Sons of the Soil

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SONS OF THE SOIL

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC


Translated by
Katharine Prescott Wormeley



DEDICATION

To Monsieur P. S. B. Gavault.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote these words at the beginning of his
Nouvelle Heloise: "I have seen the morals of my time and I publish
these letters." May I not say to you, in imitation of that great
writer, "I have studied the march of my epoch and I publish this
work"?

The object of this particular study--startling in its truth so
long as society makes philanthropy a principle instead of
regarding it as an accident--is to bring to sight the leading
characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who
seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is
only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the
sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate
the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have
risen, and cried by every pen, "Arise, working-men!" just as
formerly they cried, "Arise!" to the "tiers etat." None of these
Erostrates, however, have dared to face the country solitudes and
study the unceasing conspiracy of those whom we term weak against
those others who fancy themselves strong,--that of the peasant
against the proprietor. It is necessary to enlighten not only the
legislator of to-day but him of to-morrow. In the midst of the
present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers
blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to exhibit the peasant who
renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land
to be a thing that is, and that is not.

You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which
undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides
an acre into a hundred fragments,--ever spurred on to his banquet
by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary
and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the
Revolution, will some day absorb the middle classes, just as the
middle classes have destroyed the nobility. Lifted above the law
by its own insignificance, this Robespierre, with one head and
twenty million arms, is at work perpetually; crouching in country
districts, intrenched in municipal councils, under arms in the
national guard of every canton in France,--one result of the year
1830, which failed to remember that Napoleon preferred the chances
of defeat to the danger of arming the masses.

If during the last eight years I have again and again given up the
writing of this book (the most important of those I have
undertaken to write), and as often returned to it, it was, as you
and other friends can well imagine, because my courage shrank from
the many difficulties, the many essential details of a drama so
doubly dreadful and so cruelly bloody. Among the reasons which
render me now almost, it may be thought, foolhardy, I count the
desire to finish a work long designed to be to you a proof of my
deep and lasting gratitude for a friendship that has ever been
among my greatest consolations in misfortune.

De Balzac.




SONS OF THE SOIL




PART I

Whoso land hath, contention hath.



CHAPTER I

THE CHATEAU

Les Aigues, August 6, 1823.

To Monsieur Nathan,

My dear Nathan,--You, who provide the public with such delightful
dreams through the magic of your imagination, are now to follow me
while I make you dream a dream of truth. You shall then tell me
whether the present century is likely to bequeath such dreams to the
Nathans and the Blondets of the year 1923; you shall estimate the
distance at which we now are from the days when the Florines of the
eighteenth century found, on awaking, a chateau like Les Aigues in the
terms of their bargain.

My dear fellow, if you receive this letter in the morning, let your
mind travel, as you lie in bed, fifty leagues or thereabouts from
Paris, along the great mail road which leads to the confines of
Burgundy, and behold two small lodges built of red brick, joined, or
separated, by a rail painted green. It was there that the diligence
deposited your friend and correspondent.

On either side of this double pavilion grows a quick-set hedge, from
which the brambles straggle like stray locks of hair. Here and there a
tree shoots boldly up; flowers bloom on the slopes of the wayside
ditch, bathing their feet in its green and sluggish water. The hedge
at both ends meets and joins two strips of woodland, and the double
meadow thus inclosed is doubtless the result of a clearing.

These dusty and deserted lodges give entrance to a magnificent avenue
of centennial elms, whose umbrageous heads lean toward each other and
form a long and most majestic arbor. The grass grows in this avenue,
and only a few wheel-tracks can be seen along its double width of way.
The great age of the trees, the breadth of the avenue, the venerable
construction of the lodges, the brown tints of their stone courses,
all bespeak an approach to some half-regal residence.

Before reaching this enclosure from the height of an eminence such as
we Frenchmen rather conceitedly call a mountain, at the foot of which
lies the village of Conches (the last post-house), I had seen the long
valley of Aigues, at the farther end of which the mail road turns to
follow a straight line into the little sub-prefecture of La
Ville-aux-Fayes, over which, as you know, the nephew of our friend des
Lupeaulx lords it. Tall forests lying on the horizon, along vast slopes
which skirt a river, command this rich valley, which is framed in the
far distance by the mountains of a lesser Switzerland, called the Morvan.
These forests belong to Les Aigues, and to the Marquis de Ronquerolles
and the Comte de Soulanges, whose castles and parks and villages, seen
in the distance from these heights, give the scene a strong
resemblance to the imaginary landscapes of Velvet Breughel.

If these details do not remind you of all the castles in the air you
have desired to possess in France you are not worthy to receive the
present narrative of an astounded Parisian. At last I have seen a
landscape where art is blended with nature in such a way that neither
of them spoils the other; the art is natural, and the nature artistic.
I have found the oasis that you and I have dreamed of when reading
novels,--nature luxuriant and adorned, rolling lines that are not
confused, something wild withal, unkempt, mysterious, not common. Jump
that green railing and come on!

When I tried to look up the avenue, which the sun never penetrates
except when it rises or when it sets, striping the road like a zebra
with its oblique rays, my view was obstructed by an outline of rising
ground; after that is passed, the long avenue is obstructed by a
copse, within which the roads meet at a cross-ways, in the centre of
which stands a stone obelisk, for all the world like an eternal
exclamation mark. From the crevices between the foundation stones of
this erection, which is topped by a spiked ball (what an idea!), hang
flowering plants, blue or yellow according to the season. Les Aigues
must certainly have been built by a woman, or for a woman; no man
would have had such dainty ideas; the architect no doubt had his cue.

Passing through the little wood placed there as sentinel, I came upon
a charming declivity, at the foot of which foamed and gurgled a little
brook, which I crossed on a culvert of mossy stones, superb in color,
the prettiest of all the mosaics which time manufactures. The avenue
continues by the brookside up a gentle rise. In the distance, the
first tableau is now seen,--a mill and its dam, a causeway and trees,
linen laid out to dry, the thatched cottage of the miller, his
fishing-nets, and the tank where the fish are kept,--not to speak of
the miller's boy, who was already watching me. No matter where you are
in the country, however solitary you may think yourself, you are
certain to be the focus of the two eyes of a country bumpkin; a
laborer rests on his hoe, a vine-dresser straightens his bent back, a
little goat-girl, or shepherdess, or milkmaid climbs a willow to stare
at you.

Presently the avenue merges into an alley of acacias, which leads to
an iron railing made in the days when iron-workers fashioned those
slender filagrees which are not unlike the copies set us by a
writing-master. On either side of the railing is a ha-ha, the edges
of which bristle with angry spikes,--regular porcupines in metal. The
railing is closed at both ends by two porter's-lodges, like those of
the palace at Versailles, and the gateway is surmounted by colossal
vases. The gold of the arabesques is ruddy, for rust has added its
tints, but this entrance, called "the gate of the Avenue," which
plainly shows the hand of the Great Dauphin (to whom, indeed, Les
Aigues owes it), seems to me none the less beautiful for that. At the
end of each ha-ha the walls of the park, built of rough-hewn stone,
begin. These stones, set in a mortar made of reddish earth, display
their variegated colors, the warm yellows of the silex, the white of
the lime carbonates, the russet browns of the sandstone, in many a
fantastic shape. As you first enter it, the park is gloomy, the walls
are hidden by creeping plants and by trees that for fifty years have
heard no sound of axe. One might think it a virgin forest, made primeval
again through some phenomenon granted exclusively to forests. The trunks
of the trees are swathed with lichen which hangs from one to another.
Mistletoe, with its viscid leaves, droops from every fork of the
branches where moisture settles. I have found gigantic ivies, wild
arabesques which flourish only at fifty leagues from Paris, here where
land does not cost enough to make one sparing of it. The landscape on
such free lines covers a great deal of ground. Nothing is smoothed
off; rakes are unknown, ruts and ditches are full of water, frogs are
tranquilly delivered of their tadpoles, the woodland flowers bloom,
and the heather is as beautiful as that I have seen on your mantle-shelf
in January in the elegant beau-pot sent by Florine. This mystery is
intoxicating, it inspires vague desires. The forest odors, beloved
of souls that are epicures of poesy, who delight in the tiny mosses,
the noxious fungi, the moist mould, the willows, the balsams, the wild
thyme, the green waters of a pond, the golden star of the yellow
water-lily,--the breath of all such vigorous propagations came to my
nostrils and filled me with a single thought; was it their soul? I
seemed to see a rose-tinted gown floating along the winding alley.

The path ended abruptly in another copse, where birches and poplars
and all the quivering trees palpitated,--an intelligent family with
graceful branches and elegant bearing, the trees of a love as free! It
was from this point, my dear fellow, that I saw a pond covered with
the white water-lily and other plants with broad flat leaves and
narrow slender ones, on which lay a boat painted white and black, as
light as a nut-shell and dainty as the wherry of a Seine boatman.
Beyond rose the chateau, built in 1560, of fine red brick, with stone
courses and copings, and window-frames in which the sashes were of
small leaded panes (O Versailles!). The stone is hewn in diamond
points, but hollowed, as in the Ducal Palace at Venice on the facade
toward the Bridge of Sighs. There are no regular lines about the
castle except in the centre building, from which projects a stately
portico with double flights of curving steps, and round balusters
slender at their base and broadening at the middle. The main building
is surrounded by clock-towers and sundry modern turrets, with
galleries and vases more or less Greek. No harmony there, my dear
Nathan! These heterogeneous erections are wrapped, so to speak, by
various evergreen trees whose branches shed their brown needles upon
the roofs, nourishing the lichen and giving tone to the cracks and
crevices where the eye delights to wander. Here you see the Italian
pine, the stone pine, with its red bark and its majestic parasol; here
a cedar two hundred years old, weeping willows, a Norway spruce, and a
beech which overtops them all; and there, in front of the main tower,
some very singular shrubs,--a yew trimmed in a way that recalls some
long-decayed garden of old France, and magnolias with hortensias at
their feet. In short, the place is the Invalides of the heroes of
horticulture, once the fashion and now forgotten, like all other
heroes.

A chimney, with curious copings, which was sending forth great volumes
of smoke, assured me that this delightful scene was not an opera
setting. A kitchen reveals human beings. Now imagine _me_, Blondet, who
shiver as if in the polar regions at Saint-Cloud, in the midst of this
glowing Burgundian climate. The sun sends down its warmest rays, the
king-fisher watches on the shores of the pond, the cricket chirps, the
grain-pods burst, the poppy drops its morphia in glutinous tears, and
all are clearly defined on the dark-blue ether. Above the ruddy soil
of the terraces flames that joyous natural punch which intoxicates the
insects and the flowers and dazzles our eyes and browns our faces. The
grape is beading, its tendrils fall in a veil of threads whose
delicacy puts to shame the lace-makers. Beside the house blue
larkspur, nasturtium, and sweet-peas are blooming. From a distance
orange-trees and tuberoses scent the air. After the poetic exhalations
of the woods (a gradual preparation) came the delectable pastilles of
this botanic seraglio.

Standing on the portico, like the queen of flowers, behold a woman
robed in white, with hair unpowdered, holding a parasol lined with
white silk, but herself whiter than the silk, whiter than the lilies
at her feet, whiter than the starry jasmine that climbed the
balustrade,--a woman, a Frenchwoman born in Russia, who said as I
approached her, "I had almost given you up." She had seen me as I left
the copse. With what perfection do all women, even the most guileless,
understand the arrangement of a scenic effect? The movements of the
servants, who were preparing to serve breakfast, showed me that the
meal had been delayed until after the arrival of the diligence. She
had not ventured to come to meet me.

Is this not our dream,--the dream of all lovers of the beautiful,
under whatsoever form it comes; the seraphic beauty that Luini put
into his Marriage of the Virgin, that noble fresco at Sarono; the
beauty that Rubens grasped in the tumult of his "Battle of the
Thermodon"; the beauty that five centuries have elaborated in the
cathedrals of Seville and Milan; the beauty of the Saracens at
Granada, the beauty of Louis XIV. at Versailles, the beauty of the
Alps, and that of this Limagne in which I stand?

Belonging to the estate, about which there is nothing too princely,
nor yet too financial, where prince and farmer-general have both lived
(which fact serves to explain it), are four thousand acres of
woodland, a park of some nine hundred acres, the mill, three leased
farms, another immense farm at Conches, and vineyards,--the whole
producing a revenue of about seventy thousand francs a year. Now you
know Les Aigues, my dear fellow; where I have been expected for the
last two weeks, and where I am at this moment, in the chintz-lined
chamber assigned to dearest friends.

Above the park, towards Conches, a dozen little brooks, clear, limpid
streams coming from the Morvan, fall into the pond, after adorning
with their silvery ribbons the valleys of the park and the magnificent
gardens around the chateau. The name of the place, Les Aigues, comes
from these charming streams of water; the estate was originally called
in the old title-deeds "Les Aigues-Vives" to distinguish it from
"Aigues-Mortes"; but the word "Vives" has now been dropped. The pond
empties into the stream, which follows the course of the avenue,
through a wide and straight canal bordered on both sides and along its
whole length by weeping willows. This canal, thus arched, produces a
delightful effect. Gliding through it, seated on a thwart of the
little boat, one could fancy one's self in the nave of some great
cathedral, the choir being formed of the main building of the house
seen at the end of it. When the setting sun casts its orange tones
mingled with amber upon the casements of the chateau, the effect is
that of painted windows. At the other end of the canal we see Blangy,
the county-town, containing about sixty houses, and the village
church, which is nothing more than a tumble-down building with a
wooden clock-tower which appears to hold up a roof of broken tiles.
One comfortable house and the parsonage are distinguishable; but the
township is a large one,--about two hundred scattered houses in all,
those of the village forming as it were the capital. The roads are
lined with fruit-trees, and numerous little gardens are strewn here
and there,--true country gardens with everything in them; flowers,
onions, cabbages and grapevines, currants, and a great deal of manure.
The village has a primitive air; it is rustic, and has that decorative
simplicity which we artists are forever seeking. In the far distance
is the little town of Soulanges overhanging a vast sheet of water,
like the buildings on the lake of Thune.

When you stroll in the park, which has four gates, each superb in
style, you feel that our mythological Arcadias are flat and stale.
Arcadia is in Burgundy, not in Greece; Arcadia is at Les Aigues and
nowhere else. A river, made by scores of brooklets, crosses the park
at its lower level with a serpentine movement; giving a dewy freshness
and tranquillity to the scene,--an air of solitude, which reminds one
of a convent of Carthusians, and all the more because, on an
artificial island in the river, is a hermitage in ruins, the interior
elegance of which is worthy of the luxurious financier who constructed
it. Les Aigues, my dear Nathan, once belonged to that Bouret who spent
two millions to receive Louis XV. on a single occasion under his roof.
How many ardent passions, how many distinguished minds, how many
fortunate circumstances have contributed to make this beautiful place
what it is! A mistress of Henri IV. rebuilt the chateau where it now
stands. The favorite of the Great Dauphin, Mademoiselle Choin (to whom
Les Aigues was given), added a number of farms to it. Bouret furnished
the house with all the elegancies of Parisian homes for an Opera
celebrity; and to him Les Aigues owes the restoration of its ground
floor in the style Louis XV.

I have often stood rapt in admiration at the beauty of the
dining-room. The eye is first attracted to the ceiling, painted in fresco
in the Italian manner, where lightsome arabesques are frolicking. Female
forms, in stucco ending in foliage, support at regular distances
corbeils of fruit, from which spring the garlands of the ceiling.
Charming paintings, the work of unknown artists, fill the panels
between the female figures, representing the luxuries of the table,
--boar's-heads, salmon, rare shell-fish, and all edible things,--which
fantastically suggest men and women and children, and rival the
whimsical imagination of the Chinese,--the people who best understand,
to my thinking at least, the art of decoration. The mistress of the
house finds a bell-wire beneath her feet to summon servants, who enter
only when required, disturbing no interviews and overhearing no
secrets. The panels above the doorways represent gay scenes; all the
embrasures, both of doors and windows, are in marble mosaics. The room
is heated from below. Every window looks forth on some delightful
view.

This room communicates with a bath-room on one side and on the other
with a boudoir which opens into the salon. The bath-room is lined with
Sevres tiles, painted in monochrome, the floor is mosaic, and the bath
marble. An alcove, hidden by a picture painted on copper, which turns
on a pivot, contains a couch in gilt wood of the truest Pompadour. The
ceiling is lapis-lazuli starred with gold. The tiles are painted from
designs by Boucher. Bath, table and love are therefore closely united.

After the salon, which, I should tell you, my dear fellow, exhibits
the magnificence of the Louis XIV. manner, you enter a fine billiard-room
unrivalled so far as I know in Paris itself. The entrance to this
suite of ground-floor apartments is through a semi-circular
antechamber, at the lower end of which is a fairy-like staircase,
lighted from above, which leads to other parts of the house, all built
at various epochs--and to think that they chopped off the heads of the
wealthy in 1793! Good heavens! why can't people understand that the
marvels of art are impossible in a land where there are no great
fortunes, no secure, luxurious lives? If the Left insists on killing
kings why not leave us a few little princelings with money in their
pockets?

At the present moment these accumulated treasures belong to a charming
woman with an artistic soul, who is not content with merely restoring
them magnificently, but who keeps the place up with loving care. Sham
philosophers, studying themselves while they profess to be studying
humanity, call these glorious things extravagance. They grovel before
cotton prints and the tasteless designs of modern industry, as if we
were greater and happier in these days than in those of Henri IV.,
Louis XIV., and Louis XVI., monarchs who have all left the stamp of
their reigns upon Les Aigues. What palace, what royal castle, what
mansions, what noble works of art, what gold brocaded stuffs are
sacred now? The petticoats of our grandmothers go to cover the chairs
in these degenerate days. Selfish and thieving interlopers that we
are, we pull down everything and plant cabbages where marvels once
were rife. Only yesterday the plough levelled Persan, that magnificent
domain which gave a title to one of the most opulent families of the
old parliament; hammers have demolished Montmorency, which cost an
Italian follower of Napoleon untold sums; Val, the creation of
Regnault de Saint-Jean d'Angely, Cassan, built by a mistress of the
Prince de Conti; in all, four royal houses have disappeared in the
valley of the Oise alone. We are getting a Roman campagna around Paris
in advance of the days when a tempest shall blow from the north and
overturn our plaster palaces and our pasteboard decorations.

Now see, my dear fellow, to what the habit of bombasticising in
newspapers brings you to. Here am I writing a downright article. Does
the mind have its ruts, like a road? I stop; for I rob the mail, and I
rob myself, and you may be yawning--to be continued in our next; I
hear the second bell, which summons me to one of those abundant
breakfasts the fashion of which has long passed away, in the dining-rooms
of Paris, be it understood.

Here's the history of my Arcadia. In 1815, there died at Les Aigues
one of the famous wantons of the last century,--a singer, forgotten of
the guillotine and the nobility, after preying upon exchequers, upon
literature, upon aristocracy, and all but reaching the scaffold;
forgotten, like so many fascinating old women who expiate their golden
youth in country solitudes, and replace their lost loves by another,
--man by Nature. Such women live with the flowers, with the woodland
scents, with the sky, with the sunshine, with all that sings and skips
and shines and sprouts,--the birds, the squirrels, the flowers, the
grass; they know nothing about these things, they cannot explain them,
but they love them; they love them so well that they forget dukes,
marshals, rivalries, financiers, follies, luxuries, their paste jewels
and their real diamonds, their heeled slippers and their rouge,--all,
for the sweetness of country life.

I have gathered, my dear fellow, much precious information about the
old age of Mademoiselle Laguerre; for, to tell you the truth, the
after life of such women as Florine, Mariette, Suzanne de Val Noble,
and Tullia has made me, every now and then, extremely inquisitive, as
though I were a child inquiring what had become of the old moons.

In 1790 Mademoiselle Laguerre, alarmed at the turn of public affairs,
came to settle at Les Aigues, bought and given to her by Bouret, who
passed several summers with her at the chateau. Terrified at the fate
of Madame du Barry, she buried her diamonds. At that time she was only
fifty-three years of age, and according to her lady's-maid, afterwards
married to a gendarme named Soudry, "Madame was more beautiful than
ever." My dear Nathan, Nature has no doubt her private reasons for
treating women of this sort like spoiled children; excesses, instead
of killing them, fatten them, preserve them, renew their youth. Under
a lymphatic appearance they have nerves which maintain their
marvellous physique; they actually preserve their beauty for reasons
which would make a virtuous woman haggard. No, upon my word, Nature is
not moral!