Sons of the Soil

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


Blondet did not proceed far on his morning walk, for he was presently
brought to a stand-still by the sight of a peasant,--one of those who,
in this drama, are supernumeraries so essential to its action that it
may be doubted whether they are not in fact its leading actors.

When the clever journalist reached a group of rocks where the main
stream is imprisoned, as it were, between two portals, he saw a man
standing so motionless as to excite his curiosity, while the clothes
and general air of this living statue greatly puzzled him.

The humble personage before him was a living presentment of the old
men dear to Charlet's pencil; resembling the troopers of that Homer of
soldiery in a strong frame able to endure hardship, and his immortal
skirmishers in a fiery, crimson, knotted face, showing small capacity
for submission. A coarse felt hat, the brim of which was held to the
crown by stitches, protected a nearly bald head from the weather;
below it fell a quantity of white hair which a painter would gladly
have paid four francs an hour to copy,--a dazzling mass of snow, worn
like that in all the classical representations of Deity. It was easy
to guess from the way in which the cheeks sank in, continuing the
lines of the mouth, that the toothless old fellow was more given to
the bottle than the trencher. His thin white beard gave a threatening
expression to his profile by the stiffness of its short bristles. The
eyes, too small for his enormous face, and sloping like those of a
pig, betrayed cunning and also laziness; but at this particular moment
they were gleaming with the intent look he cast upon the river. The
sole garments of this curious figure were an old blouse, formerly
blue, and trousers of the coarse burlap used in Paris to wrap bales.
All city people would have shuddered at the sight of his broken
sabots, without even a wisp of straw to stop the cracks; and it is
very certain that the blouse and the trousers had no money value at
all except to a paper-maker.

As Blondet examined this rural Diogenes, he admitted the possibility
of a type of peasantry he had seen in old tapestries, old pictures,
old sculptures, and which, up to this time, had seemed to him
imaginary. He resolved for the future not to utterly condemn the
school of ugliness, perceiving a possibility that in man beauty may be
but the flattering exception, a chimera in which the race struggles to
believe.

"What can be the ideas, the morals, the habits, of such a being? What
is he thinking of?" thought Blondet, seized with curiosity. "Is he my
fellow-creature? We have nothing in common but shape, and even
that!--"

He noticed in the old man's limbs the peculiar rigidity of the tissues
of persons who live in the open air, accustomed to the inclemencies of
the weather and to the endurance of heat and cold,--hardened to
everything, in short,--which makes their leathern skin almost a hide,
and their nerves an apparatus against physical pain almost as powerful
as that of the Russians or the Arabs.

"Here's one of Cooper's Red-skins," thought Blondet; "one needn't go
to America to study savages."

Though the Parisian was less than ten paces off, the old man did not
turn his head, but kept looking at the opposite bank with a fixity
which the fakirs of India give to their vitrified eyes and their
stiffened joints. Compelled by the power of a species of magnetism,
more contagious than people have any idea of, Blondet ended by gazing
at the water himself.

"Well, my good man, what do you see there?" he asked, after the lapse
of a quarter of an hour, during which time he saw nothing to justify
this intent contemplation.

"Hush!" whispered the old man, with a sign to Blondet not to ruffle
the air with his voice; "You will frighten it--"

"What?"

"An otter, my good gentleman. If it hears us it'll go quick under
water. I'm certain it jumped there; see! see! there, where the water
bubbles! Ha! it sees a fish, it is after that! But my boy will grab it
as it comes back. The otter, don't you know, is very rare; it is
scientific game, and good eating, too. I get ten francs for every one
I carry to Les Aigues, for the lady fasts Fridays, and to-morrow is
Friday. Years agone the deceased madame used to pay me twenty francs,
and gave me the skin to boot! Mouche," he called, in a low voice,
"watch it!"

Blondet now perceived on the other side of the river two bright eyes,
like those of a cat, beneath a tuft of alders; then he saw the tanned
forehead and tangled hair of a boy about ten years of age, who was
lying on his stomach and making signs towards the otter to let his
master know he kept it well in sight. Blondet, completely mastered by
the eagerness of the old man and boy, allowed the demon of the chase
to get the better of him,--that demon with the double claws of hope
and curiosity, who carries you whithersoever he will.

"The hat-makers buy the skin," continued the old man; "it's so soft,
so handsome! They cover caps with it."

"Do you really think so, my old man?" said Blondet, smiling.

"Well truly, my good gentleman, you ought to know more than I, though
I am seventy years old," replied the old fellow, very humbly and
respectfully, falling into the attitude of a giver of holy water;
"perhaps you can tell me why conductors and wine-merchants are so fond
of it?"

Blondet, a master of irony, already on his guard from the word
"scientific," recollected the Marechal de Richelieu and began to
suspect some jest on the part of the old man; but he was reassured by
his artless attitude and the perfectly stupid expression of his face.

"In my young days we had lots of otters," whispered the old fellow;
"but they've hunted 'em so that if we see the tail of one in seven
years it is as much as ever we do. And the sub-prefect at
Ville-aux-Fayes,--doesn't monsieur know him? though he be a Parisian,
he's a fine young man like you, and he loves curiosities,--so, as I was
saying, hearing of my talent for catching otters, for I know 'em as
you know your alphabet, he says to me like this: 'Pere Fourchon,' says
he, 'when you find an otter bring it to me, and I'll pay you well; and
if it's spotted white on the back,' says he, 'I'll give you thirty
francs.' That's just what he did say to me as true as I believe in God
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And there's a learned man at
Soulanges, Monsieur Gourdon, our doctor, who is making, so they tell
me, a collection of natural history which hasn't its mate at Dijon
even; indeed he is first among the learned men in these parts, and
he'll pay me a fine price, too; he stuffs men and beasts. Now my boy
there stands me out that that otter has got the white spots. 'If
that's so,' says I to him, 'then the good God wishes well to us this
morning!' Ha! didn't you see the water bubble? yes, there it is! there
it is! Though it lives in a kind of a burrow, it sometimes stays whole
days under water. Ha, there! it heard you, my good gentleman; it's on
its guard now; for there's not a more suspicious animal on earth; it's
worse than a woman."

"So you call women suspicious, do you?" said Blondet.

"Faith, monsieur, if you come from Paris you ought to know about that
better than I. But you'd have done better for me if you had stayed in
your bed and slept all the morning; don't you see that wake there?
that's where she's gone under. Get up, Mouche! the otter heard
monsieur talking, and now she's scary enough to keep us at her heels
till midnight. Come, let's be off! and good-bye to our thirty francs!"

Mouche got up reluctantly; he looked at the spot where the water
bubbled, pointed to it with his finger and seemed unable to give up
all hope. The child, with curly hair and a brown face, like the angels
in a fifteenth-century picture, seemed to be in breeches, for his
trousers ended at the knee in a ragged fringe of brambles and dead
leaves. This necessary garment was fastened upon him by cords of
tarred oakum in guise of braces. A shirt of the same burlap which made
the old man's trousers, thickened, however, by many darns, open in
front showed a sun-burnt little breast. In short, the attire of the
being called Mouche was even more startlingly simple than that of Pere
Fourchon.

"What a good-natured set of people they are here," thought Blondet;
"if a man frightened away the game of the people of the suburbs of
Paris, how their tongues would maul him!"

As he had never seen an otter, even in a museum, he was delighted with
this episode of his early walk. "Come," said he, quite touched when
the old man walked away without asking him for a compensation, "you
say you are a famous otter catcher. If you are sure there is an otter
down there--"

From the other side of the water Mouche pointed his finger to certain
air-bubbles coming up from the bottom of the Avonne and bursting on
its surface.

"It has come back!" said Pere Fourchon; "don't you see it breathe, the
beggar? How do you suppose they manage to breathe at the bottom of the
water? Ah, the creature's so clever it laughs at science."

"Well," said Blondet, who supposed the last word was a jest of the
peasantry in general rather than of this peasant in particular, "wait
and catch the otter."

"And what are we to do about our day's work, Mouche and I?"

"What is your day worth?"

"For the pair of us, my apprentice and me?--Five francs," said the old
man, looking Blondet in the eye with a hesitation which betrayed an
enormous overcharge.

The journalist took ten francs from his pocket, saying, "There's ten,
and I'll give you ten more for the otter."

"And it won't cost you dear if there's white on its back; for the
sub-prefect told me there wasn't one o' them museums that had the like;
but he knows everything, our sub-prefect,--no fool he! If I hunt the
otter, he, M'sieur des Lupeaulx, hunts Mademoiselle Gaubertin, who has
a fine white 'dot' on her back. Come now, my good gentleman, if I may
make so bold, plunge into the middle of the Avonne and get to that
stone down there. If we head the otter off, it will come down stream;
for just see their slyness, the beggars! they always go above their
burrow to feed, for, once full of fish, they know they can easily
drift down, the sly things! Ha! if I'd been trained in their school I
should be living now on an income; but I was a long time finding out
that you must go up stream very early in the morning if you want to
bag the game before others. Well, somebody threw a spell over me when
I was born. However, we three together ought to be slyer than the
otter."

"How so, my old necromancer?"

"Why, bless you! we are as stupid as the beasts, and so we come to
understand the beasts. Now, see, this is what we'll do. When the otter
wants to get home Mouche and I'll frighten it here, and you'll
frighten it over there; frightened by us and frightened by you it will
jump on the bank, and when it takes to earth, it is lost! It can't
run; it has web feet for swimming. Ho, ho! it will make you laugh,
such floundering! you don't know whether you are fishing or hunting!
The general up at Les Aigues, I have known him to stay here three days
running, he was so bent on getting an otter."

Blondet, armed with a branch cut for him by the old man, who requested
him to whip the water with it when he called to him, planted himself
in the middle of the river by jumping from stone to stone.

"There, that will do, my good gentleman."

Blondet stood where he was told without remarking the lapse of time,
for every now and then the old fellow made him a sign as much as to
say that all was going well; and besides, nothing makes time go so
fast as the expectation that quick action is to succeed the perfect
stillness of watching.

"Pere Fourchon," whispered the boy, finding himself alone with the old
man, "there's _really_ an otter!"

"Do you see it?"

"There, see there!"

The old fellow was dumb-founded at beholding under water the
reddish-brown fur of an actual otter.

"It's coming my way!" said the child.

"Hit him a sharp blow on the head and jump into the water and hold him
fast down, but don't let him go!"

Mouche dove into the water like a frightened frog.

"Come, come, my good gentleman," cried Pere Fourchon to Blondet,
jumping into the water and leaving his sabots on the bank, "frighten
him! frighten him! Don't you see him? he is swimming fast your way!"

The old man dashed toward Blondet through the water, calling out with
the gravity that country people retain in the midst of their greatest
excitements:--

"Don't you see him, there, along the rocks?"

Blondet, placed by direction of the old fellow in such a way that the
sun was in his eyes, thrashed the water with much satisfaction to
himself.

"Go on, go on!" cried Pere Fourchon; "on the rock side; the burrow is
there, to your left!"

Carried away by excitement and by his long waiting, Blondet slipped
from the stones into the water.

"Ha! brave you are, my good gentleman! Twenty good Gods! I see him
between your legs! you'll have him!-- Ah! there! he's gone--he's
gone!" cried the old man, in despair.

Then, in the fury of the chase, the old fellow plunged into the
deepest part of the stream in front of Blondet.

"It's your fault we've lost him!" he cried, as Blondet gave him a hand
to pull him out, dripping like a triton, and a vanquished triton. "The
rascal, I see him, under those rocks! He has let go his fish,"
continued Fourchon, pointing to something that floated on the surface.
"We'll have that at any rate; it's a tench, a real tench."

Just then a groom in livery on horseback and leading another horse by
the bridle galloped up the road toward Conches.

"See! there's the chateau people sending after you," said the old man.
"If you want to cross back again I'll give you a hand. I don't mind
about getting wet; it saves washing!"

"How about rheumatism?"

"Rheumatism! don't you see the sun has browned our legs, Mouche and
me, like tobacco-pipes. Here, lean on me, my good gentleman--you're
from Paris; you don't know, though you _do_ know so much, how to walk on
our rocks. If you stay here long enough, you'll learn a deal that's
written in the book o' nature,--you who write, so they tell me, in the
newspapers."

Blondet had reached the bank before Charles, the groom, perceived him.

"Ah, monsieur!" he cried; "you don't know how anxious Madame has been
since she heard you had gone through the gate of Conches; she was
afraid you were drowned. They have rung the great bell three times,
and Monsieur le cure is hunting for you in the park."

"What time is it, Charles?"

"A quarter to twelve."

"Help me to mount."

"Ha!" exclaimed the groom, noticing the water that dripped from
Blondet's boots and trousers, "has monsieur been taken in by Pere
Fourchon's otter?"

The words enlightened the journalist.

"Don't say a word about it, Charles," he cried, "and I'll make it all
right with you."

"Oh, as for that!" answered the man, "Monsieur le comte himself has
been taken in by that otter. Whenever a visitor comes to Les Aigues,
Pere Fourchon sets himself on the watch, and if the gentleman goes to
see the sources of the Avonne he sells him the otter; he plays the
trick so well that Monsieur le comte has been here three times and
paid him for six days' work, just to stare at the water!"

"Heavens!" thought Blondet. "And I imagined I had seen the greatest
comedians of the present day!--Potier, the younger Baptiste, Michot,
and Monrose. What are they compared to that old beggar?"

"He is very knowing at the business, Pere Fourchon is," continued
Charles; "and he has another string to his bow, besides. He calls
himself a rope-maker, and has a walk under the park wall by the gate
of Blangy. If you merely touch his rope he'll entangle you so cleverly
that you will want to turn the wheel and make a bit of it yourself;
and for that you would have to pay a fee for apprenticeship. Madame
herself was taken in, and gave him twenty francs. Ah! he is the king
of tricks, that old fellow!"

The groom's gossip set Blondet thinking of the extreme craftiness and
wiliness of the French peasant, of which he had heard a great deal
from his father, a judge at Alencon. Then the satirical meaning hidden
beneath Pere Fourchon's apparent guilelessness came back to him, and
he owned himself "gulled" by the Burgundian beggar.

"You would never believe, monsieur," said Charles, as they reached the
portico at Les Aigues, "how much one is forced to distrust everybody
and everything in the country,--especially here, where the general is
not much liked--"

"Why not?"

"That's more than I know," said Charles, with the stupid air servants
assume to shield themselves when they wish not to answer their
superiors, which nevertheless gave Blondet a good deal to think of.

"Here you are, truant!" cried the general, coming out on the terrace
when he heard the horses. "Here he is; don't be uneasy!" he called
back to his wife, whose little footfalls were heard behind him. "Now
the Abbe Brossette is missing. Go and find him, Charles," he said to
the groom.



CHAPTER III

THE TAVERN

The gate of Blangy, built by Bouret, was formed of two wide pilasters
of projecting rough-hewn stone; each surmounted by a dog sitting on
his haunches and holding an escutcheon between his fore paws. The
proximity of a small house where the steward lived dispensed with the
necessity for a lodge. Between the two pilasters, a sumptuous iron
gate, like those made in Buffon's time for the Jardin des Plantes,
opened on a short paved way which led to the country road (formerly
kept in order by Les Aigues and the Soulanges family) which unites
Conches, Cerneux, Blangy, and Soulanges to Ville-aux-Fayes, like a
wreath, for the whole road is lined with flowering hedges and little
houses covered with roses and honey-suckle and other climbing plants.

There, along a pretty wall which extends as far as a terrace from
which the land of Les Aigues falls rapidly to the valley till it meets
that of Soulanges, are the rotten posts, the old wheel, and the forked
stakes which constituted the manufactory of the village rope-maker.

Soon after midday, while Blondet was seating himself at table opposite
the Abbe Brossette and receiving the tender expostulations of the
countess, Pere Fourchon and Mouche arrived at this establishment. From
that vantage-ground Pere Fourchon, under pretence of rope-making,
could watch Les Aigues and see every one who went in and out. Nothing
escaped him, the opening of the blinds, tete-a-tete loiterings, or the
least little incidents of country life, were spied upon by the old
fellow, who had set up this business within the last three years,--a
trifling circumstance which neither the masters, nor the servants, nor
the keepers of Les Aigues had as yet remarked upon.

"Go round to the house by the gate of the Avonne while I put away the
tackle," said Pere Fourchon to his attendant, "and when you have
blabbed about the thing, they'll no doubt send after me to the
Grand-I-Vert, where I am going for a drop of drink,--for it makes one
thirsty enough to wade in the water that way. If you do just as I tell
you, you'll hook a good breakfast out of them; try to meet the
countess, and give a slap at me, and that will put it into her head to
come and preach morality or something! There's lots of good wine to
get out of it."

After these last instructions, which the sly look in Mouche's face
rendered quite superfluous, the old peasant, hugging the otter under
his arm, disappeared along the country road.

Half-way between the gate and the village there stood, at the time
when Emile Blondet stayed at Les Aigues, one of those houses which are
never seen but in parts of France where stone is scarce. Bits of
bricks picked up anywhere, cobblestones set like diamonds in the clay
mud, formed very solid walls, though worn in places; the roof was
supported by stout branches and covered with rushes and straw, while
the clumsy shutters and the broken door--in short, everything about
the cottage was the product of lucky finds, or of gifts obtained by
begging.

The peasant has an instinct for his habitation like that of an animal
for its nest or its burrow, and this instinct was very marked in all
the arrangements of this cottage. In the first place, the door and the
window looked to the north. The house, placed on a little rise in the
stoniest angle of a vineyard, was certainly healthful. It was reached
by three steps, carefully made with stakes and planks filled in with
broken stone and gravel, so that the water ran off rapidly; and as the
rain seldom comes from the northward in Burgundy, no dampness could
rot the foundations, slight as they were. Below the steps and along
the path ran a rustic paling, hidden beneath a hedge of hawthorn and
sweet-brier. An arbor, with a few clumsy tables and wooden benches,
filled the space between the cottage and the road, and invited the
passers-by to rest themselves. At the upper end of the bank by the
house roses grew, and wall-flowers, violets, and other flowers that
cost nothing. Jessamine and honey-suckle had fastened their tendrils
on the roof, mossy already, though the building was far from old.

To the right of the house, the owner had built a stable for two cows.
In front of this erection of old boards, a sunken piece of ground
served as a yard where, in a corner, was a huge manure-heap. On the
other side of the house and the arbor stood a thatched shed, supported
on trunks of trees, under which the various outdoor properties of the
peasantry were put away,--the utensils of the vine-dressers, their
empty casks, logs of wood piled about a mound which contained the
oven, the mouth of which opened, as was usual in the houses of the
peasantry, under the mantle-piece of the chimney in the kitchen.

About an acre of land adjoined the house, inclosed by an evergreen
hedge and planted with grape-vines; tended as peasants tend them,
--that is to say, well-manured, and dug round, and layered so that they
usually set their fruit before the vines of the large proprietors in a
circuit of ten miles round. A few trees, almond, plum, and apricot,
showed their slim heads here and there in this enclosure. Between the
rows of vines potatoes and beans were planted. In addition to all
this, on the side towards the village and beyond the yard was a bit of
damp low ground, favorable for the growth of cabbages and onions
(favorite vegetables of the working-classes), which was closed by a
wooden gate, through which the cows were driven, trampling the path
into mud and covering it with dung.

The house, which had two rooms on the ground-floor, opened upon the
vineyard. On this side an outer stairway, roofed with thatch and
resting against the wall of the house, led up to the garret, which was
lighted by one round window. Under this rustic stairway opened a
cellar built of Burgundy brick, containing several casks of wine.

Though the kitchen utensils of the peasantry are usually only two,
namely, a frying-pan and an iron pot, with which they manage to do all
their cooking, exceptions to this rule, in the shape of two enormous
saucepans hanging beneath the mantle-shelf and above a small portable
stove, were to be seen in this cottage. In spite, however, of this
indication of luxury, the furniture was in keeping with the external
appearance of the place. A jar held water, the spoons were of wood or
pewter, the dishes, of red clay without and white within, were scaling
off and had been mended with pewter rivets; the heavy table and chairs
were of pine wood, and for flooring there was nothing better than the
hardened earth. Every fifth year the walls received a coat of
white-wash and so did the narrow beams of the ceiling, from which hung
bacon, strings of onions, bundles of tallow candles, and the bags in
which a peasant keeps his seeds; near the bread-box stood an
old-fashioned wardrobe in walnut, where the scanty household linen,
and the one change of garments together with the holiday attire of the
entire family were kept.

Above the mantel of the chimney gleamed a poacher's old gun, not worth
five francs,--the wood scorched, the barrel to all appearances never
cleaned. An observer might reflect that the protection of a hovel with
only a latch, and an outer gate that was only a paling and never
closed, needed no better weapon; but still the wonder was to what use
it was put. In the first place, though the wood was of the commonest
kind, the barrel was carefully selected, and came from a valuable gun,
given in all probability to a game-keeper. Moreover, the owner of this
weapon never missed his aim; there was between him and his gun the
same intimate acquaintance that there is between a workman and his
tool. If the muzzle must be raised or lowered the merest fraction in
its aim, because it carries just an atom above or below the range, the
poacher knows it; he obeys the rule and never misses. An officer of
artillery would have found the essential parts of this weapon in good
condition notwithstanding its uncleanly appearance. In all that the
peasant appropriates to his use, in all that serves him, he displays
just the amount of force that is needed, neither more nor less; he
attends to the essential and to nothing beyond. External perfection he
has no conception of. An unerring judge of the necessary in all
things, he thoroughly understands degrees of strength, and knows very
well when working for an employer how to give the least possible for
the most he can get. This contemptible-looking gun will be found to
play a serious part in the life of the family inhabiting this cottage,
and you will presently learn how and why.