SONS OF THE SOIL
By Honore De Balzac
Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
DEDICATION
To Monsieur P. S. B. Gavault.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote these words at the beginning of his
Nouvelle Heloise: “I have seen the morals of my time and I publish
these letters.” May I not say to you, in imitation of that great
writer, “I have studied the march of my epoch and I publish this
work”?
The object of this particular study--startling in its truth so
long as society makes philanthropy a principle instead of
regarding it as an accident--is to bring to sight the leading
characters of a class too long unheeded by the pens of writers who
seek novelty as their chief object. Perhaps this forgetfulness is
only prudence in these days when the people are heirs of all the
sycophants of royalty. We make criminals poetic, we commiserate
the hangman, we have all but deified the proletary. Sects have
risen, and cried by every pen, “Arise, working-men!” just as
formerly they cried, “Arise!” to the “tiers etat.” None of these
Erostrates, however, have dared to face the country solitudes and
study the unceasing conspiracy of those whom we term weak against
those others who fancy themselves strong,--that of the peasant
against the proprietor. It is necessary to enlighten not only the
legislator of to-day but him of to-morrow. In the midst of the
present democratic ferment, into which so many of our writers
blindly rush, it becomes an urgent duty to exhibit the peasant who
renders Law inapplicable, and who has made the ownership of land
to be a thing that is, and that is not.
You are now to behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which
undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides
an acre into a hundred fragments,--ever spurred on to his banquet
by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary
and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the
Revolution, will some day absorb the middle classes, just as the
middle classes have destroyed the nobility. Lifted above the law
by its own insignificance, this Robespierre, with one head and
twenty million arms, is at work perpetually; crouching in country
districts, intrenched in municipal councils, under arms in the
national guard of every canton in France,--one result of the year
1830, which failed to remember that Napoleon preferred the chances
of defeat to the danger of arming the masses.
If during the last eight years I have again and again given up the
writing of this book (the most important of those I have
undertaken to write), and as often returned to it, it was, as you
and other friends can well imagine, because my courage shrank from
the many difficulties, the many essential details of a drama so
doubly dreadful and so cruelly bloody. Among the reasons which
render me now almost, it may be thought, foolhardy, I count the
desire to finish a work long designed to be to you a proof of my
deep and lasting gratitude for a friendship that has ever been
among my greatest consolations in misfortune.
De Balzac.
SONS OF THE SOIL
PART I
Whoso land hath, contention hath.
CHAPTER I. THE CHATEAU
Les Aigues, August 6, 1823.
To Monsieur Nathan,
My dear Nathan,--You, who provide the public with such delightful dreams
through the magic of your imagination, are now to follow me while I make
you dream a dream of truth. You shall then tell me whether the present
century is likely to bequeath such dreams to the Nathans and the
Blondets of the year 1923; you shall estimate the distance at which we
now are from the days when the Florines of the eighteenth century found,
on awaking, a chateau like Les Aigues in the terms of their bargain.
My dear fellow, if you receive this letter in the morning, let your
mind travel, as you lie in bed, fifty leagues or thereabouts from Paris,
along the great mail road which leads to the confines of Burgundy, and
behold two small lodges built of red brick, joined, or separated, by
a rail painted green. It was there that the diligence deposited your
friend and correspondent.
On either side of this double pavilion grows a quick-set hedge, from
which the brambles straggle like stray locks of hair. Here and there a
tree shoots boldly up; flowers bloom on the slopes of the wayside ditch,
bathing their feet in its green and sluggish water. The hedge at both
ends meets and joins two strips of woodland, and the double meadow thus
inclosed is doubtless the result of a clearing.
These dusty and deserted lodges give entrance to a magnificent avenue of
centennial elms, whose umbrageous heads lean toward each other and form
a long and most majestic arbor. The grass grows in this avenue, and only
a few wheel-tracks can be seen along its double width of way. The great
age of the trees, the breadth of the avenue, the venerable construction
of the lodges, the brown tints of their stone courses, all bespeak an
approach to some half-regal residence.
Before reaching this enclosure from the height of an eminence such as we
Frenchmen rather conceitedly call a mountain, at the foot of which lies
the village of Conches (the last post-house), I had seen the long valley
of Aigues, at the farther end of which the mail road turns to follow a
straight line into the little sub-prefecture of La Ville-aux-Fayes, over
which, as you know, the nephew of our friend des Lupeaulx lords it. Tall
forests lying on the horizon, along vast slopes which skirt a river,
command this rich valley, which is framed in the far distance by the
mountains of a lesser Switzerland, called the Morvan. These forests
belong to Les Aigues, and to the Marquis de Ronquerolles and the Comte
de Soulanges, whose castles and parks and villages, seen in the distance
from these heights, give the scene a strong resemblance to the imaginary
landscapes of Velvet Breughel.
If these details do not remind you of all the castles in the air you
have desired to possess in France you are not worthy to receive the
present narrative of an astounded Parisian. At last I have seen a
landscape where art is blended with nature in such a way that neither
of them spoils the other; the art is natural, and the nature artistic.
I have found the oasis that you and I have dreamed of when reading
novels,--nature luxuriant and adorned, rolling lines that are not
confused, something wild withal, unkempt, mysterious, not common. Jump
that green railing and come on!
When I tried to look up the avenue, which the sun never penetrates
except when it rises or when it sets, striping the road like a zebra
with its oblique rays, my view was obstructed by an outline of rising
ground; after that is passed, the long avenue is obstructed by a copse,
within which the roads meet at a cross-ways, in the centre of which
stands a stone obelisk, for all the world like an eternal exclamation
mark. From the crevices between the foundation stones of this erection,
which is topped by a spiked ball (what an idea!), hang flowering plants,
blue or yellow according to the season. Les Aigues must certainly have
been built by a woman, or for a woman; no man would have had such dainty
ideas; the architect no doubt had his cue.
Passing through the little wood placed there as sentinel, I came upon
a charming declivity, at the foot of which foamed and gurgled a little
brook, which I crossed on a culvert of mossy stones, superb in color,
the prettiest of all the mosaics which time manufactures. The avenue
continues by the brookside up a gentle rise. In the distance, the first
tableau is now seen,--a mill and its dam, a causeway and trees, linen
laid out to dry, the thatched cottage of the miller, his fishing-nets,
and the tank where the fish are kept,--not to speak of the miller’s boy,
who was already watching me. No matter where you are in the country,
however solitary you may think yourself, you are certain to be the focus
of the two eyes of a country bumpkin; a laborer rests on his hoe,
a vine-dresser straightens his bent back, a little goat-girl, or
shepherdess, or milkmaid climbs a willow to stare at you.
Presently the avenue merges into an alley of acacias, which leads to an
iron railing made in the days when iron-workers fashioned those slender
filagrees which are not unlike the copies set us by a writing-master. On
either side of the railing is a ha-ha, the edges of which bristle with
angry spikes,--regular porcupines in metal. The railing is closed
at both ends by two porter’s-lodges, like those of the palace at
Versailles, and the gateway is surmounted by colossal vases. The gold
of the arabesques is ruddy, for rust has added its tints, but this
entrance, called “the gate of the Avenue,” which plainly shows the hand
of the Great Dauphin (to whom, indeed, Les Aigues owes it), seems to me
none the less beautiful for that. At the end of each ha-ha the walls
of the park, built of rough-hewn stone, begin. These stones, set in a
mortar made of reddish earth, display their variegated colors, the
warm yellows of the silex, the white of the lime carbonates, the russet
browns of the sandstone, in many a fantastic shape. As you first enter
it, the park is gloomy, the walls are hidden by creeping plants and by
trees that for fifty years have heard no sound of axe. One might think
it a virgin forest, made primeval again through some phenomenon granted
exclusively to forests. The trunks of the trees are swathed with lichen
which hangs from one to another. Mistletoe, with its viscid leaves,
droops from every fork of the branches where moisture settles. I have
found gigantic ivies, wild arabesques which flourish only at fifty
leagues from Paris, here where land does not cost enough to make one
sparing of it. The landscape on such free lines covers a great deal of
ground. Nothing is smoothed off; rakes are unknown, ruts and ditches
are full of water, frogs are tranquilly delivered of their tadpoles, the
woodland flowers bloom, and the heather is as beautiful as that I have
seen on your mantle-shelf in January in the elegant beau-pot sent by
Florine. This mystery is intoxicating, it inspires vague desires. The
forest odors, beloved of souls that are epicures of poesy, who delight
in the tiny mosses, the noxious fungi, the moist mould, the willows, the
balsams, the wild thyme, the green waters of a pond, the golden star
of the yellow water-lily,--the breath of all such vigorous propagations
came to my nostrils and filled me with a single thought; was it their
soul? I seemed to see a rose-tinted gown floating along the winding
alley.
The path ended abruptly in another copse, where birches and poplars and
all the quivering trees palpitated,--an intelligent family with graceful
branches and elegant bearing, the trees of a love as free! It was from
this point, my dear fellow, that I saw a pond covered with the white
water-lily and other plants with broad flat leaves and narrow slender
ones, on which lay a boat painted white and black, as light as a
nut-shell and dainty as the wherry of a Seine boatman. Beyond rose
the chateau, built in 1560, of fine red brick, with stone courses and
copings, and window-frames in which the sashes were of small leaded
panes (O Versailles!). The stone is hewn in diamond points, but
hollowed, as in the Ducal Palace at Venice on the facade toward the
Bridge of Sighs. There are no regular lines about the castle except in
the centre building, from which projects a stately portico with double
flights of curving steps, and round balusters slender at their base
and broadening at the middle. The main building is surrounded by
clock-towers and sundry modern turrets, with galleries and vases more
or less Greek. No harmony there, my dear Nathan! These heterogeneous
erections are wrapped, so to speak, by various evergreen trees whose
branches shed their brown needles upon the roofs, nourishing the lichen
and giving tone to the cracks and crevices where the eye delights to
wander. Here you see the Italian pine, the stone pine, with its red bark
and its majestic parasol; here a cedar two hundred years old, weeping
willows, a Norway spruce, and a beech which overtops them all; and
there, in front of the main tower, some very singular shrubs,--a yew
trimmed in a way that recalls some long-decayed garden of old France,
and magnolias with hortensias at their feet. In short, the place is
the Invalides of the heroes of horticulture, once the fashion and now
forgotten, like all other heroes.
A chimney, with curious copings, which was sending forth great volumes
of smoke, assured me that this delightful scene was not an opera
setting. A kitchen reveals human beings. Now imagine _me_, Blondet, who
shiver as if in the polar regions at Saint-Cloud, in the midst of this
glowing Burgundian climate. The sun sends down its warmest rays, the
king-fisher watches on the shores of the pond, the cricket chirps, the
grain-pods burst, the poppy drops its morphia in glutinous tears, and
all are clearly defined on the dark-blue ether. Above the ruddy soil
of the terraces flames that joyous natural punch which intoxicates the
insects and the flowers and dazzles our eyes and browns our faces. The
grape is beading, its tendrils fall in a veil of threads whose
delicacy puts to shame the lace-makers. Beside the house blue larkspur,
nasturtium, and sweet-peas are blooming. From a distance orange-trees
and tuberoses scent the air. After the poetic exhalations of the woods
(a gradual preparation) came the delectable pastilles of this botanic
seraglio.
Standing on the portico, like the queen of flowers, behold a woman robed
in white, with hair unpowdered, holding a parasol lined with white silk,
but herself whiter than the silk, whiter than the lilies at her feet,
whiter than the starry jasmine that climbed the balustrade,--a woman, a
Frenchwoman born in Russia, who said as I approached her, “I had almost
given you up.” She had seen me as I left the copse. With what perfection
do all women, even the most guileless, understand the arrangement of
a scenic effect? The movements of the servants, who were preparing to
serve breakfast, showed me that the meal had been delayed until after
the arrival of the diligence. She had not ventured to come to meet me.
Is this not our dream,--the dream of all lovers of the beautiful, under
whatsoever form it comes; the seraphic beauty that Luini put into his
Marriage of the Virgin, that noble fresco at Sarono; the beauty that
Rubens grasped in the tumult of his “Battle of the Thermodon”; the
beauty that five centuries have elaborated in the cathedrals of Seville
and Milan; the beauty of the Saracens at Granada, the beauty of Louis
XIV. at Versailles, the beauty of the Alps, and that of this Limagne in
which I stand?
Belonging to the estate, about which there is nothing too princely,
nor yet too financial, where prince and farmer-general have both lived
(which fact serves to explain it), are four thousand acres of woodland,
a park of some nine hundred acres, the mill, three leased farms, another
immense farm at Conches, and vineyards,--the whole producing a revenue
of about seventy thousand francs a year. Now you know Les Aigues, my
dear fellow; where I have been expected for the last two weeks, and
where I am at this moment, in the chintz-lined chamber assigned to
dearest friends.
Above the park, towards Conches, a dozen little brooks, clear, limpid
streams coming from the Morvan, fall into the pond, after adorning
with their silvery ribbons the valleys of the park and the magnificent
gardens around the chateau. The name of the place, Les Aigues, comes
from these charming streams of water; the estate was originally called
in the old title-deeds “Les Aigues-Vives” to distinguish it from
“Aigues-Mortes”; but the word “Vives” has now been dropped. The pond
empties into the stream, which follows the course of the avenue, through
a wide and straight canal bordered on both sides and along its
whole length by weeping willows. This canal, thus arched, produces a
delightful effect. Gliding through it, seated on a thwart of the little
boat, one could fancy one’s self in the nave of some great cathedral,
the choir being formed of the main building of the house seen at the end
of it. When the setting sun casts its orange tones mingled with amber
upon the casements of the chateau, the effect is that of painted
windows. At the other end of the canal we see Blangy, the county-town,
containing about sixty houses, and the village church, which is nothing
more than a tumble-down building with a wooden clock-tower which
appears to hold up a roof of broken tiles. One comfortable house and the
parsonage are distinguishable; but the township is a large one,--about
two hundred scattered houses in all, those of the village forming as
it were the capital. The roads are lined with fruit-trees, and numerous
little gardens are strewn here and there,--true country gardens with
everything in them; flowers, onions, cabbages and grapevines, currants,
and a great deal of manure. The village has a primitive air; it is
rustic, and has that decorative simplicity which we artists are forever
seeking. In the far distance is the little town of Soulanges overhanging
a vast sheet of water, like the buildings on the lake of Thune.
When you stroll in the park, which has four gates, each superb in style,
you feel that our mythological Arcadias are flat and stale. Arcadia is
in Burgundy, not in Greece; Arcadia is at Les Aigues and nowhere else. A
river, made by scores of brooklets, crosses the park at its lower level
with a serpentine movement; giving a dewy freshness and tranquillity
to the scene,--an air of solitude, which reminds one of a convent of
Carthusians, and all the more because, on an artificial island in the
river, is a hermitage in ruins, the interior elegance of which is worthy
of the luxurious financier who constructed it. Les Aigues, my dear
Nathan, once belonged to that Bouret who spent two millions to receive
Louis XV. on a single occasion under his roof. How many ardent passions,
how many distinguished minds, how many fortunate circumstances have
contributed to make this beautiful place what it is! A mistress of Henri
IV. rebuilt the chateau where it now stands. The favorite of the Great
Dauphin, Mademoiselle Choin (to whom Les Aigues was given), added
a number of farms to it. Bouret furnished the house with all the
elegancies of Parisian homes for an Opera celebrity; and to him Les
Aigues owes the restoration of its ground floor in the style Louis XV.
I have often stood rapt in admiration at the beauty of the dining-room.
The eye is first attracted to the ceiling, painted in fresco in the
Italian manner, where lightsome arabesques are frolicking. Female forms,
in stucco ending in foliage, support at regular distances corbeils
of fruit, from which spring the garlands of the ceiling. Charming
paintings, the work of unknown artists, fill the panels between the
female figures, representing the luxuries of the table,--boar’s-heads,
salmon, rare shell-fish, and all edible things,--which fantastically
suggest men and women and children, and rival the whimsical imagination
of the Chinese,--the people who best understand, to my thinking
at least, the art of decoration. The mistress of the house finds a
bell-wire beneath her feet to summon servants, who enter only when
required, disturbing no interviews and overhearing no secrets. The
panels above the doorways represent gay scenes; all the embrasures, both
of doors and windows, are in marble mosaics. The room is heated from
below. Every window looks forth on some delightful view.
This room communicates with a bath-room on one side and on the other
with a boudoir which opens into the salon. The bath-room is lined with
Sevres tiles, painted in monochrome, the floor is mosaic, and the bath
marble. An alcove, hidden by a picture painted on copper, which turns
on a pivot, contains a couch in gilt wood of the truest Pompadour. The
ceiling is lapis-lazuli starred with gold. The tiles are painted from
designs by Boucher. Bath, table and love are therefore closely united.
After the salon, which, I should tell you, my dear fellow, exhibits the
magnificence of the Louis XIV. manner, you enter a fine billiard-room
unrivalled so far as I know in Paris itself. The entrance to this suite
of ground-floor apartments is through a semi-circular antechamber, at
the lower end of which is a fairy-like staircase, lighted from
above, which leads to other parts of the house, all built at various
epochs--and to think that they chopped off the heads of the wealthy in
1793! Good heavens! why can’t people understand that the marvels of art
are impossible in a land where there are no great fortunes, no secure,
luxurious lives? If the Left insists on killing kings why not leave us a
few little princelings with money in their pockets?
At the present moment these accumulated treasures belong to a charming
woman with an artistic soul, who is not content with merely restoring
them magnificently, but who keeps the place up with loving care. Sham
philosophers, studying themselves while they profess to be studying
humanity, call these glorious things extravagance. They grovel before
cotton prints and the tasteless designs of modern industry, as if we
were greater and happier in these days than in those of Henri IV., Louis
XIV., and Louis XVI., monarchs who have all left the stamp of their
reigns upon Les Aigues. What palace, what royal castle, what mansions,
what noble works of art, what gold brocaded stuffs are sacred now?
The petticoats of our grandmothers go to cover the chairs in these
degenerate days. Selfish and thieving interlopers that we are, we pull
down everything and plant cabbages where marvels once were rife. Only
yesterday the plough levelled Persan, that magnificent domain which
gave a title to one of the most opulent families of the old parliament;
hammers have demolished Montmorency, which cost an Italian follower
of Napoleon untold sums; Val, the creation of Regnault de Saint-Jean
d’Angely, Cassan, built by a mistress of the Prince de Conti; in all,
four royal houses have disappeared in the valley of the Oise alone. We
are getting a Roman campagna around Paris in advance of the days when a
tempest shall blow from the north and overturn our plaster palaces and
our pasteboard decorations.
Now see, my dear fellow, to what the habit of bombasticising in
newspapers brings you to. Here am I writing a downright article. Does
the mind have its ruts, like a road? I stop; for I rob the mail, and I
rob myself, and you may be yawning--to be continued in our next; I hear
the second bell, which summons me to one of those abundant breakfasts
the fashion of which has long passed away, in the dining-rooms of Paris,
be it understood.
Here’s the history of my Arcadia. In 1815, there died at Les Aigues one
of the famous wantons of the last century,--a singer, forgotten of
the guillotine and the nobility, after preying upon exchequers, upon
literature, upon aristocracy, and all but reaching the scaffold;
forgotten, like so many fascinating old women who expiate their
golden youth in country solitudes, and replace their lost loves by
another,--man by Nature. Such women live with the flowers, with the
woodland scents, with the sky, with the sunshine, with all that sings
and skips and shines and sprouts,--the birds, the squirrels, the
flowers, the grass; they know nothing about these things, they cannot
explain them, but they love them; they love them so well that they
forget dukes, marshals, rivalries, financiers, follies, luxuries, their
paste jewels and their real diamonds, their heeled slippers and their
rouge,--all, for the sweetness of country life.
I have gathered, my dear fellow, much precious information about the old
age of Mademoiselle Laguerre; for, to tell you the truth, the after life
of such women as Florine, Mariette, Suzanne de Val Noble, and Tullia has
made me, every now and then, extremely inquisitive, as though I were a
child inquiring what had become of the old moons.
In 1790 Mademoiselle Laguerre, alarmed at the turn of public affairs,
came to settle at Les Aigues, bought and given to her by Bouret, who
passed several summers with her at the chateau. Terrified at the fate
of Madame du Barry, she buried her diamonds. At that time she was only
fifty-three years of age, and according to her lady’s-maid, afterwards
married to a gendarme named Soudry, “Madame was more beautiful than
ever.” My dear Nathan, Nature has no doubt her private reasons for
treating women of this sort like spoiled children; excesses, instead
of killing them, fatten them, preserve them, renew their youth. Under
a lymphatic appearance they have nerves which maintain their marvellous
physique; they actually preserve their beauty for reasons which would
make a virtuous woman haggard. No, upon my word, Nature is not moral!
Mademoiselle Laguerre lived an irreproachable life at Les Aigues, one
might even call it a saintly one, after her famous adventure,--you
remember it? One evening in a paroxysm of despairing love, she fled from
the opera-house in her stage dress, rushed into the country, and passed
the night weeping by the wayside. (Ah! how they have calumniated the
love of Louis XV.’s time!) She was so unused to see the sunrise, that
she hailed it with one of her finest songs. Her attitude, quite as much
as her tinsel, drew the peasants about her; amazed at her gestures,
her voice, her beauty, they took her for an angel, and dropped on their
knees around her. If Voltaire had not existed we might have thought it
a new miracle. I don’t know if God gave her much credit for her tardy
virtue, for love after all must be a sickening thing to a woman as weary
of it as a wanton of the old Opera. Mademoiselle Laguerre was born in
1740, and her hey-day was in 1760, when Monsieur (I forget his name) was
called the “ministre de la guerre,” on account of his liaison with her.
She abandoned that name, which was quite unknown down here, and called
herself Madame des Aigues, as if to merge her identity in the estate,
which she delighted to improve with a taste that was profoundly
artistic. When Bonaparte became First Consul, she increased her property
by the purchase of church lands, for which she used the proceeds of
her diamonds. As an Opera divinity never knows how to take care of
her money, she intrusted the management of the estate to a steward,
occupying herself with her flowers and fruits and with the beautifying
of the park.
After Mademoiselle was dead and buried at Blangy, the notary of
Soulanges--that little town which lies between Ville-aux-Fayes and
Blangy, the capital of the township--made an elaborate inventory, and
sought out the heirs of the singer, who never knew she had any. Eleven
families of poor laborers living near Amiens, and sleeping in cotton
sheets, awoke one fine morning in golden ones. The property was sold
at auction. Les Aigues was bought by Montcornet, who had laid by enough
during his campaigns in Spain and Pomerania to make the purchase, which
cost about eleven hundred thousand francs, including the furniture. The
general, no doubt, felt the influence of these luxurious apartments; and
I was arguing with the countess only yesterday that her marriage was a
direct result of the purchase of Les Aigues.
To rightly understand the countess, my dear Nathan, you must know that
the general is a violent man, red as fire, five feet nine inches tall,
round as a tower, with a thick neck and the shoulders of a blacksmith,
which must have amply filled his cuirass. Montcornet commanded
the cuirassiers at the battle of Essling (called by the Austrians
Gross-Aspern), and came near perishing when that noble corps was driven
back on the Danube. He managed to cross the river astride a log of wood.
The cuirassiers, finding the bridge down, took the glorious resolution,
at Montcornet’s command, to turn and resist the entire Austrian army,
which carried off on the morrow over thirty wagon-loads of cuirasses.
The Germans invented a name for their enemies on this occasion which
means “men of iron.”[*] Montcornet has the outer man of a hero of
antiquity. His arms are stout and vigorous, his chest deep and broad;
his head has a leonine aspect, his voice is of those that can order a
charge in the thick of battle; but he has nothing more than the courage
of a daring man; he lacks mind and breadth of view. Like other generals
to whom military common-sense, the natural boldness of those who spend
their lives in danger, and the habit of command gives an appearance of
superiority, Montcornet has an imposing effect when you first meet him;
he seems a Titan, but he contains a dwarf, like the pasteboard giant
who saluted Queen Elizabeth at the gates of Kenilworth. Choleric though
kind, and full of imperial hauteur, he has the caustic tongue of a
soldier, and is quick at repartee, but quicker still with a blow. He
may have been superb on a battle-field; in a household he is simply
intolerable. He knows no love but barrack love,--the love which those
clever myth-makers, the ancients, placed under the patronage of Eros,
son of Mars and Venus. Those delightful chroniclers of the old religions
provided themselves with a dozen different Loves. Study the fathers and
the attributes of these Loves, and you will discover a complete social
nomenclature,--and yet we fancy that we originate things! When the world
turns upside down like an hour-glass, when the seas become continents,
Frenchmen will find canons, steamboats, newspapers, and maps wrapped up
in seaweed at the bottom of what is now our ocean.
[*] I do not, on principle, like foot-notes, and this is the
first I have ever allowed myself. Its historical interest
must be my excuse; it will prove, moreover, that
descriptions of battles should be something more than the
dry particulars of technical writers, who for the last three
thousand years have told us about left and right wings and
centres being broken or driven in, but never a word about
the soldier himself, his sufferings, and his heroism. The
conscientious care with which I prepared myself to write the
“Scenes from Military Life,” led me to many a battle-field
once wet with the blood of France and her enemies. Among
them I went to Wagram. When I reached the shores of the
Danube, opposite Lobau, I noticed on the bank, which is
covered with turf, certain undulations that reminded me of
the furrows in a field of lucern. I asked the reason of it,
thinking I should hear of some new method of agriculture:
“There sleep the cavalry of the imperial guard,” said the
peasant who served us as a guide; “those are their graves
you see there.” The words made me shudder. Prince Frederic
Schwartzenburg, who translated them, added that the man had
himself driven one of the wagons laden with cuirasses. By
one of the strange chances of war our guide had served a
breakfast to Napoleon on the morning of the battle of
Wagram. Though poor, he had kept the double napoleon which
the Emperor gave him for his milk and his eggs. The curate
of Gross-Aspern took us to the famous cemetery where French
and Austrians struggled together knee-deep in blood, with a
courage and obstinacy glorious to each. There, while
explaining that a marble tablet (to which our attention had
been attracted, and on which were inscribed the names of the
owner of Gross-Aspern, who had been killed on the third day)
was the sole compensation ever given to the family, he said,
in a tone of deep sadness: “It was a time of great misery,
and of great hopes; but now are the days of forgetfulness.”
The saying seemed to me sublime in its simplicity; but when
I came to reflect upon the matter, I felt there was some
justification for the apparent ingratitude of the House of
Austria. Neither nations nor kings are wealthy enough to
reward all the devotions to which these tragic struggles
give rise. Let those who serve a cause with a secret
expectation of recompense, set a price upon their blood and
become mercenaries. Those who wield either sword or pen for
their country’s good ought to think of nothing but of _doing
their best_, as our fathers used to say, and expect nothing,
not even glory, except as a happy accident.
It was in rushing to retake this famous cemetery for the
third time that Massena, wounded and carried in the box of a
cabriolet, made this splendid harangue to his soldiers:
“What! you rascally curs, who have only five sous a day
while I have forty thousand, do you let me go ahead of you?”
All the world knows the order which the Emperor sent to his
lieutenant by M. de Sainte-Croix, who swam the Danube three
times: “Die or retake the village; it is a question of
saving the army; the bridges are destroyed.”
The Author.
Now, I must tell you that the Comtesse de Montcornet is a fragile,
timid, delicate little woman. What do you think of such a marriage
as that? To those who know society such things are common enough; a
well-assorted marriage is the exception. Nevertheless, I have come to
see how it is that this slender little creature handles her bobbins in
a way to lead this heavy, solid, stolid general precisely as he himself
used to lead his cuirassiers.
If Montcornet begins to bluster before his Virginie, Madame lays a
finger on her lips and he is silent. He smokes his pipes and his cigars
in a kiosk fifty feet from the chateau, and airs himself before he
returns to the house. Proud of his subjection, he turns to her, like a
bear drunk on grapes, and says, when anything is proposed, “If Madame
approves.” When he comes to his wife’s room, with that heavy step which
makes the tiles creak as though they were boards, and she, not wanting
him, calls out: “Don’t come in!” he performs a military volte-face and
says humbly: “You will let me know when I can see you?”--in the very
tones with which he shouted to his cuirassiers on the banks of the
Danube: “Men, we must die, and die well, since there’s nothing else we
can do!” I have heard him say, speaking of his wife, “Not only do I love
her, but I venerate her.” When he flies into a passion which defies all
restraint and bursts all bonds, the little woman retires into her own
room and leaves him to shout. But four or five hours later she will say:
“Don’t get into a passion, my dear, you might break a blood-vessel; and
besides, you hurt me.” Then the lion of Essling retreats out of sight
to wipe his eyes. Sometimes he comes into the salon when she and I are
talking, and if she says: “Don’t disturb us, he is reading to me,” he
leaves us without a word.
It is only strong men, choleric and powerful, thunder-bolts of war,
diplomats with olympian heads, or men of genius, who can show this
utter confidence, this generous devotion to weakness, this constant
protection, this love without jealousy, this easy good humor with a
woman. Good heavens! I place the science of the countess’s management
of her husband as far above the peevish, arid virtues as the satin of a
causeuse is superior to the Utrecht velvet of a dirty bourgeois sofa.
My dear fellow, I have spent six days in this delightful country-house,
and I never tire of admiring the beauties of the park, surrounded by
forests where pretty wood-paths lead beside the brooks. Nature and its
silence, these tranquil pleasures, this placid life to which she woos
me,--all attract. Ah! here is true literature; no fault of style among
the meadows. Happiness forgets all things here,--even the Debats! It has
rained all the morning; while the countess slept and Montcornet tramped
over his domain, I have compelled myself to keep my rash, imprudent
promise to write to you.
Until now, though I was born at Alencon, of an old judge and a prefect,
so they say, and though I know something of agriculture, I supposed the
tale of estates bringing in four or five thousand francs a month to be
a fable. Money, to me, meant a couple of dreadful things,--work and a
publisher, journalism and politics. When shall we poor fellows come upon
a land where gold springs up with the grass? That is what I desire for
you and for me and the rest of us in the name of the theatre, and of the
press, and of book-making! Amen!
Will Florine be jealous of the late Mademoiselle Laguerre? Our modern
Bourets have no French nobles now to show them how to live; they hire
one opera-box among three of them; they subscribe for their pleasures;
they no longer cut down magnificently bound quartos to match the octavos
in their library; in fact, they scarcely buy even stitched paper books.
What is to become of us?
Adieu; continue to care for
Your Blondet.
If this letter, dashed off by the idlest pen of the century, had not by
some lucky chance been preserved, it would have been almost impossible
to describe Les Aigues; and without this description the history of the
horrible events that occurred there would certainly be less interesting.
After that remark some persons will expect to see the flashing of the
cuirass of the former colonel of the guard, and the raging of his anger
as he falls like a waterspout upon his little wife; so that the end
of this present history may be like the end of all modern dramas,--a
tragedy of the bed-chamber. Perhaps the fatal scene will take place
in that charming room with the blue monochromes, where beautiful ideal
birds are painted on the ceilings and the shutters, where Chinese
monsters laugh with open jaws on the mantle-shelf, and dragons, green
and gold, twist their tails in curious convolutions around rich vases,
and Japanese fantasy embroiders its designs of many colors; where
sofas and reclining-chairs and consoles and what-nots invite to that
contemplative idleness which forbids all action.
No; the drama here to be developed is not one of private life; it
concerns things higher, or lower. Expect no scenes of passion; the truth
of this history is only too dramatic. And remember, the historian should
never forget that his mission is to do justice to all; the poor and the
prosperous are equals before his pen; to him the peasant appears in
the grandeur of his misery, and the rich in the pettiness of his folly.
Moreover, the rich man has passions, the peasant only wants. The peasant
is therefore doubly poor; and if, politically, his aggressions must be
pitilessly repressed, to the eyes of humanity and religion he is sacred.