Sons of the Soil

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"Will they be allowed to put us in prison?" he was saying. "After
Conches they'll come to Blangy. I'm an old offender, and I shall get
three months."

"What can we do against the gendarmerie, old drunkard?" said Vaudoyer.

"Why! cut the legs of their horses with our scythes. That'll bring
them down; their muskets are not loaded, and when they find us ten to
one against them they'll decamp. If the three villages all rose and
killed two or three gendarmes, they couldn't guillotine the whole of
us. They'd have to give way, as they did on the other side of
Burgundy, where they sent a regiment. Bah! that regiment came back
again, and the peasants cut the woods just as much as they ever did."

"If we kill," said Vaudoyer; "it is better to kill one man; the
question is, how to do it without danger and frighten those Arminacs
so that they'll be driven out of the place."

"Which one shall we kill?" asked Laroche.

"Michaud," said Courtecuisse. "Vaudoyer is right, he's perfectly
right. You'll see that when a keeper is sent to the shades there won't
be one of them willing to stay even in broad daylight to watch us. Now
they're there night and day,--demons!"

"Wherever one goes," said old Mother Tonsard,--who was seventy-eight
years old, and presented a parchment face honey-combed with the
small-pox, lighted by a pair of green eyes, and framed with dirty-white
hair, which escaped in strands from a red handkerchief,--"wherever one
goes, there they are! they stop us, they open our bundles, and if
there's a single branch, a single twig of a miserable hazel, they
seize the whole bundle, and they say they'll arrest us. Ha, the
villains! there's no deceiving them; if they suspect you, you've got
to undo the bundle. Dogs! all three are not worth a farthing! Yes,
kill 'em, and it won't ruin France, I tell you."

"Little Vatel is not so bad," said Madame Tonsard.

"He!" said Laroche, "he does his business, like the others; when
there's a joke going he'll joke with you, but you are none the better
with him for that. He's worse than the rest,--heartless to poor folks,
like Michaud himself."

"Michaud has got a pretty wife, though," said Nicolas Tonsard.

"She's with young," said the old woman; "and if this thing goes on
there'll be a queer kind of baptism for the little one when she
calves."

"Oh! those Arminacs!" cried Marie Tonsard; "there's no laughing with
them; and if you did, they'd threaten to arrest you."

"You've tried your hand at cajoling them, have you?" said
Courtecuisse.

"You may bet on that."

"Well," said Tonsard with a determined air, "they are men like other
men, and they can be got rid of."

"But I tell you," said Marie, continuing her topic, "they won't be
cajoled; I don't know what's the matter with them; that bully at the
pavilion, he's married, but Vatel, Gaillard, and Steingel are not;
they've not a woman belonging to them; indeed, there's not a woman in
the place who would marry them."

"Well, we shall see how things go at the harvest and the vintage,"
said Tonsard.

"They can't stop the gleaning," said the old woman.

"I don't know that," remarked Madame Tonsard. "Groison said that the
mayor was going to publish a notice that no one should glean without a
certificate of pauperism; and who's to give that certificate? Himself,
of course. He won't give many, I tell you! And they say he is going to
issue an order that no one shall enter the fields till the carts are
all loaded."

"Why, the fellow's a pestilence!" cried Tonsard, beside himself with
rage.

"I heard that only yesterday," said Madame Tonsard. "I offered Groison
a glass of brandy to get something out of him."

"Groison! there's another lucky fellow!" said Vaudoyer, "they've built
him a house and given him a good wife, and he's got an income and
clothes fit for a king. There was I, field-keeper for twenty years,
and all I got was the rheumatism."

"Yes, he's very lucky," said Godain, "he owns property--"

"And we go without, like the fools that we are," said Vaudoyer. "Come,
let's be off and find out what's going on at Conches; they are not so
patient over there as we are."

"Come on," said Laroche, who was none too steady on his legs. "If I
don't exterminate one of two of those fellows may I lose my name."

"You!" said Tonsard, "you'd let them put the whole district in prison;
but I--if they dare to touch my old mother, there's my gun and it
never misses."

"Well," said Laroche to Vaudoyer, "I tell you that if they make a
single prisoner at Conches one gendarme shall fall."

"He has said it, old Laroche!" cried Courtecuisse.

"He has said it," remarked Vaudoyer, "but he hasn't done it, and he
won't do it. What good would it do to get yourself guillotined for
some gendarme or other? No, if you kill, I say, kill Michaud."

During this scene Catherine Tonsard stood sentinel at the door to warn
the drinkers to keep silent if any one passed. In spite of their
half-drunken legs they sprang rather than walked out of the tavern,
and their bellicose temper started them at a good pace on the road to
Conches, which led for over a mile along the park wall of Les Aigues.

Conches was a true Burgundian village, with one street, which was
crossed by the main road. The houses were built either of brick or of
cobblestones, and were squalid in aspect. Following the mail-road from
Ville-aux-Fayes, the village was seen from the rear and there it
presented rather a picturesque effect. Between the road and the
Ronquerolles woods, which continued those of Les Aigues and crowned
the heights, flowed a little river, and several houses, rather
prettily grouped, enlivened the scene. The church and the parsonage
stood alone and were seen from the park of Les Aigues, which came
nearly up to them. In front of the church was a square bordered by
trees, where the conspirators of the Grand-I-Vert saw the gendarmerie
and hastened their already hasty steps. Just then three men on
horseback rode rapidly out of the park of Les Aigues and the peasants
at once recognized the general, his groom, and Michaud the bailiff,
who came at a gallop into the square. Tonsard and his party arrived a
minute or two after them. The delinquents, men and women, had made no
resistance, and were standing between five of the Soulanges gendarmes
and fifteen of those from Ville-aux-Fayes. The whole village had
assembled. The fathers, mothers, and children of the prisoners were
going and coming and bringing them what they might want in prison. It
was a curious scene, that of a population one and all exasperated, but
nearly all silent, as though they had made up their minds to a course
of action. The old women and the young ones alone spoke. The children,
boys and girls, were perched on piles of wood and heaps of stones to
get a better sight of what was happening.

"They have chosen their time, those hussars of the guillotine," said
one old woman; "they are making a fete of it."

"Are you going to let 'em carry of your man like that? How shall you
manage to live for three months?--the best of the year, too, when he
could earn so much."

"It's they who rob us," replied the woman, looking at the gendarmes
with a threatening air.

"What do you mean by that, old woman?" said the sergeant. "If you
insult us it won't take long to settle you."

"I meant nothing," said the old woman, in a humble and piteous tone.

"I heard you say something just now you may have cause to repent of."

"Come, come, be calm, all of you," said the mayor of Conches, who was
also the postmaster. "What the devil is the use of talking? These men,
as you know very well, are under orders and must obey."

"That's true; it's the owner of Les Aigues who persecutes us-- But
patience!"

Just then the general rode into the square and his arrival caused a
few groans which did not trouble him in the least. He rode straight up
to the lieutenant in command, and after saying a few words gave him a
paper; the officer then turned to his men and said: "Release your
prisoners; the general has obtained their pardon."

General Montcornet was then speaking to the mayor; after a few
moments' conversation in a low tone, the latter, addressing the
delinquents, who expected to sleep in prison and were a good deal
surprised to find themselves free, said to them:--

"My friends, thank Monsieur le comte. You owe your release to him. He
went to Paris and obtained your pardon in honor of the anniversary of
the king's restoration. I hope that in future you will conduct
yourself properly to a man who has behaved so well to you, and that
you will in future respect his property. Long live the King!"

The peasants shouted "Long live the King!" with enthusiasm, to avoid
shouting, "Hurrah for the Comte de Montcornet!"

The scene was a bit of policy arranged between the general, the
prefect, and the attorney-general; for they were all anxious, while
showing enough firmness to keep the local authorities up to their duty
and awe the country-people, to be as gentle as possible, fully
realizing as they did the difficulties of the question. In fact, if
resistance had occurred, the government would have been in a tight
place. As Laroche truly said, they could not guillotine or even
convict a whole community.

The general invited the mayor of Conches, the lieutenant, and the
sergeant to breakfast. The conspirators of the Grand-I-Vert adjourned
to the tavern of Conches, where the delinquents spent in drink the
money their relations had given them to take to prison, sharing it
with the Blangy people, who were naturally part of the wedding,--the
word "wedding" being applied indiscriminately in Burgundy to all such
rejoicings. To drink, quarrel, fight, eat and go home drunk and sick,
--that is a wedding to these peasants.

The general, who had come by the park, took his guests back through
the forest that they might see for themselves the injury done to the
timber, and so judge of the importance of the question.

Just as Rigou and Soudry were on their way back to Blangy, the count
and countess, Emile Blondet, the lieutenant of gendarmerie, the
sergeant, and the mayor of Conches were finishing their breakfast in
the splendid dining-room where Bouret's luxury had left the delightful
traces already described by Blondet in his letter to Nathan.

"It would be a terrible pity to abandon this beautiful home," said the
lieutenant, who had never before been at Les Aigues, and who was
glancing over a glass of champagne at the circling nymphs that
supported the ceiling.

"We intend to defend it to the death," said Blondet.

"If I say that," continued the lieutenant, looking at his sergeant as
if to enjoin silence, "it is because the general's enemies are not
only among the peasantry--"

The worthy man was quite moved by the excellence of the breakfast, the
magnificence of the silver service, the imperial luxury that
surrounded him, and Blondet's clever talk excited him as much as the
champagne he had imbibed.

"Enemies! have I enemies?" said the general, surprised.

"He, so kind!" added the countess.

"But you are on bad terms with our mayor, Monsieur Gaubertin," said
the lieutenant. "It would be wise, for the sake of the future, to be
reconciled with him."

"With him!" cried the count. "Then you don't know that he was my
former steward, and a swindler!"

"A swindler no longer," said the lieutenant, "for he is mayor of
Ville-aux-Fayes."

"Ha, ha!" laughed Blondet, "the lieutenant's wit is keen; evidently a
mayor is essentially an honest man."

The lieutenant, convinced by the count's words that it was useless to
attempt to enlighten him, said no more on that subject, and the
conversation changed.



CHAPTER VI

THE FOREST AND THE HARVEST

The scene at Conches had, apparently, a good effect on the peasantry;
on the other hand, the count's faithful keepers were more than ever
watchful that only dead wood should be gathered in the forest of Les
Aigues. But for the last twenty years the woods had been so thoroughly
cleared out that very little else than live wood was now there; and
this the peasantry set about killing, in preparation for winter, by a
simple process, the results of which could only be discovered in the
course of time. Tonsard's mother went daily into the forest; the
keepers saw her enter; knew where she would come out; watched for her
and made her open her bundle, where, to be sure, were only fallen
branches, dried chips, and broken and withered twigs. The old woman
would whine and complain at the distance she had to go at her age to
gather such a miserable bunch of fagots. But she did not tell that she
had been in the thickest part of the wood and had removed the earth at
the base of certain young trees, round which she had then cut off a
ring of bark, replacing the earth, moss, and dead leaves just as they
were before she touched them. It was impossible that any one could
discover this annular incision, made, not like a cut, but more like
the ripping or gnawing of animals or those destructive insects called
in different regions borers, or turks, or white worms, which are the
first stage of cockchafers. These destructive pests are fond of the
bark of trees; they get between the bark and the sap-wood and eat
their way round. If the tree is large enough for the insect to pass
into its second state (of larvae, in which it remains dormant until
its second metamorphose) before it has gone round the trunk, the tree
lives, because so long as even a small bit of the sap-wood remains
covered by the bark, the tree will still grow and recover itself. To
realize to what a degree entomology affects agriculture, horticulture,
and all earth products, we must know that naturalists like Latreille,
the Comte Dejean, Klugg of Berlin, Gene of Turin, etc., find that the
vast majority of all known insects live at the sacrifice of
vegetation; that the coleoptera (a catalogue of which has lately been
published by Monsieur Dejean) have twenty-seven thousand species, and
that, in spite of the most earnest research on the part of
entomologists of all countries, there is an enormous number of species
of whom they cannot trace the triple transformations which belong to
all insects; that there is, in short, not only a special insect to
every plant, but that all terrestrial products, however much they may
be manipulated by human industry, have their particular parasite. Thus
flax, after covering the human body and hanging the human being, after
roaming the world on the back of an army, becomes writing-paper; and
those who write or who read are familiar with the habits and morals of
an insect called the "paper-louse," an insect of really marvellous
celerity and behavior; it undergoes its mysterious transformations in
a ream of white paper which you have carefully put away; you see it
gliding and frisking along in its shining robe, that looks like
isinglass or mica,--truly a little fish of another element.

The borer is the despair of the land-owner; he works underground; no
Sicilian vespers for him until he becomes a cockchafer! If the
populations only realized with what untold disasters they are
threatened in case they let the cockchafers and the caterpillars get
the upper hand, they would pay more attention than they do to
municipal regulations.

Holland came near perishing; its dikes were undermined by the teredo,
and science is unable to discover the insect from which that mollusk
derives, just as science still remains ignorant of the metamorphoses
of the cochineal. The ergot, or spur, of rye is apparently a
population of insects where the genius of science has been able, so
far, to discover only one slight movement. Thus, while awaiting the
harvest and gleaning, fifty old women imitated the borer at the feet
of five or six hundred trees which were fated to become skeletons and
to put forth no more leaves in the spring. They were carefully chosen
in the least accessible places, so that the surrounding branches
concealed them.

Who conveyed the secret information by which this was done? No one.
Courtecuisse happened to complain in Tonsard's tavern of having found
a tree wilting in his garden; it seemed he said, to have a disease,
and he suspected a borer; for he, Courtecuisse, knew what borers were,
and if they once circled a tree just below the ground, the tree died.
Thereupon he explained the process. The old women at once set to work
at the same destruction, with the mystery and cleverness of gnomes;
and their efforts were doubled by the rules now enforced by the mayor
of Blangy and necessarily followed by the mayors of the adjoining
districts.

The great land-owners of the department applauded General de
Montcornet's course; and the prefect in his private drawing-room
declared that if, instead of living in Paris, other land-owners would
come and live on their estates and follow such a course together, a
solution of the difficulty could be obtained; for certain measures,
added the prefect, ought to be taken, and taken in concert, modified
by benefactions and by an enlightened philanthropy, such as every one
could see actuated in General Montcornet.

The general and his wife, assisted by the abbe, tried the effects of
such benevolence. They studied the subject, and endeavored to show by
incontestable results to those who pillaged them that more money could
be made by legitimate toil. They supplied flax and paid for the
spinning; the countess had the thread woven into linen suitable for
towels, aprons, and coarse napkins for kitchen use, and for
underclothing for the very poor. The general began improvements which
needed many laborers, and he employed none but those in the adjoining
districts. Sibilet was in charge of the works and the Abbe Brossette
gave the countess lists of the most needy, and often brought them to
her himself. Madame de Montcornet attended to these matters personally
in the great antechamber which opened upon the portico. It was a
beautiful waiting-room, floored with squares of white and red marble,
warmed by a porcelain stove, and furnished with benches covered with
red plush.

It was there that one morning, just before harvest, old Mother Tonsard
brought her granddaughter Catherine, who had to make, she said, a
dreadful confession,--dreadful for the honor of a poor but honest
family. While the old woman addressed the countess Catherine stood in
an attitude of conscious guilt. Then she related on her own account
the unfortunate "situation" in which she was placed, which she had
confided to none but her grandmother; for her mother, she knew, would
turn her out, and her father, an honorable man, might kill her. If she
only had a thousand francs she could be married to a poor laborer
named Godain, who _knew all_, and who loved her like a brother; he could
buy a poor bit of ground and build a cottage if she had that sum. It
was very touching. The countess promised the money; resolving to
devote the price of some fancy to this marriage. The happy marriages
of Michaud and Groison encouraged her. Besides, such a wedding would
be a good example to the people of the neighborhood and stimulate to
virtuous conduct. The marriage of Catherine Tonsard and Godain was
accordingly arranged by means of the countess's thousand francs.

Another time a horrible old woman, Mother Bonnebault, who lived in a
hut between the gate of Conches and the village, brought back a great
bundle of skeins of linen thread.

"Madame la comtesse has done wonders," said the abbe, full of hope as
to the moral progress of his savages. "That old woman did immense
damage to your woods, but now she has no time for it; she stays at
home and spins from morning till night; her time is all taken up and
well paid for."

Peace reigned everywhere. Groison made very satisfactory reports;
depredations seemed to have ceased, and it is even possible that the
state of the neighborhood and the feeling of the inhabitants might
really have changed if it had not been for the revengeful eagerness of
Gaubertin, the cabals of the leading society of Soulanges, and the
intrigues of Rigou, who one and all, with "the affair" in view, blew
the embers of hatred and crime in the hearts of the peasantry of the
valley des Aigues.

The keepers still complained of finding a great many branches cut with
shears in the deeper parts of the wood and left to dry, evidently as a
provision for winter. They watched for the delinquents without ever
being able to catch them. The count, assisted by Groison, had given
certificates of pauperism to only thirty or forty of the real poor of
the district; but the other two mayors had been less strict. The more
clement the count showed himself in the affair at Conches the more
determined he was to enforce the laws about gleaning, which had now
degenerated into theft. He did not interfere with the management of
three of his farms which were leased to tenants, nor with those whose
tenants worked for his profit, of which he had a number; but he
managed six farms himself, each of about two hundred acres, and he now
published a notice that it was forbidden, under pain of being arrested
and made to pay the fine imposed by the courts, to enter those fields
before the crop was carried away. The order concerned only his own
immediate property. Rigou, who knew the country well, had let his
farm-lands in portions and on short leases to men who knew how to get
in their own crops, and who paid him in grain; therefore gleaning did
not affect him. The other proprietors were peasants, and no nefarious
gleaning was attempted on their land.

When the harvest began the count went himself to Michaud to see how
things were going on. Groison, who advised him to do this, was to be
present himself at the gleaning of each particular field. The
inhabitants of cities can have no idea what gleaning is to the
inhabitants of the country; the passion of these sons of the soil for
it seems inexplicable; there are women who will give up well-paid
employments to glean. The wheat they pick up seems to them sweeter
than any other; and the provision they thus make for their chief and
most substantial food has to them an extraordinary attraction. Mothers
take their babes and their little girls and boys; the feeblest old men
drag themselves into the wheat-fields; and even those who own property
are paupers for the nonce. All gleaners appear in rags.

The count and Michaud were present on horseback when the first
tattered batch entered the first fields from which the wheat had been
carried. It was ten o'clock in the morning. August had been a hot
month, the sky was cloudless, blue as a periwinkle; the earth was
baked, the wheat flamed, the harvestmen worked with their faces
scorched by the reflection of the sun-rays on the hard and arid earth.
All were silent, their shirts wet with perspiration; while from time
to time, they slaked their thirst with water from round, earthenware
jugs, furnished with two handles and a mouth-piece stoppered with a
willow stick.

At the father end of the stubble-field stood the carts which contained
the sheaves, and near them a group of at least a hundred beings who
far exceeded the hideous conceptions of Murillo and Teniers, the
boldest painters of such scenes, or of Callot, that poet of the
fantastic in poverty. The pictured bronze legs, the bare heads, the
ragged garments so curiously faded, so damp with grease, so darned and
spotted and discolored, in short, the painters' ideal of the material
of abject poverty was far surpassed by this scene; while the
expression on those faces, greedy, anxious, doltish, idiotic, savage,
showed the everlasting advantage which nature possesses over art by
its comparison with the immortal compositions of those princes of
color. There were old women with necks like turkeys, and hairless,
scarlet eyelids, who stretched their heads forward like setters before
a partridge; there were children, silent as soldiers under arms,
little girls who stamped like animals waiting for their food; the
natures of childhood and old age were crushed beneath the fierceness
of a savage greed,--greed for the property of others now their own by
long abuse. All eyes were savage, all gestures menacing; but every one
kept silence in presence of the count, the field-keeper, and the
bailiff. At this moment all classes were represented,--the great
land-owners, the farmers, the working men, the paupers; the social
question was defined to the eye; hunger had convoked the actors in the
scene. The sun threw into relief the hard and hollow features of those
faces; it burned the bare feet dusty with the soil; children were present
with no clothing but a torn blouse, their blond hair tangled with
straw and chips; some women brought their babes just able to walk, and
left them rolling in the furrows.

The gloomy scene was harrowing to the old soldier, whose heart was
kind, and he said to Michaud: "It pains me to see it. One must know
the importance of these measures to be able to insist upon them."

"If every land-owner followed your example, lived on his property, and
did the good that you and yours are doing, general, there would be, I
won't say no poor, for they are always with us, but no poor man who
could not live by his labor."