Sons of the Soil

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"I have seen enough for to-day; take me home, gentlemen," murmured the
countess, putting her hand on Emile's arm.

She bowed sadly to Madame Michaud, after watching La Pechina safely
back to the pavilion. Olympe's depression was transferred to her
mistress.

"Ah, madame," said the abbe, as they continued their way, "can it be
that the difficulty of doing good is about to deter you? For the last
five years I have slept on a pallet in a parsonage which has no
furniture; I say mass in a church without believers; I preach to no
hearers; I minister without fees or salary; I live on the six hundred
francs the law allows me, asking nothing of my bishop, and I give the
third of that in charity. Still, I am not hopeless. If you knew what
my winters are in this place you would understand the strength of
those words,--I am not hopeless. I keep myself warm with the belief
that we can save this valley and bring it back to God. No matter for
ourselves, madame; think of the future! If it is our duty to say to
the poor, 'Learn how to be poor; that is, how to work, to endure, to
strive,' it is equally our duty to say to the rich, 'Learn your duty
as prosperous men,'--that is to say, 'Be wise, be intelligent in your
benevolence; pious and virtuous in the place to which God has called
you.' Ah! madame, you are only the steward of Him who grants you
wealth; if you do not obey His behests you will never transmit to your
children the prosperity He gives you. You will rob your posterity. If
you follow in the steps of that poor singer's selfishness, which
caused the evils that now terrify us, you will bring back the
scaffolds on which your fathers died for the faults of their fathers.
To do good humbly, in obscurity, in country solitudes, as Rigou now
does evil,--ah! that indeed is prayer in action and dear to God. If in
every district three souls only would work for good, France, our
country, might be saved from the abyss that yawns; into which we are
rushing headlong, through spiritual indifference to all that is not
our own self-interest. Change! you must change your morals, change
your ethics, and that will change your laws."

Though deeply moved as she listened to this grand utterance of true
catholic charity, the countess answered in the fatal words, "We will
consider it,"--words of the rich, which contain that promise to the
ear which saves their purses and enables them to stand with arms
crossed in presence of all disaster, under pretext that they were
powerless.

Hearing those words, the abbe bowed to Madame de Montcornet and turned
off into a path which led him direct to the gate of Blangy.

"Belshazzar's feast is the everlasting symbol of the dying days of a
caste, of an oligarchy, of a power!" he thought as he walked away. "My
God! if it be Thy will to loose the poor like a torrent to reform
society, I know, I comprehend, why it is that Thou hast abandoned the
wealthy to their blindness!"



CHAPTER XII

SHOWETH HOW THE TAVERN IS THE PEOPLE'S PARLIAMENT

Old Mother Tonsard's screams brought a number of people from Blangy to
know what was happening at the Grand-I-Vert, the distance from the
village to the inn not being greater than that from the inn to the
gate of Blangy. One of these inquiring visitors was old Niseron, La
Pechina's grandfather, who was on his way, after ringing the second
Angelus, to dig the vine-rows in his last little bit of ground.

Bent by toil, with pallid face and silvery hair, the old vinedresser,
now the sole representative of civic virtue in the community, had
been, during the Revolution, president of the Jacobin club at
Ville-aux-Fayes, and a juror in the revolutionary tribunal of the
district. Jean-Francois Niseron, carved out of the wood that the
apostles were made of, was of the type of Saint Peter; whom painters
and sculptors have united in representing with the square brow of the
people, the thick, naturally curling hair of the laborer, the muscles
of the man of toil, the complexion of a fisherman; with the large nose,
the shrewd, half-mocking lips that scoff at fate, the neck and
shoulders of the strong man who cuts his wood to cook his dinner while
the doctrinaires of his opinions talk.

Such, at forty years of age on the breaking out of the Revolution, was
this man, strong as iron, pure as gold. Advocate of the people, he
believed in a republic through the very roll of that name, more
formidable in sound perhaps than in reality. He believed in the
republic of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the brotherhood of man, in the
exchange of noble sentiments, in the proclamation of virtue, in the
choice of merit without intrigue,--in short, in all that the narrow
limits of one arrondissement like Sparta made possible, and which the
vast proportions of an empire make chimerical. He signed his beliefs
with his blood,--his only son went to war; he did more, he signed them
with the prosperity of his life,--last sacrifice of self. Nephew and
sole heir of the curate of Blangy, the then all-powerful tribune might
have enforced his rights and recovered the property left by the priest
to his pretty servant-girl, Arsene; but he respected his uncle's
wishes and accepted poverty, which came upon him as rapidly as the
fall of his cherished republic came upon France.

Never a farthing's worth, never so much as the branch of a tree
belonging to another passed into the hands of this notable republican,
who would have made the republic acceptable to the world if he and
such as he could have guided it. He refused to buy the national
domains; he denied the right of the Republic to confiscate property.
In reply to all demands of the committee of public safety he asserted
that the virtue of citizens would do for their sacred country what low
political intriguers did for money. This patriot of antiquity publicly
reproved Gaubertin's father for his secret treachery, his underhand
bargaining, his malversations. He reprimanded the virtuous Mouchon,
that representative of the people whose virtue was nothing more nor
less than incapacity,--as it is with so many other legislators who,
gorged with the greatest political resources that any nation ever
gave, armed with the whole force of a people, are still unable to
bring forth from them the grandeur which Richelieu wrung for France
out of the weakness of a king. Consequently, citizen Niseron became a
living reproach to the people about him. They endeavored to put him
out of sight and mind with the reproachful remark, "Nothing satisfies
that man."

The patriot peasant returned to his cot at Blangy and watched the
destruction, one by one, of his illusions; he saw his republic come to
an end at the heels of an emperor, while he himself fell into utter
poverty, to which Rigou stealthily managed to reduce him. And why?
Because Niseron had never been willing to accept anything from him.
Reiterated refusals showed the ex-priest in what profound contempt the
nephew of the curate held him; and now that icy scorn was revenged by
the terrible threat as to his little granddaughter, about which the
Abbe Brossette spoke to the countess.

The old man had composed in his own mind a history of the French
republic, filled with the glorious features which gave immortality to
that heroic period to the exclusion of all else. The infamous deeds,
the massacres, the spoliations, his virtuous soul ignored; he admired,
with a single mind, the devotedness of the people, the "Vengeur," the
gifts to the nation, the uprising of the country to defend its
frontier; and he still pursued his dream that he might sleep in peace.

The Revolution produced many poets like old Niseron, who sang their
poems in the country solitudes, in the army, openly or secretly, by
deeds buried beneath the whirlwind of that storm, just as the wounded
left behind to die in the great wars of the empire cried out, "Long
live the Emperor!" This sublimity of soul belongs especially to
France. The Abbe Brossette respected the convictions of the old man,
who became simply but deeply attached to the priest from hearing him
say, "The true republic is in the Gospel." The stanch republican
carried the cross, and wore the sexton's robe, half-red, half-black,
and was grave and dignified in church,--supporting himself by the
triple functions with which he was invested by the abbe, who was able
to give the fine old man, not, to be sure, enough to live on, but
enough to keep him from dying of hunger.

Niseron, the Aristides of Blangy, spoke little, like all noble dupes
who wrap themselves in the mantle of resignation; but he was never
silent against evil, and the peasants feared him as thieves fear the
police. He seldom came more than six times a year to the Grand-I-Vert,
though he was always warmly welcomed there. The old man cursed the
want of charity of the rich,--their selfishness disgusted him; and
through this fiber of his mind he seemed to the peasants to belong to
them; they were in the habit of saying, "Pere Niseron doesn't like the
rich; he's one of us."

The civic crown won by this noble life throughout the valley lay in
these words: "That good old Niseron! there's not a more honest man."
Often taken as umpire in certain kinds of disputes, he embodied the
meaning of that archaic term,--the village elder. Always extremely
clean, though threadbare, he wore breeches, coarse woollen stockings,
hob-nailed shoes, the distinctively French coat with large buttons and
the broad-brimmed felt hat to which all old peasants cling; but for
daily wear he kept a blue jacket so patched and darned that it looked
like a bit of tapestry. The pride of a man who feels he is free, and
knows he is worthy of freedom, gave to his countenance and his whole
bearing a _something_ that was inexpressibly noble; you would have felt
he wore a robe, not rags.

"Hey! what's happening so unusual?" he said, "I heard the noise down
here from the belfry."

They told him of Vatel's attack on the old woman, talking all at once
after the fashion of country-people.

"If she didn't cut the tree, Vatel was wrong; but if she did cut it,
you have done two bad actions," said Pere Niseron.

"Take some wine," said Tonsard, offering a full glass to the old man.

"Shall we start?" said Vermichel to the sheriff's officer.

"Yes," replied Brunet, "we must do without Pere Fourchon and take the
assistant at Conches. Go on before me; I have a paper to carry to the
chateau. Rigou has gained his second suit, and I've got to deliver the
verdict."

So saying, Monsieur Brunet, all the livelier for a couple of glasses
of brandy, mounted his gray mare after saying good-bye to Pere
Niseron; for the whole valley were desirous in their hearts of the
good man's esteem.

No science, not even that of statistics, can explain the rapidity with
which news flies in the country, nor how it spreads over those
ignorant and untaught regions which are, in France, a standing
reproach to the government and to capitalists. Contemporaneous history
can show that a famous banker, after driving post-horses to death
between Waterloo and Paris (everybody knows why--he gained what the
Emperor had lost, a commission!) carried the fatal news only three
hours in advance of rumor. So, not an hour after the encounter between
old mother Tonsard and Vatel, a number of the customers of the
Grand-I-Vert assembled there to hear the tale.

The first to come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have
recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose
wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen. Aged, and thin,
and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned.
"He tried to climb higher than the ladder," was what his neighbors
said when others pitied him and blamed Rigou. "He wanted to be a
bourgeois himself."

In fact, Courtecuisse did intend to pass for a bourgeois in buying the
Bachelerie, and he even boasted of it; though his wife went about the
roads gathering up the horse-droppings. She and Courtecuisse got up
before daylight, dug their garden, which was richly manured, and
obtained several yearly crops from it, without being able to do more
than pay the interest due to Rigou for the rest of the purchase-money.
Their daughter, who was living at service in Auxerre, sent them her
wages; but in spite of all their efforts, in spite of this help, the
last day for the final payment was approaching, and not a penny in
hand with which to meet it. Madame Courtecuisse, who in former times
occasionally allowed herself a bottle of boiled wine or a bit of roast
meat, now drank nothing but water. Courtecuisse was afraid to go to
the Grand-I-Vert lest he should have to leave three sous behind him.
Deprived of power, he had lost his privilege of free drinks, and he
bitterly complained, like all other fools, of man's ingratitude. In
short, he found, according to the experience of all peasants bitten
with the demon of proprietorship, that toil had increased and food
decreased.

"Courtecuisse has done too much to the property," the people said,
secretly envying his position. "He ought to have waited till he had
paid the money down and was master before he put up those fruit
palings."

With the help of his wife he had managed to manure and cultivate the
three acres of land sold to him by Rigou, together with the garden
adjoining the house, which was beginning to be productive; and he was
in danger of being turned out of it all. Clothed in rags like
Fourchon, poor Courtecuisse, who lately wore the boots and gaiters of
a huntsman, now thrust his feet into sabots and accused "the rich" of
Les Aigues of having caused his destitution. These wearing anxieties
had given to the fat little man and his once smiling and rosy face a
gloomy and dazed expression, as though he were ill from the effects of
poison or with some chronic malady.

"What's the matter with you, Monsieur Courtecuisse; is your tongue
tied?" asked Tonsard, as the man continued silent after he had told
him about the battle which had just taken place.

"No, no!" cried Madame Tonsard; "he needn't complain of the midwife
who cut his string,--she made a good job of it."

"It is enough to make a man dumb, thinking from morning till night of
some way to escape Rigou," said the premature old man, gloomily.

"Bah!" said old Mother Tonsard, "you've got a pretty daughter,
seventeen years old. If she's a good girl you can easily manage
matters with that old jail bird--"

"We sent her to Auxerre two years ago to Madame Mariotte the elder, to
keep her out of harm's way; I'd rather die than--"

"What a fool you are!" said Tonsard, "look at my girls,--are they any
the worse? He who dares to say they are not as virtuous as marble
images will have to do with my gun."

"It'll be hard to have to come to that," said Courtecuisse, shaking
his head. "I'd rather earn the money by shooting one of those
Arminacs."

"Well, I call it better for a girl to save a father than to wrap up
her virtue and let it mildew," retorted the innkeeper.

Tonsard felt a sharp tap on his shoulder, delivered by Pere Niseron.

"That is not a right thing to say!" cried the old man. "A father is
the guardian of the honor of his family. It is by behaving as you do
that scorn and contempt are brought upon us; it is because of such
conduct that the People are accused of being unfit for liberty. The
People should set an example of civic virtue and honor to the rich.
You all sell yourselves to Rigou for gold; and if you don't sell him
your daughters, at any rate you sell him your honor,--and it's wrong."

"Just see what a position Courtecuisse is in," said Tonsard.

"See what a position I am in," replied Pere Niseron; "but I sleep in
peace; there are no thorns in my pillow."

"Let him talk, Tonsard," whispered his wife, "you know they're just
_his notions_, poor dear man."

Bonnebault and Marie, Catherine and her brother came in at this moment
in a state of exasperation, which had begun with Nicolas's failure,
and was raised to the highest pitch by Michaud's advice to the
countess about Bonnebault. As Nicolas entered the tavern he was
uttering frightful threats against the Michaud family and Les Aigues.

"The harvest's coming; well, I vow I'll not go before I've lighted my
pipe at their wheat-stacks," he cried, striking his fist on the table
as he sat down.

"Mustn't yelp like that before people," said Godain, showing him Pere
Niseron.

"If the old fellow tells, I'll wring his neck," said Catherine. "He's
had his day, that old peddler of foolish reasons! They call him
virtuous; it's his temperament that keeps him so, that's all."

Strange and noteworthy sight!--that of those lifted heads, that group
of persons gathered in the reeking hovel, while old Mother Tonsard
stood sentinel at the door as security for the secret words of the
drinkers.

Of all those faces, that of Godain, Catherine's suitor, was perhaps
the most alarming, though the least pronounced. Godain,--a miser
without money,--the cruelest of misers, for he who seeks money surely
takes precedence of him who hoards it, one turning his eagerness
within himself, the other looking outside with terrible intentness,
--Godain represented the type of the majority of peasant faces.

He was a journeyman, small in frame, and saved from the draft by not
attaining the required military height; naturally lean and made more
so by hard work and the enforced sobriety under which reluctant
workers like Courtecuisse succumb. His face was no bigger than a man's
fist, and was lighted by a pair of yellow eyes with greenish strips
and brown spots, in which a thirst for the possession of property was
mingled with a concupiscence which had no heat,--for desire, once at
the boiling-point, had now stiffened like lava. His skin, brown as
that of a mummy, was glued to his temples. His scanty beard bristled
among his wrinkles like stubble in the furrows. Godain never
perspired, he reabsorbed his substance. His hairy hands, formed like
claws, nervous, never still, seemed to be made of old wood. Though
scarcely twenty-seven years of age, white lines were beginning to show
in his rusty black hair. He wore a blouse, through the breast opening
of which could be seen a shirt of coarse linen, so black that he must
have worn it a month and washed it himself in the Thune. His sabots
were mended with old iron. The original stuff of his trousers was
unrecognizable from the darns and the infinite number of patches. On
his head was a horrible cap, evidently cast off and picked up in the
doorway of some bourgeois house in Ville-aux-Fayes.

Clear-sighted enough to estimate the elements of good fortune that
centred in Catherine Tonsard, his ambition was to succeed her father
at the Grand-I-Vert. He made use of all his craftiness and all his
actual powers to capture her; he promised her wealth, he also promised
her the license her mother had enjoyed; besides this, he offered his
prospective father-in-law an enormous rental, five hundred francs a
year, for his inn, until he could buy him out, trusting to an
agreement he had made with Monsieur Brunet to pay these costs by notes
on stamped paper. By trade a journeyman tool-maker, this gnome worked
for the wheelwrights when work was plentiful, but he also hired
himself out for any extra labor which was well paid. Though he
possessed, unknown to the whole neighborhood, eighteen hundred francs
now in Gaubertin's hands, he lived like a beggar, slept in a barn, and
gleaned at the harvests. He wore Gaubertin's receipt for his money
sewn into the waist-belt of his trousers,--having it renewed every
year with its own added interest and the amount of his savings.

"Hey! what do I care," cried Nicolas, replying to Godain's prudent
advice not to talk before Niseron. "If I'm doomed to be a soldier I'd
rather the sawdust of the basket sucked up my blood than have it
dribbled out drop by drop in the battles. I'll deliver this country of
at least one of those Arminacs that the devil has launched upon us."

And he related what he called Michaud's plot against him, which Marie
and Bonnebault had overheard.

"Where do you expect France to find soldiers?" said the white-haired
old man, rising and standing before Nicolas during the silence which
followed the utterance of this threat.

"We serve our time and come home again," remarked Bonnebault, twirling
his moustache.

Observing that all the worst characters of the neighborhood were
collecting, Pere Niseron shook his head and left the tavern, after
offering a farthing to Madame Tonsard in payment for his glass of
wine. When the worthy man had gone down the steps a movement of relief
and satisfaction passed through the assembled drinkers which would
have told whoever watched them that each man in that company felt he
was rid of the living image of his own conscience.

"Well, what do you say to all that, hey, Courtecuisse?" asked
Vaudoyer, who had just come in, and to whom Tonsard had related
Vatel's attempt.

Courtecuisse clacked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and set
his glass on the table.

"Vatel put himself in the wrong," he said. "If I were Mother Tonsard,
I'd give myself a few wounds and go to bed and say I was ill, and have
that Shopman and his keeper up before the assizes and get twenty
crowns damages. Monsieur Sarcus would give them."

"In any case the Shopman would give them to stop the talk it would
make," said Godain.

Vaudoyer, the former field-keeper, a man five feet six inches tall,
with a face pitted with the small-pox and furrowed like a nut-cracker,
kept silence with a hesitating air.

"Well, you old ninny, does that ruffle you?" asked Tonsard, attracted
by the idea of damages. "If they had broken twenty crowns' worth of my
mother's bones we could turn it into good account; we might make a
fine fuss for three hundred francs; Monsieur Gourdon would go to Les
Aigues and tell them that the mother had got a broken hip--"

"And break it, too," interrupted Madame Tonsard; "they do that in
Paris."

"It would cost too much," remarked Godain.

"I have been too long among the people who rule us to believe that
matters will go as you want them," said Vaudoyer at last, remembering
his past official intercourse with the courts and the gendarmerie. "If
it were at Soulanges, now, it might be done; Monsieur Soudry
represents the government there, and he doesn't wish well to the
Shopman; but if you attack the Shopman and Vatel they'll defend
themselves viciously; they'll say, 'The woman was to blame; she had a
tree, otherwise she would have let her bundle be examined on the
highroad; she wouldn't have run away; if an accident happened to her
it was through her own fault.' No, you can't trust to that plan."

"The Shopman didn't resist when I sued him," said Courtecuisse; "he
paid me at once."

"I'll go to Soulanges, if you like," said Bonnebault, "and consult
Monsieur Gourdon, the clerk of the court, and you shall know to-night
if _there's money in it_."

"You are only making an excuse to be after that big goose of a girl,
Socquard's daughter," said Marie Tonsard, giving Bonnebault a slap on
the shoulder that made his lungs hum.

Just then a verse of an old Burgundian Christmas carol was heard:--

"One fine moment of his life
Was at the wedding feast;
He changed the water into wine,--
Madeira of the best."

Every one recognized the vinous voice of old Fourchon, to whom the
verse must have been peculiarly agreeable; Mouche accompanied in his
treble tones.

"Ha! they're full!" cried old Mother Tonsard to her daughter-in-law;
"your father is as red as a grid-iron, and that chip o' the block as
pink as vine-shoot."

"Your healths!" cried the old man, "and a fine lot of scoundrels you
are! All hail!" he said to his granddaughter, whom he spied kissing
Bonnebault, "hail, Marie, full of vice! Satan is with three; cursed
art thou among women, etcetera. All hail, the company present! you are
done for, every one of you! you may just say good-bye to your sheaves.
I being news. I always told you the rich would crush us; well now, the
Shopman is going to have the law of you! Ha! see what it is to
struggle against those bourgeois fellows, who have made so many laws
since they got into power that they've a law to enforce every trick
they play--"

A violent hiccough gave a sudden turn to the ideas of the
distinguished orator.

"If Vermichel were only here I'd blow in his gullet, and he'd get an
idea of sherry wine. Hey! what a wine it is! If I wasn't a Burgundian
I'd be a Spaniard! It's God's own wine! the pope says mass with it
-- Hey! I'm young again! Say, Courtecuisse! if your wife were only here
we'd be young together. Don't tell me! Spanish wine is worth a dozen
of boiled wine. Let's have a revolution if it's only to empty the
cellars!"

"But what's your news, papa?" said Tonsard.

"There'll be no harvest for you; the Shopman has given orders to stop
the gleaning."

"Stop the gleaning!" cried the whole tavern, with one voice, in which
the shrill tones of the four women predominated.