Sons of the Soil

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


At half-past four o'clock the great green gate of the former parsonage
turned on its hinges, and the bay horse, led by Jean, was brought
round to the front door. Madame Rigou and Annette came out on the
steps and looked at the little wicker carriage, painted green, with a
leathern hood, where their lord and master was comfortably seated on
good cushions.

"Don't be late home, monsieur," said Annette, with a little pout.

The village folk, already informed of the measures the general
proposed to take, were at their doors or standing in the main street
as Rigou drove by, believing that he was going to Soulanges in their
defence.

"Well, Madame Courtecuisse, so our mayor is on his way to protect us,"
remarked an old woman as she knitted; the question of depredating in
the forest was of great interest to her, for her husband sold the
stolen wood at Soulanges.

"Ah! the good man, his heart bleeds to see the way we are treated; he
is as unhappy as we are about it," replied the poor woman, who
trembled at the very name of her husband's creditor, and praised him
out of fear.

"And he himself, too,--they've shamefully ill-used him! Good-day,
Monsieur Rigou," said the old knitter to the usurer, who bowed to her
and to his debtor's wife.

As Rigou crossed the Thune, fordable at all seasons, Tonsard came out
of the tavern and met him on the high-road.

"Well, Pere Rigou," he said, "so the Shopman means to make dogs of
us?"

"We'll see about that," said the usurer, whipping up his horse.

"He'll protect us," said Tonsard, turning to a group of women and
children who were near him.

"Rigou is thinking as much about you as a cook thinks of the gudgeons
he is frying in his pan," called out Fourchon.

"Take the clapper out of your throat when you are drunk," said Mouche,
pulling his grandfather by the blouse, and tumbling him down on a bank
under a poplar tree. "If that hound of a mayor heard you say that,
he'd never buy any more of your tales."

The truth was that Rigou was hurrying to Soulanges in consequence of
the warning given him by the steward of Les Aigues, which, in his
heart, he regarded as threatening the secret coalition of the valley.




PART II



CHAPTER I

THE LEADING SOCIETY OF SOULANGES

About six kilometres (speaking legally) from Blangy, and at the same
distance from Ville-aux-Fayes, on an elevation radiating from the long
hillside at the foot of which flows the Avonne, stands the little town
of Soulanges, surnamed La Jolie, with, perhaps, more right to that
title than Mantes.

At the foot of the hill, the Thune broadens over a clay bottom to a
space of some seventy acres, at the end of which the Soulanges mills,
placed on numerous little islets, present as graceful a group of
buildings as any landscape architect could devise. After watering the
park of Soulanges, where it feeds various other streams and artificial
lakes, the Thune falls into the Avonne through a fine broad channel.

The chateau of Soulanges, rebuilt under Louis XIV. from designs of
Jules Mansart, and one of the finest in Burgundy, stands facing the
town; so that Soulanges and its chateau mutually present to each other
a charming and even elegant vista. The main road winds between the
town and the pond, called by the country people, rather pompously, the
lake of Soulanges.

The little town is one of those natural compositions which are
extremely rare in France, where _prettiness_ of its own kind is
absolutely wanting. Here you would indeed find, as Blondet said in his
letter, the charm of Switzerland, the prettiness of the environs of
Neuf-chatel; while the bright vineyards which encircle Soulanges
complete the resemblance,--leaving out, be it said, the Alps and the
Jura. The streets, placed one above another on the slope of the hill,
have but few houses; for each house stands in its own garden, which
produces a mass of greenery rarely seen in a town. The roofs, red or
blue, rising among flower-gardens, trees, and trellised terraces,
present an harmonious variety of aspects.

The church, an old Middle-Age structure, built of stone, thanks to the
munificence of the lords of Soulanges, who reserved for themselves
first a chapel near the chancel, then a crypt as their necropolis,
has, by way of portal, an immense arcade, like that of the church at
Lonjumeau, and is bordered by flower-beds adorned with statues, and
flanked on either side by columns with niches, which terminate in
spires. This portal, often seen in churches of the same period when
chance has saved them from the ravages of Calvinism, is surmounted by
a triglyph, above which stands a statue of the Virgin holding the
infant Jesus. The sides of the structure are externally of five
arches, defined by stone ribs and lighted by windows with small panes.
The apse rests on arched abutments that are worthy of a cathedral. The
clock-tower, placed in a transept of the cross, is square and
surmounted by a belfry. The church can be seen from a great distance,
for it stands at the top of the great square, at the lower end of
which the high-road passes through the town.

This square, large for the size of the town, is surrounded by very
original buildings, all of different epochs. Many, half-wood,
half-brick, with their timbers faced with slate, date back to the Middle
Ages. Others, of stone, with balconies, show the form of gable so dear
to our ancestors, which belongs to the twelfth century. Several charm
the eye with those old projecting beams, carved with grotesque faces,
which form the roof of a sort of shed, and recall the days when the
middle classes were exclusively commercial. The finest house among
them was that of the chief magistrate of former days,--a house with a
sculptured front on a line with the church, to which it forms a fine
accompaniment. Sold as national property, it was bought in by the
commune, which turned it into a town-hall and court-house, where
Monsieur Sarcus had presided ever since the establishment of municipal
judges.

This slight sketch will give an idea of the square of Soulanges,
adorned in the centre with a charming fountain brought from Italy in
1520 by the Marechal de Soulanges, which was not unworthy of a great
capital. An unfailing jet of water, coming from a spring higher up the
hill, was shed by four Cupids in white marble, bearing shells in their
arms and baskets of grapes upon their heads.

Literary travellers who may pass this way (should any such follow
Emile Blondet) might imagine the spot to have inspired Moliere and the
Spanish drama, which held its footing so long on French boards,
showing that comedy is native to warm countries where so much of life
is passed in the public streets. The square of Soulanges is all the
more a reminder of that classic stage because the two principal
streets, opening just on a line with the fountain, afford the exit and
entrances so necessary for the dramatic masters and valets whose
business it is either to meet or to avoid each other. At the corner of
one of these streets, called the rue de la Fontaine, shone the
notarial escutcheon of Maitre Lupin. The houses of Messieurs Sarcus,
Guerbet the collector, Brunet, Gourdon, clerk of the court, and that
of his brother the doctor, also that of old Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled,
the keeper of the forests and streams,--all these houses, kept with
extreme neatness by their owners, who held firmly to the flattering
surname of their native town, stand in the neighborhood of the square
and form the aristocratic quarter of Soulanges.

The house of Madame Soudry--for the powerful individuality of
Mademoiselle Laguerre's former waiting-maid took the lead of her
husband in the community--was modern, having been built by a rich
wine-merchant, born in Soulanges, who, after making his money in
Paris, returned there in 1793 to buy wheat for his native town. He was
slain as an "accapareur," a monopolist, by the populace, instigated by
a mason, the uncle of Godain, with whom he had had some quarrel about
the building of his ambitious house. The settlement of his estate,
sharply contested by collateral heirs, dragged slowly along until, in
1798, Soudry, who had then returned to Soulanges, was able to buy the
wine-merchant's palace for three thousand francs in specie. He then
let it, in the first instance, to the government for the headquarters
of the gendarmerie. In 1811 Mademoiselle Cochet, whom Soudry consulted
about all his affairs, strongly objected to the renewal of the lease,
making the house uninhabitable, she declared, with barracks. The town
of Soulanges, assisted by the department, then erected a building for
the gendarmerie in a street running at right angles from the town-hall.
Thereupon Soudry cleaned up his house and restored its primitive
lustre, not a little dimmed by the stabling of horses and the
occupancy of gendarmes.

The house, only one story high, with projecting windows in the roof,
has a view on three sides; one to the square, another to a lake, the
third to a garden. The fourth side looks on a courtyard which
separates the Soudrys from the adjoining house occupied by a grocer
named Wattebled, a man of the SECOND-CLASS society of Soulanges,
father of the beautiful Madame Plissoud, of whom we shall presently
have occasion to speak.

All little towns have a renowned beauty, just as they have a Socquard
and a Cafe de la Paix.

It will be apparent to every one that the frontage of the Soudry
mansion on the lake must have a terraced garden confined by a stone
balustrade which overlooks both the lake and the main road. A flight
of steps leads down from the terrace to the road, and on it an
orange-tree, a pomegranate, a myrtle, and other ornamental shrubs are
placed, necessitating a greenhouse. On the side toward the square the
house is entered from a portico raised several steps above the level
of the street. According to the custom of small towns the gate of the
courtyard, used only for the service of the house or for any unusual
arrival, was seldom opened. Visitors, who mostly came on foot, entered
by the portico.

The style of the Hotel Soudry is plain. The courses are indicated by
projecting lines; the windows are framed by mouldings alternately
broad and slender, like those of the Gabriel and Perronnet pavilion in
the place Louis XV. These ornaments in so small a town give a certain
solid and monumental air to the building which has become celebrated.

Opposite to this house, in another angle of the square stands the
famous Cafe de la Paix, the characteristics of which, together with
the fascinations of its Tivoli, will require, somewhat later, a less
succinct description than that we have given of the Soudry mansion.

Rigou very seldom came to Soulanges; everybody was in the habit of
going to him,--Lupin and Gaubertin, Soudry and Gendrin,--so much were
they afraid of him. But we shall presently understand why any educated
man, such as the ex-Benedictine, would have done as Rigou did, and
kept away from the little town, after reading the following sketch of
the personages who composed what was called in those parts "the
leading society of Soulanges."

Of its principal figures, the most original, as you have already
suspected, was that of Madame Soudry, whose personality, to be duly
rendered, needs a minute and careful brush.

Madame Soudry, respectfully imitating Mademoiselle Laguerre, began by
allowing herself a "mere touch of rouge"; but this delicate tint had
changed through force of habit to those vermilion patches
picturesquely described by our ancestors as "carriage-wheels." The
wrinkles growing deeper and deeper, it occurred to the ex-lady's-maid
to fill them up with paint. Her forehead becoming unduly yellow, and
the temples too shiny, she "laid on" a little white, and renewed the
veins of her youth with a tracery of blue. All this color gave an
exaggerated liveliness to her eyes which were already tricksy enough,
so that the mask of her face would seem to a stranger even more than
fantastic, though her friends and acquaintances, accustomed to this
fictitious brilliancy, actually declared her handsome.

This ungainly creature, always decolletee, showed a bosom and a pair
of shoulders that were whitened and polished by the same process
employed upon her face; happily, for the sake of exhibiting her
magnificent laces, she partially veiled the charms of these chemical
products. She always wore the body of her dress stiffened with
whalebone and made in a long point and garnished with knots of ribbon,
even on the point! Her petticoats gave forth a creaking noise,--so
much did the silk and the furbelows abound.

This attire, which deserves the name of apparel (a word that before
long will be inexplicable), was, on the evening in question, of costly
brocade,--for Madame Soudry possessed over a hundred dresses, each
richer than the others, the remains of Mademoiselle Laguerre's
enormous and splendid wardrobe, made over to fit Madame Soudry in the
last fashion of the year 1808. Her blond wig, frizzed and powdered,
sustained a superb cap with knots of cherry satin ribbon matching
those on her dress. If you will kindly imagine beneath this
ultra-coquettish cap the face of a monkey of extreme ugliness, on which
a flat nose, fleshless as that of Death, is separated by a strong hairy
line from a mouth filled with false teeth, whence issue sounds like
the confused clacking of hunting-horns, you will have some difficulty
in understanding why the leading society of Soulanges (all the town,
in fact) thought this quasi-queen a beauty,--unless, indeed, you
remember the succinct statement recently made "ex professo," by one of
the cleverest women of our time, on the art of making her sex
beautiful by surrounding accessories.

As to accessories, in the first place, Madame Soudry was surrounded by
the magnificent gifts accumulated by her late mistress, which the
ex-Benedictine called "fructus belli." Then she made the most of her
ugliness by exaggerating it, and by assuming that indescribable air
and manner which belongs only to Parisian women, the secret of which
is known even to the most vulgar among them,--who are always more or
less mimics. She laced tight, wore an enormous bustle, also diamond
earrings, and her fingers were covered with rings. At the top of her
corsage, between two mounds of flesh well plastered with pearl-white,
shone a beetle made of topaz with a diamond head, the gift of dear
mistress,--a jewel renowned throughout the department. Like the late
dear mistress, she wore short sleeves and bare arms, and flirted an
ivory fan, painted by Boucher with two little rose-diamonds in the
handle.

When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true
eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of
which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe. When she walked
about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar,
might have thought her one of Watteau's dames.

In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined
with silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots
of the good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of
lilies upheld by Cupids--in this salon, filled with furniture in
gilded wood of the "pied de biche" pattern, it is not impossible to
understand why the people of Soulanges called the mistress of the
house, "The beautiful Madame Soulanges." The mansion had actually
become the civic pride of this capital of a canton.

If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the
queen as surely believed in herself. By a phenomenon not in the least
rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all
moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their
marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end
of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the
mayoress, that she not only did not remember her past, but she
actually believed herself a well-bred woman. She had studied the airs
and graces, the dulcet tones, the gestures, the ways of her mistress,
so long that when she found herself in the midst of an opulence of her
own she was able to practice the natural insolence of it. She knew her
eighteenth century, and the tales of its great lords and all their
belongings, by heart. This back-stairs erudition gave to her
conversation a flavor of "oeil-de-boeuf"; her soubrette gossip passed
muster for courtly wit. Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say
so, tinsel; but to savages paste diamonds are as good as real ones.

The woman found herself courted and worshipped by the society in which
she lived, just as her mistress had been worshipped in former days.
She gave weekly dinners, with coffee and liqueurs to those who came in
after the dessert. No female head could have resisted the exhilarating
force of such continual adulation. In winter the warm salon, always
well-lighted with wax candles, was well-filled with the richest people
of Soulanges, who paid for the good liqueurs and the fine wines which
came from dear mistress's cellars, with flatteries to their hostess.
These visitors and their wives had a life-interest, as it were, in
this luxury; which was to them a saving of lights and fuel. Thus it
came to pass that in a circuit of fifteen miles and even as far as
Ville-aux-Fayes, every voice was ready to declare: "Madame Soudry does
the honors admirably. She keeps open house; every one enjoys her
salon; she knows how to carry herself and her fortune; she always says
the witty thing, she makes you laugh. And what splendid silver! There
is not another house like it short of Paris--"

The silver had been given to Mademoiselle Laguerre by Bouret. It was a
magnificent service made by the famous Germain, and Madame Soudry had
literally stolen it. At Mademoiselle Laguerre's death she merely took
it into her own room, and the heirs, who knew nothing of the value of
their inheritance, never claimed it.

For some time past the twelve or fifteen personages who composed the
leading society of Soulanges spoke of Madame Soudry as the _intimate
friend_ of Mademoiselle Laguerre, recoiling at the term
"waiting-woman," and making believe that she had sacrificed herself
to the singer as her friend and companion.

Strange yet true! all these illusions became realities, and spread
even to the actual regions of the heart; Madame Soudry reigned
supreme, in a way, over her husband.

The gendarme, required to love a woman ten years older than himself
who kept the management of her fortune in her own hands, behaved to
her in the spirit of the ideas she had ended by adopting about her
beauty. But sometimes, when persons envied him or talked to him of his
happiness, he wished they were in his place, for, to hide his
peccadilloes, he was forced to take as many precautions as the husband
of a young and adoring wife; and it was not until very recently that
he had been able to introduce into the family a pretty servant-girl.

This portrait of the Queen of Soulanges may seem a little grotesque,
but many specimens of the same kind could be found in the provinces at
that period,--some more or less noble in blood, others belonging to
the higher banking-circles, like the widow of a receiver-general in
Touraine who still puts slices of veal upon her cheeks. This portrait,
drawn from nature, would be incomplete without the diamonds in which
it is set; without the surrounding courtiers, a sketch of whom is
necessary, if only to explain how formidable such Lilliputians are,
and who are the makers of public opinion in remote little towns. Let
no one mistake me, however; there are many localities which, like
Soulanges, are neither hamlets, villages, nor little towns, which
have, nevertheless, the characteristics of all. The inhabitants are
very different from those of the large and busy and vicious provincial
cities. Country life influences the manners and morals of the smaller
places, and this mixture of tints will be found to produce some truly
original characters.

The most important personage after Madame Soudry was Lupin, the
notary. Though forty-five springs had bloomed for Lupin, he was still
fresh and rosy, thanks to the plumpness which fills out the skin of
sedentary persons; and he still sang ballads. Also, he retained the
elegant evening dress of society warblers. He looked almost Parisian
in his carefully-varnished boots, his sulphur-yellow waistcoats, his
tight-fitting coats, his handsome silk cravats, his fashionable
trousers. His hair was curled by the barber of Soulanges (the gossip
of the town), and he maintained the attitude of a man "a bonne
fortunes" by his liaison with Madame Sarcus, wife of Sarcus the rich,
who was to his life, without too close a comparison, what the
campaigns of Italy were to Napoleon. He alone of the leading society
of Soulanges went to Paris, where he was received by the Soulanges
family. It was enough to hear him talk to imagine the supremacy he
wielded in his capacity as dandy and judge of elegance. He passed
judgment on all things by the use of three terms: "out of date,"
"antiquated," "superannuated."[*] A man, a woman, or a piece of
furniture might be "out of date"; next, by a greater degree of
imperfection, "antiquated"; but as to the last term, it was the
superlative of contempt. The first might be remedied, the second was
hopeless, but the third,--oh, better far never to have left the void
of nothingness! As to praise, a single word sufficed him, doubly and
trebly uttered: "Charming!" was the positive of his admiration.
"Charming, charming!" made you feel you were safe; but after
"Charming, charming, charming!" the ladder might be discarded, for the
heaven of perfection was attained.


[*] "Croute," "crouton," and "croute-au-pot," untranslatable, and
without equivalent in English. A "croute" is the slang term for a
man behind the age.--Tr.


The tabellion,--he called himself "tabellion," petty notary, and
keeper of notes (making fun of his calling in order to seem above it),
--the tabellion was on terms of spoken gallantry with Madame Soudry,
who had a weakness for Lupin, though he was blond and wore spectacles.
Hitherto the late Cochet had loved none but dark men, with moustachios
and hairy hands, of the Alcides type. But she made an exception in
favor of Lupin on account of his elegance, and, moreover, because she
thought her glory at Soulanges was not complete without an adorer;
but, to Soudry's despair, the queen's adorers never carried their
adoration so far as to threaten his rights.

Lupin had married an heiress in wooden shoes and blue woollen
stockings, the only daughter of a salt-dealer, who made his money
during the Revolution,--a period when contraband salt-traders made
enormous profits by reason of the reaction that set in against the
gabelle. He prudently left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he
called her, was supported under his absence by a platonic passion for
a handsome clerk who had no other means than his salary,--a young man
named Bonnac, belonging to the second-class society, where he played
the same role that his master, the notary, played in the first.

Madame Lupin, a woman without any education whatever, appeared on
great occasions only, under the form of an enormous Burgundian barrel
dressed in velvet and surmounted by a little head sunken in shoulders
of a questionable color. No efforts could retain her waist-belt in its
natural place. "Bebelle" candidly admitted that prudence forbade her
wearing corsets. The imagination of a poet or, better still, that of
an inventor, could not have found on Bebelle's back the slightest
trace of that seductive sinuosity which the vertebrae of all women who
are women usually produce. Bebelle, round as a tortoise, belonged to
the genus of invertebrate females. This alarming development of
cellular tissue no doubt reassured Lupin on the subject of the
platonic passion of his fat wife, whom he boldly called Bebelle
without raising a laugh.

"Your wife, what is she?" said Sarcus the rich, one day, when unable
to digest the fatal word "superannuated," applied to a piece of
furniture he had just bought at a bargain.

"My wife is not like yours," replied Lupin; "she is not defined as
yet."

Beneath his rosy exterior the notary possessed a subtle mind, and he
had the sense to say nothing about his property, which was fully as
large as that of Rigou.

Monsieur Lupin's son, Amaury, was a great trouble to his father. An
only son, and one of the Don Juans of the valley, he utterly refused
to follow the paternal profession. He took advantage of his position
as only son to bleed the strong-box cruelly, without, however,
exhausting the patience of his father, who would say after every
escapade, "Well, I was like that in my young days." Amaury never came
to Madame Soudry's; he said she bored him; for, with a recollection of
her early days, she attempted to "educate" him, as she called it,
whereas he much preferred the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de
la Paix. He frequented the worst company of Soulanges, even down to
Bonnebault. He continued sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry
remarked, and replied to all his father's remonstrances with one
perpetual request: "Send me back to Paris, for I am bored to death
here."