Sons of the Soil

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


Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was
semi-conjugal. His known passion, in spite of his former liaison with
Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the municipal
court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer,
who reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the
first. Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the
under-world of Soulanges on account of his wife's conduct, which it
was said he authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of
the leading society.

If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon,
the doctor, was its man of science. The town said of him, "We have
here in our midst a scientific man of the first order." Madame Soudry
(who believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini
and Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera)
persuaded society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his
fortune by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting
that the doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.

Monsieur Gourdon merely repeated the ideas of Cuvier and Buffon, which
might not have enabled him to pose as a scientist before the Soulanges
world; but besides this he was making a collection of shells, and he
possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds. He lived upon
the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the
town of Soulanges. After this was known he was considered throughout
the department as a great naturalist and the successor of Buffon. Like
a certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan
propriety he copied, without possessing either his money or his
shrewdness, Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the
famous collection, consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which
had died on their way to Soulanges), all the rodents of the
department, mice and field-mice and dormice, rats, muskrats, and
moles, etc.; all the interesting birds ever shot in Burgundy, and an
Alpine eagle caught in the Jura. Gourdon also possessed a collection
of lepidoptera,--a word which led society to hope for monstrosities,
and to say, when it saw them, "Why, they are only butterflies!"
Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil shells, mostly the
collections of his friends which they bequeathed to him, and all the
minerals of Burgundy and the Jura.

These treasures, laid out on shelves with glass doors (the drawers
beneath containing the insects), occupied the whole of the first floor
of the doctor's house, and produced a certain effect through the
oddity of the names on the tickets, the magic effect of the colors,
and the gathering together of so many things which no one pays the
slightest attention to when seen in nature, though much admired under
glass. Society took a regular day to go and look at Monsieur Gourdon's
collection.

"I have," he said to all inquirers, "five hundred ornithological
objects, two hundred mammifers, five thousand insects, three thousand
shells, and seven thousand specimens of minerals."

"What patience you have had!" said the ladies.

"One must do something for one's country," replied the collector.

He drew an enormous profit from his carcasses by the mere repetition
of the words, "I have bequeathed everything to the town by my will."
Visitors lauded his philanthropy; the authorities talked of devoting
the second floor of the town hall to the "Gourdon Museum," after the
collector's death.

"I rely upon the gratitude of my fellow-citizens to attach my name to
the gift," he replied; "for I dare not hope they would place a marble
bust of me--"

"It would be the very least we could do for you," they rejoined; "are
you not the glory of our town?"

Thus the man actually came to consider himself one of the celebrities
of Burgundy. The surest incomes are not from consols after all; those
our vanity obtains for us have better security. This man of science
was, to employ Lupin's superlatives, happy! happy!! happy!!!

Gourdon, the clerk of the court, brother of the doctor, was a pitiful
little creature, whose features all gathered about his nose, so that
the nose seemed the point of departure for the forehead, the cheeks,
and the mouth, all of which were connected with it just as the ravines
of a mountain begin at the summit. This pinched little man was thought
to be one of the greatest poets in Burgundy,--a Piron, it was the
fashion to say. The dual merits of the two brothers gave rise to the
remark: "We have the brothers Gourdon at Soulanges--two very
distinguished men; men who could hold their own in Paris."

Devoted to the game of cup-and-ball, the clerk of the court became
possessed by another mania,--that of composing an ode in honor of an
amusement which amounted to a passion in the eighteenth century.
Manias among mediocrats often run in couples. Gourdon junior gave
birth to his poem during the reign of Napoleon. That fact is
sufficient to show the sound and healthy school of poesy to which he
belonged; Luce de Lancival, Parny, Saint-Lambert, Rouche, Vigee,
Andrieux, Berchoux were his heroes. Delille was his god, until the day
when the leading society of Soulanges raised the question as to
whether Gourdon were not superior to Delille; after which the clerk of
the court always called his competitor "Monsieur l'Abbe Delille," with
exaggerated politeness.

The poems manufactured between 1780 and 1814 were all of one pattern,
and the one which Gourdon composed upon the Cup-and-Ball will give an
idea of them. They required a certain knack or proficiency in the art.
"The Chorister" is the Saturn of this abortive generation of jocular
poems, all in four cantos or thereabouts, for it was generally
admitted that six would wear the subject threadbare.

Gourdon's poem entitled "Ode to the Cup-and-Ball" obeyed the poetic
rules which governed these works, rules that were invariable in their
application. Each poem contained in the first canto a description of
the "object sung," preceded (as in the case of Gourdon) by a species
of invocation, of which the following is a model:--

I sing the good game that belongeth to all,
The game, be it known, of the Cup and the Ball;
Dear to little and great, to the fools and the wise;
Charming game! where the cure of all tedium lies;
When we toss up the ball on the point of a stick
Palamedus himself might have envied the trick;
O Muse of the Loves and the Laughs and the Games,
Come down and assist me, for, true to your aims,
I have ruled off this paper in syllable squares.
Come, help me--

After explaining the game and describing the handsomest cup-and-balls
recorded in history, after relating what fabulous custom it had
formerly brought to the Singe-Vert and to all dealers in toys and
turned ivories, and finally, after proving that the game attained to
the dignity of statics, Gourdon ended the first canto with the
following conclusion, which will remind the erudite reader of all the
conclusions of the first cantos of all these poems:--

'Tis thus that the arts and the sciences, too,
Find wisdom in things that seemed silly to you.

The second canto, invariably employed to depict the manner of using
"the object," explaining how to exhibit it in society and before
women, and the benefit to be derived therefrom, will be readily
conceived by the friends of this virtuous literature from the
following quotation, which depicts the player going through his
performance under the eyes of his chosen lady:--

Now look at the player who sits in your midst,
On that ivory ball how his sharp eye is fixt;
He waits and he watches with keenest attention,
Its least little movement in all its precision;
The ball its parabola thrice has gone round,
At the end of the string to which it is bound.
Up it goes! but the player his triumph has missed,
For the disc has come down on his maladroit wrist;
But little he cares for the sting of the ball,
A smile from his mistress consoles for it all.

It was this delineation, worthy of Virgil, which first raised a doubt
as to Delille's superiority over Gourdon. The word "disc," contested
by the opinionated Brunet, gave matter for discussions which lasted
eleven months; in fact, until Gourdon the scientist, one evening when
all present were on the point of getting seriously angry, annihilated
the anti-discers by observing:--

"The moon, called a _disc_ by poets, is undoubtedly a ball."

"How do you know that?" retorted Brunet. "We have never seen but one
side."

The third canto told the regulation story,--in this instance, the
famous anecdote of the cup-and-ball which all the world knows by
heart, concerning a celebrated minister of Louis XVI. According to the
sacred formula delivered by the "Debats" from 1810 to 1814, in praise
of these glorious words, Gourdon's ode "borrowed fresh charms from
poesy to embellish the tale."

The fourth canto summed up the whole, and concluded with these daring
words,--not published, be it remarked, from 1810 to 1814; in fact,
they did not see the light till 1824, after Napoleon's death.

'Twas thus that I sang in the time of alarms.
Oh, if kings would consent to bear no other arms,
And people enjoyed what was best for them all,
The sweet little game of the Cup and the Ball,
Our Burgundy then might be free of all fear,
And return to the good days of Saturn and Rhea.

These fine verses were published in a first and only edition from the
press of Bournier, printer of Ville-aux-Fayes. One hundred
subscribers, in the sum of three francs, guaranteed the dangerous
precedent of immortality to the poem,--a liberality that was all the
greater because these hundred persons had heard the poem from
beginning to end a hundred times over.

Madame Soudry had lately suppressed the cup-and-ball, which usually
lay on a pier-table in the salon and for the last seven years had
given rise to endless quotations, for she finally discovered in the
toy a rival to her own attractions.

As to the author, who boasted of future poems in his desk, it is
enough to quote the terms in which he mentioned to the leading society
of Soulanges a rival candidate for literary honors.

"Have you heard a curious piece of news?" he had said, two years
earlier. "There is another poet in Burgundy! Yes," he added, remarking
the astonishment on all faces, "he comes from Macon. But you could
never imagine the subjects he takes up,--a perfect jumble, absolutely
unintelligible,--lakes, stars, waves, billows! not a single
philosophical image, not even a didactic effort! he is ignorant of the
very meaning of poetry. He calls the sky by its name. He says 'moon,'
bluntly, instead of naming it 'the planet of night.' That's what the
desire to be thought original brings men to," added Gourdon,
mournfully. "Poor young man! A Burgundian, and sing such stuff as
that!--the pity of it! If he had only consulted me, I would have
pointed out to him the noblest of all themes, wine,--a poem to be
called the Baccheide; for which, alas! I now feel myself too old."

This great poet is still ignorant of his finest triumph (though he
owes it to the fact of being a Burgundian), namely, that of living in
the town of Soulanges, so rounded and perfected within itself that it
knows nothing of the modern Pleiades, not even their names.

A hundred Gourdons made poetry under the Empire, and yet they tell us
it was a period that neglected literature! Examine the "Journal de la
Libraire" and you will find poems on the game of draughts, on
backgammon, on tricks with cards, on geography, typography, comedy,
etc.,--not to mention the vaunted masterpieces of Delille on Piety,
Imagination, Conversation; and those of Berchoux on Gastromania and
Dansomania, etc. Who can foresee the chances and changes of taste, the
caprices of fashion, the transformations of the human mind? The
generations as they pass along sweep out of sight the last fragments
of the idols they found on their path and set up other gods,--to be
overthrown like the rest.

Sarcus, a handsome little man with a dapple-gray head, devoted himself
in turn to Themis and to Flora,--in other words, to legislation and a
greenhouse. For the last twelve years he had been meditating a book on
the History of the Institution of Justices of the Peace, "whose
political and judiciary role," he said, "had already passed through
several phases, all derived from the Code of Brumaire, year IV.; and
to-day that institution, so precious to the nation, had lost its power
because the salaries were not in keeping with the importance of its
functions, which ought to be performed by irremovable officials."
Rated in the community as an able man, Sarcus was the accepted
statesman of Madame Soudry's salon; you can readily imagine that he
was the leading bore. They said he talked like a book. Gaubertin
prophesied he would receive the cross of the Legion of honor, but not
until the day when, as Leclercq's successor, he should take his seat
on the benches of the Left Centre.

Guerbet, the collector, a man of parts, a heavy, fat, individual with
a buttery face, a toupet on his bald spot, gold earrings, which were
always in difficulty with his shirt-collar, had the hobby of pomology.
Proud of possessing the finest fruit-garden in the arrondissement, he
gathered his first crops a month later than those of Paris; his
hot-beds supplied him with pine-apples, nectarines, and peas, out of
season. He brought bunches of strawberries to Madame Soudry with pride
when the fruit could be bought for ten sous a basket in Paris.

Soulanges possessed a pharmaceutist named Vermut, a chemist, who was
more of a chemist than Sarcus was a statesman, or Lupin a singer, or
Gourdon the elder a scientist, or his brother a poet. Nevertheless,
the leading society of Soulanges did not take much notice of Vermut,
and the second-class society took none at all. The instinct of the
first may have led them to perceive the real superiority of this
thinker, who said little but smiled at their absurdities so
satirically that they first doubted his capacity and then whispered
tales against it; as for the other class they took no notice of him
one way or the other.

Vermut was the butt of Madame Soudry's salon. No society is complete
without a victim,--without an object to pity, ridicule, despise, and
protect. Vermut, full of his scientific problems, often came with his
cravat untied, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his little green surtout
spotted.

The little man, gifted with the patience of a chemist, could not enjoy
(that is the term employed in the provinces to express the abolition
of domestic rule) Madame Vermut,--a charming woman, a lively woman,
capital company (for she could lose forty sous at cards and say
nothing), a woman who railed at her husband, annoyed him with
epigrams, and declared him to be an imbecile unable to distil anything
but dulness. Madame Vermut was one of those women who in the society
of a small town are the life and soul of amusement and who set things
going. She supplied the salt of her little world, kitchen-salt, it is
true; her jokes were somewhat broad, but society forgave them; though
she was capable of saying to the cure Taupin, a man of seventy years
of age, with white hair, "Hold your tongue, my lad."

The miller of Soulanges, possessing an income of fifty thousand
francs, had an only daughter whom Lupin desired for his son Amaury,
since he had lost the hope of marrying him to Gaubertin's daughter.
This miller, a Sarcus-Taupin, was the Nucingen of the little town. He
was supposed to be thrice a millionaire; but he never transacted
business with others, and thought only of grinding his wheat and
keeping a monopoly of it; his most noticeable point was a total
absence of politeness and good manners.

The elder Guerbet, brother of the post-master at Conches, possessed an
income of ten thousand francs, besides his salary as collector. The
Gourdons were rich; the doctor had married the only daughter of old
Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled, keeper of the forests and streams, whom the
family were now _expecting to die_, while the poet had married the niece
and sole heiress of the Abbe Taupin, the curate of Soulanges, a stout
priest who lived in his cure like a rat in his cheese.

This clever ecclesiastic, devoted to the leading society, kind and
obliging to the second, apostolic to the poor and unfortunate, made
himself beloved by the whole town. He was cousin of the miller and
cousin of the Sarcuses, and belonged therefore to the neighborhood and
to its mediocracy. He always dined out and saved expenses; he went to
weddings but came away before the ball; he paid the costs of public
worship, saying, "It is my business." And the parish let him do it,
with the remark, "We have an excellent priest." The bishop, who knew
the Soulanges people and was not at all misled as to the true value of
the abbe, was glad enough to keep in such a town a man who made
religion acceptable, and who knew how to fill his church and preach to
sleepy heads.

It is unnecessary to remark that not only each of these worthy
burghers possessed some one of the special qualifications which are
necessary to existence in the provinces, but also that each cultivated
his field in the domain of vanity without a rival. Pere Guerbet
understood finance, Soudry might have been minister of war; if Cuvier
had passed that way incognito, the leading society of Soulanges would
have proved to him that he knew nothing in comparison with Monsieur
Gourdon the doctor. "Adolphe Nourrit with his thread of a voice,"
remarked the notary with patronizing indulgence, "was scarcely worthy
to accompany the nightingale of Soulanges." As to the author of the
"Cup-and-Ball" (which was then being printed at Bournier's), society
was satisfied that a poet of his force could not be met with in Paris,
for Delille was now dead.

This provincial bourgeoisie, so comfortably satisfied with itself,
took the lead through the various superiorities of its members.
Therefore the imagination of those who ever resided, even for a short
time, in a little town of this kind can conceive the air of profound
satisfaction upon the faces of these people, who believed themselves
the solar plexus of France, all of them armed with incredible
dexterity and shrewdness to do mischief,--all, in their wisdom,
declaring that the hero of Essling was a coward, Madame de Montcornet
a manoeuvring Parisian, and the Abbe Brossette an ambitious little
priest.

If Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin had lived at Ville-aux-Fayes, they
would have quarrelled; their various pretensions would have clashed;
but fate ordained that the Lucullus of Blangy felt too strongly the
need of solitude, in which to wallow at his ease in usury and
sensuality, to live anywhere but at Blangy; that Madame Soudry had
sense enough to see that she could reign nowhere else except at
Soulanges; and that Ville-aux-Fayes was Gaubertin's place of business.
Those who enjoy studying social nature will admit that General
Montcornet was pursued by special ill-luck in this accidental
separation of his dangerous enemies, who thus accomplished the
evolutions of their individual power and vanity at such distances from
each other that neither star interfered with the orbit of the other,
--a fact which doubled and trebled their powers of mischief.

Nevertheless, though all these worthy bourgeois, proud of their
accomplishments, considered their society as far superior in
attractions to that of Ville-aux-Fayes, and repeated with comic
pomposity the local dictum, "Soulanges is a town of society and social
pleasures," it must not be supposed that Ville-aux-Fayes accepted this
supremacy. The Gaubertin salon ridiculed ("in petto") the salon
Soudry. By the manner in which Gaubertin remarked, "We are a financial
community, engaged in actual business; we have the folly to fatigue
ourselves in making fortunes," it was easy to perceive a latent
antagonism between the earth and the moon. The moon believed herself
useful to the earth, and the earth governed the moon. Earth and moon,
however, lived in the closest intimacy. At the carnival the leading
society of Soulanges went in a body to four balls given by Gaubertin,
Gendrin, Leclercq, and Soudry, junior. Every Sunday the latter, his
wife, Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoiselle Elise Gaubertin dined with
the Soudrys at Soulanges. When the sub-prefect was invited, and when
the postmaster of Conches arrived to take pot-luck, Soulanges enjoyed
the sight of four official equipages drawn up at the door of the
Soudry mansion.



CHAPTER II

THE CONSPIRATORS IN THE QUEEN'S SALON

Reaching Soulanges about half-past five o'clock, Rigou was sure of
finding the usual party assembled at the Soudrys'. There, as
everywhere else in town, the dinner-hour was three o'clock, according
to the custom of the last century. From five to nine the notables of
Soulanges met in Madame Soudry's salon to exchange the news, make
their political speeches, comment upon the private lives of every one
in the valley, and talk about Les Aigues, which latter topic kept the
conversation going for at least an hour every day. It was everybody's
business to learn at least something of what was going on, and also to
pay their court to the mistress of the house.

After this preliminary talk they played at boston, the only game the
queen understood. When the fat old Guerbet had mimicked Madame Isaure,
Gaubertin's wife, laughed at her languishing airs, imitated her thin
voice, her pinched mouth, and her juvenile ways; when the Abbe Taupin
had related one of the tales of his repertory; when Lupin had told of
some event at Ville-aux-Fayes, and Madame Soudry had been deluged with
compliments ad nauseum, the company would say: "We have had a charming
game of boston."

Too self-indulgent to be at the trouble of driving over to the
Soudrys' merely to hear the vapid talk of its visitors and to see a
Parisian monkey in the guise of an old woman, Rigou, far superior in
intelligence and education to this petty society, never made his
appearance unless business brought him over to meet the notary. He
excused himself from visiting on the ground of his occupations, his
habits, and his health, which latter did not allow him, he said, to
return at night along a road which led by the foggy banks of the
Thune.

The tall, stiff usurer always had an imposing effect upon Madame
Soudry's company, who instinctively recognized in his nature the
cruelty of the tiger with steel claws, the craft of a savage, the
wisdom of one born in a cloister and ripened by the sun of gold,--a
man to whom Gaubertin had never yet been willing to fully commit
himself.

The moment the little green carriole and the bay horse passed the Cafe
de la Paix, Urbain, Soudry's man-servant, who was seated on a bench
under the dining-room windows, and was gossipping with the
tavern-keeper, shades his eyes with his hand to see who was coming.

"It's Pere Rigou," he said. "I must go round and open the door. Take
his horse, Socquard." And Urbain, a former trooper, who could not get
into the gendarmerie and had therefore taken service with Soudry, went
round the house to open the gates of the courtyard.

Socquard, a famous personage throughout the valley, was treated, as
you see, with very little ceremony by the valet. But so it is with
many illustrious people who are so kind as to walk and to sneeze and
to sleep and to eat precisely like common mortals.

Socquard, born a Hercules, could carry a weight of eleven hundred
pounds; a blow of his fist applied on a man's back would break the
vertebral column in two; he could bend an iron bar, or hold back a
carriage drawn by one horse. A Milo of Crotona in the valley, his fame
had spread throughout the department, where all sorts of foolish
stories were current about him, as about all celebrities. It was told
how he had once carried a poor woman and her donkey and her basket on
his back to market; how he had been known to eat a whole ox and drink
the fourth of a hogshead of wine in one day, etc. Gentle as a
marriageable girl, Socquard, who was a stout, short man, with a placid
face, broad shoulders, and a deep chest, where his lungs played like
the bellows of a forge, possessed a flute-like voice, the limpid tones
of which surprised all those who heard them for the first time.

Like Tonsard, whose renown released him from the necessity of giving
proofs of his ferocity, in fact, like all other men who are backed by
public opinion of one kind or another, Socquard never displayed his
extraordinary muscular force unless asked to do so by friends. He now
took the horse as the usurer drew up at the steps of the portico.

"Are you all well at home, Monsieur Rigou?" said the illustrious
innkeeper.

"Pretty well, my good friend," replied Rigou. "Do Plissoud and
Bonnebault and Viollet and Amaury still continue good customers?"

This question, uttered in a tone of good-natured interest, was by no
means one of those empty speeches which superiors are apt to bestow
upon inferiors. In his leisure moments Rigou thought over the smallest
details of "the affair," and Fourchon had already warned him that
there was something suspicious in the intimacy between Plissoud,
Bonnebault, and the brigadier, Viollet.