. Elise as he added, 
 "I am afraid that we are going to lose the General; he is 
 about to sell his estate " 
 
 "M. Gaubertin, I beg of you not to forget my lodge I can- 
 not bear the noise and dust of Ville-aux-Fayes any longer; 
 like some poor imprisoned bird, I gasp for the air of the 
 far-off fields and woods," drawled Mme. Isaure, her eyes half 
 closed, her head thrown back over her left shoulder, while she 
 languidly twisted her long pale ringlets. 
 
 "Pray, be careful, madame !" said Gaubertin, lowering his 
 voice, "your babbling will not buy the lodge for us " 
 
 Then he turned to the sub-prefect : 
 
 "So they still cannot find the perpetrators of the crime 
 committed on the person of the head-forester?" he inquired. 
 
 "It seems that they cannot," replied the sub-prefect. 
 
 "That will injure the sale of the Aigues very much," an-
 
 THE PEASANTRY 34? 
 
 nounced Gaubertin to all who heard him ; "for my own part, 
 I would not buy the place, I know. The peasants are too 
 troublesome. Even in Mile. Laguerre's time I used to have 
 trouble with them, though the Lord knows that she allowed 
 them latitude enough." 
 
 The month of May was drawing to a close, and there was 
 nothing indicated that the General meant to sell the Aigues. 
 He was hesitating. One night about ten o'clock he was re- 
 turning from the forest by one of the six avenues which led 
 to the hunting-lodge; he was so near home that he had dis- 
 missed the keeper who went with him. At a turn in the 
 avenue a man armed with a rifle came out from a bush. 
 
 "General," he said, "this is the third time that I have had 
 you close to the muzzle of my gun, and this makes the third 
 time that I have given you your life." 
 
 "And why should you want to kill me, Bonnebault?" said 
 the Count, without a sign of flinching. 
 
 "Faith ! if I did not, it would be somebody else ; and, you 
 see, I myself have a liking for those who served under the 
 Emperor, and I cannot make up my mind to shoot you like 
 a partridge. Don't ask me about it ; I don't mean to say any- 
 thing. But you have enemies who are more cunning and 
 stronger than you are, and they will crush you at last. I am 
 to have three thousand francs if I kill you, and I shall marry 
 Marie Tonsard. Well, give me a few acres of waste and a 
 cabin; I will go on saying, as I have said before, that I have 
 not found an opportunity. You shall have time to sell your 
 place and go away, but be quick. I am a good fellow still, 
 scapegrace though I am; somebody else might do you a mis- 
 chief." 
 
 "And if I give you your demands," said the General, "will 
 you tell me who it was that promised you the three thousand 
 crowns ?" 
 
 "I do not know; some one is pushing me on to do this, 
 but I am too fond of that person to mention names. . . . 
 
 And if I did, and if you knew that it was Marie Tonsard, you 
 VOL. 10-48
 
 348 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 would be no further. Marie would be as mute as a wall, and 1 
 should deny my words." 
 
 "Come and see me to-morrow," said the General. 
 
 "That is enough," said Bonnebault; "if they think that I 
 am bungling the business, I will let you know." 
 
 A week after this strange conversation, the district, the 
 whole department nay, Paris itself was floodel with huge 
 placards, wherein it was set forth that the Aigues was to be 
 put up for sale in lots; applications to be made to Maitre 
 Corbinet, notary, Soulanges. All the lots were knocked down 
 to Rigou, the total amount paid being two million one hun- 
 dred and fifty thousand francs. 
 
 On the morrow of the sale the names of the buyers were 
 changed. M. Gaubertin took the forest, Kigou and Soudry 
 had the vineyards and the rest of the estate. The chateau 
 and the park were resold to the Black Band, to be pulled down 
 for building materials; only the hunting-lodge, with its de- 
 pendencies, was allowed to stand M. Gaubertin reserved 
 it as a present for his poetical and sentimental spouse. 
 
 Many years went by. During the winter of 1837, Emile 
 Blondet, one of the most remarkable political writers of the 
 time, had reached the lowest depth of poverty, which he had 
 hitherto concealed beneath the brilliant and elegant surface 
 of his life. He was hesitating on the brink of a desperate re- 
 solve; he saw that his work, his wit and knowledge of men 
 and affairs, had ended in naught, that he was a machine work- 
 ing for the benefit of others. He saw that all places were 
 filled; he felt that he was growing older, and knew that he 
 had neither wealth nor position. The placemen and inca- 
 pables of the Eestoration had succeeded to the bourgeois im- 
 beciles and incapables, and the Government was reconstituted 
 as it had been before 1830. r One evening, when suicide, at 
 which he had scoffed so often, was hovering in his thoughts, 
 he glanced finally over his unlucky life, in which work had 
 filled a far larger space tha.n the dissipation which slander
 
 THE PEASANTRY 349 
 
 imputed to him, and saw the fair and noble face of a woman 
 rise out of the past, like a stainless and unbroken marble 
 statue amid the dreariest ruins. His porter brought him a 
 letter with a black seal. The Comtesse de Montcornet wrote 
 to inform him of the death 'of her husband, who had returned 
 to the army, and again commanded a division. She was his 
 heir; she had no children. That letter, in spite of its wo- 
 manly dignity, told Blondet that the woman of forty, whom 
 he had loved in his youth, held out a comrade's hand to him 
 and a considerable fortune. 
 
 Shortly afterwards a marriage took place between the Comt- 
 esse de Montcornet and M. Blondet, a newly-appointed pre- 
 fect. He went to his prefecture by the route on which the 
 Aigues formerly lay, and stopped the traveling carriage 
 opposite the place where the park gates used to stand, to see 
 once more the commune of Blangy, so thronged with tender 
 memories for them both. The country was no longer recog- 
 nizable. The mysterious woods, the avenues in the park, 
 had been cleared away, the country looked like a tailor's chart 
 of patterns. The Peasantry had taken possession of the soil 
 as conquerors and by right of conquest; already it had been 
 divided up into more than a thousand holdings; already the 
 population of Blangy had trebled itself. The once beautiful 
 park so carefully ordered, so luxuriantly fair was now an 
 agricultural district, with one familiar building standing out 
 in strong contrast against the changed background. This 
 was the hunting-lodge, re-christened II Bnen-Retiro by Mme. 
 Isaure Gaubertin, who had converted it into a villa residence. 
 The building looked almost like a chateau, so miserable were 
 the peasants' cabins scattered round about it. 
 
 "Behold the march of progress !" cried fimile. "Here is a 
 page from Jean-Jacques' Control Social. And here am I, 
 in harness, a part of the social machinery which brings about 
 such results as these ! Good heavens ! what will become of 
 kings in a little while ? Nay, what will become of the nations 
 themselves in fifty years' time, if this state of things con- 
 tinues?"
 
 350 THE PEASANTRY 
 
 "You love me you are at my side. . . The present 
 is very fair for me, and I hardly care to think of such a far- 
 off future," his wife answered. 
 
 "With you beside me, long live the Present ! and the devil 
 take the Future !" cried the enraptured Blondet. 
 
 He made a sign to the man, the horses sprang forward at a 
 gallop, and the newly-wedded lovers resumed the course of 
 their honeymoon. 
 
 The author of The Peasantry should be allowed to be sufficiently 
 learned in the history of his own times to know that there never 
 were any Cuirassiers of the Imperial Guard. He takes the lib- 
 erty of stating here that he has in his study the uniforms of 
 the Republic, the Empire, and the Restoration; a complete col- 
 lection of the military costumes of every country which has 
 fought with France as an- enemy or as an ally; and more military 
 works on the wars of 1792-1815 than any Marshal of France. 
 He takes the opportunity, through the medium of the press, of 
 thanking those persons who have honored him by taking a suffi- 
 cient interest in his work to correct his mistakes and send him 
 information. 
 
 Once for all, he here states in reply that these inaccuracies are 
 deliberately and designedly made. The story is not a Scene de la 
 Tie Militaire, in which an author is bound not to equip his in- 
 fantry men with sabretaches. Every attempt to deal with con- 
 temporary history, even through contemporary types, has its 
 dangers. It is only by making use of a general scheme, in which 
 all the details are minutely true, and all the facts severally al- 
 tered by giving an unfamiliar color to them, that the petty reef 
 of "personalities" can be avoided in fiction. In a previous case 
 (Une Tenebreuse Affaire), although the facts belonged to history 
 and the details had been altered, the author was compelled to 
 reply to ridiculous objections raised on the ground that there 
 was but one senator kidnapped and confined in the time of the 
 Empire. I quite believe it! Possiblv be who should have ab- 
 ducted a second senator would have been crowned with flowers. 
 
 If this inaccuracy with regard to the Cuirassiers is too shock- 
 Ing, it is easy to suppress the mention of the Guard; though, in 
 that case, the family of the illustrious General who commanded
 
 THE PEASANTRY 351 
 
 the regiment of horse which was pushed down to the edge of 
 the Danube, might ask us to account for those eleven hundred 
 thousand francs, which the Emperor allowed Montcornet to save 
 in Pomerania. 
 
 We shall soon be requested to give the name of the geography 
 book in which Ville-aux-Fayes and the Avonne and Soulanges 
 are to be found. Let it be said that all these places, and the 
 Cuirassiers of the Guard likewise, are to be found on those 
 shores where the Master of Ravenswood's tower stands; there 
 you will find Saint Konan's Well and the lands of Tillietudlern 
 and Gandercleugh and Lilliput and the Abbey of Thelema, and 
 Hoffmann's privy councillors, and Robinson Crusoe's Island, and 
 the estates of the Shandy Family; in that world no taxes arc 
 paid, and those who fain would make the voyage may travel 
 thither post, at the rate of twenty centimes a volume. 
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE.
 
 A 000 095 274 7