Sons of the Soil

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


To explain the present fortune of the land-steward of Les Aigues
before the judgment-seat of probability, it is necessary to state its
beginnings. Pushed by his father's influence, he became mayor of
Blangy. Thus he was able, contrary to law, to make the debtors pay in
coin, by "terrorizing" (a phrase of the day) such of them as might, in
his opinion, be subjected to the crushing demands of the Republic. He
himself paid the citizens in assignats as long as the system of paper
money lasted,--a system which, if it did not make the nation
prosperous, at least made the fortunes of private individuals. From
1793 to 1795, that is, for three years, Francois Gaubertin wrung one
hundred and fifty thousand francs out of Les Aigues, with which he
speculated on the stock-market in Paris. With her purse full of
assignats Mademoiselle was actually obliged to obtain ready money from
her diamonds, now useless to her. She gave them to Gaubertin, who sold
them, and faithfully returned to her their full price. This proof of
honesty touched her heart; henceforth she believed in Gaubertin as she
did in Piccini.

In 1796, at the time of his marriage with the citoyenne Isaure
Mouchon, daughter of an old "conventional," a friend of his father,
Gaubertin possessed about three hundred and fifty thousand francs in
money. As the Directory seemed to him likely to last, he determined,
before marrying, to have the accounts of his five years' stewardship
ratified by Mademoiselle, under pretext of a new departure.

"I am to be the head of a family," he said to her; "you know the
reputation of land-stewards; my father-in-law is a republican of Roman
austerity, and a man of influence as well; I want to prove to him that
I am as upright as he."

Mademoiselle Laguerre accepted his accounts at once in very flattering
terms.

In those earlier days the steward had endeavored, in order to win the
confidence of Madame des Aigues (as Mademoiselle was then called) to
repress the depredations of the peasantry; fearing, and not without
reason, that the revenues would suffer too severely, and that his
private bonus from the buyers of the timber would sensibly diminish.
But in those days the sovereign people felt the soil was their own
everywhere; Madame was afraid of the surrounding kings and told her
Richelieu that the first desire of her soul was to die in peace. The
revenues of the late singer were so far in excess of her expenses that
she allowed all the worst, and, as it proved, fatal precedents to be
established. To avoid a lawsuit, she allowed the neighbors to encroach
upon her land. Knowing that the park walls were sufficient protection,
she did not fear any interruption of her personal comfort, and cared
for nothing but her peaceful existence, true philosopher that she was!
A few thousand a year more or less, the indemnities exacted by the
wood-merchants for the damages committed by the peasants,--what were
they to a careless and extravagant Opera-girl, who had gained her
hundred thousand francs a year at the cost of pleasure only, and who
had just submitted, without a word of remonstrance, to a reduction of
two thirds of an income of sixty thousand francs?

"Dear me!" she said, in the easy tone of the wantons of the old time,
"people must live, even if they are republicans."

The terrible Mademoiselle Cochet, her maid and female vizier, had
tried to enlighten her mistress when she saw the ascendency Gaubertin
was obtaining over one whom he began by calling "Madame" in defiance
of the revolutionary laws about equality; but Gaubertin, in his turn,
enlightened Mademoiselle Cochet by showing her a so-called
denunciation sent to his father, the prosecuting attorney, in which
she was vehemently accused of corresponding with Pitt and Coburg. From
that time forward the two powers went on shares--shares a la
Montgomery. Cochet praised Gaubertin to Madame, and Gaubertin praised
Cochet. The waiting-maid had already made her own bed, and knew she
was down for sixty thousand francs in the will. Madame could not do
without Cochet, to whom she was accustomed. The woman knew the secrets
of dear mistress's toilet; she alone could put dear mistress to sleep
at night with her gossip, and get her up in the morning with her
flattery; to the day of dear mistress's death the maid never could see
the slightest change in her, and when dear mistress lay in her coffin,
she doubtless thought she had never seen her looking so well.

The annual pickings of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet, their wages
and perquisites, became so large that the most affectionate relative
could not possibly have been more devoted than they to their kindly
mistress. There is really no describing how a swindler cossets his
dupe. A mother is not so tender nor so solicitous for a beloved
daughter as the practitioner of tartuferie for his milch cow. What
brilliant success attends the performance of Tartufe behind the closed
doors of a home! It is worth more than friendship. Moliere died too
soon; he would otherwise have shown us the misery of Orgon, wearied by
his family, harassed by his children, regretting the blandishments of
Tartufe, and thinking to himself, "Ah, those were the good times!"

During the last eight years of her life the mistress of Les Aigues
received only thirty thousand francs of the fifty thousand really
yielded by the estate. Gaubertin had reached the same administrative
results as his predecessor, though farm rents and territorial products
were notably increased between 1791 and 1815,--not to speak of
Madame's continual purchases. But Gaubertin's fixed idea of acquiring
Les Aigues at the old lady's death led him to depreciate the value of
the magnificent estate in the matter of its ostensible revenues.
Mademoiselle Cochet, a sharer in the scheme, was also to share the
profits. As the ex-divinity in her declining years received an income
of twenty thousand francs from the Funds called consolidated (how
readily the tongue of politics can jest!), and with difficulty spent
the said sum yearly, she was much surprised at the annual purchases
made by her steward to use up the accumulating revenues, remembering
how in former times she had always drawn them in advance. The result
of having few wants in her old age seemed, to her mind, a proof of the
honesty and uprightness of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet.

"Two pearls!" she said to the persons who came to see her.

Gaubertin kept his accounts with apparent honesty. He entered all
rentals duly. Everything that could strike the feeble mind of the late
singer, so far as arithmetic went, was clear and precise. The steward
took his commission on all disbursements,--on the costs of working the
estate, on rentals made, on suits brought, on work done, on repairs of
every kind,--details which Madame never dreamed of verifying, and for
which he sometimes charged twice over by collusion with the
contractors, whose silence was bought by permission to charge the
highest prices. These methods of dealing conciliated public opinion in
favor of Gaubertin, while Madame's praise was on every lip; for
besides the payments she disbursed for work, she gave away large sums
of money in alms.

"May God preserve her, the dear lady!" was heard on all sides.

The truth was, everybody got something out of her, either indirectly
or as a downright gift. In reprisals, as it were, of her youth the old
actress was pillaged; so discreetly pillaged, however, that those who
throve upon her kept their depredations within certain limits lest
even her eyes might be opened and she should sell Les Aigues and
return to Paris.

This system of "pickings" was, alas! the cause of Paul-Louis Carter's
assassination; he committed the mistake of advertising the sale of his
estate and allowing it to be known that he should take away his wife,
on whom a number of the Tonsards of Lorraine were battening. Fearing
to lose Madame des Aigues, the marauders on the estate forbore to cut
the young trees, unless pushed to extremities by finding no branches
within reach of shears fastened to long poles. In the interests of
robbery, they did as little harm as they could; although, during the
last years of Madame's life, the habit of cutting wood became more and
more barefaced. On certain clear nights not less than two hundred
bundles were taken. As to the gleaning of fields and vineyards, Les
Aigues lost, as Sibilet had pointed out, not less than one quarter of
its products.

Madame des Aigues had forbidden Cochet to marry during her lifetime,
with the selfishness often shown in all countries by a mistress to a
maid; which is not more irrational than the mania for keeping
possession, until our last gasp, of property that is utterly useless
to our material comfort, at the risk of being poisoned by impatient
heirs. Twenty days after the old lady's burial Mademoiselle Cochet
married the brigadier of the gendarmerie of Soulanges, named Soudry, a
handsome man, forty-two years of age, who, ever since 1800 (in which
year the gendarmerie was formed) had come every day to Les Aigues to
see the waiting-maid, and dined with her at least three times a week
at the Gaubertins'.

During Madame's lifetime dinner was served to her and to her company
by themselves. Neither Cochet nor Gaubertin, in spite of their great
familiarity with the mistress, was ever admitted to her table; the
leading lady of the Academie Royale retained, to her last hour, her
sense of etiquette, her style of dress, her rouge and her heeled
slippers, her carriage, her servants, and the majesty of her
deportment. A divinity at the Opera, a divinity within her range of
Parisian social life, she continued a divinity in the country
solitudes, where her memory is still worshipped, and still holds its
own against that of the old monarchy in the minds of the "best
society" of Soulanges.

Soudry, who had paid his addresses to Mademoiselle Cochet from the
time he first came into the neighborhood, owned the finest house in
Soulanges, an income of six thousand francs, and the prospect of a
retiring pension whenever he should quit the service. As soon as
Cochet became Madame Soudry she was treated with great consideration
in the town. Though she kept the strictest secrecy as to the amount of
her savings,--which were intrusted, like those of Gaubertin, to the
commissary of wine-merchants of the department in Paris, a certain
Leclercq, a native of Soulanges, to whom Gaubertin supplied funds as
sleeping partner in his business,--public opinion credited the former
waiting-maid with one of the largest fortunes in the little town of
twelve hundred inhabitants.

To the great astonishment of every one, Monsieur and Madame Soudry
acknowledged as legitimate, in their marriage contract, a natural son
of the gendarme, to whom, in future, Madame Soudry's fortune was to
descend. At the time when this son was legally supplied with a mother,
he had just ended his law studies in Paris and was about to enter into
practice, with the intention of fitting himself for the magistracy.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that a mutual understanding of
twenty years had produced the closest intimacy between the families of
Gaubertin and Soudry. Both reciprocally declared themselves, to the
end of their days, "urbi et orbi," to be the most upright and
honorable persons in all France. Such community of interests, based on
the mutual knowledge of the secret spots on the white garment of
conscience, is one of the ties least recognized and hardest to untie
in this low world. You who read this social drama, have you never felt
a conviction as to two persons which has led you to say to yourself,
in order to explain the continuance of a faithful devotion which made
your own egotism blush, "They must surely have committed some crime
together"?

After an administration of twenty-five years, Gaubertin, the
land-steward, found himself in possession of six hundred thousand
francs in money, and Cochet had accumulated nearly two hundred and
fifty thousand. The rapid and constant turning over and over of their
funds in the hands of Leclercq and Company (on the quai Bethume, Ile
Saint Louis, rivals of the famous house of Grandet) was a great
assistance to the fortunes of all parties. On the death of Mademoiselle
Laguerre, Jenny, the steward's eldest daughter was asked in marriage by
Leclercq. Gaubertin expected at that time to become owner of Les
Aigues by means of a plot laid in the private office of Lupin, the
notary, whom the steward had set up and maintained in business within
the last twelve years.

Lupin, a son of the former steward of the estate of Soulanges, had
lent himself to various slight peculations,--investments at fifty per
cent below par, notices published surreptitiously, and all the other
manoeuvres, unhappily common in the provinces, to wrap a mantle, as
the saying is, over the clandestine manipulations of property. Lately
a company has been formed in Paris, so they say, to levy contributions
upon such plotters under a threat of outbidding them. But in 1816
France was not, as it is now, lighted by a flaming publicity; the
accomplices might safely count on dividing Les Aigues among them, that
is, between Cochet, the notary, and Gaubertin, the latter of whom
reserved to himself, "in petto," the intention of buying the others
out for a sum down, as soon as the property fairly stood in his own
name. The lawyer employed by the notary to manage the sale of the
estate was under personal obligations to Gaubertin, so that he favored
the spoliation of the heirs, unless any of the eleven farmers of
Picardy should take it into their heads to think they were cheated,
and inquire into the real value of the property.

Just as those interested expected to find their fortunes made, a
lawyer came from Paris on the evening before the final settlement, and
employed a notary at Ville-aux-Fayes, who happened to be one of his
former clerks, to buy the estate of Les Aigues, which he did for
eleven hundred thousand francs. None of the conspirators dared outbid
an offer of eleven hundred thousand francs. Gaubertin suspected some
treachery on Soudry's part, and Soudry and Lupin thought they were
tricked by Gaubertin. But a statement on the part of the purchasing
agent, the notary of Ville-aux-Fayes, disabused them of these
suspicions. The latter, though suspecting the plan formed by
Gaubertin, Lupin, and Soudry, refrained from informing the lawyer in
Paris, for the reason that if the new owners indiscreetly repeated his
words, he would have too many enemies at his heels to be able to stay
where he was. This reticence, peculiar to provincials, was in this
particular case amply justified by succeeding events. If the dwellers
in the provinces are dissemblers, they are forced to be so; their
excuse lies in the danger expressed in the old proverb, "We must howl
with the wolves," a meaning which underlies the character of
Phillinte.

When General Montcornet took possession of Les Aigues, Gaubertin was
no longer rich enough to give up his place. In order to marry his
daughter to a rich banker he was obliged to give her a dowry of two
hundred thousand francs; he had to pay thirty thousand for his son's
practice; and all that remained of his accumulations was three hundred
and seventy thousand, out of which he would be forced, sooner or
later, to pay the dowry of his remaining daughter, Elise, for whom he
hoped to arrange a marriage at least as good as that of her sister.
The steward determined to study the general, in order to find out if
he could disgust him with the place,--hoping still to be able to carry
out his defeated plan in his own interests.

With the peculiar instinct which characterizes those who make their
fortunes by craft, Gaubertin believed in a resemblance of nature
(which was not improbable) between an old soldier and an Opera-singer.
An actress, and a general of the Empire,--surely they would have the
same extravagant habits, the same careless prodigality? To the one as
to the other, riches came capriciously and by lucky chances. If some
soldiers are wily and astute and clever politicians, they are
exceptions; a soldier is, usually, especially an accomplished cavalry
officer like Montcornet, guileless, confident, a novice in business,
and little fitted to understand details in the management of an
estate. Gaubertin flattered himself that he could catch and hold the
general with the same net in which Mademoiselle Laguerre had finished
her days. But it so happened that the Emperor had once, intentionally,
allowed Montcornet to play the same game in Pomerania that Gaubertin
was playing at Les Aigues; consequently, the general fully understood
a system of plundering.

In planting cabbages, to use the expression of the first Duc de Biron,
the old cuirassier sought to divert his mind, by occupation, from
dwelling on his fall. Though he had yielded his "corps d'armee" to the
Bourbons, that duty (performed by other generals and termed the
disbanding of the army of the Loire) could not atone for the crime of
having followed the man of the Hundred-Days to his last battle-field.
In presence of the allied army it was impossible for the peer of 1815
to remain in the service, still less at the Luxembourg. Accordingly,
Montcornet betook himself to the country by advice of a dismissed
marshal, to plunder Nature herself. The general was not deficient in
the special cunning of an old military fox; and after he had spent a
few days in examining his new property, he saw that Gaubertin was a
steward of the old system,--a swindler, such as the dukes and marshals
of the Empire, those mushrooms bred from the common earth, were well
acquainted with.

The wily general, soon aware of Gaubertin's great experience in rural
administration, felt it was politic to keep well with him until he had
himself learned the secrets of it; accordingly, he passed himself off
as another Mademoiselle Laguerre, a course which lulled the steward
into false security. This apparent simple-mindedness lasted all the
time it took the general to learn the strength and weakness of Les
Aigues, to master the details of its revenues and the manner of
collecting them, and to ascertain how and where the robberies
occurred, together with the betterments and economies which ought to
be undertaken. Then, one fine morning, having caught Gaubertin with
his hand in the bag, as the saying is, the general flew into one of
those rages peculiar to the imperial conquerors of many lands. In
doing so he committed a capital blunder,--one that would have ruined
the whole life of a man of less wealth and less consistency than
himself, and from which came the evils, both small and great, with
which the present history teems. Brought up in the imperial school,
accustomed to deal with men as a dictator, and full of contempt for
"civilians," Montcornet did not trouble himself to wear gloves when it
came to putting a rascal of a land-steward out of doors. Civil life
and its precautions were things unknown to the soldier already
embittered by his loss of rank. He humiliated Gaubertin ruthlessly,
though the latter drew the harsh treatment upon himself by a cynical
reply which roused Montcornet's anger.

"You are living off my land," said the general, with jesting severity.

"Do you think I can live off the sky?" returned Gaubertin, with a
sneer.

"Out of my sight, blackguard! I dismiss you!" cried the general,
striking him with his whip,--blows which the steward always denied
having received, for they were given behind closed doors.

"I shall not go without my release in full," said Gaubertin, coldly,
keeping at a distance from the enraged soldier.

"We will see what is thought of you in a police court," replied
Montcornet, shrugging his shoulders.

Hearing the threat, Gaubertin looked at the general and smiled. The
smile had the effect of relaxing Montcornet's arms as though the
sinews had been cut. We must explain that smile.

For the last two years, Gaubertin's brother-in-law, a man named
Gendrin, long a justice of the municipal court of Ville-aux-Fayes, had
become the president of that court through the influence of the Comte
de Soulanges. The latter was made peer of France in 1814, and remained
faithful to the Bourbons during the Hundred-Days, therefore the Keeper
of the Seals readily granted an appointment at his request. This
relationship gave Gaubertin a certain importance in the country. The
president of the court of a little town is, relatively, a greater
personage than the president of one of the royal courts of a great
city, who has various equals, such as generals, bishops, and prefects;
whereas the judge of the court of a small town has none,--the
attorney-general and the sub-prefect being removable at will. Young
Soudry, a companion of Gaubertin's son in Paris as well as at Les
Aigues, had just been appointed assistant attorney in the capital of
the department. Before the elder Soudry, a quartermaster in the
artillery, became a brigadier of gendarmes, he had been wounded in a
skirmish while defending Monsieur de Soulanges, then adjutant-general.
At the time of the creation of the gendarmerie, the Comte de
Soulanges, who by that time had become a colonel, asked for a brigade
for his former protector, and later still he solicited the post we
have named for the younger Soudry. Besides all these influences, the
marriage of Mademoiselle Gaubertin with a wealthy banker of the quai
Bethume made the unjust steward feel that he was far stronger in the
community than a lieutenant-general driven into retirement.

If this history provided no other instruction that that offered by the
quarrel between the general and his steward, it would still be useful
to many persons as a lesson for their conduct in life. He who reads
Machiavelli profitably, knows that human prudence consists in never
threatening; in doing but not saying; in promoting the retreat of an
enemy and never stepping, as the saying is, on the tail of the
serpent; and in avoiding, as one would murder, the infliction of a
blow to the self-love of any one lower than one's self. An injury done
to a person's interest, no matter how great it may be at the time, is
forgiven or explained in the long run; but self-love, vanity, never
ceases to bleed from a wound given, and never forgives it. The moral
being is actually more sensitive, more living as it were, than the
physical being. The heart and the blood are less impressible than the
nerves. In short, our inward being rules us, no matter what we do. You
may reconcile two families who have half-killed each other, as in
Brittany and in La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more
reconcile the calumniators and the calumniated than you can the
spoilers and the despoiled. It is only in epic poems that men curse
each other before they kill. The savage, and the peasant who is much
like a savage, seldom speak unless to deceive an enemy. Ever since
1789 France has been trying to make man believe, against all evidence,
that they are equal. To say to a man, "You are a swindler," may be
taken as a joke; but to catch him in the act and prove it to him with
a cane on his back, to threaten him with a police-court and not follow
up the threat, is to remind him of the inequality of conditions. If
the masses will not brook any species of superiority, is it likely
that a swindler will forgive that of an honest man?

Montcornet might have dismissed his steward under pretext of paying
off a military obligation by putting some old soldier in his place;
Gaubertin and the general would have understood the matter, and the
latter, by sparing the steward's self-love would have given him a
chance to withdraw quietly. Gaubertin, in that case, would have left
his late employer in peace, and possibly he might have taken himself
and his savings to Paris for investment. But being, as he was,
ignominiously dismissed, the man conceived against his late master one
of those bitter hatreds which are literally a part of existence in
provincial life, the persistency, duration, and plots of which would
astonish diplomatists who are trained to let nothing astonish them. A
burning desire for vengeance led him to settle at Ville-aux-Fayes, and
to take a position where he could injure Montcornet and stir up
sufficient enmity against to force him to sell Les Aigues.

The general was deceived by appearances; for Gaubertin's external
behavior was not of a nature to warn or to alarm him. The late steward
followed his old custom of pretending, not exactly poverty, but
limited means. For years he had talked of his wife and three children,
and the heavy expenses of a large family. Mademoiselle Laguerre, to
whom he had declared himself too poor to educate his son in Paris,
paid the costs herself, and allowed her dear godson (for she was
Claude Gaubertin's sponsor) two thousand francs a year.

The day after the quarrel, Gaubertin came, with a keeper named
Courtecuisse, and demanded with much insolence his release in full of
all claims, showing the general the one he had obtained from his late
mistress in such flattering terms, and asking, ironically, that a
search should be made for the property, real and otherwise, which he
was supposed to have stolen. If he had received fees from the
wood-merchants on their purchases and from the farmers on their leases,
Mademoiselle Laguerre, he said, had always allowed it; not only did
she gain by the bargains he made, but everything went on smoothly
without troubling her. The country-people would have died, he
remarked, for Mademoiselle, whereas the general was laying up for
himself a store of difficulties.