Sons of the Soil

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In 1791, just about the time that the Abbe Niseron offered his house
as an asylum to Rigou and his brother Jean, the little girl played one
of her mischievous but innocent tricks. She was playing with Arsene
and some other children at a game which consists in hiding an object
which the rest seek, and crying out, "You burn!" or "You freeze!"
according as the searchers approach or leave the hidden article.
Little Genevieve took it into her head to hide the bellows in Arsene's
bed. The bellows could not be found, and the game came to an end;
Genevieve was taken home by her mother and forgot to put the bellows
back on the nail. Arsene and her aunt searched more than a week for
them; then they stopped searching and managed to do without them, the
old abbe blowing his fire with an air-cane made in the days when air-
canes were the fashion,--a fashion which was no doubt introduced by
some courtier of the reign of Henri III. At last, about a month before
her death, the housekeeper, after a dinner at which the Abbe Mouchon,
the Niseron family, and the curate of Soulanges were present, returned
to her jeremiades about the loss of the bellows.

"Why! they've been these two weeks in Arsene's bed!" cried the little
one, with a peal of laughter. "Great lazy thing! if she had taken the
trouble to make her bed she would have found them."

As it was 1791 everybody laughed; but a dead silence succeeded the
laugh.

"There is nothing laughable in that," said the housekeeper; "since I
have been ill Arsene sleeps in my room."

In spite of this explanation the Abbe Niseron looked thunderbolts at
Madame Niseron and his nephew, thinking they were plotting mischief
against him. The housekeeper died. Rigou contrived to work up the
abbe's resentment to such a pitch that he made a will disinheriting
Jean-Francois Niseron in favor of Arsene Pichard.

In 1823 Rigou, perhaps out of a sense of gratitude, still blew the
fire with an air-cane, and left the bellows hanging to the screw.

Madame Niseron, idolizing her daughter, did not long survive her.
Mother and child died in 1794. The old abbe, too, was dead, and
citizen Rigou took charge of Arsene's affairs by marrying her. A
former convert in the monastery, attached to Rigou as a dog is to his
master, became the groom, gardener, herdsman, valet, and steward of
the sensual Harpagon. Arsene Rigou, the daughter, married in 1821
without dowry to the prosecuting-attorney, inheriting something of her
mother's rather vulgar beauty, together with the crafty mind of her
father.

Now about sixty-seven years of age, Rigou had never been ill in his
life, and nothing seemed able to lessen his aggressively good health.
Tall, lean, with brown circles round his eyes, the lids of which were
nearly black, any one who saw him of a morning, when as he dressed he
exposed the wrinkled, red, and granulated skin of his neck, would have
compared him to a condor,--all the more because his long nose, sharp
at the tip, increased the likeness by its sanguineous color. His head,
partly bald, would have frightened phrenologists by the shape of its
skull, which was like an ass's backbone, an indication of despotic
will. His grayish eyes, half-covered by filmy, red-veined lids, were
predestined to aid hypocrisy. Two scanty locks of hair of an undecided
color overhung the large ears, which were long and without rim, a sure
sign of cruelty, but cruelty of the moral nature only, unless where it
means actual insanity. The mouth, very broad, with thin lips,
indicated a sturdy eater and a determined drinker by the drop of its
corners, which turned downward like two commas, from which drooled
gravy when he ate and saliva when he talked. Heliogabalus must have
been like this.

His dress, which never varied, consisted of a long blue surtout with a
military collar, a black cravat, with waistcoat and trousers of black
cloth. His shoes, very thick soled, had iron nails outside, and inside
woollen linings knit by his wife in the winter evenings. Annette and
her mistress also knit the master's stockings. Rigou's name was
Gregoire.

Though this sketch gives some idea of the man's character, no one can
imagine the point to which, in his private and unthwarted life, the
ex-Benedictine had pushed the science of selfishness, good living, and
sensuality. In the first place, he dined alone, waited upon by his
wife and Annette, who themselves dined with Jean in the kitchen, while
the master digested his meal and disposed of his wine as he read "the
news."

In the country the special names of journals are never mentioned; they
are all called by the general name of "the news."

Rigou's dinner, like his breakfast and supper, was always of choice
delicacies, cooked with the art which distinguishes a priest's
housekeeper from all other cooks. Madame Rigou made the butter herself
twice a week. Cream was a concomitant of many sauces. The vegetables
came at a jump, as it were, from their frames to the saucepan.
Parisians, who are accustomed to eat the fruits of the earth after
they have had a second ripening in the sun of a city, infected by the
air of the streets, fermenting in close shops, and watered from time
to time by the market-women to give them a deceitful freshness, have
little idea of the exquisite flavors of really fresh produce, to which
nature has lent fugitive but powerful charms when eaten as it were
alive.

The butcher of Soulanges brought his best meat under fear of losing
Rigou's custom. The poultry, raised on the premises, was of the finest
quality.

This system of secret pampering embraced everything in which Rigou was
personally concerned. Though the slippers of the knowing Thelemist
were of stout leather they were lined with lamb's wool. Though his
coat was of rough cloth it did not touch his skin, for his shirt,
washed and ironed at home, was of the finest Frisian linen. His wife,
Annette, and Jean drank the common wine of the country, the wine he
reserved from his own vineyards; but in his private cellar, as well
stocked as the cellars of Belgium, the finest vintages of Burgundy
rubbed sides with those of Bordeaux, Champagne, Roussillon, not to
speak of Spanish and Rhine wines, all bought ten years in advance of
use and bottled by Brother Jean. The liqueurs in that cellar were
those of the Isles, and came originally from Madame Amphoux. Rigou had
laid in a supply to last him the rest of his days, at the national
sale of a chateau in Burgundy.

The ex-monk ate and drank like Louis XIV. (one of the greatest
consumers of food and drink ever known), which reveals the costs of a
life that was more than voluptuous. Careful and very shrewd in
managing his secret prodigalities, he disputed all purchases as only
churchmen can dispute. Instead of taking infinite precautions against
being cheated, the sly monk kept patterns and samples, had the
agreements reduced to writing, and warned those who forwarded his
wines or his provisions that if they fell short of the mark in any way
he should refuse to accept their consignments.

Jean, who had charge of the fruit-room, was trained to keep fresh the
finest fruits grown in the department; so that Rigou ate pears and
apples and sometimes grapes, at Easter.

No prophet regarded as a God was ever more blindly obeyed than was
Rigou in his own home. A mere motion of his black eyelashes could
plunge his wife, Annette, and Jean into the deepest anxiety. He held
his three slaves by the multiplicity of their many duties, which were
like a chain in his hands. These poor creatures were under the
perpetual yoke of some ordered duty, with an eye always on them; but
they had come to take a sort of pleasure in accomplishing these tasks,
and did not suffer under them. All three had the comfort and
well-being of that one man before their minds as the sole end and
object of all their thoughts.

Annette was (since 1795) the tenth pretty girl in Rigou's service, and
he expected to go down to his grave with relays of such servants.
Brought to him at sixteen, she would be sent away at nineteen. All
these girls, carefully chosen at Auxerre, Clamecy, or in the Morvan,
were enticed by the promise of future prosperity; but Madame Rigou
persisted in living. So at the end of every three years some quarrel,
usually brought about by the insolence of the servant to the poor
mistress, caused their dismissal.

Annette, who was a picture of delicate beauty, ingenuous and
sparkling, deserved to be a duchess. Rigou knew nothing of the love
affair between her and Jean-Louis Tonsard, which proves that he had
let himself be fooled by the girl,--the only one of his many servants
whose ambition had taught her to flatter the lynx as the only way to
blind him.

This uncrowned Louis XV. did not keep himself wholly to his pretty
Annette. Being the mortgagee of lands bought by peasants who were
unable to pay for them, he kept a harem in the valley, from Soulanges
to five miles beyond Conches on the road to La Brie, without making
other payments than "extension of time," for those fugitive pleasures
which eat into the fortunes of so many old men.

This luxurious life, a life like that of Bouret, cost Rigou almost
nothing. Thanks to his white slaves, he could cut and mow down and
gather in his wood, hay, and grain. To the peasant manual labor is a
small matter, especially if it serves to postpone the payment of
interest due. And so Rigou, while requiring little premiums on each
month's delay, squeezed a great deal of manual labor out of his
debtors,--positive drudgery, to which they submitted thinking they
gave little because nothing left their pockets. Rigou sometimes
obtained in this way more than the principal of a debt.

Deep as a monk, silent as a Benedictine in the throes of writing
history, sly as a priest, deceitful as all misers, carefully keeping
within the limits of the law, the man might have been Tiberius in
Rome, Richelieu under Louis XIII., or Fouche, had the ambition seized
him to go to the Convention; but, instead of all that, Rigou had the
common sense to remain a Lucullus without ostentation, in other words,
a parsimonious voluptuary. To occupy his mind he indulged a hatred
manufactured out of the whole cloth. He harassed the Comte de
Montcornet. He worked the peasants like puppets by hidden wires, the
handling of which amused him as though it were a game of chess where
the pawns were alive, the knights caracoled, the bishops, like
Fourchon, gabbled, the feudal castles shone in the sun, and the queen
maliciously checkmated the king. Every day, when he got out of bed and
saw from his window the proud towers of Les Aigues, the chimneys of
the pavilions, and the noble gates, he said to himself: "They shall
fall! I'll dry up the brooks, I'll chop down the woods." But he had
two victims in mind, a chief one and a lesser one. Though he meditated
the dismemberment of the chateau, the apostate also intended to make
an end of the Abbe Brossette by pin-pricks.

To complete the portrait of the ex-priest it will suffice to add that
he went to mass regretting that his wife still lived, and expressed
the desire to be reconciled with the Church as soon as he became a
widower. He bowed deferentially to the Abbe Brossette whenever he met
him, and spoke to him courteously and without heat. As a general thing
all men who belong to the Church, or who have come out of it, have the
patience of insects; they owe this to the obligation they have been
under, ecclesiastically, to preserve decorum,--a training which has
been lacking for the last twenty years to the vast majority of the
French nation, even those who think themselves well-bred. All the
monks which the Revolution brought out of their monasteries and forced
into business, public or private, showed in their coldness and reserve
the great advantage which ecclesiastical discipline gives to the sons
of the Church, even those who desert her.

Gaubertin had understood Rigou from the days when the Abbe Niseron
made his will and the ex-monk married the heiress; he fathomed the
craft hidden behind the jaundiced face of that accomplished hypocrite;
and he made himself the man's fellow-worshipper before the altar of
the Golden Calf. When the banking-house of Leclercq was first started
he advised Rigou to put fifty thousand francs into it, guaranteeing
their security himself. Rigou was all the more desirable as an
investor, or sleeping partner, because he drew no interest but allowed
his capital to accumulate. At the period of which we write it amounted
to over a hundred thousand francs, although in 1816 he had taken out
one hundred and eighty thousand for investment in the Public Funds,
from which he derived an income of seventeen thousand francs. Lupin
the notary had cognizance of at least one hundred thousand francs
which Rigou had lent on small mortgages upon good estates. Ostensibly,
Rigou derived about fourteen thousand francs a year from landed
property actually owned by him. But as to his amassed hoard, it was
represented by an "x" which no rule of equations could evolve, just as
the devil alone knew the secret schemes he plotted with Langlume.

This dangerous usurer, who proposed to live a score of years longer,
had established fixed rules to work upon. He lent nothing to a peasant
who bought less than seven acres, and who could not pay one-half of
the purchase-money down. Rigou well understood the defects of the law
of dispossession when applied to small holdings, and the danger both
to the Public Treasury and to land-owners of the minute parcelling out
of the soil. How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of
vines when he owns only five? The bird's-eye view of self-interest is
always twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative
body. What a lesson for a nation! Law will ever emanate from one
brain, that of a man of genius, and not from the nine hundred
legislative heads, which, great as they may be in themselves, are
belittled and lost in a crowd. Rigou's law contains the essential
element which has yet to be found and introduced into public law to
put an end to the absurd spectacle of landed property reduced to
halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths,--as in the district of
Argenteuil, where there are thirty thousand plots of land.

Such operations as those Rigou was concerned in require extensive
collusion, like those we have seen existing in this arrondissement.
Lupin, the notary, whom Rigou employed to draw at least one third of
the deeds annually entrusted to his notarial office, was devoted to
him. This shark could thus include in the mortgage note (signed always
in presence of the wife, when the borrower was married) the amount of
the illegal interest. The peasant, delighted to feel he had to pay
only his five per cent interest annually, always imagined he should be
able to meet the payment by working doubly hard or by improving the
land and getting double returns upon it.

Hence the deceitful hopes excited by what imbecile economists call
"small farming,"--a political blunder to which we owe such mistakes as
sending French money to Germany to buy horses which our own land had
ceased to breed; a blunder which before long will reduce the raising
of cattle until meat will be unattainable not only by the people, but
by the lower middle classes (see "Le Cure de Village.")

So, not a little sweat bedewed men's brows between Conches and
Ville-aux-Fayes to Rigou's profit, all being willing to give it; whereas
the labor dearly paid for by the general, the only man who did spend
money in the district, brought him curses and hatred, which were
showered upon him simply because he was rich. How could such facts be
understood unless we had previously taken that rapid glance at the
Mediocracy. Fourchon was right; the middle classes now held the
position of the former lords. The small land-owners, of whom
Courtecuisse is a type, were tenants in mortmain of a Tiberius in the
valley of the Avonne, just as, in Paris, traders without money are the
peasantry of the banking system.

Soudry followed Rigou's example from Soulanges to a distance of
fifteen miles beyond Ville-aux-Fayes. These two usurers shared the
district between them.

Gaubertin, whose rapacity was in a higher sphere, not only did not
compete against that of his associates, but he prevented all other
capital in Ville-aux-Fayes from being employed in the same fruitful
manner. It is easy to imagine what immense influence this triumvirate
--Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin--wielded in election periods over
electors whose fortunes depended on their good-will.

Hate, intelligence, and means at command, such were the three sides of
the terrible triangle which describes the general's closest enemy, the
spy ever watching Les Aigues,--a shark having constant dealings with
sixty to eighty small land-owners, relations or connections of the
peasantry, who feared him as such men always fear their creditor.

Rigou was in his way another Tonsard. The one throve on thefts from
nature, the other waxed fat on legal plunder. Both liked to live well.
It was the same nature in two species,--the one natural, the other
whetted by his training in a cloister.

It was about four o'clock when Vaudoyer left the tavern of the
Grand-I-Vert to consult the former mayor. Rigou was at dinner. Finding
the front door locked, Vaudoyer looked above the window blinds and
called out:--

"Monsieur Rigou, it is I,--Vaudoyer."

Jean came round from the porte-cochere and said to Vaudoyer:--

"Come into the garden; Monsieur has company."

The company was Sibilet, who, under pretext of discussing the verdict
Brunet had just handed in, was talking to Rigou of quite other
matters. He had found the usurer finishing his dessert. On a square
dinner-table covered with a dazzling white cloth--for, regardless of
his wife and Annette who did the washing, Rigou exacted clean
table-linen every day--the steward noted strawberries, apricots,
peaches, figs, and almonds, all the fruits of the season in profusion,
served in white porcelain dishes on vine-leaves as daintily as at Les
Aigues.

Seeing Sibilet, Rigou told him to run the bolts of the inside
double-doors, which were added to the other doors as much to stifle
sounds as to keep out the cold air, and asked him what pressing
business brought him there in broad daylight when it was so much safer
to confer together at night.

"The Shopman talks of going to Paris to see the Keeper of the Seals;
he is capable of doing you a great deal of harm; he may ask for the
dismissal of your son-in-law, and the removal of the judges at
Ville-aux-Fayes, especially after reading the verdict just rendered in
your favor. He has turned at bay; he is shrewd, and he has an adviser
in that abbe, who is quite able to tilt with you and Gaubertin. Priests
are powerful. Monseigneur the bishop thinks a great deal of the Abbe
Brossette. Madame la comtesse talks of going herself to her cousin the
prefect, the Comte de Casteran, about Nicolas. Michaud begins to see
into our game."

"You are frightened," said Rigou, softly, casting a look on Sibilet
which suspicion made less impassive than usual, and which was
therefore terrific. "You are debating whether it would not be better
on the whole to side with the Comte de Montcornet."

"I don't see where I am to get the four thousand francs I save
honestly and invest every year, after you have cut up and sold Les
Aigues," said Sibilet, shortly. "Monsieur Gaubertin has made me many
fine promises; but the crisis is coming on; there will be fighting,
surely. Promising before victory and keeping a promise after it are
two very different things."

"I will talk to him about it," replied Rigou, imperturbably. "Meantime
this is what I should say to you if I were in his place: 'For the last
five years you have taken Monsieur Rigou four thousand francs a year,
and that worthy man gives you seven and a half per cent; which makes
your property in his hands at this moment over twenty-seven thousand
francs, as you have not drawn the interest. But there exists a private
signed agreement between you and Rigou, and the Shopman will dismiss
his steward whenever the Abbe Brossette lays that document before his
eyes; the abbe will be able to do so after receiving an anonymous
letter which will inform him of your double-dealing. You would
therefore do better for yourself by keeping well with us instead of
clamoring for your pay in advance,--all the more because Monsieur
Rigou, who is not legally bound to give you seven and a half per cent
and the interest on your interest, will make you in court a legal
tender of your twenty thousand francs, and you will not be able to
touch that money until your suit, prolonged by legal trickery, shall
be decided by the court at Ville-aux-Fayes. But if you act wisely you
will find that when Monsieur Rigou gets possession of your pavilion at
Les Aigues, you will have very nearly thirty thousand francs in his
hands and thirty thousand more which the said Rigou may entrust to
you,--which will be all the more advantageous to you then because the
peasantry will have flung them themselves upon the estate of Les
Aigues, divided into small lots like the poverty of the world.' That's
what Monsieur Gaubertin might say to you. As for me, I have nothing to
say, for it is none of my business. Gaubertin and I have our own
quarrel with that son of the people who is ashamed of his own father,
and we follow our own course. If my friend Gaubertin feels the need of
using you, I don't; I need no one, for everybody is at my command. As
to the Keeper of the Seals, that functionary is often changed; whereas
we--WE are always here, and can bide our time."

"Well, I've warned you," returned Sibilet, feeling like a donkey under
a pack-saddle.

"Warned me of what?" said Rigou, artfully.

"Of what the Shopman is going to do," answered the steward, humbly.
"He started for the Prefecture in a rage."

"Let him go! If the Montcornets and their kind didn't use wheels, what
would become of the carriage-makers?"

"I shall bring you three thousand francs to-night," said Sibilet, "but
you ought to make over some of your maturing mortgages to me,--say,
one or two that would secure to me good lots of land."

"Well, there's that of Courtecuisse. I myself want to be easy on him
because he is the best shot in the canton; but if I make over his
mortgage to you, you will seem to be harassing him on the Shopman's
account, and that will be killing two birds with one stone; when
Courtecuisse finds himself a beggar, like Fourchon, he'll be capable
of anything. Courtecuisse has ruined himself on the Bachelerie; he has
cultivated all the land, and trained fruit on the walls. The little
property is now worth four thousand francs, and the count will gladly
pay you that to get possession of the three acres that jut right into
his land. If Courtecuisse were not such an idle hound he could have
paid his interest with the game he might have killed there."

"Well, transfer the mortgage to me, and I'll make my butter out of it;
the count shall buy the three acres, and I shall get the house and
garden for nothing."

"What are you going to give me out of it?"

"Good heavens! you'd milk an ox!" exclaimed Sibilet,--"when I have
just done you such a service, too. I have at last got the Shopman to
enforce the laws about gleaning--"

"Have you, my dear fellow?" said Rigou, who a few days earlier had
suggested this means of exasperating the peasantry to Sibilet, telling
him to advise the general to try it. "Then we've got him; he's lost!
But it isn't enough to hold him with one string; we must wind it round
and round him like a roll of tobacco. Slip the bolts of the door, my
lad; tell my wife to bring my coffee and the liqueurs, and tell Jean
to harness up. I'm off to Soulanges; will see you to-night!--Ah!
Vaudoyer, good afternoon," said the late mayor as his former
field-keeper entered the room. "What's the news?"

Vaudoyer related the talk which had just taken place at the tavern,
and asked Rigou's opinion as to the legality of the rules which the
general thought of enforcing.

"He has the law with him," said Rigou, curtly. "We have a hard
landlord; the Abbe Brossette is a malignant priest; he advises all
such measures because you don't go to mass, you miserable unbelievers.
I go; there's a God, I tell you. You peasants will have to bear
everything, for the Shopman will always get the better of you--"

"We shall glean," said Vaudoyer, in that determined tone which
characterizes Burgundians.

"Without a certificate of pauperism?" asked the usurer. "They say the
Shopman has gone to the Prefecture to ask for troops so as to force
you to keep the law."

"We shall glean as we have always gleaned," repeated Vaudoyer.

"Well, glean then! Monsieur Sarcus will decide whether you have the
right to," said Rigou, seeming to promise the help of the justice of
the peace.

"We shall glean, and we shall do it in force, or Burgundy won't be
Burgundy any longer," said Vaudoyer. "If the gendarmes have sabres we
have scythes, and we'll see what comes of it!"