CHAPTER XIII. A TYPE OF THE COUNTRY USURER

Strategically, Rigou’s position at Blangy was that of a picket sentinel.

He watched Les Aigues, and watched it well. The police have no spies

comparable to those that serve hatred.

When the general first came to Les Aigues Rigou apparently formed some

plans about him which Montcornet’s marriage with a Troisville put an end

to; he seemed to have wished to patronize the new land-owner. In fact

his intentions were so patent that Gaubertin thought best to let him

into the secrets of the coalition against Les Aigues. Before accepting

any part in the affair, Rigou determined, as he said, to put the general

between two stools.

One day, after the countess was fairly installed, a little wicker

carriage painted green entered the grand courtyard of the chateau. The

mayor, who was flanked by his mayoress, got out and came round to the

portico on the garden side. As he did so Rigou saw Madame le comtesse at

a window. She, however, devoted to the bishop and to religion and to the

Abbe Brossette, sent word by Francois that “Madame was out.”

This act of incivility, worthy of a woman born in Russia, turned the

face of the ex-Benedictine yellow. If the countess had seen the man whom

the abbe told her was “a soul in hell who plunged into iniquity as into

a bath in his efforts to cool himself,” if she had seen his face then

she might have refrained from exciting the cold, deliberate hatred

felt by the liberals against the royalists, increased as it was

in country-places by the jealousies of neighborhood, where the

recollections of wounded vanity are kept constantly alive.

A few details about this man and his morals will not only throw light on

his share of the plot, called “the great affair” by his two associates,

but it will have the merit of picturing an extremely curious type of

man,--one of those rural existences which are peculiar to France, and

which no writer has hitherto sought to depict. Nothing about this man is

without significance,--neither his house, nor his manner of blowing

the fire, nor his ways of eating; his habits, morals, and opinions will

vividly illustrate the history of the valley. This renegade serves

to show the utility of democracy; he is at once its theory and its

practice, its alpha and its omega, in short, its “summum.”

Perhaps you will remember certain masters of avarice pictured in former

scenes of this comedy of human life: in the first place the provincial

minister, Pere Grandet of Saumur, miserly as a tiger is cruel; next

Gobseck, the usurer, that Jesuit of gold, delighting only in its power,

and relishing the tears of the unfortunate because gold produced them;

then Baron Nucingen, lifting base and fraudulent money transactions to

the level of State policy. Then, too, you may remember that portrait

of domestic parsimony, old Hochon of Issoudun, and that other miser in

behalf of family interests, little la Baudraye of Sancerre. Well, human

emotions--above all, those of avarice--take on so many and diverse

shades in the diverse centres of social existence that there still

remains upon the stage of our comedy another miser to be studied,

namely, Rigou,--Rigou, the miser-egoist; full of tenderness for his own

gratifications, cold and hard to others; the ecclesiastical miser; the

monk still a monk so far as he can squeeze the juice of the fruit called

good-living, and becoming secular only to put a paw upon the public

money. In the first place, let us explain the continual pleasure that he

took in sleeping under his own roof.

Blangy--by that we mean the sixty houses described by Blondet in his

letter to Nathan--stands on a rise of land to the left of the Thune. As

all the houses are surrounded by gardens, the village is a very pretty

one. Some houses are built on the banks of the stream. At the upper end

of the long rise stands the church, formerly flanked by a parsonage,

its apse surrounded, as in many other villages, by a graveyard. The

sacrilegious old Rigou had bought the parsonage, which was originally

built by an excellent Catholic, Mademoiselle Choin, on land which she

had bought for the purpose. A terraced garden, from which the eye looked

down upon Blangy, Cerneux, and Soulanges standing between the two great

seignorial parks, separated the late parsonage from the church. On its

opposite side lay a meadow, bought by the last curate of the parish not

long before his death, which the distrustful Rigou had since surrounded

with a wall.

The ex-monk and mayor having refused to sell back the parsonage for its

original purpose, the parish was obliged to buy a house belonging to

a peasant, which adjoined the church. It was necessary to spend five

thousand francs to repair and enlarge it and to enclose it in a

little garden, one wall of which was that of the sacristy, so that

communication between the parsonage and the church was still as close as

it ever was.

These two houses, built on a line with the church, and seeming to belong

to it by their gardens, faced a piece of open ground planted by trees,

which might be called the square of Blangy,--all the more because

the count had lately built, directly opposite to the new parsonage,

a communal building intended for the mayor’s office, the home of the

field-keeper, and the quarters of that school of the Brothers of the

Christian Doctrine, for which the Abbe Brossette had hitherto begged in

vain. Thus, not only were the houses of the ex-monk and the young priest

connected and yet separated by the church, but they were in a position

to watch each other. Indeed, the whole village spied upon the abbe. The

main street, which began at the Thune, crept tortuously up the hill to

the church. Vineyards, the cottages of the peasantry, and a small grove

crowned the heights.

Rigou’s house, the handsomest in the village, was built of the large

rubble-stone peculiar to Burgundy, imbedded in yellow mortar smoothed by

the trowel, which produced an uneven surface, still further broken here

and there by projecting points of the stone, which was mostly black. A

band of cement, in which no stones were allowed to show, surrounded each

window with a sort of frame, where time had made some slight, capricious

cracks, such as appear on plastered ceilings. The outer blinds, of a

clumsy pattern, were noticeable for their color, which was dragon-green.

A few mosses grew among the slates of the roof. The type is that of

Burgundian homesteads; the traveller will see thousands like it when

visiting this part of France.

A double door opened upon a passage, half-way down which was the well of

the staircase. By the entrance was the door of a large room with three

windows looking out upon the square. The kitchen, built behind and

beneath the staircase, was lighted from the courtyard, which was neatly

paved with cobble-stones and entered by a porte-cochere. Such was the

ground-floor. The first floor contained three bedrooms, above them a

small attic chamber.

A wood-shed, a coach-house, and a stable adjoined the kitchen, and

formed two sides of a square around the courtyard. Above these rather

flimsy buildings were lofts containing hay and grain, a fruit-room, and

one servant’s-chamber.

A poultry-yard, the stable, and a pigsty faced the house across the

courtyard.

The garden, about an acre in size and enclosed by walls, was a true

priest’s garden; that is, it was full of wall-fruit and fruit-trees,

grape-arbors, gravel-paths, closely trimmed box-trees, and square

vegetable patches, made rich with the manure from the stable.

Within, the large room, panelled in wainscot, was hung with old

tapestry. The walnut furniture, brown with age and covered with stuffs

embroidered in needle-work, was in keeping with the wainscot and with

the ceiling, which was also panelled. The latter had three projecting

beams, but these were painted, and between them the space was plastered.

The mantel, also in walnut, surmounted by a mirror in the most grotesque

frame, had no other ornament than two brass eggs standing on a marble

base, each of which opened in the middle; the upper half when turned

over showed a socket for a candle. These candlesticks for two lights,

festooned with chains (an invention of the reign of Louis XV.), were

becoming rare. On a green and gold bracket fastened to the wall opposite

to the window was a common but excellent clock. The curtains, which

squeaked upon their rods, were at least fifty years old; their material,

of cotton in a square pattern like that of mattresses, alternately pink

and white, came from the Indies. A sideboard and dinner-table completed

the equipment of the room, which was kept with extreme nicety.

At the corner of the fireplace was an immense sofa, Rigou’s especial

seat. In the angle, above a little “bonheur du jour,” which served him

as a desk, and hanging to a common screw, was a pair of bellows, the

origin of Rigou’s fortune.

From this succinct description, in style like that of an auction sale,

it will be easy to imagine that the bedrooms of Monsieur and Madame

Rigou were limited to mere necessaries; yet it would be a mistake to

suppose that such parsimony affected the essential excellence of those

necessaries. For instance, the most fastidious of women would have slept

well in Rigou’s bed, with fine linen sheets, excellent mattresses, made

luxurious by a feather-bed (doubtless bought for some abbe by a pious

female parishioner) and protected from draughts by thick curtains. All

the rest of Rigou’s belongings were made comfortable for his use, as we

shall see.

In the first place, he had reduced his wife, who could neither read,

write, nor cipher, to absolute obedience. After having ruled her

deceased master, the poor creature was now the servant of her husband;

she cooked and did the washing, with very little help from a pretty girl

named Annette, who was nineteen years old and as much a slave to Rigou

as her mistress, and whose wages were thirty francs a year.

Tall, thin, and withered, Madame Rigou, a woman with a yellow face

red about the cheek-bones, her head always wrapped in a colored

handkerchief, and wearing the same dress all the year round, did not

leave the house for two hours in a month’s time, but kept herself

in exercise by doing the hard work of a devoted servant. The keenest

observer could not have found a trace of the fine figure, the Rubens

coloring, the splendid lines, the superb teeth, the virginal eyes which

first drew the attention of the Abbe Niseron to the young girl. The

birth of her only daughter, Madame Soudry, Jr., had blighted her

complexion, decayed her teeth, dimmed her eyes, and even caused the

dropping of their lashes. It almost seemed as if the finger of God

had fallen upon the wife of the priest. Like all well-to-do country

house-wives, she liked to see her closets full of silk gowns, made and

unmade, and jewels and laces which did her no good and only excited the

sin of envy and a desire for her death in the minds of all the young

women who served Rigou. She was one of those beings, half-woman,

half-animal, who are born to live by instinct. This ex-beautiful Arsene

was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe Niseron

would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circumstance which

prompted it, and which we give here for the edification of the vast

tribe of expectant heirs.

Madame Niseron, the wife of the old republican sexton, always paid the

greatest attention to her husband’s uncle, the priest of Blangy; the

forty or fifty thousand francs soon to be inherited from the old man

of seventy would put the family of his only nephew into a condition of

affluence which she impatiently awaited, for besides her only son (the

father of La Pechina) Madame Niseron had a charming little daughter,

lively and innocent,--one of those beings that seem perfected only

because they are to die, which she did at the age of fourteen from “pale

color,” the popular name for chlorosis among the peasantry. The darling

of the parsonage, where the child fluttered about her great uncle the

abbe as she did in her home, bringing clouds and sunshine with her, she

grew to love Mademoiselle Arsene, the pretty servant whom the old abbe

engaged in 1789. Arsene was the niece of his housekeeper, whose place

the girl took by request of the latter on her deathbed.

In 1791, just about the time that the Abbe Niseron offered his house as

an asylum to Rigou and his brother Jean, the little girl played one of

her mischievous but innocent tricks. She was playing with Arsene and

some other children at a game which consists in hiding an object which

the rest seek, and crying out, “You burn!” or “You freeze!” according

as the searchers approach or leave the hidden article. Little Genevieve

took it into her head to hide the bellows in Arsene’s bed. The bellows

could not be found, and the game came to an end; Genevieve was taken

home by her mother and forgot to put the bellows back on the nail.

Arsene and her aunt searched more than a week for them; then they

stopped searching and managed to do without them, the old abbe blowing

his fire with an air-cane made in the days when air-canes were the

fashion,--a fashion which was no doubt introduced by some courtier of

the reign of Henri III. At last, about a month before her death, the

housekeeper, after a dinner at which the Abbe Mouchon, the Niseron

family, and the curate of Soulanges were present, returned to her

jeremiades about the loss of the bellows.

“Why! they’ve been these two weeks in Arsene’s bed!” cried the little

one, with a peal of laughter. “Great lazy thing! if she had taken the

trouble to make her bed she would have found them.”

As it was 1791 everybody laughed; but a dead silence succeeded the

laugh.

“There is nothing laughable in that,” said the housekeeper; “since I

have been ill Arsene sleeps in my room.”

In spite of this explanation the Abbe Niseron looked thunderbolts at

Madame Niseron and his nephew, thinking they were plotting mischief

against him. The housekeeper died. Rigou contrived to work up the

abbe’s resentment to such a pitch that he made a will disinheriting

Jean-Francois Niseron in favor of Arsene Pichard.

In 1823 Rigou, perhaps out of a sense of gratitude, still blew the fire

with an air-cane, and left the bellows hanging to the screw.

Madame Niseron, idolizing her daughter, did not long survive her. Mother

and child died in 1794. The old abbe, too, was dead, and citizen Rigou

took charge of Arsene’s affairs by marrying her. A former convert in

the monastery, attached to Rigou as a dog is to his master, became the

groom, gardener, herdsman, valet, and steward of the sensual Harpagon.

Arsene Rigou, the daughter, married in 1821 without dowry to the

prosecuting-attorney, inheriting something of her mother’s rather vulgar

beauty, together with the crafty mind of her father.

Now about sixty-seven years of age, Rigou had never been ill in his

life, and nothing seemed able to lessen his aggressively good health.

Tall, lean, with brown circles round his eyes, the lids of which were

nearly black, any one who saw him of a morning, when as he dressed he

exposed the wrinkled, red, and granulated skin of his neck, would have

compared him to a condor,--all the more because his long nose, sharp

at the tip, increased the likeness by its sanguineous color. His head,

partly bald, would have frightened phrenologists by the shape of its

skull, which was like an ass’s backbone, an indication of despotic

will. His grayish eyes, half-covered by filmy, red-veined lids, were

predestined to aid hypocrisy. Two scanty locks of hair of an undecided

color overhung the large ears, which were long and without rim, a sure

sign of cruelty, but cruelty of the moral nature only, unless where it

means actual insanity. The mouth, very broad, with thin lips, indicated

a sturdy eater and a determined drinker by the drop of its corners,

which turned downward like two commas, from which drooled gravy when he

ate and saliva when he talked. Heliogabalus must have been like this.

His dress, which never varied, consisted of a long blue surtout with a

military collar, a black cravat, with waistcoat and trousers of black

cloth. His shoes, very thick soled, had iron nails outside, and inside

woollen linings knit by his wife in the winter evenings. Annette and her

mistress also knit the master’s stockings. Rigou’s name was Gregoire.

Though this sketch gives some idea of the man’s character, no one can

imagine the point to which, in his private and unthwarted life, the

ex-Benedictine had pushed the science of selfishness, good living, and

sensuality. In the first place, he dined alone, waited upon by his wife

and Annette, who themselves dined with Jean in the kitchen, while the

master digested his meal and disposed of his wine as he read “the news.”

In the country the special names of journals are never mentioned; they

are all called by the general name of “the news.”

Rigou’s dinner, like his breakfast and supper, was always of choice

delicacies, cooked with the art which distinguishes a priest’s

housekeeper from all other cooks. Madame Rigou made the butter herself

twice a week. Cream was a concomitant of many sauces. The vegetables

came at a jump, as it were, from their frames to the saucepan.

Parisians, who are accustomed to eat the fruits of the earth after they

have had a second ripening in the sun of a city, infected by the air of

the streets, fermenting in close shops, and watered from time to time by

the market-women to give them a deceitful freshness, have little idea of

the exquisite flavors of really fresh produce, to which nature has lent

fugitive but powerful charms when eaten as it were alive.

The butcher of Soulanges brought his best meat under fear of losing

Rigou’s custom. The poultry, raised on the premises, was of the finest

quality.

This system of secret pampering embraced everything in which Rigou was

personally concerned. Though the slippers of the knowing Thelemist were

of stout leather they were lined with lamb’s wool. Though his coat was

of rough cloth it did not touch his skin, for his shirt, washed and

ironed at home, was of the finest Frisian linen. His wife, Annette, and

Jean drank the common wine of the country, the wine he reserved from his

own vineyards; but in his private cellar, as well stocked as the cellars

of Belgium, the finest vintages of Burgundy rubbed sides with those

of Bordeaux, Champagne, Roussillon, not to speak of Spanish and Rhine

wines, all bought ten years in advance of use and bottled by Brother

Jean. The liqueurs in that cellar were those of the Isles, and came

originally from Madame Amphoux. Rigou had laid in a supply to last him

the rest of his days, at the national sale of a chateau in Burgundy.

The ex-monk ate and drank like Louis XIV. (one of the greatest consumers

of food and drink ever known), which reveals the costs of a life that

was more than voluptuous. Careful and very shrewd in managing his secret

prodigalities, he disputed all purchases as only churchmen can dispute.

Instead of taking infinite precautions against being cheated, the sly

monk kept patterns and samples, had the agreements reduced to writing,

and warned those who forwarded his wines or his provisions that if

they fell short of the mark in any way he should refuse to accept their

consignments.

Jean, who had charge of the fruit-room, was trained to keep fresh the

finest fruits grown in the department; so that Rigou ate pears and

apples and sometimes grapes, at Easter.

No prophet regarded as a God was ever more blindly obeyed than was Rigou

in his own home. A mere motion of his black eyelashes could plunge his

wife, Annette, and Jean into the deepest anxiety. He held his three

slaves by the multiplicity of their many duties, which were like a chain

in his hands. These poor creatures were under the perpetual yoke of some

ordered duty, with an eye always on them; but they had come to take a

sort of pleasure in accomplishing these tasks, and did not suffer under

them. All three had the comfort and well-being of that one man before

their minds as the sole end and object of all their thoughts.

Annette was (since 1795) the tenth pretty girl in Rigou’s service,

and he expected to go down to his grave with relays of such servants.

Brought to him at sixteen, she would be sent away at nineteen. All these

girls, carefully chosen at Auxerre, Clamecy, or in the Morvan, were

enticed by the promise of future prosperity; but Madame Rigou persisted

in living. So at the end of every three years some quarrel, usually

brought about by the insolence of the servant to the poor mistress,

caused their dismissal.

Annette, who was a picture of delicate beauty, ingenuous and sparkling,

deserved to be a duchess. Rigou knew nothing of the love affair between

her and Jean-Louis Tonsard, which proves that he had let himself be

fooled by the girl,--the only one of his many servants whose ambition

had taught her to flatter the lynx as the only way to blind him.

This uncrowned Louis XV. did not keep himself wholly to his pretty

Annette. Being the mortgagee of lands bought by peasants who were unable

to pay for them, he kept a harem in the valley, from Soulanges to

five miles beyond Conches on the road to La Brie, without making other

payments than “extension of time,” for those fugitive pleasures which

eat into the fortunes of so many old men.

This luxurious life, a life like that of Bouret, cost Rigou almost

nothing. Thanks to his white slaves, he could cut and mow down and

gather in his wood, hay, and grain. To the peasant manual labor is

a small matter, especially if it serves to postpone the payment of

interest due. And so Rigou, while requiring little premiums on each

month’s delay, squeezed a great deal of manual labor out of his

debtors,--positive drudgery, to which they submitted thinking they gave

little because nothing left their pockets. Rigou sometimes obtained in

this way more than the principal of a debt.

Deep as a monk, silent as a Benedictine in the throes of writing

history, sly as a priest, deceitful as all misers, carefully keeping

within the limits of the law, the man might have been Tiberius in Rome,

Richelieu under Louis XIII., or Fouche, had the ambition seized him to

go to the Convention; but, instead of all that, Rigou had the common

sense to remain a Lucullus without ostentation, in other words, a

parsimonious voluptuary. To occupy his mind he indulged a hatred

manufactured out of the whole cloth. He harassed the Comte de

Montcornet. He worked the peasants like puppets by hidden wires, the

handling of which amused him as though it were a game of chess where

the pawns were alive, the knights caracoled, the bishops, like Fourchon,

gabbled, the feudal castles shone in the sun, and the queen maliciously

checkmated the king. Every day, when he got out of bed and saw from his

window the proud towers of Les Aigues, the chimneys of the pavilions,

and the noble gates, he said to himself: “They shall fall! I’ll dry up

the brooks, I’ll chop down the woods.” But he had two victims in mind, a

chief one and a lesser one. Though he meditated the dismemberment of the

chateau, the apostate also intended to make an end of the Abbe Brossette

by pin-pricks.

To complete the portrait of the ex-priest it will suffice to add that

he went to mass regretting that his wife still lived, and expressed the

desire to be reconciled with the Church as soon as he became a widower.

He bowed deferentially to the Abbe Brossette whenever he met him, and

spoke to him courteously and without heat. As a general thing all men

who belong to the Church, or who have come out of it, have the patience

of insects; they owe this to the obligation they have been under,

ecclesiastically, to preserve decorum,--a training which has been

lacking for the last twenty years to the vast majority of the French

nation, even those who think themselves well-bred. All the monks

which the Revolution brought out of their monasteries and forced into

business, public or private, showed in their coldness and reserve the

great advantage which ecclesiastical discipline gives to the sons of the

Church, even those who desert her.

Gaubertin had understood Rigou from the days when the Abbe Niseron made

his will and the ex-monk married the heiress; he fathomed the craft

hidden behind the jaundiced face of that accomplished hypocrite; and he

made himself the man’s fellow-worshipper before the altar of the Golden

Calf. When the banking-house of Leclercq was first started he advised

Rigou to put fifty thousand francs into it, guaranteeing their security

himself. Rigou was all the more desirable as an investor, or sleeping

partner, because he drew no interest but allowed his capital to

accumulate. At the period of which we write it amounted to over a

hundred thousand francs, although in 1816 he had taken out one hundred

and eighty thousand for investment in the Public Funds, from which he

derived an income of seventeen thousand francs. Lupin the notary had

cognizance of at least one hundred thousand francs which Rigou had lent

on small mortgages upon good estates. Ostensibly, Rigou derived about

fourteen thousand francs a year from landed property actually owned by

him. But as to his amassed hoard, it was represented by an “x” which no

rule of equations could evolve, just as the devil alone knew the secret

schemes he plotted with Langlume.

This dangerous usurer, who proposed to live a score of years longer, had

established fixed rules to work upon. He lent nothing to a peasant who

bought less than seven acres, and who could not pay one-half of the

purchase-money down. Rigou well understood the defects of the law of

dispossession when applied to small holdings, and the danger both to the

Public Treasury and to land-owners of the minute parcelling out of the

soil. How can you sue a peasant for the value of one row of vines

when he owns only five? The bird’s-eye view of self-interest is always

twenty-five years ahead of the perceptions of a legislative body. What a

lesson for a nation! Law will ever emanate from one brain, that of a man

of genius, and not from the nine hundred legislative heads, which, great

as they may be in themselves, are belittled and lost in a crowd.

Rigou’s law contains the essential element which has yet to be found

and introduced into public law to put an end to the absurd spectacle of

landed property reduced to halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths,--as

in the district of Argenteuil, where there are thirty thousand plots of

land.

Such operations as those Rigou was concerned in require extensive

collusion, like those we have seen existing in this arrondissement.

Lupin, the notary, whom Rigou employed to draw at least one third of

the deeds annually entrusted to his notarial office, was devoted to him.

This shark could thus include in the mortgage note (signed always in

presence of the wife, when the borrower was married) the amount of the

illegal interest. The peasant, delighted to feel he had to pay only his

five per cent interest annually, always imagined he should be able to

meet the payment by working doubly hard or by improving the land and

getting double returns upon it.

Hence the deceitful hopes excited by what imbecile economists call

“small farming,”--a political blunder to which we owe such mistakes as

sending French money to Germany to buy horses which our own land had

ceased to breed; a blunder which before long will reduce the raising of

cattle until meat will be unattainable not only by the people, but by

the lower middle classes (see “Le Cure de Village.”)

So, not a little sweat bedewed men’s brows between Conches and

Ville-aux-Fayes to Rigou’s profit, all being willing to give it; whereas

the labor dearly paid for by the general, the only man who did spend

money in the district, brought him curses and hatred, which were

showered upon him simply because he was rich. How could such facts

be understood unless we had previously taken that rapid glance at the

Mediocracy. Fourchon was right; the middle classes now held the position

of the former lords. The small land-owners, of whom Courtecuisse is

a type, were tenants in mortmain of a Tiberius in the valley of the

Avonne, just as, in Paris, traders without money are the peasantry of

the banking system.

Soudry followed Rigou’s example from Soulanges to a distance of fifteen

miles beyond Ville-aux-Fayes. These two usurers shared the district

between them.

Gaubertin, whose rapacity was in a higher sphere, not only did not

compete against that of his associates, but he prevented all other

capital in Ville-aux-Fayes from being employed in the same

fruitful manner. It is easy to imagine what immense influence this

triumvirate--Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin--wielded in election periods

over electors whose fortunes depended on their good-will.

Hate, intelligence, and means at command, such were the three sides of

the terrible triangle which describes the general’s closest enemy, the

spy ever watching Les Aigues,--a shark having constant dealings with

sixty to eighty small land-owners, relations or connections of the

peasantry, who feared him as such men always fear their creditor.

Rigou was in his way another Tonsard. The one throve on thefts from

nature, the other waxed fat on legal plunder. Both liked to live well.

It was the same nature in two species,--the one natural, the other

whetted by his training in a cloister.

It was about four o’clock when Vaudoyer left the tavern of the

Grand-I-Vert to consult the former mayor. Rigou was at dinner. Finding

the front door locked, Vaudoyer looked above the window blinds and

called out:--

“Monsieur Rigou, it is I,--Vaudoyer.”

Jean came round from the porte-cochere and said to Vaudoyer:--

“Come into the garden; Monsieur has company.”

The company was Sibilet, who, under pretext of discussing the verdict

Brunet had just handed in, was talking to Rigou of quite other matters.

He had found the usurer finishing his dessert. On a square dinner-table

covered with a dazzling white cloth--for, regardless of his wife and

Annette who did the washing, Rigou exacted clean table-linen every

day--the steward noted strawberries, apricots, peaches, figs, and

almonds, all the fruits of the season in profusion, served in white

porcelain dishes on vine-leaves as daintily as at Les Aigues.

Seeing Sibilet, Rigou told him to run the bolts of the inside

double-doors, which were added to the other doors as much to stifle

sounds as to keep out the cold air, and asked him what pressing business

brought him there in broad daylight when it was so much safer to confer

together at night.

“The Shopman talks of going to Paris to see the Keeper of the Seals;

he is capable of doing you a great deal of harm; he may ask for

the dismissal of your son-in-law, and the removal of the judges at

Ville-aux-Fayes, especially after reading the verdict just rendered in

your favor. He has turned at bay; he is shrewd, and he has an adviser in

that abbe, who is quite able to tilt with you and Gaubertin. Priests

are powerful. Monseigneur the bishop thinks a great deal of the Abbe

Brossette. Madame la comtesse talks of going herself to her cousin the

prefect, the Comte de Casteran, about Nicolas. Michaud begins to see

into our game.”

“You are frightened,” said Rigou, softly, casting a look on Sibilet

which suspicion made less impassive than usual, and which was therefore

terrific. “You are debating whether it would not be better on the whole

to side with the Comte de Montcornet.”

“I don’t see where I am to get the four thousand francs I save honestly

and invest every year, after you have cut up and sold Les Aigues,” said

Sibilet, shortly. “Monsieur Gaubertin has made me many fine promises;

but the crisis is coming on; there will be fighting, surely. Promising

before victory and keeping a promise after it are two very different

things.”

“I will talk to him about it,” replied Rigou, imperturbably. “Meantime

this is what I should say to you if I were in his place: ‘For the last

five years you have taken Monsieur Rigou four thousand francs a year,

and that worthy man gives you seven and a half per cent; which makes

your property in his hands at this moment over twenty-seven thousand

francs, as you have not drawn the interest. But there exists a private

signed agreement between you and Rigou, and the Shopman will dismiss his

steward whenever the Abbe Brossette lays that document before his eyes;

the abbe will be able to do so after receiving an anonymous letter which

will inform him of your double-dealing. You would therefore do better

for yourself by keeping well with us instead of clamoring for your pay

in advance,--all the more because Monsieur Rigou, who is not legally

bound to give you seven and a half per cent and the interest on your

interest, will make you in court a legal tender of your twenty thousand

francs, and you will not be able to touch that money until your

suit, prolonged by legal trickery, shall be decided by the court at

Ville-aux-Fayes. But if you act wisely you will find that when Monsieur

Rigou gets possession of your pavilion at Les Aigues, you will have

very nearly thirty thousand francs in his hands and thirty thousand more

which the said Rigou may entrust to you,--which will be all the more

advantageous to you then because the peasantry will have flung them

themselves upon the estate of Les Aigues, divided into small lots like

the poverty of the world.’ That’s what Monsieur Gaubertin might say to

you. As for me, I have nothing to say, for it is none of my business.

Gaubertin and I have our own quarrel with that son of the people who is

ashamed of his own father, and we follow our own course. If my friend

Gaubertin feels the need of using you, I don’t; I need no one, for

everybody is at my command. As to the Keeper of the Seals, that

functionary is often changed; whereas we--WE are always here, and can

bide our time.”

“Well, I’ve warned you,” returned Sibilet, feeling like a donkey under a

pack-saddle.

“Warned me of what?” said Rigou, artfully.

“Of what the Shopman is going to do,” answered the steward, humbly. “He

started for the Prefecture in a rage.”

“Let him go! If the Montcornets and their kind didn’t use wheels, what

would become of the carriage-makers?”

“I shall bring you three thousand francs to-night,” said Sibilet, “but

you ought to make over some of your maturing mortgages to me,--say, one

or two that would secure to me good lots of land.”

“Well, there’s that of Courtecuisse. I myself want to be easy on him

because he is the best shot in the canton; but if I make over his

mortgage to you, you will seem to be harassing him on the Shopman’s

account, and that will be killing two birds with one stone; when

Courtecuisse finds himself a beggar, like Fourchon, he’ll be capable

of anything. Courtecuisse has ruined himself on the Bachelerie; he has

cultivated all the land, and trained fruit on the walls. The little

property is now worth four thousand francs, and the count will gladly

pay you that to get possession of the three acres that jut right into

his land. If Courtecuisse were not such an idle hound he could have paid

his interest with the game he might have killed there.”

“Well, transfer the mortgage to me, and I’ll make my butter out of

it; the count shall buy the three acres, and I shall get the house and

garden for nothing.”

“What are you going to give me out of it?”

“Good heavens! you’d milk an ox!” exclaimed Sibilet,--“when I have just

done you such a service, too. I have at last got the Shopman to enforce

the laws about gleaning--”

“Have you, my dear fellow?” said Rigou, who a few days earlier had

suggested this means of exasperating the peasantry to Sibilet, telling

him to advise the general to try it. “Then we’ve got him; he’s lost! But

it isn’t enough to hold him with one string; we must wind it round and

round him like a roll of tobacco. Slip the bolts of the door, my lad;

tell my wife to bring my coffee and the liqueurs, and tell Jean to

harness up. I’m off to Soulanges; will see you to-night!--Ah! Vaudoyer,

good afternoon,” said the late mayor as his former field-keeper entered

the room. “What’s the news?”

Vaudoyer related the talk which had just taken place at the tavern, and

asked Rigou’s opinion as to the legality of the rules which the general

thought of enforcing.

“He has the law with him,” said Rigou, curtly. “We have a hard landlord;

the Abbe Brossette is a malignant priest; he advises all such measures

because you don’t go to mass, you miserable unbelievers. I go; there’s

a God, I tell you. You peasants will have to bear everything, for the

Shopman will always get the better of you--”

“We shall glean,” said Vaudoyer, in that determined tone which

characterizes Burgundians.

“Without a certificate of pauperism?” asked the usurer. “They say the

Shopman has gone to the Prefecture to ask for troops so as to force you

to keep the law.”

“We shall glean as we have always gleaned,” repeated Vaudoyer.

“Well, glean then! Monsieur Sarcus will decide whether you have the

right to,” said Rigou, seeming to promise the help of the justice of the

peace.

“We shall glean, and we shall do it in force, or Burgundy won’t be

Burgundy any longer,” said Vaudoyer. “If the gendarmes have sabres we

have scythes, and we’ll see what comes of it!”

At half-past four o’clock the great green gate of the former parsonage

turned on its hinges, and the bay horse, led by Jean, was brought round

to the front door. Madame Rigou and Annette came out on the steps and

looked at the little wicker carriage, painted green, with a leathern

hood, where their lord and master was comfortably seated on good

cushions.

“Don’t be late home, monsieur,” said Annette, with a little pout.

The village folk, already informed of the measures the general proposed

to take, were at their doors or standing in the main street as Rigou

drove by, believing that he was going to Soulanges in their defence.

“Well, Madame Courtecuisse, so our mayor is on his way to protect us,”

remarked an old woman as she knitted; the question of depredating in

the forest was of great interest to her, for her husband sold the stolen

wood at Soulanges.

“Ah! the good man, his heart bleeds to see the way we are treated; he is

as unhappy as we are about it,” replied the poor woman, who trembled at

the very name of her husband’s creditor, and praised him out of fear.

“And he himself, too,--they’ve shamefully ill-used him! Good-day,

Monsieur Rigou,” said the old knitter to the usurer, who bowed to her

and to his debtor’s wife.

As Rigou crossed the Thune, fordable at all seasons, Tonsard came out of

the tavern and met him on the high-road.

“Well, Pere Rigou,” he said, “so the Shopman means to make dogs of us?”

“We’ll see about that,” said the usurer, whipping up his horse.

“He’ll protect us,” said Tonsard, turning to a group of women and

children who were near him.

“Rigou is thinking as much about you as a cook thinks of the gudgeons he

is frying in his pan,” called out Fourchon.

“Take the clapper out of your throat when you are drunk,” said Mouche,

pulling his grandfather by the blouse, and tumbling him down on a bank

under a poplar tree. “If that hound of a mayor heard you say that, he’d

never buy any more of your tales.”

The truth was that Rigou was hurrying to Soulanges in consequence of the

warning given him by the steward of Les Aigues, which, in his heart, he

regarded as threatening the secret coalition of the valley.

PART II

CHAPTER I. THE LEADING SOCIETY OF SOULANGES

About six kilometres (speaking legally) from Blangy, and at the same

distance from Ville-aux-Fayes, on an elevation radiating from the long

hillside at the foot of which flows the Avonne, stands the little town

of Soulanges, surnamed La Jolie, with, perhaps, more right to that title

than Mantes.

At the foot of the hill, the Thune broadens over a clay bottom to a

space of some seventy acres, at the end of which the Soulanges mills,

placed on numerous little islets, present as graceful a group of

buildings as any landscape architect could devise. After watering the

park of Soulanges, where it feeds various other streams and artificial

lakes, the Thune falls into the Avonne through a fine broad channel.

The chateau of Soulanges, rebuilt under Louis XIV. from designs of Jules

Mansart, and one of the finest in Burgundy, stands facing the town; so

that Soulanges and its chateau mutually present to each other a charming

and even elegant vista. The main road winds between the town and the

pond, called by the country people, rather pompously, the lake of

Soulanges.

The little town is one of those natural compositions which are extremely

rare in France, where _prettiness_ of its own kind is absolutely

wanting. Here you would indeed find, as Blondet said in his letter, the

charm of Switzerland, the prettiness of the environs of Neuf-chatel;

while the bright vineyards which encircle Soulanges complete the

resemblance,--leaving out, be it said, the Alps and the Jura. The

streets, placed one above another on the slope of the hill, have but few

houses; for each house stands in its own garden, which produces a mass

of greenery rarely seen in a town. The roofs, red or blue, rising among

flower-gardens, trees, and trellised terraces, present an harmonious

variety of aspects.

The church, an old Middle-Age structure, built of stone, thanks to the

munificence of the lords of Soulanges, who reserved for themselves first

a chapel near the chancel, then a crypt as their necropolis, has, by way

of portal, an immense arcade, like that of the church at Lonjumeau, and

is bordered by flower-beds adorned with statues, and flanked on either

side by columns with niches, which terminate in spires. This portal,

often seen in churches of the same period when chance has saved them

from the ravages of Calvinism, is surmounted by a triglyph, above which

stands a statue of the Virgin holding the infant Jesus. The sides of

the structure are externally of five arches, defined by stone ribs and

lighted by windows with small panes. The apse rests on arched abutments

that are worthy of a cathedral. The clock-tower, placed in a transept of

the cross, is square and surmounted by a belfry. The church can be seen

from a great distance, for it stands at the top of the great square, at

the lower end of which the high-road passes through the town.

This square, large for the size of the town, is surrounded by

very original buildings, all of different epochs. Many, half-wood,

half-brick, with their timbers faced with slate, date back to the Middle

Ages. Others, of stone, with balconies, show the form of gable so dear

to our ancestors, which belongs to the twelfth century. Several charm

the eye with those old projecting beams, carved with grotesque faces,

which form the roof of a sort of shed, and recall the days when the

middle classes were exclusively commercial. The finest house among

them was that of the chief magistrate of former days,--a house with a

sculptured front on a line with the church, to which it forms a fine

accompaniment. Sold as national property, it was bought in by the

commune, which turned it into a town-hall and court-house, where

Monsieur Sarcus had presided ever since the establishment of municipal

judges.

This slight sketch will give an idea of the square of Soulanges, adorned

in the centre with a charming fountain brought from Italy in 1520 by

the Marechal de Soulanges, which was not unworthy of a great capital.

An unfailing jet of water, coming from a spring higher up the hill, was

shed by four Cupids in white marble, bearing shells in their arms and

baskets of grapes upon their heads.

Literary travellers who may pass this way (should any such follow Emile

Blondet) might imagine the spot to have inspired Moliere and the Spanish

drama, which held its footing so long on French boards, showing that

comedy is native to warm countries where so much of life is passed in

the public streets. The square of Soulanges is all the more a reminder

of that classic stage because the two principal streets, opening just on

a line with the fountain, afford the exit and entrances so necessary for

the dramatic masters and valets whose business it is either to meet or

to avoid each other. At the corner of one of these streets, called the

rue de la Fontaine, shone the notarial escutcheon of Maitre Lupin. The

houses of Messieurs Sarcus, Guerbet the collector, Brunet, Gourdon,

clerk of the court, and that of his brother the doctor, also that of old

Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled, the keeper of the forests and streams,--all

these houses, kept with extreme neatness by their owners, who held

firmly to the flattering surname of their native town, stand in

the neighborhood of the square and form the aristocratic quarter of

Soulanges.

The house of Madame Soudry--for the powerful individuality of

Mademoiselle Laguerre’s former waiting-maid took the lead of her husband

in the community--was modern, having been built by a rich wine-merchant,

born in Soulanges, who, after making his money in Paris, returned

there in 1793 to buy wheat for his native town. He was slain as an

“accapareur,” a monopolist, by the populace, instigated by a mason, the

uncle of Godain, with whom he had had some quarrel about the building of

his ambitious house. The settlement of his estate, sharply contested by

collateral heirs, dragged slowly along until, in 1798, Soudry, who had

then returned to Soulanges, was able to buy the wine-merchant’s palace

for three thousand francs in specie. He then let it, in the first

instance, to the government for the headquarters of the gendarmerie. In

1811 Mademoiselle Cochet, whom Soudry consulted about all his affairs,

strongly objected to the renewal of the lease, making the house

uninhabitable, she declared, with barracks. The town of Soulanges,

assisted by the department, then erected a building for the gendarmerie

in a street running at right angles from the town-hall. Thereupon Soudry

cleaned up his house and restored its primitive lustre, not a little

dimmed by the stabling of horses and the occupancy of gendarmes.

The house, only one story high, with projecting windows in the roof, has

a view on three sides; one to the square, another to a lake, the third

to a garden. The fourth side looks on a courtyard which separates the

Soudrys from the adjoining house occupied by a grocer named Wattebled,

a man of the SECOND-CLASS society of Soulanges, father of the beautiful

Madame Plissoud, of whom we shall presently have occasion to speak.

All little towns have a renowned beauty, just as they have a Socquard

and a Cafe de la Paix.

It will be apparent to every one that the frontage of the Soudry mansion

on the lake must have a terraced garden confined by a stone balustrade

which overlooks both the lake and the main road. A flight of steps

leads down from the terrace to the road, and on it an orange-tree,

a pomegranate, a myrtle, and other ornamental shrubs are placed,

necessitating a greenhouse. On the side toward the square the house

is entered from a portico raised several steps above the level of

the street. According to the custom of small towns the gate of the

courtyard, used only for the service of the house or for any unusual

arrival, was seldom opened. Visitors, who mostly came on foot, entered

by the portico.

The style of the Hotel Soudry is plain. The courses are indicated by

projecting lines; the windows are framed by mouldings alternately broad

and slender, like those of the Gabriel and Perronnet pavilion in the

place Louis XV. These ornaments in so small a town give a certain solid

and monumental air to the building which has become celebrated.

Opposite to this house, in another angle of the square stands the

famous Cafe de la Paix, the characteristics of which, together with

the fascinations of its Tivoli, will require, somewhat later, a less

succinct description than that we have given of the Soudry mansion.

Rigou very seldom came to Soulanges; everybody was in the habit of going

to him,--Lupin and Gaubertin, Soudry and Gendrin,--so much were they

afraid of him. But we shall presently understand why any educated man,

such as the ex-Benedictine, would have done as Rigou did, and kept

away from the little town, after reading the following sketch of the

personages who composed what was called in those parts “the leading

society of Soulanges.”

Of its principal figures, the most original, as you have already

suspected, was that of Madame Soudry, whose personality, to be duly

rendered, needs a minute and careful brush.

Madame Soudry, respectfully imitating Mademoiselle Laguerre, began by

allowing herself a “mere touch of rouge”; but this delicate tint had

changed through force of habit to those vermilion patches picturesquely

described by our ancestors as “carriage-wheels.” The wrinkles growing

deeper and deeper, it occurred to the ex-lady’s-maid to fill them up

with paint. Her forehead becoming unduly yellow, and the temples too

shiny, she “laid on” a little white, and renewed the veins of her youth

with a tracery of blue. All this color gave an exaggerated liveliness to

her eyes which were already tricksy enough, so that the mask of her face

would seem to a stranger even more than fantastic, though her friends

and acquaintances, accustomed to this fictitious brilliancy, actually

declared her handsome.

This ungainly creature, always decolletee, showed a bosom and a pair of

shoulders that were whitened and polished by the same process employed

upon her face; happily, for the sake of exhibiting her magnificent

laces, she partially veiled the charms of these chemical products. She

always wore the body of her dress stiffened with whalebone and made in

a long point and garnished with knots of ribbon, even on the point! Her

petticoats gave forth a creaking noise,--so much did the silk and the

furbelows abound.

This attire, which deserves the name of apparel (a word that before

long will be inexplicable), was, on the evening in question, of costly

brocade,--for Madame Soudry possessed over a hundred dresses, each

richer than the others, the remains of Mademoiselle Laguerre’s enormous

and splendid wardrobe, made over to fit Madame Soudry in the last

fashion of the year 1808. Her blond wig, frizzed and powdered, sustained

a superb cap with knots of cherry satin ribbon matching those on her

dress. If you will kindly imagine beneath this ultra-coquettish cap the

face of a monkey of extreme ugliness, on which a flat nose, fleshless as

that of Death, is separated by a strong hairy line from a mouth filled

with false teeth, whence issue sounds like the confused clacking of

hunting-horns, you will have some difficulty in understanding why

the leading society of Soulanges (all the town, in fact) thought

this quasi-queen a beauty,--unless, indeed, you remember the succinct

statement recently made “ex professo,” by one of the cleverest women

of our time, on the art of making her sex beautiful by surrounding

accessories.

As to accessories, in the first place, Madame Soudry was surrounded

by the magnificent gifts accumulated by her late mistress, which the

ex-Benedictine called “fructus belli.” Then she made the most of her

ugliness by exaggerating it, and by assuming that indescribable air

and manner which belongs only to Parisian women, the secret of which is

known even to the most vulgar among them,--who are always more or less

mimics. She laced tight, wore an enormous bustle, also diamond earrings,

and her fingers were covered with rings. At the top of her corsage,

between two mounds of flesh well plastered with pearl-white, shone a

beetle made of topaz with a diamond head, the gift of dear mistress,--a

jewel renowned throughout the department. Like the late dear mistress,

she wore short sleeves and bare arms, and flirted an ivory fan, painted

by Boucher with two little rose-diamonds in the handle.

When she went out Madame Soudry carried a parasol of the true

eighteenth-century style; that is to say, a tall cane at the end of

which opened a green sun-shade with a green fringe. When she walked

about the terrace a stranger on the high-road, seeing her from afar,

might have thought her one of Watteau’s dames.

In her salon, hung with red damask, with curtains of the same lined with

silk, a fire on the hearth, a mantel-shelf adorned with bibelots of the

good time of Louis XV., and bearing candelabra in the form of lilies

upheld by Cupids--in this salon, filled with furniture in gilded wood of

the “pied de biche” pattern, it is not impossible to understand why the

people of Soulanges called the mistress of the house, “The beautiful

Madame Soulanges.” The mansion had actually become the civic pride of

this capital of a canton.

If the leading society of the little town believed in its queen, the

queen as surely believed in herself. By a phenomenon not in the least

rare, which the vanity of mothers and authors carries on at all

moments under our very eyes in behalf of their literary works or their

marriageable daughters, the late Mademoiselle Cochet was, at the end

of seven years, so completely buried under Madame Soudry, the mayoress,

that she not only did not remember her past, but she actually believed

herself a well-bred woman. She had studied the airs and graces, the

dulcet tones, the gestures, the ways of her mistress, so long that when

she found herself in the midst of an opulence of her own she was able to

practice the natural insolence of it. She knew her eighteenth century,

and the tales of its great lords and all their belongings, by heart.

This back-stairs erudition gave to her conversation a flavor of

“oeil-de-boeuf”; her soubrette gossip passed muster for courtly wit.

Morally, the mayoress was, if you wish to say so, tinsel; but to savages

paste diamonds are as good as real ones.

The woman found herself courted and worshipped by the society in which

she lived, just as her mistress had been worshipped in former days. She

gave weekly dinners, with coffee and liqueurs to those who came in after

the dessert. No female head could have resisted the exhilarating

force of such continual adulation. In winter the warm salon, always

well-lighted with wax candles, was well-filled with the richest people

of Soulanges, who paid for the good liqueurs and the fine wines which

came from dear mistress’s cellars, with flatteries to their hostess.

These visitors and their wives had a life-interest, as it were, in this

luxury; which was to them a saving of lights and fuel. Thus it came

to pass that in a circuit of fifteen miles and even as far as

Ville-aux-Fayes, every voice was ready to declare: “Madame Soudry does

the honors admirably. She keeps open house; every one enjoys her salon;

she knows how to carry herself and her fortune; she always says the

witty thing, she makes you laugh. And what splendid silver! There is not

another house like it short of Paris--”

The silver had been given to Mademoiselle Laguerre by Bouret. It was a

magnificent service made by the famous Germain, and Madame Soudry had

literally stolen it. At Mademoiselle Laguerre’s death she merely took it

into her own room, and the heirs, who knew nothing of the value of their

inheritance, never claimed it.

For some time past the twelve or fifteen personages who composed the

leading society of Soulanges spoke of Madame Soudry as the _intimate

friend_ of Mademoiselle Laguerre, recoiling at the term “waiting-woman,”

and making believe that she had sacrificed herself to the singer as her

friend and companion.

Strange yet true! all these illusions became realities, and spread even

to the actual regions of the heart; Madame Soudry reigned supreme, in a

way, over her husband.

The gendarme, required to love a woman ten years older than himself who

kept the management of her fortune in her own hands, behaved to her in

the spirit of the ideas she had ended by adopting about her beauty. But

sometimes, when persons envied him or talked to him of his happiness,

he wished they were in his place, for, to hide his peccadilloes, he was

forced to take as many precautions as the husband of a young and adoring

wife; and it was not until very recently that he had been able to

introduce into the family a pretty servant-girl.

This portrait of the Queen of Soulanges may seem a little grotesque, but

many specimens of the same kind could be found in the provinces at

that period,--some more or less noble in blood, others belonging to the

higher banking-circles, like the widow of a receiver-general in Touraine

who still puts slices of veal upon her cheeks. This portrait, drawn from

nature, would be incomplete without the diamonds in which it is set;

without the surrounding courtiers, a sketch of whom is necessary, if

only to explain how formidable such Lilliputians are, and who are the

makers of public opinion in remote little towns. Let no one mistake me,

however; there are many localities which, like Soulanges, are neither

hamlets, villages, nor little towns, which have, nevertheless, the

characteristics of all. The inhabitants are very different from those

of the large and busy and vicious provincial cities. Country life

influences the manners and morals of the smaller places, and this

mixture of tints will be found to produce some truly original

characters.

The most important personage after Madame Soudry was Lupin, the notary.

Though forty-five springs had bloomed for Lupin, he was still fresh

and rosy, thanks to the plumpness which fills out the skin of sedentary

persons; and he still sang ballads. Also, he retained the elegant

evening dress of society warblers. He looked almost Parisian in

his carefully-varnished boots, his sulphur-yellow waistcoats, his

tight-fitting coats, his handsome silk cravats, his fashionable

trousers. His hair was curled by the barber of Soulanges (the gossip of

the town), and he maintained the attitude of a man “a bonne fortunes” by

his liaison with Madame Sarcus, wife of Sarcus the rich, who was to his

life, without too close a comparison, what the campaigns of Italy were

to Napoleon. He alone of the leading society of Soulanges went to Paris,

where he was received by the Soulanges family. It was enough to hear him

talk to imagine the supremacy he wielded in his capacity as dandy and

judge of elegance. He passed judgment on all things by the use of three

terms: “out of date,” “antiquated,” “superannuated.”[*] A man, a woman,

or a piece of furniture might be “out of date”; next, by a greater

degree of imperfection, “antiquated”; but as to the last term, it was

the superlative of contempt. The first might be remedied, the second was

hopeless, but the third,--oh, better far never to have left the void of

nothingness! As to praise, a single word sufficed him, doubly and trebly

uttered: “Charming!” was the positive of his admiration. “Charming,

charming!” made you feel you were safe; but after “Charming, charming,

charming!” the ladder might be discarded, for the heaven of perfection

was attained.

[*] “Croute,” “crouton,” and “croute-au-pot,”

untranslatable, and without equivalent in English. A

“croute” is the slang term for a man behind the age.--Tr.

The tabellion,--he called himself “tabellion,” petty notary, and keeper

of notes (making fun of his calling in order to seem above it),--the

tabellion was on terms of spoken gallantry with Madame Soudry, who had

a weakness for Lupin, though he was blond and wore spectacles. Hitherto

the late Cochet had loved none but dark men, with moustachios and hairy

hands, of the Alcides type. But she made an exception in favor of Lupin

on account of his elegance, and, moreover, because she thought her

glory at Soulanges was not complete without an adorer; but, to Soudry’s

despair, the queen’s adorers never carried their adoration so far as to

threaten his rights.

Lupin had married an heiress in wooden shoes and blue woollen stockings,

the only daughter of a salt-dealer, who made his money during the

Revolution,--a period when contraband salt-traders made enormous profits

by reason of the reaction that set in against the gabelle. He prudently

left his wife at home, where Bebelle, as he called her, was supported

under his absence by a platonic passion for a handsome clerk who had no

other means than his salary,--a young man named Bonnac, belonging to the

second-class society, where he played the same role that his master, the

notary, played in the first.

Madame Lupin, a woman without any education whatever, appeared on great

occasions only, under the form of an enormous Burgundian barrel dressed

in velvet and surmounted by a little head sunken in shoulders of a

questionable color. No efforts could retain her waist-belt in its

natural place. “Bebelle” candidly admitted that prudence forbade her

wearing corsets. The imagination of a poet or, better still, that of an

inventor, could not have found on Bebelle’s back the slightest trace of

that seductive sinuosity which the vertebrae of all women who are women

usually produce. Bebelle, round as a tortoise, belonged to the genus of

invertebrate females. This alarming development of cellular tissue no

doubt reassured Lupin on the subject of the platonic passion of his fat

wife, whom he boldly called Bebelle without raising a laugh.

“Your wife, what is she?” said Sarcus the rich, one day, when unable to

digest the fatal word “superannuated,” applied to a piece of furniture

he had just bought at a bargain.

“My wife is not like yours,” replied Lupin; “she is not defined as yet.”

Beneath his rosy exterior the notary possessed a subtle mind, and he had

the sense to say nothing about his property, which was fully as large as

that of Rigou.

Monsieur Lupin’s son, Amaury, was a great trouble to his father. An

only son, and one of the Don Juans of the valley, he utterly refused

to follow the paternal profession. He took advantage of his position as

only son to bleed the strong-box cruelly, without, however, exhausting

the patience of his father, who would say after every escapade, “Well,

I was like that in my young days.” Amaury never came to Madame Soudry’s;

he said she bored him; for, with a recollection of her early days, she

attempted to “educate” him, as she called it, whereas he much preferred

the pleasures and billiards of the Cafe de la Paix. He frequented the

worst company of Soulanges, even down to Bonnebault. He continued

sowing his wild oats, as Madame Soudry remarked, and replied to all

his father’s remonstrances with one perpetual request: “Send me back to

Paris, for I am bored to death here.”

Lupin ended, alas! like other gallants, by an attachment that was

semi-conjugal. His known passion, in spite of his former liaison with

Madame Sarcus, was for the wife of the under-sheriff of the municipal

court,--Madame Euphemie Plissoud, daughter of Wattebled the grocer, who

reigned in the second-class society as Madame Soudry did in the first.

Monsieur Plissoud, a competitor of Brunet, belonged to the under-world

of Soulanges on account of his wife’s conduct, which it was said he

authorized,--a report that drew upon him the contempt of the leading

society.

If Lupin was the musician of the leading society, Monsieur Gourdon, the

doctor, was its man of science. The town said of him, “We have here

in our midst a scientific man of the first order.” Madame Soudry (who

believed she understood music because she had ushered in Piccini and

Gluck and had dressed Mademoiselle Laguerre for the Opera) persuaded

society, and even Lupin himself, that he might have made his fortune

by his voice, and, in like manner, she was always regretting that the

doctor did not publish his scientific ideas.

Monsieur Gourdon merely repeated the ideas of Cuvier and Buffon, which

might not have enabled him to pose as a scientist before the Soulanges

world; but besides this he was making a collection of shells, and he

possessed an herbarium, and he knew how to stuff birds. He lived upon

the glory of having bequeathed his cabinet of natural history to the

town of Soulanges. After this was known he was considered throughout

the department as a great naturalist and the successor of Buffon. Like a

certain Genevese banker, whose pedantry, coldness, and puritan propriety

he copied, without possessing either his money or his shrewdness,

Monsieur Gourdon exhibited with great complacency the famous collection,

consisting of a bear and a monkey (both of which had died on their way

to Soulanges), all the rodents of the department, mice and field-mice

and dormice, rats, muskrats, and moles, etc.; all the interesting birds

ever shot in Burgundy, and an Alpine eagle caught in the Jura. Gourdon

also possessed a collection of lepidoptera,--a word which led society

to hope for monstrosities, and to say, when it saw them, “Why, they are

only butterflies!” Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil

shells, mostly the collections of his friends which they bequeathed to

him, and all the minerals of Burgundy and the Jura.

These treasures, laid out on shelves with glass doors (the drawers

beneath containing the insects), occupied the whole of the first floor

of the doctor’s house, and produced a certain effect through the oddity

of the names on the tickets, the magic effect of the colors, and the

gathering together of so many things which no one pays the slightest

attention to when seen in nature, though much admired under glass.

Society took a regular day to go and look at Monsieur Gourdon’s

collection.

“I have,” he said to all inquirers, “five hundred ornithological

objects, two hundred mammifers, five thousand insects, three thousand

shells, and seven thousand specimens of minerals.”

“What patience you have had!” said the ladies.

“One must do something for one’s country,” replied the collector.

He drew an enormous profit from his carcasses by the mere repetition

of the words, “I have bequeathed everything to the town by my will.”

Visitors lauded his philanthropy; the authorities talked of devoting

the second floor of the town hall to the “Gourdon Museum,” after the

collector’s death.

“I rely upon the gratitude of my fellow-citizens to attach my name to

the gift,” he replied; “for I dare not hope they would place a marble

bust of me--”

“It would be the very least we could do for you,” they rejoined; “are

you not the glory of our town?”

Thus the man actually came to consider himself one of the celebrities of

Burgundy. The surest incomes are not from consols after all; those our

vanity obtains for us have better security. This man of science was, to

employ Lupin’s superlatives, happy! happy!! happy!!!

Gourdon, the clerk of the court, brother of the doctor, was a pitiful

little creature, whose features all gathered about his nose, so that the

nose seemed the point of departure for the forehead, the cheeks, and

the mouth, all of which were connected with it just as the ravines of a

mountain begin at the summit. This pinched little man was thought to be

one of the greatest poets in Burgundy,--a Piron, it was the fashion to

say. The dual merits of the two brothers gave rise to the remark: “We

have the brothers Gourdon at Soulanges--two very distinguished men; men

who could hold their own in Paris.”

Devoted to the game of cup-and-ball, the clerk of the court became

possessed by another mania,--that of composing an ode in honor of an

amusement which amounted to a passion in the eighteenth century. Manias

among mediocrats often run in couples. Gourdon junior gave birth to his

poem during the reign of Napoleon. That fact is sufficient to show

the sound and healthy school of poesy to which he belonged; Luce de

Lancival, Parny, Saint-Lambert, Rouche, Vigee, Andrieux, Berchoux were

his heroes. Delille was his god, until the day when the leading society

of Soulanges raised the question as to whether Gourdon were not superior

to Delille; after which the clerk of the court always called his

competitor “Monsieur l’Abbe Delille,” with exaggerated politeness.

The poems manufactured between 1780 and 1814 were all of one pattern,

and the one which Gourdon composed upon the Cup-and-Ball will give an

idea of them. They required a certain knack or proficiency in the art.

“The Chorister” is the Saturn of this abortive generation of jocular

poems, all in four cantos or thereabouts, for it was generally admitted

that six would wear the subject threadbare.

Gourdon’s poem entitled “Ode to the Cup-and-Ball” obeyed the poetic

rules which governed these works, rules that were invariable in their

application. Each poem contained in the first canto a description of

the “object sung,” preceded (as in the case of Gourdon) by a species of

invocation, of which the following is a model:--

I sing the good game that belongeth to all,

The game, be it known, of the Cup and the Ball;

Dear to little and great, to the fools and the wise;

Charming game! where the cure of all tedium lies;

When we toss up the ball on the point of a stick

Palamedus himself might have envied the trick;

O Muse of the Loves and the Laughs and the Games,

Come down and assist me, for, true to your aims,

I have ruled off this paper in syllable squares.

Come, help me--

After explaining the game and describing the handsomest cup-and-balls

recorded in history, after relating what fabulous custom it had formerly

brought to the Singe-Vert and to all dealers in toys and turned ivories,

and finally, after proving that the game attained to the dignity of

statics, Gourdon ended the first canto with the following conclusion,

which will remind the erudite reader of all the conclusions of the first

cantos of all these poems:--

‘Tis thus that the arts and the sciences, too,

Find wisdom in things that seemed silly to you.

The second canto, invariably employed to depict the manner of using “the

object,” explaining how to exhibit it in society and before women, and

the benefit to be derived therefrom, will be readily conceived by the

friends of this virtuous literature from the following quotation, which

depicts the player going through his performance under the eyes of his

chosen lady:--

Now look at the player who sits in your midst,

On that ivory ball how his sharp eye is fixt;

He waits and he watches with keenest attention,

Its least little movement in all its precision;

The ball its parabola thrice has gone round,

At the end of the string to which it is bound.

Up it goes! but the player his triumph has missed,

For the disc has come down on his maladroit wrist;

But little he cares for the sting of the ball,

A smile from his mistress consoles for it all.

It was this delineation, worthy of Virgil, which first raised a doubt as

to Delille’s superiority over Gourdon. The word “disc,” contested by

the opinionated Brunet, gave matter for discussions which lasted eleven

months; in fact, until Gourdon the scientist, one evening when all

present were on the point of getting seriously angry, annihilated the

anti-discers by observing:--

“The moon, called a _disc_ by poets, is undoubtedly a ball.”

“How do you know that?” retorted Brunet. “We have never seen but one

side.”

The third canto told the regulation story,--in this instance, the

famous anecdote of the cup-and-ball which all the world knows by heart,

concerning a celebrated minister of Louis XVI. According to the sacred

formula delivered by the “Debats” from 1810 to 1814, in praise of these

glorious words, Gourdon’s ode “borrowed fresh charms from poesy to

embellish the tale.”

The fourth canto summed up the whole, and concluded with these daring

words,--not published, be it remarked, from 1810 to 1814; in fact, they

did not see the light till 1824, after Napoleon’s death.

‘Twas thus that I sang in the time of alarms.

Oh, if kings would consent to bear no other arms,

And people enjoyed what was best for them all,

The sweet little game of the Cup and the Ball,

Our Burgundy then might be free of all fear,

And return to the good days of Saturn and Rhea.

These fine verses were published in a first and only edition from the

press of Bournier, printer of Ville-aux-Fayes. One hundred subscribers,

in the sum of three francs, guaranteed the dangerous precedent of

immortality to the poem,--a liberality that was all the greater because

these hundred persons had heard the poem from beginning to end a hundred

times over.

Madame Soudry had lately suppressed the cup-and-ball, which usually lay

on a pier-table in the salon and for the last seven years had given rise

to endless quotations, for she finally discovered in the toy a rival to

her own attractions.

As to the author, who boasted of future poems in his desk, it is enough

to quote the terms in which he mentioned to the leading society of

Soulanges a rival candidate for literary honors.

“Have you heard a curious piece of news?” he had said, two years

earlier. “There is another poet in Burgundy! Yes,” he added, remarking

the astonishment on all faces, “he comes from Macon. But you could

never imagine the subjects he takes up,--a perfect jumble, absolutely

unintelligible,--lakes, stars, waves, billows! not a single

philosophical image, not even a didactic effort! he is ignorant of the

very meaning of poetry. He calls the sky by its name. He says ‘moon,’

bluntly, instead of naming it ‘the planet of night.’ That’s what the

desire to be thought original brings men to,” added Gourdon, mournfully.

“Poor young man! A Burgundian, and sing such stuff as that!--the pity

of it! If he had only consulted me, I would have pointed out to him the

noblest of all themes, wine,--a poem to be called the Baccheide; for

which, alas! I now feel myself too old.”

This great poet is still ignorant of his finest triumph (though he owes

it to the fact of being a Burgundian), namely, that of living in the

town of Soulanges, so rounded and perfected within itself that it knows

nothing of the modern Pleiades, not even their names.

A hundred Gourdons made poetry under the Empire, and yet they tell us

it was a period that neglected literature! Examine the “Journal de

la Libraire” and you will find poems on the game of draughts, on

backgammon, on tricks with cards, on geography, typography, comedy,

etc.,--not to mention the vaunted masterpieces of Delille on Piety,

Imagination, Conversation; and those of Berchoux on Gastromania and

Dansomania, etc. Who can foresee the chances and changes of taste,

the caprices of fashion, the transformations of the human mind? The

generations as they pass along sweep out of sight the last fragments

of the idols they found on their path and set up other gods,--to be

overthrown like the rest.

Sarcus, a handsome little man with a dapple-gray head, devoted himself

in turn to Themis and to Flora,--in other words, to legislation and a

greenhouse. For the last twelve years he had been meditating a book

on the History of the Institution of Justices of the Peace, “whose

political and judiciary role,” he said, “had already passed through

several phases, all derived from the Code of Brumaire, year IV.; and

to-day that institution, so precious to the nation, had lost its power

because the salaries were not in keeping with the importance of its

functions, which ought to be performed by irremovable officials.” Rated

in the community as an able man, Sarcus was the accepted statesman of

Madame Soudry’s salon; you can readily imagine that he was the leading

bore. They said he talked like a book. Gaubertin prophesied he would

receive the cross of the Legion of honor, but not until the day when, as

Leclercq’s successor, he should take his seat on the benches of the Left

Centre.

Guerbet, the collector, a man of parts, a heavy, fat, individual with

a buttery face, a toupet on his bald spot, gold earrings, which were

always in difficulty with his shirt-collar, had the hobby of pomology.

Proud of possessing the finest fruit-garden in the arrondissement, he

gathered his first crops a month later than those of Paris; his hot-beds

supplied him with pine-apples, nectarines, and peas, out of season. He

brought bunches of strawberries to Madame Soudry with pride when the

fruit could be bought for ten sous a basket in Paris.

Soulanges possessed a pharmaceutist named Vermut, a chemist, who was

more of a chemist than Sarcus was a statesman, or Lupin a singer, or

Gourdon the elder a scientist, or his brother a poet. Nevertheless, the

leading society of Soulanges did not take much notice of Vermut, and

the second-class society took none at all. The instinct of the first may

have led them to perceive the real superiority of this thinker, who said

little but smiled at their absurdities so satirically that they first

doubted his capacity and then whispered tales against it; as for the

other class they took no notice of him one way or the other.

Vermut was the butt of Madame Soudry’s salon. No society is complete

without a victim,--without an object to pity, ridicule, despise, and

protect. Vermut, full of his scientific problems, often came with his

cravat untied, his waistcoat unbuttoned, and his little green surtout

spotted.

The little man, gifted with the patience of a chemist, could not enjoy

(that is the term employed in the provinces to express the abolition of

domestic rule) Madame Vermut,--a charming woman, a lively woman, capital

company (for she could lose forty sous at cards and say nothing), a

woman who railed at her husband, annoyed him with epigrams, and declared

him to be an imbecile unable to distil anything but dulness. Madame

Vermut was one of those women who in the society of a small town are the

life and soul of amusement and who set things going. She supplied the

salt of her little world, kitchen-salt, it is true; her jokes were

somewhat broad, but society forgave them; though she was capable of

saying to the cure Taupin, a man of seventy years of age, with white

hair, “Hold your tongue, my lad.”

The miller of Soulanges, possessing an income of fifty thousand francs,

had an only daughter whom Lupin desired for his son Amaury, since he had

lost the hope of marrying him to Gaubertin’s daughter. This miller, a

Sarcus-Taupin, was the Nucingen of the little town. He was supposed to

be thrice a millionaire; but he never transacted business with others,

and thought only of grinding his wheat and keeping a monopoly of it;

his most noticeable point was a total absence of politeness and good

manners.

The elder Guerbet, brother of the post-master at Conches, possessed

an income of ten thousand francs, besides his salary as collector. The

Gourdons were rich; the doctor had married the only daughter of old

Monsieur Gendrin-Vatebled, keeper of the forests and streams, whom the

family were now _expecting to die_, while the poet had married the niece

and sole heiress of the Abbe Taupin, the curate of Soulanges, a stout

priest who lived in his cure like a rat in his cheese.

This clever ecclesiastic, devoted to the leading society, kind and

obliging to the second, apostolic to the poor and unfortunate, made

himself beloved by the whole town. He was cousin of the miller and

cousin of the Sarcuses, and belonged therefore to the neighborhood and

to its mediocracy. He always dined out and saved expenses; he went to

weddings but came away before the ball; he paid the costs of public

worship, saying, “It is my business.” And the parish let him do it,

with the remark, “We have an excellent priest.” The bishop, who knew the

Soulanges people and was not at all misled as to the true value of the

abbe, was glad enough to keep in such a town a man who made religion

acceptable, and who knew how to fill his church and preach to sleepy

heads.

It is unnecessary to remark that not only each of these worthy burghers

possessed some one of the special qualifications which are necessary to

existence in the provinces, but also that each cultivated his field in

the domain of vanity without a rival. Pere Guerbet understood finance,

Soudry might have been minister of war; if Cuvier had passed that way

incognito, the leading society of Soulanges would have proved to him

that he knew nothing in comparison with Monsieur Gourdon the doctor.

“Adolphe Nourrit with his thread of a voice,” remarked the notary

with patronizing indulgence, “was scarcely worthy to accompany the

nightingale of Soulanges.” As to the author of the “Cup-and-Ball” (which

was then being printed at Bournier’s), society was satisfied that a poet

of his force could not be met with in Paris, for Delille was now dead.

This provincial bourgeoisie, so comfortably satisfied with itself, took

the lead through the various superiorities of its members. Therefore

the imagination of those who ever resided, even for a short time, in a

little town of this kind can conceive the air of profound satisfaction

upon the faces of these people, who believed themselves the solar plexus

of France, all of them armed with incredible dexterity and shrewdness to

do mischief,--all, in their wisdom, declaring that the hero of Essling

was a coward, Madame de Montcornet a manoeuvring Parisian, and the Abbe

Brossette an ambitious little priest.

If Rigou, Soudry, and Gaubertin had lived at Ville-aux-Fayes, they would

have quarrelled; their various pretensions would have clashed; but

fate ordained that the Lucullus of Blangy felt too strongly the need

of solitude, in which to wallow at his ease in usury and sensuality, to

live anywhere but at Blangy; that Madame Soudry had sense enough to

see that she could reign nowhere else except at Soulanges; and that

Ville-aux-Fayes was Gaubertin’s place of business. Those who enjoy

studying social nature will admit that General Montcornet was pursued by

special ill-luck in this accidental separation of his dangerous enemies,

who thus accomplished the evolutions of their individual power and

vanity at such distances from each other that neither star interfered

with the orbit of the other,--a fact which doubled and trebled their

powers of mischief.

Nevertheless, though all these worthy bourgeois, proud of their

accomplishments, considered their society as far superior in attractions

to that of Ville-aux-Fayes, and repeated with comic pomposity the local

dictum, “Soulanges is a town of society and social pleasures,” it

must not be supposed that Ville-aux-Fayes accepted this supremacy. The

Gaubertin salon ridiculed (“in petto”) the salon Soudry. By the manner

in which Gaubertin remarked, “We are a financial community, engaged

in actual business; we have the folly to fatigue ourselves in making

fortunes,” it was easy to perceive a latent antagonism between the earth

and the moon. The moon believed herself useful to the earth, and the

earth governed the moon. Earth and moon, however, lived in the closest

intimacy. At the carnival the leading society of Soulanges went in a

body to four balls given by Gaubertin, Gendrin, Leclercq, and Soudry,

junior. Every Sunday the latter, his wife, Monsieur, Madame, and

Mademoiselle Elise Gaubertin dined with the Soudrys at Soulanges. When

the sub-prefect was invited, and when the postmaster of Conches arrived

to take pot-luck, Soulanges enjoyed the sight of four official equipages

drawn up at the door of the Soudry mansion.

CHAPTER II. THE CONSPIRATORS IN THE QUEEN’S SALON

Reaching Soulanges about half-past five o’clock, Rigou was sure of

finding the usual party assembled at the Soudrys’. There, as everywhere

else in town, the dinner-hour was three o’clock, according to the custom

of the last century. From five to nine the notables of Soulanges met

in Madame Soudry’s salon to exchange the news, make their political

speeches, comment upon the private lives of every one in the valley, and

talk about Les Aigues, which latter topic kept the conversation going

for at least an hour every day. It was everybody’s business to learn at

least something of what was going on, and also to pay their court to the

mistress of the house.

After this preliminary talk they played at boston, the only game the

queen understood. When the fat old Guerbet had mimicked Madame Isaure,

Gaubertin’s wife, laughed at her languishing airs, imitated her thin

voice, her pinched mouth, and her juvenile ways; when the Abbe Taupin

had related one of the tales of his repertory; when Lupin had told of

some event at Ville-aux-Fayes, and Madame Soudry had been deluged with

compliments ad nauseum, the company would say: “We have had a charming

game of boston.”

Too self-indulgent to be at the trouble of driving over to the Soudrys’

merely to hear the vapid talk of its visitors and to see a Parisian

monkey in the guise of an old woman, Rigou, far superior in intelligence

and education to this petty society, never made his appearance unless

business brought him over to meet the notary. He excused himself from

visiting on the ground of his occupations, his habits, and his health,

which latter did not allow him, he said, to return at night along a road

which led by the foggy banks of the Thune.

The tall, stiff usurer always had an imposing effect upon Madame

Soudry’s company, who instinctively recognized in his nature the cruelty

of the tiger with steel claws, the craft of a savage, the wisdom of

one born in a cloister and ripened by the sun of gold,--a man to whom

Gaubertin had never yet been willing to fully commit himself.

The moment the little green carriole and the bay horse passed the Cafe

de la Paix, Urbain, Soudry’s man-servant, who was seated on a

bench under the dining-room windows, and was gossipping with the

tavern-keeper, shades his eyes with his hand to see who was coming.

“It’s Pere Rigou,” he said. “I must go round and open the door. Take his

horse, Socquard.” And Urbain, a former trooper, who could not get into

the gendarmerie and had therefore taken service with Soudry, went round

the house to open the gates of the courtyard.

Socquard, a famous personage throughout the valley, was treated, as

you see, with very little ceremony by the valet. But so it is with many

illustrious people who are so kind as to walk and to sneeze and to sleep

and to eat precisely like common mortals.

Socquard, born a Hercules, could carry a weight of eleven hundred

pounds; a blow of his fist applied on a man’s back would break the

vertebral column in two; he could bend an iron bar, or hold back a

carriage drawn by one horse. A Milo of Crotona in the valley, his fame

had spread throughout the department, where all sorts of foolish stories

were current about him, as about all celebrities. It was told how he had

once carried a poor woman and her donkey and her basket on his back to

market; how he had been known to eat a whole ox and drink the fourth

of a hogshead of wine in one day, etc. Gentle as a marriageable

girl, Socquard, who was a stout, short man, with a placid face, broad

shoulders, and a deep chest, where his lungs played like the bellows

of a forge, possessed a flute-like voice, the limpid tones of which

surprised all those who heard them for the first time.

Like Tonsard, whose renown released him from the necessity of giving

proofs of his ferocity, in fact, like all other men who are backed by

public opinion of one kind or another, Socquard never displayed his

extraordinary muscular force unless asked to do so by friends. He now

took the horse as the usurer drew up at the steps of the portico.

“Are you all well at home, Monsieur Rigou?” said the illustrious

innkeeper.

“Pretty well, my good friend,” replied Rigou. “Do Plissoud and

Bonnebault and Viollet and Amaury still continue good customers?”

This question, uttered in a tone of good-natured interest, was by no

means one of those empty speeches which superiors are apt to bestow

upon inferiors. In his leisure moments Rigou thought over the smallest

details of “the affair,” and Fourchon had already warned him that there

was something suspicious in the intimacy between Plissoud, Bonnebault,

and the brigadier, Viollet.

Bonnebault, in payment of a few francs lost at cards, might very likely

tell the secrets he heard at Tonsard’s to Viollet; or he might let them

out over his punch without realizing the importance of such gossip. But

as the information of the old otter man might be instigated by thirst,

Rigou paid no attention except so far as it concerned Plissoud, whose

situation was likely to inspire him with a desire to counteract the

coalition against Les Aigues, if only to get his paws greased by one or

the other of the two parties.

Plissoud combined with his duties of under-sheriff other occupations

which were poorly remunerated, that of agent of insurance (a new form of

enterprise just beginning to show itself in France), agent, also, of a

society providing against the chances of recruitment. His insufficient

pay and a love of billiards and boiled wine made his future doubtful.

Like Fourchon, he cultivated the art of doing nothing, and expected his

fortune through some lucky but problematic chance. He hated the leading

society, but he had measured its power. He alone knew the middle-class

coalition organized by Gaubertin to its depths; and he continued to

sneer at the rich men of Soulanges and Ville-aux-Fayes, as if he alone

represented the opposition. Without money and not respected, he did not

seem a person to be feared professionally, and so Brunet, glad to have a

despised competitor, protected him and helped him along, to prevent him

selling his business to some eager young man, like Bonnac for instance,

who might force him, Brunet, to divide the patronage of the canton

between them.

“Thanks to those fellows, we keep the ball a-rolling,” said Socquard.

“But folks are trying to imitate my boiled wine.”

“Sue them,” said Rigou, sententiously.

“That would lead too far,” replied the innkeeper.

“Do your clients get on well together?”

“Tolerably, yes; sometimes they’ll have a row, but that’s only natural

for players.”

All heads were at the window of the Soudry salon which looked to the

square. Recognizing the father of his daughter-in-law, Soudry came to

the portico to receive him.

“Well, comrade,” said the mayor of Soulanges, “is Annette ill, that you

give us your company of an evening?”

Through an old habit acquired in the gendarmerie Soudry always went

direct to the point.

“No,--There’s trouble brewing,” replied Rigou, touching his right

fore-finger to the hand which Soudry held out to him. “I came to talk

about it, for it concerns our children in a way--”

Soudry, a handsome man dressed in blue, as though he were still a

gendarme, with a black collar, and spurs at his heels, took Rigou by the

arm and led him up to his imposing better-half. The glass door to the

terrace was open, and the guests were walking about enjoying the summer

evening, which brought out the full beauty of the glorious landscape

which we have already described.