Sons of the Soil

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


Have you now taken in all the many details of this hovel, planted
about five hundred feet away from the pretty gate of Les Aigues? Do
you see it crouching there, like a beggar beside a palace? Well, its
roof covered with velvet mosses, its clacking hens, its grunting pig,
its straying heifer, all its rural graces have a horrible meaning.

Fastened to a pole, which was stuck in the ground beside the entrance
through the fence, was a withered bunch of three pine branches and
some old oak-leaves tied together with a rag. Above the door of the
house a roving artist had painted, probably in return for his
breakfast, a huge capital "I" in green on a white ground two feet
square; and for the benefit of those who could read, this witty joke
in twelve letters: "Au Grand-I-Vert" (hiver). On the left of the door
was a vulgar sign bearing, in colored letters, "Good March beer," and
the picture of a foaming pot of the same, with a woman, in a dress
excessively low-necked, on one side, and an hussar on the other,--both
coarsely colored. Consequently, in spite of the blooming flowers and
the fresh country air, this cottage exhaled the same strong and
nauseous odor of wine and food which assails you in Paris as you pass
the door of the cheap cook-shops of the faubourg.

Now you know the surroundings. Behold the inhabitants and hear their
history, which contains more than one lesson for philanthropists.

The proprietor of the Grand-I-Vert, named Francois Tonsard, commends
himself to the attention of philosophers by the manner in which he had
solved the problem of an idle life and a busy life, so as to make the
idleness profitable, and occupation nil.

A jack-of-all-trades, he knew how to cultivate the ground, but for
himself only. For others, he dug ditches, gathered fagots, barked the
trees, or cut them down. In all such work the employer is at the mercy
of the workman. Tonsard owned his plot of ground to the generosity of
Mademoiselle Laguerre. In his early youth he had worked by the day for
the gardener at Les Aigues; and he really had not his equal in
trimming the shrubbery-trees, the hedges, the horn-beams, and the
horse-chestnuts. His very name shows hereditary talent. In remote
country-places privileges exist which are obtained and preserved with
as much care as the merchants of a city display in getting theirs.
Mademoiselle Laguerre was one day walking in the garden, when she
overheard Tonsard, then a strapping fellow, say, "All I need to live
on, and live happily, is an acre of land." The kind creature,
accustomed to make others happy, gave him the acre of vineyard near
the gate of Blangy, in return for one hundred days' work (a delicate
regard for his feelings which was little understood), and allowed him
to stay at Les Aigues, where he lived with her servants, who thought
him one of the best fellows in Burgundy.

Poor Tonsard (that is what everybody called him) worked about thirty
days out of the hundred that he owed; the rest of the time he idled
about, talking and laughing with Mademoiselle's women, particularly
with Mademoiselle Cochet, the lady's maid, though she was ugly, like
all confidential maids of handsome actresses. Laughing with
Mademoiselle Cochet signified so many things that Soudry, the
fortunate gendarme mentioned in Blondet's letter, still looked askance
at Tonsard after the lapse of nearly twenty-five years. The walnut
wardrobe, the bedstead with the tester and curtains, and the ornaments
about the bedroom were doubtless the result of the said laughter.

Once in possession of his care, Tonsard replied to the first person
who happened to mention that Mademoiselle Laguerre had given it to
him, "I've bought it deuced hard, and paid well for it. Do rich folks
ever give us anything? Are one hundred days' work nothing? It has cost
me three hundred francs, and the land is all stones." But that speech
never got beyond the regions of his own class.

Tonsard built his house himself, picking up the materials here and
there as he could,--getting a day's work out of this one and that one,
gleaning in the rubbish that was thrown away, often asking for things
and always obtaining them. A discarded door cut in two for convenience
in carrying away became the door of the stable; the window was the
sash of a green-house. In short, the rubbish of the chateau, served to
build the fatal cottage.

Saved from the draft by Gaubertin, the steward of Les Aigues, whose
father was prosecuting-attorney of the department, and who, moreover,
could refuse nothing to Mademoiselle Cochet, Tonsard married as soon
as his house was finished and his vines had begun to bear. A
well-grown fellow of twenty-three, in everybody's good graces at Les
Aigues, on whom Mademoiselle had bestowed an acre of her land, and who
appeared to be a good worker, he had the art to ring the praises of
his negative merits, and so obtained the daughter of a farmer on the
Ronquerolles estate, which lies beyond the forest of Les Aigues.

This farmer held the lease of half a farm, which was going to ruin in
his hands for want of a helpmate. A widower, and inconsolable for the
loss of his wife, he tried to drown his troubles, like the English, in
wine, and then, when he had put the poor deceased out of his mind, he
found himself married, so the village maliciously declared, to a woman
named Boisson. From being a farmer he became once more a laborer, but
an idle and drunken laborer, quarrelsome and vindictive, capable of
any ill-deed, like most of his class when they fall from a well-to-do
state of life into poverty. This man, whose practical information and
knowledge of reading and writing placed him far above his fellow-workmen,
while his vices kept him at the level of pauperism, you have already
seen on the banks of the Avonne, measuring his cleverness with that of
one of the cleverest men in Paris, in a bucolic overlooked by Virgil.

Pere Fourchon, formerly a schoolmaster at Blangy, lost that place
through misconduct and his singular ideas as to public education. He
helped the children to make paper boats with their alphabets much
oftener than he taught them how to spell; he scolded them in so
remarkable a manner for pilfering fruit that his lectures might really
have passed for lessons on the best way of scaling the walls. From
teacher he became a postman. In this capacity, which serves as a
refuge to many an old soldier, Pere Fourchon was daily reprimanded.
Sometimes he forgot the letters in a tavern, at other times he kept
them in his pocket. When he was drunk he left those for one village in
another village; when he was sober he read them. Consequently, he was
soon dismissed. No longer able to serve the State, Pere Fourchon ended
by becoming a manufacturer. In the country a poor man can always get
something to do, and make at least a pretence of gaining an honest
livelihood. At sixty-eight years of age the old man started his
rope-walk, a manufactory which requires the very smallest capital. The
workshop is, as we have seen, any convenient wall; the machinery costs
about ten francs. The apprentice slept, like his master, in a hay-loft,
and lived on whatever he could pick up. The rapacity of the law in
the matter of doors and windows expires "sub dio." The tow to make
the first rope can be borrowed. But the principal revenue of Pere
Fourchon and his satellite Mouche, the natural son of one of his
natural daughters, came from the otters; and then there were
breakfasts and dinners given them by peasants who could neither read
nor write, and were glad to use the old fellow's talents when they had
a bill to make out, or a letter to dispatch. Besides all this, he knew
how to play the clarionet, and he went about with his friend
Vermichel, the miller of Soulanges, to village weddings and the grand
balls given at the Tivoli of Soulanges.

Vermichel's name was Michel Vert, but the transposition was so
generally used that Brunet, the clerk of the municipal court of
Soulanges, was in the habit of writing Michel-Jean-Jerome Vert, called
Vermichel, practitioner. Vermichel, a famous violin in the Burgundian
regiment of former days, had procured for Pere Fourchon, in
recognition of certain services, a situation as practitioner, which in
remote country-places usually devolves on those who are able to sign
their name. Pere Fourchon therefore added to his other avocations that
of witness, or practitioner of legal papers, whenever the Sieur Brunet
came to draw them in the districts of Cerneux, Conches, and Blangy.
Vermichel and Fourchon, allied by a friendship of twenty years'
tippling, might really be considered a business firm.

Mouche and Fourchon, bound together by vice as Mentor and Telemachus
by virtue, travelled like the latter, in search of their father,
"panis angelorum,"--the only Latin words which the old fellow's memory
had retained. They went about scraping up the pickings of the
Grand-I-Vert, and those of the adjacent chateaux; for between them, in
their busiest and most prosperous years, they had never contrived to
make as much as three hundred and sixty fathoms of rope. In the first
place, no dealer within a radius of fifty miles would have trusted his
tow to either Mouche or Fourchon. The old man, surpassing the miracles
of modern chemistry, knew too well how to resolve the tow into the
all-benignant juice of the grape. Moreover, his triple functions of
public writer for three townships, legal practitioner for one, and
clarionet-player at large, hindered, so he said, the development of his
business.

Thus it happened that Tonsard was disappointed from the start in the
hope he had indulged of increasing his comfort by an increase of
property in marriage. The idle son-in-law had chanced, by a very
common accident, on an idler father-in-law. Matters went all the worse
because Tonsard's wife, gifted with a sort of rustic beauty, being
tall and well-made, was not fond of work in the open air. Tonsard
blamed his wife for her father's short-comings, and ill-treated her,
with the customary revenge of the common people, whose minds take in
only an effect and rarely look back to causes.

Finding her fetters heavy, the woman lightened them. She used
Tonsard's vices to get the better of him. Loving comfort and good
eating herself, she encouraged his idleness and gluttony. In the first
place, she managed to procure the good-will of the servants of the
chateau, and Tonsard, in view of the results, made no complaint as to
the means. He cared very little what his wife did, so long as she did
all he wanted of her. That is the secret agreement of many a
household. Madame Tonsard established the wine-shop of the
Grand-I-Vert, her first customers being the servants of Les Aigues and
the keepers and huntsmen.

Gaubertin, formerly steward to Mademoiselle Laguerre, one of La
Tonsard's chief patrons, gave her several puncheons of excellent wine
to attract custom. The effect of these gifts (continued as long as
Gaubertin remained a bachelor) and the fame of her rather lawless
beauty commended this beauty to the Don Juans of the valley, and
filled the wine-shop of the Grand-I-Vert. Being a lover of good
eating, La Tonsard was naturally an excellent cook; and though her
talents were only exercised on the common dishes of the country,
jugged hare, game sauce, stewed fish and omelets, she was considered
in all the country round to be an admirable cook of the sort of food
which is eaten at a counter and spiced in a way to excite a desire for
drink. By the end of two years, she had managed to rule Tonsard, and
turn him to evil courses, which, indeed, he asked no better than to
indulge in.

The rascal was continually poaching, and with nothing to fear from it.
The intimacies of his wife with Gaubertin and the keepers and the
rural authorities, together with the laxity of the times, secured him
impunity. As soon as his children were large enough he made them
serviceable to his comfort, caring no more for their morality than for
that of his wife. He had two sons and two daughters. Tonsard, who
lived, as did his wife, from hand to mouth, might have come to an end
of this easy life if he had not maintained a sort of martial law over
his family, which compelled them to work for the preservation of it.
When he had brought up his children, at the cost of those from whom
his wife was able to extort gifts, the following charter and budget
were the law at the Grand-I-Vert.

Tonsard's old mother and his two daughters, Catherine and Marie, went
into the woods at certain seasons twice a-day, and came back laden
with fagots which overhung the crutch of their poles at least two feet
beyond their heads. Though dried sticks were placed on the outside of
the heap, the inside was made of live wood cut from young trees. In
plain words, Tonsard helped himself to his winter's fuel in the woods
of Les Aigues. Besides this, father and sons were constantly poaching.
From September to March, hares, rabbits, partridges, deer, in short,
all the game that was not eaten at the chateau, was sold at Blangy and
at Soulanges, where Tonsard's two daughters peddled milk in the early
mornings,--coming back with the news of the day, in return for the
gossip they carried about Les Aigues, and Cerneux, and Conches. In the
months when the three Tonsards were unable to hunt with a gun, they
set traps. If the traps caught more game than they could eat, La
Tonsard made pies of it and sent them to Ville-aux-Fayes. In
harvest-time seven Tonsards--the old mother, the two sons (until they
were seventeen years of age), the two daughters, together with old
Fourchon and Mouche--gleaned, and generally brought in about sixteen
bushels a day of all grains, rye, barley, wheat, all good to grind.

The two cows, led to the roadside by the youngest girl, always managed
to stray into the meadows of Les Aigues; but as, if it ever chanced
that some too flagrant trespass compelled the keepers to take notice
of it, the children were either whipped or deprived of a coveted
dainty, they had acquired such extraordinary aptitude in hearing the
enemy's footfall that the bailiff or the park-keeper of Les Aigues was
very seldom able to detect them. Besides, the relations of those
estimable functionaries with Tonsard and his wife tied a bandage over
their eyes. The cows, held by long ropes, obeyed a mere twitch or a
special low call back to the roadside, knowing very well that, the
danger once past, they could finish their browsing in the next field.
Old mother Tonsard, who was getting more and more infirm, succeeded
Mouche in his duties, after Fourchon, under pretence of caring for his
natural grandson's education, kept him to himself; while Marie and
Catherine made hay in the woods. These girls knew the exact spots
where the fine forest-grass abounded, and there they cut and spread
and cocked and garnered it, supplying two thirds, at least, of the
winter fodder, and leading the cows on all fine days to sheltered
nooks where they could still find pasture. In certain parts of the
valley of Les Aigues, as in all places protected by a chain of
mountains, in Piedmont and in Lombardy for instance, there are spots
where the grass keeps green all the year. Such fields, called in Italy
"marciti," are of great value; though in France they are often in
danger of being injured by snow and ice. This phenomenon is due, no
doubt, to some favorable exposure, and to the infiltration of water
which keeps the ground at a warmer temperature.

The calves were sold for about eighty francs. The milk, deducting the
time when the cows calved or went dry, brought in about one hundred
and sixty francs a year besides supplying the wants of the family.
Tonsard himself managed to earn another hundred and sixty by doing odd
jobs of one kind or another.

The sale of food and wine in the tavern, after all costs were paid,
returned a profit of about three hundred francs, for the great
drinking-bouts happened only at certain times and in certain seasons;
and as the topers who indulged in them gave Tonsard and his wife due
notice, the latter bought in the neighboring town the exact quantity
of provisions needed and no more. The wine produced by Tonsard's
vineyard was sold in ordinary years for twenty francs a cask to a
wine-dealer at Soulanges with whom Tonsard was intimate. In very
prolific years he got as much as twelve casks from his vines; but
eight was the average; and Tonsard kept half for his own traffic. In
all wine-growing districts the gleaning of the large vineyards gives a
good perquisite, and out of it the Tonsard family usually managed to
obtain three casks more. But being, as we have seen, sheltered and
protected by the keepers, they showed no conscience in their
proceedings,--entering vineyards before the harvesters were out of
them, just as they swarmed into the wheat-fields before the sheaves
were made. So, the seven or eight casks of wine, as much gleaned as
harvested, were sold for a good price. However, out of these various
proceeds the Grand-I-Vert was mulcted in a good sum for the personal
consumption of Tonsard and his wife, who wanted the best of everything
to eat, and better wine than they sold,--which they obtained from
their friend at Soulanges in payment for their own. In short, the
money scraped together by this family amounted to about nine hundred
francs, for they fattened two pigs a year, one for themselves and the
other to sell.

The idlers and scapegraces and also the laborers took a fancy to the
tavern of the Grand-I-Vert, partly because of La Tonsard's merits, and
partly on account of the hail-fellow-well-met relation existing
between this family and the lower classes of the valley. The two
daughters, both remarkably handsome, followed the example of their
mother as to morals. Moreover, the long established fame of the
Grand-I-Vert, dating from 1795, made it a venerable spot in the eyes of
the common people. From Conches to Ville-aux-Fayes, workmen came there
to meet and make their bargains and hear the news collected by the
Tonsard women and by Mouche and old Fourchon, or supplied by Vermichel
and Brunet, that renowned official, when he came to the tavern in
search of his practitioner. There the price of hay and of wine was
settled; also that of a day's work and of piece-work. Tonsard, a
sovereign judge in such matters, gave his advice and opinion while
drinking with his guests. Soulanges, according to a saying in these
parts, was a town for society and amusement only, while Blangy was a
business borough; crushed, however, by the great commercial centre of
Ville-aux-Fayes, which had become in the last twenty-five years the
capital of this flourishing valley. The cattle and grain market was
held at Blangy, in the public square, and the prices there obtained
served as a tariff for the whole arrondissement.

By staying in the house and doing no out-door work, La Tonsard
continued fresh and fair and dimpled, in comparison with the women who
worked in the fields and faded as rapidly as the flowers, becoming old
and haggard before they were thirty. She liked to be well-dressed. In
point of fact, she was only clean, but in a village cleanliness is a
luxury. The daughters, better dressed than their means warranted,
followed their mother's example. Beneath their outer garment, which
was relatively handsome, they wore linen much finer than that of the
richest peasant women. On fete-days they appeared in dresses that were
really pretty, obtained, Heaven knows how! For one thing, the
men-servants at Les Aigues sold to them, at prices that were easily
paid, the cast-off clothing of the lady's-maids, which, after sweeping
the streets of Paris and being made over to fit Marie and Catherine,
appeared triumphantly in the precincts of the Grand-I-Vert. These
girls, bohemians of the valley, received not one penny in money from
their parents, who gave them food only, and the wretched pallets on
which they slept with their grandmother in the barn, where their
brothers also slept, curled up in the hay like animals. Neither father
nor mother paid any heed to this propinquity.

The iron age and the age of gold are more alike than we think for. In
the one nothing aroused vigilance; in the other, everything rouses it;
the result to society is, perhaps, very much the same. The presence of
old Mother Tonsard, which was more a necessity than a precaution, was
simply one immorality the more. And thus it was that the Abbe
Brossette, after studying the morals of his parishioners, made this
pregnant remark to his bishop:--

"Monseigneur, when I observe the stress that the peasantry lay on
their poverty, I realize how they fear to lose that excuse for their
immorality."

Though everybody knew that the family had no principles and no
scruples, nothing was ever said against the morals of the
Grand-I-Vert. At the beginning of this book it is necessary to
explain, once for all, to persons accustomed to the decencies of
middle-class life, that the peasants have no decency in their
domestic habits and customs. They make no appeal to morality when
their daughters are seduced, unless the seducer is rich and timid.
Children, until the State takes possession of them, are used either
as capital or as instruments of convenience. Self-interest has become,
specially since 1789, the sole motive of the masses; they never ask if
an action is legal or immoral, but only if it is profitable. Morality,
which is not to be confounded with religion, begins only at a certain
competence,--just as one sees, in a higher sphere, how delicacy blossoms
in the soul when fortune decorates the furniture. A positively moral and
upright man is rare among the peasantry. Do you ask why? Among the
many reasons that may be given for this state of things, the principal
one is this: Through the nature of their social functions, the
peasants live a purely material life which approximates to that of
savages, and their constant union with nature tends to foster it. When
toil exhausts the body it takes from the mind its purifying action,
especially among the ignorant. The Abbe Brossette was right in saying
that the state policy of the peasant is his poverty.

Meddling in everybody's interests, Tonsard heard everybody's
complaints, and often instigated frauds to benefit the needy. His
wife, a kindly appearing woman, had a good word for evil-doers, and
never withheld either approval or personal help from her customers in
anything they undertook against the rich. This inn, a nest of vipers,
brisk and venomous, seething and active, was a hot-bed for the hatred
of the peasants and the workingmen against the masters and the
wealthy.

The prosperous life of the Tonsards was, therefore, an evil example.
Others asked themselves why they should not take their wood, as the
Tonsards did, from the forest; why not pasture their cows and have
game to eat and to sell as well as they; why not harvest without
sowing the grapes and the grain. Accordingly, the pilfering thefts
which thin the woods and tithe the ploughed lands and meadows and
vineyards became habitual in this valley, and soon existed as a right
throughout the districts of Blangy, Conches, and Cerneux, all adjacent
to the domain of Les Aigues. This sore, for certain reasons which will
be given in due time, did far greater injury to Les Aigues than to the
estates of Ronquerolles or Soulanges. You must not, however, fancy
that Tonsard, his wife and children, and his old mother ever
deliberately said to themselves, "We will live by theft, and commit it
as cleverly as we can." Such habits grow slowly. To the dried sticks
they added, in the first instance, a single bit of good wood; then,
emboldened by habit and a carefully prepared immunity (necessary to
plans which this history will unfold), they ended at last in cutting
"their wood," and stealing almost their entire livelihood. Pasturage
for the cows and the abuses of gleaning were established as customs
little by little. When the Tonsards and the do-nothings of the valley
had tasted the sweets of these four rights (thus captured by rural
paupers, and amounting to actual robbery) we can easily imagine they
would never give them up unless compelled by a power greater than
their own audacity.

At the time when this history begins Tonsard, then about fifty years
of age, tall and strong, rather stout than thin, with curly black
hair, skin highly colored and marbled like a brick with purple
blotches, yellow whites to the eyes, large ears with broad flaps, a
muscular frame, encased, however, in flabby flesh, a retreating
forehead, and a hanging lip,--Tonsard, such as you see him, hid his
real character under an external stupidity, lightened at times by a
show of experience, which seemed all the more intelligent because he
had acquired in the company of his father-in-law a sort of bantering
talk, much affected by old Fourchon and Vermichel. His nose, flattened
at the end as if the finger of God intended to mark him, gave him a
voice which came from his palate, like that of all persons disfigured
by a disease which thickens the nasal passages, through which the air
then passes with difficulty. His upper teeth overlapped each other,
and this defect (which Lavater calls terrible) was all the more
apparent because they were as white as those of a dog. But for a
certain lawless and slothful good humor, and the free-and-easy ways of
a rustic tippler, the man would have alarmed the least observing of
spectators.