The gate of Blangy, built by Bouret, was formed of two wide pilasters
of projecting rough-hewn stone; each surmounted by a dog sitting on his
haunches and holding an escutcheon between his fore paws. The proximity
of a small house where the steward lived dispensed with the necessity
for a lodge. Between the two pilasters, a sumptuous iron gate, like
those made in Buffon’s time for the Jardin des Plantes, opened on a
short paved way which led to the country road (formerly kept in order
by Les Aigues and the Soulanges family) which unites Conches, Cerneux,
Blangy, and Soulanges to Ville-aux-Fayes, like a wreath, for the whole
road is lined with flowering hedges and little houses covered with roses
and honey-suckle and other climbing plants.
There, along a pretty wall which extends as far as a terrace from which
the land of Les Aigues falls rapidly to the valley till it meets that
of Soulanges, are the rotten posts, the old wheel, and the forked stakes
which constituted the manufactory of the village rope-maker.
Soon after midday, while Blondet was seating himself at table opposite
the Abbe Brossette and receiving the tender expostulations of the
countess, Pere Fourchon and Mouche arrived at this establishment. From
that vantage-ground Pere Fourchon, under pretence of rope-making, could
watch Les Aigues and see every one who went in and out. Nothing escaped
him, the opening of the blinds, tete-a-tete loiterings, or the least
little incidents of country life, were spied upon by the old fellow,
who had set up this business within the last three years,--a trifling
circumstance which neither the masters, nor the servants, nor the
keepers of Les Aigues had as yet remarked upon.
“Go round to the house by the gate of the Avonne while I put away the
tackle,” said Pere Fourchon to his attendant, “and when you have blabbed
about the thing, they’ll no doubt send after me to the Grand-I-Vert,
where I am going for a drop of drink,--for it makes one thirsty enough
to wade in the water that way. If you do just as I tell you, you’ll hook
a good breakfast out of them; try to meet the countess, and give a slap
at me, and that will put it into her head to come and preach morality or
something! There’s lots of good wine to get out of it.”
After these last instructions, which the sly look in Mouche’s face
rendered quite superfluous, the old peasant, hugging the otter under his
arm, disappeared along the country road.
Half-way between the gate and the village there stood, at the time when
Emile Blondet stayed at Les Aigues, one of those houses which are never
seen but in parts of France where stone is scarce. Bits of bricks picked
up anywhere, cobblestones set like diamonds in the clay mud, formed
very solid walls, though worn in places; the roof was supported by stout
branches and covered with rushes and straw, while the clumsy shutters
and the broken door--in short, everything about the cottage was the
product of lucky finds, or of gifts obtained by begging.
The peasant has an instinct for his habitation like that of an animal
for its nest or its burrow, and this instinct was very marked in all
the arrangements of this cottage. In the first place, the door and the
window looked to the north. The house, placed on a little rise in the
stoniest angle of a vineyard, was certainly healthful. It was reached by
three steps, carefully made with stakes and planks filled in with broken
stone and gravel, so that the water ran off rapidly; and as the rain
seldom comes from the northward in Burgundy, no dampness could rot the
foundations, slight as they were. Below the steps and along the path ran
a rustic paling, hidden beneath a hedge of hawthorn and sweet-brier.
An arbor, with a few clumsy tables and wooden benches, filled the space
between the cottage and the road, and invited the passers-by to rest
themselves. At the upper end of the bank by the house roses grew, and
wall-flowers, violets, and other flowers that cost nothing. Jessamine
and honey-suckle had fastened their tendrils on the roof, mossy already,
though the building was far from old.
To the right of the house, the owner had built a stable for two cows. In
front of this erection of old boards, a sunken piece of ground served as
a yard where, in a corner, was a huge manure-heap. On the other side of
the house and the arbor stood a thatched shed, supported on trunks of
trees, under which the various outdoor properties of the peasantry were
put away,--the utensils of the vine-dressers, their empty casks, logs
of wood piled about a mound which contained the oven, the mouth of
which opened, as was usual in the houses of the peasantry, under the
mantle-piece of the chimney in the kitchen.
About an acre of land adjoined the house, inclosed by an evergreen hedge
and planted with grape-vines; tended as peasants tend them,--that is to
say, well-manured, and dug round, and layered so that they usually set
their fruit before the vines of the large proprietors in a circuit of
ten miles round. A few trees, almond, plum, and apricot, showed their
slim heads here and there in this enclosure. Between the rows of vines
potatoes and beans were planted. In addition to all this, on the side
towards the village and beyond the yard was a bit of damp low ground,
favorable for the growth of cabbages and onions (favorite vegetables of
the working-classes), which was closed by a wooden gate, through which
the cows were driven, trampling the path into mud and covering it with
dung.
The house, which had two rooms on the ground-floor, opened upon the
vineyard. On this side an outer stairway, roofed with thatch and resting
against the wall of the house, led up to the garret, which was lighted
by one round window. Under this rustic stairway opened a cellar built of
Burgundy brick, containing several casks of wine.
Though the kitchen utensils of the peasantry are usually only two,
namely, a frying-pan and an iron pot, with which they manage to do all
their cooking, exceptions to this rule, in the shape of two enormous
saucepans hanging beneath the mantle-shelf and above a small portable
stove, were to be seen in this cottage. In spite, however, of this
indication of luxury, the furniture was in keeping with the external
appearance of the place. A jar held water, the spoons were of wood or
pewter, the dishes, of red clay without and white within, were scaling
off and had been mended with pewter rivets; the heavy table and chairs
were of pine wood, and for flooring there was nothing better than the
hardened earth. Every fifth year the walls received a coat of white-wash
and so did the narrow beams of the ceiling, from which hung bacon,
strings of onions, bundles of tallow candles, and the bags in which
a peasant keeps his seeds; near the bread-box stood an old-fashioned
wardrobe in walnut, where the scanty household linen, and the one change
of garments together with the holiday attire of the entire family were
kept.
Above the mantel of the chimney gleamed a poacher’s old gun, not worth
five francs,--the wood scorched, the barrel to all appearances never
cleaned. An observer might reflect that the protection of a hovel with
only a latch, and an outer gate that was only a paling and never closed,
needed no better weapon; but still the wonder was to what use it was
put. In the first place, though the wood was of the commonest kind, the
barrel was carefully selected, and came from a valuable gun, given in
all probability to a game-keeper. Moreover, the owner of this weapon
never missed his aim; there was between him and his gun the same
intimate acquaintance that there is between a workman and his tool. If
the muzzle must be raised or lowered the merest fraction in its aim,
because it carries just an atom above or below the range, the poacher
knows it; he obeys the rule and never misses. An officer of artillery
would have found the essential parts of this weapon in good condition
notwithstanding its uncleanly appearance. In all that the peasant
appropriates to his use, in all that serves him, he displays just the
amount of force that is needed, neither more nor less; he attends to
the essential and to nothing beyond. External perfection he has no
conception of. An unerring judge of the necessary in all things, he
thoroughly understands degrees of strength, and knows very well when
working for an employer how to give the least possible for the most he
can get. This contemptible-looking gun will be found to play a serious
part in the life of the family inhabiting this cottage, and you will
presently learn how and why.
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.
If the portraits of Tonsard, his inn, and his father-in-law take a
prominent place in this history, it is because that place belongs to him
and to the inn and to the family. In the first place, their existence,
so minutely described, is the type of a hundred other households in the
valley of Les Aigues. Secondly, Tonsard, without being other than the
instrument of deep and active hatreds, had an immense influence on the
struggle that was about to take place, being the friend and counsellor
of all the complainants of the lower classes. His inn, as we shall
presently see, was the rendezvous for the aggressors; in fact, he became
their chief, partly on account of the fear he inspired throughout the
valley--less, however, by his actual deeds than by those that were
constantly expected of him. The threat of this man was as much dreaded
as the thing threatened, so that he never had occasion to execute it.
Every revolt, open or concealed, has its banner. The banner of the
marauders, the drunkards, the idlers, the sluggards of the valley des
Aigues was the terrible tavern of the Grand-I-Vert. Its frequenters
found amusement there,--as rare and much-desired a thing in the country
as in a city. Moreover, there was no other inn along the country-road
for over twelve miles, a distance which conveyances (even when laden)
could easily do in three hours; so that those who went from Conches to
Ville-aux-Fayes always stopped at the Grand-I-Vert, if only to refresh
themselves. The miller of Les Aigues, who was also assistant-mayor, and
his men came there. The grooms and valets of the general were not averse
to Tonsard’s wine, rendered attractive by Tonsard’s daughters; so the
Grand-I-Vert held subterraneous communication with the chateau through
the servants, and knew immediately everything that they knew. It is
impossible either by benefits or through their own self-interests, to
break up the perpetual understanding that exists between the servants of
a household and the people from whom they come. Domestic service is of
the masses, and to the masses it will ever remain attached. This fatal
comradeship explains the reticence of the last words of Charles the
groom, as he and Blondet reached the portico of the chateau.