Sons of the Soil

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Gaubertin--and this trait is frequently to be seen in the majority of
those professions in which the property of others can be taken by
means not foreseen by the Code--considered himself a perfectly honest
man. In the first place, he had so long had possession of the money
extorted from Mademoiselle Laguerre's farmers through fear, and paid
in assignats, that he regarded it as legitimately acquired. It was a
mere matter of exchange. He thought that in the end he should have
quite as much risk with coin as with paper. Besides, legally,
Mademoiselle had no right to receive any payment except in assignats.
"Legally" is a fine, robust adverb, which bolsters up many a fortune!
Moreover, he reflected that ever since great estates and land-agents
had existed, that is, ever since the origin of society, the said
agents had set up, for their own use, an argument such as we find our
cooks using in this present day. Here it is, in its simplicity:--

"If my mistress," says the cook, "went to market herself, she would
have to pay more for her provisions than I charge her; she is the
gainer, and the profits I make do more good in my hands than in those
of the dealers."

"If Mademoiselle," thought Gaubertin, "were to manage Les Aigues
herself, she would never get thirty thousand francs a year out of it;
the peasants, the dealers, the workmen would rob her of the rest. It
is much better that I should have it, and so enable her to live in
peace."

The Catholic religion, and it alone, is able to prevent these
capitulations of conscience. But, ever since 1789 religion has no
influence on two thirds of the French people. The peasants, whose
minds are keen and whose poverty drives them to imitation, had
reached, specially in the valley of Les Aigues, a frightful state of
demoralization. They went to mass on Sundays, but only at the outside
of the church, where it was their custom to meet and transact business
and make their weekly bargains.

We can now estimate the extent of the evil done by the careless
indifference of the great singer to the management of her property.
Mademoiselle Laguerre betrayed, through mere selfishness, the
interests of those who owned property, who are held in perpetual
hatred by those who own none. Since 1792 the land-owners of Paris have
become of necessity a combined body. If, alas, the feudal families,
less numerous than the middle-class families, did not perceive the
necessity of combining in 1400 under Louis XI., nor in 1600 under
Richelieu, can we expect that in this nineteenth century of progress
the middle classes will prove to be more permanently and solidly
combined that the old nobility? An oligarchy of a hundred thousand
rich men presents all the dangers of a democracy with none of its
advantages. The principle of "every man for himself and for his own,"
the selfishness of individual interests, will kill the oligarchical
selfishness so necessary to the existence of modern society, and which
England has practised with such success for the last three centuries.
Whatever may be said or done, land-owners will never understand the
necessity of the sort of internal discipline which made the Church
such an admirable model of government, until, too late, they find
themselves in danger from one another. The audacity with which
communism, that living and acting logic of democracy, attacks society
from the moral side, shows plainly that the Samson of to-day, grown
prudent, is undermining the foundations of the cellar, instead of
shaking the pillars of the hall.



CHAPTER VII

CERTAIN LOST SOCIAL SPECIES

The estate of Les Aigues could not do without a steward; for the
general had no intention of renouncing his winter pleasures in Paris,
where he owned a fine house in the rue Neuve-des-Mathurines. He
therefore looked about for a successor to Gaubertin; but it is very
certain that his search was not as eager as that of Gaubertin himself,
who was seeking for the right person to put in his way.

Of all confidential positions there is none that requires more trained
knowledge of its kind, or more activity, than that of land-steward to
a great estate. The difficulty of finding the right man is only fully
known to those wealthy landlords whose property lies beyond a certain
circle around Paris, beginning at a distance of about one hundred and
fifty miles. At that point agricultural productions for the markets of
Paris, which warrant rentals on long leases (collected often by other
tenants who are rich themselves), cease to be cultivated. The farmers
who raise them drive to the city in their own cabriolets to pay their
rents in good bank-bills, unless they send the money through their
agents in the markets. For this reason, the farms of the Seine-et-Oise,
Seine-et-Marne, the Oise, the Eure-et-Loir, the Lower Seine, and
the Loiret are so desirable that capital cannot always be invested
there at one and a half per cent. Compared to the returns on estates
in Holland, England, and Belgium, this result is enormous. But at one
hundred miles from Paris an estate requires such variety of working,
its products are so different in kind, that it becomes a business,
with all the risks attendant on manufacturing. The wealthy owner is
really a merchant, forced to look for a market for his products, like
the owner of ironworks or cotton factories. He does not even escape
competition; the peasant, the small proprietor, is at his heels with
an avidity which leads to transactions to which well-bred persons
cannot condescend.

A land-steward must understand surveying, the customs of the locality,
the methods of sale and of labor, together with a little quibbling in
the interests of those he serves; he must also understand book-keeping
and commercial matters, and be in perfect health, with a liking for
active life and horse exercise. His duty being to represent his master
and to be always in communication with him, the steward ought not to
be a man of the people. As the salary of his office seldom exceeds
three thousand francs, the problem seems insoluble. How is it possible
to obtain so many qualifications for such a very moderate price,--in a
region, moreover, where the men who are provided with them are
admissible to all other employments? Bring down a stranger to fill the
place, and you will pay dear for the experience he must acquire. Train
a young man on the spot, and you are more than likely to get a thorn
of ingratitude in your side. It therefore becomes necessary to choose
between incompetent honesty, which injures your property through its
blindness and inertia, and the cleverness which looks out for itself.
Hence the social nomenclature and natural history of land-stewards as
defined by a great Polish noble.

"There are," he said, "two kinds of stewards: he who thinks only of
himself, and he who thinks of himself and of us; happy the land-owner
who lays his hands on the latter! As for the steward who would think
only of us, he is not to be met with."

Elsewhere can be found a steward who thought of this master's
interests as well as of his own. ("Un Debut dans la vie," "Scenes de
la vie privee.") Gaubertin is the steward who thinks of himself only.
To represent the third figure of the problem would be to hold up to
public admiration a very unlikely personage, yet one that was not
unknown to the old nobility, though he has, alas! disappeared with
them. (See "Le Cabinet des Antiques," "Scenes de la vie de province.")
Through the endless subdivision of fortunes aristocratic habits and
customs are inevitably changed. If there be not now in France twenty
great fortunes managed by intendants, in fifty years from now there
will not be a hundred estates in the hands of stewards, unless a great
change is made in the law. Every land-owner will be brought by that
time to look after his own interests.

This transformation, already begun, suggested the following answer of
a clever woman when asked why, since 1830, she stayed in Paris during
the summer. "Because," she said, "I do not care to visit chateaux
which are now turned into farms." What is to be the future of this
question, getting daily more and more imperative,--that of man to man,
the poor man and the rich man? This book is written to throw some
light upon that terrible social question.

It is easy to understand the perplexities which assailed the general
after he had dismissed Gaubertin. While saying to himself, vaguely,
like other persons free to do or not to do a thing, "I'll dismiss that
scamp"; he had overlooked the risk and forgotten the explosion of his
boiling anger,--the anger of a choleric fire-eater at the moment when
a flagrant imposition forced him to raise the lids of his wilfully
blind eyes.

Montcornet, a land-owner for the first time and a denizen of Paris,
had not provided himself with a steward before coming to Les Aigues;
but after studying the neighborhood carefully he saw it was
indispensable to a man like himself to have an intermediary to manage
so many persons of low degree.

Gaubertin, who discovered during the excitement of the scene (which
lasted more than two hours) the difficulties in which the general
would soon be involved, jumped on his pony after leaving the room
where the quarrel took place, and galloped to Soulanges to consult the
Soudrys. At his first words, "The general and I have parted; whom can
we put in my place without his suspecting it?" the Soudrys understood
their friend's wishes. Do not forget that Soudry, for the last
seventeen years chief of police of the canton, was doubly shrewd
through his wife, an adept in the particular wiliness of a
waiting-maid of an Opera divinity.

"We may go far," said Madame Soudry, "before we find any one to suit
the place as well as our poor Sibilet."

"Made to order!" exclaimed Gaubertin, still scarlet with
mortification. "Lupin," he added, turning to the notary, who was
present, "go to Ville-aux-Fayes and whisper it to Marechal, in case
that big fire-eater asks his advice."

Marechal was the lawyer whom his former patron, when buying Les Aigues
for the general, had recommended to Monsieur de Montcornet as legal
adviser.

Sibilet, eldest son of the clerk of the court at Ville-aux-Fayes, a
notary's clerk, without a penny of his own, and twenty-five years old,
had fallen in love with the daughter of the chief-magistrate of
Soulanges. The latter, named Sarcus, had a salary of fifteen hundred
francs, and was married to a woman without fortune, the eldest sister
of Monsieur Vermut, the apothecary of Soulanges. Though an only
daughter, Mademoiselle Sarcus, whose beauty was her only dowry, could
scarcely have lived on the salary paid to a notary's clerk in the
provinces. Young Sibilet, a relative of Gaubertin, by a connection
rather difficult to trace through family ramifications which make
members of the middle classes in all the smaller towns cousins to each
other, owed a modest position in a government office to the assistance
of his father and Gaubertin. The unlucky fellow had the terrible
happiness of being the father of two children in three years. His own
father, blessed with five, was unable to assist him. His wife's father
owned nothing beside his house at Soulanges and an income of two
thousand francs. Madame Sibilet the younger spent most of her time at
her father's home with her two children, where Adolphe Sibilet, whose
official duty obliged him to travel through the department, came to
see her from time to time.

Gaubertin's exclamation, though easy to understand from this summary
of young Sibilet's life, needs a few more explanatory details.

Adolphe Sibilet, supremely unlucky, as we have shown by the foregoing
sketch of him, was one of those men who cannot reach the heart of a
woman except by way of the altar and the mayor's office. Endowed with
the suppleness of a steel-spring, he yielded to pressure, certain to
revert to his first thought. This treacherous habit is prompted by
cowardice; but the business training which Sibilet underwent in the
office of a provincial notary had taught him the art of concealing
this defect under a gruff manner which simulated a strength he did not
possess. Many false natures mask their hollowness in this way; be
rough with them in return and the effect produced is that of a balloon
collapsed by a prick. Such was Sibilet. But as most men are not
observers, and as among observers three fourths observe only after a
thing has taken place, Adolphe Sibilet's grumbling manner was
considered the result of an honest frankness, of a capacity much
praised by his master, and of a stubborn uprightness which no
temptation could shake. Some men are as much benefited by their
defects as others by their good qualities.

Adeline Sarcus, a pretty young woman, brought up by a mother (who died
three years before her marriage) as well as a mother can educate an
only daughter in a remote country town, was in love with the handsome
son of Lupin, the Soulanges notary. At the first signs of this
romance, old Lupin, who intended to marry his son to Mademoiselle
Elise Gaubertin, lost no time in sending young Amaury Lupin to Paris,
to the care of his friend and correspondent Crottat, the notary,
where, under pretext of drawing deeds and contracts, Amaury committed
a variety of foolish acts, and made debts, being led thereto by a
certain Georges Marest, a clerk in the same office, but a rich young
man, who revealed to him the mysteries of Parisian life. By the time
Lupin the elder went to Paris to bring back his son, Adeline Sarcus
had become Madame Sibilet. In fact, when the adoring Adolphe offered
himself, her father, the old magistrate, prompted by young Lupin's
father, hastened the marriage, to which Adeline yielded in sheer
despair.

The situation of clerk in a government registration office is not a
career. It is, like other such places which admit of no rise, one of
the many holes of the government sieve. Those who start in life in
these holes (the topographical, the professorial, the highway-and-canal
departments) are apt to discover, invariably too late, that cleverer
men then they, seated beside them, are fed, as the Opposition writers
say, on the sweat of the people, every time the sieve dips down into
the taxation-pot by means of a machine called the budget. Adolphe,
working early and late and earning little, soon found out the barren
depths of his hole; and his thoughts busied themselves, as he trotted
from township to township, spending his salary in shoe-leather and
costs of travelling, with how to find a permanent and more profitable
place.

No one can imagine, unless he happens to squint and to have two
legitimate children, what ambitions three years of misery and love had
developed in this young man, who squinted both in mind and vision, and
whose happiness halted, as it were, on one leg. The chief cause of
secret evil deeds and hidden meanness is, perhaps, an incompleted
happiness. Man can better bear a state of hopeless misery than those
terrible alternations of love and sunshine with continual rain. If the
body contracts disease, the mind contracts the leprosy of envy. In
petty minds that leprosy becomes a base and brutal cupidity, both
insolent and shrinking; in cultivated minds it fosters anti-social
doctrines, which serve a man as footholds by which to rise above his
superiors. May we not dignify with the title of proverb the pregnant
saying, "Tell me what thou hast, and I will tell thee of what thou art
thinking"?

Though Adolphe loved his wife, his hourly thought was: "I have made a
mistake; I have three balls and chains, but I have only two legs. I
ought to have made my fortune before I married. I could have found an
Adeline any day; but Adeline stands in the way of my getting a fortune
now."

Adolphe had been to see his relation Gaubertin three times in three
years. A few words exchanged between them let Gaubertin see the muck
of a soul ready to ferment under the hot temptations of legal robbery.
He warily sounded a nature that could be warped to the exigencies of
any plan, provided it was profitable. At each of the three visits
Sibilet grumbled at his fate.

"Employ me, cousin," he said; "take me as a clerk and make me your
successor. You shall see how I work. I am capable of overthrowing
mountains to give my Adeline, I won't say luxury, but a modest
competence. You made Monsieur Leclercq's fortune; why won't you put me
in a bank in Paris?"

"Some day, later on, I'll find you a place," Gaubertin would say;
"meantime make friends and acquaintance; such things help."

Under these circumstances the letter which Madame Soudry hastily
dispatched brought Sibilet to Soulanges through a region of castles in
the air. His father-in-law, Sarcus, whom the Soudrys advised to take
steps in the interest of his daughter, had gone in the morning to see
the general and to propose Adolphe for the vacant post. By advice of
Madame Soudry, who was the oracle of the little town, the worthy man
had taken his daughter with him; and the sight of her had had a
favorable effect upon the Comte de Montcornet.

"I shall not decide," he answered, "without thoroughly informing
myself about all applicants; but I will not look elsewhere until I
have examined whether or not your son-in-law possesses the
requirements for the place." Then, turning to Madame Sibilet he added,
"The satisfaction of settling so charming a person at Les Aigues--"

"The mother of two children, general," said Adeline, adroitly, to
evade the gallantry of the old cuirassier.

All the general's inquiries were cleverly anticipated by the Soudrys,
Gaubertin, and Lupin, who quietly obtained for their candidate the
influence of the leading lawyers in the capital of the department,
where a royal court held sessions,--such as Counsellor Gendrin, a
distant relative of the judge at Ville-aux-Fayes; Baron Bourlac,
attorney-general; and another counsellor named Sarcus, a cousin thrice
removed of the candidate. The verdict of every one to whom the general
applies was favorable to the poor clerk,--"so interesting," as they
called him. His marriage had made Sibilet as irreproachable as a novel
of Miss Edgeworth's, and presented him, moreover, in the light of a
disinterested man.

The time which the dismissed steward remained at Les Aigues until his
successor could be appointed was employed in creating troubles and
annoyances for his late master; one of the little scenes which he thus
played off will give an idea of several others.

The morning of his final departure he contrived to meet, as it were
accidentally, Courtecuisse, the only keeper then employed at Les
Aigues, the great extent of which really needed at least three.

"Well, Monsieur Gaubertin," said Courtecuisse, "so you have had
trouble with the count?"

"Who told you that?" answered Gaubertin. "Well, yes; the general
expected to order us about as he did his cavalry; he didn't know
Burgundians. The count is not satisfied with my services, and as I am
not satisfied with his ways, we have dismissed each other, almost with
fisticuffs, for he raged like a whirlwind. Take care of yourself,
Courtecuisse! Ah! my dear fellow, I expected to give you a better
master."

"I know that," said the keeper, "and I'd have served you well. Hang
it, when friends have known each other for twenty years, you know! You
put me here in the days of the poor dear sainted Madame. Ah, what a
good woman she was! none like her now! The place has lost a mother."

"Look here, Courtecuisse, if you are willing, you might help us to a
fine stroke."

"Then you are going to stay here? I heard you were off to Paris."

"No; I shall wait to see how things turn out; meantime I shall do
business at Ville-aux-Fayes. The general doesn't know what he is
dealing with in these parts; he'll make himself hated, don't you see?
I shall wait for what turns up. Do your work here gently; he'll tell
you to manage the people with a high hand, for he begins to see where
his crops and his woods are running to; but you'll not be such a fool
as to let the country-folk maul you, and perhaps worse, for the sake
of his timber."

"But he would send me away, dear Monsieur Gaubertin, he would get rid
of me! and you know how happy I am living there at the gate of the
Avonne."

"The general will soon get sick of the whole place," replied
Gaubertin; "you wouldn't be long out even if he did happen to send you
away. Besides, you know those woods," he added, waving his hand at the
landscape; "I am stronger there than the masters."

This conversation took place in an open field.

"Those 'Arminac' Parisian fellows ought to stay in their own mud,"
said the keeper.

Ever since the quarrels of the fifteenth century the word 'Arminac'
(Armagnacs, Parisians, enemies of the Dukes of Burgundy) has continued
to be an insulting term along the borders of Upper Burgundy, where it
is differently corrupted according to locality.

"He'll go back to it when beaten," said Gaubertin, "and we'll plough
up the park; for it is robbing the people to allow a man to keep nine
hundred acres of the best land in the valley for his own pleasure."

"Four hundred families could get their living from it," said
Courtecuisse.

"If you want two acres for yourself you must help us to drive that cur
out," remarked Gaubertin.

At the very moment that Gaubertin was fulminating this sentence of
excommunication, the worthy Sarcus was presenting his son-in-law
Sibilet to the Comte de Montcornet. They had come with Adeline and the
children in a wicker carryall, lent by Sarcus's clerk, a Monsieur
Gourdon, brother of the Soulanges doctor, who was richer than the
magistrate himself. The general, pleased with the candor and dignity
of the justice of the peace, and with the graceful bearing of Adeline
(both giving pledges in good faith, for they were totally ignorant of
the plans of Gaubertin), at once granted all requests and gave such
advantages to the family of the new land-steward as to make the
position equal to that of a sub-prefect of the first class.

A lodge, built by Bouret as an object in the landscape and also as a
home for the steward, an elegant little building, the architecture of
which was sufficiently shown in the description of the gate of Blangy,
was promised to the Sibilets for their residence. The general also
conceded the horse which Mademoiselle Laguerre had provided for
Gaubertin, in consideration of the size of the estate and the distance
he had to go to the markets where the business of the property was
transacted. He allowed two hundred bushels of wheat, three hogsheads
of wine, wood in sufficient quantity, oats and barley in abundance,
and three per cent on all receipts of income. Where the latter in
Mademoiselle Laguerre's time had amounted to forty thousand francs,
the general now, in 1818, in view of the purchases of land which
Gaubertin had made for her, expected to receive at least sixty
thousand. The new land-steward might therefore receive before long
some two thousand francs in money. Lodged, fed, warmed, relieved of
taxes, the costs of a horse and a poultry-yard defrayed for him, and
allowed to plant a kitchen-garden, with no questions asked as to the
day's work of the gardener, certainly such advantages represented much
more than another two thousand francs; for a man who was earning a
miserable salary of twelve hundred francs in a government office to
step into the stewardship of Les Aigues was a change from poverty to
opulence.

"Be faithful to my interests," said the general, "and I shall have
more to say to you. Doubtless I could get the collection of the rents
of Conches, Blangy, and Cerneux taken away from the collection of
those of Soulanges and given to you. In short, when you bring me in a
clear sixty thousand a year from Les Aigues you shall be still further
rewarded."

Unfortunately, the worthy justice and his daughter, in the flush of
their joy, told Madame Soudry the promise the general had made about
these collections, without reflecting that the present collector of
Soulanges, a man named Guerbet, brother of the postmaster of Conches,
was closely allied, as we shall see later, with Gaubertin and the
Gendrins.

"It won't be so easy to do it, my dear," said Madame Soudry; "but
don't prevent the general from making the attempt; it is wonderful how
easily difficult things are done in Paris. I have seen the Chevalier
Gluck at dear Madame's feet to get her to sing his music, and she did,
--she who so adored Piccini, one of the finest men of his day; never
did _he_ come into Madame's room without catching me round the waist and
calling me a dear rogue."

"Ha!" cried Soudry, when his wife reported this news, "does he think
he is going to lead the notary by the nose, and upset everything to
please himself and make the whole valley march in line, as he did his
cuirassiers? These military fellows have a habit of command!--but
let's have patience; Monsieur de Soulanges and Monsieur de
Ronquerolles will be on our side. Poor Guerbet! he little suspects who
is trying to pluck the best roses out of his garland!"