When Mademoiselle Laguerre first visited her estate, in 1791, she took
as steward the son of the ex-bailiff of Soulanges, named Gaubertin. The
little town of Soulanges, at present nothing more than the chief town
of a canton, was once the capital of a considerable county, in the days
when the House of Burgundy made war upon France. Ville-aux-Fayes, now
the seat of the sub-prefecture, then a mere fief, was a dependency of
Soulanges, like Les Aigues, Ronquerolles, Cerneux, Conches, and a score
of other parishes. The Soulanges have remained counts, whereas the
Ronquerolles are now marquises by the will of that power, called the
Court, which made the son of Captain du Plessis duke over the heads of
the first families of the Conquest. All of which serves to prove that
towns, like families, are variable in their destiny.
Gaubertin, a young man without property of any kind, succeeded a steward
enriched by a management of thirty years, who preferred to become a
partner in the famous firm of Minoret rather than continue to administer
Les Aigues. In his own interests he introduced into his place as
land-steward Francois Gaubertin, his accountant for five years, whom he
now relied on to cover his retreat, and who, out of gratitude for his
instructions, promised to obtain for him a release in full of all claims
from Madame Laguerre, who by this time was terrified at the Revolution.
Gaubertin’s father, the attorney-general of the department, henceforth
protected the timid woman. This provincial Fouquier-Tinville raised a
false alarm of danger in the mind of the opera-divinity on the ground
of her former relations to the aristocracy, so as to give his son
the equally false credit of saving her life; on the strength of
which Gaubertin the younger obtained very easily the release of his
predecessor. Mademoiselle Laguerre then made Francois Gaubertin her
prime minister, as much through policy as from gratitude. The late
steward had not spoiled her. He sent her, every year, about thirty
thousand francs, though Les Aigues brought in at that time at least
forty thousand. The unsuspecting opera-singer was therefore much
delighted when the new steward Gaubertin promised her thirty-six
thousand.
To explain the present fortune of the land-steward of Les Aigues
before the judgment-seat of probability, it is necessary to state its
beginnings. Pushed by his father’s influence, he became mayor of Blangy.
Thus he was able, contrary to law, to make the debtors pay in coin,
by “terrorizing” (a phrase of the day) such of them as might, in his
opinion, be subjected to the crushing demands of the Republic. He
himself paid the citizens in assignats as long as the system of paper
money lasted,--a system which, if it did not make the nation prosperous,
at least made the fortunes of private individuals. From 1793 to 1795,
that is, for three years, Francois Gaubertin wrung one hundred and
fifty thousand francs out of Les Aigues, with which he speculated on the
stock-market in Paris. With her purse full of assignats Mademoiselle was
actually obliged to obtain ready money from her diamonds, now useless to
her. She gave them to Gaubertin, who sold them, and faithfully returned
to her their full price. This proof of honesty touched her heart;
henceforth she believed in Gaubertin as she did in Piccini.
In 1796, at the time of his marriage with the citoyenne Isaure Mouchon,
daughter of an old “conventional,” a friend of his father, Gaubertin
possessed about three hundred and fifty thousand francs in money. As the
Directory seemed to him likely to last, he determined, before marrying,
to have the accounts of his five years’ stewardship ratified by
Mademoiselle, under pretext of a new departure.
“I am to be the head of a family,” he said to her; “you know the
reputation of land-stewards; my father-in-law is a republican of Roman
austerity, and a man of influence as well; I want to prove to him that I
am as upright as he.”
Mademoiselle Laguerre accepted his accounts at once in very flattering
terms.
In those earlier days the steward had endeavored, in order to win the
confidence of Madame des Aigues (as Mademoiselle was then called) to
repress the depredations of the peasantry; fearing, and not without
reason, that the revenues would suffer too severely, and that his
private bonus from the buyers of the timber would sensibly diminish.
But in those days the sovereign people felt the soil was their own
everywhere; Madame was afraid of the surrounding kings and told her
Richelieu that the first desire of her soul was to die in peace. The
revenues of the late singer were so far in excess of her expenses that
she allowed all the worst, and, as it proved, fatal precedents to be
established. To avoid a lawsuit, she allowed the neighbors to encroach
upon her land. Knowing that the park walls were sufficient protection,
she did not fear any interruption of her personal comfort, and cared for
nothing but her peaceful existence, true philosopher that she was! A
few thousand a year more or less, the indemnities exacted by the
wood-merchants for the damages committed by the peasants,--what were
they to a careless and extravagant Opera-girl, who had gained her
hundred thousand francs a year at the cost of pleasure only, and who had
just submitted, without a word of remonstrance, to a reduction of two
thirds of an income of sixty thousand francs?
“Dear me!” she said, in the easy tone of the wantons of the old time,
“people must live, even if they are republicans.”
The terrible Mademoiselle Cochet, her maid and female vizier, had tried
to enlighten her mistress when she saw the ascendency Gaubertin was
obtaining over one whom he began by calling “Madame” in defiance of
the revolutionary laws about equality; but Gaubertin, in his turn,
enlightened Mademoiselle Cochet by showing her a so-called denunciation
sent to his father, the prosecuting attorney, in which she was
vehemently accused of corresponding with Pitt and Coburg. From that time
forward the two powers went on shares--shares a la Montgomery.
Cochet praised Gaubertin to Madame, and Gaubertin praised Cochet. The
waiting-maid had already made her own bed, and knew she was down for
sixty thousand francs in the will. Madame could not do without
Cochet, to whom she was accustomed. The woman knew the secrets of dear
mistress’s toilet; she alone could put dear mistress to sleep at night
with her gossip, and get her up in the morning with her flattery; to
the day of dear mistress’s death the maid never could see the slightest
change in her, and when dear mistress lay in her coffin, she doubtless
thought she had never seen her looking so well.
The annual pickings of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet, their wages
and perquisites, became so large that the most affectionate relative
could not possibly have been more devoted than they to their kindly
mistress. There is really no describing how a swindler cossets his dupe.
A mother is not so tender nor so solicitous for a beloved daughter as
the practitioner of tartuferie for his milch cow. What brilliant success
attends the performance of Tartufe behind the closed doors of a home! It
is worth more than friendship. Moliere died too soon; he would otherwise
have shown us the misery of Orgon, wearied by his family, harassed by
his children, regretting the blandishments of Tartufe, and thinking to
himself, “Ah, those were the good times!”
During the last eight years of her life the mistress of Les Aigues
received only thirty thousand francs of the fifty thousand really
yielded by the estate. Gaubertin had reached the same administrative
results as his predecessor, though farm rents and territorial products
were notably increased between 1791 and 1815,--not to speak of Madame’s
continual purchases. But Gaubertin’s fixed idea of acquiring Les
Aigues at the old lady’s death led him to depreciate the value of
the magnificent estate in the matter of its ostensible revenues.
Mademoiselle Cochet, a sharer in the scheme, was also to share the
profits. As the ex-divinity in her declining years received an income of
twenty thousand francs from the Funds called consolidated (how readily
the tongue of politics can jest!), and with difficulty spent the said
sum yearly, she was much surprised at the annual purchases made by her
steward to use up the accumulating revenues, remembering how in former
times she had always drawn them in advance. The result of having few
wants in her old age seemed, to her mind, a proof of the honesty and
uprightness of Gaubertin and Mademoiselle Cochet.
“Two pearls!” she said to the persons who came to see her.
Gaubertin kept his accounts with apparent honesty. He entered all
rentals duly. Everything that could strike the feeble mind of the late
singer, so far as arithmetic went, was clear and precise. The steward
took his commission on all disbursements,--on the costs of working the
estate, on rentals made, on suits brought, on work done, on repairs of
every kind,--details which Madame never dreamed of verifying, and for
which he sometimes charged twice over by collusion with the contractors,
whose silence was bought by permission to charge the highest prices.
These methods of dealing conciliated public opinion in favor of
Gaubertin, while Madame’s praise was on every lip; for besides the
payments she disbursed for work, she gave away large sums of money in
alms.
“May God preserve her, the dear lady!” was heard on all sides.
The truth was, everybody got something out of her, either indirectly
or as a downright gift. In reprisals, as it were, of her youth the old
actress was pillaged; so discreetly pillaged, however, that those who
throve upon her kept their depredations within certain limits lest even
her eyes might be opened and she should sell Les Aigues and return to
Paris.
This system of “pickings” was, alas! the cause of Paul-Louis Carter’s
assassination; he committed the mistake of advertising the sale of his
estate and allowing it to be known that he should take away his wife,
on whom a number of the Tonsards of Lorraine were battening. Fearing to
lose Madame des Aigues, the marauders on the estate forbore to cut the
young trees, unless pushed to extremities by finding no branches within
reach of shears fastened to long poles. In the interests of robbery,
they did as little harm as they could; although, during the last
years of Madame’s life, the habit of cutting wood became more and more
barefaced. On certain clear nights not less than two hundred bundles
were taken. As to the gleaning of fields and vineyards, Les Aigues lost,
as Sibilet had pointed out, not less than one quarter of its products.
Madame des Aigues had forbidden Cochet to marry during her lifetime,
with the selfishness often shown in all countries by a mistress to
a maid; which is not more irrational than the mania for keeping
possession, until our last gasp, of property that is utterly useless to
our material comfort, at the risk of being poisoned by impatient heirs.
Twenty days after the old lady’s burial Mademoiselle Cochet married the
brigadier of the gendarmerie of Soulanges, named Soudry, a handsome
man, forty-two years of age, who, ever since 1800 (in which year the
gendarmerie was formed) had come every day to Les Aigues to see the
waiting-maid, and dined with her at least three times a week at the
Gaubertins’.
During Madame’s lifetime dinner was served to her and to her company
by themselves. Neither Cochet nor Gaubertin, in spite of their great
familiarity with the mistress, was ever admitted to her table; the
leading lady of the Academie Royale retained, to her last hour, her
sense of etiquette, her style of dress, her rouge and her heeled
slippers, her carriage, her servants, and the majesty of her deportment.
A divinity at the Opera, a divinity within her range of Parisian social
life, she continued a divinity in the country solitudes, where her
memory is still worshipped, and still holds its own against that of the
old monarchy in the minds of the “best society” of Soulanges.
Soudry, who had paid his addresses to Mademoiselle Cochet from the
time he first came into the neighborhood, owned the finest house in
Soulanges, an income of six thousand francs, and the prospect of a
retiring pension whenever he should quit the service. As soon as Cochet
became Madame Soudry she was treated with great consideration in the
town. Though she kept the strictest secrecy as to the amount of
her savings,--which were intrusted, like those of Gaubertin, to the
commissary of wine-merchants of the department in Paris, a certain
Leclercq, a native of Soulanges, to whom Gaubertin supplied funds as
sleeping partner in his business,--public opinion credited the former
waiting-maid with one of the largest fortunes in the little town of
twelve hundred inhabitants.
To the great astonishment of every one, Monsieur and Madame Soudry
acknowledged as legitimate, in their marriage contract, a natural son
of the gendarme, to whom, in future, Madame Soudry’s fortune was to
descend. At the time when this son was legally supplied with a mother,
he had just ended his law studies in Paris and was about to enter into
practice, with the intention of fitting himself for the magistracy.
It is scarcely necessary to remark that a mutual understanding of
twenty years had produced the closest intimacy between the families of
Gaubertin and Soudry. Both reciprocally declared themselves, to the
end of their days, “urbi et orbi,” to be the most upright and honorable
persons in all France. Such community of interests, based on the mutual
knowledge of the secret spots on the white garment of conscience, is one
of the ties least recognized and hardest to untie in this low world. You
who read this social drama, have you never felt a conviction as to two
persons which has led you to say to yourself, in order to explain the
continuance of a faithful devotion which made your own egotism blush,
“They must surely have committed some crime together”?
After an administration of twenty-five years, Gaubertin, the
land-steward, found himself in possession of six hundred thousand
francs in money, and Cochet had accumulated nearly two hundred and fifty
thousand. The rapid and constant turning over and over of their funds in
the hands of Leclercq and Company (on the quai Bethume, Ile Saint Louis,
rivals of the famous house of Grandet) was a great assistance to the
fortunes of all parties. On the death of Mademoiselle Laguerre, Jenny,
the steward’s eldest daughter was asked in marriage by Leclercq.
Gaubertin expected at that time to become owner of Les Aigues by means
of a plot laid in the private office of Lupin, the notary, whom the
steward had set up and maintained in business within the last twelve
years.
Lupin, a son of the former steward of the estate of Soulanges, had lent
himself to various slight peculations,--investments at fifty per
cent below par, notices published surreptitiously, and all the other
manoeuvres, unhappily common in the provinces, to wrap a mantle, as
the saying is, over the clandestine manipulations of property. Lately
a company has been formed in Paris, so they say, to levy contributions
upon such plotters under a threat of outbidding them. But in 1816 France
was not, as it is now, lighted by a flaming publicity; the accomplices
might safely count on dividing Les Aigues among them, that is, between
Cochet, the notary, and Gaubertin, the latter of whom reserved to
himself, “in petto,” the intention of buying the others out for a sum
down, as soon as the property fairly stood in his own name. The lawyer
employed by the notary to manage the sale of the estate was under
personal obligations to Gaubertin, so that he favored the spoliation of
the heirs, unless any of the eleven farmers of Picardy should take it
into their heads to think they were cheated, and inquire into the real
value of the property.
Just as those interested expected to find their fortunes made, a lawyer
came from Paris on the evening before the final settlement, and employed
a notary at Ville-aux-Fayes, who happened to be one of his former
clerks, to buy the estate of Les Aigues, which he did for eleven hundred
thousand francs. None of the conspirators dared outbid an offer of
eleven hundred thousand francs. Gaubertin suspected some treachery
on Soudry’s part, and Soudry and Lupin thought they were tricked by
Gaubertin. But a statement on the part of the purchasing agent, the
notary of Ville-aux-Fayes, disabused them of these suspicions. The
latter, though suspecting the plan formed by Gaubertin, Lupin, and
Soudry, refrained from informing the lawyer in Paris, for the reason
that if the new owners indiscreetly repeated his words, he would have
too many enemies at his heels to be able to stay where he was. This
reticence, peculiar to provincials, was in this particular case amply
justified by succeeding events. If the dwellers in the provinces are
dissemblers, they are forced to be so; their excuse lies in the danger
expressed in the old proverb, “We must howl with the wolves,” a meaning
which underlies the character of Phillinte.
When General Montcornet took possession of Les Aigues, Gaubertin was no
longer rich enough to give up his place. In order to marry his daughter
to a rich banker he was obliged to give her a dowry of two hundred
thousand francs; he had to pay thirty thousand for his son’s practice;
and all that remained of his accumulations was three hundred and seventy
thousand, out of which he would be forced, sooner or later, to pay the
dowry of his remaining daughter, Elise, for whom he hoped to arrange a
marriage at least as good as that of her sister. The steward determined
to study the general, in order to find out if he could disgust him with
the place,--hoping still to be able to carry out his defeated plan in
his own interests.
With the peculiar instinct which characterizes those who make their
fortunes by craft, Gaubertin believed in a resemblance of nature (which
was not improbable) between an old soldier and an Opera-singer. An
actress, and a general of the Empire,--surely they would have the same
extravagant habits, the same careless prodigality? To the one as to the
other, riches came capriciously and by lucky chances. If some soldiers
are wily and astute and clever politicians, they are exceptions; a
soldier is, usually, especially an accomplished cavalry officer like
Montcornet, guileless, confident, a novice in business, and little
fitted to understand details in the management of an estate. Gaubertin
flattered himself that he could catch and hold the general with the
same net in which Mademoiselle Laguerre had finished her days. But it so
happened that the Emperor had once, intentionally, allowed Montcornet
to play the same game in Pomerania that Gaubertin was playing at
Les Aigues; consequently, the general fully understood a system of
plundering.
In planting cabbages, to use the expression of the first Duc de Biron,
the old cuirassier sought to divert his mind, by occupation, from
dwelling on his fall. Though he had yielded his “corps d’armee” to
the Bourbons, that duty (performed by other generals and termed the
disbanding of the army of the Loire) could not atone for the crime of
having followed the man of the Hundred-Days to his last battle-field.
In presence of the allied army it was impossible for the peer of 1815
to remain in the service, still less at the Luxembourg. Accordingly,
Montcornet betook himself to the country by advice of a dismissed
marshal, to plunder Nature herself. The general was not deficient in
the special cunning of an old military fox; and after he had spent a few
days in examining his new property, he saw that Gaubertin was a steward
of the old system,--a swindler, such as the dukes and marshals of the
Empire, those mushrooms bred from the common earth, were well acquainted
with.
The wily general, soon aware of Gaubertin’s great experience in rural
administration, felt it was politic to keep well with him until he had
himself learned the secrets of it; accordingly, he passed himself off
as another Mademoiselle Laguerre, a course which lulled the steward into
false security. This apparent simple-mindedness lasted all the time it
took the general to learn the strength and weakness of Les Aigues, to
master the details of its revenues and the manner of collecting them,
and to ascertain how and where the robberies occurred, together with the
betterments and economies which ought to be undertaken. Then, one fine
morning, having caught Gaubertin with his hand in the bag, as the saying
is, the general flew into one of those rages peculiar to the
imperial conquerors of many lands. In doing so he committed a capital
blunder,--one that would have ruined the whole life of a man of less
wealth and less consistency than himself, and from which came the evils,
both small and great, with which the present history teems. Brought up
in the imperial school, accustomed to deal with men as a dictator, and
full of contempt for “civilians,” Montcornet did not trouble himself to
wear gloves when it came to putting a rascal of a land-steward out of
doors. Civil life and its precautions were things unknown to the
soldier already embittered by his loss of rank. He humiliated Gaubertin
ruthlessly, though the latter drew the harsh treatment upon himself by a
cynical reply which roused Montcornet’s anger.
“You are living off my land,” said the general, with jesting severity.
“Do you think I can live off the sky?” returned Gaubertin, with a sneer.
“Out of my sight, blackguard! I dismiss you!” cried the general,
striking him with his whip,--blows which the steward always denied
having received, for they were given behind closed doors.
“I shall not go without my release in full,” said Gaubertin, coldly,
keeping at a distance from the enraged soldier.
“We will see what is thought of you in a police court,” replied
Montcornet, shrugging his shoulders.
Hearing the threat, Gaubertin looked at the general and smiled. The
smile had the effect of relaxing Montcornet’s arms as though the sinews
had been cut. We must explain that smile.
For the last two years, Gaubertin’s brother-in-law, a man named Gendrin,
long a justice of the municipal court of Ville-aux-Fayes, had become the
president of that court through the influence of the Comte de Soulanges.
The latter was made peer of France in 1814, and remained faithful to
the Bourbons during the Hundred-Days, therefore the Keeper of the Seals
readily granted an appointment at his request. This relationship gave
Gaubertin a certain importance in the country. The president of the
court of a little town is, relatively, a greater personage than the
president of one of the royal courts of a great city, who has various
equals, such as generals, bishops, and prefects; whereas the judge
of the court of a small town has none,--the attorney-general and the
sub-prefect being removable at will. Young Soudry, a companion of
Gaubertin’s son in Paris as well as at Les Aigues, had just been
appointed assistant attorney in the capital of the department. Before
the elder Soudry, a quartermaster in the artillery, became a brigadier
of gendarmes, he had been wounded in a skirmish while defending Monsieur
de Soulanges, then adjutant-general. At the time of the creation of
the gendarmerie, the Comte de Soulanges, who by that time had become a
colonel, asked for a brigade for his former protector, and later still
he solicited the post we have named for the younger Soudry. Besides all
these influences, the marriage of Mademoiselle Gaubertin with a wealthy
banker of the quai Bethume made the unjust steward feel that he was
far stronger in the community than a lieutenant-general driven into
retirement.
If this history provided no other instruction that that offered by the
quarrel between the general and his steward, it would still be useful
to many persons as a lesson for their conduct in life. He who reads
Machiavelli profitably, knows that human prudence consists in never
threatening; in doing but not saying; in promoting the retreat of an
enemy and never stepping, as the saying is, on the tail of the serpent;
and in avoiding, as one would murder, the infliction of a blow to the
self-love of any one lower than one’s self. An injury done to a person’s
interest, no matter how great it may be at the time, is forgiven or
explained in the long run; but self-love, vanity, never ceases to bleed
from a wound given, and never forgives it. The moral being is actually
more sensitive, more living as it were, than the physical being. The
heart and the blood are less impressible than the nerves. In short,
our inward being rules us, no matter what we do. You may reconcile
two families who have half-killed each other, as in Brittany and in
La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more reconcile the
calumniators and the calumniated than you can the spoilers and the
despoiled. It is only in epic poems that men curse each other before
they kill. The savage, and the peasant who is much like a savage, seldom
speak unless to deceive an enemy. Ever since 1789 France has been trying
to make man believe, against all evidence, that they are equal. To say
to a man, “You are a swindler,” may be taken as a joke; but to catch him
in the act and prove it to him with a cane on his back, to threaten him
with a police-court and not follow up the threat, is to remind him of
the inequality of conditions. If the masses will not brook any species
of superiority, is it likely that a swindler will forgive that of an
honest man?
Montcornet might have dismissed his steward under pretext of paying
off a military obligation by putting some old soldier in his place;
Gaubertin and the general would have understood the matter, and the
latter, by sparing the steward’s self-love would have given him a chance
to withdraw quietly. Gaubertin, in that case, would have left his late
employer in peace, and possibly he might have taken himself and his
savings to Paris for investment. But being, as he was, ignominiously
dismissed, the man conceived against his late master one of those bitter
hatreds which are literally a part of existence in provincial life, the
persistency, duration, and plots of which would astonish diplomatists
who are trained to let nothing astonish them. A burning desire for
vengeance led him to settle at Ville-aux-Fayes, and to take a position
where he could injure Montcornet and stir up sufficient enmity against
to force him to sell Les Aigues.
The general was deceived by appearances; for Gaubertin’s external
behavior was not of a nature to warn or to alarm him. The late steward
followed his old custom of pretending, not exactly poverty, but limited
means. For years he had talked of his wife and three children, and the
heavy expenses of a large family. Mademoiselle Laguerre, to whom he had
declared himself too poor to educate his son in Paris, paid the costs
herself, and allowed her dear godson (for she was Claude Gaubertin’s
sponsor) two thousand francs a year.
The day after the quarrel, Gaubertin came, with a keeper named
Courtecuisse, and demanded with much insolence his release in full of
all claims, showing the general the one he had obtained from his late
mistress in such flattering terms, and asking, ironically, that a
search should be made for the property, real and otherwise, which he was
supposed to have stolen. If he had received fees from the wood-merchants
on their purchases and from the farmers on their leases, Mademoiselle
Laguerre, he said, had always allowed it; not only did she gain by the
bargains he made, but everything went on smoothly without troubling
her. The country-people would have died, he remarked, for Mademoiselle,
whereas the general was laying up for himself a store of difficulties.
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.