Sons of the Soil

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Sons of the Soil


"Yes," said Mouche, "he is going to issue an order, and Groison is to
take it round, and post it up all over the canton. No one is to glean
except those who have pauper certificates."

"And what's more," said Fourchon, "the folks from the other districts
won't be allowed here at all."

"What's that?" cried Bonnebault, "do you mean to tell me that neither
my grandmother nor I, nor your mother, Godain, can come here and
glean? Here's tomfoolery for you; a pretty show of authority! Why, the
fellow is a devil let loose from hell,--that scoundrel of a mayor!"

"Shall you glean whether or no, Godain?" said Tonsard to the
journeyman wheelwright, who was saying a few words to Catherine.

"I? I've no property; I'm a pauper," he replied; "I shall ask for a
certificate."

"What did they give my father for his otter, bibi?" said Madame
Tonsard to Mouche.

Though nearly at his last gasp from an over-taxed digestion and two
bottles of wine, Mouche, sitting on Madame Tonsard's lap, laid his
head on his aunt's neck and whispered slyly in her ear:--

"I don't know, but he has got gold. If you'll feed me high for a
month, perhaps I can find out his hiding-place; he has one, I know
that."

"Father's got gold!" whispered La Tonsard to her husband, whose voice
was loudest in the uproar of the excited discussion, in which all
present took part.

"Hush! here's Groison," cried the old sentinel.

Perfect silence reigned in the tavern. When Groison had got to a safe
distance, Mother Tonsard made a sign, and the discussion began again
on the question as to whether they should persist in gleaning, as
before, without a certificate.

"You'll have to give in," said Pere Fourchon; "for the Shopman has
gone to see the prefect and get troops to enforce the order. They'll
shoot you like dogs,--and that's what we are!" cried the old man,
trying to conquer the thickening of his speech produced by his
potations of sherry.

This fresh announcement, absurd as it was, made all the drinkers
thoughtful; they really believed the government capable of
slaughtering them without pity.

"I remember just such troubles near Toulouse, when I was stationed
there," said Bonnebault. "We were marched out, and the peasants were
cut and slashed and arrested. Everybody laughed to see them try to
resist cavalry. Ten were sent to the galleys, and eleven put in
prison; the whole thing was crushed. Hey! what? why, soldiers are
soldiers, and you are nothing but civilian beggars; they've a right,
they think, to sabre peasants, the devil take you!"

"Well, well," said Tonsard, "what is there in all that to frighten you
like kids? What can they get out of my mother and daughters? Put 'em
in prison? well, then they must feed them; and the Shopman can't
imprison the whole country. Besides, prisoners are better fed at the
king's expense than they are at their own; and they're kept warmer,
too."

"You are a pack of fools!" roared Fourchon. "Better gnaw at the
bourgeois than attack him in front; otherwise, you'll get your backs
broke. If you like the galleys, so be it,--that's another thing! You
don't work as hard there as you do in the fields, true enough; but you
don't have your liberty."

"Perhaps it would be well," said Vaudoyer, who was among the more
valiant in counsel, "if some of us risked our skins to deliver the
neighborhood of that Languedoc fellow who has planted himself at the
gate of the Avonne."

"Do Michaud's business for him?" said Nicolas; "I'm good for that."

"Things are not ripe for it," said old Fourchon. "We should risk too
much, my children. The best way is to make ourselves look miserable
and cry famine; then the Shopman and his wife will want to help us,
and you'll get more out of them that way than you will by gleaning."

"You are all blind moles," shouted Tonsard, "let 'em pick a quarrel
with their law and their troops, they can't put the whole country in
irons, and we've plenty of friends at Ville-aux-Fayes and among the
old lords who'll sustain us."

"That's true," said Courtecuisse; "none of the other land-owners
complain, it is only the Shopman; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur
de Ronquerolles and others, they are satisfied. When I think that if
that cuirassier had only had the courage to let himself be killed like
the rest I should still be happy at the gate of the Avonne, and that
it was he that turned my life topsy-turvy, it just puts me beside
myself."

"They won't call out the troops for a Shopman who has set every one in
the district against him," said Godain. "The fault's his own; he tried
to ride over everybody here, and upset everything; and the government
will just say to him, 'Hush up.'"

"The government never says anything else; it can't, poor government!"
said Fourchon, seized with a sudden tenderness for the government.
"Yes, I pity it, that good government; it is very unlucky,--it hasn't
a penny, like us; but that's very stupid of a government that makes
the money itself, very stupid! Ah! if I were the government--"

"But," cried Courtecuisse, "they tell me in Ville-aux-Fayes that
Monsieur de Ronquerolles talked about our rights in the Assembly."

"That's in Monsieur Rigou's newspaper," said Vaudoyer, who in his
capacity of ex-field-keeper knew how to read and write; "I read it--"

In spite of his vinous tenderness, old Fourchon, like many of the
lower classes whose faculties are stimulated by drunkenness, was
following, with an intelligent eye and a keen ear, this curious
discussion which a variety of asides rendered still more curious.
Suddenly, he stood up in the middle of the room.

"Listen to the old one, he's drunk!" said Tonsard, "and when he is, he
is twice as full of deviltry; he has his own and that of the wine--"

"Spanish wine, and that trebles it!" cried Fourchon, laughing like a
satyr. "My sons, don't butt your head straight at the thing,--you're
too weak; go at it sideways. Lay low, play dead; the little woman is
scared. I tell you, the thing'll come to an end before long; she'll
leave the place, and if she does the Shopman will follow her, for
she's his passion. That's your plan. Only, to make 'em go faster, my
advice is to get rid of their counsellor, their support, our spy, our
ape--"

"Who's that?"

"The damned abbe, of course," said Tonsard; "that hunter after sins,
who thinks the host is food enough for us."

"That's true," cried Vaudoyer; "we were happy enough till he came. We
ought to get rid of that eater of the good God,--he's the real enemy."

"Finikin," added Fourchon, using a nickname which the abbe owed to his
prim and rather puny appearance, "might be led into temptation and
fall into the power of some sly girl, for he fasts so much. Then if we
could catch him in the act and drum him up with a good charivari, the
bishop would be obliged to send him elsewhere. It would please old
Rigou devilish well. Now if your daughter, Courtecuisse, would leave
Auxerre--she's a pretty girl, and if she'd take to piety, she might
save us all. Hey! ran tan plan!--"

"Why don't _you_ do it?" said Godain to Catherine, in a low voice;
"there'd be scuttles full of money to hush up the talk; and for the
time being you'd be mistress here--"

"Shall we glean, or shall we not glean? that's the point," said
Bonnebault. "I don't care two straws for your abbe, not I; I belong to
Conches, where we haven't a black-coat to poke up our consciences."

"Look here," said Vaudoyer, "we had better go and ask Rigou, who knows
the law, whether the Shopman can forbid gleaning, and he'll tell us if
we've got the right of it. If the Shopman has the law on his side,
well, then we must do as the old one says,--see about taking things
sideways."

"Blood will be spilt," said Nicolas, darkly, as he rose after drinking
a whole bottle of wine, which Catherine drew for him in order to keep
him silent. "If you'd only listen to me you'd down Michaud; but you
are miserable weaklings,--nothing but poor trash!"

"I'm not," said Bonnebault. "If you are all safe friends who'll keep
your tongues between your teeth, I'll aim at the Shopman-- Hey! how
I'd like to put a plum through his bottle; wouldn't it avenge me on
those cursed officers?"

"Tut! tut!" cried Jean-Louis Tonsard, who was supposed to be, more or
less, Gaubertin's son, and who had just entered the tavern. This
fellow, who was courting Rigou's pretty servant-girl, had succeeded
his nominal father as clipper of hedges and shrubberies and other
Tonsardial occupations. Going about among the well-to-do houses, he
talked with masters and servants and picked up ideas which made him
the man of the world of the family, the shrewd head. We shall
presently see that in making love to Rigou's servant-girl, Jean-Louis
deserved his reputation for shrewdness.

"Well, what have you to say, prophet?" said the innkeeper to his son.

"I say that you are playing into the hands of the rich folk," replied
Jean-Louis. "Frighten the Aigues people to maintain your rights if you
choose; but if you drive them out of the place and make them sell the
estate, you are doing just what the bourgeois of the valley want, and
it's against your own interest. If you help the bourgeois to divide
the great estates among them, where's the national domain to be bought
for nothing at the next Revolution? Wait till then, and you'll get
your land without paying for it, as Rigou got his; whereas if you go
and thrust this estate into the jaws of the rich folk of the valley,
the rich folk will dribble it back to you impoverished and at twice
the price they paid for it. You are working for their interests, I
tell you; so does everybody who works for Rigou,--look at
Courtecuisse."

The policy contained in this allocution was too deep for the drunken
heads of those present, who were all, except Courtecuisse, laying by
their money to buy a slice of the Aigues cake. So they let Jean-Louis
harangue, and continued, as in the Chamber of Deputies, their private
confabs with one another.

"Yes, that's so; you'll be Rigou's cats-paw!" cried Fourchon, who
alone understood his grandson.

Just then Langlume, the miller of Les Aigues, passed the tavern.
Madame Tonsard hailed him.

"Is it true," she said, "that gleaning is to be forbidden?"

Langlume, a jovial white man, white with flour and dressed in
grayish-white clothes, came up the steps and looked in. Instantly
all the peasants became as sober as judges.

"Well, my children, I am forced to answer yes, and no. None but the
poor are to glean; but the measures they are going to take will turn
out to your advantage."

"How so?" asked Godain.

"Why, they can prevent any but paupers from gleaning here," said the
miller, winking in true Norman fashion; "but that doesn't prevent you
from gleaning elsewhere,--unless all the mayors do as the Blangy mayor
is doing."

"Then it is true," said Tonsard, in a threatening voice.

"As for me," said Bonnebault, putting his foraging-cap over one ear
and making his hazel stick whiz in the air, "I'm off to Conches to
warn the friends."

And the Lovelace of the valley departed, whistling the tune of the
martial song,--

"You who know the hussars of the Guard,
Don't you know the trombone of the regiment?"

"I say, Marie! he's going a queer way to get to Conches, that friend
of yours," cried old Mother Tonsard to her granddaughter.

"He's after Aglae!" said Marie, who made one bound to the door. "I'll
have to thrash her once for all, that baggage!" she cried, viciously.

"Come, Vaudoyer," said Tonsard, "go and see Rigou, and then we shall
know what to do; he's our oracle, and his spittle doesn't cost
anything."

"Another folly!" said Jean-Louis, in a low voice, "Rigou betrays
everybody; Annette tells me so; she says he's more dangerous when he
listens to you than other folks are when they bluster."

"I advise you to be cautious," said Langlume. "The general has gone to
the prefecture about your misdeeds, and Sibilet tells me he has sworn
an oath to go to Paris and see the Chancellor of France and the King
himself, and the whole pack of them if necessary, to get the better of
his peasantry."

"His peasantry!" shouted every one.

"Ha, ha! so we don't belong to ourselves any longer?"

As Tonsard asked the question, Vaudoyer left the house to see Rigou.

Langlume, who had already gone out, turned on the door-step, and
answered:--

"Crowd of do-nothings! are you so rich that you think you are your own
masters?"

Though said with a laugh, the meaning contained in those words was
understood by all present, as horses understand the cut of a whip.

"Ran tan plan! masters indeed!" shouted old Fourchon. "I say, my lad,"
he added to Nicolas, "after your performance this morning it's not my
clarionet that you'll get between your thumb and four fingers!"

"Don't plague him, or he'll make you throw up your wine by a punch in
the stomach," said Catherine, roughly.



CHAPTER XIII

A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY USURER

Strategically, Rigou's position at Blangy was that of a picket
sentinel. He watched Les Aigues, and watched it well. The police have
no spies comparable to those that serve hatred.

When the general first came to Les Aigues Rigou apparently formed some
plans about him which Montcornet's marriage with a Troisville put an
end to; he seemed to have wished to patronize the new land-owner. In
fact his intentions were so patent that Gaubertin thought best to let
him into the secrets of the coalition against Les Aigues. Before
accepting any part in the affair, Rigou determined, as he said, to put
the general between two stools.

One day, after the countess was fairly installed, a little wicker
carriage painted green entered the grand courtyard of the chateau. The
mayor, who was flanked by his mayoress, got out and came round to the
portico on the garden side. As he did so Rigou saw Madame le comtesse
at a window. She, however, devoted to the bishop and to religion and
to the Abbe Brossette, sent word by Francois that "Madame was out."

This act of incivility, worthy of a woman born in Russia, turned the
face of the ex-Benedictine yellow. If the countess had seen the man
whom the abbe told her was "a soul in hell who plunged into iniquity
as into a bath in his efforts to cool himself," if she had seen his
face then she might have refrained from exciting the cold, deliberate
hatred felt by the liberals against the royalists, increased as it was
in country-places by the jealousies of neighborhood, where the
recollections of wounded vanity are kept constantly alive.

A few details about this man and his morals will not only throw light
on his share of the plot, called "the great affair" by his two
associates, but it will have the merit of picturing an extremely
curious type of man,--one of those rural existences which are peculiar
to France, and which no writer has hitherto sought to depict. Nothing
about this man is without significance,--neither his house, nor his
manner of blowing the fire, nor his ways of eating; his habits,
morals, and opinions will vividly illustrate the history of the
valley. This renegade serves to show the utility of democracy; he is
at once its theory and its practice, its alpha and its omega, in
short, its "summum."

Perhaps you will remember certain masters of avarice pictured in
former scenes of this comedy of human life: in the first place the
provincial minister, Pere Grandet of Saumur, miserly as a tiger is
cruel; next Gobseck, the usurer, that Jesuit of gold, delighting only
in its power, and relishing the tears of the unfortunate because gold
produced them; then Baron Nucingen, lifting base and fraudulent money
transactions to the level of State policy. Then, too, you may remember
that portrait of domestic parsimony, old Hochon of Issoudun, and that
other miser in behalf of family interests, little la Baudraye of
Sancerre. Well, human emotions--above all, those of avarice--take on
so many and diverse shades in the diverse centres of social existence
that there still remains upon the stage of our comedy another miser to
be studied, namely, Rigou,--Rigou, the miser-egoist; full of
tenderness for his own gratifications, cold and hard to others; the
ecclesiastical miser; the monk still a monk so far as he can squeeze
the juice of the fruit called good-living, and becoming secular only
to put a paw upon the public money. In the first place, let us explain
the continual pleasure that he took in sleeping under his own roof.

Blangy--by that we mean the sixty houses described by Blondet in his
letter to Nathan--stands on a rise of land to the left of the Thune.
As all the houses are surrounded by gardens, the village is a very
pretty one. Some houses are built on the banks of the stream. At the
upper end of the long rise stands the church, formerly flanked by a
parsonage, its apse surrounded, as in many other villages, by a
graveyard. The sacrilegious old Rigou had bought the parsonage, which
was originally built by an excellent Catholic, Mademoiselle Choin, on
land which she had bought for the purpose. A terraced garden, from
which the eye looked down upon Blangy, Cerneux, and Soulanges standing
between the two great seignorial parks, separated the late parsonage
from the church. On its opposite side lay a meadow, bought by the last
curate of the parish not long before his death, which the distrustful
Rigou had since surrounded with a wall.

The ex-monk and mayor having refused to sell back the parsonage for
its original purpose, the parish was obliged to buy a house belonging
to a peasant, which adjoined the church. It was necessary to spend
five thousand francs to repair and enlarge it and to enclose it in a
little garden, one wall of which was that of the sacristy, so that
communication between the parsonage and the church was still as close
as it ever was.

These two houses, built on a line with the church, and seeming to
belong to it by their gardens, faced a piece of open ground planted by
trees, which might be called the square of Blangy,--all the more
because the count had lately built, directly opposite to the new
parsonage, a communal building intended for the mayor's office, the
home of the field-keeper, and the quarters of that school of the
Brothers of the Christian Doctrine, for which the Abbe Brossette had
hitherto begged in vain. Thus, not only were the houses of the ex-monk
and the young priest connected and yet separated by the church, but
they were in a position to watch each other. Indeed, the whole village
spied upon the abbe. The main street, which began at the Thune, crept
tortuously up the hill to the church. Vineyards, the cottages of the
peasantry, and a small grove crowned the heights.

Rigou's house, the handsomest in the village, was built of the large
rubble-stone peculiar to Burgundy, imbedded in yellow mortar smoothed
by the trowel, which produced an uneven surface, still further broken
here and there by projecting points of the stone, which was mostly
black. A band of cement, in which no stones were allowed to show,
surrounded each window with a sort of frame, where time had made some
slight, capricious cracks, such as appear on plastered ceilings. The
outer blinds, of a clumsy pattern, were noticeable for their color,
which was dragon-green. A few mosses grew among the slates of the
roof. The type is that of Burgundian homesteads; the traveller will
see thousands like it when visiting this part of France.

A double door opened upon a passage, half-way down which was the well
of the staircase. By the entrance was the door of a large room with
three windows looking out upon the square. The kitchen, built behind
and beneath the staircase, was lighted from the courtyard, which was
neatly paved with cobble-stones and entered by a porte-cochere. Such
was the ground-floor. The first floor contained three bedrooms, above
them a small attic chamber.

A wood-shed, a coach-house, and a stable adjoined the kitchen, and
formed two sides of a square around the courtyard. Above these rather
flimsy buildings were lofts containing hay and grain, a fruit-room,
and one servant's-chamber.

A poultry-yard, the stable, and a pigsty faced the house across the
courtyard.

The garden, about an acre in size and enclosed by walls, was a true
priest's garden; that is, it was full of wall-fruit and fruit-trees,
grape-arbors, gravel-paths, closely trimmed box-trees, and square
vegetable patches, made rich with the manure from the stable.

Within, the large room, panelled in wainscot, was hung with old
tapestry. The walnut furniture, brown with age and covered with stuffs
embroidered in needle-work, was in keeping with the wainscot and with
the ceiling, which was also panelled. The latter had three projecting
beams, but these were painted, and between them the space was
plastered. The mantel, also in walnut, surmounted by a mirror in the
most grotesque frame, had no other ornament than two brass eggs
standing on a marble base, each of which opened in the middle; the
upper half when turned over showed a socket for a candle. These
candlesticks for two lights, festooned with chains (an invention of
the reign of Louis XV.), were becoming rare. On a green and gold
bracket fastened to the wall opposite to the window was a common but
excellent clock. The curtains, which squeaked upon their rods, were at
least fifty years old; their material, of cotton in a square pattern
like that of mattresses, alternately pink and white, came from the
Indies. A sideboard and dinner-table completed the equipment of the
room, which was kept with extreme nicety.

At the corner of the fireplace was an immense sofa, Rigou's especial
seat. In the angle, above a little "bonheur du jour," which served him
as a desk, and hanging to a common screw, was a pair of bellows, the
origin of Rigou's fortune.

From this succinct description, in style like that of an auction sale,
it will be easy to imagine that the bedrooms of Monsieur and Madame
Rigou were limited to mere necessaries; yet it would be a mistake to
suppose that such parsimony affected the essential excellence of those
necessaries. For instance, the most fastidious of women would have
slept well in Rigou's bed, with fine linen sheets, excellent
mattresses, made luxurious by a feather-bed (doubtless bought for some
abbe by a pious female parishioner) and protected from draughts by
thick curtains. All the rest of Rigou's belongings were made
comfortable for his use, as we shall see.

In the first place, he had reduced his wife, who could neither read,
write, nor cipher, to absolute obedience. After having ruled her
deceased master, the poor creature was now the servant of her husband;
she cooked and did the washing, with very little help from a pretty
girl named Annette, who was nineteen years old and as much a slave to
Rigou as her mistress, and whose wages were thirty francs a year.

Tall, thin, and withered, Madame Rigou, a woman with a yellow face red
about the cheek-bones, her head always wrapped in a colored
handkerchief, and wearing the same dress all the year round, did not
leave the house for two hours in a month's time, but kept herself in
exercise by doing the hard work of a devoted servant. The keenest
observer could not have found a trace of the fine figure, the Rubens
coloring, the splendid lines, the superb teeth, the virginal eyes
which first drew the attention of the Abbe Niseron to the young girl.
The birth of her only daughter, Madame Soudry, Jr., had blighted her
complexion, decayed her teeth, dimmed her eyes, and even caused the
dropping of their lashes. It almost seemed as if the finger of God had
fallen upon the wife of the priest. Like all well-to-do country
house-wives, she liked to see her closets full of silk gowns, made and
unmade, and jewels and laces which did her no good and only excited
the sin of envy and a desire for her death in the minds of all the
young women who served Rigou. She was one of those beings, half-woman,
half-animal, who are born to live by instinct. This ex-beautiful
Arsene was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe
Niseron would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circumstance
which prompted it, and which we give here for the edification of the
vast tribe of expectant heirs.

Madame Niseron, the wife of the old republican sexton, always paid the
greatest attention to her husband's uncle, the priest of Blangy; the
forty or fifty thousand francs soon to be inherited from the old man
of seventy would put the family of his only nephew into a condition of
affluence which she impatiently awaited, for besides her only son (the
father of La Pechina) Madame Niseron had a charming little daughter,
lively and innocent,--one of those beings that seem perfected only
because they are to die, which she did at the age of fourteen from
"pale color," the popular name for chlorosis among the peasantry. The
darling of the parsonage, where the child fluttered about her great
uncle the abbe as she did in her home, bringing clouds and sunshine
with her, she grew to love Mademoiselle Arsene, the pretty servant
whom the old abbe engaged in 1789. Arsene was the niece of his
housekeeper, whose place the girl took by request of the latter on her
deathbed.